Ilaria Ramelli, Durham University
The Patristic exegete and theologian Origen of Alexandria, a major Christian Platonist who was strongly influenced by many aspects of Stoicism, was very well acquainted with the thought of the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus (as Clement of Alexandria also was) and, noting the coherence between Musonius’s thought and his life, described him as a ‘model of the best kind of moral life’ (παράδειγμα τοῦ ἀρίστου βίου, Cels. 3.66). While Musonius’s influence on Clement of Alexandria has been studied extensively (e.g. Maier 1994; Inwood 2017), a systematic investigation of the manifold and profound influence of his ideas on Origen is still a substantial desideratum. Therefore, here I will set out to offer some basic elements for a research of this kind. From the analysis I conducted it results that most of the influence exerted by Musonius on Origen concerns the field of ethics. This is not surprising, as ethics, along with logic, is the main (although not exclusive) area in which Stoicism impacted Origen’s thought.
The influence of Musonius, together with that of Epictetus, another Roman Stoic (which will not be examined in full here, since it has been already partially investigated: Frede 2011, 103, 106-107, and passim; Ramelli 2022), is wide-ranging and deep. It regards, for instance, the imperative of obeying the law of Zeus or God willingly, having the same opinion and wanting the same things as the supreme deity; the use and value of free self-determination (αὐτεξούσιον), which grounds Origen’s theology of freedom (the latter has been studied, e.g., byLekkas 2002; Hengstermann 2015; Ramelli 2022); the theory of οἰκείωσις, which Origen appropriated and Christianized (Ramelli 2014), paving the way for Gregory of Nyssa’s Christian theory of οἰκείωσις; the criticism of wealth and the roots of Origen’s equation between wealth and theft, which proved highly influential on a number of Patristic thinkers, especially Gregory of Nyssa (Ramelli 2016); the importance of habit and the concepts of moral illness and moral death; related to this, the imperative of removing of the dead part of one’s soul; the role of koinai ennoiai; ethical intellectualism, virtue, and the relation between human and divine virtue; the problem of Stoic compatibilism; and the issue of marital ethics with the relevant imperative of chastity on the part of both spouses in marriage.
The most significant examples will be pointed out and analysed in the presentation I am proposing.