Stoicism’s Influence on Early Christianity

Bruce McDonald, Ph.D., Texas Wesleyan University.

My talk will deal with the nature of Stoicism and its influence on the early Christian Church. We will discuss history and essential tenets of Stoicism, with examples. I will be discussing Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. We will discuss influential ideas that the early Church used in its presentation of the Christian gospel. These will include the idea of the “divine spark” in every human, related, perhaps, to the Hebrew idea of humans being made in the image of God. Origen of Alexandria also enjoyed the stoic idea of cyclical re-creations of the world. We will discuss the gradual replacement of Stoic influence by Platonism, particularly after the rise of Monasticism and Asceticism. With the ascetic view of the “evil” of the world, emphasis began to be on escaping from it, not on the Stoic concept of self-control in order to make life work better. The marked influence of Stoicism on the North African Christian apologist Tertullian (fl. 200), and how he was different from other Christian writers in this respect. The Stoic emphasis on self-control and discipline was very much in line with his rigorous ideas about how the Christian life should be lived.

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