page_title: History of theology
section_title: Hellenistic theology
hierarchical_section_title: History of theology / Ancient Greek and Hellenistic theology / Hellenistic theology
caption_attribution_description: English: Scanned from a book dated 1900. Original caption: "MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO. Photogravure from the marble bust in the Prado Gallery at Madrid. This is the most pleasing of all extant likenesses of the great Roman orator. It represents Cicero when he was about sixty years of age and at the zenith of his career." Presumably the bust is now in Madrid's Museum of Archeology, where most or all of the Museo del Prado's collection of works from Classical Antiquity were moved.
context_page_description: Greek theologia was used with the meaning "discourse on god" around 380 BC by Plato in The Republic, Book ii, Ch. 18. Aristotle divided theoretical philosophy into mathematike, physike and theologike, with the last corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.
  Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such discourse: mythical, rational and civil.
  Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold usage, though Augustine also used the term more simply to mean 'reasoning or discussion concerning the deity'
  In patristic Greek Christian sources, theologia could refer narrowly to devout and inspired knowledge of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.
  The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality. Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.
context_section_description: Philosophical reflection on the gods, on religion, and on the origins and governance of the Universe, flourished in the Hellenistic period among both Greek- and Latin-speaking thinkers.  Among the very diverse movements of Hellenistic philosophy in which theological reflection could be found were Skepticism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Middle Platonism, and Neoplatonism.  The Skeptics were to have a larger impact on Western reasoning than the Cynics; but this would not occur until after its having been reified during the middle years of the Roman Empire when it passed into the mainstream of Western thought.
  Influential texts include:
  Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus (3rd century BC)
  Cicero's de Natura Deorum (45 BC)
  Lucretius' de Rerum Natura (1st century BC)
  Epictetus' Enchiridion (135)
  Plotinus' Enneads (c. 235 and after).
  Hellenistic theology, which could be deemed to last until the suppression of the Athenian Academy in 529 by Justinian I, overlaps with early Jewish and early Christian theology (see below), and several strands of thought important particularly to early Christian thought arise within Hellenistic circles: attempts to explain the apparent caprice of the gods, Atheism, the development of monotheism, the idea of God as first cause or form of the Good, the dualism of spirit and matter in humanity, and redemption (the release of the spirit from its material prison to a higher spiritual world) through knowledge.
caption: Cicero
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