ABSTRACT
Aristotle came to be the philosophical preceptor of the Catholic, Jewish and Islamic worlds in the middle Ages. Origen, writing a generation later, continues to suspect Aristotle himself of denying providence, but can reason on fate and freedom in a manner reminiscent of Alexander. In the pagan schools of late antiquity, where the reigning voice was now always that of Plato as interpreted by Plotinus, the Platonization of Aristotle was carried to, and perhaps beyond, it’s legitimate consummation. In common with his contemporaries, he adapts the vocabulary of Aristotle to his own account of the union of two natures in the one person of Christ, and he resembles Severus of Antioch, another Miaphysite, in his conviction that an ousia must be coterminous with the hypostasis that instantiates it. Boethius, his contemporary, is perhaps the first Latin Christian to approach Aristotle directly and not, with Augustine and Marius Victorinus, through the lens of Porphyry.
