Pierre Hadot On The Link Between Christianity And Philosophy

Related: 

Don’t Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises.

What Is Contemplation? An Interview With Michael Chase.

 Hadot On The Philosophical Way of Life.

An excerpt from, “Philosophy as a Way of Life” By Pierre Hadot, Translated by Michael Chase, Publishers Ltd, 1995, Pg. 128 – 131:

In order to understand the phenomenon under consideration, it is essential to recall that there was a widespread Christian tradition which portrayed Christianity as a philosophy. This assimilation began with those Christian writers of the second century who are usually referred to as the Apologists, and in particular with Justin. The Apologists considered Christianity a philosophy, and to mark its opposition to Greek philosophy, they spoke of Christianity as “our philosophy” or as “Barbarian philosophy.” They did not, however, consider Christianity to be just one philosophy among others; they thought of it as the philosophy. They believed that that which had been scattered and dispersed throughout Greek philosophy had been synthesized and systematized in Christian philosophy. Each Greek philosopher, they wrote, had possessed only a portion of the Logos, whereas the Christians were in possession of the logos itself, incarnated in Jesus Christ. If to do philosophy was to live in accordance with the law of reason, then the Christians were philosophers, since they lived in conformity with the law of the divine Logos.

Clement of Alexandria dwells at length on this theme. He establishes a close link between philosophy and paideia, by which he means the education of mankind. Already within Greek philosophy, the Logos, or divine pedagogue, had been at work educating humanity, but Christianity itself, as the complete revelation of the logos, was the true philosophy which “teaches us to conduct ourselves so that we may resemble God, and to accept the divine plan [oikonomia] as the guiding principle of all our education.

The identification of Christianity with true philosophy inspired many aspects of the teaching of Origen, and it remained influential throughout the Origenist tradition, especially among the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. It is also in evidence in John Chrysostom. All these authors speak of “our philosophy”; of the “complete philosophy”; or of “the philosophy according to Christ. “ 

We may well ask ourselves if such an identification was legitimate, and wonder whether it did not contribute to a large extent to the notorious “Hellenization” of Christianity, about which so much has been written. I will not go into this complex problem here, but shall limit myself to pointing out that in portraying Christianity as a philosophy, this tradition was the heir – almost certainly consciously so – of a tendency already at work in the Jewish tradition, particularly in Philo of Alexandria. Philo portrayed Judaism as a patrios philosophia: the traditional philosophy of the Jewish people. The same terminology was used by Flavius Josephus.

When, a few centuries later, monasticism came to represent the culmination of Christian perfection, it, too, could be portrayed as a philosophia. From the fourth century on, this is exactly how it was in fact described, by church Fathers such as Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom, and especially by Evagrius Ponticus. This viewpoint was still current in the fifth century, for instance in Theodoret of Cyrrhus.

Here again, it was Philo of Alexandria who had shown the way. He had given the name “philosophers” to the Therapeutae, who, according to his description, lived in solitude, meditating on the law and devoting themselves to contemplation. Jean Leclercq has shown that, under the influence of Greek tradition, the monastic life continued to be designated by the term philosophia throughout the Middle Ages. Thus, a Cistercian monastic text tells us that Bernard of Clairvaux used to initiate his disciples “into the disciplines of celestial philosophy.” Finally, John of Salisbury maintained that it was the monks who “philosophized” in the most correct and authentic way.

The importance of this assimilation between Christianity and philosophy cannot be over-emphasized. Let us be clear on one point, however: there can be no question of denying the incomparable originality of Christianity. We shall return to this point later; in particular, we shall emphasize the specifically Christian character of this “philosophy,” as well as the care Christians have taken to connect it with the biblical/ evangelical tradition. Moreover, the tendency to assimilation was confined within strict historical limits, and always linked more or less closely to the tradition of the Apologists and of Origen. This tendency did, however, exist; its importance was considerable, and its result was the introduction of philosophical spiritual exercises into Christianity.

Along with its absorption of spiritual exercises, Christianity acquired a specific style of life, spiritual attitude, and tonality, which had been absent from primitive Christianity. This fact is highly significant: it shows that if Christianity was able to be assimilated to a philosophy, the reason was that philosophy itself was already, above all else, a way of being and a style of life. As Jean Leclercq points out: “In the monastic Middle Ages, just as much as in Antiquity, philosophia did not designate a theory or a means of knowledge, but a lived, experienced wisdom, and a way of living according to reason.” 

We remarked above that the fundamental attitude of the Stoic philosopher was prosoche: attention to oneself and vigilance at every instant. For the Stoics, the person who is “awake” is always perfectly conscious not only of what he does, but of what he is. In other words, he is aware of his place in the universe and of his relationship to God. His self-consciousness is, first and foremost, a moral consciousness.

A person endowed with such consciousness seeks to purify and rectify his intentions at every instant. He is constantly on the lookout for signs within himself of any motive for action other than the will to do good. Such self-consciousness is not, however, merely a moral conscience; it is also cosmic consciousness. The “attentive” person lives constantly in the presence of God and is constantly remembering God, joyfully consenting to the will of universal reason, and he sees all things with the eyes of God himself. 

Such is the philosophical attitude par excellence. It is also the attitude of the Christian philosopher. We encounter this attitude already in Clement of Alexandria, in a passage which foreshadows the spirit which was later to reign in philosophically-inspired monasticism: “It is necessary that divine law inspire fear, so that the philosopher may acquire and conserve peace of mind [ amerimtiia ], by dint of prudence [ eulabeia] and attention to himself [prosoche], and that he may remain exempt from sins and falls in all things.” For Clement, the divine law is simultaneously the universal reason of the philosophers, and the divine word of the Christians. It inspires fear, not in the sense of a passion – which, as such, would be condemned by the Stoics – but rather in the sense of a certain circumspection in thought and action. Such attention to oneself brings about amerimnia or peace of mind, one of the most sought-after goals in monasticism. 

Attention to oneself is the subject of a very important sermon by Basil of Caesarea.Basil bases his sermon on the Greek version of a passage from Deuteronomy: “Give heed to yourself, lest there be a hidden word in your heart.” On this basis, Basil develops an entire theory of prosoche, strongly influenced by the Stoic and Platonic traditions. We shall return to this point later. For the moment, let us simply note that Basil’s reason for commenting on this particular passage of Deuteronomy is that, for him, it evokes a technical term of ancient philosophy. For Basil, attention to oneself consists in awakening the rational principles of thought and action which God has placed in our souls. We are to watch over ourselves – that is, over our spirit and our soul – and not over that which is ours (our body) or that which is round about us (our possessions). Thus, prosoche consists in paying attention to the beauty of our souls, by constantly renewing the examination of our conscience and our knowledge of ourselves. By so doing, we can correct the judgments we bring upon ourselves. If we think we are rich and noble, we are to recall that we are made of earth, and ask ourselves where are the famous men who have preceded us now. If, on the contrary, we are poor and in disgrace, we are to take cognizance of the riches and splendors which the cosmos offers us: our body, the earth, the sky, and the stars, and we shall then be reminded of our divine vocation. It is not hard to recognize the philosophical character of these themes. 

Prosoche or attention to oneself, the philosopher’s fundamental attitude, became the fundamental attitude of the monk. We can observe this phenomenon in Athanasius’ Life of Antony, written in AD 357. When describing the saint’s conversion to the monastic life, Athanasius simply says: “He began to pay attention to himself.” Antony himself, we read later, is supposed to have said to his disciples on his deathbed: “Live as though you were dying every day, paying heed to yourselves fprosechontes heautois] and remembering what you heard from my preaching.”

In the sixth century, Dorotheus of Gaza remarked: “We are so negligent that we do not know why we have gone out of the world … That is why we are not making progress … The reason for it is that there is no prosoche in our hearts.” “As we have seen, attention and vigilance presuppose continuous concentration on the present moment, which must be lived as if it were, simultaneously, the first and last moment of life. Athanasius tells us that Antony used to make no attempt to remember the time he had already spent at his exercises, but rather made a brand new effort every day, as if starting afresh from zero. In other words, he lived the present moment as if it were his first, but also his last. We also saw that Antony told his disciples to “Live as though you were dying every day.” Athanasius reports another of Antony’s sayings: “If we live as if we were going to die each day, we will not commit sin.” We are to wake up thinking it possible that we may not make it until the evening, and go to sleep thinking that we shall not wake up. Epictetus had spoken along similar lines: “Let death be before your eyes every day, and you will never have any abject thought nor excessive desire.” 

In the same vein, Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Let your every deed and word and thought be those of one who might depart from this life this very moment.” Dorotheus of Gaza also established a close link between prosoche and the imminence of death: “Let us pay heed to ourselves, brothers, and be vigilant while we still have time … Look! Since the time we sat down at this conference we have used up two or three hours of our time and got that much nearer to death. Yet though we see that we are losing time, we are not afraid!” And again: “Let us pay heed to ourselves and be vigilant, brothers. Who will give us back the present time if we waste it?”