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Of philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages and renaissance

REVIEW ESSAY/COMPTE RENDU

JULIUSZ DOMASKI, LA PHILOSOPHIE, THORIE OU MANIRE DE VIVRE?

LES CONTROVERSES DE LANTIQUIT LA RENAISSANCE

Matthew Sharpe, Deakin University

1. From Hadot to Domaski: the significance of the work

In his characteristically limpid manner, Pierre Hadot in the Preface to Juliusz Domaskis La

Philosophie, Thorie oui manire de Vivre? introduces readers to the impressive sweep and

trajectory of the Polish scholars work. Domaskis earliest works were on Erasmus and the

Italian renaissance, a fact which is telling, as we shall duly see. Yet Le Philosophie is testimony

indeed to an immense culture which rests upon lengthy researches conducted in the domain

of Antiquity, the Medieval period and modern times (vi). The same Preface explains what

converging lines led Hadots work into a profound intellectual proximity and debt to that of

Domaski. Pierre Hadots work is much more widely known than Domaskis, particularly

after the 1996 publication of Philosophy as a Way of Life (translation by Michael Chase, with

Wiley-Blackwell). It will therefore make the best sense that the review and commentary that

follows should present its examination of Domaski s La Philosophie in dialogue with Hadots

work on ancient philosophy and its afterlives.

For Hadot, we know, ancient philosophy was a way of life. Of course, philosophers produced

sophisticated philosophical discourses concerning things human and divine, to borrow a

Stoic trope. Yet philosophy and its teaching took aim at the cultivation of wisdom, a

transformed way of seeing and being in the world, as well as a conceptual achievement: the

sage, not the system. In order to cultivate this sophia, philosophers would accordingly practice
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and prescribe regimens of spiritual exercises: some meditative, some cognitive, some

imaginative or rhetorical, some even somatic, involving the slow mastery of the passions. The

principal testimony we have to this conception of ancient philosophy is philological, not

sociological (for we know little directly about the day to day workings of the ancient schools).

Ancient philosophers wrote poems, prayers, consolations, exhortations, therapies,

meditations and dialogues. Yet, today, none of these genres are weighed as philosophical. A

second problem Hadot thus raises, but treats much less extensively, is accordingly the

following. Just when and how, at whose hands, did the ancient, existential conception of

philosophia as a way of life involving intellectual and spiritual exerciseswhat Domaski will

call its practicist conceptionbecome lost, such that we can scarcely recognise or credit it

today? And why did it suffer this eclipse?

Hadots answer is that in the Christian period, philosophy was subject to a two-fold exigency.

On the one hand, several of the Church fathers and apologists (as we will recall with Domaski)

conceived of the Christian life as the true philosophia. Christian monasticism, following the

Church Fathers, took on and redirected towards Christian ends the philosophical spiritual

exercises, like the premeditation of evils or mortality, and practices of attention or

concentration. On the other hand, with ancient philosophys spiritual dimension thus

appropriated within the monasteries, its highly sophisticated conceptual, discursive

developments:

became a simple theoretical took in the service of theology (ancilla theologiae).

From ancient philosophy, one preserves no more than the scholastic techniques, the

teaching procedures, the cosmological representations: that is to say, a simply

conceptual material (viii). 1

1Here as elsewhere numbers in brackets, unmarked, signify pages in La Philosophie. In his Preface as
elsewhere, Hadot will comment philosophically that there is a tendency which operates across
historical periods for scholars to take refuge in the commodious universe of concepts, shielded from
the conceptually less demanding, but existentially far more telling vicissitudes of life and fortune (viii).
The medieval rendering of philosophy into discourse, which modern academicians largely inherit,
thus speaks to a supra-historical tendency of human nature, or at least the condition of scholars.
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We nevertheless search in vain for a developed treatment in Hadots own texts of medieval

philosophy. The same holds of the period of the Renaissance, despite its being characterised

by the rediscovery of many of the Hellenistic and Roman sources central to Hadots portrait of

ancient thought, alongside pagan poetry, history and rhetorical texts (see 5 below). The

works of Domaski propose a much more complex and more nuanced depiction of this

historical phenomenon of the medieval transformation of our sense of philosophy than his

own works, Hadot generously concedes, explaining his appreciation for Domaskis study

(viii). Indeed, the central two chapters of La Philosophie, and over half of its pages, are given

over to the kind of examination of medieval philosophy Hadots work arguably calls for, but

does not itself carry out.

Domaskis analytic method is also different from Hadots or the later Foucaults. This method

is to look, wherever possible, only at what we should call the directly metaphilosophical

declarations of the thinkers whose work he examines. As Domaski tells is in his Avant-

Propos:

I would like to specify that the matter that I will treat of will be limited in principle to

texts of a metaphilosophical type and content: that is to say, to the statements of

philosophers or their contemporaries which are in the first place definitions of

philosophy, which have for their object the nature and value, whether of philosophy in

general, or of particular domains (xv-xvi).

It is obvious (il va de soi), Domaski continues, that these statements will be closely bound

to the substantive subjects considered by philosophers at different times (xvi). More than this,

they will even more closely reflect the extra-doctrinal circumstances which attend

philosophical activity: namely, its cultural and religious contexts (xvi). What Domaskis

method indeed shows us, perhaps above all, is the complex ways in which philosophy, from

later antiquity forwards, has been conceived in continuing relations to two phenomena.

Firstly, there are the seven liberal arts which would become in medieval Christendom the basis

of the teaching of Arts Facultiesbeing the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic/dialectic) and
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the quadrivium (astronomy, music, arithmetic, geometry). Secondly, there is the ancient

practicist or existential sense of philosophia as a way of life, whose representation in La

Philosophie we will examine momentarily. In fact, Domaski argues that this practicist sense

of philosophy never entirely fell out of circulation in the West. This, even during the centuries

of high scholasticism, whereas he also demonstrates how central it was to the renaissance in

figures led by Petrarch, Bruni and Erasmus.

But let us pass now from these introductory remarks into a more systematic treatment of

Domaskis invaluable text.

1. On the ancient conceptions of philosophy

Domaski opens La Philosophie by considering the famous extract concerning Pythagoras

original coining of the term philosophia, as recorded for us in Ciceros Tusculan

Disputations V. If life is like an Olympic games, we are told, the philosopher is neither an

athlete, competing for glory, nor the merchant, competing for money, but the spectator,

interested in the nature of things and their causes. Yet this purely contemplative or

theoretical depiction of philosophy, in which contemporary scholars might recognise their

own calling, as Domaski notes, is not unchallenged in antiquity. We know that Socrates soon

enough brought philosophy down from the heavens into the streets, as the same book of the

Tusculans famously continues. Domaski continues by looking at the definitions of wisdom

and philosophy first in the pseudo-Platonic work of Definitions (c. 4th-3rd century BCE), then

secondly in later antique Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle.

In the first source, we find philosophy defined either as an aspiration, the desire (orexis) for

the science of what is always, or a quality of mind: the theoretical habitus (hexis) concerning

what is true and how it is true (5). Thirdly, philosophy is called directly a therapy (therapeia)

of the soul, bound to right reason. In the Neoplatonic commentators, some six definitions

are adduced. As Domaski parses them, a first grouping delineates the theoretical objects of
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philosophy (what is, insofar as it is; namely, things human and divine.) A second

practical grouping, however, describes philosophy, in terms redolent of Platos Phaedo (8),

as the exercise of death (melet thanatou), or as the assimilation to Godor rather to the

Divineinsofar as this is possible for human beings, in terms redolent of Platos Thaeatetus

(6). In these definitions, again, it is the goal of philosophy which is highlighted, and this goal

exceeds the [solely] theoretical as circumscribed by the anecdote of Pythagoras, pointing

towards the larger life or character of the philosopher (7).

To be sure, to ethikon or ta ethika was widely delineated from early on in philosophical history

as one part (meros) of philosophywhether alongside logic and physics, in the Stoics, or

alongside the theoretical sciences, in the Aristotelian schemas (10-11). But what is at stake in

the definition of philosophy itself as a practical pursuit aimed at the therapy of the psyche or

its assimilation to the divine, for Domaski, is that philosophical reflection is itself the

realisation of a conception of the good life: a realised ethics, a science of morals not solely

theoretical but practiced (11). It does not suffice to know or think certain things to count

oneself a philosophos. One must also shape ones life according to what one knows or thinks

as a philosopher.

Intriguingly, Domaski then delineates three ancient modalities of the relation between theory

and practice stipulated here. The first, appearing in Platos Republic VI and later in the vying

Stoic and Epicurean depictions of the sage and his wisdom (17, 18), sees the realisation of an

ethics, a modus vivendi, as the highest fulfilment of philosophical activity. So the true

philosopher will have not only a good memory and quick apprehension. He shall also evince

a greatness of soul; and a friendship not only with truth, but also with the virtues, justice,

courage and temperance (13-14). A second theory-practice relation, sketched in the Platonic

Phaedo and then adopted by Neoplatonic philosophers, rather sees ethics purgation of the

passions as the precondition for a higher contemplative approach to the Ideas or the Divine

(14-15). The third theory-practice modality, in Aristotelian philosophy, sees philosophical

contemplation itself, and the practice of this contemplation, as an ideal kind of life (15-16), at
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the same time as we can find in Aristotles texts competing definitions of the good life (insofar

as the bios politikos is also extensively treated), and of philosophy and wisdom as solely

intellectual or cognitive achievements, the science of truth (Met. 993 b19-29).

From philosophy to the philosopher: a strongly emphasised leitmotif of Domaskis treatment

of the ancients, and in his larger history of philosophy as a way of life, is that the person who

thus aims to live philosophically is always characterised by non-philosophers, from the

Thaeatetus or Symposium forwards, as strange, atopos. Like Thales falling down his well, and

Socrates in the agora, the philosopher is a figure who may well be seen by the many as

bizarre, mad, or a threat to sound morals. This idea of the atopia of the philosopher is seen

by La Philosophie as the predominant metaphilosophical conception in later antiquity. We

see this above all in Diogenes Laertius Lives (21-22), a doxography of anecdotes and sayings

of the philosophers that Domaski comments that we could be forgiven for thinking was

composed only one half seriously, and half for laughs, as we say in English (22). The core

(sein) of the philosophical apothegms that Diogenes Laertes delights in conveyingand it

should be remembered that he is our primary source for Diogenes the Cynic or Pyrrho,

amongst othersis the paradox, inseparable from the atopia of the philosophers (22). The

philosophical attempt to replace opinion (doxa) with knowledge of the hidden natures and

causes of things, or again to try to live according to such para-doxical knowledges, must have

something inescapably comic about it, from the moment when our apparent wisdom has

ceased to make us forget how not to take ourselves too seriously (22).

With that said, the Socratic figure of the paradoxical and atopic philosopher was soon to

disappear in the West, to re-emerge only with figures like Erasmus in the Renaissance or

Voltaire in the enlightenment, and perhaps now to be forgotten anew.

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2. Christian philosophy in the Church Fathers (Justin, Clement, John Chrysostom)

We arrive then at the largest part of La Philosophie, and perhaps its largest contribution to

contemporary researches on philosophy as a way of life. This concerns the fate of the

conceptions of philosophy in the Christian era. Here, above all, we depart from ancient

materials more familiar to readers of Pierre Hadot, John Sellars, Ilsetraut Hadot, the later

Michel Foucault et al.

The Fathers of the Church of course challenged, qua Christians, the ancient conception of

philosophia. Yet they disputed, above all, whether it could provide the true or sufficient way

to lasting wisdom or perfection. The biblical New Testament, we know, contains scathingly

anti-philosophical passages (like Paul Col. II 8 (cf. 23-4)) or opposing the wisdom of the

world to the wisdom of God, which is the stupidity of the cross, and folly to the Greeks (24).

Nevertheless, in the second century CE, as the Christian movements began to grow, the early

apologists began to carry over onto Christian soil much of the vocabulary, and also something

of the metaphilosophical conceptions of the pagan philosophers. Several indeed explicitly

describe their work as propounding a Christian philosophy, a point that Hadot also

highlights in his place (viz. Ancient spiritual exercises and Christian Philosophy, in

Philosophy as a Way of Life, 126 ff.). The Fathers carried out this apologetic

transubstantiation first of all on the basis of the pragmatic exigencies of apologetics. There

was a need to speak in the hegemonic language of the Greco-Roman world in order to

proselytise within it. Furthermore, the apologists could look in doing this to illustrious Jewish

precedents like Philo of Alexandria, who had brought the thought of the Greeks, led by Plato,

to the understanding of the Sacred Jewish texts.

Domaski however points to three additional kinds of reasons explaining why the Church

Fathers adopted this rubric of Christian philosophy to describe their own pursuits. Firstly,

Christianity lays claim to revealed truths concerning the highest things which we have seen

form part of the repeated ancient definitions of philosophy: viz. God, the world and human

fate and nature. Secondly, Christianity enshrines moral precepts, in the light of these higher
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truths, like ta ethika as studied as one part of the ancient philosophies. But thirdly, and here

pointing to the Christian inheritance of the ancient practicist sense of philosophy as a

realised ethics, Christian texts present for their readers edification exemplars of lives lived

according to Christian wisdom, led by the examples of Christ Himself and then the Saints (25).

The predominant critique by the Fathers of the ancient philosophies, accordingly, hones in

upon this third practicist sense of philosophy as involving a way of living. The pagan

philosophers, due to the grace of God about which they knew nothing, discovered and

communicated theoretical truths, according to reason, about the natural world, logic, and

morals. For Justin Martyr, all men who lived according to the Logos could be considered

Christians, including Greek philosophers (26). For Clement of Alexandria (c. 150c. 215),

divine Providence had given the Greeks and Romans philosophy so that they might become

good men (26). According to Basil the Great (c. 329-379), wisdom is realising in life the virtues

of which the philosophers had only spoken, led by Socrates and Diogenes (27). Yet, the

Christian Fathers argue, the philosophers could not actualise their noble theoretical teachings,

however much they knew that this was the goal of true philosophia (28).

John Chrysostom (c349-407 CE) thus instructively appropriates elements of the ideal of Stoic

sage. Christian philosophy, for him, implicates a discipline touching the whole of a life in order

to realise virtue and wisdom, as the Stoics had known. The philosophers conceptions of the

virtues can even be used to critique and inspire Christians in their ethical efforts: a motif we

will see taken up later by Abelard, Roger Bacon, then Erasmus. Yet, John argues, human

beings alone cannot realise the highest form of life. Indeed, pride accrues to the very

acquisition of greatness of soul, a sin which Chrysostom sees writ large in Diogenes the Cynics

antics. Here, that is, the atopia of the philosopher comes to seem a mere affectation or a

pose, a protesting too much, concealing a profound impotence (29). Christ and the Saints

have come to teach us the life proper to philosophers (29), which the philosophers could only

glimpse theoretically, but not fully realise.

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We note also that this important Christian critique of the pagans alleged practicist

shortcomings will, in subsequent Christian culture, justify that increasing tendency to

conceive of philosophy as composing solely theoretical components which Hadot highlights,

and to which Domaski also devotes many of his pages, to which we duly turn now (29).

3. Philosophy and the liberal arts in the middle ages

Central to understanding the way that philosophy was understood in the middle ages,

Domaski highlights, is its relation to the seven liberal arts: again, the trivium (grammar,

dialectic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (astronomy, music, arithmetic and geometry). These

would become in the 13th century the core of the Arts syllabuses at the mediaeval Universities.

For Domaski, in a thought whose content we will want to qualify in our closing remarks, the

teaching and learning of the liberal arts in the middle ages involves a cultivating of the intellect

alone of the student. Yet, we have seen that the ancient philosophies aimed to train the the

ethical character as well as the intellect of their students. For Seneca (Letters to Lucilius, 88)

as already, again, in the pedagogical program for the philosopher-guardians laid out in Platos

Republic VI-VII, the liberal arts had been considered by the pagan philosophers as

propaedeutic to the study of philosophy, in its most elevated sense. In the Christian period, in

the contrast that interests Domaski, from as early as the 3rd century CE, philosophy comes to

take the preparatory place formerly held by the liberal arts, as per figure 1 below.

Figure 1: the displacement of philosophy in the dominant mediaeval conception

Ancients

Liberal arts propaedeutic to philosophy

Medieval scholasticism

Philosophy propaedeutic to theology (medicine, law)

as (one of?) liberal arts
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The Church Father Origen (c. 185-255 CE), in a letter to his student, Gregory the Thaumaturge

explicitly and already makes this displacement in the early 3rd century after Christ. As

geometry, astronomy and the liberal arts were to philosophy forthe pagans, so philosophy is

to Christianity itself, he explains. I wish for you to borrow from Greek philosophy those

branches which could serve at base for a general formation and constitute a preparation for

Christianity (32).

Boethius in the famous Consolations of Philosophy (c. 525) has for Domaski a more

ambiguous place. Boethius influence on later mediaeval thought, including in dialectics, was

huge. On the one hand, the female figure of Philosophy who appears to him in the

Consolations offers a wisdom which is primarily practical and moral, enabling him to reconcile

himself to his worldly fall (Boethius now being a political prisoner) and to mortality itself.

This consolation then looks very much like a legatee to the first modality of the theory-

practice relation in the ancient practicist metaphilosophy. Furthermore, the Lady chides

Boethius for his adherence to the liberal arts. She tells him bluntly that she must expel their

muses, if philosophy is to do its therapeutic work. But on the other hand, this Lady bears on

her dress a letter Pi () near the base, signifying praxis, and a Theta () near its top, meaning

theoria, these two Greek symbols being separated by ascending marks, as of a ladder. As

Domaski notes, this symbolism rather suggests Boethius commitment to the Platonic-

Neoplatonic, second ancient model of relating theory and practice we saw above: with theory

or contemplation placed above and perfecting the virtues. Indeed, as Domaski asks us to see

things, it is above all this second ancient model, via Boethius Neoplatonic vision of philosophy

involving a staged ascent from ethics to contemplation, which as it were becomes its own step

on the later, scholastic pathway to devaluing philosophy per se beneath theology or monastic

beatitude.
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Figure 2: the fate of the three practicist ancient conceptions in the hegemonic scholastic tendance of

the medieval period

1. Theoria realised ethics/wisdom 3. Contemplation as mode of life

2. ethicstheoretical knowing

Via displacement liberal arts/philosophy Christianised (cf. 6 below)

Scholasticism (philosophy propaedeutic to higher studies)

This is a pathway which will pass by way of the explicit and direct identification of philosophy

with the liberal arts which we can find in an 8th century figure like Alcuin (c. 735-805 CE) in

his Grammar. In his reading of Boethiuss Consolations, Alcuin identifies Boethius figure of

Philosophy Herself in the Consolation with Christian Divine Wisdom, anticipating what

will be the later scholastic elevation of the science of theology as queen of the sciences. This

figures dismissal of the liberal arts in Boethius is however now neglected. Indeed, Alcuin

advances an allegorical interpretation of the biblical description of Solomons mansion, built

by wisdom and supported by the seven pillars, which instead elevates the liberal arts to an

identity with philosophia unknown to antiquity (cf. Prov. 9.1). The pillars represent, we are

told, the seven degrees of philosophy that the ancient philosophers are supposed to have

exhausted themselves upon. But then, these part of philosophy are none other than grammar,

rhetoric, logic; astronomy, geometry, music, arithmetic; viz. the trivium and quadrivium. The

liberal arts, now identified with philosophy, are according to Alcuin so many steps towards

wisdom. This is now itself identified with evangelical perfection, which for Alcuin meant

a monastic life, superior to any theoretical achievements (37).

It is with the University statutes of the early 13th century, led by that of Paris in 1215, that the

scholastic demotion of philosophy, by way of its close identification with the liberal arts, is

however most fully consummated. The liberal arts, as we have commented, formed the core

of the Arts syllabi in the later medieval universities. In the later 12th century, with the new
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availability in Latin of the texts of Aristotles oeuvre, in some places forms of philosophy

came to be taught separately to the trivium and quadrivium in the Arts Faculties (whether

physics and metaphysics, encompassing Aristotles texts on these subjects; or ethics, reading

the Nicomachean Ethics). Yet, even in these cases, Domaski is right to underscore the

significance of the fact that the Faculties of Arts itself were subordinated to the higher faculties

of medicine and law, in the Italian universities, and to medicine, law and theology in most

centres north of the Alps.

This predominant scholastic tendance to equate philosophy with the liberal arts, and to

position both as propaedeutic to higher studiesand thus to subordinate philosophy to

theology, in particular (49)was however coupled to a second famous tendency which

Domaski also highlights. This saw the prioritisation of dialectic within the teaching of the

trivium, and the Arts Faculty itself. Alongside being one of the seven liberal arts, dialectic had

been differently situated in the ancient philosophical schools as one part of philosophy

(alongside ethics and physics in the Stoics), as one part of the Organon in Aristotle, or

contrastinglyby Plato, as the means to the discovery of the Ideas. The high place of dialectic

in the mediaeval universities is of course well known. This elevation would later become the

subject of particular humanistic ire (as for instance in Petrarchs Letters). Certainly, dialectic

was elevated by Abelard to a position where it could subordinate even theology, a position for

which Abelard claimed Augustines authority, but which was not widely adopted. In the

thirteenth century, alongside the authoritative lecture or reading of a text by a master in the

Arts courses, dialectic also became a means to analyse texts, as well asin the famous

disputations, on which more in our Concluding Thoughts belowa means to train and

examine students in the arts of analysis and argument.

The importance in medieval pedagogy of the reading of authoritative texts, and in the Arts

Faculties of the 13th and 14th centuries, of the corpus Aristotelicum, points to a third feature

which Domaski identifies as shaping what philosophy had come to mean in the later

mediaeval period. This is that philosophy, whatever its explicit place in syllabi, had by this
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stage come to be widely conceived as a wholly theoretical or scientific endeavour. All traces

of its ancient, practicist dimension are almost completely eclipsed. Indeed, according to

Domaski, to philosophise in this context came to mean above all to read and interpret the

philosopher', so an almost grammatical affair:

the scholastic philosopher is a scholar who attempts to resolve the problems that

reason poses itself a propos of the writings of Aristotle, and who explains to others the

solutions to these problems, with all arguments for and against. It is a solely

intellectual travail. In this situation, [the philosopher] is not obliged to give himself

by his comportment or by his personal meritsa testimony to the truth drawn from

the text (50).

This is then also to say, fourthly, that the term philosophy has also disappeared as a

description of the Christian life in the 13th century Arts masters, in contrast to the terms usage

in the Church Fathers (see 2 above). Instead, says Domaski, in a telling description: the

names of ancient philosophers are only for [the scholastics] word-signs which serve to indicate

doctrines and opinions (50). This description remains mostly true for academic philosophers

today. Even ethics, conceived as the reading of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, was thus a

theoretical or scientific activity in the universities, to use Domaskis term, implying no

existential implications (50). Insofar as the reader of Aristotle in these universities had an

interest in living or realising any ethics, this was as a Christian, a theologian or aspirant monk,

and not as a philosopher.

In the light of these four features of the scholastic moment (demotion of philosophy to

propaedeutic, elevation of dialectic amongst the liberal arts, the equation of philosophy with

practices and cultures of reading, and the severance of philosophy from life), Domaski

devotes several pages to Saint Thomas Aquinas reading of Aristotles conception of the

contemplative life in Nicomachean Ethics X, chapter 7. As we skirted above, wisdom for

Aristotle is the end or goal of human existence, and it remains so for Thomas, within the

context of the latters Christian system. According to Aristotle, the contemplative life of the
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philosopher is more supremely happy than the political life of the statesman or man of affairs.

But wisdom itself supposes a preparatory philosophical stage, the stage of research, and of

the seeking after the truths that one will only then be able to enjoy in theoria. Thomas accepts

Aristotles research-goal/philosophy-wisdom opposition; the goal (wisdom) being superior

and more pleasant than its pursuit (philosophy). To contemplate, in the most satisfying sense,

is to contemplate truths already acquired. But wisdom, Thomas then says, is not solely

cognitive, as [for the] philosophers, because it is also directed to human life, by way of the

Christian pursuit of the enjoyment of the contact with God (STh II II q19, a7). In this

revealing parenthesis, Domaski claims, we see directly how the term philosophy has come

by the time of Thomas to be considered in the universities, as a solely intellectual endeavour.

There is no longer a question for Thomas of looking to philosophy for the achievement of

wisdom and the best form of life, let alone of looking to the exemplars posed by the lives of the

philosophers.

4. Monastic and Averroist counter-strain/s

Domaskis depiction of the scholastic intellectualisation of philosophy, and its demotion to

the propaedeutic order of the liberal arts, so far complements and adds detail to Pierre Hadots

better-known retelling of the history of philosophy. It does not add new chapters to it.

Nevertheless, as Hadot himself notes in his Preface to La Philosophie, not the least point of

interest for scholars in this area in Domaskis La Philosophie lies in its third chapter (x-xii).

This chapter is given over to qualifying the portrait of philosophy in the Middle Ages that his

second chapter on the scholastics has set up before our eyes. Domaski now shows how the

Christian period harboured plural, competing conceptions of philosophy. Two such lineages

emerge from the text; what we might term the medieval-monastic and the Averroist.

Hadot himself, as we recalled above, holds that the pagan spiritual exercises were taken up

and transformed in the early monastic schools within early Christendom. But he focused on

sources from the early centuries CE. Drawing on Jean Leclercqs important work in particular,
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Domaski stresses that we cannot rightly forget that the monastic legacy within Christendom

perdured, and that it always stood alongside, and sometimes in conflict, with the

formalisations of teaching and learning in the universities.

Looking back to John Chrysostom, the different lineages of Christian monasticism continued

to oppose two modes of life. These were sometimes called the celestial-Christian and the

pagan or worldly. However, the former way of life continued to be called a philosophy,

as in the Exordium magnum cisterciense (late 12th-early 13th century CE). Odo of Canterbury

(10th century), in a letter to a student, could thus evoke the true philosophy of Christ to

describe the monastic life. Peter the Venerable of Cluny (c. 10921156) could likewise speak

in the 12th century about his assumption of the monastic frock as a taking up of the true

philosophy of Christ. John of Salisbury (c. 1220-1280) considered that the monks virtues far

surpass those of the classical Greek and Roman philosophers, whose admirable natures he

nevertheless conceded (63). It is just that, ambiguously, the present times make achieving

the ideal of the philosophical ideal too difficult for all but the monks (at 63).

For this medieval-monastic lineage of metaphilosophy, we nevertheless understand, not

Socrates or Platolet alone Aristotlebut Christ himself was the master and model of a

philosophical life. Here we see carried forwards in explicit terms the longer-standing

Christian criticisms of the inability of pagan philosophy to actually deliver the happiness

whose lineaments they theorised (and which we met in 2 above). Ellie of Cologne, writing

around 1040 CE, will speak of Christ who is the philosopher himself. Of Socrates, Plato,

Cicero, it can be said that although they philosophised their thoughts were vain and their

unreasonable hearts darkened (64). By contrast to those who follow the true path of Christ,

the virtue and wisdom of God made flesh, indeed, the pagan philosophers are depicted here as

keeping company with the courtesans of philosophy who ply their trade only at the outer

vestibules of the house of wisdom (64).

In the 12th century, however, at the very time that the great mediaeval universities were

establishing their syllabi, Domaski argues that a second lineage of thinking about philosophy
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and its roles emerged. And this lineage was even more favourable to the ancient conception

of philosophia, indeed skirting heresy and condemnation in some of its formulations. He

examines this lineage in four figures, in pages of the highest interest: they are Pierre Abelard,

Boethius of Dacia, Richard Kilwardy and Roger Bacon. In these figures,, Domaski contends:

One observes a high estimation of the attitudes and activities of the philosophers:

their virtuous life can serve Christians, if not as an example, at least as an incitation,

since this example can render them full of shame, when they perceive that their life is

worse than that of the pagan philosophers (65).

In Abelards Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian (1136-39), to begin with,

the philosopher comes to speak of his opinions about the ideal intellectual formation for the

young. For Abelards philosopher, in line with the first of the three models from antiquity

discussed above (see figure 2), this paideia should begin with the theoretical arts and sciences,

before arriving at ethics and the attempt to live well. The Christian, in reply, accepts this

practicist ordering and gradation of the sciences. But he qualifies that what the pagan calls

ethics, we call divine wisdom (66). Moreover, Christians consider the true goal, God;

whereas philosophers only consider the means to arrive at this goal: namely, the virtues. The

philosopher then concedes that the Christian conception of the virtues, aimed at the summum

bonum, is more elevated than his own. Yet what is at stake here, from beginning to end, is the

practicist sense of the activity of philosophy as aiming to realise this Good in a life well lived

(66).

In fact, in Abelards Epitome theologiae Christianae, which raises the issue of whether or not

non-Christians were to be saved, Abelard presents the pagan philosophers very favourably: as

in effect, non-baptised Christians, as they had been for Justin Martyr (see 2 above). Even Saint

Paul admits that God had revealed to the pagan philosophers the Trinity, we are told. Many

argued for an afterlife, in which punishment was assigned to wrongdoers, and rewards for the

just. Some were surely proud and corrupt, Abelard concedes. But then, so are many

Christians. Nevertheless, the ancients sophisticated description of the virtues presupposes

 17

that they must have known these virtues truly, in their lives. Indeed, Abelard proposes that

divine Providence permitted the Greek and Roman philosophers to instruct, incite and

discipline Christiansby provoking remorse and serving as examples, as so many calls to a

righteous humility (68). Moving alike beyond John Chrysostom or John of Salisbury,

however, Abelard even proposes that some philosophers really succeeded in living genuinely

admirable lives. Amazingly, Abelard is even so bold as to name in this connection Democritus

the atomist, alongside Pythagoras and Socrates.

The second figure in this counter-tendance in the later mediaeval period whose thought

concerning the status of philosophy Domaski examines is a lesser-known 13th century figure:

Boethius of Dacia. Boethius was a Latin Averroist. In contrast to other scholastics, at least as

Domaski asks us to read him, Boethius accorded philosophy a complete autonomy from

theology, treating it not as a propaedeutic to Christian teaching, but as an end in itself. In

Boethius De summa bona sive de vita philosophi, he thus proposes that the supreme good for

human beings is what gives [human beings] the highest virtus, before claiming that the

highest virtue of the human being is that of the intellect. Like Aristotle, for Boethius, the

intellect as genus has two species: the speculative intellect (which aims at the true) and the

practical intellect (which aims at the good). It follows that, for him (now skirting heresy), the

knowledge of the true and accomplishment of the good and their enjoyment is the highest good

of man. All human beings desire such knowledge. Yet only a few, the philosophers,

consecrate themselves to studio sapientiae vaccant. So, again skirting heresy, Boethius

infers that only philosophers live fully according to human nature, a direct reprisal of one of

the ancient philosophers hyperbolic paradoxes (71-72). Indeed, Boethius goes so far as to

claim that they alone they alone do not sin against the order of nature.

Boethius then gives us a very elevated depiction of the figure of the philosopher, which echoes

the third, Aristotelian conception of the relation between theory and practice we examined in

1 above. Boethius philosopher alone amongst peoples is conscious of the turpitude in action,

which is vice; and knows nobility of action, which is virtue. So he above all is able to act nobly.
 18

This philosopher has also tasted higher pleasures than other men, those of contemplation. So

he is best able to resist the siren calls of the lower, physical pleasures. In the intellect and

speculation, for Boethius, there is no sin; for, as Aristotle had already upheld (Nic. Eth. X 7),

there can be no excess of this good. Yet Boethius position, argues Domaski, is finally more

Neoplatonic than Aristotelian. For it involves a staged, hierarchical gradation of goods, with

the subordination of lower to higher pursuits. This he sees in contrast to the arguable ethical

pluralism of Aristotle, to the extent that the latter suggests that the bios politikos also is an

independently worthy end for human beings.

Richard Kilwardy (c. 1215-1279 CE) in the De ortu scientiarum is the third figure Domaski

examines in this medieval counter-lineage. Kilwardy is of interest to Domaski for his

reflections on two definitions of philosophy hailing from the Stoics, as transmitted by Isidore

of Seville (c. 560-636 CE). According to these Stoic definitions, philosophy is the probable

science of human and divine things, insofar as this is possible for human beings to achieve.

Yet, in a second definition, we read that it is a science of human and divine things, conjoined

to the effort to live well (cum studio bene vivendi conjuncta). What is striking here for

Domaski is less the Stoic emphasis on the ethical ends of philosophy, which we have met

above. It is that Kilwardy agrees to situate the first definition as stipulating the subjects of

philosophy and then the second definition, which stresses the directly ethical end of

philosophising, as naming the highest goal of philosophy. Here, that is, in a way which

contrasts alike with Boethius as well as the hegemonic scholastic metaphilosophy, theoretical

philosophy is subordinated to the effort to live well as the goal of philosophisinga model

which will reappear in the 15th century and the Renaissance, as we will see presently (73-74).

The fourth medieval figure Domaski examines, who for many reasons, transcends the

scholastic formation typical of his period, is Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294 CE), at the same time

a scholastic and a mediaeval humanist (74). For Bacon, reprising the first ancient model of

the relation between theory and practice we met in 2 above, ethics is the most precious part

of philosophy. For him, it constitutes both the limit and the end of all other philosophical
 19

disciplines. In scholastic terms, Bacon describes this by saying that theoretical philosophy

furnishes the conclusions which must become the principles of ethics (75). Bacon cites with

approval Cicero on the ancient exercise of the Meditatio mortis as illustrating such a

practicist endeavour: an exercise which of course looks back to the Platonic Phaedo, before

receiving different articulations in the Stoic, Epicurean, and Neoplatonic schools.

With Bacon, though, we find also, for the first time in a Christian author, a dedicated interest

in the biographies of the philosophers, which stands in striking opposition to the scholastic

treatment of their proper names as mere word signs serving to distinguish and name their

opinions and doctrines (76). As many renaissance humanists will soon become, so Bacon is

interested in the philosophers sentences, their apothegms, and in the rhetoric used by the

ancient philosophers with a view to moral exhortation. The pagan philosophersas for

Abelard and in a thought we have met several times before can provide if not ethical models,

then salutary counter-models to humble Christians pride. They have lived as well as spoken

well, and so they can incite Christians to imitation: albeit the imitation finally of higher,

Christian exemplars than themselves.

As Domaski presents things, Roger Bacon gives us the highest estimation of philosophers in

the Christian era preceding the renaissance (77-79). Although this omission is telling enough,

only the element of atopia is missing from the ancient practicist conception of philosophia in

Bacons metaphilosophical considerations.

5. The renaissance, of the classical, practicist conception of philosophy

The long fourth chapter of Domaskis La philosophie concerns the philosophy of the

renaissance, on which the author began his scholarly career. This remains one of the least

well recognised and -understood moments in the philosophical heritage today, outside of

specialised enclaves. And there is a bitter irony to this fate, since as Domaski is at pains to

stress, this period saw a return to philosophy conceived as practical morality by the person of
 20

the philosopher, which we have seen was only glimpsed in mediaeval counter-currents of

thought (89). With the renaissance humanists in particular, again often the most maligned of

renaissance philosophersor not considered philosophers at all, as for Kristeller in some

moodswe find with Domaski that:

it is a matter not simply of the idea according to which the necessary complement of

the doctrine is the life of the philosopher himself, but also particular traits of his life,

of the comportment and kind of activity proper to the philosopher, of the rapport

between his life and his work (113).

In the humanists metaphilosophical thoughts, under Domaskis guidance, we indeed witness

a full-throated revalorisation, from a chorus of voices, of the ancient practicist conception/s

of philosophia. This is undertaken in continuing comparisons and contrasts with forms of

Christianity, likewise conceived as a way of life; as well as in critiques and contrasts with

intellectualist, scholastic conception of philosophy (see 3 above).

Like most scholars of the renaissance, Domaskis account of the renaissance in La

Philosophie begins with Petrarch (91 ff.). What interests him first of all in the poet-

philosopher is Petrarchs remarkable critique of scholastic philosophy and of Aristotelian

ethics, as it was studied then (mid-14th century) in the universities. We can read this critique

in its most condensed form in Petrarchs De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. Here, Petrarch

reflects in a passage which will come to be echoed by many of the humanists:

I have read all the books of Aristotle, I have followed several courses which were

consecrated to them. My ignorance having not before been made apparent to me, it

seemed to me that I had understood something and that I was becoming more wise.

Butcontrary to what it should have beenI did not feel myself ethically better after

this reading, and I often complained to myself and sometimes to others that Aristotle

had not accomplished what he had set out, by saying at the beginning of the second

book of the Ethics that he needed to understand this domain of philosophy not in

order to know, but in order to become better (at 91).

 21

So lifeless is the language of the philosopher in the Ethics, according to Petrarch, that he

professes to find Aristotles descriptions of the vices more moving than those of the virtues. It

is only in nostri, Petrarch continuesthat is, in the more rhetorically worked texts on ethical

subjects of the Latin authors Cicero, Seneca and the philosophical poet Horacethat we find

ethical writings that can help us to become better (92). For they know how to incite to

[virtues] by the vividness of their descriptions and the force of their exhortations, which

influence as much the sentiments as the intellect, says Petrarch (at 91). As far as Petrarch is

concerned, and in close alignment with the first ancient lineage of thinking about the relations

of theory and praxis, [i]t is more important to want the good than to know the truth (93). It

follows that the true philosopher, like the poet and the orator, should know how to move and

to please as much as to teach, to echo a Ciceronian formula.

The Northern humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, in the 16th century, in his Convivium

religiosum, for his part will evoke Virgil, Cicero, Socrates and other ancients as pagan saints.

And, as in Petrarch, it is the same practicist capacity to inspire people to the cultivation of

virtue, and in nearly the same terms, that incites Erasmus admiration for these figures. As

Erasmus tells us:

I [do not] totally approve of their [the pagan philosophers] writings, but I sense that

because of their writings I become better (me redid meliorem), whereas after reading

the scholastics I am left indifferent with regard to true virtue and more incited to anger

(93-94).

If we turn then, following Domaski, to renaissance texts by Petrarch and others where the

term and notion of the philosopher is expressly reflected upon, we are not surprised to find

that the each challenge the scholastic, intellectualist account of philosophia we saw in 3 above.

Here, at some length, is Petrarch in La Vita Solitaria, stressing that the true philosopher must

(secondly) live out in practice, as an exemplar, what he teaches from the chair, as well as

being able to inspire others through his language (the first thing) to virtue:
 22

I do not give the name philosopher to those who are called, to speak justly, men of

the chair (cathedrarios). For they philosophise in the chair, while in their actions they

are unconscious [of their principles]; they give precepts to others and they are the first

to be opposed to their own recommendations, to violate their own laws. They call

themselves directors in order to leave from the first their proper rank; to revolt from

the start against power and virtue. It is thus not of these men that I speak, but of true

philosophers who, always less numerous, confirm by their acts what they preach: who

love and care for wisdom (at 94). 2

Domaski also considers a third metaphilosophical theme that stands out in the

metaphilosophical texts of the European renaissance. This is a veritable reawakening in the

early modern period of an interest in the lives and ethical maxims of the philosophers. This

revival, as Domaski presents it, looks as far back as the end of the 13th century, with John

Wallis (Ionnes Guallensis) Compendiloquium de vitis illust. Philosophorum, and his Summa

de regimine humanae vitae. Wallis works, like Diogenes Laertius or Eunapius in later

antiquity, collected information on the lives and the sentences of the philosophers, presenting

the same as exemplars and models of the good life. Walter Burley in his De vita et moribus

philosophorum (c. 1330-45 CE) reshuffled Diogenes Laertius, as translated into Latin by Henri

Aristippus in 12th century. This work also contains a legion of anecdotes attesting to the atopia,

speech and deeds of the ancient philosophers. It enjoyed popularity across Europe, translated

into several natural languages in the last quarter of the 14th century.

In 1430, the Italian humanist Ambrogi Traversari retranslated Diogenes Laertius in a new

edition, with a commentary, and dedicated to his patron, the elder Cosimo de Medici.

Traversari stresses the superiority of the single, coherent conception that Christianity affords

us of the good life, over the competing ethical visions of the different pagan schools Diogenes

2In Petrarchs elegy to Boccaccio in Genealogia deorum gentilum, XIV, Domaski notes, we read the
poet-philosopher praising Boccaccio as a man distinguished by his dignity of morals, decorum or
style, elegance and harmony. For these ethical reasons, like those of Socrates, his [Boccaccios]
students learnt more from his morals than from his speeches (at 95).
 23

Laertius work documents. Nevertheless, he judges the philosophers deeds and sentences in

general positively. Indeed, like Abelard and Bacon, Traversari appeals to these models to spur

Christians to a virtue and moderation which, we are told, these pagans have researched with

zeal and probity. In Traversari, also, an appreciation of the atopia of the figure of the

philosopher returns and becomes explicit. Most of their sayings and actions have been

introduced in the book without taking account of the sentiment of decency of the sort that they

could raise the spirit, Traversari apologises in his commentary: [n]evertheless, the rules of

translation and of respect for the truth do not authorise me to omit them (101-2).

This reawakening of interest in the lives and sayings of philosopher in the renaissance was of

course only one component of the much wider rebirth of research into the literary heritage of

antiquity. This renaissance including the translation of other doxographic and biographic

texts into Latin: such as Plutarchs Moralia, the Vitae parallela and Apothegmata; and two

translations of the Encheiridion, by Nicolo Peronti in 1451 and then Politien in 1479. Leonardo

Bruni stresses the importance of the Letters of Plato, and of knowing about Platos life. In

1415, Bruni writes a life of Cicero (as a Preface to his translation of Plutarchs life of the great

Roman orator-philosopher). In 1429, he writes a life of Aristotle. Bruni is also responsible for

a translation of Platos Symposium, featuring Alcibiades eulogy to Socrates, again dedicated

to Cosimo il vecchio. Manetti in this period writes comparative lives of Socrates and Seneca.

Ficino, a quarter of a century later, writes biographies of Socrates and Plato. Politien

attempted in a biographical study to show the extraordinary and strange traits of Pythagoras.

The stress of Bruno and Manetti in particular, in these works, falls on the political, as well as

contemplative profiles of the classical philosophers. But all of the humanists are interested in

the lived morality of the ancients, as well as their proximity to Christian virtues. Guarino

Guarini, in his Vita Platonis, indeed stops short his account of Platonic dogmata to ask

rhetorically:

but why should I make of myself a man who pursues a vain enterprise? For what

reason do I have to pass in review what Plato imagines [albeit] with greater taste
 24

than all that which is found in Latin literature [and] that you know well? I leave

these things and present uniquely what I know of his life, for it comprehends and

teaches that the glory of virtue is contained in action. And if he researches virtue with

such great effort, it is as little to speak as to discuss (106-7).

Guarini follows this remarkable declamation with several examples of Plato responding to

situations of peril for the sake of his country or his friends, of his indifference towards death,

and of his journey to Sicily, presented as a mission to ask Dionysius to liberate Syracuse and

Italy (108-9). The figure of the philosopher here, we can see, is a counsellor and moderator of

political power, as well as (per Petrarch and Erasmus) a figure of great persuasive power,

capable of inspiring virtue through his seductive speech, as much as through his example.

Certainly, as Petrarch had already stressed, the philosopher on this renaissance model trades

as much in exhortative and inspirational languagerhetorical functions we now associate with

poetry or literatureas in the analytical, descriptive or scientific registers primary in the

scholastic conceptions of philosophy. Nicolas Perotti thus wrote in these terms to Nicolas V

concerning Epictetus Encheiridion, and its contrast to Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics:

the difference between the philosophy of Epictetus and that of others lies, it seems

to me, in the fact that because of others writings, we know what justice is, and what

valour and moderation, whereas through the exhortations of Epictetus we become

valiant, just and moderate (108).

Or compare Manetti in his Vita Socratis, who like Perotti is also echoing Petrarchs Of his own

ignorance:

as much as Aristotle had known how to define and differentiate perfectly the diverse

virtues of spirit, it seems nevertheless, in reading attentively his works, that he has

done nothing to push us to research virtue more assiduously or to liberate ourselves

more stubbornly from our vices. In summary, Socrates and Plato among the Greeks,

in particular, and amongst us [sic.], Cicero and Seneca are justly devoted to this. Better
 25

than others, they have incited people, even those who sleep or who are occupied with

other things [sic.!], to a nearly unbelievable love of the virtues and hatred of the vices

(at 108-9).

One further motif that emerges in the renaissances reawakening of the classical

metaphilosophical vision (alongside admiration for the union of rhetoric and philosophy, of

words and deeds, and a renewed biographical interest) is the elevation of Socrates as a sort

of prefiguration, announcing Christ, in the words of Ficinos Confirmatio Christianorum

per Socratica: or again, the greatest example of constancy and patience for posterity. For

Erasmus, we know, the true philosopher is not the erudite savant, but someone who lives

philosophically. In his Sileni Alcibiadis the Northern humanist thus lists Socrates, Diogenes

and Epictetus alongside John the Baptist, the apostles, Saint Martin and Christ Himself as

examples of what he terms Silenic lives, manifest in their teaching as well as their

comportment. Whereas even in Bruni, Socrates atopia is underplayed, Erasmus

philosophia Christi assimilates philosophical irony, farce or atopia into Christianityfor

example in his Adagia and Apothegmata: Erasmian collections of the sayings of the

philosophers, like John Wallis or Walter Burleys, based on Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch.

In Erasmus work particularly, then, humanism contests the negative evaluation on the atopia

and indiscretion of ancient philosophy which had prevailed largely unchallenged for the

previous millennium (117). Nevertheless, unlike his Italian predecessors, Erasmus did not

write lives of philosophers. Their individuality, atopia and ethical example was above all

expressed for Erasmus in their ironic, paradoxical and atopic apothegmata.

6. Concluding thoughts

It will have gone without saying that we have been unable to examine every figure in Julius

Domaskis densely argued and densely documented book. Our aim here has been only to

pinpoint the essential joints in Domaskis account of the eclipse and revival of the classical

pagan, practicist conception of philosophy, and try to make them available to interested,
 26

non-French-reading scholars. 3 Domaskis account of classical philosophy lacks the stress we

find in Pierre or Ilsetraut Hadot, Foucault, John Sellars and others on what Hadot had called

spiritual exercises. For Domaski, who focuses pre-eminently on direct metaphilosophical

declarations, it is above all in the teleology of ancient philosophy, directed at the best form of

life, which stands out. Then there is La Philosophies stress on the atopia of the philosopher,

which echoes Hadots work on the figure of the sage in the ancient philosophers texts, and

his reading of Socrates. For Domaski, as we have seen, there are in fact three competing

practicist conceptions of the ideal relations between theory and practice in ancient thought,

each of which will return at later moments in the history of ideas: the first, Stoic or Epicurean,

for which theoretical learning should culminate in an ethical life; the second, Platonic-

Neoplatonic, for which ethical training is the prerequisite for higher theoretical or

contemplative attainments; and the third, Aristotelian, which stresses that the contemplative

life itself is the best for human beings.

Medieval thought, as for Hadot, divides itself into two predominant lineages, monastic and

scholastic. The first inherits the classical sense of philosophy as involving a way of life. But

it upholds monastic Christianitys claim to pre-eminence in this domain, challenging the

sufficiency of unaided reason and virtue for true happiness. Outside of the monasteries,

philosophy tends in the second lineage to increasingly be identified with the liberal arts, as

propaedeutic to the studies of the Higher Faculties (medicine, law, theology). At the same

time, within the trivium, dialectic comes increasingly to claim the laurel as a means of reading,

arguing and examination. The philosophy at issue in the divisions of the later mediaeval

disciplines is moreover wholly cut off from its practicist or existential dimensions, coming

increasingly indeed to be identified with competency in reading Aristotles corpus.

Nevertheless, Domaski shows that a third counter-lineage exists in medieval thinking about

philosophy, which keeps the classical conceptions of its essentially practicist dimension alive,

3 The work, independently of language, is difficult to get a hold of. The author owes his copy to the

generosity of John Sellars, alongside a debt of gratitude.

 27

in doing so risking condemnation. For Abelard and Richard Kilwardy, in line with the first

Domaskian ancient conception, the aim of philosophy is ethical. For Abelard and Roger

Bacon, the preeminent virtue of the classical philosophers represents a standing challenge, if

not a model for Christians aiming to live well. Boethius of Dacia meanwhile reanimates

Aristotles sense of the contemplative life itself as the highest human good, a position for which

he in due course censored by the Church.

Before closing with a final remark prompted by Domasks longest chapter in La Philosophie

on the renaissance thinkers reanimation of the pagan sense of philosophy as exhortative and

exemplary as well as intellectual, let me interpose here two critical thoughts or prompts

concerning the image of mediaeval thought that La philosophie presents to us.

- Firstly, Domaski positions the liberal arts, their teaching and learning, as wholly

intellectual pursuits. So philosophys mediaeval identification with these arts reflects

the loss of the practicist sense of philosophy, interested in the transformation of

psyches or lives. Yet this claim arguably needs to be qualified. The training in

dialectics instituted in the later medieval university, on one hand, was clearly what

Hadot in Ancient Philosophy, an Ethics or a Practice? calls an intellectual exercise.

That is, its aim was to train the students in certain habits of thinking and disputing, or

what we might call certain intellectual virtues essential for higher studies (and sadly

one of many losses in todays universities). Indeed, the positioning of the liberal arts

as a whole as propaedeutic to higher studies reflects a larger perspective on the goal of

education which arguably carries an ethical intentionality. This perspective sees

education as not the conveying of information or bodies of knowledge from teachers

to pupils, so much as the training of students in particular valorised intellectual

capacities. Peter Harrison has thus shown in Territories of Science and Religion

(University of Chicago Press, 2015) the frequency of statements from Christian

thinkers that position education in the liberal arts as a matter of a pedagogical ascent

towards a culminating knowledge of God, which would of course be delivered only by

 28

theology. At its most general level, that is, these arts and the philosophies were thought

of as embodying an educational and spiritual progression that moved from the

contemplation of visible things (logic, ethics, natural philosophy) to the contemplation

of invisible things (theological truths). Early Christian writers adopted versions of the

classical philosophical divisions of knowledge, but related them to the goals of

theological contemplation as understood within the Christian tradition. The

Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen, whom we met in 2 above, also treated the

divisions of knowledge as stages on the path to contemplation of God, while suggesting

that different books of the Hebrew Bible had already anticipated these stages. Saint

Augustine (c. 354-430 CE) suggested that the stages of learning proposed by the pagan

philosophers should draw the inquirer nearer to God: the object of physics being God

as the ultimate cause of being; of logic, God as the criterion of thought; and of ethics,

God as the rule of proper conduct. Or, much later than Augustine, in the period of high

scholasticism, William of Auvergne (c. 1190-1249 CE), contended that the study of the

universe leads to both the exaltation of the creator and the perfection of our souls.

For Aquinas, again, the study of the objects of the liberal arts, Gods effects in nature,

is a means to elevate the soul towards knowledge of God:

Since, however, Gods effects show us the way to the contemplation of God

Himself, according to Rm. 1:20 . . . it follows that the contemplation of the

divine effects also belongs to the contemplative life, inasmuch as man is

guided thereby to the knowledge of God.

- The second qualification here, then, is to stress that the study of theology, likewise,

should not be considered without caution as an (as it were) life-less, solely intellectual

business. We glimpsed this above (in 3, at the end), considering Aquinas

differentiation of theology from philosophy, with a view to the ends of life. The very

term scientific which Domaski uses in contrast to the practicist conception of

 29

philosophy, Harrison argues, had a very different signification in the mediaevals than

it has in the 21st century. As Harrison writes:

It is important, then, to reduce neither natural philosophy (science) nor sacra

doctrina (theology) to familiarity with an organized body of doctrines. In

proposing that sacra doctrina is a science, Thomas Aquinas is arguing that it is a

practice that leads to a particular state of mind, as a consequence of which one can

habitually reason from cause to effect. In the first question of the Summa

theologiae he thus states that unity of the science of theology comes from the fact

that it is a single faculty or habit What is really going on in the pursuit of both

natural philosophy and theology is a process of training and apprenticeship that

leads to an intellectual habituation to achieve cognitive restructuring. This

understanding of the office of the philosopher as one who undergoes personal

transformation will change quite significantly in the seventeenth century, when

the philosophical task will be directed outward toward the transformation of

nature (Territories, 69-70)

We must leave aside an examination of these issues here, however. We close instead by

underscoring once more the significance of Domaskis final chapter on the metaphilosophical

thought of the renaissance. It is striking that in Hadots own article on the Christian uptake

of philosophical exercises, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot begins with Paul Rabbow.

Rabbow had claimed that Ignatius Loyolas spiritual exercises had been rendered possible by

Loyolas familiarity with the techniques of renaissance, and thereby classical rhetoric (Hadot,

Ancient Spiritual Exercises, 126-130). In a remarkable passage in his Preface to Domaskis

La Philosophie, Thorie oui manire de Vivre? (xii), Hadot tells us of his shock of recognition

when he read in Domaskis pages the metaphilosophical declarations of the humanists

following Petrarch (see 5 above), which criticize the sufficiency of solely-theoretical

conceptions of ethics and philosophy, and extol the ability of Cicero, Seneca and others to

inspire the love of virtue, as well as its knowledge; to move the will, as well as inform the mind.
 30

Perhaps one day it will be possible to say that the deepest significance of the researches of

Pierre Hadot, Juliusz Domaski and others is that they have served, even without knowing it,

to reawaken the humanistic understanding of philosophy, largely concealed beneath two

centuries of our own academic scholasticism.