“Pierre Hadot” is not a household name. It is not even a Lutheran household name. It is not even an academic Lutheran household name. Rather, it is a name that is obscure to many people and often simply ignored with the long list of philosophers and historians that have come before and after him.
This, combined with the Confessional Lutheran’s general antipathy towards philosophy, means that many times, when I bring him up in a conversation, his name is met with a shrug and a “never heard of him,” followed by a swift reorientation of the conversation.
But I am convinced that the research of Pierre Hadot matters for Lutherans. And, if you have the patience to hear me out, I might be able to convince you of that fact, too.
Pierre Hadot was a French philologist, historian, and philosopher. He was born in 1922 at Reims. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1944, but he left the order after Pope Pius XII’s Humani generis (which condemned, among other things, French “New Theology” and Darwinian evolution).
He later became a professor for the Collège de France, where he held the Chair of History in Hellenistic and Roman Thought until he retired in 1991. He died in 2010 at the age of 88 in Orsay, France.
Among his most influential works are What is Ancient Philosophy?, a guide for navigating the philosophical world of Ancient Greece (and later, Rome), Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, an elaboration on the founder of Neoplatonism, and Philosophy as a Way of Life, a collection of essays (complied and edited by Arnold I Davidson) which seem foundational to his way of approaching ancient philosophies.
It is this last book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, which is perhaps the most interesting. And that is not just because of its holistic take of Hadot the philosopher and historian (for it does do that, showing Hadot at his best, using both modern and ancient philosophers alike): rather, it has rather interesting implications for how we understand the early church.
Yes, it flushes out very nicely what Hadot means by Philosophical Discourse and Life, Spiritual Exercises, the Sage, and all of the typical Hadot-motifs (for a drive-by analysis see my two previous articles here and here). However, Hadot does something even more exciting with these terms: he essentially baptizes them.
Hadot ends up making the claim that just as Ancient Philosophy understood itself primarily as an existential choice geared towards the radical spiritual transformation of self through the spiritual exercises which make up the philosophical life, so, too, did Christianity begin to define itself, through the traditions of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, and the Cappadocians, as a philosophical life.
In fact, Hadot would go on to seriously remark, “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.”[1]
This means that all of the things said in my previous essays about philosophical life and discourse can be appropriated to an Early Church context. The sage becomes Jesus. The loving of wisdom becomes a loving of Christ, the true Wisdom. The discourse becomes a discussion of dogma. And so, Christianity begins to subsume the worldview functions that pagan philosophy had originally fulfilled for the individual antique man and his society.
There is more to it than that, though. Hadot suggests that with this adoption of vocabulary and models, something else was appropriated into the Christian psyche: Spiritual Exercises. Christianity, in identifying itself as a philosophical school, actually began to appropriate for itself some of the spiritual exercises associated with the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Platonists, and even the Cynics.
“Under Alexandrian influence,” that is, under “the distant influence of Philo, and the more immediate influence of Origen and Clement of Alexandria, magnificently orchestrated by the Cappadocians, certain philosophical spiritual techniques were introduced into Christian spirituality.”[2] The pinnacle of this process was the engineering of ascetic piety, which, though often liturgical, was also couched in particular philosophical terminology.
Hadot offers us the prime example of this transfer of ideas: the stoic concept of prosoche. For the stoic, as well as for many philosophical schools, prosoche was considered an attention to self. This was what was written on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It was considered “the philosophical attitude par excellence,”[3]: and yet, as Hadot has observed, throughout the course of the Alexandria Appropriation, prosoche soon became “also the attitude of the Christian philosopher,”[4] as he paid attention to his own spiritual condition.
Hodot proceeds to track the use of prosoche language through several very influential church fathers, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Evagrius of Pontus, and Dortheus of Gaza.[5] And his quotations are convincing: it would seem that the language of philosophical attitude, the beginning and end of all spiritual exercises, had made its way into Christianity and, through the work of John Cassian especially, come to influence Benedict of Nursa and the entire subsequent Medieval tradition. This is just a taste of the benefits one can reap from Hadot’s research into ancient philosophy.
And so, Hadot would be beneficial for Lutheranism, because Hadot contains insights into the Early Church (that is, how the earliest Christians understood their Christianity). The Origenist tradition does not stop with the Cappadocians. Ambrose, Jerome, Rufinus, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Evagrius, John Cassian: all of them are reading Origen and/or being taught by Origenists.
When Philip Melanchthon and Martin Chemnitz in the 16th Century speak of “purer antiquity,” that is, the fourth and fifth centuries, he is talking primarily about the Fathers in this tradition. This is the tradition of theological discourse in late antiquity; and, now, it would seem, that it was also the tradition for the promotion of the philosophical life lived out through spiritual exercises.
This means that we, too, have inherited this tradition. And so, Hadot’s redefining of this tradition to language of philosophical life and discourse is of paramount important for us. If he is right, it could change the way we view the early church, and subsequently ourselves. If he is wrong, then it is an attack on our heritage, our mystical family, how we understand the early church, and, frankly, ourselves.
Therefore, I think it would be wise for us Lutherans, too, to look into and evaluate Hadot’s research. What we find might surprise us, alarm us, confuse us. But I personally doubt that it will leave us unchanged.
[1] Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 128.
[2] Ibid, 140.
[3] Ibid, 130.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 130-133.
