The text we present here, the Polish scholar Juliusz DomaÅskiâs La Philosophie, théorie ou manière de vivre, deserves a place alongside the better-known work of French philosopher and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot. This is so not least because Hadot himself, in his 1996 Preface to the present work, credits DomaÅski with expanding and revising his comprehension of what it meant to do philosophy in the medieval and Renaissance periods. In this introduction, we situate DomaÅskiâs text in relation to Hadotâs work, and also to wider discussions and debates about the career of the notion of philosophy from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. We then identify four additional reasons to accord DomaÅskiâs work a major place in the contemporary renewal in understanding of philosophy as a way of life.
One current of the scholarship on philosophy as a way of life (PWL), from Hadotâs earliest studies onward, has been to pose a kind of lapsarian question: namely, how and when did philosophy âfallâ from its conception in Antiquity as (to use the Stoic phrase) an art of livingâa set of intellectual, interpersonal and institutional disciplines or exercises, directed to the realization of a specific theoria, through a spiritual transformation of the ways students sensed, thought about, and acted in the worldâto its later, modern conception as the strictly discursive production of purely theoretical systems in didactic, mostly unironic, written textsâwith all the loss of significance this fall implies?
Hadotâs answer to this question had been to argue that by the Christian Middle Ages, the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of lifeâas, again, an ensemble of spiritual exercises performed in order to make the unwise wise, to form inchoate philosophical subjects into living philosophersâhad been thoroughly submitted to a two-fold exigency. On the one hand, Christian apologists of late Antiquity, beginning with Justin Martyr and Athenagoras in the first part of the second century, conceived of the Christian life as the true philosophy: Christian teaching purifies whatever is good in rival philosophies of paganism, while bringing it to perfection. So, discipleship in the church supersedes all other philosophies as ways of life.1 The development of ascetic Christian eremitism from the late third century, while sometimes in conflict with the authority of the urban ecclesiastical hierarchies, also advanced Christianization of specific philosophical practices of attention, like the premeditation of evils and the contemplation of mortality. In this way, then, over the course of the late antique-early medieval period, the monastic orders became the primary cultural locus of what remained of philosophy as a way of life, though they largely disavowed the name of philosophy without further qualification.2
On the other hand, Hadot claimed, as the spiritual, self-transformative direction of ancient philosophy was appropriated within the monasteries, its highly sophisticated conceptual support had by the end of the 10th century become the province of the cathedral schools, then to be taken up into the medieval universities. In that setting, however, the discursive dimension was soon cut loose from its existential mooring. Deprived of its integral role within the ensemble of spiritual exercises that trained practitioners in how to live a theoria, what was carried on under the explicit name of philosophy became soon merely âtheoreticalââa technical discourse that was in itself no answer to the question, how a person should live. As Hadot put it:
With the advent of medieval Scholasticism ⦠we find a clear distinction being drawn between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, while philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises. ⦠Reduced to the rank of a âhandmaid of theology,â philosophyâs role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptualâand hence purely theoreticalâmaterial.3
Other currents, in scholarship have advanced a different view of medieval metaphilosophy, however. As Gianfranco Fioravanti has observed, Hadotâs Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique attracted little attention among medievalists at its first appearance in 1981, the only notable exception being Ruedi Imbach, Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Sorbonne, who reviewed it critically in 1983.4 During the same year, Maria Corti published her pioneering La felicità mentale. Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante. This work inaugurated an interpretative model, that of âintellectual felicity,â which became a challenging alternative to Hadotâs thesis on the medieval decline of the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life.5 As Calma explains, in fact, the term âintellectual felicityâ:
is used to summarize the Scholastic appropriation of Averroesâ interpretation of Aristotleâs account in the Nicomachean Ethics concerning philosophy as the supreme good and source of happiness. According to some key figures of the thirteen and fourteenth century (such as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant), philosophy was an autonomous discipline, with its own set of rules, methods, and objects of knowledge, and the study of philosophy represented the highest form of living. It claims that those among us who do not practice philosophy should be counted among the beasts because they do not live according [to] their true intellectual nature. Some scholars call this radical view âethical Averroism.â6
When talking of an âethical Averroism,â Calma is here referring to the works of Alain de Libera (especially Penser au Moyen Ãge),7 whose interpretative proposalânamely, the identification of the spirit of medieval philosophy with these Parisian Masters8 âis best understood by contrast to Hadotâs own, as he himself tells us in an interview:
My point is better understood, I think, if we compare it to the thesis of Pierre Hadot, according to whom medieval scholasticism organized the divorce between theory and practice, philosophy and spirituality, choice of life and abstract knowledge. Speaking of the spirit of medieval philosophy, I wanted to emphasize that philosophy as a form of life had not, on the contrary disappeared in the Middle Ages; that it had only changed its institutional location (the University, and no longer the Academy, the Lyceum, or the Porch).9
And yet, while Hadot never interacted with Cortiâs La felicità mentaleânor systematically engaged with any of the scholars influenced by her account, such as de Libera10 âhe appears to have eventually reached the same insights and changed his mind, at least in part. As we have already said, Hadot explicitly credited this changed estimation to what he called his âspiritual encounterâ with Juliusz DomaÅski, a serendipitous convergence of the itineraries of their thought. He remarks on DomaÅskiâs influence in What is Ancient Philosophy? (published in French in 1995). Thanks to the work of the latter, Hadot says:
I have been able to correct the overly brief and inexact presentation of the âtheoreticizingâ of philosophy I had proposed in previous studies. I still believe that this phenomenon is closely linked to the relations between philosophy and Christianity, especially as these were defined in the medieval universities. Yet I must admit that the rediscovery of philosophy as a way of life was not as late as I had stated, and that it too began to be sketched in the medieval universities.11
Hadot says more about the origin of this reassessment in the preface he wrote for La Philosophie, théorie ou manière de vivre, also translated here. Without preempting what readers will find there, we can say that he explains that he first came to know of DomaÅskiâs studies in the history of the idea of philosophy only after publication of his own âessential positions,â and only to know them âimperfectlyâ at that.12 Still, not until 1990, thanks to the series of lectures comprised in the present text, did Hadot recognize the âoriginality and profundityâ of his research. DomaÅski, Hadot admits, proposes a âmuch more complex and more nuanced depictionâ of the medieval transformation of philosophy than his own sketches. Indeed, the central two chapters of La Philosophie, théorie ou manière de vivreâmore than half of its pagesâare given over to the kind of diligent examination of medieval philosophy which Hadotâs work does not include.
So, DomaÅskiâs studies merit translation and a wider audience not just as ancillae to Hadotâs trail-blazing contributions. His originality sometimes overlaps with, sometimes diverges from, Hadotâs trajectory. We identify at least four striking claims in DomaÅskiâs account of the fate of philosophy in the Middle Ages. Firstly, like Hadot, he interprets the history of the concept of philosophy in the Middle Ages as, largely, the history of a fall from philosophyâs elevated call in the ancient world. For DomaÅski, it is the Church Fathers that first sharply distinguished theoretical from practical dimensions of philosophy. Indeed, they leveraged the ancient âpracticistâ sense of philosophy to undermine their rivals. The pagan philosophers had discovered and communicated theoretical truths in accordance with reason, they conceded. Yet, echoing the speech attributed to Paul in Athens by the author of Acts of the Apostles, they argued that the philosophers owed their achievement to the grace of the one God, of Whom the philosophers knew nothing. According to some of the patristic writers, the pagan philosophersâ doctrines of the virtues could be used in the Church to correct and encourage the faithful in their efforts to live a Christian life; the practices of the philosophers, though, could not lead to the actualization of their noble teachings. Augustine of Hippo, for instance, held that the mere desire to cultivate greatness of soul was a manifestation of sinful pride, such sin as his eastern contemporary, John Chrysostom, claimed to see writ large in the atopic antics of Diogenes the Cynic. Still, DomaÅski notes, the extension of the term philosophia in the early and even High Middle Ages continued to include ways of life characterized as active or practical love of wisdom. In the orbit of medieval Christendom, however, this meant devotion to God and Christ through the specifically âreligiousâ vocation to monastic orders. It was monks and nuns who could be, and were, described as pursuing or living according to (the true) âphilosophy.â Besides the Old and New Testament accounts of the life of Christ (that is, as read through the fourfold allegorical hermeneutics that assimilated all scripture to a Christian metahistory), a burgeoning hagiographical literature presented lives of the saints as wisdom enacted for readersâ devotion and edification.
Secondly, DomaÅski argues that the âseveranceâ of philosophical discourse from any sense of philosophy as a way of life was consummated within the scholastic milieu of the later medieval universities. Here, again, DomaÅski can be taken to lend confirmation to Hadotâs âessential position,â although he makes his case with considerably more detail than Hadot did. âPhilosophyâ ceased to be, inherently, a way of life due to a growing trend in scholastic divisions of the sciences and the university syllabi to place philosophy with or even within the seven liberal artsâthe trivium: rhetoric, dialectic, grammar; and the quadriviumâastronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music. Whereas the liberal arts were considered by some ancient philosophers (like Seneca) to be a necessary propaedeutic to philosophy, now philosophy, in being identified with them, with dialectic especially, was demoted in status. The Arts Faculty as a whole, within which philosophy was now taught, was positioned as propaedeutic for higher studies in medicine, law, or theology. If philosophy retained a distinction from the other arts, it was in being especially the âhandmaidenâ of theology.
As we have already indicated, DomaÅski observes that the trend toward identifying philosophy as one among the liberal arts, subordinate to theology above all, was coupled with a prioritisation of dialectic within the teaching of the trivium. The high place of dialectic in the medieval universities is well known, and would later become the subject of particular humanistic ire, as in Petrarchâs Letters, for example. Dialectic for the ancients, in all perhaps but the sceptical schools, and notwithstanding its august position in some forms of Platonism, was at most one way to exercise the love of wisdom. In the thirteenth century, alongside the authoritative âlectureâ or reading of a text by a master in the Arts courses, dialectic became the privileged method not only of textual analysis, but of what passed for dialogueâwe mean the famous (and famously formalized) disputations.
The displacement of philosophy in the dominant mediaeval conception
The centrality to medieval pedagogy of the reading of authoritative texts, the corpus Aristotelicum above all, in the Arts Faculties of the 13th and 14th centuries, is the basis of DomaÅskiâs third outstanding claim. He argues that in this later medieval period, the idea of philosophy, irrespective of its various appearances in the university curriculum, was the idea of a wholly theoretical, that is, a âscientificâ endeavor to ascertain the authoritative teaching of a select group of received texts. Indeed, according to DomaÅski, to philosophise in this context meant above all to read and interpret âthe Philosopherâ:
As to the separation of philosophy and theology, ⦠the task of a philosopher is limited to commenting upon, explicating and, possibly, developing the truth discovered by natural reason and contained in the writings of Aristotle. It is, therefore, a solely intellectual work. The Christian philosopher-scholastic is a scientific scholar [savant] who seeks to solve the problems that reason poses regarding the writings of Aristotle, and who should explain to others the solution to these problems, with all the arguments for and against. / In this situation, the scholar is not himself obliged to giveâby his comportment or by his personal meritsâa witness to the truth drawn from the texts. (p. 42)
In short (as DomaÅski puts it later), âthe use of the word âphilosophyâ to designate the Christian life disappeared from the vocabulary of the scholastic masters of the 13th century.â (p. 59)
As one corollary of this momentous refiguring of philosophy, DomaÅski asserts that the âinterest of [the scholastic masters] no longer bears upon the philosophers as personalities. The names of the ancient philosophers for them are only word-signs that serve to indicate doctrines and opinions.â (ibid.) Even ethics, conceived then as the reading of Aristotleâs Nicomachean Ethics, became an exclusively intellectual affair, without existential entailments. Insofar as readers of Aristotle in the universities of the late Middle Ages had an interest in living or realising an ethics, they had it as Christians; their occupation as philosophers was, strictly speaking, not germane to their moral and spiritual calling.
To argue in this way that the concept of philosophy follows a lapsarian trajectory from Antiquity to the medieval era raises another question that, of course, has to be posed in the contemporary scholarly retrieval of philosophy as a way of life: if medieval philosophy was divested of its existential power, if those who claimed to do philosophy disowned its spiritual depth, then who, if anyone, preserved the ancient conception, resisting its eclipse as the predominant metaphilosophy in the West, reviving it and handing it on? La Philosophie offers a substantive response to that question, and this is its fourth important claim on our attention. Indeed, it is this contribution that Hadot especially credited as reforming his opinions. DomaÅski shows how in the 12th century, at the very time that the great universities were establishing their syllabi, a counter-scholastic lineage (or at least an alternative scholastic lineage) of thinking about philosophy and its roles emerged.13 DomaÅski examines this alternative lineage through four figures: Peter Abelard (1079â1142), Boethius of Dacia (1240â1284), Robert Kilwardby (1215â1279), and Roger Bacon (1219/20â1294). In this lineage, he writes that we may observe âa high estimation of the attitudes and activities of the [ancient] philosophers: their virtuous life can serve Christians, if not as an example, at least as an incitement, since it can make them ashamed when they see that their life is worse than that of the pagan philosophers.â (p. 54)
So, consider, with DomaÅski, the today little-known 13th century figure, Boethius of Dacia. Boethius was one of the Latin Averroists. As DomaÅski reads him, Boethius accorded philosophy a complete autonomy, independent of theology grounded in revelation. In his De summo bono sive de vita philosophi, Boethius proposes that the supreme good of human beings is whatever redounds to them in accordance with the exercise of their best power or virtue. Now the best power in human beings, he says, is the reasoning intellect [ratio et intellectus], because, whether one engages things for a theoretical or a practical end, it is the âsupreme rule of human life.â Therefore, âknowledge of the true and accomplishment of the good, and their enjoyment, is the highest good of humankind.â Yet ironically only a few, the philosophers, dedicate their lives and themselves to that end: studio sapientiae vacant (âthey devote themselves to the study of wisdomâ). Thus, says Boethius, flirting with heresy, only philosophers do not âsin against the order of nature.â For only they realize, by their knowledge, in their actions, the proper ordination of the soul to natureâs order. Inasmuch as a philosopher seeks rational intellection of that order, he maintains, they will be incapable of sin.
Or consider the final figure DomaÅski examines in this lineage, who âfor many reasons, transcends the scholastic formation typical of his periodâ: Roger Bacon. In DomaÅskiâs view, Bacon gives us the highest estimation of philosophers of any figure in the Christian era, until the European Renaissance. Bacon shows a vital interest in the lives and deeds of the philosophers, their sentences, their apothegms, their moral exhortations. For him, ethics, understood as living conduct (thereby reprising one ancient philosophical model of the relation between theory and practice), is the most precious part of philosophy. Ethics, so understood, constitutes the limit and end of all other philosophical disciplines. In scholastic terms, Bacon describes this by saying that theoretical philosophy furnishes the conclusions which must become the principles of ethics. In not-so-scholastic terms, Bacon maintains that for this reason, the philosophers of Antiquity deserve to be studied and emulated. Even though they part from the most sublime way, the pagan philosophers model lives that should humble the inordinate pride of many a sinful Christian.
It is not just these arguments concerning medieval philosophy that give La philosophie its importance for a richer history of philosophy as a way of life, though. For in the fourth chapter, DomaÅski extends his examination to the Renaissance. In fact, DomaÅskiâs itinerary toward the âspiritual encounterâ with Hadot originated in his study of the Renaissance humanists, figures today rarely taught to philosophy students. Hadot gestured at times towards the potential importance of the Renaissance for the history of philosophy as a way of life, but he never studied the humanists and their times in depth. It is from his profound knowledge of them, especially Erasmus, that DomaÅski makes several more trenchant contributions to our understanding of the history of philosophy as a way of life in the West, of how and through whom the ancient metaphilosophy lived on. As he is at pains to stress, it was the Renaissance humanists who made an especially direct return to philosophy conceived as practiced morality exemplified in the person of the philosopher. Through them comes a revalorization of ancient pagan philosophy as compared to Christian saintliness, a revalorization which is grounded in and justified by the perception of a direct correlation between philosophical wisdom and the pursuit of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily admirable, way of life.
To begin, DomaÅski shines light on what became for the humanists a paradigmatic criticism of the scholastic preoccupation with Aristotle. For instance, Petrarch (1304â1374), in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, announces:
I have read all the moral books of Aristotle, I have followed some courses which were dedicated to them. Before my ignorance dawned on me, it seemed to me that I understood something of them, and that I was becoming more wise. Butâcontrary to what should have occurredâI did not feel myself internally improved after the reading and I complained often to myself and sometimes to others of not really achieving what Aristotle had said at the start of the second book of his Ethics, that you had to learn this domain of philosophy, not to know, but to become better. (pp. 79â80)
The language of âThe Philosopherâ in the Nicomachean Ethics is lifeless, the Italian philosopher-poet-rhetor complains; it inspires neither hatred nor love, and hence cannot move people to live by the principles it isolates. Proficiency in the discourse of Aristotelianism merely permits advancement in the world of the university. Only in âour ownâ (nostri), Petrarch continues, that is, in the (as he considers) more rhetorically artful, Latin texts of Cicero, Seneca, and Horaceâwhich scholastic philosophers neglectâwill readers find genuinely ethical discourse, that is, discourse that actually enables them to become better human beings. For âthey know how to encourage readers to the virtues, by the picturesque nature of their descriptions and the force of their exhortations, which affect the intellect as much as the sentiments,â Petrarch says. This same classical ideaâwhich captures something absolutely essential to the idea of philosophy as a way of lifeâwill be echoed by Niccolò Perotti concerning Epictetusâ Encheiridion, and by Giannozzo Manetti in his Vita Socratis.
DomaÅski turns, secondly, to humanist texts where the term âphilosopherâ is expressly reflected upon, and finds again the ancient concept, asserted against the scholastic model. In his Vita Solitaria, to take but one example, Petrarch lays blame on the university professors, who argue with skill but contradict themselves in practice, while he praises the ability of âtrue philosophers,â like Socrates, to live as they teach:
I do not call philosophers those to whom one gives, appropriately, the name of âmen of the chairâ (cathedrarios). For they philosophize in a chair, whereas in their actions they are fools [insensés]; they give precepts to others and are the first to be opposed to their own recommendations, to annul their own laws. ⦠It is therefore not of these that I speak, but of true philosophers who, always less numerous, and now perhaps completely disappeared, confirm by their actions what they preach; the love and care of wisdom.14 (pp. 82â83)
The third metaphilosophical theme of the Renaissance that DomaÅski considers is the revealing interest in making more widely available accounts of the personalities of the ancient philosophers. A translation of Diogenes Laertius (now lost) was made in the twelfth century by Henry Aristippus. Then, in 1430, the Italian humanist Ambrogio Traversari translated Diogenes Laertius in an edition dedicated to his patron, Cosimo il Vecchio. Traversari piously stressed the uncontested superiority of the Christian conception of the good life over the competing visions of the different pagan schools. He was embarrassed by the stories of atopic behavior, which he accounted âindecency.â Nevertheless, like Abelard and Bacon, he appealed to the ancient models of living to spur Christians to âvirtue and moderationâ which, he says, the pagans pursued with âzeal and probity.â Traversariâs Diogenes Laertius was just one of a rush of translations of classical doxographic and biographic texts into Latin, as well as original portraits of the philosophers by Manetti, Ficino, and Politianus.
The fourth and final motif that DomaÅski highlights in the Renaissanceâs reawakening of the classical metaphilosophy is the depiction of Socrates in particular as a kind of evangelist. He is, in Ficinoâs words, âa sort of prefiguration, [who] announces ⦠Christâ and who, by his conduct âbecomes for posterity the example of the greatest constancy and patience.â For Erasmus, in his Sileni Alcibiadis, Socrates, alongside Diogenes and Epictetus, finds a place with John the Baptist, the apostles, and Christ himself as examples of what the Northern humanist terms âSilenicâ lives, manifested in their comportment as well as their teachings. Moreover, whereas even in Bruni, Socratesâ atopia is underplayed, Erasmusâ âphilosophia Christiâ contests the negative evaluation of the antinomic âindiscretionâ characterising many ancient presentations of the philosopher, an evaluation which had prevailed unchallenged for the previous millennium. With Erasmus, that is, the ancient sense of philosophy as a distinctive and (for those bound to convention) a disturbing way of living informed by theoretical learning, had been reborn in Christian attire.
Pierre Hadot tells us in his Preface that as he read DomaÅski on the metaphilosophy of the Renaissance humanists he felt that the accuracy of his fundamental orientation concerning ancient philosophy was powerfully confirmed (xii). Indeed, we might contend that what DomaÅskiâs ground-breaking study allows us to seeâand this may be his profoundest contribution to this fieldâis how Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadotâs pioneering studies on ancient philosophy all along have been part of a much larger cultural current, a current that persistently returns us to the humanistic sense of philosophy, no less today, in the face of its occlusion by modern forms of university scholasticism and sophism, than in the great philosophical ages of the past. On this view of things, it is remarkable that the critical response to Hadotâs and DomaÅskiâs assessments of medieval philosophy pointed to an eventual convergence of the different scholarly trajectories concerning the phenomenon of philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages, by deepening appreciation of ways in which medieval philosophers of every stripe may have understood themselves as practitioners of ways of life. Moreover, for more than a few, the goal of such discipline was, even if not autonomous with respect to the revealed teaching authority of the Church, hardly ancillary to religious beatitude. Rather, philosophy was for them integral to an encompassing process of personal transformation. In presenting this translation of one of Juliusz DomaÅskiâs most synoptic and incisive studies of the phenomenon of philosophy, together with its metaphilosophical appropriation, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, we hope to increase recognition of DomaÅskiâs significance for the contemporary study of philosophy as a way of life. We hope also to advance his argument, that a quest for an authentic and authentically lived self-understanding has always been of the essence of the long career of the human love of wisdom.
Already by the end of the second century, patristic writings as different as those of Irenaeus of Lyons in the West and Clement of Alexandria in the East give clear indications that institutional features of the Greco-Roman philosophical schools were being purposefully appropriated as models for administering the emerging ecclesial bureaucracy in cities of the empire. Arguably, these second century figures assume a trajectory in Christian self-understanding that was already well afoot, if contested. See, for example, Steve N. Mason, âPhilosophiai: Graeco-Roman, Judean, and Christian,â in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (New York: Routledge, 1996), 31â58.
Guy G. Stroumsa, in The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2016), argues that novel textual practices of Christians, especially early Christian monks, were crucial to the cultural revolution that resulted in a new kind of self, an intensely introspective self which ancient philosophy had neither assumed not anticipated as an audience. âFor Christian intellectuals,â says Stroumsa, âreading scripture and interpreting it meant becoming the successors of the ancient sages. It is through scripture that they learned to become wise men and spiritual guides.â (81).
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 107. The quotation comes from the essay first published in 1977, âExercices spirituels,â Annuaire: Résumé des conférences et travaux, Ãcole pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses, 84 (1975â1976), (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1977), and reprinted in both the first edition of Exercices spirituelles et philosophie antique (Paris, Ãtudes augustiniennes, 1981) and the second (1987).
Gianfranco Fioravanti, âLa felicità intellettuale: Storiografia e precisazioni,â in La felicità nel Medioevo: Atti del convegno della Società Italiana per lo Studio del Pensiero Medievale (S.I.S.P.M.), Milano, 12â13 settembre 2003, ed. Maria Bettetini and Francesco D Paparella (Louvain-La-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts dâÃtudes Médiévales, 2005), 4. Ruedi Imbach, âPhilosophie als geistliche Ãbung: zu einem Aufsatzband von Pierre Hadot,â Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 30 (1983), 179â187. This review was republished in French as Ruedi Imbach, âLa philosophie comme exercice spirituel,â Critique 454 (1985), 275â283. Hadot revised his assessment in response to Imbachâs criticisms in Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique Deuxième édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Ãtudes augustiniennes, 1987), 236.
That Hadotâs narrative of the decline of the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages may be criticized by pointing at the case of Severinus Boethius has been noted by Jan A Aertsen, âIs There a Medieval Philosophy?,â International Philosophical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1999): 391. Following the latter, see Brian Harding, âMetaphysical Speculation and its Applicability to a Mode of Living: The Case of Boethiusâ De Consolatione Philosophiae,â Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch für Antike und Mittelalter 9, no. 1 (2004). More recently Rolf Darge, âTheorie als Lebensform. Pierre Hadots Sicht der Philosophie als spirituelle Ãbung,â in Philosophie und MystikâTheorie oder Lebensform?, ed. Johannes Schaber and Martin Thurner (Muenchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 2020), 22ff.
Dragos Calma, âMetaphysics as a Way of Life: Heymericus de Campo on Universals and the âInner Manâ,â Vivarium 58, no. 4 (2020): 307. Similarly see Fioravanti, âLa felicità intellettuale,â 6: âIn a certain sense the cypher of âmental happinessâ [felicità mentale] introduced by Maria Corti [â¦] worked as a catalyst of interpretation and trends, the outcome of which could present itself as a response to Hadotâs theses: right at the beginning of its structuring as a public and university discipline, philosophy presented itself in the Middle Ages as a form of life, even as the highest form of life, consciously linking itself to the tradition of the classical world.â Translation ours.
Alain de Libera, Penser au Moyen Ãge (Paris: éditions du Seuil, 1991). To say that de Libera developed his thesis only on the basis of Cortiâs account in Felicità mentale is an oversimplification, as Bianchi notes. Luca Bianchi, âFelicità intellettuale,«ascetismo» e «arabismo»: nota sul «De summa bono» di Boezio di Dacia,â in Le felicità nel Medioevo: Atti del Convegno della Società Italiana per lo Studio del Pensiero Medievale (SISPM), Milano, 12â13 settembre 2003 (2005), 16. Moreover, as Fioravanti noted, de Libera was not the only scholar to have been influenced by the âmodello Corti.â Fioravanti, âLa felicità intellettuale,â 5 See also the last chapter (âVirtù, felicità e filosofiaâ) in Luca Bianchi, Il vescovo e i filosofi: la condanna parigina del 1277 e lâevoluzione dellâaristotelismo scolastico (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990). But also Ruedi Imbach, Dante, la philosophie et les laïcs (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions Universitaires de Fribourg, 1996).
Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale, Que sais-je?, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 122.
Alain de Libera and J. A. Aertsen, âEntretien avec Alain de Libera,â Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 65, no. 1 (1998): 172. It is also worth noting that de Liberaâs tendency to identify the âessenceâ of medieval philosophy in the magistri artium, rather than in Christian philosophy, was developed in polemics with Gilson. This was criticized in turn by Steel, âMedieval Philosophy: an Impossible Project? Thomas Aquinas and the âAverroisticâ Ideal of Happiness,â 171. Similarly, see also Kent Emery and Andreas Speer, âAfter the Condemnation of 1277: New Evidence, New Perspectives, and Grounds for New Interpretations,â in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277/After the Condemnation of 1277 (De Gruyter, 2013), 10. On Steel, see also the considerations in Fioravanti, âLa felicità intellettuale,â 8â9.
This notwithstanding, de Liberaâs works have consistently been associated by contemporary scholars with Hadotâs production after his encounter with DomaÅski. Aertsen, for instance, considered Hadot to be part of that ânew tendency in the study of medieval philosophyââthat tendency that sees in the Faculty of Arts the âspiritâ or âessenceâ of medieval philosophyâof which Alain de Libera can be considered the main ârepresentative.â Aertsen, âIs There a Medieval Philosophy?,â 386. From the same author, see also Jan A. Aertsen, âMittelalterliche Philosophie: ein unmogliches Project? Zur Wende des Philosophieverstandnisses im 13. Jahrhundert,â in Geistesleben im 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000), 13. Similarly, also Emery and Speer, âAfter the condemnation of 1277,â 8.; Andreas Speer, âSapientia nostra: Zum Verhältnis von philosophischer und theologischer Weisheit in den Pariser Debatten am Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts,â in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277/After the Condemnation of 1277 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 251â52. On the association of the theses of the two French scholars, see Fioravanti, âLa felicità intellettuale,â 6, 12. As far as we have ascertained, Hadot refers to de Libera only in reference to Aubry of Reims, Dante and Meister Eckhart (and not Boethius of Dacia or Siger of Brabant), in Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004), 319, n25 and n26.
Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 254. Even so, Hadot continued to insist that philosophy as a way of life all but came to an end with the rise of Medieval scholasticism, apart from a few anomalous thinkers. Hankey noted this insistence on Hadotâs part in Wayne Hankey, âPhilosophy as Way of Life for Christians? Iamblichan and Porphyrian Reflections on Religion, Virtue, and Philosophy in Thomas Aquinas,â Laval théologique et philosophique 59, no. 2 (2003): 199.
See n. 3 for the relevant publications.
It is worth noting this very idea of considering Boethius of Dacia (one of the most eminent professional philosophers of his time) as part of a âcounter-scholastic tendencyâ has given rise to some strong objections in the literature. See Luca Bianchi, âVae vobis homines: una massima di Avenzoreth e le sue metamorfosi fra XIII e XVI secolo,â in: âRatio practicaâ e âratio civilisâ: Studi di etica e politica medievali per Giancarlo Garfagnini, edited by A. Rodolfi (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2016), 225â248 (esp. 244â245, n. 52).
In Boccaccioâs eulogy to Petrarch in Genealogia deorum gentilum, XIV, DomaÅski notes, we read the poet-philosopher praising Petrarch as a man distinguished by his dignity of morals, decorum or style, elegance and harmony. For these ethical reasons, like those of Socrates, âhis students learned more from his conduct than from his words.â (84)