How To Be An Agnostic
a view to a transformation. And third, this spirituality does not
conceive of the individual being given truths, as if it were some
kind of gnostic reward. Rather, the process itself is its own ful-
fi lment where it becomes a way of life. To borrow a distinction
made by Epicurus: in most labours of life, the reward follows
when the task is complete; the tougher the task, the more pro-
found the rewards. But with this way of life, ‘the learning and
the enjoyment are simultaneous’. ‘He who loses his life, gains
it’, is the biblical, more gnomic summary.
One does not need to learn much more of this old philosoph-
ical tradition before an obvious question springs to mind. How
is it that what is usually taken as philosophy today seems so
different? Why does it apparently make so little demand upon
the modern philosopher’s person (beyond the development
of rational techniques, thought and intellectual know-how)?
Philosophers may try to live ethically, as in having good reasons
for what they do. But rarely is philosophy taken as being a spir-
itual practice in the sense of the ancients – one that seeks to
shape the individual, heart and mind, body and soul. No profes-
sor today would say to his or her students it is not my lectures
or publications that count, but what I am becoming.
Hadot has asked this question and he puts it down to his-
torical developments that came with the institutionalisation
of Christianity. Broadly speaking, it may be summed up. First,
over time Christianity tended to treat philosophy more and
more as a servant of revealed theology the content of which
became settled, lessening the sense of search. The new religion
fl exed its muscles and built up a body of timeless doctrines with
which to govern itself and manage its institutional boundaries.
The burden of philosophy’s ‘job’ came to be to elucidate the
givens of dogma, sidelining the exploration of uncertainties and
apophatic theology; more and more it became the handmaid
of dogmatic theology not agnosticism. In the same move, the
ancient philosophers’ approaches became detached and trans-
formed, re-associated with Christian disciplines whose goal was
not so much transformation as salvation. Practice tended to