The following is a blog entry written by Samuel Kaldas. Sam is Coptic youth currently study in Sydney Australia and if the title of the blog did not give it away his major is Philosophy. I have been in communication with Sam for over a year and our dialogues and close friendship have developed fruitful dialogues about many things ranging from church topics to philosophy topics to talks about Father Matthew the Poor or just nonsense talks about the most silliest things you can think off. Sam currently has begun a blog called This Great Mystery and he has build a team around him who constantly write and post on this blog. Thank you for sharing this Sam and if anyone else would like to write on the blog you can get a hold off me anytime! Thank you! Enjoy.
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Philosophy is simpler than it sounds. Really. It’s
so simple, in fact, that children tend to do very good philosophy with no
formal training. For one, children tend to ask a lot why questions - to
the point that it can become annoying. Even at university levels, philosophy
never really becomes much more than a very formal, systematic and professional
way of dealing with the kinds of questions that children ask: Why can’t
I do that? Who am I exactly? Does my dog have feelings like I do? How do I know
that you’re a real person and not just a robot?
To practically minded people, philosophy can look like
a waste of time. It doesn’t have many practical applications: no philosopher
will ever get to watch their work curing cancer or making cars faster. But the
questions philosophers ask aren’t simply idle curiosities, with no relevance to the
real world. On the contrary, it could be argued that philosophy has a greater
influence on the real world than any branch of science or engineering. Why?
Because philosophy attempts to answer the questions that give meaning to every
other aspect of human life: What’s the point of life? What is a human being? Do we have
free will? What is truth? What is right and wrong? Is there a God? A culture’s
answers to those questions will tell you what kind of people they are; in a
very real sense, philosophy is the measure of a society’s
soul. Other disciplines can make things bigger, better and faster, but only
philosophy is concerned with what we ought to do with our ever-growing power.
Clearly, philosophy is important. But let’s
be frank: philosophy makes a lot of Copts nervous. If you’ve
studied philosophy and mentioned that fact at church, you’ve
no doubt heard things like, “I don’t
know man, the last guy I knew who studied philosophy became an atheist,”
or “Be careful, don’t get pulled in.” And to be fair, philosophy’s
reputation as a ‘dangerous’ subject
isn’t totally underserved. Philosophy is one of the only
academic disciplines which demands that you put everything you believe
on the line, including your beliefs about God, human purpose and meaning.
No-one cares what engineers or doctors do on a Sunday or what they believe
about right or wrong, so long as their religious beliefs don’t
impact their work. In philosophy however, you’re
required to justify all your beliefs, including and especially religious
ones, and pit them against a host of other beliefs all vying for your
attention. That has caught many a young Christian off-guard. It doesn’t
help that although things vary from college to college, philosophy tutors and
lecturers at secular universities can often be critical of religion.
So what are we to do? Does the hostile climate of
contemporary philosophy mean that Christians ought to stay right away? As
Orthodox Christians, we’re used to looking to the early church for guidance;
and when it comes to the question of how Christians ought to relate to
philosophy, the early church has some very interesting things to say indeed.
One particularly helpful example, I think, is the story of St. Basil and St.
Gregory - the authors of the two most frequently used Coptic liturgies. It’s
a little known fact that these two saints became good friends long before
either them were ordained, and that they first met at university. Not a
Christian university, but the ‘secular’ (‘pagan’ might
be more accurate) university of Athens, where they studied philosophy.
The intellectual climate at the Athenian university
back then was no less hostile to Christianity than it is today. In fact, it was hostile to pretty much
everyone. If modern universities are ‘marketplaces of ideas’,
the Athenian university in Basil’s time was the ‘battlefield of ideas’;
the rivalries between professors and competing schools of thought were
extremely heated, and frequently broke out into very real violence (Wenzel
2010). New students were particularly vulnerable: a pagan called Libanius was
once welcomed to the university by being kept against his will in a small room
until he agreed to attend only the lectures of his captors’ teacher.
This kind of thing doesn’t seem to have been uncommon. Remembering his school
days, St. Gregory would later say of the Athenian students: “They are just like men devoted to horses and
exhibitions, as we see, at the horse-races; they leap, they shout, raise clouds
of dust, they drive in their seats, they beat the air …”
(Orat. 43, Ch. 15) The
philosophy classes of Athens were hardly friendly places.
But that didn’t dissuade
either saint from entering the fray. Many years later, at St. Basil’s
funeral, St. Gregory praised his friend for having emerged from this clamour of
conflicting opinions and deceitful rhetoricians as a humble but powerful
Christian voice:
“… as to what he was to his masters, what he was to his
classmates, equalling the former, surpassing the latter in every form of
culture, what renown he won in a short time from all, both of the common
people, and of the leaders of the state; by showing both a culture beyond his
years, and a steadfastness of character beyond his culture. An orator among
orators, even before the chair of the rhetoricians, a philosopher among
philosophers, even before the doctrines of philosophers … So much deference
was paid to him in every respect by all.” (Orat. 43, Ch. 13)
The intellectual and social world at Athens was deeply
hostile to Christianity, and yet, with the help and guidance of Christian
teachers (Ch. 21), the two young saints were not only able to keep their faith alive
throughout their time there, they even strengthened it. Their peers may not
have agreed with them, but they respected them as ‘philosophers among philosophers, even before the
doctrines of philosophers.’
So why exactly would St. Gregory and St. Basil would
persevere through such a hostile environment? Probably, they had realised for
themselves something that St. Clement of Alexandria had argued centuries
earlier. “Philosophy,”
said St. Clement, “is characterized by investigation into truth and the
nature of things (this is the truth of which the Lord Himself said, “I am the truth”).”
Philosophy, ancient and
modern, hostile or not, is always the search for truth. And for
Christians, Christ is the truth, which makes philosophy nothing more than
the search for Christ. St. Gregory described his friendship with St. Basil
as growing chiefly because of their united commitment to philosophy: “…
as time went on, we
acknowledged our mutual affection, and that philosophy was our aim, we
were all in all to one another, housemates, messmates, intimates, with one
object in life, or an affection for each other ever growing warmer and
stronger.” (Ch.
19) For these saints, as for many of the Church Fathers, philosophy was a
fundamentally Christian activity; St. Clement even went so far as to say that
philosophy was to the Greeks like the Law was to the Jews (Stromata 1.5). To the Christian, any search for truth can only
lead to Christ.
There are many more examples of ancient Christian
philosophers: from St. Justin the Martyr to Pope Peter of Alexandria, and even
St. Paul the Apostle who debated with the philosophers in the Athens long
before St. Basil and St. Gregory would arrive there three centuries later (Acts
17:15-34). And fortunately, there’s no shortage of contemporary Christian philosophers
either; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press just published a book (Turning
East - see below) featuring interviews with sixteen Orthodox Christian
philosophers, many of whom don’t teach at Christian universities.
None of this is to deny that philosophy can be
extremely difficult, and even dangerous when done badly - it’s
certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, and all students of philosophy,
including the Christian ones, absolutely must be skeptical and discerning with their teachers and
peers. But budding Orthodox philosophers need more than warnings and horror
stories: they need teachers like St. Basil and St. Gregory who can enter the
confusing din of conflicting voices and and emerge as humble and respected ‘philosophers among philosophers.’ What’s
more, they need to be trusted to enter that din themselves, because even though He
might be hard to hear amidst all the angry voices, Christ is in that din too.
+++++
Further
reading/Bibliography:
“What is Philosophy?’’,
Florida State University Website: <http://philosophy.fsu.edu/content/view/full/36588>.
St.
Gregory’s Funeral Oration for St. Basil (Orat. 43), (esp. Ch.
11 and Ch’s
15-22) - <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310243.htm>.
St. Clement’s Stromata - Book 1, Ch’s 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 - <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02101.htm>.
Also: “Clement of Alexandria: The Original Christian
Philosopher” by Mark Moussa - <http://www.coptic.net/articles/clementofalexandria.txt>.
St. Justin Martyr’s First Apology,
Ch’s 2-3 <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm>.
St. Basil’s Address to the Youth on the Right Use of Pagan
Literature, <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/basil_litterature01.htm>.
“Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the
Ancient Christian Faith”, SVS Press - <http://www.svspress.com/turning-east-contemporary-philosophers-and-the-ancient-christian-faith/>.
Wenzel, A. (2010). “Libanius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Ideal of
Athens in Late Antiquity” in Journal of Late Antiquity. Vol. 3, Number 2, Fall 2010.
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