Member-only story
Conceptions of contemplation in the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers
- From a talk from 2022 at the Melbourne Contemplative Studies Centre.
To undertake to give even a working survey of conceptions of contemplation in Greek and Roman philosophy is to skirt difficulties on nearly every side. Not only will we be talking of philosophical traditions spanning nearly an unbroken millennium of immense historical and cultural transformation.
Today’s predominant understandings of what “philosophy” is, and how it relates in particular to “religion”, are still stretched in competing directions.
On the one hand, there is the idea that what philosophy just is involves forms of rational argumentation, ideally susceptible to formalization, but unrelated to any specific modalities of subjective experience, like those we associate with forms of meditation or contemplation. (One can reason correctly in a rage, or with serenity: it doesn’t matter).
On the other hand, it is widely recognized — because impossible to deny — that Platonic and Neoplatonic thought had a momentous influence on Christian theology, and also forms of monasticism which embraced contemplative exercises.
What comes out of this stretch tends to be some notion that Platonism and Neoplatonism in particular, amongst the ancient philosophical…