Philosophy as transformation in early Christian thought

[Extract] This chapter* explores intersections between the philosophical goal of godlikeness, virtue development, and ways of knowing in late-antique monasticism. It traces philosophical ideas from Stoicism and Platonism which remained influential in Late Antiquity, before analysing works of Dorotheus of Gaza, an influential sixth-century monk, who had trained in rhetoric and medicine in Gaza and Alexandria, before he entered a monastery at Thawatha, just outside Gaza. The movement I explore is from godlikeness to virtue and back again. This transition involves translating between ethical and metaphysical claims, and entails a distinctive way of going about knowing. In Dorotheus of Gaza, practising the virtues likens monks to God, and what counts as a virtue is determined by claims about what God is like. Humility—in the Classical world a highly unlikely candidate for virtue, let alone the paradigmatic virtue Dorotheus makes of it—is a means by which a good monk becomes godlike, because God-incarnate is humble. Metaphysical claims entail virtues and practising a particular virtue opens up knowledge about metaphysical truths.¹

In the case of Palestinian monasticism, as for the Neoplatonists discussed elsewhere in this volume, one comes to know that God and the world are like this rather than that, through reading and reflecting in ways that are taken to be transformative rather than merely informative. In this frame, knowing that humility is a virtue because humility characterises God is necessary but insufficient. Such knowledge is acquired through reading, praying, and meditating (activities often spoken about interchangeably). In a broader argument which requires a longer elaboration than is possible within the constraints of this paper, I hope to show that Dorotheus structures his monastic discourses as a whole in order to move readers ever deeper into knowledge of virtues like humility and the resulting concept of what God is really like, and that this view of texts as transformational is itself dependent on the metaphysical claim that it is possible for humans to become godlike through the exercise of the virtues and other practices, reading, praying and meditating among them. Here I can make the more limited claim that Dorotheus’ account of humility is grounded in metaphysics, and that his theoretical claims in the areas of virtue and metaphysics are meant to transform readers to become godlike. Dorotheus’ reflections on monastic life provide metaphors to live by, by which insiders, in this case monks in Palestine, come to embody truths significant for their community in a process of self-transformation through the acquisition of theoretical knowledge and its concomitant claims on the ethical life.