Philosophy and Ancient Religious Traditions

How Can Philosophy Approach Ancient Religious Traditions Without Distorting or Trivializing Them?  

This research project will focus on the specific cases of Vasubandhu, the Indian Buddhist teacher, and Evagrius Ponticus, the Christian monastic author.

Since the late-twentieth century and the rise of what Glenn Wallis qualifies as "Western Buddhism," Vasubandhu has been commonly presented as a phenomenologist and philosopher of experience shunning metaphysical commitments. Similarly, religious studies show interest in Evagrius as a theorizer of spiritual life and asceticism but rarely inquire his philosophical background in Greek metaphysics. While such appropriations make the texts more accessible to contemporary readers, the question arises whether they still reflect the original environments in which they were created. 

Against the secular ambition to make religious thought compatible with contemporary empirical science, spiritual wellbeing, and materialist ontologies, Vasubandhu and Evagrius will be resituated in their contemplative and monastic contexts. To that aim, the following two texts will be cross-read: Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostica, preserved in two Syriac translations, and Vasubandhu’s Madhyāntavibhāgabhāṣya.

Both these texts invite the practitioners to turn away from the sensible world toward transcendence, stress the essential role of monastic and acosmic practices, involve metaphysical assumptions about ultimate reality, and oppose this-worldly, immanentist approaches to our existence.  

The project thus proposes, on one hand, to rehabilitate metaphysics as a basis for intercultural exchange, and on the other hand, a new historical and philological methodology that observes the radicality of religious ideas. 

Project point person: Fabien Muller, Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy of Religion