Romanitas and the Contemplative Life: from Aristotle, through Epicureanism, to St. Benedict

Dr Dal Monte discusses the contemplative life from its pagan origins in Aristotle and Epicurus, and M. Tullius Cicero to St Benedict of Nursia.

From One Peter Five

By Daniel Dal Monte, PhD

Our epoch of political ideology and activism, in which we tend to view exterior activity in society as the highest form of activity, needs to embrace again the contemplative life. The knowledge and love of God is the highest end of the contemplative life.[1] Political activism ought to flow from an inner devotion to contemplation, and not instead crowd out the contemplative life and replace it. The contemplative life, pursued most fully in monasteries, is the great witness against liberation theology, which condemns as useless any failure to participate in the political revolution. While we are political animals by nature, and should not exercise the option of political withdrawal (as if we were atomistic individuals in a liberal system), , there is a special vocation to profound devotion to contemplation in the monastic life.

Aristotle (384-322 BC), the great thinker of ancient Greece, provided an early anticipation of the contemplative life. Aristotle considered the highest good proper to a human being, that ultimate end we desire for its own sake and towards which all our activities have orientation. Pleasure could not be the highest good worthy of a human being, because excessive immersion in pleasure turns us into animals, and forms addictions. Honor cannot be the highest good worthy of us, because then we become subject to the opinion of other people. Towards the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reveals the true end that will satisfy the deepest human desires, i.e. contemplation of the divine. We achieve eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), a blessedness akin to the gods, when we fully exercise our rational faculty, in disinterested contemplation of wisdom that allows us to participate in the immortal life of the gods. We can surely baptize this view, purge it of its polytheism, and articulate eudaimonia in terms of participation in the life of the one God.

For Aristotle, we live a divine life by actualizing the faculty that is most divine in us, the understanding. “Hence if the understanding is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will life in accord with the understanding be divine in comparison with human life.”[2] This contemplative life seeks no good apart from the sheer joy of contemplation. “Study seems to be liked because of itself alone, since it has no result beyond having studied.”[3] The contemplative immerses him/herself in the abyss of the divine, in a state of separation from the polis. The political sphere is important, but the contemplative receives a special grace of withdrawal from the political sphere, to engage in the most sublime activity available to human beings. Aquinas would later recognize Aristotle’s endorsement of the contemplative life: “Unde et philosophus, in X Ethic., in contemplatione optimi intelligibilis ponit ultimam felicitatem hominis,” (The Philosopher (Ethic. x, 7) places man’s ultimate happiness in the contemplation of the supreme intelligible good).[4] Aquinas is referring to Aristotle as the Philosopher, and Ethics is Nicomachean Ethics. 

The Greeks had a strong influence on the Romans, and the Catholic faith, as G.K. Chesterton notes, “arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman empire.”[5] The Roman Empire eventually became the vessel for the rise of Christendom, and so it must have had some cultural foundations in place—in spite of its serious flaws—to be able to receive the Gospel and promote its flourishing.

Yet, the contemplative life, at least on the surface, was foreign to the Romans. Cicero, for instance, the great Roman statesman and orator (106-43 B.C.), thought his primary duty was politics, and took up philosophy only in periods of withdrawal, e.g. after the death of his daughter, Tullia. After this tragic loss, Cicero retreated to a Tusculan villa, in an area in the peaceful hills on the outskirts of Rome. Here, instead of wasting his leisure time in sports and superficial entertainment, Cicero engages in deep philosophical dialogue on fundamental questions, such as fear of death and how to bear up under suffering with fortitude.

Cicero, though, opens the Tusculan Dialogues, the work arising from this philosophical retreat from public life, with the acknowledgement that the Roman people are good at many things, but lag behind in the contemplative arts of poetry and philosophy. Cicero deliberately chooses to write philosophy in Latin instead of Greek, to focus the attention of his countrymen on cultivating this forgotten art. In family and domestic affairs; in the republic, which blended monarchy and democracy to create a balance of power; and in military affairs, the Romans have surpassed the Greeks. But, it was five hundred years after the founding of Rome, before the Romans produced their first poet. Cicero complains also that the Romans have debased the study of geometry. Instead of contemplating shapes for their own sake, they use geometry only for practical calculations.[6] Cicero had to deal with a stubborn anti-intellectualism in Roman culture—typical of many Americans, in thrall to a vulgar materialism that views only the body as important, and perhaps a fundamentalist Protestantism that views the letter of the Bible as sufficient. Cicero wrote the work Hortensius, in praise of philosophy, against the figure, Hortensius, who developed the philosophy that philosophy was useless.[7] This book would later have a profound influence on St. Augustine, but we tragically have lost this manuscript.

Given the practical bent of the Roman genius, how can we trace the thread from the Greek love of contemplation for its own sake, to the birth of contemplative monasticism? Cicero’s withdrawal from public life, upon the death of his daughter, into a life of quiet contemplation in a more rural area, is itself a clue that the Roman character was far from uniformly practical.

To trace this thread connecting Roman culture, though primarily practical, to the contemplative life, taking place in monasteries, that would become the jewel of Christian culture for centuries, I will focus briefly on an oft-misunderstood philosophy, Epicureanism. Epicurus, the founder of the school bearing his name, maintained that the chief good, the good which is the ultimate telos of action and not a means to something else, is pleasure. Christians are rightfully uncomfortable with this doctrine, since commitment to the glory of God will sometimes not coincide with pleasure, as we see most clearly in the acts of the martyrs. Cicero, in a dialogue with an Epicurean, mentions a Roman official who had to issue a judgment on his own son, who accepted bribes. Committing himself to equality under the law was surely not a pleasure for this official, but it was his duty.[8] Epicureanism seems to be an attack on a self-sacrificial commitment to duty.

Yet, we should not caricature Epicureanism as rationalizing the selfish love of comfort over the embrace of duty. The defender of Epicureanism in Cicero’s dialogue insists that the philosophy is serious, temperate, and austere, as opposed to “sensual, lax, and luxurious.”[9] The key issue is an ambiguity in the idea of pleasure. Is pleasure, on the one hand, a positive sensation of physical delight, as we receive in eating, sex, drinking, etc.? Or, is pleasure the absence of pain? Epicureans view the greatest pleasure as a kind of peaceful withdrawal, in which one no longer deals with the agitation of public life. Once we recognize that pleasure is an ambiguous phrase, and we begin to associate Epicureanism with an attitude of peaceful withdrawal leading to the absence of pain, we can appreciate how it is a kind of precursor to the monastic life.

To achieve this state of the absence of pain, the Epicurean must pursue wisdom, which will allow him to adjudicate his desires. Desires can cause us unnecessary agitation, and we must prune some of our unnecessary desires. The Epicureans developed a sophisticated classificatory system for various desires and their value in their moral psychology. The Epicurean should be content with desires that are natural and necessary, not induced artificially by society. The Epicurean must rid himself of the “imaginary” desires, i.e. things we fantasize about and think we need, but which are entirely dispensable and a source of constant agitation.[10]

This peaceful life of simplification and withdrawal may very well have laid the groundwork for the monastic movement that would arise in the western Roman empire. St. Benedict was the son of a Roman noble and spent his boyhood studying in Rome. We can only speculate about his educational influences, but as a teenager Benedict abandoned Rome, preferring to devote himself to live according to the Gospels in relative seclusion. Though Benedict was reacting against the dissolute lives of the Romans living in the terminal stages of the western empire (around 500 A.D.), it does not seem reasonable that Benedict’s vocation to monasticism emerged in a vacuum. First, St. John Cassian had previously translated Egyptian monasticism into Latin by means of his Conferences and Institutes. But in terms of pre-Christian Romanitas of which we are treating, we can see the similarities that may have influenced him.In addition to the worldliness of the Romans, there was a pagan philosophical movement, born strictly of reflection with the natural powers of reason, that sought relief from the world. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor of Rome in the second century A.D., established Epicurean chairs of philosophy, giving it recognition, along with Stoicism, Platonism, and Aristotelianism, as one of four major philosophical schools of Rome.[11] Benedict’s flight from Rome perhaps had a precursor in the flight of the Epicureans from unnatural desire caused by life in society. This sort of flight must have been part of the Zeitgeist.

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[1] Gurdon, E. (1908). Contemplative Life. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04329a.htm

[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd Edition, ed. and trans. by Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999): X.7.1177b.30.

[3] NE X.7.1177b.3.

[4] ST II-II.Q180.A4.

[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006): 143.

[6] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. by C.D. Yonge, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877): Book I, sections 1 and 2.

[7] Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library): Book 1, pg. 11.

[8] Ibid., Book I, p. 16.

[9] Ibid., Book I, p. 18.

[10] Ibid., Book I, p. 20.

[11] Ryan, M.J. (1909). Epicureanism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05500b.htm

Pictured: Marcus Tullius Cicero