Philosophy and the Sacred in Antiquity
The idea of the issue was suggested by P. Hadot’s paper (1979) “
Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité”
, where he singles out three types of the philosophical divisions in Antiquity. One of them is the Eleusinian type, within which philosophical ascension is seen as asort of religious initiation. This division, particularly popular in Platonism, has attracted a lot of scholarly attention both from the historians of religion and from the historians of philosophy.
Still, the historians of religion turn to be more interested in the literal level of the metaphor, for it allows to specify our ideas about the religion of the Greeks, whereas Platonic scholars are more focused on the figurative level, i.e. in what lies “behind” the metaphor.
However, the metaphor isnot only an embellishment or a parable: to a great extent, it constructs our conception of the philosophical reality. In this regard, the very fact of auto-definition of philosophy in religious terms presents an independent historical and philosophical interest.