Pierre Hadot loses his religion

At this point, it would probably not come as any surprise that my favorite philosopher in the last five hundred years is an apostate Catholic priest. Pierre Hadot was born in 1922 to a Catholic family and entered minor seminary in his early teens. He advanced rapidly in his studies, having been put through the typical regimen of scholastic philosophy and militant Counter-Reformation piety in style at the time. He was ordained in the midst of the Second World War at the age of 22. Unlike others from his generation, he did not leave the priesthood in the wake of Vatican II, but preceded the mass exodus of men from the priesthood by about fifteen years. He abandoned his priestly vows and ultimately the faith in 1950 to run off with a woman who he would divorce twelve years later. His reflections on his Catholic upbringing and formation are predictably mixed, but the few times he speaks of them in his latest book to be translated into English, The Present Alone is Our Happiness, they are very perceptive in reading the mood of the Church in Europe before the Council.



Hadot’s portrayal of the Catholicism of his youth is one of a system of taboos and rituals that contained very little positive content. In this book of interviews, he speaks of visiting relatives at the border with Germany while wearing shorts, and how the “devout” Catholics of the place were scandalized by his inappropriate show of skin. Another cousin was refused Holy Communion at the altar rail just for having her hair short. He also shares how his parents were forbidden conjugal relations by the parish priest since the mother could no longer have children; therefore, the point of sex would have been worthless. Hadot thus describes his first “spiritual” experience as being one of purely “natural” mysticism. He explains:

It was an experience that was entirely foreign to Christianity. This seemed much more essential, much more fundamental than the experience I could have in Christianity, in the liturgy, in the religious offices. Christianity seemed to be tied to everyday banality.

In the tumult after World War II, while working in the parishes, the young Fr. Hadot ultimately succumbed to the spirit of the age, imbibing existentialism, the worker priests’ movements, and the various theological tendencies condemned in the encyclical, Humani Generis. His leaving the Catholic Faith did not seem at all a torturous process for him, and indeed, he seemed to fit right into the atmosphere of secularizing France, even getting notoriety as a scholar of Patristic Latin and Greek, and moving on to be one of the foremost philosophers of the late twentieth century.

There is one text in the book that seems to reflect Hadot’s thinking back on his experience in the Church. He says:

For a time I would sometimes attend religious ceremonies, but they always seemed rather artificial because, following the council of Vatican II, there were recited or sung in French. I was not opposed to the translation in principle, but it always seemed to reveal the immense distance between the world of the twentieth century and the mythical and stereotypical formulas of Christian liturgy – a distance that was sensed less when people did not understand what was being said. I believe that Henri-Charles Puech had the same impression I did when he told me with a big smile, “Jesus, God’s sheep”, alluding to the translation of the Agnus Dei. It was not the Latin that was incomprehensible, but the concepts and the images hidden behind Latin for centuries. (My emphasis)

When I read this, I knew that this is probably one of the most perceptive thoughts that I have encountered concerning the problem of religion in the modern world. For it is not just a problem of “God’s sheep” or “Lamb of God”, but it is the problem of words like “kingdom”, “lord”, “salvation”, “sin”, and “repentance”. The problem with Christian liturgy, and ultimately, Christian discourse, is that it was formed in a world where all of these terms meant something very specific and where the laws of cosmology functioned in radically different ways from our own current perceptions of the world. Religious forms prior to Vatican II had reached a point where they were perceived to have very little positive content, but were merely repeated like mantras. Pace all of the reformers of that time, no amount of catechesis could change this, since no amount of catechesis can change the objective conditions of the world in which we live. We have to deal with them, whether we like it or not.

The question of whether we use Latin in the liturgy is ultimately of little importance since even when translated, liturgy and Scripture on a fundamental level no longer make sense to modern man. Sure, we can try to extract dogma and morals from them like juice from an orange, but in the end, I fear, all we will get is an inverted, crypto-pious image of ourselves staring back at us. Some may call this: “inculturation”. Pardon me if I give it what I feel to be a more accurate name: “narcissism”.

What then will we have? I cannot think that we could have anything else but an individualistic religion based on our own tastes and “consumer decisions”. In places where religion is a hobby and not a necessity, people are going to continue to make religious choices based on personal preference. Whether or not we can reconstruct a culture of faith within this context is not a question that can be easily answered.

(In a post in the near future, I will actually write about the rest of this book from a “purely philosophical” standpoint.)