Camille and I had a very touching, beautiful experience last weekend related to our emerging faith, but it's all very personal, not something I want to discuss much here, as one should not sensationalize their spiritual experiences.
Since September of last year, we’ve identified as Christian. When we were young, we were baptized in the Church (I was baptized Orthodox, she Catholic), but we never attended. Now we are returning and learning: going to church, reading the Bible, taking an Alpha course, and so on.
On another front, since 2002, over two decades ago, I’ve experienced what I call a “philosophical opening,” a period when I began questioning everything, including philosophy itself. I found myself rebelling against the gatekeepers of philosophy and how they understood it, which was largely theoretical and confined to the university. Instead, I was most attracted to the spirit of philosophy, the love of wisdom, which I believe is most readily expressed in practical philosophy rather than its theoretical counterpart.
In my non-Christian days, doing philosophy seemed to guide me, but in reality, it didn’t offer true guidance. Instead, it left me in a state of perplexity, stripping away false certainty and, over time, clearing out philosophical deadwood to make things slightly clearer. In essence, it helped me shed unnecessary, assumption-laden clutter—ideas borrowed from others without question.
Still, I put too much pressure on philosophy to be something it was never meant to be. I was spiritually stubborn, and I did not want to take a knee. In essence, I made an idol out of philosophy.
I recently finished outlining my framework for how I understand and, more importantly, practice philosophy. However, I wrote it primarily through a secular lens, lacking the spiritual richness of my emerging faith. I did my best to make the framework internally coherent, but on its own, it is incomplete and risks conveying that doing philosophy is all you need for the good life.
It’s not.
Philosophy cannot serve itself. It is the love of wisdom, not Wisdom itself. It is, then, as they say, a handmaiden to something else.
But what?
Some well-known phrases already exist:
Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology.
Philosophy is the handmaiden of science.
I’d add a third, which, in practice, is gaining in popularity:
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