ABSTRACT
Coming to philosophy by a side-door-as a student in a Catholic seminary for whom attendance at university lectures in philosophy was a required propaedeutic to the study of theology-I could not avoid being struck by its distance, indeed aversion, from spirituality. This term was one that I did not then need to define: deepening one’s ‘spiritual life’ was a central aim of the seminary regime, with ‘spiritual reading’, for example, a daily discipline and engagement with ‘the spiritual exercises’ of St Ignatius of Loyola an early element in the formative process. I would later come to recognise the limitations of this kind of spirituality-limitations stemming not from its immersion in a particular religious tradition but from its having too heavily absorbed the very subjectivism which in some respects Catholic teaching saw itself as opposing. What seemed more obvious to me at the time, however, was the limitations of the kind of philosophy to which we were introduced. To be sure, there was value in being exposed to discourses in which religious convictions could be made to appear incomprehensible, weak-minded, or regressive. And there was a particular frisson in encountering Marx, Freud and Sartre, whose militant atheism connected strongly with one’s own commitments; even if it contested their rightness, at least it confirmed the importance of the issue on which one was wrong (Nietzsche’s star had not then risen-it was the late 1960s and postmodernism had not yet arrived to claim him as prophet). Still, these figures were heroic exceptions. What we came to recognise as ‘philosophy’ was dry in tenor, its posture to the world detached and deflationary. Determined by epistemological anxieties that seeped into its treatment of virtually every topicby an Ayer, a Strawson or a Hare-it hardly spoke to the concerns of anyone seeking wisdom or existential enlightenment let alone a student working through the strains of a religious vocation.
