In the ancient conception of wisdom, philosophy is the quest for knowledge of the purpose and destiny of the human soul, and of its relationship to the divine, as philosophers from Socrates to Augustine at any rate have thought. We will study the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life: wisdom as realized outside the text, as the living self-disclosure of the philosopher who is in some sense not just a thinker, but is also a seer. Pagan and Christian philosophers agreed in all but name on the fundamental nature of reality and how to find it: what separated them was more often than not an institutional clash that forced them to draw ideological battle lines.

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