Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology

Reason, Meaning and Experience

Kevin Vanhoozer, Martin Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317008019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Presenting new opportunities in the dialogue between philosophy and theology, this interdisciplinary text addresses the contemporary reshaping of intellectual boundaries. Exploring human experience in a 'post-Christian' era, the distinguished contributors bring to bear what have been traditionally seen as theological resources while drawing on contemporary developments in philosophy, both 'continental' and 'analytic'. Set in the context of two complementary narratives - one philosophical concerning secularity, the other theological about the question of God - the authors point to ways of reconfiguring both traditional reason / faith oppositions and those between interpretation / text and language / experience. Contributors: David Brown, Philip Clayton, Chris Firestone, Grace Jantzen, Nicholas Lash, George Pattison, Dan Stiver, Charles Taylor, Kevin Vanhoozer, Graham Ward, Martin Warner.

Chapter 1
Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology

Martin Warner

Knowledge and Belief

‘I know that my redeemer liveth’; Handel’s musical setting makes the stress unmistakable and, through the popularity of his oratorio, has made this affirmation resonate through the English-speaking world. But from the point of view of classic epistemology it would appear an odd sort of knowledge. In the context from which it is taken (Job 19:25) the words seem less an expression of justified true belief (the familiar tripartite definition, despite recurrent critique from Plato onwards) than of anguished hope against hope, hence the exclamation following the sentence of which the affirmation is a part, in the Revised Standard Version: ‘My heart faints within me!’ The translators of the New English Bible lose their nerve in a paraphrase: ‘But in my heart I know that my vindicator lives’; one is reminded of Austin’s ‘We all feel the very great difference between saying even “I’m absolutely sure” and saying “I know”’ (Austin 1961: 68). On Austin’s account ‘I know’ provides a warrant for others of a kind reports of psychological states do not; qualifying ‘I know’ with ‘in my heart’ looks suspiciously like taking away with one hand what is given with the other. It would hardly have suited Handel’s purposes.

Of course the text here is notoriously corrupt, and Christian prefigurative commentary lies behind Handel and his librettist. What is clear is that Job’s developing hope that in some way God will prove to be just, despite all appearances, is given especial prominence and associated with the deepest awe. If paraphrase rather than translation is what is sought then there is much to be said for the New English Bible version; Job’s ‘knowledge’ about his goel (redeemer or vindicator) looks more like a fleeting insight (or of course flash of wishful thinking), partially foreshadowed but immediately lost to view, than even a settled conviction, let alone knowledge in the epistemologist’s sense, and the same goes for the associated claim (on some readings) that ‘without my flesh shall I see God’, lost sight of not just for the rest of the book but for centuries thereafter. In context, Job’s claim may express a psychological state but is hardly a reliable warrant for others. In subsequent religious tradition ‘believe’ has figured a good deal more prominently than ‘know’, while claims to knowledge or gnosis have often been treated with considerable reserve – the early Church, in particular, setting its face against ‘gnosticism’.

Along these lines one might develop a familiar type of commentary. Knowledge requires justification, a suggestion going back to the proposal in Plato’s Theaetetus that it should be analysed in terms of true opinion with a rational explanation, justification or logos. But, as Plato’s Socrates pointed out, the problems of circularity here are difficult to avoid the moment one tries to analyse and clarify the status of ‘justification’ or ‘logos’. Often justification has been construed in foundationalist terms, and with increasing scepticism about the possibility of any ‘hard’ data that could act as a relevantly informative foundation doubts have developed about knowledge itself. If knowledge is a derivative notion whose derivation remains perpetually elusive, we are perhaps best advised to concentrate on more fundamental notions such as truth and the varieties of justification for belief (though some of course have resisted relegating knowledge to a derivative category). On such an account the religious emphasis on belief rather than knowledge has been prescient and the important issue lies in the forms of justification, if any, for religious belief or beliefs. From his perspective among the ashes, scraping his sores with a potsherd and convinced of his innocence, the justification of Job’s belief in the justice of God, it appears, seems remarkably weak, hence perhaps his hope against hope for a vindicator.

To which there is, of course, an equally familiar riposte. One should discriminate between varieties of belief, and those associated with religious faith are importantly different from those central to classic epistemology, from the belief that Socrates is snub-nosed to the belief that Fermat’s last theorem is provable; faith in God is not to be construed analogously to the belief that the abominable snowman exists, or that a greatest prime number does not, or even that every event has a cause (on some accounts empirical, analytic and synthetic a priori beliefs or judgements respectively). Often the distinction is drawn between ‘belief that’, the province of the epistemologist, and ‘belief in’, that of personal relations and religious faith, with the claim that neither is reducible to the other. Of course this can hardly be a claim about surface grammar, since ‘Jones believes that the abominable snowman exists’ can be idiomatically rendered ‘Jones believes in the existence of the abominable snowman’ and vice versa; rather, this convenient if perhaps potentially misleading shorthand points to the claim that ‘an attitude to a proposition’ is radically different from ‘an attitude to a person, whether human or divine’ (Price 1969: 426). On such an account the favoured forms of ‘belief in’ involve forms of trust, in the reliability or faithfulness of that in which one believes (not only persons, a complication perhaps insufficiently noticed), and seeking justifications or tests for such belief may often be not merely inappropriate but even radically counterproductive, as in a number of Shakespeare’s plays; in religious terms: ‘Thou shalt not tempt (that is, test) the Lord thy God’. It is this sort of trust in God’s faithfulness, not justified (or unjustified) true (or false) belief, that Job here expresses.

But perhaps this is a little too easy; denying knowledge to make room for faith has a suspiciously anachronistic, Kantian, ring. The various gnosticisms were, after all, not entirely without scriptural support, and it may be that it was (at least in part) their models of knowledge (often with Platonic overtones) that proved problematic in Christian terms rather than invocations of knowledge as such. ‘We know [oidamen, the same verb as in the Septuagint translation of Job’s affirmation] that we have passed from death into life’, writes St John, ‘because we love the brethren’ (1 John 3:14), and the impending regress is blocked with ‘By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments’ (5:2); again, he maintains, ‘By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren’ (3:16). In each case a form of explanation, indeed warrant, is offered for that which is affirmed as known, but the type of logos or justification offered is rather different from those familiar from classic epistemology. The knowledge in question relates to correct interpretation: in the first case knowledge of one’s own status is warranted by one’s attitude and knowledge of one’s attitude is, in part, warranted by one’s behaviour; in the second case knowledge of the nature of love is provided by correct interpretation of another’s action, which together warrant a pattern of behaviour.

Though the Greek should not be pressed too far, St John also seems to provide what is at least the suggestion of a contrast between belief and knowledge, ‘I write this to you who believe (pisteuousin) in the name of the Son of God, that you may know (eidete) that you have eternal life’ (5:13); the New English Bible offers ‘to assure you’ (Austin’s warrant) for ‘that you may know’. ‘Belief in’ being taken as given, the further knowledge or assurance is provided by his own letter which provides the recipients with criteria to test their own status: ‘let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth’ (3:18–19). Once again knowledge is related to attitude and action, which of course brings Johannine ‘knowledge’ close to Pauline ‘faith’. But, again like St Paul in the case of faith, such knowledge points beyond itself: ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (3:2). Rowan Williams’s commentary on this passage is to the point: ‘Knowledge of God is not a subject’s conceptual grasp of an object, it is sharing what God is, … knowledge by identification, loving union.… God is known in and by the exercise of crucifying compassion’ (St John’s ‘laying down his life’) and ‘if we are like him in that, we know him’ (Williams 1990: 14).

Selective quotation from biblical texts is, of course, of little value in itself. What gives wider significance to such passages is the way that this model of knowledge of God has played a significant role in Christian (and indeed other monotheistic) theology and spirituality. What is essential to it is that such knowledge has an inescapably subjective element, more closely akin to personal knowledge than to knowledge of the truth of propositions: God is discerned in the context of a transformed pattern of life into which, phenomenologically speaking, it seems that one is drawn, rather than God’s existence and characteristics being deduced from sets of observations and concepts independent of the life of faith; John’s offer of assurance is ‘to you who believe’. St Augustine, in his influential Confessions, tells how he was led by his reading of ‘the Platonists’ to explore his own inwardness and there encountered ‘the immutable light higher than my mind’, but nevertheless found himself ‘far from you’ (Augustine 1992: VII x 16, p. 123) for ‘Where was the charity which builds on the foundation of humility which is Christ Jesus? When would the Platonist books have taught me that?’ (VII xx 26, p. 130) God, for Augustine, makes himself known as he who ‘resists the proud’ through giving grace to the humble that seek to love God and neighbour; it was the experience of humiliation that enabled him to grasp ‘with what mercy you have shown humanity the way of humility in that your “Word was made flesh and dwelt among men”’ (IV xv 26; p. 66; Vii ix 13, p. 121), and led him to that central insight of the work ‘Da quod jubes et jube quod vis’, ‘Grant what you command, and command what you will’ (X xxix 40, p. 202, etc.), the repeated cry which sparked the Pelagian schism (in this respect Pelagian epistemology is far more Platonist). For Augustine nearness to God is the same as likeness to God, for ‘it is not by place, but by being unlike Him, that a man is afar from God’ (Augustine 1979: Ps. 95.2, p. 467; Ps. 94.2 in original, fuller, Latin text; see also Williams 1990: 84), so knowledge of him becomes possible only as one is drawn into his likeness. The model, once again, is neither knowledge by description nor even (in the ordinary sense) knowledge by acquaintance, but knowledge by identification, and the criteria for identification relate to the extent to which an individual’s life bears the marks of that which is known (in this case the marks of the life of the incarnate Word).

Augustine is not alone. The Eastern Orthodox tradition similarly brings together knowledge and love of God. For St Gregory of Nyssa, for example, ‘The vision of God is discipleship’ (Williams 1990: 63). In St Gregory Palamas the Divine essence is wholly beyond us and the Divine energies are known only though our participation in them, by being experienced rather than through detached conceptualization; the goal of theosis or ‘deification’, involving transformation of the whole person, is that of union with the divine energies, not with the unknowable divine essence (which would point the way to pantheism). In the central tradition of Christian spirituality apophatic theology, the via negativa, is rarely far away. Even in St Thomas Aquinas the knowledge ‘by connaturality’ of contemplation, based on God’s presence in the self, is a form of darkness interdependent with love of God. Pascal’s ‘Memorial’ with its challenging ‘“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob”, not of philosophers and scholars’ (Pascal 1966: Fragment 913, p. 309) is part of a record of his own decisive spiritual experience which brought ‘Certainty, certainty’ of a sort very different from that sought by Descartes, characterized in the Pensées (Pensée 887; p. 300) as ‘useless and uncertain’. More recently Kierkegaard’s insistence on raising fundamental questions of truth in terms of ‘subjectivity’, which lies behind much twentieth-century existentialism, draws on this tradition. In these terms, one might argue, rather than remaining content with boundaries established by Kant (1958: B xxx, p. 29), who ‘found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’, we might wish to re-inspect both concepts. Scrutiny of the concept of religious faith has become a familiar activity; the above suggests that there may be scope for reconsideration of that of religious knowledge as well.

But perhaps not only religious knowledge, but knowledge more generally. For, philosophical preconceptions apart, it is not at all clear that individuals’ subjective states should be regarded as irrelevant to the knowledge of which they are capable, any more than mathematical, logical or scientific competence are irrelevant to the capacity to grasp complex theorems and scientific laws. The return to prominence of what has become known as ‘virtue ethics’ has revived interest in the Aristotelian insight that practical wisdom, or phronesis, requires appropriate experience and training, for ‘each man judges well the things he knows’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). Aristotle is here primarily thinking of normative matters (though the notion of phronesis has been taken up by modern hermeneutics, a matter to which we shall return) but if God is understood as ‘That than which no greater can be conceived’, to use St Anselm’s formula, theology is itself inescapably normative. However, on the Aristotelian account mere knowledge by acquaintance of ‘the actions that occur in life’ is of itself of little value; what matters is conjoining such experience with logos, a rational principle through which to interpret it; phronesis is embodied by the phronimos, the man of practical wisdom, for ‘regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit it with’ (1140a), and to the extent that we identify with the phronimos by modelling our lives on his we become ethically wise – this is not just a matter of will and intellect but requires habituation and (ideally) training. Once again, the criteria for identification relate to the extent to which an individual’s life bears the marks of that which is known.

If this is not to be entirely circular some specificity has to be given to the appropriate logos, and this Aristotle seeks to provide, but always in the context of human action and lived experience, which brings us back to that traditional account of knowledge sketched earlier, which requires logos as well as true belief. The obvious objection to reading the required logos in terms of any form of human subjectivity is that the logos element is supposed to add an objective, rational, element to the knowledge claim; if I know I cannot be, not merely am not, wrong, but human subjectivity is always fallible. The canons of rationality cannot be person (perhaps not even culture) specific. But as the phronesis model suggests, some forms of interdependence between rational principle and subjectivity do not necessarily foreclose objectivity, and recent recovery of other models of rationality, which have been marginalized in the modern period, reinforce the point – which returns us to Job.

Reason, Will and Feeling

One of the more striking features of the Book of Job, as we have it, is the way that it incipiently displays two competing models of rationality. The ‘comforters’ operate, effectively, in terms of familiar deductive patterns of argument. God is just and almighty, Job is suffering, therefore Job’s suffering is just; he should, therefore, repent the sin which has brought just suffering upon him. Job is sure that his suffering is innocent (the Prologue endorses this), and seeks understanding. Experience teaches Job the falsity of the traditional wisdom, and the chiding of his friends provides the goad that forces him on in his intellectual and emotional progress. The work presents a pattern of human development in such a way that it is possible for the reader to judge its credibility; this development culminates in an experience of the numinous that integrates its various strands and leads to a conviction of the presence in the midst of innocent suffering of a God felt as making himself known through the evil, with questions of disavowal or affirmation being transcended in the consciousness of God’s presence with the sufferer. If the pattern displayed is psychologically credible, and it recurs throughout religious literature from Isaiah to Simone Weil, then it shows how a person may be brought by experience to such a conviction, and to the extent that Job’s experience appears to readers to resonate with their own it enables them to see how it could resolve their own perplexities. Thus far, in biblical terms, the work appeals to the ‘heart’. Of course, however much such a faith might resolve one’s perplexities, it cannot be accepted if it is self-contradictory or otherwise refuted; thus the work both tests it against the wisdom of orthodoxy, showing that in terms of faithfulness to the facts it is a better account, and sets out to guard against the charge of inconsistency (Warner 1989: ch. 4); the ordinary empirical and analytic norms are respected, but represented as inadequate.

This inadequacy is instructive, though to explore this is to go beyond the thought world of the Book of Job. The ‘comforters’ are represented as deducing false conclusions from allegedly first principles. In contrast, the book takes an example of a relevant pattern of experience, and attempts to display its paradigmatic status by showing it coming recognizably to terms with fundamental human concerns in a manner that resolves both psychological and intellectual perplexity. Unless one is to rule out the relevance of religious experience altogether in the establishment of first principles in religion, such a method looks promising; how promising begins to emerge when we consider the establishment of first principles more generally, and here Aristotle is again a useful point of reference.

For much of his corpus there is a threefold distinction between demonstration, dialectic and rhetoric; demonstration starts from first principles, but ‘dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries’ (Topics A. 101a–b). This criticism employs both deduction and induction and takes its start from reputable opinions (which may of course be false); it characteristically explores conflicts between such opinions, or between them and the apparent findings of experience, and seeks to find a way of rethinking the issue in question in a way that explains such conflicts and thereby to provide a superior way of integrating and organizing human experience. This does not, of course, formally guarantee the truth of the ‘first principles’ that fall out from this process, but the process is not only subject to formal constraints since dialectic properly takes place in the context of debate between competent individuals cooperating in a genuine attempt to arrive at the truth, thereby ensuring that any doubtful move is subjected to criticism. Even this, one might think, can hardly be expected to establish without reasonable doubt the truth of first principles on which, for Aristotle, all science depends, and in any case his model of disinterested enquiry with no element of arguing for victory is hardly realistic, as Augustine long ago pointed out. Aristotle’s distinction between dialectic and rhetoric is, it appears, one of degree, turning on the level of expertise and type of motivation possessed by those involved, and what Gilbert Ryle (1949: 8) frankly called ‘persuasions of conciliatory kinds’, which Aristotle would have classified as rhetorical, have regularly played a role in dialectical debate.

At the beginning of the modern period Descartes, for these and other reasons, rejected such dialectic and argued for the primacy of deductive demonstration, after the model of geometry. But his attempt to establish first principles in this way, most notoriously through the Cogito, have failed to carry conviction. Subsequent attempts have also proved problematic, leading in recent years to what has been termed ‘philosophical relativity’, where ‘the answer one prefers for a certain philosophical problem depends on what assumptions one has adopted in relation to that problem’ (Unger 1984: 5); alleged ‘first principles’ are person- or culture-relative. Pascal saw the weakness at once, describing Descartes’s ‘method’, as we have seen, as ‘useless and uncertain’. Complementing l’esprit géométrie, he maintained, is l’esprit de finesse (Pascal 1966: Pensée 512; pp. 210–12), which his Pensées in large part exemplify, and his analysis weaves together Aristotelian and biblical elements. It sketches a mode of reasoning other than the demonstrative to establish first principles, a mode which takes its starting-point from a number of diverse elements which themselves need to be subjected to critical scrutiny, and proceeds by attempting to bring out underlying principles that will reconcile apparent ‘contradictions’ among these elements. But this familiar Aristotelian picture is revolutionized by the introduction of the Augustinian theme of the centrality of the will, itself a version of the importance the Bible assigns to the ‘heart’; we are ‘thrown’ (jetée) into the body – Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (1962: sections 29 and 38) – embarqué as embodied beings with all that that involves (Pensée 418; pp. 149–50), thus any framework of thinking that centres round the ideal of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
• 2 Once More Into the Borderlands: The Way of Wisdom in Philosophy and Theology after the ‘Turn to Drama’
• Section One Reason, Rationality and Traditions of Rationality
• 3 What is Secularity?
• 4 Rational Religious Faith and Kant’s Transcendental Boundaries
• 5 Boundaries Crossed and Uncrossable: Physical Science, Social Science, Theology
• 6 The Logos, the Body and the World: On the Phenomenological Border
• Section Two Meaning, Language and Interpretation
• 7 The Question of God Today
• 8 Felicity and Fusion: Speech Act Theory and Hermeneutical Philosophy
• Section Three Experience, Imagination and Mysticism
• 9 Experience Skewed
• 10 On Philosophers (Not) Reading History: Narrative and Utopia
• 11 What To Say: Reflections on Mysticism after Modernity
• Bibliography
• Index