Faith's Knowledge

Explorations into the Theory and Application of Theological Epistemology

Paul Tyson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621896661
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Can we know truth even though certain proof is unattainable? Can we be known by Truth? Is there a relationship between belief and truth, and if so, what is the nature of that relationship? Do we need to have faith in reason and in real meaning to be able to reason towards truth? These are the sorts of questions this book seeks to address. In Faith's Knowledge, Paul Tyson argues that all knowledge that aims at truth is always the knowledge of faith. If this is the case, then--against our modernist cultural assumptions about knowledge--truth cannot be had by proof. Yet, if this is true, then mere information and simply objective facts do not (for us as knowers) exist. Knowledge is always embedded in belief, and knowledge and belief is always expressed in relationships, histories, narratives, shared meanings, and power. Hence, a theological sociology of knowledge emerges out of these explorations in thinking about knowledge as a function of faith.

PART ONE

Theory

1

Transcendence and Epistemology

We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend. Faith is experience that intelligence is enlightened by love.7

—Simone Weil

Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing.8

—George MacDonald

Modern secular reason is grounded in epistemological foundationalism typically traced back to Descartes. Here, truth sits within the confines of what the autonomous human mind can indubitably know and those confines are defined by what can be validly demonstrated by human logic and/or perception. Whilst this approach to truth greatly facilitated the launch of the modern scientific method, it was philosophically unstable from the outset. Hume argued that metaphysical and theological speculation grounded in the modern conception of truth invariably collapses, for modern truth feeds into fundamental solipsistic doubt in a manner that is not only theologically destructive but that leads naturally to epistemological nihilism in relation to all realist conceptions of truth. “Truth” must hence be practical and skeptical and cannot be metaphysical or theological. Kant attempted to salvage Western metaphysics and theology from Humean doubt but his ‘salvage’ only deepened our problem. Since the opening of the nineteenth century the West has been reeling in a cultural crisis of metaphysical and theological failure, what one scholar has called the “dis-enchantment of reason.”9 For Kant’s powerful thinking makes it reasonable for us to believe that the Real, though it may exist, is substantively unknowable. Today, a profound spiritual skepticism underpins both modernism and postmodernism and this makes the very exploration of epistemology and transcendence difficult.

However, if modern epistemological foundationalism itself is grounded in a faulty set of onto-epistemological assumptions then a specific critique of those assumptions rather than the wholesale rejection of realist ontology and epistemology may open up the ideas of knowable transcendent truth and inherently meaningful reality to us again. The Radical Orthodoxy critique of secular reason, delving into the theological roots of the modern outlook, underlies the liberty this chapter takes in exploring the largely abandoned territory of epistemology and transcendence.

This chapter starts with Plato’s approach to epistemology and transcendence and finds this powerful in its own right, compatible with orthodox Christian theology, and refreshingly outside of the onto-epistemological assumptions implicit in modern epistemological foundationalism. Christian Neoplatonist Aristotelianism—as developed in the via antiqua of Aquinas and Bonaventure—is argued as onto-epistemologically of one piece with Christian Platonism. So Augustine and Aquinas are seen as allies in theologically premised realism that is profoundly at odds with the via moderna that is heralded by Abelard, takes off with William of Ockham, leads through the Renaissance to Descartes, and then arrives at its striking Humean metaphysical dead end in the Enlightenment. However, this chapter argues that proto-modern Aristotelian epistemology, in contrast to Neoplatonic Aristotelianism, is integral to the via moderna and the metaphysical failure of modern truth. For the via moderna is under-girded by an epistemological revolution that can be traced back to the enormous influence of Aristotle’s science, logic and metaphysics on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this period of Aristotelian supremacy philosophy first delineated itself from theology and then slowly produced the secularized natural theology which emerges in Enlightenment metaphysics, finally giving progressive nineteenth century materialism its amazing theological confidence. The anti-Aristotelian epistemological invention of representation by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham is a critical development for the via moderna, but this chapter suggests that the background role of Aristotle’s approach to perception and logic underpins Franciscan science, is a critical feature of proto-modern science, and underlies the mortal conflict between science and religion that was to flower in high modernity. For once nature and super-nature are fixedly separated by the nominalists, Aristotle’s pagan natural theology creeps back into the West in a trajectory thoroughly at odds with both Aquinas’ baptism of Aristotle’s philosophy into dogmatic Christian theology and the delineated theological interests of the nominalists. Yet, modern scientific and naturalistic truth is a doomed enterprise. Naturalistic metaphysics without the Platonic belief in a transcendent reality beyond matter in which natural reality nevertheless ontically participates, becomes wrecked by the inherent unknowables of human perception and reason understood in natura pura and nominalist terms. So, this chapter argues, Aristotle is very important as an influence supporting the ontotheological hubris and metaphysical dead ends of modernity. Yet, the argument of this chapter suggests that this hubris and metaphysical failure can be discarded and a valid knowledge of transcendent truth can be regained if we can open up a new and post-secular chapter in epistemology that draws more directly on the epistemological traditions of Christian Platonism.

Plato’s approach to truth: faith in divine reason

In his famous cave analogy Plato takes the flux, contingency and transience of all that we perceive to be but confused shadows of reality.10 Equally, Plato sees the emptiness of merely cunning arguments. The instrumental and manipulative language games of the Sophists do not aim at truth, thus they are nothing but deceptive concoctions of semantic shadows. So to Plato, neither immediate perception nor mere argument delivers truth.11 Given these limitations, the search for the true is hence a search away from the play of shadows on the cave wall towards the real things that produce the shadows, and ultimately to ecstatic union with the sun itself. But whilst the shadows of truth do, in their confused and illusive manner, stimulate us to seek real truth, truth is itself the cause of the shadows and this asymmetrical causal relationship can never be reversed. The realm of contingency and flux and the sophistic knots of constructed speculative language games can never, in those terms, divulge truth to us. Yet to Plato, this does not mean that we cannot know truth.

In Theaetetus Plato puts forward the notion that our knowledge of timeless universal truths—such as mathematics—cannot be derived from perception but must be directly apprehended by some capacity of the mind herself.12 In Meno Plato puts forward the notion that because we do have an innate pre-recognition of universal and timeless truths, it stands to reason that our minds have a transcendent origin.13 We can only recognize necessary truths if our minds already have truth and are, in some profound sense, akin to transcendent truth. To Plato, that we do grasp universal truths beyond the contingency and flux of the perceptual manifold indicates that our minds are not spawned from contingent fluctuating temporal nature. In this way Plato grounds the ordinary processes of thought in transcendence and makes perception a derivative knowledge grounded in the mysteries of transcendent reality, rather than seeing perception, or the internal structures of our mind, as the source of knowledge itself.14

Due to the asymmetry mentioned above, logical and empirical proofs constructed in the terms of our ‘natural’ epistemological capacities are not found in Plato. Whilst Plato is a master of dialectics and keen observation, these are merely tools to deflect distractions, untangle confusions, or undermine false confidence. The essence of his philosophy is what we would now call religious: when Plato is grasped by Nous in the context of intellectual love (desiring contemplation), there he gains divine insights that are spiritual, that can only be expressed in parables, in analogies, in poetic myths—for they are insights not of the transient sub-lunar world, but of the eternal Reality on which our comprehension and being, and the being of the perceived world, depends. Plato puts the heart of his philosophy forward in a way that must be grasped as inspired and searching spiritual analogies; never as definitive rational or scientific descriptions that replicate a simple correspondence with “reality” as some objective material thing. And yet, the rigor of contemplative thought in Plato is in no contradiction to the poetic imagery in which he seeks to express the mystical and spiritually erotic insights that ground his whole conception of the love of wisdom. Plato’s onto-epistemological belief framework, as a blend of mystical insight, rigorous dialect, human warmth, literary art and broad learning, is subtle and profound. And it is essentially religious.

An examination of how Plato depicts Socratic wisdom, as found in Apology, brings out a twofold purpose in Plato’s approach to the human situation in relation to the divine, and reveals Plato as a deeply theological thinker. Negatively, Plato critiques “human wisdom” grounded in immediate sensory knowledge, custom, status and power, and mere argument. Such “wisdom” cannot be adequately justified. But Plato’s critique is not critique for its own sake. Positively, once merely human wisdom is found wanting, Plato seeks to bring divine wisdom into view; wisdom which cannot be grasped by merely human capacities, but must hence be received, in humility, from the god.

“The god” is pivotal to Plato’s depiction of Socratic wisdom. In Apology 22e–23b the true wisdom of “Socratic ignorance” is clearly identified with Socrates’ refusal to trust reputed “human wisdom,” precisely because he serves the god of true and divine wisdom. At issue here is not simply a theory about wisdom and knowledge, but an approach to life that must be lived out in either good faith or bad faith to the god that the illusions of human certainty cannot grasp. Socrates discovers that such an approach to ignorance and wisdom is politically problematic. For as human wisdom cannot grasp divine wisdom in the terms of human “certainty” and “control,” true wisdom, grounded in the divine, will always appear uncertain and subversive to those committed to merely conventional authority and the apparent immediacy and solidity generated by the perceptual manifold. The condemnation and execution of Socrates underlines the political problematic of life lived in devotion to the god of true wisdom.

Serving divine wisdom is a life of existential commitment, of political danger and most of all, of re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Theory
• Chapter 1: Transcendence and Epistemology
• Chapter 2: Plato against Ontotheology
• Chapter 3: Faith in Plato and John
• Part Two: Application
• What Is Applied Theological Epistemology?
• Chapter 4: The Iron Cage Closes
• Chapter 5: Australian Universities in Transition
• Chapter 6: A Post-Secular Approach to Understanding Religion and Global Security
• Chapter 7: Faith and Medicine
• Faith’s Knowledge
• Bibliography