Philosophy for Theologians, Essay Example

Pope John Paul II’s composition of the Fides et Ratio and its advocation of the “defense of the power of human intelligence to arrive by its natural powers to at least some certain truths” (Ashley 2010, 1) can be viewed as a continuation of Pope Leo XIII’s decision for an Aristotelian model of epistemology.  For both accounts stress the fundamental relationship that exists between two types of knowledge: human knowledge and the knowledge of revelation. The Aristotelian model does not propose an irreconcilable gap between these two types, but rather posits a relationship in which the two are constitutive of an authentic human experience that concomitantly evokes the divine.

To understand this account, it is necessary to delineate what each type of knowledge entails. In the case of human knowledge, there is an emphasis on the epistemological value of anthropic “experience, senses, imagination and reason.”[1] Yet the problem with such an approach is that such knowledge inevitably remains incomplete, insofar as this knowledge is ultimately a human product and thus subject to finitude. The human knowledge of rationalism is coextensive with a stricture, as it designates only one type of knowing – it is a fundamentally limited epistemology, one that is capable of truths, but not the truth in toto, as evidenced by the claim of the scripture in Heb 11:1 that recapitulates faith in terms of “the evidence of things not seen.”[2] (Ashley 2010, 1) Hence, according to their internal impasse, human reason and material empiricism must also defer to the knowledge of revelation, which is the direct word of God. This deferral demands the necessity of revealed knowledge for any rigorous pursuit of truth, to the extent that such revealed knowledge completes the insufficiency of human knowledge. At the same time, however, such revealed knowledge is not alien to human thought, but is radically meaningful to this thought as a personal revelation of that which is beyond human epistemology, insofar as Aquinas states our task is “to somehow express and explain the Word of God in terms that come from this human experience.”[3] This knowledge addresses questions unanswerable by reason, questions that are both deeply personal and scientific, such as inquiries concerning the teleology of the world and why the world exists.[4] The decision for Aristotle follows from the linkage as opposed to separation of human and revealed knowledge.

Such a decision for the Aristotelian epistemology stands in opposition to theoretical tendencies within the history of epistemology that emphasize one approach over the other. For example, the notion that the spiritual epistemology is defined by its renunciation of the material as any guarantor of knowledge is central to the work of Plato. The empirical realm that is posited by the human senses is immediately deemed as “an illusory, illusory or shadowy existence or at least puts no trust in the certainty of knowledge based on the senses”[5] (Ashley 2010, 2) This decision thus indicates the notion that the true structure of the world lies in the spiritual unseen realm. Following the non-material essence of true knowledge, Plato requires rational thought to move beyond the fallacy of empirical (non)knowledge, a movement that occurs through the usage of logic to grasp the supra-sensorial realm that is the proper place of knowledge.

The antipodal position to the spiritual epistemology is that of the materialist epistemology. In the materialist position, truth can essentially be derived from the structure of the world itself, as “all truth must reduce to what can be observed by our senses or inferred from such observations to be material.”[6] This position is not an exclusively modern scientific world-view, insofar as it is also present in various pre-Socratic philosophies, in which empirical observations are used to postulate a cosmology, such as those theories that anticipate radically materialist accounts like the pro-evolutionary theory of Empedocles and the atomism of Democritus. The material epistemology thus locates knowledge in the correlation between the observation and the behaviour of matter. This materialist position can also be seen as reflected in the dominance of mathematics as a form of epistemology, as evidenced in Descartes’ approach to philosophy: Cartesian subjectivity emphasizes the stability of the internal world against the external world, through the certitude of the notion of the cogito ergo sum. This idealism thus takes the putative certainty of mathematics as one consistent with such subjectivity, proposing an explanation of the world in terms that are immanent to the world.

The radicality of the Aristotelian position can be said to lie in its synthesis of these very two epistemologies. On the one hand, Platonic ideas are to be rejected in favour of a knowledge paradigm that stresses the importance of observation and matter. In this sense, Aristotle emphasizes the significance and meaning of the world as it is experienced by human beings – these experiences are not illusory, but possess a deeper meaning. Concomitantly however, the causal nature of the material world implies that the existence of the world itself necessitates the inclusion of the concept of a prime mover, or a first cause, which as necessarily unconditioned simultaneously removes itself from the observed workings of the material world. In other words, the concept of a first cause necessarily underscores the necessity of an absolute creator of the world that is God. This notion thus recapitulates a spiritual dimension to the Aristotelian epistemology, as he makes clear that a decision for material epistemology in its emphasis on causality eventually leads to the purely spiritual notion of God. The significance of the Aristotelian epistemology is thus that it provides a middle road between materialist and spiritualist epistemologies: Aristotle does not perform an eliminativism in which he prioritizes one epistemological position over the other, but rather grants a truth to both epistemological positions, as the Aristotelian epistemology entails that simultaneously “natural science is basic to all human knowledge but it establishes its own limits by showing that reality includes both material and spiritual beings.”[7]

From this perspective, Pope Leo’s endorsement of an Aristotelian epistemology in his Aeterni Patris becomes more lucid. The spiritual epistemology entails a rejection of the world as it is, a world that God has created: However, insofar as God would not create something meaningless, the materialist epistemology must to an extent be necessarily valid. The purely material epistemology repeats this same problem, insofar as there is nothing within the materialist epistemology that can foreground its own premises. For example, the limits of empiricism as denoted by Hume lie in the absence of a reason for why such empirical observation or the behavior of matter would remain consistent over time – there is nothing in the observation itself that elaborates the reason for this behaviour. That Kant, in response, to Hume’s challenge, subsequently relativized all possible epistemological claims to the human mind has the consequence of making it impossible to know anything outside of human subjectivity: this has the anti-theological corollary of rendering a knowledge of God impossible. The result of such an account is a “growing skepticism and anti-rationalism”[8] that is as alien to Catholic doctrine as a radical materialism that professes to eliminate God. Pope Leo XIII’s support for an Aristotelian epistemology thus identifies the radical balance between the prima facie antagonistic positions of spiritual and material epistemology.[9] The consequences of a strict division between materialist and spiritual epistemology inevitably leads to either a radical skepticism that renders knowledge impossible or the denial of the importance of God’s creation of the world. In contrast, the Aristotelian epistemology stresses the material as the creation of the Creator, thereby positing a profound spiritual dimension within the material world. The commitment to an Aristotelian epistemology thus subverts the conclusions of material and spiritual epistemology through a vindication of the value of human knowledge and meaning, while also opening the possibility for a relationship with the divine.

[1] Ashley, 2010, p. 1

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 2.

[4] Ibid. .

[5] Ibid. .

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 3.

[8] Ibid., 6.

[9] And here is a profound difference from Protestanism, insofar as the Protestant Reformation arises from “a gap between philosophy and revealed theology.” (Ibid., 4)