To be something…

For the central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas or concepts, but a matter of fact, or reality. The heart of the Christian mystery is the fact of God made man, God with us, in Christ; words, even his words, are secondary to the reality of what he accomplished. To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something. The role of the Church, then, is not simply as the contingent vehicle - in history - of the Christian message, but as the community, through belonging to which we come into touch with the Christian mystery.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 74.

 

Louth on Science and Mystery IV: Tacit knowledge and the Fathers

If we look at the role of tradition in our coming to know God we find in the Fathers a pattern reminiscent of what we have already noticed in Gadamer and Polanyi. Participation in the tradition of the Church meant for the Fathers acceptance of the Church’s rule of faith, acceptance of the framework of preconceptions within which Scripture and one’s own experience of grace could be interpreted as furthering the understanding of God. This tradition was essentially non-specifiable, or if specifiable, not simply by an indication of specific doctrines, but primarily as the bond of unity, the bond of love, which established the Church as the Body of Christ. As the Church reflected on the notion of tradition, it developed (as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter) a notion of what we might call, following Polany, a tacit dimension in which our knowledge of God is rooted. The Patristic doctrine of tradition might well be paraphrased in the language of Polanyi by saying that all knowledge of God in Christ is either the tacit knowledge of tradition or rooted in such tacit knowledge.

The notion of the tacit has deeper resonance within the Fathers’ thought, however, than in the thought of Polanyi. In them the tacit is interpreted as silence, the silence of presence, the presence of God who gives himself to the soul who waits on him in silence. The silence of the tacit makes immediate contact with the silence of prayer: and prayer is seen in the Fathers to be, as it were, the amniotic fluid in which our knowledge of God takes form. Participation in the tradition of the Church implies participation in a life of love, of loving devotion to God and loving care of our neighbour. Participation in the tradition is indeed a moral activity: it implies a growing attentiveness to Our Lord, and a growing likeness to him. In other words, the Fathers understand the place of what we have called, following Gadamer, paideia in making us into those who are capable of knowing God, or rather in making us receptive to God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. Hort’s assertion that ‘the perception of truth depends as much on the state of him who desires to perceive as on the objects that are presented to his view’ is axiomatic for the Fathers.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 64-65.

Louth’s discussion has brought him to a point where the Enlightenment paradigm not only looks “less compelling” but where it “is seen to be based on assumptions about how we come to knowledge that re being rendered increasingly incredible and naïve.” (66) Indeed it has had damaging effects for both the humanities and theology in leading to a one-sided understanding of truth.

While Louth rejects an absolute division between the sciences and the humanities, the sciences can be characterised by a concern with solving problems, whereas the humanities have a deeper dimension and require a deeper sort of reason to that required by the sciences. Understanding in the humanities does not bring definitive solutions but leads to a deeper engagement with reality. Drawing on Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between mystery and problem Louth continues 

… what I am suggesting is that concern for the mysterious is at the heart of the humanities, whereas at the heart of the sciences there is a concern with the problematic. That this is a contrast, and not a dichotomy, is seen in the way in which problem-solving has a place in the humanities - though the most significant kind of problem is one that, in Marcel’s language, ‘conceals a mystery’ - and in the complementary way in which some scientists, such as Einstein, have spoken of a deepening sense of awe and wonder awakened in them, an awe and wonder in the presence of the universe, that grows through the advance of the sciences, through the growing success in solving problems. But the contrast remains, and since problem-solving can be successful, whereas contemplation of mystery cannot, there cannot be in the humanities any hope for the sort of success the sciences have known. Nor in theology: and especially not in Christian theology whose central mystery is focused in the birth of a child in a stable, and in the death of a man on a cross. (70)

Louth highlights the return to mystery in twentieth century theologians such as Barth and Rahner. He proceeds to argue that the main concern of theology should be not so much to elucidate anything, but rather to prevent us from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith, which is precisely what the heresies attempted to do. The task of theology is to guard the mystery and to lead us back “to those ultimate unities that have so long eluded our grasp, unities that draw together the mind and the heart (or rather, find there a primordial unity which we have lost), unities that are nourished by the love of God which is the mystery of our faith.” (72)

***

I’m not sure if there’s much point commenting as I am generally most appreciative of everything Louth has argued in this chapter, even if my own background in science and religion is rather minimal. I’ve particularly appreciated his emphasis on the involvement of the one who knows in the process of knowing, which points to an ascetical dimension for all aspects of theology, something that has far-reaching implications and which I keep thinking I’d like to pursue further but never seem to get to! (A while ago Father Gregory Jensen of Koinonia had an insightful post on the role of the passions, and the struggle against the passions, in Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, and this is a theme that could be explored much further, not least in the polarised situation within the Catholic Church).

I have also been wondering whether Father Louth would use the language of “mystery” in the same way if he were to write this book today. This is sparked by having recently read his Afterword to the new edition of his The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition in which he provides a thorough going critique of the concept of “mysticism”, something that I really do intend writing on soon!

 

Louth on Science and Mystery III

At the heart of Polanyi’s insight here is his recognition of what one might call the mysteriousness of our engagement with the outside world. The kind of empiricism that often underpins the scientific or experimental method assumes that our perception of the external world is relatively straightforward and unproblematic: that we simply register impressions from the external world and organize them by a process of interpretation. Polanyi’s point is that in much of our perception of the external world, what we perceive is often unspecifiable in detail. We recognize one another’s faces, yet are quite unable to specify what it is that we are recognizing … If we attempt to attend to the detail, we often miss the more elusive total impression that we discern but cannot explain.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 59.

Louth highlights Polanyi’s concept of the tacit, which functions as an interpretive framework that enables us to know. This is knowledge that has been grasped and understood by a person, involving numerous ways of perception and a range of anticipations that we have learnt by experience. It enables us to form a framework by which we instinctively interpret our conclusions. For Polanyi all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. It relies on stimuli coming from outside and on a wide range of linguistic pointers “which bring to bear our pre-conceptions - based on past experience - on the interpretation of our subject matter.” (62)

 Louth suggests that

What we have in Polanyi is an analysis of what is involved in knowing that calls into question some of the simplifications underlying the idea that the scientific method, the experimental method, is the way of moving from ignorance and error to objective knowledge. (62)

Far from this being a one-way movement, explicit knowledge needs to become tacit if it is to be fruitful, and Polanyi gives the example of the skills involved in learning to drive a car. Knowledge is more a personal orientation to reality than an objective account of it. Moreover, Polanyi develops Dilthey’s idea of knowledge as indwelling in which we interiorise the means by which we come to knowledge and come to dwell in them. He writes:

Tacit knowledge now appears as an act of indwelling by which we gain access to new meaning. When exercising a skill we literally dwell in the innumerable muscular acts which contribute to its purpose, a purpose which constitutes their joint meaning. Therefore, since all understanding is tacit knowing, all understanding is achieved by indwelling. The idea developed by Dilthey and Lipps, that we can know human beings and works of art only by indwelling, can thus be justified. But we see now also that these authors were mistaken in distinguishing indwelling from observation as practised in the natural sciences. The difference is only a matter of degree: indwelling is less deep when observing a star than when understanding men or works of art. The theory of tacit knowing establishes a continuous transition from the natural sciences to the study of the humanities. (64-65)

Thus there is no absolute distinction between patterns of knowing in the sciences and in the humanities, and it is therefore unnecessary to look to the sciences to shed light on the theological task. Moreover, Louth points out that the ways of knowing described by Polanyi are precisely those that we find in the theology of the Fathers, a theme that I will discuss in the next post.

 

Louth on Science and Mystery II

[Hort] points out that the contrast between truth of revelation and truth of discovery merely brings out a polarity in the human grasping of truth that is necessarily implicit in it. There cannot be pure truth of revelation: for to apprehend a truth which is received is to relate it to what we know already, to make it one’s own. But neither can there be pure truth of discovery: for no one starts from scratch, we take for granted a body of learning that has been handed down to us, we trust those from whom we learn, and those from whom they learnt. ‘Truth of discovery is received by everyone except the discoverer as much from without as if it were revealed. Truth of revelation remains inert till it has been appropriated by a human working of recognition which it is hard to distinguish from that of discovery.’ Hort draws attention to the danger of thinking that because much of the advance in knowledge since the Renaissance has been by criticism and rejection of traditions discovered to be false, it follows that tradition has no place in our knowing, and that we should accept only what we have proved for ourselves. The task is impossible; but more dangerously, the attitude behind such a determination is self-frustrating: ‘in knowledge as in all else he labours in vain to be independent: he is most himself when he receives most, and most freely acknowledges that he receives’.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 55-56.

While Louth sees theology as more closely allied to the humanities than to the sciences (theologians work in “libraries, not laboratories”) he nevertheless want to avoid an absolute division between the two. Moreover, he questions whether the emphasis on method, experimentation, objectivity and a break with tradition that became prominent in the wake of the Renaissance is not something of a caricature. Such emphases have certainly proved successful, but “this may not mean that it is a complete way of developing human knowledge, only that it is effective within its limits.” (55) Drawing on Hort’s work Louth argues for a sort of continuity between scientific and theological knowledge in which the personal implication of the one who seeks is not something which one should seek to elide, but means rather an integral part in the process of undeception. In this the quest for truth acquires ascetical overtones. (For Hort’s description of this process, see here). Thus

From Hort there emerges a very positive attitude to the growth of the sciences which yet sees the pursuit of the scientist as part of the common human pursuit for truth, and not as fundamentally different from it in kind. Emphasis is laid on the importance of tradition; while the objectivity required of the one who is seriously dedicated to the truth is seen not as an impersonal elision of the observer, but rather in moral terms as a growth in wisdom and selflessness. Nor is there any reliance on some ‘method’ which holds the key of knowledge, rather there is an awareness of the manifoldness of the truth and of our perception of it. (59)

 

Louth on Science and Mystery I

 … do we perhaps lose something in relinquishing the idea of theology as a science? Cannot perhaps the revision in the understanding of science that came about with the growth of experimental science give us a truer insight into the nature of theology as a science? Is there not something to be said for restoring theology to the realm of the sciences, if not to her erstwhile pre-eminent position as the ‘queen of the sciences’? And, given the enormous respect in which the sciences are held nowadays, would it not be of considerable apologetic value if theology could be regarded as being genuinely ‘scientific’? And is there not a further consideration, taking us back to the concerns of chapter I? There I spoke of a divide, a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, in our culture, and suggested that one of the elements in this dissociation is the way in which the claim of the scientific method to be the sole route to truth, with its consequences that truth is limited to the form of impersonal objectivity, has been too easily conceded by the humanities. But if we argue, as I have done, that the humanities are concerned with truth and that their way to this truth is radically different to the experimental method of the sciences, are we not promoting just such a divide in our understanding of the world, and therefore in our culture, that we have deplored in chapter I? May not the rediscovery of ‘theological science’ be the way to help us heal this breach?

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 47-48.

Louth begins his chapter on “Science and Mystery” by outlining the fundamental shift that has taken place in the relationship between theology and science. Within an Aristotelian perspective theology was the “queen of the sciences” because, being concerned with the study of the highest reality, its subject matter made it the highest of the speculative or theoretical sciences. Such a perspective was deductive, drawing conclusions from indubitable principles and resulting in a hierarchy of knowledge at whose pinnacle was natural theology. This understanding was undermined by two factors. The first was the change in the notion of science brought about by the experimental sciences whose methodology was inductive and worked from hypothesis and experiment. The second was that the historical consciousness inherent in the Judaeo-Christian tradition itself had always fitted rather awkwardly into the Aristotelian perspective.

It is against this background that Louth considers some attempts to rethink the relationship between theology and science, and focuses in particular on the work of T.F. Torrance. Torrance discusses Barth’s distinction between philosophy and theology and of the necessity of revelation and faith for the latter.

… what is interesting, and what concerns us most closely here, is Torrance’s final comment in this discussion: ‘As it has turned out, does not theology bear a closer comparison with an exact science, such as physics, which restricts its activities to the limits laid down by the nature of its concrete object, and develops a method in accordance with the nature of its object, bracketing it off from every world-view (either as an a priori condition or as an a posteriori product), and involving an open mind about what may lay beyond the limits of its own area of knowledge?’ (50-51)

Thus Torrance attempts to find illumination for the theological task from the way in which modern science, and especially physics, has had to grapple with problems of epistemology. However, Louth argues that such commonalities as there are between theology and science come precisely from the fact that, as a human activity, knowing in the sciences “is much less unlike understanding in the humane disciplines than the early protagonists of the scientific method seem to have thought.” (52) Moreover, the experimental method is not only inappropriate for theology because of its concern with grace, but also because it is concerned with men and women, with persons. Thus Louth considers the illumination that Torrance brings to the theological task as “mainly oblique” - while not fundamental to the identity of theology it can nevertheless be helpful to it - and insufficient for identifying theology as a science, although he continues to problematise the absolute divide between the humanities as the sciences as becomes apparent in the rest of this chapter.

 

New edition of Discerning the Mystery

Kevin Edgecomb of Biblicalia has a post drawing our attention to a  new edition of Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery, which at US $ 25 is considerably cheaper than previous editions.

I can only agree with Kevin when he says: “Hopefully with this text being available at such a low price, it will be more widely read and discussed, as it deserves much more attention than it has received.”

And I really do regret that I have got so behind in posting on this book - it is certainly not for lack of enthusiasm and I do hope to return to it soon.

 

Hort on perceiving truth

The perception of truth depends as much on the state of him that desires to perceive as on the objects that are presented to his view. No slight or swift or uniform process will enable any one to master the mere art of discerning truth from false appearance. But, not to speak of this most needful and most various mental preparation, there is another condition which is never forgotten with impunity. The more we know of truth, the more we come to see how manifold is the operation by which we take hold of it. It is not reached by one organ but through many. No single faculty, if indeed there be any single faculties, can arrogate a right to exclude from the domain of truth what cannot be readily subjected to its own special action. It may be that no element of our compound nature is entirely shut out from taking part in knowledge. It is at all events certain that the specially mental powers will never be able to judge together in rightful relation when the nature as a whole is disordered by moral corruption. There is no evil passion cherished, no evil practice followed, which does not cloud or distort our vision whenever we look beyond the merest abstract form of things. There is a truth within us, to use the language of Scripture, a perfect inward ordering as of a transparent crystal, by which alone the faithful image of truth without us is brought within our ken. Not in vain said the Lord that it is the pure in heart, they whose nature has been subdued from distraction into singleness, who shall see God; or, we may add, who shall see the steps of the ladder by which we may mount to God.

The stedfast and prescient pursuit of truth is therefore itself a moral and spiritual discipline.

F.J.A. Hort, The Way, The Truth, The Life (London, 2nd edn. reprinted 1897) 92-3, quoted in Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 57.

 

Hort on the traditions of the hour

The traditions of the hour or the age are as indubitably external to us, and as little founded of necessity on freshly perceived truth, as any traditions of the past. The danger of them lies in their disguise. The single negative fact that they make war on some confessed tradition prevents us from discovering that they too draw their force no less from an authority, until it is too late and we have lost or damaged that power of independent vision which is but braced and harmonized by a known or honoured tradition.

F.J.A. Hort, The Way, The Truth, The Life (London, 2nd edn. reprinted 1897) 92, quoted in Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 56.

 

Louth on Gadamer II

By suggesting that Bildung occupy the place in the humanities which method occupies in the sciences, Gadamer means that initiation into the study of the humanities is not so much initiation into any techniques as into the tradition with which we are concerned in the humanities. Our primary aim is not to find a way that will enable us to achieve objectivity, but rather a sufficiently activated subjectivity, a sensitivity to our historical situation and all that has contributed to it …

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 43.

Louth continues his discussion of Gadamer’s work on engagement with tradition by comparing it to the different ways in which conversation works. The first kind of engagement does not allow any conversation at all, for the other remains simply an object. Gadamer considers this kind of “conversation” to be analogous to the social sciences in which people are units operating under laws which need to be discovered. The second form of engagement, which allows a more real conversation, attempts to understand the other person, but does not directly listen to what he or she is saying, seeking rather to read between the lines and understand the other’s background and what is not said. Gadamer considers such a conversation analogous to the concern with “historical consciousness” which seeks to know others better than they know themselves. However, by seeking to elide his or her own historical reality, the one seeking understanding is in effect seeking to master the past. The third form of engagement, that of a genuine conversation, is one in which

I not only recognize the otherness of another, but also recognize his claim over me and listen to what he has to say to me. I am not trying to ‘understand’ him and thus dominate him; I am seeking to understand what he has to say, I am open to learning something from him. Here there is genuine listening, genuine openness to another. And this is analogous to the true way of seeking to understand the past, which Gadamer wants to commend. ‘I must’, he says, ‘allow the validity of the claim made by tradition, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. (41)

Louth proceeds to highlight Gadamer’s use of the concept of Bildung as occupying the place in the humanities that method occupies in the sciences. “Bildung - or we could use the Greek word paideia, education, though there is no word in English which corresponds with it very closely - is what one has to undergo in order to grow up, and also what it is that one grows up into.” (42) This emphasis on formation means both acquiring the common sense, sensus communis, of what a group, but also what all of humanity has in common, and it also means acquiring eloquence which means not just speaking well, but, more importantly, learning how to say the right thing in the right way at the right time. It is the acquiring of practical wisdom, phronesis, as opposed the universal wisdom of sophia.

Bildung is then a fashioning of the individual. Instead of seeking an illusory escape from prejudice, it initiates us into our prejudices so that we are able to see that which they shed light on.

 ***

Two things struck me in relation to Louth’s use of Gadamer’s concept of Bildung. Firstly, as I have been reading Saint Irenaeus, I was struck by the kinship of the idea of Bildung or paideia to Irenaeus’ idea of humanity having been created as a child who still had to grow up and whom God had to form and mould to its full stature in Christ. Related to this is Louth’s footnote noting the origin of the German word Bildung in German mystical literature in the notion of humanity as the image of God, Bild Gottes, and the refashioning of humanity into that image.

Secondly - and it may be a bit dangerous for me to venture into territory involving Greek! - the suggestion that Bildung is related to phronesis, in Aristotle’s sense of practical wisdom, reminded me of a quote I posted a while back from Father Florovsky in which he spoke of acquiring the Fathers’ “mind”, their phronema. This does seem to be the fundamental challenge for all genuine formation.

 

Louth on Gadamer I

If we accept the implications of this - that interpretation of the past is not an attempt to transcend tradition, but rather an engagement with tradition; that the one who seeks to understand the past cannot himself step outside his own situation but is seeking an understanding of the past in the present, a present which bears upon him in ways of which he cannot be objectively aware; that this engagement with the past is not simply a process whereby we understand the past, but equally a process of self-discovery which can never be complete - if we accept the implications of this, we can begin to see what is involved in any process of understanding within the humanities. It is a process of revising our preconceptions, not seeking to escape from them. It is a growing into what we learn from tradition. The movement in the process is a movement of undeception: as a result of experience and growing understanding we see that we have been deceived and so are freed from deception. It is thus a growth in truth and a growth in openness towards new experiences.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 36-37.

Central to the development of the scientific method was the ideal of reaching objective truth independently of the one who knows this truth. Thus the aim of experimentation - which needed to be open to repetition - was to elide the subjectivity of the researcher. This is however much more problematical when applied to the humanities in which humanity itself is the object of study and in which there is a “connaturality that exists between the author and his interpreter.” (30) By seeking the reconstruction of the original historical context, the original intention of the author and a meaning that exists independently of any interpretation, the historical-critical method forgets that both the original author and the interpreter belong to history and that both are more than simply isolated individuals.

Louth highlights both Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment’s illusory ideal of presuppositionless understanding, which only serves to disconnect us from history and to see us as isolated individuals, and his rehabilitation of the notion of prejudice which is necessary for any genuine understanding. In contrast, Louth, following Gadamer, argues that “a truer theory of interpretation, which does not seek to elide the historical reality of the one seeking understanding, sets the interpreter himself within tradition. … Understanding is an engagement with tradition, not an attempt to escape from it.” (33)

By engaging tradition we are confronted with the mystery of human freedom. This is a mystery in which we participate, unlike our confrontation of the mystery of natural laws. Tradition, for Gadamer, is the context in which we can be free. We do not need to try and forget our preconceptions and prejudices, but we do need to be open to having them challenged. Louth comments:

… we find in the process of seeking to understand that it is not simply a matter of our putting questions to the tradition, but of our being subject to questioning by that tradition itself. As we ‘make the text speak’, we hear what it has to say, and what we have to say, as we hear it, addresses us and calls us into question. If we are not open to that, we are not open to understanding. (39)

 ***

The importance of Gadamer for Louth’s specifically theological argument is further developed in later chapters. For now I should note that my own response to Gadamer seems to have shifted somewhat from when I read him (or works on him) twelve to fifteen years ago. Then I was concerned with his arguments in rehabilitating tradition and of tradition’s ability to be self-critical in a rather abstract way. Now his work strikes me as having a rather ascetical tone to it, it enables an encounter with the tradition as that which seeks to purify us, a purification that works at a number of levels, including the intellectual. I suppose that this was there all along and I was just blind to it, or at least orientated to other things. But it is perhaps partly also due to Louth’s reading of him which highlights the transformative potential of his work and which will, in later chapters, situate it within the context of our call to holiness.

In a following post I will discuss tradition’s role in formation for Gadamer.