The Union of Faith and Reason in the Heart
I have previously written about how it is that faith and reason have become divorced from one another in human understanding, such that it is generally agreed among thinkers today that the only real knowledge that counts for anything is the knowledge of the mind, of reason. But that is demonstrably false. I have spoken about how faith is, indeed, productive of knowledge, though of a different sort than reason, and how there need be no divorce between the knowledge produced by faith and that produced by reason, but rather how the knowledge produced by each can complement and reinforce one another. I wish now to address how it is that faith and reason can be united in the heart, and on what grounds this union takes place.
But I must confess at the beginning: my words will be more from theoretical understanding than from personal experience. For I am only beginning to have some insight into this union, and have not yet begun to faithfully practice it. Further, wherever I am in error, according to the wisdom of the Church and her Scriptures, then I need correction. It is my intent to summarize what I understand the Church to teach, not to assert my own theory.
First, if Christians must prioritize these forms of knowledge, the knowledge produced by reason must bend the knee to that produced by faith. It is faith which orients our hearts, minds and lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and therefore, reason will always follow faith.
This is not as scandalous as it may sound. The fact of the matter is that the presupposition that reason should be the sole determinant of what is and isn't knowledge is itself an article of faith—it cannot be proven by reason alone (as was so ably shown by the sceptic Sextus Empiricus nearly two thousand years ago). All our first principles are inarguable, as Aristotle says in the first book of the Metaphysics. What remains is to demonstrate the coherence and rationality of one's presuppositions. The presupposition that faith should lead reason is, in fact, more reasonable than the converse.
For Christians, Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 10:5 are paradigmatic: “We take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” The Faith filters our thinking, providing us the categories with which to judge our experience and all our thinking.
But how do faith and reason become unified? I have already hinted at this: They are unified by being submerged in one's heart. That is to say, one must exercise one's faith and one's reason from within one's heart.
I have noted that the heart is both a physical organ and the central seat of the whole human person. Just as we think of the mind as that thing situated in the brain (yet we cannot weigh and measure the mind like we can the brain), so the heart is both the organ which can be weighed and measured and that thing which is beyond the mere physicality of the organ.
We moderns find this assertion that we must lead reason down into our hearts strange, esoteric, mystical, and, of course, impractical. But we have more experience of this than we might imagine. None of us would imagine that we should have relationships with family, friends and loved ones without that relationship “coming from the heart.” We even, I think, understand how it is that athletes who excel in a given contest run (or jump, or throw) “from the heart.”
It should not be any surprise, then, that we ought “think from the heart.” When we love others, we know what this feels like. We say things like “my heart is about to explode.” When an athlete excels, his chest expands, and he “feels proud” of his accomplishment. These are instances in which we have the experience of living (at least in these moments) from the heart. We pray from the heart—and a richer experience it is than in merely having the words echo in our minds and heads. In many ways, thinking from the heart is not too different. The thoughts which originate in our mind are focused into our heart and take root there.
Of course, one can immediately see the great concern we should have for what thoughts enter our minds, and which settle in the heart. Settle they will, which is why we must maintain constant vigilance over our thoughts, rejecting those which oppose Christ, accepting and ruminating on those which obey Christ. This is why the Jesus Prayer is an important ascetical discipline.
But one other thing we must contemplate. The union of the mind and faith in the heart cannot take place apart from suffering. The genius of the Church has informed us that all of Christian life is struggle, ascesis. We must fight the passions and all the forces of darkness which incite the passions. We are purified as by fire. Each of us are called to different forms of suffering, no suffering to which we are called being more than we can endure or from which we may not expect deliverance from our all-powerful Lord.
The suffering to which we are called forces us to dwell in the heart. Who of us hasn't gone through some time of suffering, and all our life in those moments seems to well up from the pain in our chest? We can do nothing except it is tinged with the ache that beats beneath our breast. This is how it should be for us in all of life. Suffering calls us to this and gives us the opportunity to bring our mind and our faith down into the heart where our Lord dwells and who strengthens our hearts for the struggle of faith.
I do not speak of this on my own authority, but as best I can transmit those experiences of the saints (both those glorified and those known only to each of us) who show us the way of suffering, and of the union of faith and reason in the heart.
The unifying of our faith and our mind in the heart is a lifelong quest. But only when that happens can we claim to know, which is a wisdom more deep than all the wisdom of the world.
Knowledge, the Product of Faith and Reason
I have already noted how faith and reason are united in the heart. I want to dwell further on this and to reflect on the heart as the instrument of knowing in the human person. As you may have guessed from the outset, what I will eventually come to is an assertion that faith, indeed, is productive of knowledge, though knowledge of a different quality than that of reason.
As I have noted previously, since Plato, knowledge has generally been understood to be "justified true belief" (though again, I note that even in the Theaetetus, where this definition is discussed, it is problematic). That is to say, knowledge is belief with some foundation or guarantee of its truth, that guarantee being one which satisfies reason's demands. So, for example, a body of knowledge must be internally consistent, must not violate the strictures of logic, must conform to generally recognized principles that themselves have been tested by reason and have been taken to be authoritative. But note that what this particular body of knowledge must satisfy is reason's searching investigation. If a body of knowledge in any way fails to fulfill the demands of reason, then it can be little better than an established opinion, but it cannot be knowledge.
But this assumes that the only measure of knowledge is reason, and that reason is, in this way, the only real source of knowledge. Knowledge is not grounded in or derived from the gods, religion, human feelings, or mythology. The intellect is that from which knowledge flows.
But this is, I assert, a grave mistake.
For there is, in human experience, a sort of knowing that is not attributable to reason. It is a knowing that derives from koinonia, from personal communion. The Christian Scriptures speak of sexual intercourse in terms of "knowing." "And Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived a son." More than just a euphemistic metaphor, a polite obscurantism chastely drawing a veil over the intimate, it is, I would assert, descriptive of a general reality. But this sort of knowing, while not exclusive of rationality, is primarily a knowing of another sort. It is a knowing of faith, of covenant.
Personal relationships, grounded in a love involving the whole person, are a different sort of knowing than that of reason. Indeed, the knowing of faith is hardly circumscribable by reason. We know our beloved, but we cannot be said to always understand them. We each of us act in ways that are "illogical," yet in ways that are perfectly familiar, known, by our beloved. Personal relationships are built, not on reason, but on faith, on trust. Personal relationships are not intellectual databases, conglomerations of factoids united by an overarching rational principle. Rather they are matters of faith, based in covenant, and ways of living.
It is in this way, then, that faith is productive of knowledge. We can be said to know God, though we cannot rationally prove his existence, or logically demonstrate the unity of his Trinitarian essence. For neither can we rationally prove the existence of our beloved, but we do not doubt that existence for all that. We cannot rationally prove that our beloved is who indeed they claim they are. But we know it, despite all that, through the communion of personal covenant. And the accumulation of this faithful knowing, is, indeed, a body of knowledge. It is a way of life, a tradition handed down through the personal communion of Christ's Body. A body of knowledge not memorized through the intellect alone (though certainly not apart from it), but retained through the faithful living of what and whom we know. This body of knowledge is not so much theology as it is prayer. Or if it is theology, then it is the theology that is prayer.
God is known, then, not primarily by the mind, but by faith, and in the heart. Do we bring to bear our rational capacities on this personal relationship? Of course. But the final arbiter of the relationship's realities is not the mind, though the mind is not excluded from this relationship based in faith.
And because the heart is the primary instrument in the human being for knowing, both of faith and of reason, it is in the heart that we have the greatest capacity for the union of rational knowing and of faithful knowing. It is in the heart that we can have a personal relationship with the rational facts of the universe. That is to say, we can, in one way, know the creation in its measurable and demonstrable instances. We can note the red shift in the background radiation of the cosmos. We can articulate the atomic weight of the air we breathe. But more than that, we can know the light of the universe as a Person. We can relate to the wind which animates our lungs as the Spirit. We can unify our mind with our emotions, our intuition with our will, the formula for the conservation of energy and mass with the warmth of the skin of our beloved, all in the inner recesses of our heart.
I remember in my undergraduate days in Bible college the strong warnings I got from some well-intended brothers in the faith about going on to seminary education (and post-graduate degrees). There was a deep concern that I would lose my fervor of faith under the onslaught of the rational. And given the deep mind-body dualist split in Western academia and philosophy, this was not a vain and idle fear.
But the fear need not paralyze. Certainly not if one remembers that the call of Christ is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Faith produces knowledge, as does reason. And while the bodies of knowledge that each human capacity produces is distinguishable, they are not divided, nor opposed. I need not lose my faith in Christ through the exercise of my mind. But neither need I lose my mind through the exercise of my faith. What is called for is to unify my faith and my reason in my heart, so that the knowing I engage is reflective of the whole of who I am, and of those facts and persons whom I claim to know. It is the faithful knowing that creates meaning, love, from the mere facts of reason. It is the rational knowing that grounds personal communion in the reality that is suffused by the Godhead, in whom we both live and move and have our being, and in whom is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Next, I would like to explore how it is one may unify the knowing of faith and reason in the heart.
One of the important matters related to this understanding of the relationship between faith, reason and knowledge is our ability to know God, and to know God we must come to some conclusion about whether or not he exists. If it is granted that he does exist, then what are his attributes? How can we know them?
I want to say more about faith, reason and knowledge specifically, but it has been helpful for my thinking to lay the groundwork for further discussion by running through the ancient sceptical arguments against whether one can dogmatically assert God's existence and make claims about his attributes. I will use the third chapter of Book III of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism, especially paragraphs 6-12, as my working text.
Sextus is thought to have lived in the late second century A.D., and his work is a summarization of one line of ancient scepticism that purports to date from Pyrrho in the early fourth century B.C. Sextus's work falls into four neat divisions: Book I discusses Pyrrhonian scepticism in general, including terms and concepts, and the famous ten modes and the so-called "Agrippan" modes on which sceptical thought is based and from which it derives its critical force. Book II applies those concepts and modes to the ancient philosophical subject and discipline of Logic (or Dialectic), and Book III further applies these modes and concepts to the areas of Physics (or the Causes, primarily motions--chapters 1-21) and Ethics (chapters 21-32).
Our text falls in the third chapter of Book III. After some discussion about the necessity of remaining undogmatic (we would say agnostic) about God's existence and claims about his attributes, Sextus writes:
Further, in order to form a conception of God one must necessarily--so far as depends on the dogmatists---suspend judgment as to his existence or nonexistence. For the existence of God is not preevident. For if God impressed us automatically, the dogmatists would have agreed together regarding his essence, his character, and his place; whereas their interminable disagreement has made him seem to us nonevident and needing demonstration. Now he that demonstrates the existence of God does so by means of what is either preevident or nonevident. Certainly not, then, by means of the preevident; for if what demonstrates God's existence were preevident, then--since the thing proved is conceived together with that which proves it, and therefore is apprehended along with it as well, as we have established--God's existence also will be preevident, it being apprehended along with the preevident fact which proves it. But, as we have shown, it is not preevident; therefore it is not proved, either, by a preevident fact. Nor yet by what is nonevident. For if the nonevident fact which is capable of proving God's existence, needing proof as it does, shall be said to be proved by means of a preevident fact, it will no longer be nonevident but preevident. Therefore the nonevident fact which proves his existence is not proved by what is preevident. Nor yet by what is nonevident; for he who asserts this will be driven into circular reasoning when we keep demanding proof every time for the nonevident fact which he produces as proof of the last one propounded. Consequently, the existence of God cannot be proved from any other fact. But if God's is neither automatically preevident nor proved from another fact, it will be inapprehensible.
The typical sceptical move in Sextus is simple: there are disagreements about whether or not God exists, therefore we must suspend judgment about whether or not God exists. For if it were clear ("preevident") that God exists, then there would be no dispute. But since there are disagreements, God's existence must be demonstrated.
Now those demonstrations are either: clear ("preevident") or unclear ("nonevident"). But they cannot be preevident, because if they were preevident then a) the implication is that God's existence would be demonstrated and there would be no disagreement and b) since what is preevident must be conceived together with the proof that is preevident, then God's existence would also be preevident with the preevident fact; but in fact God's existence is not preevident.
But neither can God's existence be proven by a nonevident fact, because it would need a preevident fact to provide proof for itself. But a nonevident fact cannot be proven by a preevident fact because the nonevident fact would have to be preevident along with the preevident fact which provides the basis for accepting the nonevident fact. But similarly, a nonevident fact cannot be proven by another nonevident fact, because either one assumes the conclusive proof in the premise (which is circular reasoning) or one would have to provide yet another nonevident fact to prove the nonevident fact proving the first nonevident fact, and this would only lead to infinite regress.
Thus, Sextus concludes, since there are only preevident or nonevident facts, and neither is a ground for proving God's existence, there are no proofs of God's existence.
But while this argument works for the limited operations of reasoning, one cannot assume that reason is the only way of knowing God. If God is a person, as we Christians, among others, take him to be, then while reason is one component of our knowledge of him, he is not circumscribable by reason. In fact, precisely because God is a person, one might well expect that his existence could not be proven on the basis of human reasoning alone. Think for example of attempting to prove the existence of one of your friends to another friend who does not know him and has not had direct contact with him. In the end, the "proof" would have to rely on your testimony, supported by various reasonings.
But all this is not the same thing as denying God's existence. Sextus himself notes that one cannot, by lack of proof, assert that God does not exist, because this stance itself would need demonstration. But that demonstration would fall prey to the same sceptical attack. In short, the best that reason can do with regard to God's existence is to remain agnostic. (It seems to me that Kant makes basically this same move in the first Critique.)
Next, Sextus explores God's attributes: forethought (or foreknowledge), will and power, and how these relate to God's goodness or malignancy.
There is this also to be said. He who affirms that God exists either declares that he has, or that he has not, forethought for the things in the universe, and in the former case that such forethought is for all things or for some things. But if he had forethought for all, there would have been nothing bad and no badness in the world; yet all things, they say, are full of badness; hence it shall not be said that God forethinks all things. If, again, he forethinks some, why does he forethink these things and not those? For either he has both the will and the power to forethink all things, or else he has the will but not the power, or the power but not the will, or neither the will nor the power. But if he had had both the will and the power he would have had forethought for all things; but for the reasons stated above he does not forethink all; therefore he has not both the will and the power to forethink all. And if he has the will but not the power, he is less strong than the cause which renders him unable to forethink what he does not forethink: but it is contrary to our notion of God that he should be weaker than anything. And if, again, he has the power but not the will to have forethought for all, he will be held to be malignant; while if he has neither the will nor the power, he is both malignant and weak--an impious thing to say about God. Therefore God has no forethought for the universe.
This essentially is an early version of the theodicy problem. If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does evil exist? Sextus' move runs something like this: God forethinks things in the universe, or he does not. But if he does, then his forethought encompasses all things or only some things. But if he forethinks all things, since evil exists in the universe, this would make God responsible for evil. This seems impious to attribute to God. So it cannot be that God forethinks all things.
But if God only forethinks some things, why certain things and not others? If he does not forethink all things, then either he does not have the will to do so, or he does not have the power to do so, or yet again he has neither the will nor the power. If he had the will and the power to forethink some things, then he had the will and the power to forethink all things, but we have seen that he did not forethink all things, so he either doesn't have the will or the power. If he does not have the power to forethink all things, even if he has the will, then the things he does not forethink are more powerful than he, but this is a contradiction to our understanding of God that he be all-powerful. If he does not have the will to forethink all things, but has the power to do so, then he is evil, for it is a contradiction to our understanding of an all-good God that he would willfully tolerate the existence of evil. But if he has neither the will nor the power, then God is both evil and weak--and this is an impious thing to think about God. Thus God is not foreknowing.
Again, this makes a fundamental mistake with regard to God's nature. Sextus--among other ancient and modern philosophers--equates God's attributes with his essence. And if one assumes that God is utterly simple, this makes perfect sense, God is the attributes he evidences. But if God is essentially a person, then philosophical assertion that God is utterly simple cannot be true, because personhood is a complex nature irreducible to a single attribute or set of attributes. Christianity teaches this: God is three Persons in one Nature. Paradoxically, God is both simple and complex. But this is precisely the experience we have of human persons. They are not reducible to a single essence. One cannot sum up one's spouse in a single word, a relationship into a concept. Thus, God's personhood is irreducible to his foreknowledge, his will, his power, his love. But at the same time, it is proper to say, God is love. (Note: Precisely because God is a person, one cannot reverse subject and predicate. It is wrong to assert Love is God.)
So while reason can properly show our limitations in speaking about God's foreknowledge, will and power, and the reality of evil in a universe of his making, it cannot disprove God's existence (or at least prohibit the assertion of his existence), because God is not reducible to his attributes.
But if he exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God's existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists. And from this we further conclude that those who positively affirm God's existence are probably compelled to be guilty of impiety; for if they say that he forethinks all things they will be declaring that God is the cause of what is evil, while if they say that he forethinks some things or nothing they will be forced to say that God is either malignant or weak, and obviously this is to use impious language.
Sextus concludes then, that if God does not exercise forethought, then nothing that exists can be demonstrated to be his work. And there will be nothing by which his existence can be apprehended. Thus God's existence is inapprehensible. And those who dogmatically assert God's existence are being impious because in so doing they assert that he is the cause of evil, or that he is himself evil or weak.
But since this argument has all along failed to understand God as a person, then it similarly fails to understand that God's attributes are an extension of his person, and, as it were, under his volitional control. This is preeminently revealed in the Incarnation, in which, Christ, who in his very nature was God, chose not to exercise his foreknowledge at various points in his earthly ministry, and remained ignorant of specific matters (for example, the day and hour of his return). Philippians 2:5-11 clearly highlights the loving condescension of God who chose not to continue to grasp his divine perogatives, but became as one of us and suffer and died. Christ did not cease to have the attributes attributed to God's person, but he chose not to exercise them out of love for us.
Clearly mine is only a sketch at an attempt to answer Sextus' sceptical critique. There are gaps in my reasoning which clearly need filled in, not the least of which are the implications of what it means for God not to exercise his attributes, and whether, indeed, God's attributes are as separable (or, better, distinguishable) from his person as I seem to be claiming they are.
But what I have intended is to show that the sort of knowing reason engages in is only one sort. There is a knowing that we have as persons of other persons that is not reducible to rational terms, and that this sort of knowing may be said to be governed by the rubrics of faith. As I have mentioned in my reflecting on the unity of faith and reason, these two sorts of knowings are not in conflict with one another--or at least need not be--but neither can one be reducible to the terms of the other.
Next I will take up the relationship between faith and reason through the activity of knowing.
Christ is risen!
The Union of Faith and Reason
One need not spend much time talking about faith and reason before encountering the split between them. From questions about whether or not it's possible to "prove" the existence of God, to whether or not the Genesis account can be taken as a "literal" description of the origins of the earth especially given what science has to say about cosmogony, to questions about the place of faith and religion in public life, we generally operate under an assumption of the dichotomy between the two. These questions have further implications, such as, to speak specifically, the nature of faith itself and the whole question of "believer's baptism."
The relation of faith and knowledge can be seen from two crises: that of an intellectualized faith, or sometimes a pietized intellect, or, more usually, a dichotomized life of intellect versus pietism. That is to say, the intellect subsumes faith under its own rubric leading usually to a variant of secularism, or faith subsumes the intellect leading to fundamentalism, or, more usually, the intellect and faith are compartmentalized, leading to a split life of secularism and pietism. In all cases, the problem is a lack of union between faith and knowledge.
We could perhaps trace the origins of this split between the intellect and faith to Descartes' mind-body dualism. But it's also true that in twelfth and thirteenth century Islam as well as in St. Thomas separate provenances were given to faith and reason; though St. Thomas did affirm an overlap of the two in something like natural theology. Whatever may be the reasons, the end result is that Christian faith gets split between pious living and intellectual doctrine, which leads to neoGnostic split between belief and practice, with belief becoming something like an "optional" addendum. Clearly any conception of a split between faith and reason is ultimately untenable.
For after all Christianity is the salvation of whole persons. The task is not so much to accomplish the union of faith and reason, since if what we believe about Christian salvation is true, this is already a reality that is coming to be in ever greater fulness. Rather, the task is to seek how this union currently obtains and is realized.
At the outset, we should come to some understanding about how we should understand the terms under discussion: faith, reason, and knowledge.
By reason is often meant "intellect," and this intellect is often divorced from mundane living. Reason usually abstracts ideas and concepts and removes them from common experience. But in so doing, reason removes itself from this daily living. This abstraction is not illegitimate. It is a part of what reason does and how it is meant to perform. The problem is in seeing reason as autonomous, as either compartmentalized and removed from faith, or as dominant over faith. As is well known, Kant helpfully showed the limitations of reason (that it cannot speak about the soul, immortality and God), but failed to go beyond his conclusions and illegitimately concluded that faith must be subsumed under reason if it was to be rational and universal.
But if, as I am proposing, reason is to be unified with faith, it must lose its autonomy. It cannot be seen in isolation, nor be unanswerable to a higher authority, whether that authority be faith, God, or what have you. Reason has an authority, clearly; it has a purview of activity. But it cannot be seen as solely authoritative. Its authority is derived. But we will speak more about this later. For now I am seeking the unity of faith and reason so as to resolve the dilemma of dichotomization.
By knowledge is usually meant something deriving from the intellect, some sort of body of organized mental concepts. But if one properly understands Christian teaching, knowledge is not just intellectual, but is also personal. The Church has never spoke of knowledge as only, mostly, or merely those things which can be intellectually, or rationally, apprehended. Rather, in the Church's teaching, knowledge includes all of a person as seen, most strikingly, in the full and deeply intimate relationship betwen man and wife. There is a knowing that one does, not in isolation from reason, but in primarily other ways, ways in which reason plays a subservient role. One cannot reduce one's spousal relationship to a set of theorems. But neither is this somehow not knowing. It is a knowing that transcends reason, and gives, as it were, its own organized body of understandings. This is not to say that reason plays no role in such a knowing, for clearly it does, but that it does not play the dominant role. And it is this conception of knowledge that most clearly gives us the place of union of faith and reason and the means of resolving the split and imbalance between faith and reason. More on that in a moment.
By faith is usually meant belief, which entails some body of intellectual concepts. But this is not the way that the faith was talked about from the beginning. For Christians faith was (and is) always a way of life, not merely intellect. The Church has never limited Faith to the intellect, but has always characterized the faith as a way of life, encompassing all of a man and his life. But this does not mean, of course, that faith is split off from reason, for there are, indeed, certain intellectual understandings that Christians are required to have. But it has always been the Church's practice to invite converts into a way of life prior to their having an intellectual understanding of the faith. One participates in the life and practices of the Church, then one goes on to understanding. There is no split, nor need it necessarily be the case that we conclude that faith is more authoritative than reason. For after all the Church is not submitting that understanding is nonessential, but that in a temporal process, participation comes first.
So how, in the end, does one unify faith and intellect? I think it clearly the case that this can only be done in the heart. By heart, of course, I do not mean some sort of little container of emotion. The Christian understanding of the heart is that it is the seat of the whole person, the point at which the entire human person (intellect, faith, action, will, emotions, body) is unified. We moderns have given to the brain something of a mystical being: it somehow is the center of bodily activity and of the mind. But the Christian teaching is that the seat of the human is the heart. The heart is more central physically than the brain, and it contains within it, not only all the necessary physical processes of circulation but also those of willing, emotions, faith and intellect. I am not suggesting that somehow we do not think or emote with our brains (and minds), but rather that all these processes pass through the heart, as does the physical blood which permeates every cell of our body.
The heart, then, is the place and power of the unification of faith and reason. The heart is that authority, if you will, to which faith and reason answer, if a human is to be centered and whole. But the heart is not an end or an authority unto itself. It, too, has an authority to which it answers, the Person of Christ, whom it both believes and knows to be the Truth, the Person from whom we derive our ability to reason and the motivation to believe.
Consequently, it comes to be seen that reason cannot provide knowledge, or rather the only knowledge that reason can provide is partial and limited. Kant was right in his analysis, but wrong in his conclusion. For as I hope is already partly evident, faith itself can provide knowledge, if that knowledge is a complement to and different in quality from that of reason.
Introduction
This past winter (yes, it's officially spring, though one barely can tell here in Chicago) I reflected on what it meant for a Christian to think faithfully, that is to say, what foundations lay under a Christian's mind in the various tasks of thinking. I would like to turn my attention now to a related question: can faith, specifically Christian faith, provide knowledge?
The question actually arose out of a conversation I had yesterday with my professor during our meeting for my directed reading on ancient scepticism. We were examining Sextus' account of the five modes (which had been preceded by the ten modes, and followed by the two modes and the eight modes . . .). These are typically called the "Agrippan modes" and three of them have been called "the Agrippan trilemma." Essentially these are criticisms for the justification of a belief as true. The trilemma is this: one's belief is a) justified by something else, which itself needs justified by something else, and so on in infinite regress, or b) justified by something else, but that other thing receives its justification by the belief in question, which is circular reasoning, or c) justified by simple assertion of its truth, but this is no justification.
My reply, which I should note came from some significant ignorance of current epistemological debates, was something along the lines of: "Well, one is left either with fideism or foundationalism." Foundationalism was out, due to the Agrippan trilemma, and, frankly, I misunderstood fideistic accounts of knowledge. My professor was examining my statement, correcting it and so forth, when I made this apparently self-evident--to him--statement, "Well, that assumes that faith does not produce knowledge."
He knows I'm a professed Christian of Eastern Orthodox predilections so he made an obviously careful (and gracious) response. (In other words, he didn't burst out into a bit of a chuckle and a "Well, duh!") But as I reflected on it later it became clear to me that he and I were using faith in slightly, but perhaps with significant consequences, different ways. And that led me to this project.
Preliminary Questions
The standard philosophical tradition on faith, reason and knowledge derives from the Platonic accounts of knowledge (as in the Theaetetus) as "justified true belief" (though even in the Theaetetus this definition is not without its problems). That is to say, belief (pistis, which in Christian terminology is faith) must be justified (if you prefer, warranted) by reason if it is to produce knowledge. Or, to say it another way, only reason's actions can produce knowledge.
So the spheres of faith/belief and reason have been kept separate and their contents and sources separate as well. Belief's/faith's content (or product) is opinion derived from (largely unexamined) human experience or, in Christian terms, is dogma derived from divine revelation. Reason's content (or product) is knowledge derived from dialectic and contemplation (theoria). Each are, in their own way, somewhat self-referential (which is why the sceptics attacks on reason are so challenging). So both rationalists and fideists welcome the attacks of scepticism on the other, though perhaps the fideists gain more from the sceptical attack than do the rationalists.
This distinction between faith and reason has always been set in terms of opposition, or at least the two spheres (as in Aquinas) have only minimal overlap (in natural theology, say). Reason's actions cannot found Christian dogma, and Faith's actions cannot found knowledge.
But I deny that it is Christian at all to set these two things, faith and reason, in opposition. Both activities are necessary for human thought and its content. Nor am I alone in this. Kant had his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, but Nicholas Wolterstorff has his Reason within the Bounds of Religion. With the work of Alvin Plantinga, Kelly Clarke, et. al., this sort of assertion is perhaps unremarkable.
Still, this does not answer other concerns. How does one (and should one) prioritize the claims of faith or reason when these appear to be in opposition? In what way is faith and reason unified in the person? Are dogma (the presumed product of faith) and knowledge (the presumed product of reason) essentially different things, or is dogma itself some form of knowledge, or are both together aspects of something else (wisdom?)?
These are the sorts of things on which I want to reflect for the spring. I doubt I'll come to definitive conclusions, but hopefully I can better articulate the questions.