LIBERATING  REASON  THROUGH  TRADITION:     A  HERMENEUTIC  CRITIQUE  OF  THE  SUBJECTIVE-­‐OBJECTIVE  DICHOTOMY  AND  ITS   IMPLICATIONS  FOR  CHRISTIANITY by ZACHARY PORCU A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Philosophy Stream We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard ............................................................................... Dr. Jens Zimmermann, PhD; Thesis Supervisor ................................................................................ Dr. Grant Havers, Ph.D.; Second Reader ................................................................................ Dr. Robert Doede, Ph.D.; Third Reader TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY April 2015 © Zachary Porcu Porcu  2                                 For  Jann   for  coming  on  this  journey  with  me                                     Porcu  3   Abstract   One  of  the  major  transitions  in  Western  culture  from  premodernity  to  modernity,   philosophically,  was  the  idea  that  authority  or  tradition  as  a  preferable  or  even  an   acceptable  source  of  knowledge  be  replaced  by  the  picture  of  the  free  individual,  aided  by   autonomous  reason,  discovering  truth  for  himself.  Starting  with  Descartes  and  culminating   in  the  Enlightenment,  the  tendency  to  validate  only  those  things  which  could  be  proved  by   pure  reason  or  repeatedly  verified  by  scientific  observation  became  the  standard  for   reliable  knowledge.  Knowledge  which  did  not  fall  into  these  narrow  categories  was   relegated  to  the  realm  of  the  "merely"  subjective,  a  second-­‐class-­‐citizen  in  the   epistemological  pecking  order.  The  Romantic,  and  then  later  the  "postmodern"  attempt  to   validate  the  subjective,  only  served  to  deepen  the  problematic  dichotomy  between  the   objective  and  the  subjective.  Taking  the  objective-­‐subjective  dichotomy  as  a  starting  point,  I   argue  for  three  things:  First,  that  the  Reformation  movement  is  essentially  conducted  in  the   same  spirit  and  with  the  same  result  as  the  Enlightenment:  a  push  towards  a  certain  kind  of   verifiability  that  ends  up  creating  the  same  dichotomy  between  objective  and  subjective.   Second,  that  the  way  to  liberate  reason  from  these  problematic  categories  is  to  turn  to   Gadamer  and  the  hermeneutic  movement  to  re-­‐contextualize  and  re-­‐define  how  reason  is   used  to  acquire  knowledge  in  light  of  our  experience  of  it.  Finally,  that  Eastern  Orthodoxy   provides  a  strong  model  for  a  Christianity  animated  by  these  hermeneutical  principles,  and   further,  that  sacramental  theology  takes  Gadamer's  idea  of  truth  as  indwelling  to  its  next   logical  step.                                             Porcu  4   Table  of  Contents   Introduction      5   Chapter  1:  The  Modern  Mind   11   Chapter  2:  The  Reformation   34   Chapter  3:  The  Hermeneutical  Alternative   51   Chapter  4:  Orthodoxy  as  Hermeneutical  Christianity   71 Porcu  5     The  Supermarket  of  Beliefs   Introduction:   Children  of  Our  Age   We  live  in  an  age  of  unprecedented  pluralism.  I  don’t  just  mean  the  fact  that   globalization  has  brought  a  multiplicity  of  different  walks  of  life  to  our  collective   awareness,  or  that  countries  everywhere  tend  to  be  less  homogenous  and  more  multi-­‐ cultural.  In  a  real  way  this  sort  of  pluralism  has  always  been  around,  even  since  antiquity,   and  at  every  point  in  history  where  different  people  of  different  cultures  lived  and  worked   together.  In  contrast  to  prior  forms  of  cultural  plurality,  modern  pluralism  is  more  of  a   “hyperpluralism”  due  to  the  self-­‐styled  way  in  which  modern  people  tend  to  construct  their   worldviews.  Another  way  to  say  this  is  that  there  are  no  longer  logical  boundaries  of  any   kind  when  it  comes  to  choosing  a  worldview.   For  example,  while  there  exist  a  plentiful  quantity  of  atheists  and  skeptics,  it  seems   as  though  it  is  becoming  harder  to  find  a  good  “old-­‐fashioned”  skeptic,  wholly  committed  to   a  robust  materialism.  Instead  we  find  atheists  who  hold  to  their  materialism  but  meanwhile   pursue  with  fascination  any  number  of  clearly  supernatural  subjects:  Tibetan  mysticism,   shamanism,  or  various  beliefs  about  “positive  energy”  and  karma.    In  the  same  vein,  those   who  identify  as  “Christian”  are  perhaps  even  more  jumbled.  In  keeping  with  the  literal   meaning  of  “heretic,”1  contemporary  Christians  may  believe  almost  anything.  While  it  is   common  to  find  Christians  who  have  decided  to  live  their  lives  under  the  imperative  of   some  Biblical  passages  or  tenants  of  tradition  while  ignoring  others,  more  radical  positions   are  less  and  less  uncommon.  There  is  here  a  wide  spectrum,  which  includes  those  for                                                                                                                   1  αἵρεσις,  “to  choose”;  i.e.,  someone  who  “picks  and  chooses”  which  parts  of  the  faith  they  want  to  accept  and   which  they  want  to  reject,  rather  than  following  the  whole  teaching. Porcu  6   whom  Christianity  is  one  truth  among  many,  those  who  have  combined  their  Christian   beliefs  with  their  Wiccan  ones,  or  those  who  have  abandoned  theism  altogether  but  still   identify  as  “Christian.”  This  sort  of  phenomena  holds  true  for  similar  religions,  and  it  is  not   at  all  uncommon  to  find  Jews  who  deliberately  celebrate  Hanukkah  while  denying  belief  in   God,  or  Muslims  who  drink  alcohol.  Indeed,  the  developed  world  is  full  of  people  who  might   hold  any  set  of  divergent  or  contradictory  truth  claims,  as  many  people  draw  on  a  diverse   range  of  individual  propositions  to  build  their  customized  worldview,  indiscriminately   collecting  from  any  number  of  sources,  from  traditional  religion,  pre-­‐Christian  cultural   practices,  eastern  philosophy,  neo-­‐pagan  magic,  or  pseudo-­‐scientific  mythologies  about   alternative  dimensions  and  the  beings  that  inhabit  them.   This  hyperpluralism  is  not  limited  to  what  a  given  individual  privately  thinks  about   the  nature  of  the  world,  and  this  is  perhaps  most  readily  seen  in  the  cultural  discussion   about  social  life.  In  this  realm,  answers  to  the  question  of  how  to  order  society  abound:   some  people  talk  about  a  woman’s  right  to  choose,  while  others  talk  about  the  murder  of   the  unborn;  some  think  that  all  citizens  should  have  the  right  to  bear  arms,  while  others   move  to  de-­‐arm  the  population;  some  argue  for  vegetarianism  on  the  grounds  that  it  is   wrong  to  harm  animals,  while  others  assert  their  right  to  eat  whatever  they  desire.  The  list   goes  on.  More  recently,  and  perhaps  more  radically,  western  culture  has  called  even   biological  realities  into  question  in  the  debate  about  sexuality.  Like  pluralism  in  general,   sexual  promiscuity,  homosexuality,  and  various  kinds  of  sexual  deviancy  are  as  old  as   Sodom  and  Gomorrah,  but  our  modern  world  has  taken  these  ideas  to  an  extreme.   Nowhere  in  antiquity  was  it  possible  to  conceive  of  homosexuality,  especially  of  a   homosexual  family  unit,  as  a  normative  sort  of  lifestyle,  indistinguishable  from  a  family  of   Porcu  7   heterosexual  parents.  The  fact  that  moderns  want  to  challenge  the  idea  that  “gender”  is   even  a  valid  or  binding  category  for  identity  is  evidence  for  how  different  our  world  is  from   our  ancestors.  Even  in  times  of  the  most  volatile  cultural  controversies,  say,  during   pluralistic  pagan  antiquity,  the  genesis  of  Christianity,  the  rise  of  Islam,  or  the  Reformation,   there  have  always  been  some  foundational  human  constants  that  all  people  have  agreed   upon,  such  as  the  normative  nature  of  the  traditional  family  or  the  ontological  status  of   gender.  Yet,  we  are  rapidly  approaching  an  era  where  no  such  constants  exist.   The  main  reason  we  have  this  unprecedented  level  of  hyperpluralism  about  every   facet  of  human  existence  is  because  the  western  world  lacks  any  kind  of  unifying  principle   about  knowledge,  truth,  or  meaning.  Yes,  science  does  something  to  provide  us  with  certain   facts  about  the  world  around  us,  but  the  way  these  facts  are  interpreted  varies  wildly  from   person  to  person,  because  facts  are  too  often  appropriated  eclectically  in  the  face  of   individual  beliefs.  At  the  same  time,  there  are  many  for  whom  none  of  this  is  a  problem.   Pluralism  is  seen  as  evidence  of  individual  freedom,  and  forcing  people  to  choose,  believe,   or  do  anything  is  about  as  unified  a  position  as  western  culture  is  able  to  maintain.   However,  for  anyone  who  cares  deeply  about  truth,  rather  than  someone  who  simply  pays   lip  service  to  the  idea,  the  contemporary  cacophony  of  competing  and  unresolved  answers   to  the  question  “what  is  the  good  life?”  should  be  entirely  disconcerting.  As  G.K.  Chesterton   points  out,  “there  is  one  thing  that  is  infinitely  more  absurd  and  unpractical  than  burning  a   man  for  his  philosophy.  This  is  the  habit  of  saying  that  his  philosophy  does  not  matter,  and   this  is  done  universally  in  the  twentieth  century.”2  Chesterton’s  judgment  has  become  even   more  accurate  for  the  twenty-­‐first  century.                                                                                                                   2  Chesterton,  G.K.,  Heretics  (New  York:  Classic  Books  America,  2009),  p.7   Porcu  8   Yet  our  desire  for  truth  is  also  a  problem.  We  say  that  we  live  in  an  age  of   information,  but  for  all  the  information  we  seem  to  be  compiling  and  producing,  the   existence  of  accepted  knowledge  is  hard  to  come  by.  Indeed,  it  so  often  seems  that  far  from   understanding  the  world  better,  we  actually  understand  it  less.  Obviously  this   understanding  doesn’t  include  subjects  like  marine  biology  or  medicine,  for  some  scientific   fields  consistently  plug  along,  carrying  out  their  task  to  understand  their  particular  subject.   Rather,  what  we  lack  is  knowledge  about  the  essential  questions  of  human  existence,  the   kind  that  give  meaning  to  a  world  that  seems  to  be  unified  only  by  a  shared  desire  for   consumption  of  information  and  material  goods.   Meanwhile,  that  old  bastion  of  meaning  for  the  western  world,  the  Judeo-­‐Christian   tradition,  is  almost  visibly  wilting  under  the  constant  pressure  to  conform  to  the  cultural   zeitgeist.  I  especially  have  modern  Christianity  in  mind,  which  is  also  full  of  its  own   pluralistic  in-­‐fighting,  doctrinal  relativism,  and  lack  of  unity.  As  many  versions  of   Christianity  trim  down  the  offensive  parts  of  their  religion  in  an  effort  to  compromise  with   the  dominant  culture,  much  of  contemporary  Christianity  loses  all  semblance  to  the   tradition  of  greater  orthodox  Christianity.    The  problem  with  modern  Christianity,   especially  the  greater  Protestant  and  specifically  Evangelical  Christianity  of  North  America,   is  that  it  only  ever  appears  to  be  counter-­‐cultural.  It  denounces  the  most  recent  liberal   move  away  from  traditional  Christian  ideas,  but  has  meanwhile  already  compromised  with   the  previous  liberal  move,  and  says  no  more  about  it.  A  good  example  is  how   Evangelicalism  rages  against  homosexuality  as  the  culture  is  moving  to  embrace  it,  while  it   has  meanwhile  accepted  no-­‐fault  divorce  and  serial  monogamy,  despite  the  even  more   specific  scriptural  admonishes  against  those  things.  Being  one  step  behind  the  culture  does   Porcu  9   not  make  it  radical,  it  only  makes  it  slow.  “Why  not  just  give  up  on  this  dead  thing?”  it  might   be  said.  “It  is  already  most  of  the  way  converted  to  secular  pluralism  anyway.”     Where  We  Go  From  Here   It  seems  to  me  that  one  of  the  central  causes  of  this  problem  of  hyperpluralism  is   that  we  do  not  know  how  to  use  reason  in  order  to  sort  out  contradictory  truth  claims  or   obtain  knowledge  about  reality  in  general.  Competing  truth  claims  about  anything  of  any   value  raise  the  problem  immediately:  how  can  we  say  that  we  know  anything?  How  do  we   use  reason  to  discover  knowledge  about  human  life?  Or,  more  specifically,  how  can   Christianity  continue  to  have  any  meaningful  identity  in  this  sort  of  context?  To  answer   these  questions  I  want  to  investigate  some  of  the  history  behind  how  modernity  has   approached  reason  and  knowledge,  the  problems  it  has  run  into,  and  some  solutions  to   those  problems.  While  I  don’t  expect  to  have  solved  all  of  the  problems  mentioned  above  by   the  end  of  this  study,  it  is  my  hope  that  a  better  definition  of  terms,  an  improved  historical   consciousness,  and  an  exploration  of  method  can  enrich  future  discussions  on  the  issue  of   knowing,  in  both  general  applicability  to  daily  human  life,  as  well  as  in  specific  concerns   about  Christianity’s  mode  of  being.     I  propose  to  discuss  the  relationship  of  reason  to  knowledge  and  faith  in  four   chapters.  In  Chapter  One,  I  want  to  investigate  the  origins  and  history  of  the  modern  age   and  the  way  modernity  has  formed  its  assumptions  about  reason  and  knowledge.  In   Chapter  Two,  I  want  to  investigate  the  same  question  for  modern  Christianity  by  taking  a   closer  look  at  the  Reformation.  In  Chapter  Three,  I  will  challenge  modernity’s  assumptions   about  knowledge  via  Hans-­‐Georg  Gadamer  and  the  hermeneutic  movement.  Finally,  in   Porcu  10   Chapter  Four,  I  will  explore  some  ways  in  which  Christianity  can  better  instantiate  this   hermeneutic  method  of  knowing,  rather  than  simply  borrowing  its  methodology  from   modernity.                                                                                 Porcu  11     Introduction     Chapter  1:     The  Modern  Mind   Historical  terminology  tends  to  get  thrown  around  in  every-­‐day  conversation   without  much  reflection.  When  talking  about  history,  we  moderns  often  speak  of  an   “antiquity”  that  descended  into  the  “dark  ages,”  out  of  which  came  a  “rebirth”  and   culminated  in  an  “enlightenment.”  We,  as  we  stand  here  and  now,  are  modern,  with  all  the   connotations  of  being  up-­‐to-­‐date  that  that  entails,  and  we  look  back  on  pre-­‐modern  society   sometimes  with  disdain,  sometimes  with  amusement,  but  always  with  a  sense  of  “how  far   we’ve  come”  from  such  impoverished  beginnings.  This  is  especially  true  of  modernity’s   consistent  disdain  for  the  Christian  era  in  Europe.  While  calling  the  6th-­‐16th  centuries  “the   dark  ages”  displays  a  profound  historical  ignorance  (one  that  is  thankfully  being  largely   corrected  in  modern  scholarship),  even  the  title  of  “medieval”  (middle)  is  condescending.   Indeed,  however  many  examples  are  multiplied,  it  is  easy  to  get  the  sense  that  modern  man   says,  “we  are  modern”  with  the  unspoken  subtext,  “unlike  those  pre-­‐modern  barbarians.”   Besides  being  somewhat  overly  dramatic,  and  indulging  a  historical  bias  that  I  hope  to   challenge  by  the  end  of  this  study,  this  way  of  talking  about  our  past  also  highlights  the   tendency  of  modernity  to  define  itself  negatively.  Accordingly,  I  want  to  frame  our   discussion  on  the  philosophical  commitments  of  modernity  with  a  few  words  about   medieval  thought  and  some  of  the  fundamental  assumptions  of  that  world.         Porcu  12   The  Medieval  World     Arguably  the  most  striking  point  of  disconnect  between  medieval  and  modern   attitudes  toward  thought  is  the  medieval  reverence  for  authority.  The  medieval  world  is   one  in  which  authority  is  the  primary  mediator  of  every  dimension  of  human  life:   knowledge,  morality,  belief,  learning,  and  law  were  confirmed,  conferred,  and  preserved   always  with  reference  to  some  sort  of  authority.  The  most  obvious  source  of  this  authority   is  the  church,  which  occupied  a  place  of  supreme  centrality  in  the  life  of  medieval  man.  To   medieval  historian  John  Herman  Handall  Jr.,  the  church  primarily  “undertook  to  administer   authoritatively  the  moral  life  of  the  community.  Since  the  Church  was  the  sole  ark  of   salvation  and  the  supreme  authority  in  all  things  of  faith  and  morals,  conformity  with  its   regulations  was  the  framework  within  which  men’s  varying  aims  were  sought.”3  In  this   way,  we  can  speak  of  the  medieval  church  as  primarily  a  mediating  institution  in  and   through  which  men  lived  and  worked.  All  the  major  touchstones  of  human  life  were   connect  to  the  medieval  church,  from  birth,  marriage,  and  death  to  the  fundamental   underlying  cultural  mores.  There  is  no  institution  today  to  compare  with  the  church  of  the   medieval  world,  in  all-­‐encompassing  scope  or  centrality  in  human  affairs.     But  this  tendency  to  reference  authority  was  not  unique  to  the  church.  C.S.  Lewis   points  out  that  “when  we  speak  of  the  Middle  Ages  as  the  ages  of  authority  we  are  usually   thinking  about  the  authority  of  the  Church.  But  they  were  the  ages  not  only  of  her   authority,  but  of  authorities.”4  Lewis  is  warning  against  a  common  caricature  of  the   medieval  era,  namely,  that  the  church  was  the  sole  driving  force  behind  the  idea  that  an                                                                                                                   3  Handall,  John  Herman,  Jr.,  The  Making  of  the  Modern  Mind:  A  survey  of  the  intellectual  background  of  the   present  age  (New  York:  Columbia  University  Press,  1940),  p.  50   4  Lewis,  Clive  Staples,  The  Discarded  Image:  An  Introduction  to  Medieval  and  Renaissance  Literature  (London,   New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1964),  p.  5   Porcu  13   “authority”  could  be  legitimate.  To  the  contrary,  the  medieval  age  was  an  age  of  many   authorities,  because  the  medievals  found  the  very  concept  of  authority  to  be  extremely   compelling,  and  actively  sought  out  authorities.  This  is  most  apparent  in  the   “overwhelmingly  bookish  or  clerky  character  of  medieval  culture,”  as  we  find  the  medievals   “indeed  very  credulous  of  books.  They  find  it  hard  to  believe  that  anything  an  old  auctour   has  said  is  simply  untrue.”5  This  need  to  understand  and  draw  on  authority  meant  that   “every  writer,  if  he  possibly  can,  bases  himself  on  an  earlier  writer,  follows  an  auctour,   preferably  a  Latin  one.  This  is  one  of  the  things  that  differentiate  the  period  almost  equally   from  savagery  and  from  our  modern  civilization  .  .  .  the  Middle  Ages  depended   predominantly  on  books.”6  Moreover,  these  books  were  not  merely  the  books  of  the  Bible;   certainly  those  books  occupied  a  central  part  of  the  medieval  edifice,  but  the  medievals  did   not  hesitate  to  read  and  appropriate  the  entire  corpus  of  pagan  philosophers,  scientists,   and  rhetoricians.  “This  emphasis  on  traditional  authorities,  of  course,  derives  from  the   whole  attitude  of  the  medieval  mind,  in  which  the  authority  of  the  learning  of  the  ancient   world  and  the  authority  of  the  tradition  of  revelation  were  so  involved  with  each  other  that   when  a  conflict  arose  a  decision  could  be  made  on  the  basis  of  the  authority  of  revelation.”7   This  “medieval  synthesis”  aimed  to  unify  all  learning  into  a  single  whole,  governed  by  the   revelation  of  the  truth  of  Christianity,  but  respecting  the  authority  of  pagan  scholarship  by   incorporating  it  into  the  Christian  paradigm.  While  revelation  served  as  the  arbiter  by   which  to  resolve  ultimate  conflicts,  this  process  did  not  operate  in  the  absence  of  reason.   “In  this  form  of  scholarship,  based  upon  authority,  the  task  of  reason  was  to  reconcile                                                                                                                   5  Lewis,  p.11   6  Lewis,  p.5   7  Ebeling,  Gerhard,  Luther:  An  Introduction  to  his  Thought,  trans.  R.A.  Wilson  (Philadelphia:  Fortress  Press,   1970),  p.83   Porcu  14   contradictions,  refute  objections  and  develop  consequences  by  the  use  of  the  syllogistic   method,  that  is,  by  means  of  dialectic.”8  Indeed,  reason  and  revelation,  far  from  being  seen   as  opposed  to  one  another,  were  fundamentally  interrelated  toward  the  total  project  of   understanding  all  that  could  be  known,  and  organizing  that  knowledge  in  ways  that  would   be  both  useful  and  meaningful.     Perhaps  the  confidence  with  which  medieval  thinkers  pursued  this  project  of   synthesis  is  telling  of  the  unspoken  medieval  assumption  that  all  knowledge,  the  world   itself,  and  the  human  mind  were  fundamentally  interconnected,  and  that  therefore  all  that   existed  could  be  known  by  mankind.  In  a  real  sense,  the  medieval  man  did  not  feel  himself   isolated  and  separated  from  the  world  in  the  dramatic  sense  that  moderns  do.  The   philosopher  Owen  Barfield  describes  the  situation  of  medieval  man  “as  a  microcosm  within   the  macrocosm.  It  is  clear  that  he  did  not  feel  himself  isolated  by  his  skin  from  the  world   outside  to  quite  the  same  extent  that  we  do.  He  was  integrated  or  mortised  into  it,  each   different  part  of  him  being  united  to  a  different  part  of  it  by  some  invisible  thread.  In  his   relation  to  his  environment,  the  man  of  the  middle  ages  was  rather  less  like  an  island,   rather  more  like  an  embryo.”9  This  is  related  to  authority  on  a  more  fundamental  axis:   medieval  man  saw  himself  as  part  of  an  ordered  cosmos,  a  rationally  governed  whole,  and   so  it  is  natural  that  medieval  man  would  freely  accept  and  even  seek  out  proper  authorities   as  the  primary  way  of  understanding  the  world  of  which  he  was  a  part.  What  could  be  more   natural  for  the  creature  who  was  the  “microcosm  within  the  macrocosm”?                                                                                                                     8  Ebeling,  Gerhard,  p.83   9  Barfield,  Owen.  Saving  the  Appearances:  A  Study  in  Idolatry.  New  York:  Harcouourt  Brace  Jovanovich,  n.d.),  p.   78 Porcu  15   Descartes  and  the  Shift  to  Modernity   It  is  in  contrast  to  this  medieval  world  of  authority  that  we  must  understand  the   essential  spirit  of  the  modern  era.  While  a  number  of  factors  ultimately  collaborated  to   affect  the  shift  to  modernity,  in  the  work  of  René  Descartes  we  find  almost  all  of  the  major   assumptions  and  methods  of  modernity  at  play.  The  philosophical  questions  he  introduced   in  his  Meditations  on  First  Philosophy  became  programmatic  for  the  Enlightenment  in   particular  and  modernity  as  a  whole.     According  to  philosopher  Anthony  Kenny,  Descartes  was  fundamentally  motivated   by  the  desire  to  establish  a  reliable  basis  for  knowledge:  “in  his  Meditations,  [Descartes]  set   himself  the  task  of  liberating  philosophy  from  the  threat  of  skepticism  that  had  developed   in  the  preceding  century.”10  Over  and  against  his  skeptical  opponents,  Descartes  makes  the   attempt  to  show,  by  virtue  of  pure  reason,  exactly  which  things  can  be  trusted  and  believed.   In  short,  he  withdraws  into  solitude  and  begins  by  doubting  everything  that  he  could   possibly  doubt;  that  is,  anything  that  has  even  the  least  possibility  of  being  wrong.  In  so   doing  Descartes  ends  up  mistrusting  almost  everything,  especially  the  experience  of  the   senses,  as  everything  he  experiences  could  be  a  dream  or  the  lie  of  an  “evil  demon.”  In  the   end  Descartes  rescues  himself  from  doubt  by  using  pure  reason:  through  the  cogito  ergo   sum,  Descartes  demonstrates  his  own  existence,  and  through  his  own  ontological  argument,   he  demonstrates  God’s.  From  there,  and  the  premise  that  it  is  not  in  God’s  character  to  lie   or  deceive,  Descartes  demonstrates  that  the  external  world  can  be  reliably  trusted.  For  our   thesis,  the  key  element  is  the  fact  that  Descartes  begins  with  the  subject,  and  does  not   proceed  very  far  from  there.  That  he  retreats  into  solitude  with  himself  and  his  reason                                                                                                                   10  Kenny,  Anthony,  A  New  History  of  Western  Philosophy,  Vol.  III:  The  Rise  of  Modern  Philosophy  (Oxford:   Clardendon  Press,  2006),  p.  119.   Porcu  16   alone  to  undertake  the  task  of  discovering  truth  and  falsity11  emphasizes  the  subject  and   the  individual  in  contrast  to  the  authority  of  tradition  or  faith.  It  is  worth  noting  that   Descartes  is  not  actually  interested  in  an  aggressive  assault  upon  tradition,  and  is  himself   quite  comfortable  with  Christianity  and  its  intellectual  tradition,  but  his  writing  betrays  the   spirit  of  the  age.  He  writes  that  “accustomed  opinions  assiduously  recur,  and  almost  even   involuntarily  for  me  do  they  occupy  my  credulity,  which  is  bound  to  them  as  though  by  long   use  and  the  right  of  familiarity.”12  He  acknowledges  the  way  in  which  custom  and  prejudice   incline  the  mind  to  accept  certain  propositions  about  the  world,  and  finds  this  problematic   (in  keeping  with  his  method  of  doubting  everything  whatsoever  that  could  be  doubted).   But  what  is  significant  for  us  is  the  paradigm  shift  from  medieval  epistemology.  As  Lewis   described,  it  was  difficult  for  medieval  man  to  take  anything  written  down  (or  passed   down)  as  simply  untrue,  and  a  large  part  of  medieval  systematizing  was  dedicated  to   harmonizing  divergent  elements.  For  Descartes  the  starting  point  is  entirely  inverted:  all   things,  including  tradition,  are  to  be  viewed  incredulously,  until  they  can  be  shown  true.  He   concludes  that  the  best  course  of  action  should  be  to  deceive  oneself,  and  to  “feign  for  a   time  that  these  opinions  are  entirely  false  and  imaginary,  until,  finally,  the  weights  of   prejudices  having  been  –  as  it  were  –  balanced  on  both  sides,  no  depraved  custom  would   any  longer  detour  my  judgment  from  the  correct  perception  of  things.”13  In  the  end,  the   only  thing  that  counts  is  that  which  cannot  be  doubted.     Another  element  central  to  Descartes  is  the  power  and  trustworthiness  of  pure   reason,  especially  in  the  sense  of  “autonomous  reason”;  reason  disconnected  from  any                                                                                                                   11  Descartes,  René,  Meditations  on  First  Philosophy,  A  Monolingual  Edition,  ed.,  trans.,  George  Heffernan  (Notre   Dame,  London:  University  of  Notre  Dame  Press,  1992),  p.25   12  Descartes,  p.29   13  Descartes,  p.29   Porcu  17   other  source.  Descartes,  while  casting  doubt  on  the  testimony  of  the  senses,  nevertheless   affirms  the  credulity  of  some  things  based  on  pure  reasoning:  “For,  whether  I  would  be   awake  or  sleeping,  two  and  three  added  together  are  five,  and  a  square  has  no  more  than   four  sides.”14  This  emphasis  on  a  particular  method  of  using  reason  can  be  seen  with  even   more  clarity  in  Descartes’  immediate  successors.  Leibniz  is  a  good  example  of  the  pursuit  of   reason  single-­‐mindedly  pursued  in  an  “autonomous”  sense.  Though  proofs  and  syllogisms   were  well-­‐developed  from  antiquity  and  throughout  the  medieval  era,  ”the  Leibnizian   understanding  of  proof  did  not  much  exist  before  his  time.  Yet  so  well  did  Leibniz   understand  proof  that  he  could  offer  metamathematical  demonstrations  of  consistency   using  the  fact  that  a  contradiction  cannot  be  derived  in  any  number  of  steps  from  premises   of  a  given  form.”15  The  advent  of  this  sort  of  hyper-­‐rationalism  about  reality  became  a   central  theme  for  modernity:  if  pure  reason  was  to  be  autonomous  and  sovereign,  then  it   needed  to  be  developed  with  an  extreme  rigor  capable  of  testing  and  validating  any  and  all   truth  claims.  This  notion  that  all  our  previous  ideas  needed  to  be  thrust  aside  and  subjected   to  the  extreme  scrutiny  of  reason,  carried  out  in  Leibniz  and  continuing  into  late  modernity,   found  its  most  paradigmatic  expression  in  Descartes’  earlier  methodology.     This  denigration  of  the  senses  or  past  experience  and  a  reliance  on  “pure”  or   “autonomous”  reason  had  the  additional  effect  of  shifting  the  basic  realm  of  inquiry.  While   the  particular  concepts  Descartes  was  exploring  were  not  very  new  –  the  ontological   argument,  the  structured  use  of  reason  and  deduction,  the  transcendental  grounding  of   reality  –  Descartes’  approach  made  a  profound  difference.  “According  to  Descartes  all                                                                                                                   14  Descartes,  p.28   15  Hacking,  Ian,  Leibniz  and  Descartes:  Proof  and  Eternal  Truths,  from  Rationalism,  Empiricism,  and  Idealism:   British  Academy  Lectures  on  the  History  of  Philosophy,  ed.  Anthony  Kenny  (Oxford:  University  Printing  House,   1986),  p.48,  p.49   Porcu  18   philosophy  begins  with  a  consideration  of  those  ‘primitive  notions’  in  our  minds  which  are   the  models  for  all  other  knowledge.”16  These  include  things  like  being,  number,  extension,   form,  motion,  duration,  and  so  forth.  One  must  catch  the  shift  here:  this  seems  to  be  a   contemplation  of  properties  of  the  external  world,  but  the  way  Descartes  couches  these   terms,  they  become  categories  in  the  mind  of  the  subject,  and  interaction  with  the  external   world  becomes  subject-­‐centered.  For  Descartes,  and  especially  for  the  thinkers  who  came   after  him,  “the  nature  of  human  knowledge  can  only  be  explained  in  terms  of  the  ideas   which  the  mind  finds  within  itself.”17  While  this  may  seem  like  a  small  point,  it  is  in  fact  a   total  methodological  shift  of  starting  place:  in  the  pagan  and  Christian  eras,  the  mind  had   an  implicit  connection  with  the  world,  because  it  was  embedded  in  an  intelligible  reality.   This  made  the  interior  journey’s  of  Augustine  or  Socrates  possible  because  of  the   fundamental  connection  between  mind  and  world.  Descartes’  shift,  however,  moved   epistemological  inquiry  out  of  that  intelligible  reality  and  exclusively  into  the  internal  state   of  the  human  mind,  without  (initial)  reference  to  that  intelligible  reality.   However,  it  is  probably  safe  to  say  that  Descartes  had  no  real  intention  of  enacting  a   philosophical  paradigm  shift  of  this  kind.  He  never  ascribed  or  put  forward  an  “ideological   rationalism”  whose  intention  was  to  trap  the  knower  in  the  box  of  his  own  mind.  His   thinking  was,  we  may  venture  to  say,  deeply  committed  to  the  power  of  a  transcendent   grounding  and  cause  for  reality  as  well  as  for  truth,  which  was,  in  spirit,  quite  medieval.   Indeed,  his  entire  solution  to  the  Meditations’  problem  of  chronic  skepticism  hinged  on   proving  God  by  pure  reason,  and  then  extrapolating  that  God’s  divine  goodness  would  not                                                                                                                   16  Cassierer,  Ernst,  The  Philosophy  of  the  Enlightenment,  trans.  Fritz  C.  A.  Koelln  and  James  P.  Pettegrove   (Princeton:  Princeton  University  Press),  p.95   17  Cassierer,  p.95   Porcu  19   allow  him  to  leave  his  creatures  mired  in  confusion  about  reality  or  deceived  by  a  demon.   “It  is  because  God  cannot  lie  that  clear  and  distinct  ideas  deserve  our  assent,  and  he  who   does  not  know  the  divine  truthfulness  is  strictly  certain  of  nothing.”18  Just  as  the  grounding   of  all  epistemic  certainty  in  the  Meditations  hangs  on  the  existence  of  God  and  his  goodness,   losing  that  grounding  means  a  loss  of  certainty  about  almost  everything.  “If  we  could  not   lean  on  the  guarantee  of  the  truthfulness  of  the  Creator.  .  .  we  could  not  know  on   trustworthy  authority  that  there  is  a  material  world,  or  that  there  exist  outside  our  thought   things  in  conformity  with  our  ideas,  or  even  that  these  ideas  deliver  to  us  anything  of  the   authentic,  intelligible  object  or  of  the  eternal  truths,  and  do  not  deceive  us  even  in  what  we   conceive  as  most  evident.”19     But,  regardless  of  Descartes’  intentions  or  private  commitments,  “he  created  the   conditions  of  an  ideological  rationalism  when  he  transferred  the  question  of  truth  from  its   traditional  ontological  basis  (according  to  which  truth  resides  primarily  in  the  nature  of  the   real)  to  an  epistemic  one  whereby  it  becomes  the  result  of  a  method  of  thinking.”20  This   methodological  shift,  though  convenient  for  his  purposes,  changes  everything  about  the   approach  of  philosophy.  When  truth  is  the  result  of  a  special  method,  it  becomes  a   primarily  epistemic  concern,  and  moves  away  from  reality  as-­‐it-­‐is.  Additionally,  doubt  is   cast  on  the  nature  of  reality  as  a  whole,  and  the  subject  becomes  the  only  credible  source  of   certainty.  Descartes  became  programmatic  for  the  age  because  “in  establishing  self-­‐ consciousness  as  the  one  point  of  absolute  certainty  from  which  all  other  certainties  could                                                                                                                   18  Maritain  Jacques,  Three  Reformers:  Luther,  Descartes,  Rousseau  (New  York:  Thomas  Y.  Crowell  Company,   1970),  p.62   19  Maritain,  p.62   20  Dupré,  p.7   Porcu  20   be  deduced,  [Descartes]  initiated  a  new  stage  in  philosophical  thought.”21  The  validity  of   this  subject-­‐oriented  approach,  armed  with  pure  reason,  “seemed  confirmed  by  the  success   of  the  mathematical  method  in  the  scientific  revolution  of  the  seventeenth  century.  The   new  trust  in  the  power  of  human  reason  was  to  inspire  the  culture  of  the  Enlightenment,   the  second  wave  of  modernity.”22     While  many  important  developments  in  the  philosophy  of  modernity  were  to   rapidly  elaborate  on  Descartes’  foundation  (we  have  already  briefly  noted  Leibniz),  Isaac   Newton’s  publication  of  the  Philosophiæ  Naturalis  Principia  Mathematica  marks  the  final   needed  transition  to  the  Enlightenment.  For  Newton,  inquiry  was  not  to  start  at  the  highest,   most  foundational  principles  and  move  outward  to  less  basic  ones,  but  was  to  start  with  the   basic  facts  and  observations  about  reality  and  then  generalize  upward  to  the  highest   principles.  This  shift  constituted  a  move  from  a  method  primarily  based  on  deduction  to   one  based  on  induction.  “The  ideal  of  reason  in  Newton  is  not  to  transcend  experience,  but   to  make  us  at  home  in  it.  It  begins  with  the  data  of  experience  and  moves  toward  the   principles  in  the  light  of  which  these  data  become  comprehensible.”23  What  is  crucial  about   this  method  is  that  the  ordering  principles  cannot  be  brought  in  a  priori  in  any  sense,  for   “these  principles  are  to  be  derived  from  no  other  source  than  from  those  data…they  must   be  derived  from  the  facts  themselves.”24  Newton’s  method  may  appear  to  be  a  total  reversal   of  Cartesianism,  but  it  actually  constitutes  no  dramatic  change.  The  subject  is  still  the   starting  point,  autonomous  reason  is  still  the  tool,  and  method  is  still  the  emphasis.  Newton                                                                                                                   21  Dupré,  Louis,  The  Enlightenment  and  the  Intellectual  Foundations  of  Modern  Culture  (New  Haven  and   London:  Yale  University  Press,  2004),  p.3   22  Dupré,  p.3   23  Caponigri,  Robert  A.,  A  History  of  Western  Philosophy:  Volume  III:  Philosophy  from  The  Renaissance  to  the   Romantic  Age  (Notre  Dame,  London:  University  of  Notre  Dame  Press,  1963),  p.  277   24  Caponigri,  p.277   Porcu  21   merely  tweaked  Descartes’  approach  by  removing  the  reliance  on  God  and  in  doing  so   opened  up  the  method  to  complete  independence  from  all  metaphysics.     The  Enlightenment   This  adoption  of  a  new  perspective  and  methodology  in  early  modernity  reached  its   height  in  the  Enlightenment,  which  took  a  variety  of  forms  across  Europe,  each  having  a   somewhat  different  emphasis.  In  the  British  Isles,  thinkers  like  Bacon  and  Hume  helped  to   develop  a  skeptical  attitude  and  a  reliance  on  empiricism,  while  political  philosophy  in  the   hands  of  thinkers  like  Hobbes  and  Locke  expounded  on  political  systems  based  on  the  idea   of  society  as  made  of  individuals.  France  saw  a  somewhere  more  adamant  hostility  toward   religion,  if  Voltaire  is  any  indication.  Meanwhile,  the  raw  power  of  the  German   Enlightenment  brought  forth  logicians  and  systematic  philosophers,  like  Kant,  who  sought   to  revolutionize  the  entire  philosophical  landscape.  Yet,  for  their  differences,  the  elements   common  to  epistemic  concerns  were  largely  part  of  a  joint  conversation,  from  Descartes   through  Kant,  and  there  was  a  shared  general  belief  in  reason  wielded  toward  social   progress  against  the  old  folly  of  the  past.  “In  the  widest  terms,  the  Enlightenment  may  be   designated  as  that  movement  in  European  culture  which  is  characterized  by  a  complete   confidence  in  the  power  of  ‘reason’  to  dispel  the  obscuring  clouds  of  ignorance  and  mystery   which  had  weighted  upon  the  human  spirit  .  .  .  In  doing  so,  Enlightenment  thinkers  sought   to  render  men  at  once  happier,  and  morally  and  spiritually  better.”25  The  Enlightenment   was  a  time  of  great  optimism  about  the  use  of  this  methodology  toward  the  betterment  of   human  existence.  The  huge  success,  first  of  reason  and  mathematics,  and  then  empiricism                                                                                                                   25  Caponigri,  p.  272   Porcu  22   and  the  scientific  method,  raised  the  obvious  question  of  why  these  methods  could  not   simply  be  applied  to  everything,  especially  to  social  problems.  The  same  sorts  of   foundational  laws  could  be  established  in  the  social  sphere,     until  a  great  harmonious  system,  connected  by  unbreakable  logical  links  and   capable  of  being  formulated  in  precise  –  that  is,  mathematical  –  terms,  could  be   established.  The  rational  reorganization  of  society  would  put  an  end  to  spiritual  and   intellectual  confusion,  the  reign  of  prejudice  and  superstition,  blind  obedience  to   unexamined  dogmas,  and  the  stupidities  and  cruelties  of  the  oppressive  regimes   which  such  intellectual  darkness  bred  and  promoted.26     While  this  attitude  was  not  quite  so  severe  in  all  corners  of  the  general  movement  of  the   Enlightenment,  the  more  extreme  examples,  like  Voltaire  or  Auguste  Comte,  provide  potent   indications  of  the  kind  of  presuppositions  that  found  currency  in  modernity.     The  success  of  science  in  this  particular  manner  seems  to  indicate  the  final   transition  from  the  “bookish”  age  of  the  medieval  era.  “These  triumphs  in  the  field  of   science  transformed  the  cultural  climate  from  literary  to  scientific,”27  in  which  the  medieval   world’s  life  of  texts  and  wisdom  was  replaced  by  the  modern  world’s  emphasis  on  method   and  data.  What  this  meant  is  that,  for  modernity,  texts  could  no  longer  have  any  special   authority  simply  by  being  texts,  in  the  same  way  that  they  could  during  the  medieval  era.  In   that  era,  philosophers  or  apostles  were  seen  as  authoritative  because  their  experience   granted  them  greater  insight  into  the  nature  of  reality.  Now,  however,  such  persons  or   institutions  could  have  nothing  to  say  on  the  basis  of  their  being  who  or  what  they  were;   what  mattered  was  demonstrability  by  virtue  of  method,  either  by  reason  or  science.  The   shift  is  from  the  ancient  or  medieval  conception  of  truth  “according  to  which  truth  resides                                                                                                                   26  Berlin,  Isaiah,  The  proper  study  of  mankind:  An  Anthology  of  Essays  (New  York:  Farrar,  Straus,  and  Giroux,   1998),  p.4   27  Caponigri,  p.  273   Porcu  23   primarily  in  the  nature  of  the  real”28  to  the  modern  epistemic  concern  about  proper   method.  The  result  was  that  the  singular  human  subject,  armed  with  the  proper  application   of  autonomous  reason  (method)  could  correctly  ascertain  truth  about  reality,  and  all  other   approaches  were  suspect.   This  explains  why  the  Enlightenment’s  particular  “object  .  .  .  of  aversion  might  be   said  to  be  authority.”  The  Enlightenment  would  accept  no  idea  or  value  simply  because  it   had  been  accepted  by  others  and  handed  down  by  them,  whether  in  doctrinal  or   institutional  form.  It  was  obsessed  by  the  notion  that  all  “men’s  ills  came  from  ignorance,   superstition,  prejudice.”29  Because  of  this  obsession,    Enlightenment  thinkers  cultivated  the   habit  of  “demanding  a  reason  and  a  proof  for  everything.  Only  that  which  could  be  so   accounted  for  and  proven  had  any  binding  power  in  its  eyes,  because  it  constituted  the   nature  of  things,  the  norm  and  pattern  of  all.”30  In  part  this  may  explain  why  the  crowning   glory  of  the  period  was  not  a  truth,  a  revelation,  or  even  a  fact,  but  a  method,  the  scientific   method,  which  was  to  change  the  shape  of  how  things  were  done  in  every  discipline.  Yet,  it   must  be  emphasized  again  that  the  Enlightenment’s  infatuation  with  the  success  of  science   and  its  particular  view  of  reason  was  not  simply  one  of  positive  advocacy  for  an   epistemological  method  but  also  contained  a  strong  element  of  contempt.  This  contempt   was  turned  not  only  upon  the  medieval  era  but  also  the  notion  of  the  past  in  general  as   something  to  be  liberated  from.  Enlightenment  thinkers  were  “convinced  that  scientific   knowledge  is  the  only  effective  instrument  for  achieving  human  happiness,  and  they  were   interested  in  freeing  Europe  from  the  fantastic  mythologies  and  fanaticisms  which                                                                                                                   28  Dupré,  p.7   29  Caponigri,  p.  272   30  Caponigri  p.273   Porcu  24   prevented  men  from  being  either  intelligent  or  happy.”31  This  comes  out  in  their  histories   as  well:  “Most  of  the  histories  written  during  the  Enlightenment  were  frankly  pragmatic   and  reformist  in  temper,  hoping  to  free  men  from  slavish  dependence  on  the  past  by   revealing  it  as  a  record  of  crime  and  folly.”32     This  attitude  is  a  clue  to  why  Kant  takes  such  a  severe  tone  about  the  responsibility   of  the  individual  in  his  definition  of  the  Enlightenment.  When  prompted  to  answer  the   question,  “what  is  Enlightenment?”  Kant  famously  declared  that  “Enlightenment  is   mankind’s  exit  from  its  self-­‐incurred  immaturity.”33  He  goes  on  to  explain  that,  “Immaturity   is  the  inability  to  make  use  of  one’s  own  understanding  without  the  guidance  of  another.   Self-­‐incurred  is  this  inability  if  its  cause  lies  not  in  the  lack  of  understanding  but  rather  in   the  lack  of  the  resolution  and  the  courage  to  use  it  without  the  guidance  of  another.  Sapere   aude!  Have  the  courage  to  use  your  own  understanding!  is  the  motto  of  the   Enlightenment.”34  For  Kant,  this  issue  of  authority  is  not  just  about  better  or  worse  ways  of   going  about  life,  but  is  wrapped  up  with  being  a  full  person.  If  his  identification  of  authority   with  immaturity  were  not  enough,  Kant  sarcastically  remarks  that  “it  is  so  easy  to  be   immature.  If  I  have  a  book  that  has  understanding  for  me,  a  pastor  who  has  a  conscience  for   me,  a  doctor  who  judges  my  diet  for  me,  and  so  forth,  surely  I  do  not  need  to  trouble  myself.                                                                                                                   31  Frankel,  Charles,  “The  Philosophy  of  the  Enlightenment,”  from  A  History  of  Philosophical  Systems,  ed.   Vergilius  Ferm  (New  York:  The  Philosophical  Library,  1950),  p.266   32  Frankel,  p.272   33  Kant,  Immanuel,  trans.  James  Schmidt,  “An  Answer  to  the  Question:  What  is  Enlightenment?”  from  What  is   Enlightenment?  Eighteenth-­‐Century  Answers  and  Twentieth-­‐Century  Questions,  ed.  Schmidt,  James  (Berkley   and  Los  Angeles:  University  of  California  Press,  1996),  p.58   34  Kant,  p.58   Porcu  25   I  have  no  need  to  think,  if  only  I  can  pay;  others  will  take  over  the  tedious  business  for   me.”35   Authority  was  often  defined  in  this  way,  in  opposition  to  the  Enlightenment’s   particular  notion  of  rationality.  Autonomous  reason  was  painted  as  struggling  against  all   authorities  and  dead  traditionalisms,  which  held  it  back,  in  pursuit  of  bettering  human  life,   rather  than  leaving  it  to  stagnate.  Andreas  Riem,  a  prominent  voice  of  the  time,  felt  that  this   insistence  upon  authorities  worked  against  reason  and  stunted  the  growth  of  science  and   discovery.  In  characterizing  the  medieval  period,  Riem  writes,  “Have  not  all  arts  and   sciences  had  their  lamentable  epochs,  in  which  even  philosophy  was  nonsense?  The   Sorbonne  was  in  an  uproar  and  ferment  in  the  days  when  the  entire  scholarly  community   of  Paris  divided  over  Aristotle,  when  Galileo  dared  to  say  that  the  earth  was  round.  What  if,   in  those  days,  prejudice  in  the  service  of  stupidity  had  triumphed  over  enlightened  reason?   What  would  have  become  of  philosophy  and  natural  science?”36  Prejudice  here  is  closely   associated  with  tradition,  which  these  thinkers  felt  bound  men  to  repetitions  of  the  past   and  kept  them  from  examining  and  learning  from  the  present.  Even  the  fact  that  Riem   confuses  the  controversy  of  heliocentrism  with  an  alleged  controversy  over  a  flat  earth  is   indicative  of  how  poorly  Enlightenment  thinkers  thought  of  the  ancients  (who  had  long   since  declared  the  earth  a  sphere  and  even  calculated  its  circumference).  With  religion  in   mind,  Riem  concludes  that,  “Enthusiasts  of  all  periods  forbid  the  free  use  of  the                                                                                                                   35  Kant,  p.58   36  Riem,  Andreas,  “On  Enlightenment:  Is  It  and  Could  It  Be  Dangerous  to  the  State,  to  Religion,  or  Dangerous   in  General?  A  Word  to  be  Heeded  by  Princes,  Statesmen,  and  Clergy,”  trans.  Jane  Kneller,  from,  What  is   Enlightenment?  Eighteenth-­‐Century  Answers  and  Twentieth-­‐Century  Questions,  ed.  Schmidt,  James  (Berkley   and  Los  Angeles:  University  of  California  Press,  1996),  p.171   Porcu  26   understanding  because  they  must  fear  it.”37  While  such  anti-­‐religious  fervor  was  not  so   pronounced  in  every  part  of  the  Enlightenment,  Riem’s  sentiment  highlights  the  way  in   which  Enlightenment  thinkers  often  fell  into  a  dichotomy  between  the  claims  of  authority   and  the  convictions  of  autonomous  reason.     This  antagonism  between  the  supposed  fideism  of  the  medieval  era  and  the   autonomous  reason  of  the  Enlightenment  became  a  narrative  for  modern  thinkers,  and  the   renowned  commentator  David  Bentley  Hart  makes  a  general  caricature  of  it.   ’Once  upon  a  time,’  as  the  story  goes,  ‘there  was  a  late  Roman  Hellenistic  culture  that   cherished  the  power  of  reason  and  pursued  science  and  high  philosophy.  Then  came   Christianity,  which  valued  only  blind  obedience  to  irrational  dogma,  and  which   maliciously  extinguished  the  light  of  pagan  wisdom.  Then,  thanks  to  Islam,   thirteenth-­‐century  Christendom  suddenly  rediscovered  reason  and  began  to  chafe   against  the  bondage  of  witless  fideism.  And  then,  as  if  by  magic,  Copernicus   discovered  heliocentrism,  and  reason  began  its  inexorable  charge  toward  victory   through  the  massed  and  hostile  legions  of  faith.’38     Though  indeed  a  generalization,  Hart’s  picture  touches  on  some  of  the  central  themes  of   modernity.  Though  severe,  “blind  obedience  to  irrational  dogma”  is  a  fairly  accurate  picture   of  how  authority  and  tradition  came  to  be  viewed  by  thinkers  like  Kant  (not  to  mention   contemporary  views  of  the  past),  where  the  idea  that  conformity  or  alignment  of  any  kind   somehow  inherently  stifled  the  mind  and  prevented  reason  from  pursuing  reality.  All  of   these  sorts  of  concerns  –  hostility  to  tradition,  reliance  on  reason,  and  the  individual  as  the   starting  point  –  are  present  from  the  dawn  of  modernity  and  were  articulated  to  various   degrees  by  Enlightenment  thinkers.  These,  and  many  of  the  other  themes  of  modern                                                                                                                   37  Riem,  p.172   38  Hart,  David  Bentley,  Atheist  Delusions:  The  Christian  Revolution  and  Its  Fashionable  Enemies  (New  Haven   and  London:  Yale  University  Press,  2009),  p.57   Porcu  27   philosophy  are  deeply  epistemological  in  nature,  and  can  be  summed  up  in  a  few  concrete   categories.       The  Commitments  of  the  Enlightenment     We  can  describe  three  major  philosophical  commitments  with  regard  to  knowing   that  had  solidified  by  the  height  of  the  Enlightenment.  The  first  was  an  aversion  to   authority  that  was  not  merely  preferential  but  deeply  adversarial.  Enlightenment  thinkers   scorned  prejudice,  the  hold  of  authority  on  the  mind,  and  the  authoritarian  age  of  the  past,   caricaturizing  the  latter  as  one  of  superstition,  unreason,  and  slavery  (in  many  senses).   Second,  and  in  tangent  with  this,  was  the  emphasis  on  “right  method”  for  truth  acquisition,   which  in  this  case  meant  “autonomous  reason”  and  science  as  the  main  instantiation  of  that   power.  All  realms  were  to  be  reduced  to  scientific  or  mathematical  formulations  and  solved   accordingly.  Finally,  as  the  underlying  foundation  for  this  emphasis  on  autonomous  reason   and  the  scientific  method,  there  was  the  translation  of  the  starting  point  for  all  thought   from  reality  as  a  whole  (including  the  transcendental,  the  metaphysical,  and  the   community)  to  the  individual  subject.  The  human  knower  became  the  starting  point  for  all   inquiry,  and  knowledge  could  only  be  valid  if  it  could  come  into  proper  relation  to  the   independent  human  subject.     This  is  why  science  became  such  an  obvious  fit  for  the  era:  empirical  science  and  the   inductive  approach  of  Newton  allowed  for  verifiability,  a  unique  interest  of  modernity.  In   the  medieval  or  classical  world  of  texts  and  authorities,  reference  to  a  common  source  of   authority  was  a  valid  method  for  solving  problems  about  knowledge.  This  is  because  the   classical  and  medieval  worlds  were  comfortable  mediating  knowledge  through   Porcu  28   communally  accepted  authorities  (whether  it  be  the  church  community,  the  community  of   the  polis,  or  the  community  of  historical  authorities  on  cultural  matters)  in  order  to  reach   conclusions.  In  modernity,  however,  knowledge  was  restricted  to  the  individual  human   knower,  and  so  the  only  way  for  knowledge  to  be  transferred  from  subject  to  subject   through  the  huge  gulf  between  individuals  was  if  that  knowledge  was  repeatedly  verifiable.   That  is,  one  subject  could  say  to  the  other,  “here  is  my  experiment.  You  may  repeat  it   yourself,  and  then  know  what  I  know  also  for  yourself.”  This  explains  why  verifiability   became  supremely  important  to  modernity  almost  as  soon  as  the  notion  of  authority  was   jettisoned.     The  Problems   It  is  hard  for  most  people  in  our  post-­‐Enlightenment  world  not  to  reflexively  nod  in   approval  at  the  exercise  of  reason  in  the  hands  of  the  autonomous  human  subject,  using   science  to  improve  the  world.  But  this  is  only  one  side  of  the  story.  If  history  has  shown  us   anything  (and  as  postmodern  critics  have  tirelessly  pointed  out),  the  Enlightenment  has   not  introduced  a  brave  new  era  of  universal  rationalism,  science  at  the  service  of  human   flourishing,  worldwide  peace,  or  any  of  the  other  radical  promises  it  made  in  the  orgy  of  its   optimism.  Enlightenment  philosophy  has  fostered  a  number  of  complications  intrinsic  to  its   basic  commitments,  which  I  think  can  be  generalized  into  three  categories:  the   marginalization  of  anything  that  did  not  fit  its  method,  deconstruction  turning  on  itself,  and   radical  individualism’s  maturity  as  nihilism.  Since  modernity’s  shortcomings  have  been   well  elaborated  on  in  the  past  several  decades  and  by  a  variety  of  competent  thinkers,  I  will   devote  only  a  terse  summary  to  each  of  these  points.     Porcu  29     First,  and  undeniably,  the  explanatory  power  of  science  and  “autonomous”  reason   have  completely  revolutionized  our  standards  of  living.  Yet  this  success  should  not  occlude   the  problematic  side  effect  that  all  the  areas  of  human  life  that  cannot  be  rationalized  into   the  paradigm  of  science  have  been  marginalized  to  the  realm  of  the  “merely  subjective.”  On   the  view  of  scientific  objectivism,  “only  that  which  can  be  demonstrated  experimentally  is   ‘rational’,”  and  so  “this  test-­‐tube  epistemology  makes  short  shrift  of  any  human  knowledge   that  does  not  show  up  under  the  microscope.”39  Needless  to  say,  since  “religion,  tradition,   love,  and  ultimate  questions  concerning  our  humanity  usually  do  not  show  up  in  a  test-­‐ tube,  they  do  not  count  as  real  knowledge,”40  to  say  nothing  of  the  Good  or  the  Beautiful.   This  is  most  clearly  seen  in  our  times  with  the  state  of  the  humanities  –  literature,  poetry,   art,  and  so  forth  –  in  the  modern  university  setting,  where  funding  is  increasingly  cut  and   they  lose  out  to  the  more  lucrative  scientific  areas  of  study.41  Since  these  realms  of   knowledge  are  not  capable  of  being  “verified”  as  a  result  of  scientific  activity,  it  is  inevitable   that  they  become  diminished  in  influence  and  importance  in  human  life.    In  a  word,   scientific  objectivism  marginalizes,  by  its  very  nature,  whole  dimensions  of  human   experience  because  they  do  not  fit  into  the  narrow  definitional  realm  of  what  is   scientifically  verifiable:  the  moral,  aesthetic,  spiritual,  personal,  and  inter-­‐personal  are  all   categories  that  are  reduced  to  sub-­‐human  functionalist  narratives  if  they  are  even  included   in  modernity’s  total  picture  of  the  human  at  all.  We  have  gained  something  with  the   progress  of  technology,  but  it  is  clear  that  we  have  left  something  very  significant  behind.                                                                                                                   39  Zimmermann,  Jens,  Humanism  and  Religion:  A  Call  for  the  Renewal  of  Western  Culture  (Oxford  and  New   York:  Oxford  University  Press,  2012),  p.  24   40  Zimmermann,  p.24   41  Cf.  Humanitas  and  Pedagogy,  in  which  I  discuss  at  length  the  origin  and  goal  of  the  humanities  over  and   against  how  they  currently  fare  in  higher  education   (https://www.academia.edu/11029577/Humanitas_and_Pedagogy).   Porcu  30     The  second  problem  with  the  Enlightenment’s  philosophical  angle  is  its  constant   push  to  de-­‐mythologize  the  narratives  of  the  past,  especially  of  medieval  Christianity.   “Reason”  in  the  hands  of  modern  thinkers  became  a  critical  project  of  revisionism  toward   almost  the  whole  medieval  world.  This  may  have  begun  innocently  enough,  with  an  interest   in  correcting  scientific  inaccuracies  in  the  wake  of  modern  discoveries,  but  it  soon  turned   to  a  skepticism  toward  all  supernatural  claims.  Thomas  Jefferson’s  edit  of  the  Bible,  for   example,  removed  all  references  to  miracles,  angels,  and  demons,  and  a  variety  of   movements  in  the  Reformation  sought  to  challenge  even  the  most  fundamental   assumptions  of  traditional  Christianity.  This  aggressive  tendency  toward  deconstruction   seems  to  have  turned  on  the  Enlightenment  itself,  as  the  “post-­‐modern”  movement  has   demonstrated.  A  long,  thorough  discussion  of  postmodernity  is  problematic  for  other   reasons  than  the  length  it  would  require  in  order  to  do  justice  to  the  topic:  at  the  heart  of   the  movement,  postmodernity  has  an  identifiable  hostility  toward  objective  definitions  and   categories.  Yet,  when  Lyotard  described  postmodernity  as  an  “incredulity  towards   metanarratives,”  I  think  he  hit  on  what  is  essential  about  the  movement.  At  the  same  time,  I   would  draw  attention  to  the  growing  number  of  thinkers  who  would  rather  define   postmodernity  as  “late”  modernity  in  order  to  emphasize  that  “post”  modernity  is  not  a   new  age,  or  anything  like  it,  but  is  simply  the  inevitable  outgrowth  of  modernity’s  initial   premises.  This  is  perfectly  in  keeping  with  our  first  issue  with  Enlightenment  philosophy:   teleology,  or  the  end  or  purpose  of  human  life,  was  not  verifiable  under  the  lens  of   modernity’s  champion  method,  science,  and  so  inevitably  got  left  out.  Our  fallout  is  a  world   of  great  human  power,  to  no  real  end.  The  progress  narratives  of  the  Enlightenment,  in  the   final  analysis,  were  just  secular  versions  of  a  Christian  eschatological  movement  that   Porcu  31   looked  forward  to  the  culmination  of  history  in  a  utopian  state.  After  the  20th  century  saw   science  arming  the  nation-­‐states  to  destroy  one  another  on  an  unprecedented  scale,  one   can  hardly  be  surprised  why  the  Enlightenment’s  narrative  became  known  as  the  “myth”  of   progress.  And  it  is  neither  surprising  why,  with  the  collapse  of  the  Enlightenment’s   metanarrative,  all  metanarratives  should  come  into  question:  with  the  Enlightenment’s   stripping  away  of  prejudice  of  every  kind,  what  would  be  left  to  give  any  narrative  at  all?     Finally,  one  of  the  few  values  of  modernity  that  has  remained  in  the  greater  western   culture  is  the  radical  autonomy  of  the  individual  subject.  If  any  narrative  has  survived  the   disenchantment  of  late  modernity,  it  is  the  idea  of  human  freedom,  which  is  the  radicalized   form  of  the  subject  as  the  supreme  starting  place  for  knowledge  and  will.  David  Bentley   Hart  thinks  that  this  was,  in  some  very  real  way,  the  point  of  modernity  all  along:     The  modern  period  has  never  been  especially  devoted  to  reason  as  such;  the  notion   that  it  ever  was  is  merely  one  of  its  ‘originary’  myths.  The  true  essence  of  modernity   is  a  particular  conception  of  what  it  is  to  be  free.  .  .and  the  Enlightenment  language   of  an  ‘age  of  reason’  was  always  really  just  a  way  of  placing  a  frame  around  that  idea   of  freedom,  so  as  to  portray  it  as  the  rational  autonomy  and  moral  independence   that  lay  beyond  the  intellectual  infancy  of  ‘irrational’  belief.42     Hart  explains  that,  “we  are  today  more  likely  to  be  committed  to  ‘my  truth’  than  to  any   notion  of  truth  in  general,  no  matter  where  that  might  lead,”  and  that  “freedom  for  us  today   is  something  transcendent  even  of  reason,  we  no  longer  really  feel  that  we  must  justify  our   liberties  by  recourse  to  some  prior  standard  of  responsible  rationality.  Freedom  –   conceived  as  the  perfect,  unconstrained  spontaneity  of  individual  will  –  is  its  own   justification,  its  own  highest  standard,  its  own  unquestionable  truth.”43  This  primacy  of                                                                                                                   42  Hart,  p.105   43  Hart,  p.105   Porcu  32   individual  will  only  reinforces  the  problem  of  the  subjective:  i.e.,  I  have  my  opinion,  and   you  have  yours,  and  epistemic  effort,  without  recourse  to  a  standard  by  which  to  judge,   cannot  bridge  the  gap  between  I  and  thou  in  any  meaningful  way.  Here  is  the  wastebasket   in  which  the  humanities,  religion,  art,  and  the  basic  flavor  of  human  life  are  reunited:  as  the   rejects  of  a  culture  which  will  not  violate  the  supremacy  of  the  individual  subject,  even  in   the  face  of  reason.  For  Hart,  the  leftover  philosophical  milieu  that  we  have  inherited  in  the   twilight  of  the  Enlightenment  is  nihilism,  plain  and  simple:   Modernity’s  highest  ideal  –  its  special  understanding  of  personal  autonomy  –   requires  us  to  place  our  trust  in  an  original  absence  underlying  all  of  reality,  a  fertile   void  in  which  all  things  are  possible,  from  which  arises  no  impediment  to  our  wills,   and  before  which  we  may  consequently  choose  to  make  of  ourselves  what  we   choose.  We  trust,  that  is  to  say,  that  there  is  no  substantial  criterion  by  which  to   judge  our  choices  that  stands  higher  than  the  unquestioned  good  of  free  choice   itself,  and  that  therefore  all  judgment,  divine  no  less  than  human,  is  in  some  sense   an  infringement  upon  our  freedom.  This  is  our  primal  ideology.  In  the  most   unadorned  terms  possible,  the  ethos  of  modernity  is  –  to  be  perfectly  precise  –   nihilism.44     I  want  to  close  this  chapter  by  offering  a  suggestion  as  to  how  the  fundamental   epistemological  issue  of  modernity  can  be  summarized,  in  an  effort  to  get  to  the  crux  of  the   problematic  relationship  between  reason  and  knowledge.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  project  of   modernity  has  yielded  only  two  valid  categories  for  knowing:  the  objective,  by  which  it   means  that  which  has  the  unique  property  of  being  verifiable  (either  by  empirical  method   or  by  logical  deduction),  and  the  subjective,  by  which  it  means  everything  that  cannot  be   demonstrated  in  this  way.  Modernity  finds  itself  trapped  by  these  commitments:  the  only   things  which  we  can  consider  valid  knowledge  are  those  which  we  can  verify.  Meanwhile,                                                                                                                   44  Hart,  p.21     Porcu  33   the  late  modern  world  has  embraced  the  subjective,  acknowledging  that  it  contains  too   much  that  is  humanizing  to  risk  losing,  but  resigning  itself  to  the  Enlightenment’s   condemnation  that  such  things  do  not  even  rise  to  the  level  of  “knowledge”  and  must  be   consigned  to  mere  “beliefs.”  On  the  one  hand  we  have  lost  some  part  of  our  humanity,  as   those  elements  of  human  life  which  did  not  fit  with  the  constraints  of  the  verifiable  were   overlooked.  But  on  the  other  hand,  when  those  beliefs  are  saved  only  in  the  category  of  the   completely  subjective,  we  lose  our  ability  to  bridge  the  gap  between  individuals  and  have   no  recourse  to  any  unifying  element  at  all.   This  dichotomy  between  the  objective  and  the  subjective  has  a  number  of   implications  for  our  time,  no  less  for  Christianity  than  for  any  other  worldview.  I  now  want   to  turn  to  the  Reformation  in  order  to  investigate  the  degree  to  which  modern  Christianity   has  been  shaped  by  the  same  sorts  of  epistemological  categories,  and  the  effects  that  that   has  had.     Porcu  34   Chapter  2:   The  Reformation       Introduction   Modern  Christianity  is  unmistakably  shaped  by  the  Reformation  and  the   Reformation’s  principles.  While  it  almost  always  sets  itself  up  against  “the  secular,”  when   we  pull  apart  the  distinguishing  features  of  Protestant  Christianity’s  origins  in  the   Reformation,  what  we  see  bears  an  all-­‐too  familiar  resemblance  to  the  general  ethos  of   modernity  and  the  Enlightenment  that  we  explored  in  Chapter  1.  While  couched  in  what   seems  to  be  traditional  Christian  language  about  the  Bible,  the  Church,  and  the  Holy  Spirit,   the  heart  of  the  Reformation  is  concentrated  on  the  same  subject  as  the  rest  of  modernity:   the  individual.  Once  this  focus  is  made  clear,  it  is  unsurprising  that  modern  Protestant   Christianity  suffers  from  the  same  fundamental  issues  as  the  rest  of  modern  philosophical   thought  when  it  comes  to  the  problem  of  knowing,  namely,  trapped  between  the  categories   of  the  objective  and  the  subjective.       Luther  and  the  Reformers     That  Luther  is  influential  on  the  Reformation  goes  without  saying,  but  I  want  to   focus  on  two  issues  that  I  think  are  central  to  understanding  the  core  spirit  of  the   Reformers:  the  issue  of  faith  and  the  issue  of  scripture.     By  many  accounts,  the  young  Luther  particularly  struggled  with  the  problem  of   justification  before  God  in  the  face  of  human  sin.  Luther  wrote  that  he  “stood  before  God  as   a  sinner  with  an  extremely  troubled  conscience  and  I  could  not  be  sure  that  my  merit   Porcu  35   would  assuage  him.  I  did  not  love,  no,  rather,  I  hated  the  just  God  who  punishes  sinners.”45   Oswald  Bayer,  a  Lutheran  theologian,  explains  that  Luther’s  anxiety  “was  that  of  sin  in  the   face  of  death  and  the  devil,  and  in  the  face  of  the  last  judge,  the  Christ  of  the  Last   Judgment.”46  I  do  not  want  to  make  too  much  about  Luther’s  own  internal  struggle  on  these   personal  matters,  but  what  is  relevant  to  our  purposes  was  the  so-­‐called  “Reformation   epiphany”  Luther  had  as  he  poured  over  the  Bible,  seeking  an  answer  to  these  concerns.   Luther’s  epiphany  to  this  problem  came  from  the  passage  in  Romans  (1:17)  where  Paul   explains  that  “the  just  shall  live  by  faith.”  For  Luther,  this  freedom  from  merit  and  guilt  in   the  face  of  an  angry  God  was  the  ultimate  liberation,  and  he  describes  the  epiphany  in   almost  baptismal  terms:  “All  at  once  I  had  the  feeling  of  being  born  again  and  entering  into   paradise  itself  through  open  gates.  Immediately  the  whole  of  Scripture  shone  in  a  different   light.”47  Looser  caricatures  of  Luther  often  paint  him  as  a  man  starting  with  primarily   institutional  concerns,  but  Bayer  and  others  suggest  that  it  is  in  fact  a  deeply  personal   theological  starting  point  that  is  the  real  crux  of  the  matter.  “The  liberation  that  Luther   came  to  share  was  not  first  of  all  from  earthly  authorities  and  institutions  .  .  .  but  it  was  the   forgiveness  of  sins  occurring  unambiguously  in  the  world  of  absolution  as  a   pronouncement  of  eternal  salvation.”48     The  second  issue  follows  from  the  first,  and  has  to  do  with  Luther’s  relationship  to   scripture.  What  caused  Luther  to  feel  as  though  he  were  “entering  into  paradise  itself”  was                                                                                                                   45  Luther,  Martin,  D.  Martin  Luthers  Werke:  Kritische  Gesamtausgaber  [Schriften]  (65  vols.,  H.  Böhlau,  188-­‐ 1993),  vol.54,  p.179-­‐187.   46  Bayer,  Oswald,  “Luther  as  an  Interpreter  of  Holy  Scripture,”  trans.  Mark  Mattes,  from  The  Cambridge   Companion  to  Martin  Luther,  ed.  Donald  K.  McKim  (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press,  2003),  p.78.   47  Martin  Luther,  Luther’s  Works.  American  Edition.  55  vols.  (St.  Louis  and  Philadelphia:  Concordia  and   Fortress  press,  1958-­‐86),  vol.  34,  336-­‐337.     48  Bayer,  p.  78     Porcu  36   the  “reliance  on  the  promise”49  of  the  Bible,  which  brought  him  the  saving  message  that  he   was  justified  by  faith,  and  did  not  need  to  live  in  agony  about  merit.  For  Luther,  “theology   consisted  of  the  interpretation  of  the  holy  scripture.  This  task  was  completely  identified  in   his  mind  with  the  question  which  constantly  pursued  him[:]  of  his  standing  in  the  sight  of   God.  For  he  never  doubted  that  the  will  of  God  is  revealed  and  comprehensible  to  men   solely  through  the  holy  scripture.”50  This  is  how  the  Bible  became  so  central  to  Luther’s   theology:  it  is  from  the  Bible  that  the  promise  comes,  and  it  is  through  the  reading  and   appropriation  of  scripture  that  the  Christian  can  receive  the  promise  of  God  and  the   assurance  of  salvation.  All  the  commentaries  and  aid  in  the  world  ought  only  to  be  tools  to   this  aim.  Luther  writes  that  if  “anyone  .  .  .  could  achieve  this  without  commentary  or   interpretation,  my  commentaries  and  those  of  everyone  else  would  not  only  be  of  no  use,   but  merely  a  hindrance.  Go  to  the  Bible  itself,  dear  Christians,  and  let  my  expositions  and   those  of  all  scholars  be  no  more  than  a  tool  with  which  to  build  aright.”51     This  emphasis  on  the  Bible  and  its  power  to  transmit  truth  about  God  was  not,  in   itself,  problematic  for  anyone.  In  affirming  the  authority  of  the  Bible,  Luther  was   “completely  Catholic,”52  as  the  Bible’s  “unique  authority  was  always  fully  affirmed.”53  Yet,   the  “question  of  the  relationship  between  scripture  and  tradition  was  barely  discussed  in   the  prevailing  theology  of  the  time.  It  was  the  Reformation  which  first  subjected  the                                                                                                                   49  Bayer,  p.78   50  Ebeling,  Gerhard,  Luther:  An  Introduction  to  his  Thought,  trans.  R.A.  Wilson  (Philadelphia:  Fortress  Press,   1970),  p.96   51  Luther,  from  Ebeling  (1970),  p.  45-­‐46   52  Congar,  Yves  M.-­‐J.,  Tradition  and  Traditions:  The  Biblical,  Historical,  and  Theological  Evidence  for  Catholic   Teaching  on  Tradition  (San  Diego:  Basilica  Press,  1966),  p.140   53  Ebeling,  p.96   Porcu  37   problem  to  a  closer  examination.”54  The  problem  was  the  way  in  which  scripture  and   tradition  rapidly  became  mutually  exclusive  for  the  Reformers.  Reformation  historian   Markus  Wriedt  thought  that,  early  on,  “it  must  have  become  clear  to  Luther  that  his   exegetical  insight  and  its  fundamental  theological  reasoning  allow  for  no  other  authority   beside  Scripture  and  radically  call  the  structuring  of  the  church’s  own  authority  into   question.”55  What  started  with  a  devotion  to  scripture  lead  to  the  now-­‐familiar   Reformation  marching  order  of  sola  scriptura,  as  more  and  more  the  self-­‐sufficiency  of   scripture  seemed  to  call  elements  of  traditional  European  Christianity  into  question.     Without  getting  too  much  into  the  oft-­‐told  story,  it  may  be  enough  to  follow  the   summary  of  Reformation  scholar  Brad  Gregory:  “A  rejection  of  the  church’s  authority  and   many  of  its  teachings  is  precisely  what  happened  in  the  Reformation.  All  Protestant   reformers  came  to  believe  that  the  established  church  was  no  longer  the  church  established   by  Jesus.”56  Many  caricatures  of  Luther’s  early  conflicts  with  the  Roman  Church  seem  to   paint  a  picture  of  the  German  monk,  outraged  by  the  abuses  of  the  Catholic  church,  rallying   Christians  toward  reform.  But  Gregory  explains  that  the  Reformation’s,   repudiation  [of  the  practices  of  the  Roman  church]  was  not  based  primarily   on  the  church’s  rampant  abuses,  the  sinfulness  of  many  of  its  members,  or   entrenched  obstacles  to  reform.  All  of  these  had  been  obvious  to   conscientious  clerical  reformers  and  other  open-­‐eyed  Christians  for  well  over   a  century.  The  Reformation’s  upshot  was  rather  that  Roman  Catholicism,   even  at  its  best,  was  a  perverted  form  of  Christianity  even  if  all  its  members                                                                                                                   54  Ebeling,  p.96   55  Wriedt,  Markus,  “Luther’s  Theology,”  trans.  Katharina  Gustavs,  from  The  Cambridge  Companion  to  Martin   Luther,  ed.  Donald  K.  McKim  (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press,  2003),  p.  93   56  Gregory,  Brad  S.,  The  Unintended  Reformation:  How  a  Religious  Revolution  Secularized  Society  (Cambridge   and  London:  The  Belknap  Press  of  Harvard  University  Press,  2012),  p.86   Porcu  38   had  been  self-­‐consciously  following  all  the  Roman  church’s  teachings  and  had   been  enacting  all  its  permitted  practices.57     That  is  to  say,  acknowledgment  and  condemnation  of  the  various  abuses  of  the  Roman   church  was  nothing  new,  and  it  seems  to  me  that  no  great  revolution  or  paradigm  shift  was   needed  to  smooth  out  the  various  hierarchical  issues  any  more  than  at  any  other  time  in   the  church’s  history.  Yet  it  was  the  paradigm  shift  toward  the  self-­‐sufficiency  of  the  Bible  as   the  sole  authority,  inevitably  coming  into  conflict  with  traditional  Christianity,  that  became   the  point  of  tension.  At  the  same  time,  the  Roman  response  did  little  to  assuage  Protestant   concerns:  there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  Council  of  Trent,  in  “affirming  the  normative  value   of  apostolic  traditions  not  contained  in  Scripture  .  .  .  in  effect  made  tradition  a  formal   principle  different  from  Scripture,  if  not  autonomous.”58       The  situation  that  rapidly  developed  was  one  of  extreme  polarization  between  the   two  critical  reformation  ideas  mentioned  above  and  the  position  of  traditional  Christianity.   On  the  one  hand,  the  Reformers  were  united  under  the  idea  of  justification  alone,  what   Jaroslav  Pelikan  called  “the  foundation  of  the  entire  Reformation,  in  fact,  [what  was  seen   as]  the  chief  doctrine  of  Christianity  and  the  chief  point  of  difference  separating   Protestantism  from  Roman  Catholicism.”59  Luther  even  went  so  far  as  to  say  that   Pelagianism  had  become  the  dominant  philosophy  “under  the  patronage  of  the  church  of   Rome.”60  On  the  other  hand,  the  principle  of  the  Bible  as  the  sufficient  or  sole  authority   seemed  to  necessitate  a  break  from  numerous  elements  of  traditional  Christianity  which   could  not  clearly  be  demonstrated  by  recourse  to  the  Bible.  For  the  Reformers,  these  were                                                                                                                   57  Gregory,  86   58  Congar,  p.145     59  Pelikan,  Jaroslav,  The  Christian  Tradition:  A  History  of  the  Development  of  Doctrine,  Vol.  4:  Reformation  of   Church  and  Dogma  (1300-­‐1700),  (Chicago  and  London:  The  University  of  Chicago  Press),  p.139   60  Pelikan,  p.129   Porcu  39   not  mere  technical  issues,  as  they  were  convinced  that  “the  established  church  itself  was   teaching  errors  and  lies  as  if  they  were  truths.  This  was  the  problem  that  had  to  be  fixed.”61     Scripture  Alone     For  the  Reformers,  scripture  offered  the  perfect  foundation  on  which  to  build  a   “pure”  Christianity,  free  from  complication  and  Roman  additives.  Accordingly,  the   Reformers  needed  to  attribute  to  scripture  a  perfect  autonomy,  clarity,  and  accessibility   that  required  no  other  necessary  validation  or  addition.  For  Luther,  “scripture  already   contains  the  complete  revelation  of  God  established  in  Christ.  Statements  reaching  beyond   this  truth  are  simply  impossible.”62  In  this  regard,  scripture  became  a  kind  of  “necessary   and  sufficient  condition”  for  knowledge  about  God,  salvation,  and  the  Christian  life.  Zwingli   too  “held  the  same  view,  declaring  in  his  1522  treatise  on  the  clarity  and  certainty  of   scripture  that  ‘no  such  trust  should  be  given  to  any  word  like  that  given  to  [the  word  of   God].  For  it  is  certain  [gewüß]  and  may  not  fail.  It  is  clear  [heiter],  and  will  not  leave  us  to   err  in  darkness.  It  teaches  itself  on  its  own  [es  leert  sich  selbs].”63  This  tenant  of  self-­‐ interpreting  scripture  proved  to  be  a  critical  breaking  point  with  traditional  Christianity,   since  it  meant  that  the  Christian  who  took  his  theology  from  the  Bible  alone  could  dispense   entirely  with  the  norms,  practices,  and  standards  of  traditional  Christianity.  It  is  precisely   with  this  statement  of  “the  self-­‐interpreting  Scripture  (sacra  scriptura  sui  ipsius  interpres),   [that]  Luther  declares  the  independence  of  Reformation  theology  from  any  central                                                                                                                   61  Gregory,  p.86   62  Wriedt,  p.106   63  Gregory,  p.87   Porcu  40   doctrinal  office,”  such  that  “outside  of  biblical  statements  there  is  no  true  tenet  of  faith   possible.”64     This  position  was  not,  however,  one  of  simply  reading  and  proof-­‐texting  scripture.   Quite  the  contrary:  under  this  new  formulation,  a  devotion  to  the  text  of  scripture  in  great   detail  was  called  for.  This  is  especially  true  of  Luther,  “because  for  him  the  interpretation  of   scripture  was  an  utterly  serious  personal  necessity.”65  As  Protestant  theologian  Gerhard   Ebeling  saw  it,  “an  extraordinary  degree  of  devotion  to  the  scripture  is  necessary,”  in  order   to  “understand  the  fundamental  message”  whereby  “the  more  radically  one  accepts  the   challenge  to  one’s  own  existential  life  of  an  encounter  with  the  scripture”  the  more  one  is   able  to  have  “a  real  understanding  and  adequate  interpretation  of  the  scripture.”66  To  this   end,  commentary,  as  Luther  pointed  out,  was  usually  very  helpful.  Far  from  condemning  all   sources  that  were  not  the  Bible,  the  Reformers  cited  with  approval  the  creeds  of  the  early   church,  traditional  interpretations  of  the  text,  and  the  commentary  of  the  church  fathers   (Calvin  in  particular  wrote  extensive  commentaries  on  the  Fathers).  “In  a  general  way  the   Protestants  recognize  the  purity  of  the  early  Church,  which  represents,  for  them,  also,  a   privileged  moment  in  history.  For  more  than  a  century  after  the  rupture  of  the   Reformation,  the  consensus  of  the  first  five  centuries  was  accepted  by  many  as  an  empirical   criterion  of  authenticity,  and  a  possible  basis  for  the  restoration  of  Christian  unity.”67  In  the   mind  of  Luther,  and  in  the  work  of  the  Reformers  at  large,  there  was  no  intention  of  a  break   from  all  tradition  toward  radical  interpretative  autonomy  or  a  move  toward  individual   opinions  about  scripture.  “Their  shared  goal  was  to  discern  and  to  follow  what  God  had                                                                                                                   64  Wriedt,  p.112   65  Ebeling,  p.103   66  Ebeling,  p.97   67  Congar,  p.144   Porcu  41   revealed  in  scripture.  The  idea  that  biblical  interpretation  was  in  principle  a  matter  of   individual  opinion  or  preference  was  utter  anathema  to  the  early  evangelical  reformers.”68     The  Unintended  Reformation     While  the  early  Reformers  had  no  intention  of  fracturing  the  church  into  a  myriad  of   competing  sects  based  on  individual  interpretation,  in  actual  practice  that  is  precisely  what   happened.  This  may  be  surprising,  as  a  renewed  rigor  toward  scriptural  studies  and  a   common  acceptance  of  the  creeds,  teachings,  and  councils  of  the  church  of  late  antiquity   seemed  to  be  more  than  a  sufficient  foundation  for  “revising”  the  practice  of  Christianity  in   Europe.  Yet,  the  acceptance  of  the  doctrine  of  the  early  church  or  the  teachings  of  the   Fathers  could  not  be  binding  in  any  more  than  the  most  tenuous  way,  because  of  the   philosophy  of  sola  scriptura.  “In  quoting  such  authorities,  all  [the  Reformers]  make  the   condition  that  they  quote  such  writings  in  so  far  as  these  are  in  accord  with  the  word  of   God,  Scripture.”69  While  this  might  sound  like  a  “no-­‐brainer,”  what  it  meant  in  practice  is   that  the  doctrine  of  the  early  church  could  not  really  occupy  a  foundational  place  in  the   theology  of  the  Reformation,  regardless  of  how  much  lip-­‐service  (or  actual  devotion)  was   paid  to  the  fathers  and  the  early  councils.  Because  the  criterion  for  truth  never  moved  from   scripture,  and  because  scriptural  interpretation  (as  we  shall  see)  became  highly   controversial,  the  doctrine  of  the  early  church  could  only  be  relevant  in  proportion  to  how   much  any  given  individual  felt  that  such  teachings  were  in  accord  with  what  the  text  of   scripture  said.  This  is  nowhere  more  obvious  than  in  light  of  how  quickly  non-­‐Trinitarian   Protestant  groups  sprung  up,  but  more  on  that  in  a  moment.                                                                                                                   68  Gregory,  p.88   69  Congar,  p.144   Porcu  42     Thus,  with  scripture  alone  as  the  sole  criterion  for  verifiable  truth,  the  Reformation   moved  to  disunity  almost  immediately;  not  in  the  sense  of  a  few  disagreements  about   technicalities,  but  a  multiplicity  of  deep  fractures  about  essential  doctrine  from  which   Protestantism  has  never  really  recovered.  “The  assertion  that  scripture  alone  was  a  self-­‐ sufficient  basis  for  Christian  faith  and  life—independent  in  principle  of  papal,  conciliar,   patristic,  canon-­‐legal,  and/or  any  other  traditional  authorities  .  .  .  produced  not  even  rough   agreement,  but  an  open-­‐ended  welter  of  competing  and  incompatible  interpretations  of   Luther’s  ‘one  certain  rule’  (ein  gewisz  regel)  or  Karlstadt’s  “naked  truth.”70  It  is  easy  to   think  that  the  Reformation  proceeded  as  an  organized  whole  and  then  gradually  separated   into  different  groups  as  time  went  on,  but  this  was  not  so.  Indeed,  it  is  very  misleading  to   even  say  that  Protestantism  splinted  into  many  different  communions,  “as  if  there  ever  was   some  point  in  the  early  Reformation  when  anti-­‐Roman  Christians  had  agreed  among   themselves  about  what  scripture  said  and  God  taught.  There  wasn’t.”71  Indeed,  the   Reformers  found  in  one  another,  almost  immediately,  a  rivalry  more  intense  than  with  the   Roman  church,  and  on  issues  of  doctrinal  centrality.  “After  1521  Luther  had  to  deal  not  so   much  with  the  church  representatives  of  Rome  and  the  papacy,  but  rather  with  dissidents   from  his  own  side,  regarding  Holy  Scripture  as  the  norm  and  measure  of  church  life  as  well   as  justification  and  salvation.”72     The  problem  was  that,  taken  alone,  scripture  did  not  “interpret  itself,”  and  appeals   to  the  truth  of  scripture  became  more  difficult  and  more  problematic  the  more  they  were   made.  Very  early  on,  Luther,  Calvin,  and  Zwingli  (at  the  very  least)  disagreed  on  a                                                                                                                   70  Gregory,  p.94   71  Gregory,  p.91   72  Wriedt,  p.104   Porcu  43   fundamental  level  with  one  another  on  the  manner  of  salvation,  the  role  of  faith  and  the   will,  the  number  and  meaning  of  the  sacraments,  and  the  presence  of  Christ  in  the   Eucharist.  Again,  these  were  not  minor  disagreements  about  technicalities  or  details  of  the   faith,  but  vehement  disagreements  on  essentials  of  the  faith,  often  conducted  in  savagely   hostile  discourse.  What  is  more,  all  of  these  positions  were  systematically  argued  from  each   man’s  interpretation  of  the  text  of  scripture.  More  problematically,  while  Lutheran  and  the   Calvin-­‐inspired  Reformed  churches  insisted  on  conformity  with  the  confessions  of  Nicea   and  Chalcedon,  the  Unitarians  of  the  Reformation  rose  up  to  deny  a  large  variety  of  core   teachings  that  even  Protestants  and  Catholics  agreed  upon,  especially  the  doctrine  of  the   Holy  Trinity.  They  “rejected  ‘essence’  and  ‘homoousios’  as  ‘a  mere  human  fabrication,   which  is  in  no  way  conformable  to  Holy  Writ,’”73  called  Athanasius  an  “Antichrist”  for   defending  the  Trinity,  and  the  Trinitarian  reading  of  the  Bible  as  “an  invention  of  Satan.”74   One  of  the  principle  proponent  of  the  Unitarians,  Servetus,  “pointed  out  that  there  was  ‘not   one  word  to  be  found  in  the  whole  Bible’  about  such  notions  as  Trinity,  person,  and   homoousios,”75  and  so,  Jesus,  they  argued,  should  no  longer  be  thought  of  as  the  “Son  of   God”  at  all.  Again,  all  of  this  was  conducted  on  the  assumption  that  the  scriptures  were  the   exclusive  word  of  truth,  and  “began  with  the  premise  that,  if  the  dogmas  [of  the  Trinity]   were  correct,  ‘Holy  Writ  would  certain  have  taught  them  somewhere  in  a  manner  that  is   clear,  obvious,  and  free  of  verbal  complications  and  ambiguities.’”76  The  crisis,  as  I  see  it,   started  to  become  more  obvious  when  doctrines  (like  the  Trinity)  that  had  always  occupied                                                                                                                   73  Pelikan,  Jaroslav,  The  Christian  Tradition:  A  History  of  the  Development  of  Doctrine,  Vol.  4:  Reformation  of   Church  and  Dogma  (1300-­‐1700),  (Chicago  and  London:  The  University  of  Chicago  Press),  p.326   74  Pelikan,  p.327   75  Pelikan,  p.326   76  Pelikan,  p.326   Porcu  44   a  definitional  place  in  traditional  Christian  theology  were  thrown  out  as  being   “unscriptural.”  Yet  it  is  difficult  to  argue  with  Servetus  on  at  least  that  point:  “homoousios”   is  nowhere  in  scripture.77     While  appeals  to  scripture  broke  down  rather  rapidly,  the  Lutheran  principle  that   the  Holy  Spirit  guide  the  reading  of  scripture  could  be  invoked  to  solve  controversy.  For   certainly,  the  Holy  Spirit  could,  and  ought  to,  guide  the  reader  “into  all  truth,”  and  it  is   worth  remembering  how  instrumental  was  the  inspiration  of  the  Holy  Spirit  for  Luther  in  a   correct  reading  of  scripture.  Yet  this  method  proved  to  be  just  as  bad,  if  not  worse,  for   settling  issues  of  doctrine  and  bringing  about  unity.  “As  with  the  principle  of  sola  scriptura   itself,  claims  of  the  Spirit’s  authenticating,  illuminating  influence  were  voiced  by  those  on   all  sides  of  every  dispute.”78  It  should  come  as  no  surprise  that  those  vehemently  attached   to  their  reading  of  scripture  also  thought  that  their  reading  of  scripture  was  spirit-­‐inspired.   What  arguably  made  it  worse  was  that  there  was  no  way  to  verify  who  actually  had  the   spirit  and  who  did  not,  while  arguing  about  the  correct  interpretation  of  scripture  at  least   had  some  basis  in  reality.  Gregory  jokingly  points  out  that,  at  no  time  during  any  of  the   quarreling  among  the  Reformers,  did  anyone  say,  “You’re  right—I  lack  the  Holy  Spirit’s   guidance  in  my  reading  of  scripture,  and  I  see  that  you  have  it  in  yours.  I  admit  I  was   mistaken,  so  I’ll  trust  you  instead.”79  The  great  irony  is  that,  in  the  midst  of  this  doctrinal   chaos,  every  attempt  to  “step  outside”  the  increasing  fracturing  of  the  Reformation  only                                                                                                                   77  “Homousious”;  literally,  “one  essence”,  is  the  Greek  word  that  the  Fathers  invented  to  describe  the  nature   relationship  of  the  persons  of  the  Trinity,  and  proved  to  be  the  critical  way  heretics  like  Arius  were   distinguished  from  Trinitarian  Christians.     78  Gregory,  p.98   79  Gregory,  p.98   Porcu  45   added  a  new  truth  claim  about  the  “true”  reading  of  scripture  to  an  arena  already  brimming   with  truth  claims,  each  trying  to  assert  its  supremacy  over  the  others.     The  shift  to  the  centrality  of  the  individual  in  this  whole  schema  should  by  now  be   very  clear.  The  radically  diverse  positions  of  the  Reformers,  the  lack  of  any  clear  reading  of   scripture,  and  the  lack  of  any  universally  acknowledged  arbiter  of  interpretation  (since  all   rejected  traditional  Roman  Christianity)  meant  that,  ultimately,  each  individual  was  left  on   his  own  to  decide  for  himself  the  correct  reading  of  scripture  and  which  authorities  he  was   willing  to  take  as  authoritative.  One  very  critical  consequence  of  this  that  I  think  is  often   overlooked  is  that  it  moved  Christianity  away  from  a  mode  of  life  to  a  problem  of  knowledge.   What  I  mean  is  this:  in  traditional  European  Christianity,  doctrine  was  largely  settled  for   the  lay  practitioner,  and  what  was  chiefly  required  was  the  working  out  of  one’s  salvation   “with  fear  and  trembling,”  that  is,  a  concern  with  Christianity  as  a  life  lived  (personal  and   community  prayer,  fasting,  giving  alms,  works  of  mercy  and  charity,  clothing  the  poor,  etc.).   With  the  breakdown  of  doctrinal  unity,  the  issue  became  chiefly  about  sorting  through   competing  truth  claims  to  discover  the  “correct”  reading  of  the  Bible.  This  “tends  not  only   to  reduce  the  relationship  between  God  and  man  to  one  of  faith  and  knowledge,  but  also  to   restrict  this  knowledge  itself  to  what  can  be  gained  from  the  text  .  .  .  Some  Protestants,   having  achieved  a  more  complete  sacramental  experience,  have  themselves  criticized  the   Reformation  for  having  intellectualized  Christianity,  and  for  having  put  the  notional   understanding  of  the  reality  above  its  actual  possession.”80                                                                                                                     80  Congar,  p.151;  for  “some  Protestants”  he  goes  on  to  cite  H.  Asmusssen,  Die  Kirche  und  das  Amt,  Munich,   1939,  p.139,  161,  and  M.  Carrez,  “Le  Principe  scripturaire  et  l’exegese  actuelle”,  in  Foi  et  Vie,  March  1959,  p.5-­‐ 24  (p.6).     Porcu  46   This  practice  of  Christianity  as  assent  had  subjectivism  as  one  of  its  chief  fruits.  As   Protestantism  developed,  and  developed  more  specifically  along  nationalistic  lines,  it  was   perhaps  less  difficult  to  simply  find  one’s  self  identified  with  the  Christianity  of  one’s   culture:  If  Italian,  then  Catholic;  if  German,  than  Lutheran;  if  Dutch,  than  Presbyterian;  etc.   But  as  Protestantism  continued  into  late  modernity,  and  continued  to  splinter  into  more   groups,  culminating  in  the  hyperpluralism  of  the  contemporary  world,  a  doctrinal   relativism  seems  to  have  become  the  norm  for  an  incalculably  vast  number  of  those  who   identify  as  Christian.  The  result  is  that  “large  numbers  of  religious  believers,  themselves   influenced  by  these  cultural  currents  and  the  desire  to  be  inoffensive,  in  effect  relativize   and  subjectivize  their  own  truth  claims,  making  clear  that  they  speak  only  for  themselves,   base  their  opinions  only  on  their  own  experience,  or  choose  their  religious  community   based  ultimately  on  what  they  like  and  what  makes  them  comfortable.”81  But  what  else  is   the  lay  person  to  do  in  the  midst  of  so  many  thousands  of  different  versions  of  Christianity?       The  Spirit  of  the  Enlightenment   In  the  (admittedly  brief)  story  we’ve  told  here,  the  Reformation  spirit  manifests   many  uncomfortable  similarities  to  the  spirit  of  early  modernity  and  the  Enlightenment.  In   the  first  place  we  note  a  distinct  shift  from  tradition  to  the  individual.  As  pointed  out   already,  this  shift  was  unintentional,  but  the  inescapable  fact  is  that,  in  the  formulation  of   sola  scriptura  and  a  distrust  for  traditional  Christianity,  the  burden  of  truth  is  shifted  to  the   individual.  In  the  same  way  that  modern  philosophy  begins  with  a  picture  of  the  individual   sitting  alone  and  working  out  his  autonomous  reason,  so  too  we  could  paint  a  picture  of                                                                                                                   81  Gregory,  p.111-­‐112   Porcu  47   modern  Christianity  as  an  individual  sitting  alone  with  his  autonomous  and  self-­‐ interpreting  Bible.  While  nothing  about  the  Reformers’  intentions  necessitates  this,  the   almost  instantaneous  multiplication  of  radically  different  and  hostile  interpreters  of  the   Bible  across  Europe  seems  to  me  to  be  proof  enough  that  this  was  the  actual  fact  of  the   matter.   In  this  way,  I  see  both  the  Enlightenment  and  the  Reformation  as  essentially  one   movement,  constituting  the  shift  from  the  credulity  of  authority  toward  the  power  of  the   individual.  There  have  been  a  variety  of  discussions  in  recent  scholarship  on  the  precise   relationship  between  secular  modernity  and  the  Protestant  Reformation,  with  various   positions  on  which  movement  most  influenced  (or  caused)  the  other.  Yet,  for  our  purposes   it  is  sufficient  to  note  that  they  share  the  same  spirit  and  the  same  goals  in  their  rejection  of   traditional  authority  and  embrace  of  the  individual  human  subject  as  the  starting  place  for   knowing.  Both  want  to  lay  a  clear  and  certain  foundation  from  which  to  proceed,  without   recourse  to  the  constraints  of  the  authorities.  For  the  Enlightenment,  this  was  couched  as   the  shift  from  the  authority  of  tradition  to  the  authority  of  reason  (or  science).  For  the   Reformation,  this  was  conceived  of  as  the  shift  from  the  authority  of  men  to  the  authority  of   God  (i.e.,  the  Bible).  But  in  both  cases,  men  were  needed  to  wield  that  reason  and  interpret   that  book,  and  so  in  both  cases  this  was  a  shift  from  authority  in  any  sense  to  the  authority   of  the  individual.  This  is  why  it  is  not  difficult  to  see  the  “self-­‐authenticating”  power  of   Scripture  as  simply  the  Christian  stand-­‐in  for  the  Enlightenment’s  notion  of  “autonomous   reason.”     The  similarities  go  further.  Autonomous  reason,  or  science,  was  thought  to  be  a   neutral  authority  that  any  individual  could  access  and  be  corrected  by;  it  relied  on  no   Porcu  48   authority  external  to  itself  and  was,  above  all,  verifiable  by  other  individuals.  The  Bible,   taken  in  this  way,  fulfills  the  same  function:  it  is  accessible  to  all  and  verifiable,  in  the  sense   that  one  doesn’t  have  to  take  someone  else’s  word  for  it,  but  can  check  the  text  for  himself.   In  other  words,  modern  man  only  wants  to  believe  what  he  can  see  for  himself:  scientific   verificationism  and  Biblical  verificationism  are  only  two  expressions  of  the  same  tendency.   The  old,  scholastic  age  of  the  medievals  was  the  age  of  authority,  where  man  still   considered  things  above  and  beyond  himself  as  the  starting  points  for  reality  and  knowing.   Once  the  balance  of  power  shifted  to  modernity,  whether  it  be  in  the  Enlightenment  or  the   Reformation,  it  is  really  the  individual  who  occupies  the  throne.  Protestant  scholar  Leslie   Dunstan  articulates  it  this  way:  “When  man’s  spirit  asserted  itself  in  his  awareness  of   himself  as  a  person,  man  became  his  own  authority  and  considered  his  own  reason  capable   of  finding  truth  for  itself.  When  man  came  to  believe  that,  scholasticism  came  to  an  end.   Man  no  longer  reasoned  within  limiting  principles,  but  directed  his  thinking  as  he,  on  his   own  authority,  chose.”82  A  fine  sentiment,  but  in  the  wake  of  the  hyperpluralism,  nihilism,   and  hopelessly  competing  truth  claims  that  riddle  the  contemporary  intellectual  landscape,   sola  scriptura,  no  more  than  sola  ratio,  has  failed  to  offer  any  solid  foundation.     Conclusion     In  some  sense  I  take  Luther  and  Descartes  to  be  tragic  figures.  Both  of  them  seem  to   operate  within  their  own  tradition,  trying  honestly  to  work  out  theological  or  philosophical   problems,  but  unintentionally  have  the  effect  of  shifting  the  starting  point  for  knowledge  to   the  individual,  and  consequently  spawning  entire  historical  eras  that  radically  departed                                                                                                                   82  Dunstan,  Leslie  J.,  Protestantism,  ed.  (New  York:  George  Braziller,  1961),  p.21   Porcu  49   from  anything  they  would  have  condoned.  Wriedt  says  that  “all  his  efforts  make  Luther  –   against  his  will!  –  one  of  the  founders  of  a  new  epoch.”83  And  so  we  find  ourselves  back  at   the  same  problem  of  knowledge  under  which  all  of  modernity  has  struggled.  Modern   Christianity,  no  less  than  the  philosophy  of  modernity  in  general,  is  stuck  between  the   categories  of  the  verifiable  “objective”  and  the  private  “subjective.”  The  former,  as  Biblical   literalism,  threatens  to  undermine  traditional  Christian  beliefs,  from  the  Trinity  to  the   divinity  of  Christ,  or,  to  take  the  Reformation  critique  seriously,  to  place  power  absolutely   in  the  hands  of  flawed  autocrats  who  will  demolish  Christianity  in  their  own  way.  In  the   latter  case  of  subjectivism,  the  scattered  beliefs  of  individual  believers  has  no  guarantee  of   fostering  unity  among  Christians,  either  doctrinally  or  otherwise,  and  a  Christianity  of  the   isolated,  self-­‐sufficient  individual  seems  no  more  Christian  than  a  Christianity  devoid  of  the   Trinity.     At  the  same  time,  I  am  not  going  to  suggest  that  all  Protestants  everywhere  are   hopelessly  trapped  in  the  wake  of  this  bad  philosophy,  and  not  simply  because  “Protestant”   is  too  broad  a  term  to  generalize.  Savvy  and  responsible  Protestants  throughout  the  last   few  centuries  have  acknowledged  the  reality  of  the  problem  and  have  not  been  gentle  in   their  criticisms  of  a  mindless  sola  scriptura,  the  multifaceted  fracturing  of  the  Christian   community,  or  the  hyper-­‐pluralism  and  relativism  that  that  necessitates.  Older  Protestant   thinkers  have  acknowledged  the  deep  extent  to  which  Christianity  is  not  about  a  book.   Ebeling  phrases  this  nicely:   It  has,  of  course,  always  been  recognized  that  Christianity  did  not  begin  with  the   New  Testament.  The  fundamental  fact  of  revelation  is  not  a  book.  The  New   Testament  writings  should  rather  be  regarded  as  the  deposit  of  the  previous                                                                                                                   83  Wriedt,  p.113   Porcu  50   preaching,  or  of  its  fulfillment  in  the  genuine  epistles;  in  any  case,  as  the  result  of  the   revelation.  In  reality  the  canon  came  into  existence  as  the  outcome  of  a  long  process.   The  very  pattern  of  the  New  testament  demonstrates  its  origin  from  oral   transmission,  the  more  so  in  that  Jesus  himself,  and  to  a  large  extent  the  apostles  as   well,  left  nothing  written.84     Ebeling’s  picture  of  the  relationship  between  the  Bible,  revelation,  and  Christianity  as  a   whole  hints  at  another  perspective,  one  in  which  the  rigid  categories  of  the  subjective  and   the  objective  are  critically  reevaluated,  but  which  avoids  the  movement  toward   dehumanization  implicit  in  a  worldview  where  only  verifiability  is  valid.  To  that  end,  we   will  now  turn  to  a  philosophical  deconstruction  of  the  Enlightenment’s  assumptions  about   truth,  and  the  alternative  mode  of  knowing  suggested  by  the  hermeneutic  movement  of  late   modernity.                                                                                                                                 84  Ebeling,  Gerhard,  The  Word  of  God  and  Tradition,  trans.  S.  H.  Hooke  (London:  Collins  Sons  &  Co,  1968),   p.110   Porcu  51     Introduction     Chapter  3:   The  Hermeneutical  Alternative   So  far  our  argument  has  gone  something  like  this:  in  the  medieval  period,  the   approach  to  knowing  was  primarily  one  of  credulity.  The  medievals  started  with  a  default   position  of  believing  things,  and  organized  their  medieval  system  in  a  large  part  as  a   synthesis  of  a  diversity  of  truth  claims.  As  modernity  dawned,  skepticism  became  more   prominent  and  Descartes  attempted  to  engage  skepticism  on  its  strongest  terms,  doubting   everything  that  could  be  doubted,  but  still  coming  to  validate  all  of  the  traditional  beliefs   about  reality  (that  there  was  a  Good,  a  God,  an  external  world,  a  real  self,  etc.).  Yet,  though   he  did  not  intend  this,  Descartes  made  a  critical  shift  by  starting  his  inquiry  with  the   isolated,  individual  knowing  subject.  This  approach  of  starting  with  the  individual  and  then   trying  to  arrive,  by  reason,  at  other  truths  was  to  become  programmatic  for  the   Enlightenment’s  methodology.  Philosophy  became  focused  on  finding  the  correct  method   for  bridging  the  gap  between  the  subject  and  the  world,  and  by  the  height  of  the   Enlightenment,  nothing  was  valid  unless  it  was  established  by  the  very  specific  reason-­‐ science  methodology  of  the  Enlightenment  which  demanded  repeat  verifiability.   Everything  that  didn’t  fall  into  that  verifiable  category  was  relegated  to  the  realm  of  the   subjective,  which  was  thought  of  as  a  lower  order  of  knowledge.  This  dichotomy  between   the  subjective  and  the  objective  blossomed  into  a  variety  of  problems,  including  the   marginalization  of  essential  dimensions  of  human  life  and  the  inevitable  rise  of  relativism   and  nihilism.  The  Reformation  movement  made  a  similar  move  away  from  authority  and   toward  the  individual  knowing  subject,  with  many  similar  attempts  at  an  autonomous,   Porcu  52   independent,  verifiable  source  for  truth.  This  had  the  same  kinds  of  fallout:  essential   doctrine  marginalized  or  removed  for  not  fitting  with  the  method,  crucial  truths  locked  in   subjective  expressions,  and  widespread  disunity.  In  the  Reformation  as  well  as  the   Enlightenment,  the  ‘objective’,  approved  method  for  knowing  was  not  adequate  to  sustain,   by  itself,  an  essentially  human  or  Christian  life,  while  the  subjective  category  lacked  the   ability  to  be  corrected  when  it  went  astray  or  to  foster  any  kind  of  unity.     I  have  already  suggested  that  a  third  way  of  knowing  is  required  to  break  the  false   dichotomy  between  the  objective  and  the  subjective,  and  in  order  to  do  that,  we  must  call   into  question  some  of  the  fundamental  assumptions  that  gave  rise  to  these  categories.  To   do  that,  I  want  to  turn  to  Hans-­‐Georg  Gadamer  and  the  hermeneutical  movement  to  see   what  sort  of  critique  can  be  offered  against  the  Enlightenment.     Gadamer  and  the  Hermeneutic  Critique  of  Modernity     The  movement  of  philosophical  hermeneutics  is  an  attempt  to  discover  the  nature  of   human  understanding.  It  began,  arguably,  with  Heidegger,  but  was  completed  by  Gadamer.   Unsatisfied  with  the  conclusions  of  his  predecessors,  especially  Dilthey  and   Schleiermacher,  Gadamer  set  forth  to  bring  about  a  better  explanation  for  human  knowing,   beginning  with  a  critique  of  the  Enlightenment’s  notion  of  objectivity.     In  Chapter  1,  we  discussed  the  Enlightenment’s  concern  with  knowing,  namely  that   authority  and  tradition  were  to  be  repudiated,  and  autonomous  reason,  in  the  hands  of  the   individual  knowing  subject,  would  carry  on  the  task  of  understanding  the  world.  This  gave   rise  to  a  distinct  concern  with  method.  The  goal  of  this  method  was  to  strip  the  individual   knower  of  everything  that  would  get  in  the  way  of  analysis,  so  as  to  be  freed  from  the   Porcu  53   burdens  of  authority  or  influence  in  all  its  forms,  especially  those  of  prejudice.  The   Enlightenment,  says  Gadamer,  wanted  to  understand  things  “correctly,”  “i.e.,  rationally  and   without  prejudice.”85  Prejudice  was  thought  to  be  in  the  same  vein  as  authority,  in  that  it   was  something  superfluous  that  influenced  the  judgment  and  reasoning  power  of  the   subject,  keeping  him  from  enjoying  a  fully  “autonomous”  reason.  Thus  the  prejudices  from   within  the  subject,  and  the  authority  (especially  of  tradition)  outside  the  subject  must  be   eliminated  in  order  for  the  subject  to  be  fully  reasonable  and  achieve  objectivity.  Gadamer   phrases  it  this  way:  “The  fundamental  presupposition  of  the  Enlightenment,  [is]  namely   that  [the]  methodologically  disciplined  use  of  reason  can  safeguard  us  from  all  error.”86     Gadamer  found  all  of  this  problematic,  if  not  contradictory.  “The  overcoming  of  all   prejudices,”  he  writes,  “this  global  demand  of  the  Enlightenment,  will  itself  prove  to  be  a   prejudice.”87  Gadamer  explains  that  it  was  not  until  the  Enlightenment  that  the  concept  of   prejudice  acquired  the  negative  connotation  with  which  most  of  us  today  are  familiar.   “Actually  ‘prejudice’  means  a  judgment  that  is  rendered  before  all  the  elements  that   determine  a  situation  have  been  finally  examined  .  .  .  thus  ‘prejudice’  certainly  does  not   necessarily  mean  a  false  judgment,  but  part  of  the  idea  is  that  it  can  have  either  a  positive   or  negative  value.”88  This  concept  of  prejudice  as  merely  “pre-­‐judgment”,  especially  a  pre-­‐ judgment  that  is  open  to  correction,  is  far  from  entirely  negative.  But  Gadamer  goes  on  to   assert  that  prejudices  are  a  natural,  inescapable  part  of  all  understanding,  specifically  that   all  understanding  involves  a  prior  projection  of  meaning  on  to  the  object  of  understanding,                                                                                                                   85  Gadamer,  Hans-­‐Georg,  Truth  and  Method,  trans.  Joel  Weinsheimer  and  Donald  G.  Marshall  (New  York:  The   Crossroad  Publishing  Corporation,  1992),  p.272   86  Gadamer,  p.277   87  Gadamer,  p.276   88  Gadamer,  p.270.   Porcu  54   and  that  this  cannot  be  done  away  with.  For  Gadamer,  this  means  that,  “all  understanding   involves  projecting  a  meaning  upon  one’s  perceptions  that  is  not  strictly  contained  in  the   perceptions  themselves.”89  Thus,  “consciousness  is  to  be  seen  not  as  a  tabula  rasa  but  as  an   active  determiner  of  meaning,  [and]  .  .  .  the  very  perception  of  objects  involves  projections   of  meaning,  or  interpretations.”90  For  Gadamer,  “pure  seeing  and  pure  hearing  are   dogmatic  abstractions  that  artificially  reduce  phenomena.  Perception  always  includes   meaning.”91       The  philosopher  Michael  Polanyi,  working  in  the  same  tradition,  takes  this  idea  a   step  further.  More  than  just  projecting  pre-­‐judged  meaning  on  something  else,  he  explains   that  knowledge  is  actually  acquired  in  the  first  place  by  a  personal  participation  in  the  thing   that  you  come  to  know.  Experts  “acquire  their  expert  knowledge  in  part  from  textbooks,   but  these  texts  are  of  no  use  to  them  without  the  accompanying  training  of  the  eye,  the  ear,   and  the  sense  of  touch,”92  all  things  that  must  be  done  by  participation  in  the  thing  to  be   known  rather  than  as  detached  a  subject.  To  strip  the  subject  of  his  prejudices  in  these   cases  would  obviously  be  to  strip  the  subject  precisely  of  his  relevant  expert  knowledge.   The  emphasis  should  be  here  on  the  word  indwelling,  which  Polanyi  uses  to  refer  to  our   personal  relationship  to  knowledge.  We  know  because  we  are  part  of  something,  because   we  have  trained  our  prejudices  or  acquired  them  by  being  part  of  a  particular  domain  of   knowing.  The  personal  element  is  always  “an  integral  part  of  all  knowledge”93  and  cannot                                                                                                                   89  Warnke,  Georgia,  Gadamer:  Hermeneutics,  Tradition,  and  Reason  (Stanford:  Stanford  University  Press,   1987),  p.75   90  Warnke,  p.76   91  Gadamer,  p.92   92  Polanyi,  Michael,  and  Prosch,  Harry,  Meaning  (Chicago  and  London:  University  of  Chicago  Press,  1977),   p.43   93  Polanyi,  p.44   Porcu  55   be  dispensed  with.  The  necessity  of  personal  involvement  is  the  reason  we  have  experts   and  defer  to  them  for  their  expert  opinions,  and  also  why  we  value  someone  having   experience.  To  give  an  example,  let’s  say  that  a  first  year  student  of  Latin  has  taken  his   second  year  to  memorize  several  thousands  vocabulary  items  and  all  the  grammatical   forms  and  structures  in  his  second  year  book,  but  has  done  hardly  any  actual  reading,   speaking,  or  composition  of  the  Latin  language.  Let  us  also  say  that  he  knows  as  many   words  and  grammatical  constructions  as  another  student,  but  that  the  second  student  has   learned  all  of  this  through  the  rigorous  reading,  speaking,  and  writing  of  the  language,  and   is  therefore  familiar  with  those  words  and  structures  in  their  natural  setting,  as  it  were.   Though  both  students  have  an  equal  amount  of  static,  or  textbook,  knowledge  about  the   language,  the  second  student  is  a  far  superior  Latinist  because  his  knowledge  is  an  act  of   indwelling  in  the  language.  I  think  this  is  why,  culturally,  we  make  the  distinction  between   “book  smarts”  and  “street  smarts”  with  a  sort  of  condescension  toward  those  who  are   merely  book  smart  but  do  not  know  how  to  handle  themselves  practically  in  the  world.  For   these  reasons,  Polanyi  concludes  that  “All  knowing  is  personal  knowing  –  participation   through  indwelling,”94  and  this  includes  scientific  knowledge,  no  less  than  poetry.  “Science   will  then  no  longer  seem  to  us  to  require  that  we  study  man  and  society  in  a  detached   manner,  and  we  shall  have  been  restored  to  an  acceptance  of  our  position  as  human   members  of  a  human  society.”95     Another  essential  component  of  the  idea  of  indwelling  is  the  reality  of  time  and   history.  Gadamer  explains  that  all  human  life,  even  the  most  free,  is  “limited  and  qualified                                                                                                                   94  Polanyi,  p.44   95  Polanyi,  p.44-­‐45   Porcu  56   in  various  ways”96  just  by  existing  in  time.  That  is,  the  fact  that  we  exist  in  time  (and  are   finite)  places  significant  limits  on  everything  that  we  can  know  or  do.  In  the  same  way  that   the  individual  knowing  subject  cannot  be  divorced  from  his  own  personal  participation  in   knowledge,  neither  can  he  be  divorced  from  the  reality  of  his  being  situated  in  time.  The   moving  stream  of  human  experience  operates  in  and  through  time,  and  one  is  always   invariably,  to  one  degree  or  another,  a  product  of  one’s  time,  whether  standing  on  the   shoulders  of  giants,  anticipating  the  future,  or  simply  dealing  with  the  limitations  or   advantages  of  one’s  own  day  and  age.  This  historical  dimension  to  human  beings  is  one  that   the  Enlightenment  largely  ignores,  but  is  a  fundamental  dimension  to  knowledge.  This   historical  limitation  is  why  “the  idea  of  an  absolute  reason  is  not  a  possibility  for  historical   humanity.  Reason  exists  for  us  only  in  concrete,  historical  terms  –  i.e.,  it  is  not  its  own   master  but  remains  constantly  dependent  on  the  given  circumstances  in  which  it   operates.”97  This  is  why,  for  Gadamer,  “the  prejudices  of  the  individual,  far  more  than  his   judgments,  constitute  the  historical  reality  of  his  being.”98  But  for  Gadamer,  this  is  not   problematic,  because  “our  historicity  is  not  a  restriction  but  the  very  principle  of   understanding."99  Like  the  reality  of  the  personal  involvement  in  knowledge,  our  historicity   provides  the  very  medium  through  which  we  can  even  know  things  at  all.  “It  follows  that   one’s  historical  and  linguistic  situation  presents  no  barrier  to  understanding  but  is  rather   the  horizon  or  perspective  from  which  understanding  first  becomes  possible  .  .  .  One’s                                                                                                                   96  Gadamer,  p.276   97  Gadamer,  p.276   98  Gadamer,  p.277   99  Grondin,  Jean,  Introduction  to  Philosophical  Hermeneutics,  trans.  Joel  Weinsheimer  (New  Haven  and   London:  Yale  University  Press,  1994),  p.111   Porcu  57   language  is  thus  not  a  limit  to  understanding  but  the  orientation  that  permits  it  in  the  first   place.”100   These  observations  mean  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  the  Enlightenment’s  neutral   space  from  which  to  judge  things,  stripped  of  every  prejudice,  so  that  an  object  of   knowledge  can  be  analyzed  entirely  “objectively.”  The  Enlightenment  picture  is  of  a   detached  observer  looking  down  on  objects  of  knowledge  and  then  lifting  them  up  out  of   their  context;  i.e.,  by  acquiring  knowledge.  But  as  we  have  seen,  this  is  not  how  knowledge   works,  since  meaning  is  always  projected  and  interpreted,  the  self  is  always  intimately   involved  in  a  deeply  personal  way,  and  the  historical  reality  of  human  knowing  provides  an   inescapable  context.  Knowledge  is  not  something  we  acquire  from  outside  of  us,  but  is  an   unfolding  of  that  which  we  are  already  involved  in.  Moreover,  because  knowledge  does  not   work  this  way,  any  attempt  to  strip  away  these  facets  in  the  name  of  an  “unbiased,”   “unprejudiced,”  or  “objective”  approach  actually  strips  away  the  very  mediums  by  which   we  know  things  at  all.     Now,  I  don’t  think  that  these  observations  are  very  revolutionary,  mostly  because   normal  people  going  about  their  lives  seem  to  implicitly  understand  that  this  is  how   knowledge  works.  On  that  account,  I  should  think  that  there  would  be  no  objections  to  this   model,  except  for  the  fact  that  at  this  point  the  loyal  devotee  of  Enlightenment  methodology   is  crying  out  in  fear  of  subjectivity  or  relativism.  Certainly,  the  argument  goes,  we  have   shown  that  there  are  deep  problems  with  a  merely  “objective”  approach  to  knowing,  but   have  we  not,  in  liberating  ourselves  from  the  one  problem,  plunged  ourselves  into  a  far   deeper  one,  namely  that  of  relativism?  If  it  is  true  that  I  can  never  escape  my  prejudices,  or                                                                                                                   100  Warnke,  p.82   Porcu  58   my  history,  or  my  personal  involvement  in  knowledge,  how  can  I  ever  get  outside  myself  to   confirm  anything  as  certain  at  all?  This  is  the  concern  to  which  I  would  now  like  to  turn.     The  Escape  From  Subjectivism     First  of  all,  subjectivity  in  the  sense  of  a  relativism  of  total  arbitrariness  is  not   possible  within  the  hermeneutical  framework  we’ve  established  so  far.  “To  be  sure,   hermeneutics  does  maintain  that  the  experiences  we  have  with  truth  are  embedded  in  our   situation  .  .  .  but  this  is  just  what  renders  relativism  untenable  in  the  sense  that  ‘anything   goes.’  No  one  is  of  a  mind  to  accept  everything  as  equally  justified  and  equally  valuable.”101   This  is  because  the  contexts  we’ve  explored  –  historical,  personal,  prejudicial  –  do  not  allow   for  an  arbitrary  relativism  that  equates  all  things  in  terms  of  value.  It  is  the  nature  of  these   sorts  of  contexts  that  they  place  limitations  on  value.  The  cloth  merchant,  situated  by  the   various  contexts  of  his  personal  involvement,  knows  a  high-­‐quality  piece  of  fabric  from  a   poor  quality  one.  It  is  this  personal  involvement  in  knowledge  that  absolutely  precludes  his   seeing  every  cloth  as  equal  in  quality.  Therefore,  subjectivity  in  the  sense  of  a  relativism  is   not  even  applicable  here.  The  more  accurate  critique  is  the  question  of  how  it  is  we  can   have  these  standards  at  all,  and  how  it  is,  in  the  absence  of  a  principle  of  absolute   objectivity,  we  can  ever  confirm  what  we  think  we  know  to  be  true.  To  put  this  question   another  way,  if  we  follow  Gadamer  in  affirming  that  “we  must  acknowledge  the  fact  that   there  are  legitimate  prejudices,”102  how  is  it  that  we  are  able  to  decide  between  true   prejudices  and  false  ones  without  reference  to  an  “absolute”  standard?                                                                                                                   101  Grondin,  p.141   102  Gadamer,  p.277   Porcu  59   To  answer  this  question,  Gadamer  explains  that  we  use  a  number  of  processes  to   correct  error,  pursue  meaning,  and  obtain  knowledge.  The  first  process  is  the  hermeneutic   circle,  developed  by  Heidegger,  which  explains  the  relation  of  the  part  to  the  whole,  and  is   premised  on  the  coherence  of  the  thing  examined.  Simply  put,  this  idea  says  that  the  part   must  be  understood  in  relation  to  the  whole,  and  the  whole  must  be  understood  in  relation   to  the  part.  While  this  is  obviously  circular,  it  is  so  in  a  way  that  is  strikingly  meaningful.  If   we  take  the  instance  of  a  word  in  a  sentence  (especially  in  the  case  of  an  ambiguous  word   like  a  homonym),  that  word  can  only  be  in  some  sense  understood  by  the  context  of  the   sentence.  Yet,  that  word  is  part  of  the  very  sentence  that  helps  to  provide  the  context  in   which  it  is  interpreted.  This  is  not  a  fallacious  circle  any  more  than  it  is  a  mere  hypothesis:   it  is  precisely  how  we  read  texts  and  understand  words  and  their  contexts.  It  goes  back  to   our  understanding  of  personal  involvement  in  knowledge,  and  especially  to  prejudice:  we   may  start  a  sentence  with  a  pre-­‐judgment  about  what  a  particular  word  is,  but  once  we   reach  the  end  of  the  sentence,  this  prejudice  is  challenged  and  we  are  forced  to  re-­‐read  the   sentence  again  with  a  new  perspective.  “Fundamentally,”  Gadamer  insists,  “understanding   is  always  a  movement  in  this  kind  of  circle,  which  is  why  the  repeated  return  from  the   whole  to  the  parts,  and  vice  versa,  is  essential.”103  In  this  way  it  is  not  a  closed,  static  circle   with  no  beginning  or  end  point,  and  therefore  no  logical  foundation;  it  is  more  like  a  spiral   that  grows  bigger  as  it  loops  back  around,  but  each  time  the  loop  becomes  bigger  as   knowledge  increases.     The  hermeneutic  circle  is  even  bigger  than  this  when  we  realize  how  contextualized   everything  is:  we  have  described  the  hermeneutic  circle  in  terms  of  the  relationship                                                                                                                   103  Gadamer,  p.190   Porcu  60   between  a  single  word  and  the  whole  sentence,  but  the  identical  movement  and   relationship  exists  between  the  sentence  and  the  paragraph,  the  paragraph  and  the   chapter,  the  chapter  and  the  text,  the  text  and  the  other  texts  in  the  genre,  the  author’s   corpus,  the  time  period  the  text  was  written  in,  the  culture  that  produced  it,  and,  beyond   that,  the  whole  historical  and  interpretative  tradition  that  surrounds  the  work.  Gadamer   affirms  that  “this  circle  is  constantly  expanding,  since  the  concept  of  the  whole  is  relative,   and  being  integrated  in  ever  larger  contexts  always  affects  the  understanding  of  the   individual  part.”104  All  the  while,  the  meaning  of  the  individual  word  in  that  sentence  is  still   being  challenged  and  reappraised  in  each  level  of  this  spiral  of  meaning,  as  is  each  level  in   relation  to  each  other  level.  Of  course,  in  considering  texts,  we  have  only  used  one  example.   This  same  circular  relation  between  part  and  whole  applies  to  every  example  of  knowing,   from  interpersonal  interactions,  scientific  theories,  the  interpretation  of  poetry,  and  our   encounters  with  the  physical  world  itself.     But  the  hermeneutic  circle  by  itself  is  not  quite  enough  to  put  to  rest  all  our   concerns  about  standards  of  knowledge  and  certainty,  as  there  is  still  the  possibility  of   simply  “getting  it  wrong”  either  in  part  or  in  whole,  and  missing  the  full  meaning  of  what   we  are  investigating.  In  order  to  stave  off  error,  a  number  of  assumptions  need  to  be  made.   The  first  is  the  assumption  of  meaning  and  coherence.  We  must  assume  that  there  is   coherence  or  consistency  in  the  thing  we  are  examining;  that  is,  it  means  something.  If  the   parts  and  the  whole  can  continually  inform  one  another  in  the  hermeneutical  circle,  this   presupposes  a  coherent,  meaningful  whole,  and  that  one  can  “use  the  regulative  ideal  of                                                                                                                   104  Gadamer,  p.190   Porcu  61   unity  to  assess  the  adequacy  of  one’s  interpretations  of  its  various  parts.”105  Another   assumption  that  needs  to  be  made  is  the  assumption  that  whatever  one  is  examining  has   the  potential  to  be  true,  and  that  one  therefore  has  something  to  learn  from  the  encounter.   This  means  being  open  to  one’s  views  being  challenged  (or  being  false)  and  is  an  obvious   pre-­‐requisite  to  avoid  being  trapped  in  one’s  own  initial  pre-­‐judgments.  “Conversely,  if  one   abandons  the  criterion  of  truth  from  the  start,  one  will  have  no  way  of  deciding  whether   the  implausibility  of  the  text  derives  from  its  intrinsic  failures  or  one’s  own  inability  to   understand  it.”106     But  even  if  all  of  these  assumptions  are  applied  to  aid  the  hermeneutic  circle,  there   is  still  no  guarantee  that  one  will  interpret  the  meaning  of  something  (Gadamer  calls  it  a   “truth  event”)  correctly.  Thus,  it  is  necessary  to  be  aware  of  the  concept  of  the  “horizon.”   Gadamer  acknowledges  the  limitations  of  the  individual  knowing  subject,  explaining  that   time,  place,  culture,  and  language  (among  other  factors)  contribute  to  the  limitations  under   which  every  subject  must  operate.  Gadamer  describes  this  as  the  subject’s  “horizon,”  which   is  “the  range  of  vision  that  includes  everything  that  can  be  seen  from  a  particular  vantage   point.  Applying  this  to  the  thinking  mind,  we  speak  of  narrowness  of  horizon,  of  the   possible  expansion  of  horizon,  of  the  opening  up  of  new  horizons,  and  so  forth.”107  Horizons   are  the  bounds  and  positions  from  which  we  operate  within  our  situated  context,  but  one’s   horizon  must  be  cultivated  and  utilized  correctly  in  order  for  us  to  come  to  know  things.  “A   person  who  has  no  horizon  does  not  see  far  enough  and  hence  overvalues  what  is  nearest   to  him.  On  the  other  hand,  ‘to  have  a  horizon’  means  not  being  limited  to  what  is  nearby  but                                                                                                                   105  Warnke,  p.83   106  Warnke,  p.86   107  Gadamer,  p.302   Porcu  62   being  able  to  see  beyond  it.”108  Having  a  horizon  is,  in  a  large  part,  about  having  the   appropriate  perspective  on  things.  One  ought  to  have  a  horizon  at  all,  or  else  one’s  world  of   knowledge  becomes  self-­‐absorbed  and  inaccurate  with  reference  to  the  greater  context.   Likewise,  someone  who  has  a  horizon  “knows  the  relative  significance  of  everything  within   this  horizon,  whether  it  is  near  or  far,  great  or  small,”109  and  is  capable  of  expanding  his   horizon  and  having  that  horizon  meet  another  horizon  in  a  way  that  profoundly  expands  its   meaning.  Understanding  one’s  historical  situation  “involves  acquiring  an  appropriate   historical  horizon,  so  that  what  we  are  trying  to  understand  can  be  seen  in  its  true   dimensions."110     With  the  historical  horizon  in  mind  as  a  potential  resource,  one  is  able  not  only  to  be   aware  of  one’s  own  historical  prejudices  (pre-­‐judgments),  but  can  also  enlist  the  whole   history  of  knowledge  and  interpretation  of  a  given  subject  to  help  challenge  and  correct   one’s  views.  This  is  why  the  historical,  and  especially  the  traditional,  is  so  important  to   Gadamer,  as  the  interpretative  tradition  that  surrounds  any  given  subject,  from  art  to   religion  to  science,  plays  a  quintessential  role  in  unfolding  new  knowledge,  correcting  old   pre-­‐judgments,  and  expanding  one’s  horizons.  The  movement  of  the  hermeneutic  circle,  to   put  it  another  way,  must  keep  expanding  out,  referencing  especially  the  whole   interpretative  tradition  of  a  thing  in  order  to  be  complete.  This  is  also  the  way  in  which  lay   people,  who  do  not  have  the  leisure  or  skill  to  re-­‐invent  every  wheel  in  every  subject,  come   to  acquire  all  kinds  of  knowledge  about  the  world,  and  can  reasonably  come  to  know  a                                                                                                                   108  Gadamer,  p.302   109  Gadamer,  p.302   110  Gadamer,  p.303   Porcu  63   great  many  things  conveniently,  by  having  it  “passed  down”  to  them  via  tradition.111  I   “know”  that  H2O  is  water,  not  because  I  have  performed  any  experiments  or  investigations   of  the  thing  itself,  but  because  I  am  located  in  the  historical  tradition  of  natural  science  that   has  learned  this  and  faithfully  passed  it  down  to  me.  I  will  return  to  the  important  subject   of  tradition  in  a  later  section  of  this  chapter,  as  well  as  in  Chapter  4,  but  I  want  to  take  a   minute  to  address  what  I  hope  is  the  last,  fledgling,  “objectivist”  rejoinder  to  the  process  of   knowledge  we  have  so  far  described.     The  End  of  Chronic  Doubt       When  we  initially  described  the  limitations  and  general  deconstruction  of  the   Enlightenment’s  goal  of  objective  knowing,  I  promised  an  escape  from  the  abyss  of   subjectivity  in  which  no  knowledge  was  possible.  Though  we  have  extrapolated  on  the   hermeneutic  circle,  the  necessary  assumptions  of  coherence,  humility  toward  learning,  the   way  horizons  must  be  expanded,  and  the  centrality  of  historicity  and  the  interpretative   tradition,  it  is  true  that  we  have  still  not  located  a  new  “objective”  standard  of  knowing  to   save  us  from  subjectivism.  That  is,  at  every  point  of  the  hermeneutic  process,  we  could  be   wrong,  and  even  if  we  catch  the  error  via  any  of  the  movements  of  the  hermeneutic  circle,   there’s  no  guarantee  that  we  will.  A  wrong  prejudice  might  never  get  worked  out  of  one’s   individual  hermeneutic  circle.  Even  if  we  reference  our  interpretative  tradition  and  the   interpretations  of  others  to  catch  our  error,  expanding  our  horizons  and  deepening  our   historicity,  we  still  have  no  guarantee,  no  perfect  method  that  can  be  applied  to  achieve  the                                                                                                                   111  tradere,  Lat.,  to  deliver,  to  pass  down.   Porcu  64   “straight  truth”  of  a  matter.  I  assent  that  all  of  this  is  true,  but  that  it  is  entirely   unproblematic.     First,  I  want  to  reiterate  that  this  insistence  on  “objective”  knowledge  or   “autonomous  reason”  means  exactly  nothing.  We  of  course  use  reason  all  of  the  time,  in  a   largely  detached  manner,  to  come  to  conclusions  about  various  things  (mathematics  comes   quickly  to  mind).  Yet,  this  must  always  be  done  in  the  view  that  “our  ideas  as  to  what   constitutes  an  objective  judgment  or  rational  decision  are  themselves  ideas  of  a  particular   tradition.”112  The  massive  implications  of  the  reality  that  we  are  historical,  finite  beings  are   entirely  left  out  of  a  notion  of  “objective”  knowledge.  This  is  why  “Gadamer  holds  that  the   error  of  the  Enlightenment  is  to  have  assumed  a  wholly  ahistorical  idea  of  reason  and   hence  to  have  contrasted  reason  and  method  on  the  one  hand,  to  prejudice  and  tradition  on   the  other.”113  We  have  seen  that  any  attempt  to  strip  away  our  historicity,  our  pre-­‐ judgments,  and  the  other  crucial  elements  of  our  context  actually  removes  the  very   medium  by  which  we  can  be  said  to  know  anything.  Yet,  the  assumption  that  we  therefore   fall  into  an  inescapable  subjectivity  that  is  incapable  of  grasping  truth  as-­‐it-­‐is  is  to   fundamentally  beg  the  question  in  favour  of  the  Enlightenment’s  prejudices.  To  understand   this  we  must  return  to  the  starting  point  of  the  discussion  about  knowledge,  i.e.,  to   Descartes.     Descartes  starts  with  the  premise  that  whatever  can  be  doubted  should  be  doubted   until  it  is  proven  true.  Regardless  of  his  intentions,  this  is  the  paradigm  for  all  of  modernity,   and  grows  into  the  deep-­‐seated  assumption  that  there  is  a  problematic  gap  between   subject  and  object,  or  the  mind  and  the  world,  as  the  natural  state  of  things,  and  that  a                                                                                                                   112  Warnke,  p.80   113  Warnke,  p.80   Porcu  65   method  must  be  used  to  bridge  this  gap  such  that  the  mind  can  know  reality.  But  this  is,  of   course,  just  an  assumption,  and  Descartes’  evidence  to  support  it  is  paltry  at  best:  because   the  material  world  is  sometimes  not  perfectly  clear,  Descartes  takes  himself  to  be   “deceived”  and  concludes  that  all  data  needs  to  be  doubted  until  it  is  proven  true.  Needless   to  say,  there  is  no  reason  that  this  conclusion  follows  from  those  premises.  Once  this   problematic  assumption  is  made,  though,  of  course  we  are  locked  into  a  neurotic  and   circular  attempt  to  discover  or  invent  a  method  to  bridge  the  gap  between  knower  and   known.  The  irony  is  that  while  these  complicated  conclusions  about  whether  or  not  we  can   know  anything  at  all  are  being  worked  out,  everyone  meanwhile  goes  about  their  lives   confident  in  reality,  causation,  the  existence  of  the  material  world  and  other  minds,  the   existence  of  the  past,  and  any  number  of  other  beliefs  that  are  not  provable  by  the  best   Enlightenment  methodology.114     I  am  therefore  tempted  to  conclude  that  the  major  epistemological  difference   between  modernity  and  pre-­‐modernity  is  that  modernity  is  committed  to  the  assumption   “incredulous  until  proven  credulous,”  while  pre-­‐modernity,  especially  the  medieval  era,  is   committed  to  the  assumption  “credulous  until  proven  incredulous.”115  This  assumption   affects  everything  about  the  discussion,  and  determines  if  there  is  a  “problem  of   subjectivism”  or  not.  If  things  are  incredulous  until  proven  credulous,  then,  again,  of  course   the  knower  is  trapped  in  his  head  of  delusions  until  a  method  can  free  him,  and  all  truth                                                                                                                   114  Indeed,  a  whole  complicated  paper  by  Plantinga  was  needed  just  to  untangle  the  tradition  from  the  needs   of  Enlightenment  philosophy  and  make  a  space  that  even  allowed  for  “properly  basic  beliefs”  to  be  acceptable.   The  paper  was  for  theism,  but  it  sufficiently  covered  the  tension  between  properly  basic  beliefs  and   foundationalism.  Cf.  Alvin  Plantinga,  “Is  Belief  in  God  Properly  Basic?”  (Noûs,  vol.  15,  no.  1,  1981,   http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215239),  pp.41-­‐51     115  This  goes  back  to  Lewis’  comments  about  how  the  medievals  found  it  difficult  to  believe  that  what  the   ancient  authors  said  was  simply  “false.”     Porcu  66   must  be  of  such  a  rigor  as  to  approach  tautological  verifiability  before  one  can  even  chance   assenting  to  it.  All  error  is  the  omnipresent  threat  of  Descartes’  Evil  Deceiver  relentlessly   undermining  all  truth  claims.  But  if,  on  the  other  hand,  one  assumes  that  the  universe  itself   is  basically  coherent,  and  that  things  should  be  looked  at  credulously  until  reason  is  given   to  the  contrary,  all  the  darkness  and  neurosis  of  doubt  are  gone.  Assenting  to  error  is  no   longer  defeat  at  the  hands  of  the  Evil  Deceiver,  but  simply  a  natural  part  of  the  process  of   learning,  and  can  calmly  be  moved  past  once  the  error  is  discovered.     Thus,  the  rational  individual  is  simply  responsible  for  drawing  on  the  best  resources   at  hand  to  help  double-­‐check  his  conclusions,  broadening  his  horizons  by  constant  re-­‐ examination,  and  level-­‐headedly  engaging  in  the  historicity  of  his  traditions  as  they  unfold   themselves  in  the  ongoing  hermeneutic  circle  of  everyday  life.  Errors  may  occur,  they  may   even  be  assented  to  by  the  entirety  of  a  tradition  for  centuries,  but  this  not  “the  end  of  the   world”;  indeed,  the  world  keeps  going,  and  we  keep  correcting  and  re-­‐interpreting  reality   as  we  go.116  Reason  plays  a  fundamental  role  in  this  latter  conception  of  knowing,  and  is   given  room  to  flower  and  grow  freely,  testing  itself  and  everything  around  it  with  the  most   resources  at  its  disposal  and  the  least  anxiety.  Whereas  in  the  former  conception,  reason  is   both  the  only  savior  from  a  grim  world  of  absolute  skepticism  and,  by  virtue  if  its  intense   necessity,  is  also  the  slave  of  the  method:  whipped  and  forced  to  perform  acrobatics  in  the                                                                                                                   116  This  is  why  it  is  the  Enlightenment’s  revisionist  history  makes  so  much  about  heliocentrism.  For  various   political,  scientific,  and  philosophical  reasons  (and  very  much  less  for  religious  reasons  than  is  usually   supposed),  a  certain  tradition  was  “wrong”  about  some  facts  for  a  good  while.  For  that  tradition,  and  for  us  on   board  with  this  hermeneutic  approach,  that  fact  is  largely  beside  the  point;  error  does  not  invalidate  method   for  the  hermeneutic  approach,  and  they  figured  it  out  eventually  (as  is  always  the  case).  Because  error  does   invalidate  method  for  the  Enlightenment,  the  constant,  tiresome  gesturing  at  the  trial  of  Galileo  seemed  to   Enlightenment  thinkers  to  be  a  good  example  of  why  authority  “doesn’t  work,”  but  again,  this  is  only   problematic  for  a  modern  methodology,  and  not  for  a  medieval  one.     Porcu  67   most  narrow  of  premises,  trying  to  achieve  the  impossible  dream  of  perfect,  ahistorical   knowledge,  but  doing  it  totally  impoverished,  removed  from  its  tradition  and  historicity.   Ricoeur,  in  considering  Kant’s  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  aptly  described  the  sort  of   reversal  that  the  Enlightenment’s  epistemology  constituted.  “The  general  spirit  of  the   Critique,  as  we  know,  is  to  reverse  the  relation  between  the  theory  of  knowledge  and  the   theory  of  being;  the  capacity  for  knowing  must  be  measured  before  we  confront  the  nature   of  being.”117  But  for  Gadamer,  and  especially  for  Heidegger,  it  is  being  that  inescapably   comes  first,  since  that  is  the  way  we  find  ourselves:  we  exist  first,  and  we  are  tied  to  all  that   that  means  (historicity,  horizons,  tradition,  pre-­‐judgment,  etc.)  before  we  come  to  unravel   the  process  of  knowing.  Thus,  Descartes’  premise  (especially  as  it  is  taken  up  by  the   thinkers  of  the  Enlightenment)  is  groundless,  and  if  one  simply  accepts  the  assumption  that   knowing  is  not  fundamentally  problematic,  there  is  no  problem  of  subjectivity  or  relativism   at  all,  there  is  only  the  problem  of  being  the  most  responsible  within  one’s  context,  and  the   lifelong  process  of  learning  truth  from  the  inside,  rather  than  pretending  we  can  step  out  of   our  very  being  and  gaze  down  on  knowledge  from  above.     “The  Rehabilitation  of  Tradition”     In  the  interest  of  being  responsible  with  one’s  context,  and  of  learning  truth  from   the  inside,  we  turn  back  to  the  subject  of  tradition.  As  we  have  found,  not  only  can  the   horizon  of  history  not  be  escaped,  but  it  provides  the  fundamental  medium  by  which  we   come  to  know,  evaluate,  and  work  out  our  truth  claims.  “Every  thinker,  however   revolutionary,  has  to  work  within  a  tradition  using,  for  whatever  fresh  purposes,  the                                                                                                                   117  Ricoeur,  Paul,  Hermeneutics  and  the  Human  Sciences:  Essays  on  Language,  Action,  and  Interpretation,  ed.   and  trans.  John  B.  Thompson  (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1998),  p.45   Porcu  68   conceptual  tools  applied  by  his  context.”118  Really  understanding,  appropriating  and   utilizing  the  framework  of  one’s  tradition  requires  all  the  tools  mentioned  above,  and   requires  a  deep,  authentic  journey  into  one’s  tradition,  not  just  at  the  surface  level,  but   within  the  full  legacy  of  the  tradition,  in  a  way  that  allows  one  to  challenge  and  be   challenged  by  it.     Yet,  there  is  a  stereotype  that  working  this  way  through  tradition  goes  against   reason,  and  that  where  “blind  obedience”  to  tradition  exists,  reason  cannot.  Gadamer  finds   this  antithesis  between  the  two  unnecessary.  Tradition  does  not  continue  to  exist  “because   that’s  how  we’ve  always  done  it,”  but  the  continued  life  of  tradition  requires  action,  action   that  is  both  rational  and  free.  “The  fact  is  that  in  tradition  there  is  always  an  element  of   freedom  and  of  history  itself.  Even  the  most  genuine  and  pure  tradition  does  not  persist   because  of  the  inertia  of  what  once  existed.  It  needs  to  be  affirmed,  embraced,  cultivated.  It   is,  essentially,  preservation,  and  it  is  active  in  all  historical  change.”119  This  idea  of   preservation  has  a  sense  of  pruning  and  revision,  without  being  radical.  Consider  a  garden:   a  garden  can  maintain  its  essential  character  while  still  changing,  even  if  one  plant  goes  bad   and  must  be  replaced,  or  if  weeding  seems  to  tear  up  the  whole  garden.  But  Gadamer  wants   to  emphasize  that  “preservation  is  an  act  of  reason,  though  an  inconspicuous  one.  For  this   reason,  only  innovation  and  planning  appear  to  be  the  result  of  reason.  But  this  is  an   illusion.  Even  where  life  changes  violently,  as  in  the  ages  of  revolution,  far  more  of  the  old  is   preserved  in  the  supposed  transformation  of  everything  than  anyone  knows.”120  Tradition   is  a  far  more  subtle  force  than  most  people  understand.  This  is  why  Gadamer  points  out                                                                                                                   118  Ayres,  Michael,  Locke’s  Logical  Atomism,  from  Rationalism,  Empiricism,  and  Idealism:  British  Academy   Lectures  on  the  History  of  Philosophy,  ed.  Anthony  Kenny  (Oxford:  University  Printing  House,  1986)   119  Gadamer,  p.281   120  Gadamer,  p.281   Porcu  69   how  easily  the  working  out  of  reason  is  misunderstood,  how  reason  only  seems  apparent  in   dramatic  contexts,  and  how  the  constant  presence  and  growth  of  tradition  hides  in  the   background.  There  is  a  tension  between  preservation  and  innovation,  in  which  the  latter   draws  heavily  on  the  former  to  direct  its  path,  and  reason  is  active  at  every  stage  by   drawing  on  the  resources  of  tradition  to  re-­‐evaluate  and  re-­‐appropriate  that  tradition   without  losing  its  essential  character,  but  also  without  dooming  it  to  mere  repetition.     Many  people,  aware  of  the  power  and  value  of  tradition,  are  nevertheless  overly   concerned  about  tradition  exercising  its  overwhelming  power  to  control  or  fetter  the   knower.  This  is  only  a  problem  for  people  who  do  not  accept  the  reality  of  what  Gadamer   calls  their  “historically  affected  consciousness,”  that  is,  the  reality  that  they  always  exist  in  a   tradition.  “A  person  who  believes  he  is  free  of  prejudices,  relying  on  the  objectivity  of  his   procedures  and  denying  that  he  is  himself  conditioned  by  historical  circumstances”  is  going   to  run  into  problems,  because  “a  person  who  does  not  admit  that  he  is  dominated  by   prejudices  will  fail  to  see  what  manifests  itself  by  their  light.”  121  In  other  words,  if  one  tries   to  live  in  the  illusion  that  one  is  not  conditioned  by  one’s  tradition  and  the  prejudices  that   go  along  with  it,  one  will  never  be  able  to  be  self-­‐conscious  of  the  way  in  which  that   tradition  actually  controls  and  influences  him.  “Seeking  to  understand  tradition,  historical   consciousness  must  not  rely  on  the  critical  method  with  which  it  approaches  its  sources,  as   if  this  preserved  it  from  mixing  in  its  own  judgments  and  prejudices.  It  must,  in  fact,  think   within  its  own  historicity.”122  This  is  because  “to  be  situated  within  a  tradition  does  not                                                                                                                   121  Gadamer,  p.361   122  Gadamer,  p.361   Porcu  70   limit  the  freedom  of  knowledge  but  makes  it  possible,”123  which  is  why  one  must  self-­‐ consciously  engage  with  one’s  tradition.124     While  vital,  all  of  this  is  very  abstract,  and  examining  how  one  goes  about  this   process  of  self-­‐consciously  engaging  one’s  tradition  requires  a  more  detailed  look.  At  the   same  time,  the  implications  for  Christianity  at  this  point  are  manifold,  and  I  now  want  to   look  at  the  ways  in  which  these  hermeneutical  tools  can  be  used  on  the  Reformation’s   paradigm  of  Christianity,  and  in  general,  what  a  Christianity  fully  committed  to  this   hermeneutical  method  might  look  like.                                                                                                                     123  Gadamer,  p.361,  emphasis  mine.   124  This  is  not  to  say,  and  Gadamer  does  not  do  so,  that  every  particular  tradition  is  equally  life-­‐giving,  equally   makes  freedom  of  knowledge  possible,  or  otherwise  possesses  equal  merits.  By  “tradition,”  Gadamer  here  is   referencing  the  reality  of  one’s  historical  “situatedness,”  and  the  reality  that  we  all  come  from  some  sort  of   tradition  must  be  acknowledged  first.  Beyond  that,  the  rational  act  of  preservation  (cf.  p.66-­‐67)  is  required  to   enable  traditions  to  be  more  or  less  life-­‐giving,  free,  or  edifying.       Porcu  71   Chapter  4:   Orthodoxy  as  Hermeneutical  Christianity     The  Crisis  of  Modern  Christianity     As  we  saw  in  chapter  2,  the  Reformation  was  fundamentally  premised  on  the  same   movements  as  modernity  and  the  Enlightenment.  Just  as  the  Enlightenment  moved  the  act   of  knowing  from  the  interpretative  community  to  the  confines  of  the  individual  knowing   subject,  so  too  did  the  Reformation  move  the  knowledge  of  Christianity  from  the   interpretative  community  of  the  church  to  the  individual  knowing  subject.  The   Enlightenment  utilized  autonomous  reason  and  the  science  that  followed  from  it  as  its   primary  tool  for  this  new  approach,  whereas  the  Reformation  invented  the  concept  of   “scripture  alone”  as  the  corresponding  methodology.125  These  moves  were  not  without   their  fallout.  Just  as  the  Enlightenment  finally  broke  down  in  late  modernity’s   “postmodern”  plurality  of  individual  positions,  so  too  did  the  Reformation  break  down  into   thousands  of  competing  denominations  where  the  individual  subject  became  the   foundation  for  a  subjective  plurality.  In  both  cases,  while  the  attempt  was  made  for  an   “objective”  standard  for  knowing,  the  inability  to  acquire  such  a  consensus  led  instead  to  a   plurality  of  staggering  proportions.     That  subjectivity  has  reached  its  height  in  contemporary  times  with  thousands  of   independent  denominations,  with  some  estimates  ranging  upwards  of  30,000  or  more.126   While  it  would  be  very  misleading  to  extrapolate  from  that  number  the  conclusion  that   there  are  that  many  distinct  sets  of  beliefs,  even  if  only  10%  of  that  number  constituted                                                                                                                   125  I  say  “invented”  very  intentionally;  the  concept  of  sola  scriptura  is  nowhere  in  the  Bible.  If  anything  the   “or”  in  2  Thess  2:15  suggests  precisely  the  opposite.   126  Cf.  Hartford  Institute  for  Religion  Research,  at,   http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html#denom   Porcu  72   authentic  doctrinal  disagreement,  it  would  still  be  disastrously  high.  The  existence  of  these   multiplications  within  the  faith  is  a  testament  to  the  presence  of  the  sort  of  subjectivity   about  which  we  have  been  talking,  and  makes  it  difficult  for  contemporary  Christianity  to   speak  with  one  voice  on  almost  any  subject,  as  the  presence  of  Christians  whose  reading  of   the  Bible  goes  against  the  majority  of  accepted  Christian  doctrine  continues  to   demonstrate.127     Another  issue  is  the  way  in  which  what  is  commonly  called  “fundamentalist”   Christianity  has  constantly  chosen  to  pick  its  ideological  battles  with  secularity  by  entering   into  scientific  arguments,  especially  on  evolution,  in  ways  that  have  created  widespread   embarrassment  on  behalf  of  the  greater  culture.  This  is  probably  to  be  expected,  since   adopting  the  Enlightenment’s  premises  for  value  and  knowledge  will  only  ever  result  in   Enlightenment  conclusions,  and  the  failure  of  modern  Evangelicalism  to  pull  the  God-­‐rabbit   out  of  the  science-­‐hat  is  utterly  unsurprising.  This  leads  to  what  David  Bentley  Hart  calls   “some  sort  of  inherent  opposition  –  or  impermeable  partition  –  between  faith  and  reason,”   for  which,  to  him,  there  is  “nothing  .  .  .  more  tiresomely  vapid.”128  But,  regardless  of  how   misplaced  the  sentiment  is,  it  is  a  constant  source  of  popular  criticism  against  modern   Christianity.     A  final  problem,  at  least  for  now,  is  what  has  been  called  “secular  religion”  in  the   western  world,  especially  North  America.  Frank  Schaeffer,  son  of  the  late  Francis  Schaeffer,   has  taken  particular  interest  in  this  subject,  and  points  out  that  ours  is  a  culture  in  which   “we  say  we  believe  in  God,  while  at  the  same  time  we  behave  like  atheists.  When  judged  by                                                                                                                   127  The  rising  movements  against  a  traditional  Christian  understanding  of  sexuality,  the  Trinity,  and  the   divinity  of  Christ  are  primarily  in  mind,  as  are  the  “Christian  Atheist”  or  “Protestant  Atheist”  movements.       128  Hart,  David  Bentley,  Atheist  Delusions:  The  Christian  Revolution  and  Its  Fashionable  Enemies  (New  Haven   and  London:  Yale  University  Press,  2009),  p.101   Porcu  73   even  a  remotely  traditional  Christian  standard  of  behavior,  Americans  can  hardly  be   described  as  a  ‘Christian  people.’  Measured  against  other  cultures,  we  Americans  are   perhaps  the  most  materialistic  and  desacralized  people  on  earth.  But,  according  to  what  we   say  about  ourselves,  we  Americans  are  a  ‘religious,’  even  a  ‘good’  people.”129  Indeed,  it  is  all   too  common,  even  in  everyday  experience,  to  encounter  a  person  who  begins  a  sentence   with,  “I’m  a  Christian,  but…”  and  proceeds  to  describe  any  number  of  beliefs  and  practices   that  clash  on  a  fundamental  level  with  traditional  Christian  beliefs,  especially  beliefs   related  to  the  non-­‐exclusivity  of  Christianity,  such  as  “I’m  a  Christian,  but  it’s  true  for  me,   and  you  need  to  find  your  own  truth.”  Moreover,  a  Christianity  indistinguishable  in  practice   from  mainstream  secular  culture  is  problematic  on  a  number  of  levels.  This  identity  crisis,   or  the  problem  of  self-­‐definition,  can  be  rooted  in  the  fundamental  hermeneutical  problem,   that  of  Protestantism’s  special  relationship  to  the  Bible.       The  Fundamental  Hermeneutical  Problem:  The  Bible     At  the  heart  of  every  modern  Protestant  claim,  no  less  than  the  claim  of  the  original   Reformers,  is  the  call  to  scriptural  accuracy,  “Biblical”  Christianity,  or  sola  scriptura,  in   some  variation.  The  Bible  as  the  sole,  infallible,  exclusive  authority  for  truth  has  been  the   rallying  cry  since  the  beginning  of  the  Reformation.  But  if  our  hermeneutical  investigations   in  the  last  chapter  have  born  any  fruit,  it  would  seem  that  this  approach  to  the  Bible  is  just   as  unstable  as  the  appeal  to  “autonomous  reason.”  To  put  it  briefly,  the  “historically-­‐ affected  consciousness”  that  Gadamer  identified  as  supremely  important,  the  horizon  of   history,  and  the  need  to  be  conscious  cultivators  of  tradition  are  all  absent  from  a  belief                                                                                                                   129  Schaeffer,  Frank,  Dancing  Alone:  the  Quest  for  Orthodox  Faith  in  the  Age  of  False  Religion  (Brookline:  Holy   Cross  Orthodox  Press,  1994),  p.xv   Porcu  74   system  that  seeks  to  venerate  the  Bible  apart  from  its  interpretive  tradition.  While  it  is  true   that  the  early  and  more  traditional  Reformation  theologians  made  some  rather  thorough   attempts  to  preserve  the  early  historicity  of  Christianity  and/or  to  define  the  correct   interpretive  tradition,  there  was  no  way  to  extrapolate  the  right  way  to  do  this  from   scripture  alone.  Hence  the  immediate  multiplication  of  competing  models.  The  attempt  to   read  a  text  “objectively”  or  from  a  “neutral”  standpoint  collapses  under  all  the  same   arguments  made  in  Chapter  3,  namely,  that  those  sort  of  readings  will  never  be  possible  of   anything,  specifically  (and  I  repeat),  that  “a  person  who  believes  he  is  free  of  prejudices,   relying  on  the  objectivity  of  his  procedures  and  denying  that  he  is  himself  conditioned  by   historical  circumstances  .  .  .  will  fail  to  see  what  manifests  itself  by  their  light.”130     Of  course,  many  (though  I  am  not  sure  that  I  would  say  “most”)  modern  Protestants   do  not  simply  insist  on  a  Bible  entirely  devoid  of  context,  and  instead  engage  in  some  part   with  critical  scholarship,  the  historical  grammatical  method,  and,  more  generally,  the  idea   of  having  the  Bible  “interpret  itself.”  Without  getting  sidetracked  by  a  discussion  on  Biblical   criticism  per  se,  this  approach  of  contextualizing  the  Bible  through  history,  understanding   the  grammar  of  the  original  manuscript  languages,  and  interpreting  some  passages  by   other  passages  is  good  in  so  far  as  it  goes.  The  hermeneutical  circle  requires  movements  at   the  level  of  the  sentence  as  well  as  between  the  books  of  the  Bible  and  the  whole  work,  and   historical  context  is  always  useful.  Yet,  a  really  complete  exegesis  of  the  Biblical  text  cannot   be  complete  without  reference  to  the  whole  historical  tradition  of  the  manifold  interpretive   community  that  has  always  surrounded  the  Bible,  and  attempts  to  “go  no  further”  than  this   sort  of  merely  clinical  or  anthropological  examination  of  the  text  stops  short  the  natural                                                                                                                   130  Gadamer,  p.361   Porcu  75   movement  of  the  hermeneutical  circle.  Especially  with  a  text  like  the  Bible,  which  has   enjoyed  a  longer  and  richer  interpretive  tradition  than  nearly  any  other  text  in  history,  the   reality  of  this  interpretive  community  must  be  addressed  in  any  reading  of  the  text,   consciously  or  unconsciously.  “Even  the  lonely  individual  who  rebels  against  the  Church  as   an  institution  but  who  nourishes  his  soul  on  the  Bible  .  .  .  is  himself  dependent  upon  the  fact   that  there  has  been  a  Christian  community  that  produced,  preserved  and  interpreted  the   Bible  and  which  directly,  or  indirectly,  had  much  to  do  with  the  moulding  of  his  own   mind.”131  Yet  at  the  same  time,  I  will  grant  that  there  is  some  precedent  for  a  concern  about   the  overbearing  nature  of  simply  reversing  the  process  and  putting  an  authority  over  the   Bible  in  the  manner  of  much  Western  Christianity,  and  abuse  of  power  in  many  contexts  is   a  valid  source  of  concern.  But  we  will  return  to  this  point.       In  the  interest  of  not  repeating  much  of  the  argument  of  the  previous  chapter,  I  hope   it  will  be  enough  to  conclude  that  insistence  upon  “the  text  alone,”  regardless  of  what  that   text  is,  is  no  better  than  “reason  alone.”  Taking  a  careful  exegesis  of  the  Bible  is  perhaps  a   better  approach  than  insisting  that  reason  strip  itself  of  all  context  whatsoever,  but  in  the   end  it  seems  to  amount  to  much  the  same:  narrow  methodological  parameters  that  fail  to   take  into  account  the  full  historical  nature  of  all  knowledge.  Yet,  at  the  same  time,  while  the   hermeneutical  tradition  provided  a  strong  set  of  resources  to  the  wayward  Enlightenment   sympathizer  in  order  to  help  better  understand  the  world  he  lives  in,  a  more  precise  model,   or  picture,  is  needed  in  order  to  release  modern  Christianity  from  its  narrow  confines  and   return  it  to  the  full  rationality  and  historical  freedom  of  a  hermeneutical  approach  to   knowing.  While  there  are  many  Protestant  movements  with  a  growing  interest  in                                                                                                                   131  Bennett, John Coleman, “A Protestant Conception of Religious Authority,” in Vergilius Ferm, ed., The Protestant Credo (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), p.133 Porcu  76   understanding  history  and  reading  the  church  fathers,  it  does  not  seem  to  me  that  a   renewed  interest  in  patristic  literature  or  history  will  do  enough  to  keep  modern   Christianity  from  the  dogmatic  fundamentalism  or  baseless  liberalism  it  so  often  seems  to   fall  into.  Therefore,  I  want  to  examine  the  model  of  Eastern  Orthodox  Christianity,  for  two   reasons:  First,  Orthodox  Christianity  places  the  Bible  in  its  proper  hermeneutic  relationship   to  tradition;  and  second,  Orthodox  Christianity  goes  beyond  the  essential  rationalism  of  the   hermeneutic  methods  we  have  so  far  discussed,  and  takes  the  notion  of  truth  as   “indwelling”  to  its  next  logical  step.     East  and  West     I  will  pause  very  briefly  to  define  and  articulate  Eastern  Orthodox  Christianity  for   those  who  may  be  unfamiliar  with  it.  Eastern  Orthodoxy  traces  its  history  to  the  apostolic   age,  but  Christianity  at  this  time  was  in  a  largely  pre-­‐denominational  state.  The  spirit  of   Greek-­‐speaking,  Eastern  Christianity  was  present  for  centuries  before  Orthodoxy  proper   got  its  somewhat  more  formal  definition  during  the  Great  Schism.  The  Schism  is   “conventionally  dated  to  the  year  1054.  The  main  body  of  Christians  now  became  divided   into  two  communions:  in  western  Europe,  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  under  the  Pope  of   Rome;  in  the  Byzantine  Empire,  the  Eastern  Orthodox  Church.”132  As  western  Christianity   developed,  into  the  high  Middle  Ages  and  the  Reformation,  Eastern  Christianity  underwent   its  own  struggles,  mostly  with  the  powers  of  the  eastern  world,  especially  Islam,  but  it   never  developed  the  sort  of  western  theological  vocabulary  (or  the  corresponding  western   theological  controversies)  that  developed  in  the  Roman  church  or  the  Reformation.                                                                                                                   132  Ware,  Timothy,  The  Orthodox  Church  (Penguin  Books  Edition,  1997),  p.4   Porcu  77   Originally  Eastern  Orthodoxy  was  composed  of  the  four  Patriarchates  –  Jerusalem,  Antioch,   Alexandria,  and  Constantinople  –  but  now  includes  roughly  fourteen  other  patriarchates,   including  Greek,  Russian,  Serbian,  and  Romanian,  as  well  as  the  Orthodox  Churches  of   China,  Japan,  Finland,  and  America,  all  in  full  communion  with  one  another.  Eastern   Orthodoxy  persists  into  the  present,  and  there  is  a  growing  North  American  movement  of   awareness  and  conversion  among  the  millennial  generation  to  Orthodoxy.     Scripture  and  Tradition       My  first  reason  for  investigating  Orthodoxy  was  that  it  put  Scripture  in  its  correct   hermeneutical  context.  In  the  dogmatic  controversies  of  the  West,  “scripture”  and   “tradition”  have  been  articulated  as  separate  definitional  categories,  and  that  move  allows   them  to  be  placed  in  various  relationships  to  one  another,  either  in  opposition  or  in  concert   to  one  degree  or  another  (especially  hierarchically).  Yet  this  tendency,  I  think,  allows  for   the  propagation  of  an  epistemology  concerned  with  objectivity,  i.e.,  this  is  scripture,  this  is   not  tradition,  etc.  In  this  formulation,  reason  seeks  to  draw  boundaries  and  acquire   knowledge  in  the  external  way  we  mentioned  earlier,  rather  than  entering  into  knowledge   and  unfolding  it  from  within.  However,  for  Orthodox  theology,  there  is  no  categorical   difference  between  scripture  and  tradition  at  all,  and  this  necessitates  our  entry  into  the   life  of  the  church  in  order  for  knowledge  to  be  had.  As  Orthodox  theologian  Alexander   Schmemann  explains,  “Tradition  in  Orthodox  theology  is  not  distinguished  from  or   opposed  to  Scripture  because,  on  the  one  hand,  Scripture  itself  is  a  part  of  Tradition,  of   what  we  receive  in  the  Church,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  whole  Tradition  is  nothing  else   Porcu  78   but  the  reading  and  the  appropriation  of  Scripture  in  the  life  of  the  Church.”133  What  must   be  stressed  here  is  not  simply  an  “interdependence”  of  two  separate  elements  of  the  faith;   they  are  at  least  that,  but  we  want  to  go  further  than  that.  Schmemann  is  not  describing  a   relationship  as  much  as  he  is  describing  a  mode  of  being.  In  other  words,  the  fact  that  he   describes  scripture  and  traditional  definitionally  within  the  context  of  each  other  must   move  us  beyond  a  mere  interdependence  and  towards  an  ontological  unity.  “Orthodox   theology  does  not  oppose  Tradition  to  Scripture,  does  no  ‘number’  them  as  separate   sources  of  faith  .  .  .  In  a  sense  the  whole  Tradition  is  an  inspired  reading  of  Scripture  by  the   Church,  the  revelation  and  interpretation  of  its  meaning  by  the  Holy  Spirit  abiding  in  the   Church.”134  This  kind  of  unity  between  scripture  and  tradition  is  articulated  by  several   Catholic  theologians  as  well.  Dominican  theologian  Yves  Congar  paints  a  similar  picture   when  he  says  that  “any  difference  of  kind  between  the  Church’s  historical  life  and  its  divine   sources  of  revelation  is  abolished,”135  and  many  traditional  Catholic  thinkers  throughout   history  have  reinforced  this  point.136   This  approach  is  in  contrast  to  a  text-­‐centric  or  rationalistic  approach  such  as  with   the  Qur’an  in  Islam,  which  “fell  from  heaven  and  is  read  by  men  in  a  form  fixed  once  and  for   all.”137  In  this  way,  certain  highly  text-­‐centralized  versions  of  modern  Christianity  function   in  essentially  the  same  way  as  Islam.  By  contrast,  Orthodoxy  acknowledges  that                                                                                                                   133  Schmemann,  p.18   134  Schmemann,  p.23   135  Congar,  Yves  M.-­‐J.,  Tradition  and  Traditions:  The  Biblical,  Historical,  and  Theological  Evidence  for  Catholic   Teaching  on  Tradition  (San  Diego:  Basilica  Press,  1966),  p.467   136  There  are  some  controversies  about  the  relationship  of  scripture  and  tradition  in  Catholicism,  as  when   tradition  and  scripture  are  defined  distinctly,  as  we  noticed  in  the  Council  of  Trent  in  Chapter  2,  and  for  that   reason  there  is  more  here  to  discuss.  As  such  a  discussion  remains  outside  the  scope  of  this  study,  I  only   wanted  to  note  with  this  example  that  sacramental  theology  is  not  distinctly  Orthodox,  but  that  Catholic   theology  has  much  to  say  on  this  point  as  well.   137  Meyendorff,  John,  The  Orthodox  Church:  It’s  Past  and  Its  Role  in  the  World  Today  (Crestwood,  St.  Vladimir’s   Seminary  Press,  1996),  p.4   Porcu  79   Christianity’s  truth  comes  into  human  life  as  a  historical  event,  to  a  community  of  persons   (the  Apostles,  the  Virgin,  etc.).  The  Scripture  “was  given  to  a  community  which  had  been   founded  by  these  apostles  and  which  had  received  the  same  Spirit,”  and  it  is  this   community  which  constitutes  the  church,  and  “this  interpretation  and  its   acknowledgement  are  what  is  known  as  Tradition.”138  To  put  this  in  hermeneutical   language,  the  interpretive  community  (the  Church)  both  produced  the  text  (the  Scriptures)   and  continues  to  function  as  the  interpretive  community  throughout  historical  time,   constantly  engaging  in  the  act  of  preservation  (as  Gadamer  meant  it)  with  regard  to   tradition.       But,  in  the  same  way  that  Gadamer  cautioned,  tradition  here  is  less  of  a  repetition  of   the  past  and  more  of  a  continuation  of  the  life  of  the  church.  “Tradition  is  not  to  be  simply   identified  with  authority,  with  a  blind  and  mechanical  obedience  to  the  past,  considered  as   absolute  norm.  Rather,  it  can  be  compared  to  the  memory  of  a  man  for  its  real  function  is  to   transform  and  integrate  the  past  into  the  present  and  thus  to  assure  the  very  continuity  of   life,  the  identity  of  the  living  consciousness.”139  The  image  of  a  hulking  bureaucratic   machine  confined  to  the  narrow  limitations  of  its  particular  phraseology  should  here  be   replaced  with  the  image  of  a  living  organism,  a  tree  or  a  beehive,  where  continuity  with  the   past  is  a  function  of  the  ongoing  life  of  the  organism.  Tradition  is  “the  life  of  the  Holy  Spirit   in  the  Church  –  the  Spirit  who  lives  and  acts  in  the  Church  always,  today  as  yesterday,  and   inspires  all  her  life  and  makes  it  a  continuity  of  life,  faith,  and  love  and  not  a  mechanical                                                                                                                   138  Meyendorff,  p.4     139  Schmemann,  p.22;  a  comparison  with  Hegel’s  concept  of  geist  moving  throughout  history  and  self-­‐ actualizing  itself  would  be  a  fair  analogy,  though  with  certain  key  discrepancies.  Because  Christian  truth  is   considered  as  delivered  “once  and  for  all”  to  the  saints,  hermeneutical  Christianity  lacks  the  sense  of   progression  that  Hegel’s  model  necessitates.  Because  of  these  differences,  a  much  larger  section  would  have   to  be  devoted  to  the  comparison  with  Hegel  than  space  permits.     Porcu  80   repetition  of  the  past.”140  Nor  does  tradition  exclude  innovation  or  improvement  in  the   sense  of  new  forms  of  its  life,  but  these  new  forms  “will  be  the  formulations  of  the  same   eternal  and  unchanging  truth  inspired  by  the  same  eternal  and  unchanging  Spirit  and   therefore  will  never  be  in  contradiction  of  that  which  has  been  accepted  and  received  as   truth  in  the  Church.  And  it  means  that  the  new  forms  will  be  forms  of  the  same  living   Church  and  therefore  expressions  of  the  same  life.”141  The  repetition  of  the  word  “life”  is   probably  quite  intentional  in  Schmemann,  and  is  the  point  which  I  tried  to  emphasize   earlier.  While  this  sort  of  language  is  perhaps  more  emphatic  than  Gadamer,  I  take  it  to  be   of  essentially  the  same  spirit:  man’s  knowing  is  by  necessity  historically  conditioned,  and   far  from  being  a  limiting  factor  on  his  ability  to  know,  it  is  instead  the  very  medium  by   which  he  knows.  The  self-­‐conscious  examination  and  preservation  of  one’s  own  pre-­‐ judgments  and  traditions,  indeed,  the  continued  expression  and  preservation  of  eternal   truths,  when  done  through  an  interpretive  community  of  this  rigor,  necessarily  assumes   the  image  of  a  mode  of  life,  that  is,  of  continued  living  and  growth.  This  is  how  the  lay   Christian  can  “know”  with  confidence  the  truths  of  the  Incarnation  or  the  Resurrection  as   much  as  the  Fall  of  Jerusalem  in  A.D.  70:  from  within.    This  goes  back  to  our  hermeneutical   definition  of  knowledge  as  not  something  obtained  from  without,  but  as  an  unfolding  of   something  one  is  already  involved  in.  Religious  knowledge  must  occur  by  entering  in  to  the   life  of  the  church,  i.e.,  “tradition,”  but  in  this  context,  such  an  entrance  makes  the  encounter   with  scripture  unavoidable  given  what  tradition  is  in  its  essence.                                                                                                                       140  Schmemann,  p.22   141  Schmemann,  p.22-­‐23   Porcu  81   Beyond  Belief     But  this  discussion  of  the  “life”  of  the  church  leads  us  to  my  second  reason  in   bringing  up  Orthodoxy.  There  has  been  a  sense  so  far,  even  with  the  refreshing  nuance  of   the  hermeneutic  approach,  that  all  of  this  remains  rationalistic  on  at  least  one  fundamental   level.  So  far,  we  have  talked  about  the  impossibility  of  escaping  our  own  historicity,  and   that  knowing  must  be  mediated  from  within  one’s  historic  context.  Yet,  we  are  still   fundamentally  talking  about  beliefs  and  belief-­‐forming  practices,  and  to  that  degree  the   conversation  is  still  largely  about  assent  to  propositions.  The  best  propositions,  we  seem  to   be  saying,  can’t  be  assented  to  within  these  Enlightenment  or  Reformation  methods,  and  so   we  need  tradition,  historicity,  and  the  hermeneutic  circle  in  order  to  clear  things  up  so  that   the  propositions  we  assent  to  are  the  most  informed  and  responsible.  While  this  is  well  and   good,  it  does  not  seem  to  complete  what  we  began  with  Gadamer  as  the  “event”  of  truth.   Gadamer  explains  that  “understanding  is  to  be  thought  of  less  as  a  subjective  [that  is,   personal,  subject-­‐oriented]  act  than  as  participating  in  an  event  of  tradition.”142  There  is  a   sense  here,  and  throughout  Gadamer,  that  understanding  is  a  process,  truth  is  an  event,   and,  in  general,  knowledge  is  a  reality  in  which  we  live  and  upon  which  we  expound  from   the  inside.  For  Schmemann  too,  and  Orthodox  theologians  like  John  Zizioulas,  truth  is   something  in  which  we  participate,  but  what  that  means  in  light  of  Christianity  goes  beyond   mere  assent.  Jesus  does  not  say  that  he  knew  the  truth,  or  even  that  he  merely  declared  or   stood  for  the  truth,  but  that  he  is  the  truth.143  This  ontological  identification  with  truth  is   staggering  as  it  is,  but  it  is  even  more  so  when  combined  with  the  declaration  that  the                                                                                                                   142  Gadamer,  p.290   143  John  14:6   Porcu  82   Eucharist  is  his  body,144  that  to  eat  and  drink  of  Christ  is  to  share  in  his  eternal  life,145  and   that  if  we  live  at  all,  we  live  in  Jesus.146     It  seems  to  me,  then,  that  a  responsible  Christian  cannot  simply  know  or  emulate  the   truths  of  the  faith,  but  must  enter  into  Christianity  in  its  being,  in  all  its  historical   dimensions.  This  is  why  for  Orthodoxy,  it  is  not  enough  to  imitate  the  historic  faith  of   Christianity,  read  the  fathers,  or  interpret  the  Bible  within  the  proper  historical  tradition  of   interpretation,  as  if  knowledge  were  the  greatest,  or  only,  criterion  for  one’s  status  as  a   Christian.  This  comes  out  in  a  lot  of  the  terminology  of  modern  Christianity:  “Do  you   believe  in  Jesus?”  or  “I  am  a  believer.”  No  doubt  too  the  Nicene  Creed  begins  with  the  same   words  (“I  believe”)  as  any  good  confession  ought,  but  knowledge  and  assent  alone  are  not   sufficient  for  a  full  orthodoxy.  This  is  why  Orthodoxy  takes  so  seriously  the  status  of  being   connected  to  the  historic  church  and  sharing  a  body  with  it,  because  “right  belief  without   an  organic,  historical  connection  with  the  New  Testament  Church  is  merely  to  imitate  the   past  without  sharing  in  its  ongoing  life.“147  In  this  sense,  Orthodoxy  is  consonant  with   Gadamer’s  insistence  on  knowledge  from  “within,”  but  takes  it  a  step  further  in  a  far  more   radical  direction,  namely,  that  of  sacramentality.       While  the  Eucharist  is  the  most  central  sacrament  in  Orthodox  theology,  it  is  also  of   deep  significance  for  our  epistemological  concerns,  and  serves  as  an  icon  for  our   hermeneutic  method.  Though  many  pages  could  be  devoted  to  a  detailed  treatment  of  the   epistemology  of  the  Eucharist,  I  will  end  this  study  with  only  three  points.  First,  the                                                                                                                   144  Luke  22:19,  etc.   145  John  4:14,  John  6:54,  etc.   146  Romans  6:11   147  Carlton,  Clark,  The  Faith:  Understanding  Orthodox  Christianity:  An  Orthodox  Catechism  (Salisbury,  MA:   Regina  Orthodox  Press,  1997),  p.35   Porcu  83   Eucharist  seems  to  me  a  perfect  picture  of  what  Gadamer  called  a  “truth  event.”  It  is  hard  to   see  how  the  imperative  to  share  in  the  qualitative  life  of  Christ  as  well  as  to  know  Christ   comes  to  a  more  tangible  locus.  If,  as  we  have  seen,  we  know  truth  primarily  from  the   inside,  as  an  unfolding,  then  this  truth,  no  less  than  any  other  truth,  requires  a  specific   event,  or  an  encounter.  This  is  the  pattern  of  the  Incarnation:  God  enters  into  human   historicity  as  a  man,  not  descended  directly  from  heaven  like  the  Qur’an,  but  from  within   humanity  (that  is,  from  the  Virgin’s  womb),  and  goes  on  to  enter  into  us  through  his  direct   presence  in  the  Eucharistic  act.     Second,  the  Eucharist  as  mystery  is  fundamental  to  its  ability  to  be  a  truth  event.   There  are  two  elements  to  this.  One  is  the  way  in  which  the  sacrament  is  simultaneously   bread  and  wine  and  flesh  and  blood.  That  is,  if  we  say  that  the  Eucharist  is  only  a  symbol  or   a  remembrance,  we  reduce  it  to  a  cognitive  element,  a  mere  aid  to  memory.  Only  when  it  is   actually,  in  the  mystery,  the  Body  of  Christ,  can  it  be  Christ  who  is  the  Truth  that  we  enter  in   to.  This  brings  me  to  the  other  element,  which  is  that  it  is  mystery  itself  that  allows  for  a   hermeneutical,  rather  than  an  objectivist,  approach  to  knowledge.  Orthodox  theologian   Andrew  Louth  finds  the  nature  of  mystery  antagonistic  to  the  objectivist  approach  to   knowledge,  because  a  mystery  is  couched  as  a  problem  for  the  objectivist,  whose  agenda  is   specifically  to  demystify  and  make  knowledge  into  a  passive  acquisition.  Mystery  does  not   allow  for  this,  “for  mystery  does  not  present  itself  to  us  as  a  datum  of  which  there  might  be   complete,  ‘objective’  knowledge;  rather  mystery  questions  us,  demands  of  us  a  response,   challenges  us  to  decide  what  we  are  to  do,  what  we  are  to  make  of  our  lives.”148  In  other   words  it  is  only  in  mystery  that  we  can  be  challenged  existentially,  for  it  requires  us  to                                                                                                                   148  Louth,  Andrew,  Discerning  the  Mystery:  An  Essay  on  the  Nature  of  Theology  (Oxford,  New  York:  Oxford   University  Press,  2003),  p.145   Porcu  84   enter  into  the  mystery  and  to  know  it  from  inside  our  own  experience  of  it.  In  this  way  we   are  able,  as  Gadamer  might  say,  to  experience  a  fusion  of  horizons  with  the  living  Christ.     Finally,  the  Eucharist  in  Orthodoxy  is  the  direct,  tangible  medium  by  which   Orthodoxy  identifies  its  historical  continuity  in  the  life  of  the  church.  This  is  why  Zizioulas   goes  so  far  as  to  define  the  Church  as  the  “Eucharistic  community,”  which  is  “the  Body  of   Christ  par  excellence  simply  because  it  incarnates  and  realizes  our  communion  within  the   very  life  and  communion  of  the  Trinity.”149  Again,  we  are  back  to  the  sense  of  a  continuous   life,  as  an  “experience  of  truth  in  the  Church’s  existence,”150  which  is  an  intimacy  that  goes   beyond  mere  assent  to  Christian  doctrine.  This  is  why  Orthodoxy  describe  the  church  as   “life  in  Christ,  our  participation  in  and  through  Him  in  the  unending  life  of  the  All-­‐holy   Trinity.  In  the  Church  we  are  prepared  for  the  life  of  the  age  to  come  not  only  by  being   taught  the  commandments  of  Christ  but  by  actively  experiencing  His  grace.”151  Truth,  as  we   have  said,  is  an  act  of  participation,  but  it  is  one  that  cannot  be  separated  from  the  living   continuity  of  its  origin,  which  is  why  it  is  not  just  an  act  of  the  will,  that  is,  of  assent,  but  is   an  act  of  being,  one  which  must  be  realized  throughout  the  entire  life  of  the  Christian  and   by  the  apostolic  church  as  a  whole.       Conclusion     Gadamer  and  the  hermeneutical  movement  give  us  a  powerful  challenge  to  re-­‐ evaluate  and  renew  the  narrow  positivism  of  the  Enlightenment  and  the  Reformation.  Yet,   as  I  see  it,  Gadamer’s  ideas  seem  to  demand  further  exploration  in  terms  of  ontology,  as  we                                                                                                                   149  Zizioulas,  John  D.,  Being  as  Communion:  Studies  in  Personhood  and  the  Church  (New  York:  St.  Vladimir’s   Seminary  Press,  1985),  p.114   150  Zizioulas,  p.114   151  Carlton,  p.36   Porcu  85   did  in  our  brief  discussion  above.  Yet,  it  is  impossible  to  fault  Gadamer  for  this,  for  at  the   end  of  Truth  and  Method,  he  closes  by  saying  that  he  would  be  “a  poor  hermeneuticist  who   thought  he  could  have,  or  had  to  have,  the  last  word.”152  I  likewise  have  nothing  at  all  to  say   about  the  last  word  in  this  discussion,  but  I  hope  that  this  may  be  the  next  word,  or  at  least   one  of  them.  For  the  truth  is  that  a  reformation  of  the  last  five-­‐hundred  years  of   epistemology  benefits  more  disciplines  than  theology:  art,  literature,  the  humanities,   aesthetics,  ethics,  and  almost  every  area  of  human  life  has  the  distinct  capacity  to  be   genuinely  improved  by  shedding  the  poisonous  assumption,  “incredulous  until  proven   credulous”  that  has  haunted  so  much  of  the  Western  mind,  secular  and  sacred,  for  the  last   half-­‐millennium.  And  if  modern  Christianity  wants  to  survive  in  any  sort  of  recognizable   form  into  the  next  five-­‐hundred  years,  a  middle  way  between  narrow  fundamentalism  and   radical  liberalism  must  be  discovered,  or,  as  I  have  suggested,  re-­‐discovered.  Liberating   reason  through  tradition  via  the  hermeneutical  approach  opens  up  this  third  way,  and  calls   for  a  fundamental  paradigm  shift  in  two  dimensions:  first,  the  shift  from  the  individual  to   the  community;  and  second,  the  shift  from  knowing  to  being.     We  began  this  study  with  a  concern  about  our  culture  and  a  line  from  G.K.   Chesterton.  It  is  unclear  to  me  what  the  next  step  is  for  our  culture  in  terms  of  re-­‐orienting   itself  toward  a  tradition  robust  enough  to  liberate  reason  and  sort  out  its  competing  truth   claims.  Yet,  Chesterton  perfectly  captured  what  I  think  is  the  only  viable  answer  to  the   question  for  Christianity  when  he  remarked  that  the  historic  Church  “is  the  only  thing  that   frees  a  man  from  the  degrading  slavery  of  being  a  child  of  his  age.”153                                                                                                                 152  Gadamer,  p.579   153  Chesterton,  G.K.,  “Why  I  Am  a  Catholic,”  from Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926); reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. 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