The Epistemology of Divine Love According to St. John of the Cross
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THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DIVINE LOVE ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Thesis Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of Arts in Theology By Huili Stout UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio August 2018 THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DIVINE LOVE ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Name: Stout, Huili Shen APPROVED BY: ______________________________________________ Sandra Yocum, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Associate Professor ______________________________________________ Silviu Bunta, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Associate Professor ______________________________________________ William L. Portier, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Professor ii ã Copyright by Huili Shen Stout All rights reserved 2018 iii ABSTRACT THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DIVINE LOVE ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Name: Stout, Huili Shen University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Sandra Yocum St. John of the Cross is presented as an authentic epistemologist with a comprehensive theory of mystical knowledge. He describes the nature and excellence of mystical knowledge and explains how it may be attained through an unyielding and total adherence to the human telos—union with God—and through the dark night, in which a kenosis of the sensory and intellectual faculties leads to a gradual transformation of our apprehensive capacity. Mystical knowledge has the characteristics of passivity, substantiality, supra-abundance, and ineffability; it is a dynamic loving communication between God and the soul capable of transforming the whole person. The radical demands of nada on the intellect, the will, and the memory placed by John’s epistemology can be understood through a rationale of divine love. The necessary operation of faith in the dark night, which transcends reason through a loving trust of the Master amidst intellectual and affective suffering, is described. John’s insight into divine love as the fountain of all knowledge and inspiration, his thorough analysis on the power of the theological virtues to elevate our intellectual faculties, and his wisdom about the relationship between human suffering and divine knowledge make him a unique epistemologist with much to contribute to our philosophical conversations today. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: EPISTEMIC FOUNDATIONS ..................................................................16 CHAPTER 2: “A SWEET AND LIVING KNOWLEDGE” ............................................34 CHAPTER 3: THE RATIONALE OF DIVINE LOVE ....................................................65 CHAPTER 4: THE LIGHT OF FAITH .............................................................................91 CHAPTER 5: CERTITUDE, CRITERIA, AND CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ...........110 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................133 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Natural and Supernatural Apprehensions ..........................................................38 vi INTRODUCTION Mysticism and epistemology are not often associated with one another. One of the definitions for mysticism offered in the Merriam Webster dictionary is “the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience,” a germane definition that could categorize the mysticism of St. John of the Cross. Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. The fundamental difficulty in connecting mysticism and epistemology is deciding whether or not knowledge of God is a worthy subject of “justified belief.” In this introduction, I will contend that the field of epistemology, given its vast scope and multitudinous interests, should very well study mysticism and that St. John of the Cross can be appreciated as an authentic epistemologist. Diversity of Considerations in Epistemology Although the word epistemology did not get coined until the 19th century, the theory of knowledge has been studied since the Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Accounting for major modern developments, there have been many divergent schools of thought in epistemology: rationalism represented by Plato and Descartes, empiricism represented by Aristotle, Hume, and Locke, transcendental idealism heralded by Kant, skepticism, realism, pragmatism, etc. Among the differing philosophies, topics of controversy include whether truth resides in the human consciousness or in experience, 1 whether knowledge corresponds to an objective reality or can only be subjective representations, what types of knowledge there are, and what constitutes true epistemic goods rather than mere opinion. For a glimpse of the diversity in epistemology we will look back briefly at a few luminaries in the field. While Plato believes in an innate “capacity of judgment”1 which can be trained to see the invisible world of forms—“abstract and universal properties”2 of things, Aristotle designates sense perception, memory and experience as the source of knowledge of the that, which lays the foundation for the causal inquiry of general principles of a particular science.3 Aristotle also distinguishes knowledge of scientific principles from knowledge of essence.4 Contrary to both Plato and Aristotle, an ancient skepticism Pyrrhonism represented by Sextus Empiricus believes that the best attitude towards knowledge is an indefinitely ongoing investigation and a suspension of judgment, which leads to tranquility.5 Fast forwarding to modernity, we have Descartes, who locates epistemic certainty in the cogito—the ego—and Hume, who turns to sensory experience for his source of all knowledge: “we can never think of anything which we have not seen without us, or felt in our own minds.”6 Kant in his Copernican hypothesis proposes knowing as a combination of sensory experience with intellectual concepts 1 Nicholas D Smith, “Plato’s Epistemology,” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 42. 2 Stephen Hetherington, “Epistemology’s Past Here and Now,” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 10. 3 Robert Bolton and Alan Code, “Aristotle on Knowledge,” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 68. 4 Ibid., 68. 5 Gisela Striker, “Ancient Skepticism,” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 81. 6 P. J. E. Kail, “Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Epistemology,” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 113. 2 mediated through “categories.”7 Nineteenth century philosopher William James, a radical empiricist, rails against “essentialism” and defines cognition as selecting from the confusing supply of sensory experience what is interesting and pragmatic.8 Twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose dictum “essence is expressed by grammar” has enjoyed various interpretations, seems to strike a balance between “linguistic idealism and naive realism”: even though things have essences, they are carried through particular linguistic schema and cannot be grasped by the general discipline of philosophy or metaphysics.9 A contemporary of Wittgenstein, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi puts forth an epistemology of personal knowledge, defining knowing as an art of “pouring ourselves”10 into the object, a process shaped by tacit personal factors11 and motivated by a heuristic passion for a “closer contact with reality.”12 More recently, scholars have suggested some new directions of exploration in epistemology. American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and others have proposed 7 Melissa McBay Merritt and Markos Valaris, “Kant and Kantian Epistemology” in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, ed. Stephen Hetherington (London: Continuum, 2012), 135-36. 8 David J. Kalupahana, “The Epistemology of William James and Early Buddhism,” in Religious Experience and Religious Belief: Essays in the Epistemology of Religion, eds., Joseph Runzo and Craig K. Ihara (Lanham, MD: University Press of America Inc, 1986), 54, 57. Essentialism is a school of thought which believes we are able to know the essence of things, or things as they are. 9 Roger Pouivet, “Wittgenstein’s Essentialism,” in Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, eds. Julien Dutant, Davide Fassio and Anne Meylan (Geneva: University of Geneva, 2014), 450, 464, https://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/publications/engel/liberamicorum/pouivet.pdf, accessed on March 22, 2018. 10 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 59. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Ibid., 106. 3 knowledge as the product of proper functioning in the cognitive faculty.13 Virtue epistemologists such as Linda Zagzebski, Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood begin to attach importance to the roles of motivation, epistemic virtues and case studies of epistemic exemplars,14 with the latter two advocating placing the will as the central intellectual faculty because it defines a knower’s identity as agent and is the driving force behind the most interesting and important