Divine Enticement:Theological Seductions: Theological Seductions

1. Seductive Epistemology: Thinking with Assent

33 1 Seduct ive Epistemology: T hinking with Assent Neither a preliminary to reflection, nor a last resort after the exhaustion of reflection, but a persistent condition of the possibility of reflection, faith inhabits the interim between an origin always already lost and a consummation never yet enjoyed. Faith is the first, last, and always word— the operative word—of . . . every . . . Augustinian text. Faith—that too is not a solution but the name of a problem. —Lewis Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word There appears to be a curious incompatibility between seduction and any proper sort of epistemology. Knowledge, with its firm and enduring grasp of true facts and its carefully maintained distance from opinion, seems clearly opposed both to the reserve, mystery, and elusive play of seduction and to the unknowing in the face of the infinite by which even slightly apophatic theology is not inaptly characterized. When we try to think the divine or the sacred, we think that reserve and mystery; perhaps we also think of origin or ground, of joy or ecstasy, or of the world newly revealed as blessed. All of these famously elude any commonsense 34 | Seductive Epistemology knowing, even satisfactory expression in words. Yet of course there is a seduction of knowing itself. There exists, or more exactly there moves, a powerful will to know, so strong that Aristotle opens his Metaphysics by declaring it part of human nature.1 Philosophical theology, at least, is thoroughly enticed by this desire to know, and theology draws knowledge further without finality, its satisfactions always incomplete, and no less significant for it. More exactly, the ways of knowing or of thinking appropriate to thinking theologically draw us into a seductive epistemology, a new variant on a definition of faith that Augustine shares with Thomas Aquinas—“thinking with assent” (cogitare cum assensione).2 I do not mean for my considerations of faith here to cover every legitimate sense of the word (in particular, my focus on epistemology differs from the equally legitimate focus on practice and experience).3 I have most in mind the thinking, the cognitive dimension of faith. Yet I also want to note that the element of assent draws such thinking, without losing its intellectual character, close to some other fairly common understandings of religious faith, such as those of trust or fidelity, which can be practical or experiential as well as cognitive. Thinking with assent is not at all the same as assent without thinking. In his consideration of the Augustinian phrase, Thomas considers the objection that “thinking has no place in the act of faith,”4 but comes to agree with Augustine’s formulation, adding that the kind of belief appropriate to faith “is distinguished from all the other acts of the intellect, which are about the true or the false.”5 Thus, although he uses the term believe here, his sense of it is not that of affirming propositional truth-value. For this to make sense, we need first to get past several of the more common perceptions and misperceptions regarding religious faith, most particularly a widespread tendency to identify it entirely with belief, where belief is understood as a weak or ill-supported form of knowledge. “Our” here needs some qualification. Historians and religious scholars have long been aware of other senses of faith, such as the ritual and communal. But philosophers, particularly in the analytic tradition, and the thinkers assembled under the name of “new atheism,” do tend to understand faith as a mode of belief—for the latter, in fact, faith can have no other sense at all. Thinking with Assent | 35 And, of course, there are plenty of religious people who, without being scholarly or academic about it, consider it quite important to believe, whether scripture or the proclamations of ecclesial authority, in the manner of facts. At times, this particular understanding has meant, and may still mean, tweaking epistemic rules to allow some unusual things to count as evidence. The insistence that scriptures tell strictly historical stories, for instance, or that they explain the emergence of animal species, would count in this category. Crucial to a seductive sense of faith is the resistance to the often fearful certainty that would make faith into a desperately determined belief: a constant and necessary openness to question, a willingness to dwell in questioning, in mystery—and so in a sense of the sacred, as the complication of the...