The Role of Faith and Love In Voegelin's Mystical Epistemology

Abstract

This essay explores Eric Voegelin's recovery of pre-modern experiences as the basis of his own theory of knowledge.It divides roughly into five parts: the first distinguishes between Voegelin's "mystical" epistemology and the intentionalist epistemological theories of modernity; the second finds his mystical epistemology to be rooted in experience of faith and love as symbolized by the Christian mystics; the third develops the second by contrasting the traditional Christian mystical understanding with its antithesis-Martin Luther's doctrine of sola fide; the fourth explores the modem consequences of the disparity in Luther between faith and love; and the fifth, in conclusion, assesses Voegelin's ostensible rejection of Christian thought, and concomitantly of faith and love, in his later writings.We hope to show that Voegelin's theory of knowledge depends upon a certain understanding of faith and love and that it agrees essentially with the equivalent insights found in the greatest of the Classical and medieval Christian philosophers.Aristotle once said that "all men desire to know."In modern philosophy, however, this "desire" has been ignored, and concern for this fundamental human experience has been replaced by a concern for epistemological consistency.Following Descartes, the moderns began with the assumption of a knower separated from the thing known, a consciousness external to its object.How, they asked, can Faith and Love in Voegelin's EpistemologyHUMANITAS • 35 this thing (the human mind) "know" the reaUty outside of it?They searched for the rational ground of knowledge in order to provide their propositions with logical necessity and certainty.Descartes doubted everything of which he could not have demonstrable knowledge.This "universal doubt" would make no sense were Descartes not on his quest for apodictic certainty, which, as he says, "will put science upon a foundation of knowledge."From Locke to Hegel, all the great modern epistemologists, while searching for the foundation of knowledge, in effect question the very possibility of that knowledge.The quest for certainty ends with two extreme epistemological positions: the quagmire of skepticism (Hume) or the "moral holiday" of absolutism (Hegel).Each position reduces the Socratic paradox-of knowing that one does not know-to an epistemological fallacy.As a consequence, in the course of modern epistemological speculation, knowledge as power (Bacon) becomes knowledge as the pawn of the powerful (Nietzsche).Ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Socrates, however, rejected Classical both skepticism and absolutism; for they felt drawn to search for the philosophers truth by a force beyond their control.They were philosophoi, lovers ^si^ptkkm^rid wisdom; and knowledge (episteme), even though it lacked a founabsolutism.dation in apodictic certainty, was better than opinion (doxa).These philosophers beheved that at its root all knowledge was as paradoxical and mysterious as the Delphic Oracle's pronouncement to the young Socrates-that he in his ignorance was the most knowledgeable soul alive.It is with this view of knowledge in mind that Eric Voegelin set out on his search for meaning and knowledge in philosophical and religious history.Based on his recovery of meaning from this history, he concludes that the paradoxical reply to the human search for the ground is insoluble by rationalizations which enlist purely human means.He finds, instead, that the experience of knowledge is an experience of divine-human communion, a mystical experience.It is a movement of desire or love, a pull in the soul drawing the knower toward the light of truth that beckons him.The recognition of this pull requires faith, but the pull itself is a manifestation of love.This love has two senses: on the one hand, it is a love in the knower for the object loved; and, on the other, it is a recognition that the knower himself is an object of love.The experiences of faith and love form the core of pre-modem experiences of knowledge.For Voegelin, philosophical knowledge emerges from a contem-36 • Volume IX, No. 1,1996