Cognitive certainty of Western theology: Augustine's intellectualism and his construction of the intelligibility of God

With respect to intellectualism, Yannaras shows that Augustine (like Descartes later), identifies knowledge (and existence) with intellection, which is believed to possess the certainty of knowledge. For Augustine, the intellect is also the supreme part of the soul, and intelligence the part of it which makes the soul superior to the body: 

The rational soul stands out above an the things God has fashioned, ... cleaving to Him in charity the more it perceives these Reasons ... with that chief part of itself by which it is superior, that is, with its intelligence. 

As a corollary of the dominant place reserved to human intellectual capacity, Augustine is confident that the human mind can understand God: "God is for the mind to understand, as body is for the eye to see." Although Augustine points to various limits of the human capacity to truly comprehend God, the central point for this discussion is that divine intelligibility is innately suited to the intellect. 

Yannaras criticizes Augustine's intellectualism and Platonism from the perspective of his wish to advance apophaticism. The intellect, seeming to be the objection, needs to resort to objective criteria of confirmation and to authority. Apophaticism, as understood by the Greek fathers and as it will be discussed in the next section. proposes a very different attitude indeed on the question of the intelligibility of God, one that places the emphasis on indeterminacy, freedom, and relatedness, and testifies to the gulf separating the East from the West in terms of philosophical differences. Yannaras even ventures to suggest that the Latin Church had encouraged intellectualism out of a fear of the freedom entailed by the epistemological priority of personal relationships and experience (instead giving priority to cognitive certainty). 

Scholasticism perfected the idea of certainty of knowledge brought by reason, through the enthusiastic embrace, in the twelfth century, of Aristotelian logic (the Organon in arable translation) in an absolutized way, unrelated to the context of Aristode's other works, which came to be known in Western Europe only later. Syllogistic thought and systematic thinking spoke, of course, of the possibility of man's emancipation from the 'totalitarian structures of Western medieval society', and restored his dignity. They inspired confidence in the 'thinking subject's mastery of the truth of natural, historical and metaphysical reality','but they also led to the construction of an objective knowledge, and identified knowledge with intellectual conceptualization.' Thomas Aquinas perfected the tendency towards rationalization of faith by building a theory of God as a transcendent 'object' of metaphysics, and as the highest intelligible object (in contrast with the God beyond knowing of the Easterners, presented below). He inaugurated the Scholastic path to knowledge, analogia entis, the analogical relation between beings and Being (or essence): we may know God by attributing to Him the perfections of the qualities we observe in beings. This analogy between God and beings turns metaphysics from ontology into a supernatural version of physics, Yannaras notes. Scholastic epistemology exhausts the possibilities of cognition in the conventional categories of objective syllogisms in the sense that truth is understood as coincidence of the concept with the object of thoughts. 

As an effect, acquiring secular knowledge in this specific epistemology of certainty of knowledge presents the same absolutist, axiomatic character of metaphysical, transcendent axiology: The syllogistic/mathematical or experimental proof replaces in the secular realm, but mimics the given and impervious character of transcendent universals. This transfer, Yannaras notices, prompted existentialists like Kierkegaard to deplore it as the replacement of a transcendent authority with an equally absolutized intellectual certainty, as it appears in Descartes' cogito or Hegel's dialectics. 

It appears from this specific account that the initial direction of the communication between the sacred and the worldly was initially from faith towards science: faith took, in the Latin West. a systematic rationalistic shape to express the sacred, inspired by Roman legal mind, and, from there, rationalism passed back into natural sciences. Theological rationalism furnished inspiration for technology in the secular realm.


From the book International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives