THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DIVINE LOVE ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Thesis

142 Pages·2017·0.68 MB·English

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

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ã Copyright by
Huili Shen Stout
All rights reserved
2018

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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.
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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

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Natural and Supernatural Apprehensions ..........................................................38

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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 kinds of knowledge.15 Philosophers Jeremy
Fantl and Matthew McGrath suggest investigating deeper into the links between action
and knowledge and deliberating the nature of belief according to its impact on practice.16
British philosopher Timothy Williamson believes that knowledge in and of itself should
be studied in lieu of traditional concepts of “truth, belief and justification.”17 Another
British philosopher Gilbert Ryle distinguishes knowledge of a truth, “knowledge-that,”
from knowledge of a skill, “knowledge-how.”18 Other scholars have criticized the
limitation of epistemic goods to propositional knowledge in mainstream epistemology,
proposing as alternatives the study of understanding, wisdom, cognitive agents and
cognitive abilities.19

13 Hetherington, “Epistemology’s Future Here and Now,” 231.
14 Ibid., 231-32; Dalibor Renic, Ethical and Epistemic Normativity: Lonergan and Virtue
Epistemology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2012), 73-81.
15 Renic, Ethical and Epistemic Normativity, 79, citing Roberts and Wood, Intellectual
Virtues, 111-112, 154. A separation between the will and the intellect is therefore
contrived, ill-conforming to reality, because knowing is sustained by agents not faculties.
Intellectual life cannot be isolated from other parts of life.
16 Ibid., 232.
17 Ibid., 234.
18 Ibid., 232.
19 Dalibor Renic, Ethical and Epistemic Normativity: Lonergan and Virtue Epistemology
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2012), 22-3.
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