
I’ve been ruminating on Suan Sonna and Austin Suggs’ recent discussion on Suggs’ YouTube channel. It brought out something I take to be missing from dialogues about perspicuity/ tradition/ sola scriptura.
In it, they went down a path I’ve heard often after Suan laid out his argument. He argued that there is an unbreakable tie between the true belief of a protestant who derives knowledge from his/her personal reading of scripture on the one hand, and the justification of that true belief on the other; that Catholics have the resources to break this tie because they have a magisterium which can settle doctrinal disputes authoritatively.
Austin responded, as many protestants have, by suggesting that a magisterium doesn’t break the tie because, under a catholic paradigm, individuals are still forced to interpret, not only scripture, but also magisterial documents. He pushed this when he talked about the grounds for knowing whether the magisterium is true, showing that the reasons given for its truth are often scripture and history—muddled and difficult to interpret as they are. Suan countered that we need faith in the reality and goodness of God, and therefore the inerrancy of scripture, the understanding of which would require something like the magisterium.
But I don’t think this takes Austin’s counter seriously. I think we could push Austin’s point into an epistemological register which is perhaps stronger than he meant to put it, but nevertheless potent.
Here’s how we could do it. How do we know the magisterium is true? Well it cannot be by revelation, at least not completely. This is because, putting aside the truth of Christianity, to know what Christianity is, we must receive the revelation of God. How do we do that? The answer cannot be “listen to the magisterium” because the existence of the magisterium, if true, would be given by revelation. In this way, under these terms, intellectual assent to revelation as such epistemologically precedes knowledge of the magisterium.
It’s important to note, in this version of Austin’s argument, more is at stake. It’s a question of how we know revelation in the first place. In the video, Suan made an appeal to Natural Law and the necessity of faith, both of which make a God who would create a magisterium likely.
(Update: I chatted with Suan after I wrote this and he wanted to elaborate on this point. He said, “I am sympathetic to Swinburne's approach of beginning from the existence and nature of God to then reasonable proposals on what a theistic God would aim to actualize in the world given our nature as rational, political animals. My argument is not simply faith in the reality and goodness of God, although that is a fine summary I suppose.”)
However, that said, the question remains: faith in what? Well, revelation. What’s revelation? And we are off to the races and Austin’s point stands.
Granting all this, how do we proceed? I think St. Cardinal John Henry Newman has an excellent answer, especially when elaborated by Alisdair Macintyre. JHN actually makes a similar argument as Suan in his essay on development, but he undergirds it with a certain epistemology which saves the argument from the problems raised by Austin.
JHN is going to say, when we are talking about doctrine, we are talking about two things: the object (revelation) and ideas about the object (doctrine). His contribution is to characterize the nature of ideas through time. He says, “the idea which represents an object…is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects…” (28) In other words, we receive ideas through language which is the product of the “separate consciousness of individuals; and in proportion to the variety of aspects under which [the idea] presents itself to various minds in its force and depth.” (ibid) This gives rise to a certain epistemological situation for anyone thinking about what Christianity is.
JHN goes on to say that,
"Ordinarily, an idea is not brought home to the intellect as objective except though this variety; like bodily substances which are not apprehended except under the clothing of their properties and results, and which admit of being walked around and being surveyed on opposite sides…in evidence of their reality."
This is to say that talk about revelation (doctrine) is fundamentally of a developmental, and therefore traditional character. Time and culture, guided by rationality, simply is the nature of doctrine. This, of course, flies in the face of perspicuity and notions of objective, mainlined revelation, downloaded straight to the brain. However, it isn’t pure relativism either. Talk about revelation is, if Christianity is true, talk about something real, hard, and fast.
Alasdair Macintyre, a devotee of Newman, formalizes this into an epistemology in “Whose Justice? Which Rationality.” He argues that thought, because it is linguistic, and therefore communal, begins with the traditions of one’s culture; one’s culture providing stories about how the world works, the premises of which are the ideas from which we reason. However, these narratives can be challenged, either by changing realities which do not fit the explanations of one’s tradition, or by the introduction of new traditions from cultural encounters which fit existing realities better. Hence, his is an account of the rationality of traditions which are the condition for interpretation per se, while maintaining a healthy sense of a tradition’s fallibility.
Peter Siepel, a MacIntyre scholar, has located within this argument three key features.
i.) Rationality is dependent on the resources of traditions;
ii.) there is no neutral, tradition-independent way in which to assess the epistemic status of a theory of belief; and
iii.) one tradition can rationally defeat another by argument.
I think this nicely sums up the premises which lead to the picture MacIntyre/ Newman are drawing.
What does this have to do with Austin? Well, if true, there are no thoughts about revelation which are independent from a tradition. Therefore, the idea of locating revelation outside of tradition—say through a method which guarantees “objectivity”—is a dead end. “Objectivity” as understood in a modern-liberal framework fails to grasp how rationality is dependent on traditions to get off the ground.
But, perhaps more importantly, if this describes the way ideas work, then a living magisterium would be presupposed in the very idea of revelation itself. Revelation would not be some set of information—abstracted from time and experience—it would be the living knowledge of revelation. In other words, if the church is to have correct ideas about revelation at all, part of that revelation must be a tradition which has integrity, a tradition which has as a constituent part, some self-governing principle by which true ideas of revelation are propagated. Under this paradigm, the tradition itself is the revelation of God. It all ends up sounding a lot like Dei Verbum to me.
Of course, Suan’s arguments could be plugged and played here, just with an epistemic foundation which doesn’t grant the existence of knowledge outside of traditions.
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