Problem of Evil as Epistemological Fallacy article

[Bethany Gates]

[BethanyAnne]

The Orthodox tradition has consistently resisted the rationalization
of theology. The Orthodox theologian is the one who prays: knowledge
of God is only the direct personal experience of theosis. At the root
of the Orthodox dogmatic tradition is the immovable priority of the
personal choice to love or not to love. In the end, this all that
Orthodox theology is ever about. This is because loving is what true
knowledge is.
The Orthodox Church has, since at least the fourth century,
maintained a strict distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of
reality. This distinction flows from honestly wrestling with the
experience of salvation in baptism and eucharist. The empirical
experience of salvation-- recognizing that life is bestowed through
the mysteries of baptism and eucharist, mysteries which are
participated in through the persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit in
addition to the Father-- deeply confused the early Church. How could
it be that salvation is granted through two persons besides God? Who
and what are these persons?! The Fathers of the Church, in seeking a
solution to this riddle recognized that the empirical experience of
salvation must be allowed to prevail over any intellectual system. In
other words, lived experience is more real than rational
conceptualization. Because of this commitment to empirical truth, the
Fathers were willing to set aside preconceived theories of Being and
to reinvent the term ‘hypostasis’ as something more real than even
Being itself. It is the hypostasis of the Son and that of the Spirit
which they were experiencing in the salvation of the Church. Thus,
the three hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit were somehow more real,
more fundamental, than even the Being of God which of course could be
only one. But since these hypostases all cooperated in giving life,
in saving and deifying members of the Church, they must all equally be
God.
With the articulation of the Trinity, the Church established that the
‘who’ of God, the Father, Son, and Spirit, is the epistemological
starting point for any knowledge of God. Through this process, the
‘what’ of God was understood to be totally incomprehensible. In the
following centuries, the ‘what’ of God was placed thoroughly beyond
the bounds of any human knowledge. ‘What’ ever God is, God is only
knowable through the saving activity of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. This is because we can directly experience this activity as
we personally relate to these persons in the mysteries of the Church.
Whatever God is beyond this personal interaction, we have no capacity
to know.
Underlying this is the Orthodox apophatic epistemology: “a thorough
going empiricism,” according to Chrestos Yannaras. What is true is
what discloses itself in relationship to us: what constitutes and
gives us life. This means that only our experience of relatedness can
be true. Any conception, therefore, can only be a reflection upon the
truth. This is because conceptions are linguistic productions of our
own minds, and not the self-evident disclosures of particular
realities. As an example, Peter knows Paul when Paul discloses
himself to Peter in direct personal interaction. This is the truth of
Paul, revealed to Peter through the disclosure of ‘otherness:’ the
reality that Paul is a real ‘other’ person acting upon Peter. Peter
can then give an account of this interaction, of this revelation of
Paul, but Peter’s account is only a reflection upon the primary truth
which was in this case the experience of Paul’s self-disclosure. Thus
Orthodox apophaticism is an epistemology that refuses to concede the
possibility of exhausting the truth in propositional form. Truth is
experience, neither concept nor statement.
This is crucial for understanding Orthodox causality with respect to
God. Any theology or philosophy that approaches God through the
syllogism or through the “analogy of being” intrinsically conceives of
God, but does not experience God. The analogy of being is
particularly deceptive to Western theology which explicitly accepted
it, particularly in the Latinization of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas.
The analogy of being conceives of God as the Being that causes beings
to be. It is primarily by analogy to physical causality that God is
deduced to be the logically necessary first cause of the universe.
(Without a particular first cause, the chain of causality would
continue on to infinity without any actual starting point, and
therefore, the universe would never have begun without the particular
action of a first cause.) Following this analogy with physical
causality, God’s being is thought to be deducible from the beings of
creation, assuming that the nature of the effect reflects the nature
of the cause. Continuing on through the conceptions of various
created realities, the syllogism may be employed to deduce truths
about God. In this way, the Western theologian may hope to attain
knowledge of God up to but not including the precise definition of
God’s being. This logically necessary God is ‘guaranteed’ to exist
and to be the cause of all.
But the strength of this God is identical with the irrelevancy of
this God. The logically necessary God is impervious to any particular
experience precisely because this God is impossible to experience.
This is the God of rational certainty, the God of conceived truth. As
conceived truth, this God is a linguistic production of the human mind
in reflection upon the experience of physical causality, of natural
existence. This is a God that is known in and identified with the
Being of the natural world. Through the natural laws conceived by
created minds to articulate and organize our human experiences of the
created universe. This is not a God of direct empirical knowledge.
As such, the ultimate question of this God’s existence is exactly as
irrelevant as it is certain.
The analogy of being presupposes the created world’s similarity to
its creator. This method of theology denies the ‘otherness’ of the
world and affirms its ‘sameness’ to God. This analogical God, as the
Being that gives being to beings, is therefore somehow contained in
the being of beings. This is the participated emanation of platonic
theology, the nature that is somehow ‘had’ by all participants in
Being. But the Orthodox tradition refuses to identify God as Being.
Gregory Palamas resisted this equation with Being by stating
(paraphrased) ‘If God is Being, then nothing else in the world is a
being, and if God has a nature, then nothing in the world has a
nature.’ Such is the radical otherness between God and creation. God
is beyond Being. God wills beings to exist through God’s erotic
energies. God calls creation forth from absolute nothingness and
constitutes it as absolute other. This nothingness and otherness of
creation is exactly what is necessary for true erotic communion to
exist. God wills to relate ecstatically, beyond Godself. Therefore,
creation is seen to come forth from the nothingness ‘outside’ of God
and in response to the beckoning of the ecstatic energies of God as
distinguished from God’s ineffable and unknowable essence. It is the
complete otherness, the origin in nothingness, of creation that
enables the true love that God desires in creating: a true union of
‘others.’
In opposition to the analogy of being, to this God of rational
certainty, the Orthodox tradition has clung to the immediate empirical
God: as rationally uncertain as it is existentially necessary. This
opposition can be seen especially in Basil the Great and Gregory
Nazianzen, Dionysius and John Damascene especially as used by Photius
during the Great Schism, and most explicitly in Gregory Palamas in
defense of the Holy Hesychasts’ empirical vision of the uncreated
energies of God. The ‘what’ of God, the rationally deducible first
cause of Western metaphysics, is rendered existentially irrelevant in
that it is unknowable. It is the ‘who’ of God who reveal themselves
to us as life-giving beckoners to reciprocal personal love. This is
all that we know about God. We know that God reveals Godself through
the invitation to love. There is an ancient Greek pun equating the
beautiful ‘kallon’ with the one who calls ‘kalei’ us to eros. Thus
the One, the Good, the Beautiful is He who calls us to love
erotically. This is not the love of contemplation or satisfaction,
but the intense desire to leave ourselves and find the other, to be
united with the other. This is the opposite of self-sufficiency, even
the self-sufficiency of the first cause. God is primarily (one could
say ‘only’ if referring to the limits of human knowledge) the ecstatic
(ek-static: standing outside oneself) lover who beckons us to
ecstatically desire the other --including both God and all human icons
of God. In this ecstatic love, both the human and divine persons
literally stand beyond themselves for the sake of interpenetrating the
other’s energies. Their eros goes forth from their essence to relate
with their beloved’s energy. In this love, we can never know ‘what’
God is, and the Church dreadfully warns us about substituting any
conceptual notion about God for the immediate experience of erotic
union with God. This is because only erotic union is saving;
conceptual knowledge of the logically necessary God is, at best,
existentially irrelevant.
The reason that the problem of evil is an epistemological fallacy is
that it is guilty of exactly this substitution. The logically
necessary God is necessarily the cause of all things including evil.
But the Orthodox tradition maintains that there is no such God! The
logically necessary God does not exist because that God has never been
experienced by the Church. In fact, the logically necessary God is
precisely the ‘what’ of God banished to unknowability by the Church.
The only God that the Church knows is the lover who beckons us to
love. This is again because knowledge of God can only truly be called
knowledge when it is the immediate experience of ‘being saved’ by
God’s erotic self-disclosure, not in the realm of linguistic
formulations or propositional statements, but in the existential event
of communion. What, if anything, is God the cause of? God is the
cause of our invitation to love; God is the cause of our capacity to
love; God is the cause of our desire, eros, to love; God is, finally,
the fulfillment of our love by enabling our transcendence of natural
self-preservation in order to truly be united with God in Christ, the
only Word, revelation, of God. In this erotic theological universe,
there is simply no room for any intellectual deity. There does not
exist any logically deducible first cause, but only the direct
experience of the Lover’s invitation to love.
In the apophatic and erotic epistemology of the Orthodox Church, it
is relationship that constitutes knowledge; it is in fact relationship
that constitutes existence. Something not in relationship could not
exist; it would remain in the oblivion of unknowability, irrelevance,
and utter nothingness. It is relationship that constitutes reality,
goodness, and knowledge. As such, the only evil, the only non-good or
non-being, is the absence of erotic relationship. The only falling
away from beauty and goodness is the refusal to relate in love. As
God is only known through the invitation to love, we have no
epistemological grounds from which to accuse God of anything contrary
to this invitation. While there certainly occurs the refusal to
relate and to love in many people, this refusal is itself an
expression of the personal freedom presupposed in God’s invitation to
love. Furthermore even the selfish desires of ‘evil’ people
inadvertently disclose their eros, albeit a misguided one. Even the
‘evil’ yearn, although selfishly, for self-transcendence, for the
attainment of the other. And even in these ‘evil’ desires, God’s
invitation to love, to transcend self and come to relationship, is
evident.
The only propositional statement regarding God allowable for the
Church is that “God is Love.” This is because all of our empirical
knowledge of God, all of our experience of relationship with God, and
all of the life given to us through that relatedness --all the
possible forms of our human knowledge-- are disclosed to us through
the ecstatic energies of God which invite us to reciprocate His love.
There remains nothing else to say about God. All other statements
result from propositional dialectic. All other statements depend on
analogies to the created world. These superfluous statements about
God are only abstracted reflections upon nature, and so could not have
anything to do with the ineffable ‘what’ of God that remains hidden
even in God’s personal disclosure through the salvific experiences of
Baptism and Eucharist. In the end, our epistemology finds its end
(both as limit and as completion) in the immediate experience of God,
which is always and only the invitation to love.


On Oct 26, 12:32 pm, Bethany Gates <bethanyga...@gmail.com> wrote:
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[Amanda Olsen]

That was fascinating Bethany. Thank you! (I have about 10 responses but they're still formulating.)