Gnosis, Doxa, and Episteme, or, What Kind of Knowledge Do You Mean?

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Sciborg_S_Patel

Gnosis, Doxa, and Episteme, or, What Kind of Knowledge Do You Mean?

The point I want to make here is that there are things that can be justified by reference to religious experience, and things that can’t. Claims about the spiritual validity and effectiveness of a tradition fall into the first category; claims about the historical origins of a tradition fall into the second. These two sets of claims have no necessary relation to one another. A tradition can be gray with the dust of centuries and still useless or harmful; a tradition can also be newly invented and wholly valid—every tradition, after all, was brand new at one point in its history.

Yet the fact remains that inaccurate claims about a range of subjects are routinely made using religious experience as a justification. Despite the enthusiastic efforts of Biblical literalists, for example, the geological and paleontological evidence simply won’t support the claim that a worldwide flood exterminated every person and land animal on earth except the inhabitants of Noah’s Ark in the fourth millennium BCE. Despite the equally enthusiastic efforts of some of the older Druid Revival traditions, similarly, the historical evidence simply won’t support the claim that the ancient Druids used Iolo Morganwg’s rituals. Clearly you can have powerful religious experiences and still get your facts wrong.

This is where I’d like to turn to a phrase used very often in Reconstructionist circles: “unverified personal gnosis,” or UPG for short. That’s their term for the kind of claim that runs, “I had a religious experience involving X, and therefore X is true in some general sense, no matter what the evidence says.” It’s a common enough phenomenon, in and out of modern American Neopaganism, but the point I want to make is that the phrase embodies exactly the mistake that defines so-called UPG.

The word that matters here is the last one, “gnosis”—for those who aren’t familiar with the word, it’s pronounced “know-sis.” People who know their way around the alternative religiou scene know that this is a Greek word for “knowledge.” Too many of them don’t remember that the Greek language is much better at sorting out the different kind of knowledge than English is.

Bentley Layton, whose collection The Gnostic Scriptures is to my mind the best one-volume introduction to classical Gnosticism yet compiled, translates gnosis into English as “acquaintance.” That’s the kind of knowledge that gnosis is: not abstract discursive knowledge, but the kind of knowledge that implies and requires personal experience.

The distinction between gnosis and two other kinds of knowledge we’ll be discussing in a moment can be best understood through a metaphor. Imagine for a moment that you’ve just had a passionate year-long relationship with a woman who’s in the Federal witness protection program, and is living under a false identity. Literally every single “fact” you know about that woman is false—but at the same time, in another sense, you know her very, very well. The kind of knowledge you have about her, the results of your intimate acquaintance with her, is gnosis.

In ancient Greek, there are two other kinds of knowledge alongside gnosis. The first, doxa—that’s pronounced “dock-sa”—is opinion. This is something you know because you heard it from someone, or because you read it somewhere. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your source is, if you know it because you heard it or read it rather than because you experienced it yourself, it’s doxa. The world being what it is, far more often than now, when someone says they know something, what they’ve got is doxa.

The third kind? That’s episteme, pronounced “epp-iss-tay-may.” This is logical knowledge, the kind of thing you know because you understand the rules of reasoning and know how to proceed from premises to a conclusion. It’s also personal knowledge, because you have to do the reasoning yourself—if you trust someone else to do it for you, then for you, it’s doxa, not episteme—but it’s replicable personal knowledge. Most people, given patience and a willingness to learn, can be led step by step through a sequence of logic until they understand why the conclusion follows from the premises, and the moment they get it, they have episteme of it.

Notice that the same piece of knowledge can be doxa for one person, episteme for a second, and gnosis for a third—and for that matter, the same piece of knowledge can pass through all three stages in a single person’s mind. You learn a scientific fact in school, and simply commit it to memory: that’s doxa. Later on, in college, you major in that branch of science, repeat the relevant experiments, come to understand the logic that underlies that fact and gives it its meaning: that’s episteme. You end up working in that field, and experience that fact in action until you know it in your bones: that’s gnosis.

With that in mind, let’s return to the phrase “unverified personal gnosis.” That’s a double redundancy, because if something is actually gnosis, it’s personal by definition, and it’s also impossible for anyone else to to verify. At the same time, it doesn’t justify any other mode of knowledge; the mere fact that you have gnosis of something doesn’t mean that your claims to doxa about that same thing ought to be accepted at face value. As in the example of the woman in the witness protection program, you can have true gnosis and false doxa about the same subject, because there’s no overlap between these two kinds of knowledge.

And episteme? It occupies a middle ground because, as already noted, it’s personal but replicable. Your personal experience of episteme can be generalized to some extent, because you can show other people exactly how to have that experience themselves. The difficulty is simply that episteme is only possible in certain fields of human experience. You can have episteme about any subject that’s subject to objectively verifiable testing, but a huge amount of human experience can’t be tested in any objectively verifiable way. That means you’re stuck with doxa, on the one hand, and gnosis, on the other.

For about two and a half millennia now, intellectuals have tried to enlarge the empire of episteme: to find ways to have replicable personal knowledge about things that nobody has been able to know in that way before. It’s a worthwhile project, and it’s produced three of the half dozen or so greatest achievements of the human mind—mathematics, logic, and experimental science—but one of the lessons of that project is that there are massively important aspects of human life that can’t be reduced to episteme no matter how hard you try.

The standard intellectual responses to that awkward lesson are, on the one hand, to find some way to pretend to reduce those non-epistemic aspects of life to episteme anyway, and on the other, to insist that the non-epistemic aspects of life don’t exist. Religious experience is subject to both of those gambits. My readers will doubtless be familiar with all the claims that religious experience can’t exist because it can’t be proven according to replicable quantitative tests. That’s one way of dodging the issue—but the response of the angry Celtic Reconstructionists discussed in last month’s post here is another.

To insist that religious experience can’t be real unless it conforms to some historical model verified by officially sanctioned scholars, after all, is simply one more way of trying to flatten out gnosis into episteme: to drag religion out of the uncomfortably personal realm of acquaintance and try to slap it down on the lab bench for dissection. That this maneuver inevitably misses what it’s trying to find is only one of many ironies in the situation.

Now of course there’s another factor, which is that certain kinds of spiritual practice are epistemic—that is to say, people who do them systematically, with the proper preparation and attitude, reliably get the same results. To understand that, and the immense challenge it poses to the entire history of rationalism, will require a great deal of discussion in posts to come.
 
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