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Believing in order to Understand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Cyril Barrett
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Abstract

The theme of this season of lectures is hermeneutics, Verstehen and humane understanding. It is my contention in this paper that long before Droysen or Dilthey, Windelband or Rickert came up with the notion of cultural science (Geisteswissenschafte), it had been flourishing in the scholastic tradition of theology and philosophy of religion, though I am not sure that its practitioners would thank me for saying so.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 41 , September 1996 , pp. 223 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1996

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References

1 The Hebrew is beyond me but the Greek is ‘ẻan piseús ēte oúde sunẻte’ (if you do not believe you will not understand). This is the Septuagint, what Augustine would have read in North Africa. But Jerome's Vulgate has: ‘Si nor credideritis non permanebitis’ which has been translated in the King James version as ‘If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established’ (whatever that means). The New Revised Standard version has ‘If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.’ This has the virtue of neatness. But for the purpose of this paper all this is idle erudition.

2 Proslogion, ed. and tr. Hopkins, J. and Richardson, H. (London, 1974), in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, p. 93Google Scholar.

3 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Barrett, D. C. (Oxford, §1966), p. 35 (hereafter LC)Google Scholar.

4 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London, 1930), pp. 188–209Google Scholar.

5 On Certainty, (Oxford, 1979), §143, p. 21 (hereafter OC)Google Scholar.

6 Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy The Gospel in Brief (New York, 1896)Google Scholar.

7 Grammar of Asset, pp.36–97.Google Scholar

8 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London. 1909), pp. 3–121Google Scholar.