ABSTRACT
The current resurgence of religious fundamentalism is but one amongst many manifestations of a widespread and pervasive spiritual illiteracy that has bedevilled Western culture – and, indeed, penetrated beyond it – in the post-Enlightenment era. The root causes of such illiteracy are manifold, and resist simplistic explanation. 1 One such cause, however, is undoubtedly the diffusion of the epistemic fallacy from the Western academy into the habitus of the liberal lifeworld and from there into a variety of non-liberal belief systems. The failure to differentiate ontology from epistemology in the manner espoused by critical realists leads either to the modernist assertion of radical epistemic certainty or the postmodernist affirmation of radical epistemic scepticism. In both cases epistemic access to reality is affirmed or denied on prior epistemic grounds: rather than allowing mind to be transformed by the actual order-of-things, the affirmation of modern epistemic capacity or postmodern epistemic incapacity authorizes the mind to constrain and control reality. The result is a thoroughgoing irrealism, in which the conflation of epistemology and ontology effectively dislocates knowledge from reality. The possibility of realism lies in the differentiation of epistemology from ontology in a manner that creates space for judgemental rationality. The spiritual life, the on-going quest to relate appropriately to ultimate reality, requires acknowledgement of the tension between the prior claims of ontology and the actuality of epistemic relativism if it is to open up the possibility of cultivating that spiritual wisdom, or spiritual rationality, upon which spiritual literacy depends.
