Early into his recent book Rumors (Polity, 2025), Mladen Dolar makes a fairly big mistake which sets the whole project (an exciting proposal —to explore the concept of ‘rumor’ philosophically) on a rather shaky footing. Here’s what he says:
“Philosophy famously started with a divide, by drawing a sharp opposition between what in Greek times was called doxa and what was called episteme. Doxa is the regime of opinions (or beliefs) […] They draw their authority just from being repeated. By contrast episteme is knowledge that has to be epistemologically founded and substantiated: founded not on personal preferences, tautologies, or common assent but on ‘the thing itself.’” (pp.3-4)
While this is near correct, it is not quite. Doxa in the pre-Christian ancient Greek philosophical world meant something like opinion but not quite in the modern “opinions or beliefs” framework that Mladen utilizes. Doxa was intrinsically relational and social, meaning something closer to terms like “value” or “worthiness” or “importance” or “repute / reputation” or “esteem” or “regard.”
It becomes important, for example, for Socrates to make a distinction between the things his interlocutors “esteem” or “regard as true and meaningful” and what things are in reality. So, again, it’s close to Mladen’s definition but different enough to be significant. In particular it troubles the “sharp opposition” the Mladen claims to have existed.
Doxa and episteme share a relationship, or a communion, together in composing human knowledge and action, and the boundaries are not quite as firm as it would appear at first blush. An example:
Two men, imagine J.R.R. Tolkien and A.W. Tozer, both Christians, are debating the merits of pipe-smoking. They both come with evidential statements (episteme) and with value claims (doxa). We might catch a snipet like this:
AT: Smoking has been linked with cancer (episteme). Christians should not be reckless with their health (doxa).
JT: Those studies mainly examine cigarette smoking (episteme) and I think there’s reason to believe (doxa) that much of that data is spurious and politically/socially/economically motivated (episteme & doxa simultaneously …or maybe neither…?).
AT: Yes, but do you think it’s becoming for a human made int he image of God? (both, again, actually: ‘image of God’ is episteme, a fact, ‘becoming’ doxa)
JT: Absolutely I do (doxa). It takes a thing from the earth, transforms it by fire, induces reason, calmness, presence, and tranquility of thought (episteme based on private experience, but episteme nonetheless).
AT: Well you could very well justify the recreational use of cannabis on the same grounds (doxa being utilized to call episteme into question).
JT: One could do so but they’d do it improperly (claim about the proper, doxological, use of episteme). For cannabis does not produce a real tranquility or sharpness of wit, but a kind of languid lethargy, a dissipation and a repression, it lulls one into absence not presence….
And so on and so forth… you get the idea. The two terms are not opposed but mutually informative. Sure, they can be disjunctive (what I value may not line up with reality), but disjunction or conflict or tension does not render their relationship mutually-exclusive.
Because he misses this initial shared life between the two things, doxa and episteme, Mladen fails to account for, or even countenance, the philosophical revolution engendered by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Throughout scripture the word doxa is used to mean ‘glory’ (e.g. Matt. 6:13, 16:27, 24:30; Mk. 13:26, Lk. 2:9, 2:14, etc.). Can you figure-out why?
Here’s a few short bullet-points on the theme:
For the Living God there is no distinction between doxa and episteme —God’s knowledge is never in disjunction from what he regards and esteems.
All things that are (episteme) are sustained by the Word of God (logos). The Word who is God speaks all things into being just as he speaks affection and value and meaning and love in regard to those things.
There is no difference between God’s glory (doxa) and his word of truth (episteme).
The glory of God is his approval and affection. His glory is the eternal liturgical dialogue of Father Son and Spirit. God is Conversation Himself.
When God esteems a thing (doxa) He always esteems it in truth (episteme) and not in falsity.
This becomes “practical” for the Christian. It is not enough, as some might have us believe, to life in a world of neutral or secular “facts” —things which everyone can supposedly agree to without reference to God. We must work to live in God’s world in a way that our response to “facts” (episteme) is in light of what God has said about them (doxa).
The world, and everything in it, is not just a “fact.” It is a thing which stands in relation to God and which has a purpose and an order and a way to it. Everything that is stands in a doxological relation to God, not merely an epistemic one. And we ought to relate to the world according to its relation to God.
Or, as William Dunbar has put it:
“Man, pleis thy makar and be mirry,
And sett not by this warld a chirry;”
(from ‘Of Covetyce’)