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Vicens, Leigh

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Divine Holiness and the Axiology of Theism

Pearce, Kenneth L.

Foundational Grounding and Four Sources of Contingency

Fuqua, Jonathan

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian 
Philosophers 
Volume 41 Issue 1 Article 8 
1-1-2025 
Roberto Di Ceglie, God, the Good, and the Spiritual Turn in 
Epistemology 
Jonathan Fuqua 
Conception Seminary College, jfuqua@conception.edu 
Follow this and additional works at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy 
Recommended Citation 
Fuqua, Jonathan (2025) "Roberto Di Ceglie, God, the Good, and the Spiritual Turn in Epistemology," Faith 
and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 41: Iss. 1, Article 8. 
DOI: 10.37977/faithphil.2025.41.1.8 
Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol41/iss1/8 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at ePLACE: preserving, learning, and 
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Faith and Philosophy146
pp.146–150 FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY Vol. 41 No. 1 January 2025
doi: 10.37977/faithphil.2025.41.1.8
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this book. But Mihut consistently avoids this pitfall. The reason I think 
he is so successful on this front is that his project is firmly grounded in 
theological criteria which Mihut unabashedly recognizes as being funda-
mental to how we make sense of the world. For him, the moral picture 
that God’s revelation paints of the world, to which scripture testifies, is 
the very best picture simply because it is God’s picture. And the simple 
reason that Mihut’s picture should be so inviting (for Christians at least) 
is that it so beautifully resonates with how humans experience the world 
as creatures of God and followers of Christ. As such, this book is a model 
of faith seeking understanding, which I hope many other readers will be 
inspired to follow.
God, the Good, and the Spiritual Turn in epistemology, by Roberto Di Ceglie. 
Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. vii + 235. $99.99 (hardcover).
JONATHAN FUQUA, Conception Seminary College
Why are philosophical debates about religion so inconclusive? Debates 
about God’s existence, the problem of evil, religious pluralism, and other 
such matters have been going on for literally millennia, with no end in sight. 
Is there anything we can do to make these debates more fruitful? Roberto 
Di Ceglie, a philosophy professor at the Pontifical Lateran University (in 
Rome), has an answer to the fruitfulness question: we can make a spiritual 
turn (ST) in epistemology. This is something everyone should do anyway, he 
thinks—especially Christians; but such a turn would also, in his view, make 
our debates more fruitful by helping us to reach partial conclusiveness on 
some of the seemingly interminable questions that we’re still debating.
In order to understand Di Ceglie’s proposal for a spiritual  epistemology, 
we have to begin with the alternative, which comes to us largely from 
Locke and which dominates the contwemporary discussion: mere epis-
temology (ME). ME is the view that “one should always prefer beliefs 
supported by more evidence to beliefs supported by less evidence” (4). 
According to ME, “no commitment to one’s beliefs should .  .  . prevent 
one from changing one’s mind if the available evidence requires this” (2). 
This sounds a lot like evidentialism, but—curiously—Di Ceglie doesn’t re-
ally discuss ME as a version of evidentialism, say of the sort defended by 
Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. This is one example of a rather odd but 
serious lacuna that characterizes the book: it is long on applied epistemol-
ogy and short on regular epistemology. In any case, ME’s practitioners, 
BOOk ReviewS 147
on Di Ceglie’s reading, believe that following ME will produce consensus 
among debaters, yet this has manifestly not been borne out. For Di Ceg-
lie, our debates are inconclusive for a reason often overlooked by practi-
tioners of ME: “debaters simply want to stick to that view, regardless of 
the available evidence that might convince them of the contrary” (16).
The alternative to ME is the spiritual turn, which results in something 
we could call “spiritual epistemology” (note that Di Ceglie himself does 
not use this exact phrase). According to Di Ceglie, “taking the ST means 
that, before launching any initiative, intellectual initiatives included, one 
is openly committed to the good and to those beliefs that the commitment 
in question involves. Therefore, this commitment is a-rational, since the 
idea of good that it presupposes has not been attained by way of rational 
research” (118). In adopting the spiritual turn, one makes one’s spiritual 
perfection one’s top priority, understanding that this perfection is some-
thing one can make progress toward only by making commitment to the 
good – which, for Christians, is God Himself – one’s top priority. Thus, 
one prioritizes the good over settling philosophical debates, even over 
truth itself, recognizing that the search for truth is a valuable enterprise 
only because the truth is one of the goods that will aid in our perfection. 
Christians should therefore be more “responsive to God” than they are to 
“epistemological criteria” (92). Di Ceglie characterizes this commitment 
to the good as a-rational – not because it is irrational, but because it is not 
based on a philosophical investigation into the good. To predicate one’s 
commitment to the good on the basis of a prior intellectual investigation 
would be to fall into ME rather than spiritual epistemology. Because char-
ity perfects all the virtues, one’s commitment to the good should include 
making love of God and love of neighbor top priorities. For Di Ceglie, 
these loves will actually help us work toward partial conclusiveness in 
debates by, in part, helping us to become more virtuous people.
In order to motivate the spiritual turn in epistemology, Di Ceglie pros-
ecutes a two-pronged argumentative strategy throughout the book’s six 
chapters: (i) first, he criticizes ME; (ii) second, he discusses opponents of 
ME—folks like Reid, Plantinga, and Newman, among others—noting their 
cogent criticisms of ME but also noting that none of them are able to prop-
erly diagnose the heart of the problem with ME, nor offer a solution to that 
problem and the resulting inconclusiveness of our debates. In prosecuting 
this two-pronged strategy, Di Ceglie—a Catholic,  Thomist  philosopher— 
appeals to both reason and revelation. That is, he gives purely philosoph-
ical objections to ME but also appeals to the theological understanding of 
faith he adheres to as a Catholic Thomist, an understanding— we should 
add on his behalf—that one can accept without oneself being either a 
 Catholic or a Thomist. Di Ceglie’s alternative to mere epistemology— 
his spiritual turn—is then a theological epistemology, one rooted in the 
 Christian faith as Di Ceglie understands it. One particularly serious chal-
lenge that Di Ceglie levels at ME is the charge of incoherence: he says that 
Faith and Philosophy148
there is no evidence for ME and thus that its practitioners are committed 
to it in an a-rational way (191, 194).
In chapter 1, Di Ceglie provides an overview of Locke’s view of faith and 
reason. On Di Ceglie’s reading, Locke’s religious epistemology is meth-
odologically naturalistic in the sense that, for Locke, “religious belief can 
only be taken as the outcome of a rational exploration of our experience. 
This view . . . excludes any possibility that believing in God may somehow 
be due to a relationship with him, which God himself may grant to some 
of us” (15). For Di Ceglie, Locke’s view here is insufficiently Christian. 
In his first chapter, Di Ceglie also discusses Reformed epistemologists— 
Plantinga, chiefly—and Newman as critics of Locke. Di Ceglie is largely on 
board with their criticisms, but he notes that in each case there is a serious 
lacuna that hampers their religious epistemologies. Both thinkers fail to 
provide a theological discussion of the nature of faith and the way that faith 
demands that the faithful be tenacious in the face of counterevidence to the 
contrary. Chapter 2 continues similar themes: the reader is treated to a nice 
discussion of Reid and his religious epistemology and his criticisms of ME, 
including a discussion of the similarities between Reid’s religious episte-
mology and that of Aquinas. However, there is a lacuna in Reid as well: he 
never engages in a “theological exploration of the nature of faith.” He does, 
however, implicitly apply “solidly established theological views,” which 
can be “made explicit by referring to Aquinas’s theological works” (45).
In chapter 3 we are treated to an extended discussion of Aquinas’s 
views on the relationship between faith and reason. Di Ceglie argues, 
among many other things, that Aquinas has often been misread as a 
 proto-Lockean. In an extensive discussion of Aquinas, and with copious 
references to the Thomistic corpus, Di Ceglie makes a persuasive case 
that Aquinas does not think that faith requires prior evidential reasoning. 
Aquinas postulates a theological origin for faith—namely, divine grace—
one that helps explain its certitude among believers and the resulting 
firmness that characterizes the way they conduct debates with unbeliev-
ers. For Aquinas, “the Christian believer is expected to persist in her faith 
in the face of counterevidence because of her commitment to the idea that 
faith is divinely caused” (75). Natural reason can demonstrate the pre-
ambles, but even these are more certainly known, for Di Ceglie’s Aqui-
nas, by faith than by natural reason. There are signs that point to faith, 
but these only offer support, not conclusive demonstration, and, in any 
case, they are not strictly necessary for faith in the first place. God helps 
believers to believe in the Christian faith, and this includes help to love 
God and to know Him personally. Because of God’s infallibility, because 
of their relationship with Him, and because of their love for Him, believ-
ers hold firm in the face of counterevidence. Their a-rational commitment 
to God and the resulting beliefs that this commitment implies are not up 
for grabs, regardless of what the evidence at any given moment seems to 
show. Di Ceglie argues that this tenacity is not the same as fideism, which 
doesn’t want rational evaluation to have anything to do with faith. On the 
BOOk ReviewS 149
contrary, believers should appreciate reason as a gift from God and should 
be optimistic that apparent conflicts between faith and reason will, with 
patient investigation and steadfast firmness, eventually be overcome. In 
fact, Di Ceglie argues that, out of love for God, believers should seek to 
find arguments and evidences that support the faith.
In chapter 4, Di Ceglie returns to the sort of discussion that occupied 
him in the book’s first two chapters. He discusses Basil Mitchell’s religious 
epistemology, noting the positive contribution that he makes to defending 
the rationality of religious belief, but also faulting him for failing to ap-
preciate what is distinctive about faith and the tenacity that it demands. 
Other thinkers come in for similar treatment, such as Daniel Howard- 
Snyder, Lara Buchak, and Duncan Pritchard. All of these thinkers, despite 
their positive contributions, fail to take proper notice of the following: 
“Christians have traditionally emphasized the idea that only by pointing 
to the good itself . . . [can] any other good can be satisfactorily achieved” 
(112), including truth. This implies that religious believers have a religious 
reason to be tenacious, having to do with the nature of faith itself; this 
makes inconclusiveness in religious debates different than in other areas 
of philosophy.
In chapters 5 and 6, Di Ceglie turns toward two important aspects of 
his project: he begins to apply the ST to some debates in philosophy of 
religion and also to argue that the ST will, if adopted, prove to be epistem-
ically useful (though he is careful to note that this is not why it should be 
adopted; rather, it should be adopted because of the priority of spiritual 
perfection). Along the way, he argues that unbelievers, who often simply 
take ME for granted, can in fact also take the ST. In fact, many of them 
have already taken a ST of sorts, albeit unwittingly, in the form of various 
a-rational commitments, such as the belief in the wrongness of racism and 
the equal dignity of all human beings, which they hold tenaciously: that is, 
no matter what the evidence says. According to Di Ceglie, “we all seem to 
firmly hold beliefs that we are not ready to abandon even if more evidence 
seemed, rightly or not, to support their negation. Instead, we seem to be 
ready to seek whatever evidence can be found to reaffirm our beliefs” (188).
Di Ceglie applies ST to a few debates in philosophy of religion, but I 
can only mention one here, namely the debate over divine hiddenness. 
This conversation, on Di Ceglie’s reading, has devolved into a discussion 
of who culpably believes what, with each side trying to find fault with 
the belief-processes of the other. If we take the ST, however, we will shift 
attention away from evaluating the culpability of the other and toward 
our own spiritual perfection, which includes loving God and neighbor, 
including our interlocutors. Di Ceglie does criticize proponents of the hid-
denness argument, charging them with incoherence: “one cannot suffer 
from not having been given a certain good if one believes that the good in 
question has never existed. On the other hand, if they do not suffer, and 
do not believe that an opportunity of flourishing has been denied to them, 
they cannot consider God blameworthy (and this means that they cannot 
Faith and Philosophy150
FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY Vol. 41 No. 1 January 2025
doi: 10.37977/faithphil.2025.41.1.9
All rights reserved
pp.150–156
conclude that there is no God)” (143). Di Ceglie credits the ST with this 
critique, but it isn’t very clear how making the ST would lead one to the 
charge of incoherence against proponents of the hiddenness argument.
Di Ceglie acknowledges that firmness of belief will increase inconclu-
siveness, but only with respect to the core beliefs necessitated by one’s com-
mitment to the good. The ST more than makes up for this by making other 
contributions toward partial conclusiveness, such as providing optimism 
about reason, inducing virtue in debaters, helping them to love and thus 
take seriously the insights of their interlocutors, and helping them to not 
make winning debates and solving epistemological puzzles their top prior-
ity. Unsurprisingly, Di Ceglie holds Aquinas up as an example here, citing 
his practice of always attempting to find the truth in any objection he con-
sidered rather than simply dismissing the objection as epistemically useless.
This is a fascinating book, one that will interest philosophers of reli-
gion generally and religious epistemologists more specifically. It is very 
wide-ranging and Di Ceglie deftly interweaves discussions of the great 
philosophers of the tradition with analyses of the strengths and weak-
nesses of contemporary analytic philosophers who write on the same 
themes. Di Ceglie’s arguments regarding faith’s tenacity are timely and 
important, and his suggestion of a spiritual epistemology is one that many 
may find congenial; it is one, after all, rooted—as he notes—in the idea 
that all of our actions are and should be aimed at the good, including our 
epistemic actions. The book’s main weakness, in my view, is that its argu-
ments are insufficiently tied to considerations from regular epistemology. 
Di Ceglie, for example, at one point argues that the a-rational commit-
ments of those who take the ST are not justified, but he never says what he 
means by justification; rather, he notes, by way of explanation, that they are 
unjustified because they are not the outcome of intellectual investigation. 
But very few people these days would argue that epistemic justification 
always requires a prior intellectual investigation. Why couldn’t the beliefs 
of our a-rational commitments be properly basic, and thus rational in that 
sense? Despite this lacuna, the book makes an important, if controversial, 
contribution to the contemporary literature in religious epistemology.
what God would Have known: How Human intellectual and Moral  Development 
Undermines Christian Doctrine, by J.L. Schellenberg. Oxford  University 
Press, 2024. Pp xii + 202. $40 (hardcover).
DOLORES G. MORRIS, The University of South Florida


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Divine Holiness and the Axiology of Theism

Foundational Grounding and Four Sources of Contingency

Roberto Di Ceglie, GOD, THE GOOD, AND THE SPIRITUAL TURN IN EPISTEMOLOGY

Rising sun and morning calm : a comparative historical study on the response to Christianity in Korea and Japan

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