Let us call such a bigger theological current of religious recognition
a‘paradigm’. We reserve the term‘conception’for the formal and
non-religious features discussed in section 1.4 and speak of the
content-specific religious views emerging through our historical analysis
as paradigms. A paradigm captures the most common content-specific
features of a cluster of religious recognitions. While a particular instance
within such a cluster can have other features as well, we claim that
most religious recognitions discussed in our historical survey can be
subsumed under one of three such paradigms. The present study claims
that three paradigms of religious recognition emerge as the result of
our historical survey.
4.1.9. Three Religious ParadigmsFrom the New Testament to the time of Augustine religious recog-
nition took place within the frame of conversion narrative. The
Pauline situation of ‘knowledge of the truth’ (agnitio veritatis)
means a transformation of the identity of the recognizer who attaches
his or her life to the known object, the recognizee, so that a social
interaction between the recognizer and the recognizee takes place.
Although the explicit act of recognition is normally an‘upward’act
that may take a non-personal linguistic object (truth), this object
represents a divine being who has already decided to bestow some
favour upon the human recognizer.
While such a conversion narrative can be identified in the New
Testament, a particularly rich source of thisfirst paradigm is the Latin
Recognitions, a text that unites the Aristotelian model of rediscovery
and the Pauline view of knowledge of the truth. In addition to these,
Roman legal concepts of adoption and acknowledgement of property
play a role.Recognitionsshows in a paradigmatic manner how the
social interaction between the recognizer and the recognizee consti-
tutes the meaning of this phenomenon. While the recognizer performs
the act ofagnosco, it is herself rather than the recognizee who is
transformed in this event. The recognizer experiences a conversion
and may even receive a new identity. The divine recognizee prompts
this conversion. Both the recognizer and the recognizee are active.
Religious recognition has its own peculiar mode of knowledge.
Philosophy and rational thinking cannot attain the religious object
as it can only be grasped adequately within the particular conversion
narrative. In this manner, recognition is the proper way of
196 Recognition and Religion