New Models of Religious Understanding 0198796730, 9780198796732

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NEW MODELS OF RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING

New Models of Religious Understanding EDITED BY

F I O N A EL L I S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946195 ISBN 978–0–19–879673–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Cathy, Angelie, and Harold

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Contents Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Fiona Ellis

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1. Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding John Cottingham 2. Religious Understanding, Naturalism, and Theory Fiona Ellis 3. Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament Edward Kanterian 4. Transfiguring Love David McPherson

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5. Habit, Practice, Grace: Toward a Philosophy of Religious Life Clare Carlisle

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6. Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding Mark Wynn

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7. Religious Knowledge versus Religious Understanding Kyle Scott

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8. Modal Structuralism and Theism Silvia Jonas

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9. Theology and the Knowledge of Persons Eleonore Stump

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10. Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context Keith Ward

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Contents

11. Love and Philosophy of Religion: Lessons from the Cambridge Platonists Charles Taliaferro

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Bibliography Index

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Notes on Contributors Clare Carlisle is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Theology at King’s College London. She is the author of On Habit (Routledge, 2014), Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming (SUNY Press, 2005), and Living the Question of Existence: A Philosophical Biography of Kierkegaard (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2018). John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Reading University, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College London, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University of Roehampton, Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. His publications include Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships and the Wider World (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cartesian Reflections (Oxford University Press, 2008). The Moral Life, a Festschrift honoring his work in moral psychology, ethics, and religion, appeared in 2008. Fiona Ellis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Roehampton at the University of Roehampton, and Director for the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at Heythrop College, University of London. Her most recent book is God, Value, and Nature (Oxford University Press, 2014), and she has published on a variety of subjects including the philosophy of love and desire, the meaning of life, and the dismounting of seesaws. She has just finished co-directing a project on Religious Experience and Desire for which she had a non-residential research fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. Silvia Jonas is Minerva Fellow of the Max Planck Society at Munich University. Before that she was Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. She completed her PhD at Humboldt University, Berlin in 2012. Her areas of research are metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mathematics. She is the author of Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her current focus is on shared metaphysical and epistemic problems for mathematics and other allegedly a priori domains, such as theism.

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Edward Kanterian is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. His research interests include metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language, and modern philosophy. He is the author of several books, including Frege: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2012). He has a forthcoming book on Kant’s metaphysics. David McPherson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He has published essays in Philosophy, Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, and International Philosophical Quarterly, among other places. He is currently working on a monograph titled The Meaning-Seeking Animal: A Re-Enchanted Aristotelian Perspective. Kyle Scott is a teacher of Philosophy and Theology at the Abbey School, Reading, UK. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London. His research interests are in philosophy of religion and epistemology. He is particularly interested in using recent work in epistemology to better understand the nature of religious faith and belief. Eleonore Stump is Honorary Professor, Wuhun University, Honorary Professor, Logos Institute, St Andrews, Professorial Fellow, Australian Catholic University, and Robert J. Henle, S.J., Professor of Philosophy, at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. She has published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. She is past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her publication Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering incorporates her Gifford Lectures (Aberdeen, 2003), Wilde lectures (Oxford, 2006), and Stewart lectures (Princeton, 2009). Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, St Olaf College. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including Turning Images in Philosophy, Science, and Religion: A New Book of Nature (co-edited with Jill Evans; Oxford University Press, 2011). He is the editor-in-chief of Open Theology and serves on the editorial boards of Religious Studies, Religious Studies Review, Philosophy Compass, and Sophia.

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Keith Ward is Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, University of Roehampton, and Fellow of the British Academy. He was formerly Regius Professor of Divinity and a Canon of Christ Church, University of Oxford. His publications include Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Evidence for God: The Case for the Existence of the Spiritual Dimension (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2014). Mark Wynn is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford University Press, 2013), Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Introduction Fiona Ellis

PRELIMINARIES New Models of Religious Understanding started out as a sub-grant of the Templeton-funded Varieties of Understanding initiative coordinated at Fordham University, New York from 2014–16 under the directorship of Stephen Grimm. Our activities took place at Heythrop College, London under the auspices of the Centre for the Philosophy of Religion, the internal team including myself, John Cottingham, and Keith Ward. To this was added a team of external researchers, most of whom appear in the present volume. The Centre came into being as a platform for the work we were doing in the philosophy of religion. This work seemed very different from what was going on elsewhere under this heading, and we wanted to develop our own conception of the subject, and to bring together other like-minded individuals. One obvious difference is that we spend rather less time studying arguments about the nature and existence of God than the typical “analytic” philosopher of religion. This is not because we take such activities to be philosophically and theologically insignificant, and it will be clear from some of the contributions to this volume that natural theology is an ongoing concern, as is the question of how we are to comprehend God’s reality. The point is rather that there is more to philosophy of religion than this; and there are questions to be raised in any case about what it means to be doing this kind of thing and whether we should be doing it in the first place. It is a common enough theme within the continental tradition (of philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theology) that there is

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something deeply problematic about natural theology, and, more generally, analytic philosophy of religion. Terms and expressions like the “God of philosophy” and “onto-theology” get bandied around, and we are encouraged to suppose that philosophy—or a certain kind of philosophy—can tell us nothing about God, that theology—or a certain kind of theology—suffers a similar fate, and that we can rectify the relevant deficiencies only by approaching God in a very different way. The complaints are familiar from Heidegger,1 and they have been taken up and developed by his philosophical and theological descendants, often in a manner that distorts his original intent and which incites and sometimes justifies analogous complaints in the opposite direction.2 The objection from this opposing quarter is that philosophy of religion and theology have been “taken captive” by the continentals, and that their “alternative approaches” have fudged the really important issues,3 even going so far as to abandon the commitment to reason and truth—a commitment which is said to define the analytic way of proceeding and without which we are left groping in the dark. The predictable counterresponse here is that we are groping in the dark in this context. And so it goes on. There are insights lurking in both sets of complaints. As presently stated, however, their import is unclear, and the dispute calls for just the kind of analysis which is seemingly characteristic of the analytic approach under attack.4 First, the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy: yes, a distinction exists, but there are overlaps too, and certainly no prospects for identifying a single ingredient which will close the question of which philosophy is at issue. To 1

See Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stamburgh (Chicago, IL: HarperCollins Inc., 1969), 72, and his “Letter on Humanism,” trans. F.A. Capuzzi, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge Press, 1978), 251–2. 2 For example, it is often supposed that such thinking legitimates a skepticism about truth—that truth is a fiction, or that we live in a “post-truth” age. See R.R. Reno, “Theology’s Continental Captivity,” First Things, 162 (2006), pp. 26–33 for some examples in this context. It is worth pointing out that, for Heidegger, getting to the truth is the fundamental philosophical task. Ditto for the late Nietzsche—another supposed ally in this anti-truth diatribe. 3 Michael C. Rea uses these expressions, and notes such criticisms in his Introduction to Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, eds. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4 It is a merit of Rea’s piece that he engages with some of these issues, although there remains a question of where the supposedly “alternative approaches” fit into his overall vision.

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suppose otherwise is to succumb to a style of analysis which analytic philosophy has long since left behind. As one leading analytic philosopher—Timothy Williamson—puts it, “the pursuit of analyses [in the traditional reductive sense] is a degenerating research programme.”5 The alternative model of analysis which has been proposed in the wake of this rejection has been described as “connective” and “holistic,”6 and it has something in common with the hermeneutical approach defended by Heidegger in Being and Time.7 We can note also that Heidegger’s methodological interest here is testimony to his commitment to reason and argument, the real questions for him being how we are to comprehend the nature and scope of these notions, and how we are to arrive at the truth by their means. It is a virtue of the continental tradition more generally that it pushes these questions—that of truth included—to their limits.8 It doesn’t seem “Is Knowing a State of Mind?” Mind, New Series, 104(415) (July 1995), p. 542. As P.F. Strawson describes it, it involves a system of connected items “such that the function of each item, each concept, could, from the philosophical point of view, be properly understood only by grasping its connections with others,” “Reduction or Connection,” in Analysis and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Colin McGinn: “We should adopt a less ambitious and more relaxed attitude to the enterprise of analysing concepts. We should be content with whatever illumination we can obtain by relating the given concept to others with which it has conceptual liaisons; and we can construct an illuminating conceptual map of a domain of concepts without claiming that the illuminating concepts contain no tincture of the concepts to be illuminated. In other words, conceptual analysis need not be construed as foundationalist; it can be, as one says, ‘holistic’,” “The Concept of Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 25–6. 7 Heidegger offers a helpful preliminary elucidation of the hermeneutical phenomenology he seeks to enact and defend in s. 7 of the Introduction to Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962). 8 Heidegger, for example, is obsessed with the question of truth, his objection being that philosophers have approached it in a wrong-headed, shallow way. Truth, as he understands it, involves disclosure or unconcealment. This account is developed initially in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) in conjunction with his conception of hermeneutical phenomenology. For a discussion of the significance of reason to Levinas see my God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129–33. Merold Westphal offers an invaluable account of some of the relations and differences between Heidegger, Levinas, and Marion in his “Divine Excess: The God Who Comes After,” in Overcoming Onto-theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 256–84. Sarah Coakley discusses Teresa Avila’s expanded conception of “reason” in her “Dark Contemplation and Epistemic Transformation: The Analytic Theologian Re-meets Teresa of Avila,” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, eds. Oliver Crisp and Michael D. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 280–312. 5 6

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absurd to say that the task of conceptual analysis springs from a similar philosophical ambition, and that we are all in our different ways trying to get to the things themselves. Witness the following words of Dan Zahavi—which give expression to precisely this “connective” model of analysis: it is a mistake to carve up the philosophical landscape into two distinct (and incommensurable) traditions. . . . Acknowledging the diversity allows us to recognise the presence of unexpected similarities as well as fruitful and productive differences. . . . An increasing number of philosophers are now active bridge-builders. They work in and with different traditions, and are actively pursuing philosophical insights wherever they are to be found.9

The importance of working in and with different traditions reminds us that there is more to philosophy than European philosophy, and that the analytic/continental distinction is just one of several to be made in this context—think of the Asian philosophical traditions, and think, in particular, of their relevance for an understanding of the philosophy of religion.10 We are returned again to the point that there is more to philosophy of religion than philosophy of God, although in this context too there are unexpected similarities to be brought to light which put pressure on the idea that there is a clear-cut distinction between theistic and atheistic religions.11

9 “Analytic and Continental Philosophy: From Duality through Plurality to (Some Kind of) Unity,” Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives, Proceedings of the 37th Wittgenstein Symposium (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 10 There has been some interesting bridge-building between continental philosophy and Asian philosophy and religion. See, for example, Brian Schroeder, “Dancing Through Nothing: Nietzsche, The Kyoto School, and Transcendence,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 37 (Spring 2009), pp. 44–65; Bret W. Davis, “Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” op cit; Steven Heine, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985). 11 Arthur Schopenhauer argues on compelling grounds that the deepest truths of religion transcend the distinction between theism and atheism (The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, Vol. I (New York: Dover, 1966), 385. For some similarities between Nietzsche and Buddhism see Bret W. Davis, “Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 28 (Autumn 2004), pp. 89–138. For some similarities between Nietzsche and Christianity see Jacob Golomb, “Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Does it Lead to the Coldest of all Cold Monsters?,” The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, eds. John Richardson and Ken Gemes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Active bridge-building in all these respects is central to our approach. We are first and foremost philosophers, and happy to describe ourselves as philosophers of religion provided that this is not taken to mean that we have specialized into a branch of philosophy which is cut off from the really important questions and of no relevance to what really matters. Philosophy of religion is viewed in these pejorative terms by the typical atheist, and this attitude is commonplace in analytic philosophy where naturalism is the dominant programmatic orientation.12 Our work poses a challenge to this atheistic outlook, and with it the assumption that naturalism is to be so interpreted. I shall return to this point below. Analytic philosophy of religion is criticized in equally pejorative terms by those who favor a continental approach. The objection again is that the important questions have been left behind. So, for example, it is objected that the offending “analytic” approach misidentifies what really matters by focusing upon God, or that it focuses upon the wrong kind of God, or that it approaches God in the wrong kind of way. The first complaint is shared by the atheist, and the Heideggerian transforms it into the complaint that we have become forgetful of Being.13 The second objection—that analytic philosophy of religion focuses upon the wrong kind of God—gives expression to the worry that the God of philosophy is an idol. Jean-Luc Marion’s insistence that the true God is “beyond being” shows how important it is to be terminologically astute in this context,14 and the issue is

12 For a critical discussion of this naturalistic orientation and some questions about what it really amounts to, see chapter 1 of my God, Value, and Nature. 13 ‘Being-with-a-capital-B’ might be thought to invite a theistic interpretation of Being, and there is much in the literature—both primary and secondary—to support such an interpretation. Heidegger was a great influence on Karl Rahner, and Rahner discusses his philosophy in “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger,” trans. Andrew Tallon, Philosophy Today, 13 (1969), pp. 126–37. See Robert Masson, “Rahner and Heidegger: Being, Hearing, and God,” The Thomist, 37(3) (July 1973), pp. 455–88 for some reasons for questioning the extent of this influence. The theologian John Macquarrie has explored and defended the theological relevance of Heidegger’s work. See, for example, Studies in Christian Existentialism (London: SCM Press, 1965) and Heidegger and Christianity (London: Continuum, 1999). For a recent defense on this score see Judith Wolfe’s Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 14 Merold Westphal makes a similar point in his “Divine Excess: The God who Comes After,” in Overcoming Onto-theology: Towards a Post-Modern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 261. The context here is the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas on the respective merits of metaphysics and ontology.

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further confounded with Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that the true God is absent from the world.15 We seem close again to the standpoint of the atheist, and Levinas goes so far as to suggest that atheism is better placed than traditional theism to provide an authentic route to God.16 He claims also—and this is the third objection above—that we achieve this level of engagement only by standing in moral relations to others. The implication here is that there can be no direct engagement with God, and that theorizing is ruled out across the board, although Levinas grants the possibility of a theological recuperation which comes “after the glimpse of holiness.”17 This concession will be important to what follows. It should be clear that continental philosophy of religion is just as complex and diverse as its analytic counterpart, that it offers no single answer to the question of the nature and value of philosophy of religion, and that our best hope in this context is to do what Zahavi suggests when he exhorts us to pursue philosophical insights wherever they are to be found.18 Theological insights are equally important, but theology has been taken captive by the continentals, or so we have been told. And so to the turf war which is currently being played out between analytic philosophy of religion and theology, and which has resulted in the movement of analytic theology.19 We approve wholeheartedly of such a movement if it involves “drawing classic theology (in all its diverse forms), analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy of religion into new and mutually generative relationship,”20 and the 15 See, for example, “Loving the Torah More than God,” in Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 142–5. 16 See my “Levinas, Nature, and Naturalism,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), for a discussion of Levinas’s attitude to atheism. 17 Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), ix. 18 Compare Sarah Coakley’s aim of “unsettl[ing] the unfortunate disjunction between analytic and continental traditions of philosophical theology,” in her “Dark Contemplation and Epistemic Transformation: The Analytic Theologian Re-meets Teresa of Avila,” 282. 19 As well as the excellent overview of this debate by Rea and Crisp, there is also Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole’s Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Ashgate, 2005). The volume by Rea and Crisp is more weighted in favor of analytic theology, although the final three papers provide a significant and challenging counter-balance. 20 I quote here from Sarah Coakley’s 2016 Analytic Theology Lecture for the American Academy of Religion, “Sin and Desire in Analytic Theology: A Return to Genesis 3.”

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volume as a whole testifies to the way in which these interrelations can yield significant philosophical and theological conclusions. However, continental philosophy must be part of this discussion, and the stress must be on mutually generative relationship. There is bad philosophy and theology, and there will be circumstances when analysis is precisely what is needed to expose and rectify the relevant deficiencies. However, analytic philosophers do not have a monopoly on analysis, and they can go wrong too, when, for example, they exclude continental philosophy from the discussion, and with it the many theologians who are adamant that there is theological wisdom to be gained from this tradition. Such wisdom is manifestly present, but it is a deficiency of contemporary philosophy of religion—both continental and analytic— that it has tended to bypass the question of religious practice, the predominant focus being upon what religious people believe rather than upon what they do. Levinas’s stress upon moral action offers an obvious exception to this trend, and there is an early essay in his corpus which is devoted to the concept of religious practice in Judaism, and which anticipates the themes of his later work. He claims here that the practicing Jew is prevented from seeing in nature a purely natural reality, that “[h]e experiences the world as a mystery. . . . His most familiar gestures extend into the supernatural.”21 The idea that there is a supernatural dimension within nature is going to be important to what follows, as is the suggestion that it becomes accessible at the level of religious practice. So the concept of practice is central to our conception of philosophy of religion, and, of course, to our conception of the religious person’s life, although this is not to deny the significance of belief and theory. As Clare Carlisle will argue, it is what people do that shapes their belief. Assuming that these gestures “extend into the supernatural,” and that reality is transfigured hereby, we can appreciate what it could mean for such a context to yield authentic theorizing (or theological recuperation as Levinas puts it). The message again is that we must resist thinking in polarized terms, pursue insights wherever they are to be found, and comprehend the relevant relations in just the manner envisaged by those who 21 “The Meaning of Religious Practice by Emmanuel Levinas: An Introduction and Translation,” by Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Joelle Hansell, Modern Judaism, 25(3) (October 2003), p. 288.

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have warned against the errors of reductionism. To do otherwise is to risk losing one’s grip upon one’s subject-matter, or, as Timothy Williamson might put it, to succumb to a degenerating research program.

NATURALISM One such degenerating research program is the naturalism which, in the words of two recent commentators, has become “a slogan in the name of which the vast majority of work in analytic philosophy is pursued.”22 This is scientific or scientistic naturalism; it limits reality to the natural world and gives the scientist its exclusive measure.23 Naturalism thus understood threatens the very idea that the world could be understood in God-involving terms, and it is unsurprising therefore that, in philosophy of religion today, naturalism and theism are taken to be logically incompatible.24 This “naturalistic” paradigm demands philosophical scrutiny, and the volume as a whole presupposes and builds upon the work Cottingham and I have done elsewhere to challenge the scientism with which it has been predominantly identified. We defend in its place a conception of nature which can accommodate the reality of value and of God, although Cottingham is rather less interested in the question of whether the positive position which emerges in the light of this rejection can or ought to be described as a form of naturalism. My task, by contrast, has been to wrestle naturalism from the grasp of those for whom it is to be comprehended in purely scientific terms. Indeed, I would be happy to say that it has been taken captive in this context—disastrously so given that there are no good philosophical or scientific reasons for accepting the truth of scientism. Why take “naturalism” in this broader sense? Why not accept that the position is to be comprehended in scientific terms, and that there 22 “Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism,” in Naturalism in Question, eds. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2. 23 For more on the question of the limits of scientific naturalism see chs 1–2 of my God, Value, and Nature. 24 See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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are questions—including the question of God—which exceed such parameters? My answer is that the scientific naturalist does not have a monopoly on this term, that recent philosophy testifies to its pliability, and that those who have embraced it have done so with an eye to the advantages it procures.25 In particular, it gives their philosophical endeavors the seal of empirical respectability, for the position involves acknowledging—among other things—that we are natural beings in a natural world, that the claims we make about this world and our place in it must be empirically grounded, and that we must avoid metaphysical flights of fancy. The supposedly offending flights take us into supernaturalistic territory, and the typical naturalist makes it abundantly clear that she rejects supernaturalism, supernaturalism being a position which involves postulating things like God, gods, demons, souls, and anything else which resists inclusion in the “familiar natural world.”26 The real question, of course, is what counts as a flight of fancy in this context, for my more liberal naturalist takes the flight away from scientism to be wholly legitimate, and there is a clear enough sense in which this negative move takes her into supernaturalist territory—at least, it does from the vantage point of one who insists that “natural” is to be comprehended in exclusively scientific terms. This is expansive or liberal naturalism, and it grants us the right to say that there is more to the natural world and more to our ways of explaining it than the scientific naturalist is prepared to allow.27 Value is a central case in point for the typical expansive naturalist, and she denies that it can be wholly comprehended in scientific terms whilst insisting nonetheless that it is part of the “familiar natural world.” As James Griffin has put it: “values do not need any world except the ordinary world around us.”28 It should go without saying that this is not a rejection of science, but it is an endorsement of supernaturalism 25

This is all spelled out in the Introduction to my God, Value, and Nature. Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” in Naturalism in Question, eds. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2. 27 I borrows the term “expansive” from James Griffin who uses it in his Value Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). My own version of expansive naturalism, as spelled out in God, Value, and Nature, takes its inspiration from the positions of David Wiggins and John McDowell. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur offer a superb overview of the position and its varieties in their edited collection Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 28 Value Judgement, 43–4. 26

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if “supernatural” is taken to be the logical complement of “natural” in the scientific sense. We can add that, from the perspective of the scientific naturalist, this brand of supernaturalism is just as “spooky” and problematic as its theistic (or God/demon/soul-involving) counterpart.29 So the question of supernaturalism is hardly closed, and this is relevant to the philosophical concerns in my own chapter in this volume (Chapter 2), and my work elsewhere, where I argue that expansive naturalism can be expanded to accommodate God, that the arguments for legitimating this move are set in motion by the secular expansive naturalist, and that there is a knife-edge between naturalism thus understood and its secular counterpart.30 This knifeedge is illustrated in Levinas’s claim that being moral is both necessary and sufficient for relating to God—a claim which is going to be significant to an understanding of religious understanding, and in particular its relation to the moral and the spiritual.31 The idea that there is a naturalism to accommodate God does not mean that God is reducible to nature, but it does mean that the concept of the divine can already be understood as implicated in our understanding of nature, rather than being thought of as entirely outside it. This idea is fundamental in what follows, it involves reclaiming the notion of the natural for religion, and it has important implications for how we think of the relation between the transcendent and the natural. For a start, we are compelled to question an overrigid opposition in this context, and certainly any suggestion that its terms stand opposed as two ordinary objects or worlds. Such a suggestion leaves us with no way of capturing the distinction between these terms, for it turns God into just one more item within the universe, and then, of course, we are returned to the territory of the atheist.32 Once it is granted that the concept of the divine is already implicated in our understanding of nature, then we have an equal challenge to the common complaint that talk of God belongs to an esoteric 29 See ch. 2 of my God, Value, and Nature for an illustration of this dialectic as it plays out in a discussion between Peter Railton and David Wiggins. 30 See God, Value, and Nature. 31 See also Taliaferro’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 11). 32 For a brilliant discussion of this problem and a Hegelian solution see Anselm Min’s “Hegel’s Absolute: Transcendent or Immanent?,” The Journal of Religion, 56(1) (January 1976), pp. 61–87. For a Rahnerian/Heideggerian perspective see God, Value, and Nature, ch. 5.

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discipline which is irrelevant to mainstream philosophical concerns with nature and with our natural human existence. On the contrary, there is scope for developing a conception of religious understanding that is informed by, and continuous with, our understanding of natural reality (including the natural beings that we ourselves are). This idea will resurface in various guises in the chapters to follow.

HUMANE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Cottingham describes his own approach to philosophy of religion— and philosophy more generally—as “humane,” distinguishing it from one which is “scientifically inspired.”33 Scientific naturalism is so inspired, and Cottingham finds a similar scientific orientation in the reductive analysis which, for Williamson, constitutes a degenerating research program. It involves a “specious mimicry of scientific procedures”34—even more obviously so when coupled with the assumption that conceptual bedrock is to be monopolized by science. Cottingham seeks also to challenge what he describes as Western philosophy’s “ratiocentric bias—the notion that calm and detached rational analysis provides the unique key to understanding ourselves and our activities.” In response to this bias he claims that “[w]e need to recognise the limitations of intellectual analysis, and the way in which insight is achieved not just by the controlling intellect, fussily classifying and cataloguing the pieces of the jigsaw, but by a process of attunement, whereby we allow different levels of understanding and awareness to coalesce, until a picture of the whole begins to emerge.”35 He adds that this “scientistic tendency in philosophy, with its commitment to an exclusively abstract and purely cerebral perspective for inquiry, can easily blind its practitioners to the true nature of what they are supposed to be investigating,” and he implicates much analytic philosophy of religion in this regard. As he puts it, it “tends to construe religious allegiance in wholly cognitive terms, 33 “What is Humane Philosophy and Why is it at Risk?,” Conceptions of Philosophy, ed. Anthony O’Hear, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Cottingham’s conception of humane philosophy of religion is spelled out at length in his Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 34 35 Ibid., 240. Ibid., 251.

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as entirely concerned with the adoption of certain hypotheses about the cosmos, rather than as a life-changing moral and spiritual quest.” Cottingham concludes that the struggle to reach the truth is never “a purely intellectual matter,” citing with approval Heidegger’s contention that truth involves “the disclosure of what is hidden.”36 We are familiar with some of the criticisms that have been levelled at analytic philosophy of religion, and Cottingham’s reference to Heidegger is testimony to his preference for an approach which straddles the analytic/continental divide. He is also recommending a mode of analysis which is connective rather than reductive—the relevant connections obtaining between the levels of understanding and awareness which must be acknowledged if we are to see things in a faithful light. The things in question pertain to “ourselves and our activities,” and the specific example at hand is the concept of religious allegiance. According to the offending approach, it is to be treated in “wholly cognitive terms” rather than as a “life-changing moral and spiritual quest.” This contrast is going to be central to Cottingham’s approach to religious understanding. Before we come to that, however, we need to be clear about what it means to be an appropriately “humane” philosopher. As far as philosophy other than the philosophy of religion is concerned, it involves rejecting scientism, and granting an approach which is adequate to the task of comprehending “ourselves and our activities.” We are to suppose that the relevant activities embrace all that is relevant to human existence, and that they exceed the limits of scientific investigation—not simply in the sense that they are to be distinguished from the activities of the scientist, but in the sense that science cannot wholly comprehend them. Cottingham refers disparagingly to philosophy’s “ratiocentric basis,” returning us to the complaint that its approach is “wholly cognitive.” This complaint is liable to mislead if taken to mean that we should be dispensing with reason or cognition in favor of something else—for example, passion, sentiment, or the irrational. Rather, and this should be clear from what I have said about the interests of the continental philosopher, the real question is how we are to comprehend reason’s limits, and, in particular, whether it can be expanded to accommodate the affective. Putting it in these terms is crucial if we are to hold onto

36

Ibid., 253–4.

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the ideas—so important to our contributors—that our moral and spiritual responses have cognitive import, and that we can aspire to a kind of truth by their means. The idea of an expanded conception of reason/cognition involves rejecting the assumption that it is invariably “inert,” and allowing that it can have an irreducibly conative dimension. This thought has been developed by some of the naturalists to whom my own work is indebted. It involves rejecting the NeoHumean assumption that the cognitive and the conative stand opposed as “distinct existences,”37 and its significance for philosophy of religion (and theology) offers a further illustration of the way in which these disciplines can be brought into new and mutually generative relationship.38 To return to the example of religious allegiance, it becomes possible to say that it can be a life-changing moral and spiritual quest whilst also being wholly cognitive. The humane philosopher of religion takes as her focus the moral and spiritual sensibilities which shape religious belief, and the justification for this move is that such responses are that without which we should fail to engage with our subject-matter. So our responses come in at the epistemological level, and we can note a similar explanatory strategy in the work of the aforementioned moral realists. As David Wiggins puts it in the context of clarifying the relation between desire and goodness: “such desiring by human beings directed in this way is one part of what is required for there to be such a thing as the perspective from which the non-instrumental goodness of x is there to be perceived.”39 And as Roger Crisp spells it out, in the context of distinguishing the position from Humean subjectivism (the “blind passion” response): “Wiggins’ account is richer, in that The phrase comes from John McDowell’s “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?.” In Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77–94. 38 This shift away from a Humean conception of the reason/desire distinction is crucial to McDowell’s moral realist position (see “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?”, 81–9), and a similar anti-Humean perspective is to be found in Griffin (Value Judgement, 32–6) and David Wiggins (“Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism, and Motivating Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 91 (1990–1), pp. 61–85. Wiggins is anxious not to implicate Hume in this regard. The general idea here is exploited and defended by figures like Levinas, and it can be traced back to Plato and the Neo-Platonist philosophers/theologians. For more on this see Talbot Brewer’s The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and my “Religious Experience and Desire,” forthcoming, Religious Studies. 39 “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” in Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 107. 37

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the properties are to be seen as independent of the responses to them. It is just that understanding the properties requires reference to the responses.”40 Wiggins is concerned with what it means to understand the world morally. The focus of the present volume, by contrast, is the question of what it means to understand the world religiously, and it will come as no surprise that our responses have an essential epistemological role to play in this context too. But how are these responses to be understood? And to what do they provide access? Many of the contributors take as their focus our moral and spiritual responses, but there is a question of how the notions of the moral and the spiritual are to be understood, and the implications this has for an understanding of the objects to which we are responsive in such contexts. After all, the typical atheist is happy to describe herself as moral and spiritual,41 and even if we add the word “religious” to further delimit our subject-matter, it is clear that there is more to the religious than God. The matter is further complicated once it is acknowledged that the limits of theism are unclear—think of Levinas’s contention that atheism is better placed than traditional theism to provide an authentic route to God. So the relation between the moral, the spiritual, and the religious demands clarification (analysis again), and there is a further question of where this leaves religious understanding in the theoretical sense with which Cottingham takes issue—the sense according to which it is a matter of adopting a certain hypothesis about the origin and nature of the cosmos, rather than involving a life-changing moral and spiritual quest.

RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDI NG: THE CHAPTERS The idea that religious understanding is to be comprehended in moral/ spiritual terms is compatible with the idea that it is a mode of cognition, 40 “Naturalism and Non-Naturalism in Ethics,” in Identity, Truth, and Value: Essays for David Wiggins, eds. Sabina Lovibond and S.G. Williams (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996), 122. 41 For two interesting books along these lines see André Comte-Sponville’s The Book of Atheist Spirituality (London: Transworld, 2008) and Robert C. Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Solomon claims to be “naturalising” spirituality.

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and although there is a question of how such understanding is to be distinguished from moral or even non-theistic spiritual cognition, it is clearly very different from what is involved when we comprehend the world scientifically. This is the starting-point of Cottingham’s “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding,” and he objects that this difference has not been adequately appreciated by classical theological theism and analytic philosophy of religion. His complaint then is that religious understanding has been reduced to a species of scientific understanding. More specifically, it has been comprehended in explanatory inductive terms, the upshot being that understanding the world religiously becomes a matter of subscribing to an explanatory hypothesis about the origins of self and world, namely the “God hypothesis” as described and ridiculed by Richard Dawkins.42 Cottingham argues that we need a more “humane” model of religious understanding, one that is responsive to the role played by religion in the life of the believer, and which presupposes an epistemology of receptivity or involvement. This is his proposed “new” model of religious understanding, and it tells us that understanding the world religiously is less about subscribing to explanatory hypotheses than about a certain mode of engagement with reality—one that requires a moral and spiritual transformation of the subject as she opens to the presence of the divine. Cottingham’s position raises important and difficult questions about the limits of moral and spiritual understanding, and about the relation between religious understanding thus conceived and theory. I take up some of these issues in my chapter (Chapter 2), arguing that an adequate position must accommodate both of these dimensions of understanding. This conclusion is compatible with most of what Cottingham is saying, and the concession to theory is surely essential if, as he puts it, “religious thought is to hold its own in the educated Western world.” I add to this a conception of natural theology which takes inspiration from an expansive naturalistic framework, and which promises to appeal to someone who rejects scientific naturalism but who struggles to see the theistic relevance of spiritual and moral experience. There are important implications here for an understanding of the nature and limits of theology—a theme to be developed by Eleonore Stump in Chapter 9.

42

The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006), ch. 2.

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Cottingham and I provide the starting-point to Edward Kanterian’s “Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament” (Chapter 3). He agrees that our positions pose a valuable challenge to scientific naturalism, makes explicit the hermeneutical underpinnings of an epistemology of involvement, and argues that both proposals benefit from an engagement with the rich European tradition of religious reflection on the human condition. In this predominantly Christian tradition man is seen as a fallen creature—to be comforted and understood rather than objectified for the purposes of scientific investigation. Kanterian examines the development of this fallenness motif in the work of Luther, making explicit the model of religious understanding it implies. The case against scientific naturalism is further strengthened, and we are offered a particular take on its roots: it is a self-alienating attempt “to deal with that which is saddened by itself and unhappy,” a “gay science” which overhears “the sighing of the creature.”43 The idea of an epistemology of involvement is further developed by David McPherson in his “Transfiguring Love” (Chapter 4), where he argues that such a focus must be our starting-point if we are to properly understand the world in religious terms. He claims that the spiritual practice of all-embracing “active love” is integral to the epistemology of receptivity or involvement through which a religious understanding of the world comes into view, and he draws upon Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to make his case. The difference between an epistemology of involvement and one of detachment is taken to be illustrated in the contrast between Father Zosima and Ivan Karamazov, and McPherson considers how Dostoevsky seeks to respond to Ivan’s rationalistic rejection of a religious worldview— indeed of life in the world as worthwhile—through a depiction of saintly love in the life and teachings of Zosima, where the central teaching is that the practice of all-embracing “active love” has the power to reveal the sacred or “divine mystery in things” such that life is seen as “paradise.” He considers Raimond Gaita’s work on the power of saintly love to reveal the sacredness or inestimable preciousness of all human life, citing the claim that “there would be no love without the language of love.” McPherson argues that unpacking this allows us to see how a particular religiously inflected language and 43 Martin Luther, WA 56, in D. Martin Luthers Werke, 120 volumes (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau of Weimar, 1883–2009), 372.

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experience of love transfigures the world for us and enables the sacred or divine mystery of things to come into view. This movement away from the narrowly cognitive aspects of religious life is developed further by Clare Carlisle in her contribution, “Habit, Practice, Grace: Toward a Philosophy of Religious Practice” (Chapter 5). Carlisle argues that “lived religion” encompasses more than belief, and that if philosophers of religion are to do justice to their subject-matter, they need to learn to think philosophically about practice in general, and about religious practices in particular. She considers some of the methodological questions and challenges that come with this task, and examines two recent attempts to develop a philosophy of religious practice. Peter Sloterdijk is found to be operating with a belief/practice dichotomy which is rightly repaired by Kevin Schilbrack, and Carlisle takes on board Schilbrack’s irreducibly cognitive conception of practice, agreeing with him that we must take seriously the way in which religious practitioners understand their own practice as engaged, or potentially engaged, with a “super-empirical reality.” Carlisle then outlines a model which promises to explain how practice uses repetition to generate change, or even transformation; and how it gives form to desire. The account she offers is naturalistic in the sense that it enters easily into dialogue with science, and it lends emphasis to our embodied human being. However, the naturalism in question is expansive such that there is no attempt to reduce everything to science, and it is left open that there is a “super-empirical” dimension of reality. The position is intended to be applicable to diverse religious and spiritual traditions, and it concludes with a discussion of how the relevant ideas might be expressed in a Buddhist context. Carlisle’s focus is the practical dimension of religious understanding. Mark Wynn (Chapter 6) considers what kind of understanding is required if the religious or spiritual life is to be properly ordered not only to moral, but also to aesthetic goods. He is concerned then with the question of the contribution of aesthetic goods to spiritual wellbeing, and this has implications for the nature of the understanding which is realized in such a context. In short, he argues that an appreciation of the spiritual significance of aesthetic goods involves making explicit the bodily and perceptual character of religious understanding—as it occurs, for example, in the inflexions of Mary’s body in Botticelli’s depiction of the annunciation. In such

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cases the focus is upon the body’s capacity “to register directly, in bodily terms, the significance of the relevant religious context.” Like McPherson, Wynn makes reference to Gaita’s work on the power of saintly love, using the example of the bodily demeanor of the nun in her interaction with patients on a psychiatric ward. He makes clear that these ideals of bodily demeanor have application to all of us in our everyday interactions with others. A crucial part of the chapter is the discussion of conversion experience, where Wynn puzzles over Jonathan Edwards’ claim that “the appearance of everything was altered.” His radical suggestion—inspired by Aquinas’s discussion of the infused moral virtues—is that the convert’s perceptual field is a mirroring of the mind of God—a mirroring that occurs via the theologically grounded aesthetic goods which become available in such a context. Wynn concludes by drawing out the implications for his new model of religious understanding. The final five chapters (Chapters 7–11) are more general in their scope, and develop some of the questions that have been left hanging in the discussion. Kyle Scott (Chapter 7) examines the distinction between religious understanding and religious knowledge, beginning with the observation that the focus of contemporary religious epistemology has tended to be upon knowledge rather than understanding. Against this tradition, he argues that understanding is of greater epistemic value than knowledge, and that it has a more important role to play in the lives of religious believers. We are returned to the familiar idea that religious understanding has an irreducibly practical dimension, and that this dimension has been neglected in contemporary philosophical debate. So what is the difference between understanding and knowledge? Scott takes as his focus the case of propositional knowledge, arguing that whereas knowledge picks out a certain relation between a belief and the fact of the matter, understanding is a matter of having a network of beliefs and being able to grasp their connections. How does this relate to religious understanding? Scott cites D.Z. Phillips’ claim that in a religious context we are concerned not merely with extending our knowledge of facts—as if coming to see that there is a God is a matter of acquiring knowledge that some additional being exists. Rather, it involves “seeing a new meaning in one’s life, being given a new understanding.” The general idea is familiar from Cottingham, and it calls to mind Nietzsche’s insistence that belief in God orients us in everything we think and do (“who gave us the

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sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”).44 Scott sums it up with the claim that the religious believer “sees things in the world as fitting together differently and as having a different significance to the nonbeliever.” He concludes that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge. How are we to comprehend the framework at issue when the world fits together in a theistic sense—when the earth is chained to its sun, as Nietzsche would put it? Silvia Jonas (Chapter 8) tackles this question at an ultra-theoretical level, her aim being to provide a metaphysics and semantics for theism which involves treating God in the way that the modal structuralist treats numbers. This is philosophy of religion in its most analytic guise, and it involves clarifying the structural relations that define theistic belief, the focus being upon our relations to God—God for us—rather than God in essence. The distinction between God for us and God in essence is important to Cottingham’s account, one of his reasons for rejecting the possibility of theory being that the object of theological inquiry “stands outside our human frame of meaning and reference.” Jonas, by contrast, is operating within this frame, and although she takes herself to be sidestepping ontology in this respect, her position becomes rather different if God’s nature is viewed in irreducibly relational terms. Such a position is familiar in theology,45 and those who have taken it seriously have focused upon the very relations which are fundamental to the present volume, namely those at issue when we engage with God at a moral/spiritual level. Jonas does not develop such a position, and her characterization of the relevant relations is pitched at a mostly formal level, as is appropriate given her overall aim. However, the example of the mother–child relation is central to her account, and she offers a formalized description of the relation in which the

44 Nietzsche says this in the famous madman parable of The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), s. 125. Stephen Mulhall provides a fascinating account of this parable in his Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), ch. 1. 45 For articulations of such a position see Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000); Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 95–115; and Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology, 2.3 (1986), pp. 183–96.

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typical believer stands to God, i.e. the relation with which the other contributors are concerned in a decidedly non-formal sense. Personal relations play a key role in Eleonore Stump’s “Theology and the Knowledge of Persons” (Chapter 9), and much of what she says involves making explicit the kind of relation at issue when we engage with God. Her starting-point is the question of how we are to comprehend theology’s methodology. This leads to the question of what theology is, and Stump considers how it is to be distinguished from philosophy. She rejects certain prevalent ways of thinking about this difference, and argues that a more promising approach is to be found in the names of these disciplines. The name “philosophy” in its etymology means something like the love of wisdom; the name “theology” means something like the word with regard to God. God, unlike wisdom, is not an abstract universal. Rather, and by virtue of being characterized by mind and will, God is to be understood in personal terms. Stump spells out the implications of this difference, arguing that theology can be comprehended in knowledge-involving terms, but that the knowledge in question is not propositional. Rather, it is the knowledge at issue when we claim to know a person. She claims that this second-personal knowledge is sharable by the medium of narratives, that this explains why narratives are so important to theology’s methodology, and that narrative interpretation is to be distinguished from the rigorous argument of the philosopher— “interpretations present, suggest, offer, and invite; unlike philosophical arguments, they cannot attempt to compel.” Stump’s conception of interpretation takes us back to hermeneutical inquiry, and most of the contributors of the present volume would take themselves to be suggesting and inviting rather than attempting to compel. We know also that narratives have played an important role along the way. This is not sufficient to show that they are doing theology, and Stump effects the required distinction with reference to their respective objects: theology concerns God; philosophy concerns wisdom. One potential difficulty with this move is that wisdom has often been personified, and it has also been linked to God.46 This is not a criticism of Stump’s proposal, but it does suggest that the distinction between philosophy and theology is rather less 46 It is personified most notably in the Book of Proverbs and in the Hebrew Bible. Thomas Merton takes wisdom (sophia) to involve an emanation of God’s glory: “His light is diffused in the air and the light of God is diffused by Hagia Sophia. . . . In

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clear-cut than it might at first appear, and the preceding chapters are testimony to the considerable overlaps we encounter in this context. Keith Ward (Chapter 10) tackles the question of religious understanding in a contemporary global context. The issue is situated within the context of conclusions previously drawn, and it takes us beyond an exclusively theistic perspective; moreover, the chapter as a whole exemplifies the kind of hermeneutical approach to which we have become accustomed. Ward begins with the problem of how to account for the large number of differing, and often conflicting, interpretations of religious understanding across theistic and nontheistic religions. Having addressed this problem, he suggests that there are factors today which mitigate the problem of religious diversity, and which give rise to new models of religious understanding. One such model involves the phenomenon of “multiple belonging,” and this is said to involve a more global perspective upon religion. Ward illustrates such a perspective using a symbol from Indian mythology, namely the jeweled web which belongs to the God Indra and which shines with its truest and fullest light only when each jewel reflects all the other jewels in itself. The symbol lends emphasis to connection as well as distinction, both with respect to the religions which figure in the relevant web and the forms of understanding they involve. It serves equally, however, as a symbol of the approach that underpins the volume as a whole—one in which continental and analytic philosophy, philosophy and theology, theistic and non-theistic religion are drawn into new and mutually generative relationship, and in which a recognition of unexpected similarities goes hand in hand with an acknowledgment of significant differences. This approach is further exemplified and examined in the final contribution to the volume (Chapter 11), where Charles Taliaferro returns us full circle to the question of what we should be doing as philosophers of religion, taking his inspiration from the seventeenthcentury Cambridge Platonists. These figures operated with a conception of nature which accommodates the reality of value and of God, Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and love” (“Hagia Sophia,” The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 363–71). For much wisdom on these matters see Paul S. Fiddes, “The Quest for a Place which is ‘Not a Place’: The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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a conception of religious understanding which gives due weight to the significance of practice, and a conception of philosophical practice in which love is given pride of place. Philosophy thus understood involves a renunciation of self-will, and Taliaferro makes clear how this virtue-involving account of the philosophical task relates to an underlying philosophy of God as well as providing a much-needed model for our times. It is in the spirit of such a proposal that the present volume is offered.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank John Cottingham for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank Stephen Grimm and the John Templeton Foundation for the generous funding which made this project possible.

1 Transcending Science Humane Models of Religious Understanding John Cottingham

THEISM AND EXPLANATION We know there is a continuing decline in religious belief, at least in the developed Western world. But what is it that people are rejecting? The answer may at first seem clear: they are rejecting the classical theistic worldview that held sway in the West for many centuries, up until the modern age. But what exactly is this classical theism that is now losing its hold on many people’s allegiance, or which they seem to find increasingly hard to accept? According to one of its most distinguished expositors, the philosopher Richard Swinburne, theism is an “explanatory hypothesis, which purports to explain why certain observed data are as they are.” These observed data include certain very general features of the universe, such as the law of gravity, and the fact that these laws are such as to bring about from an initial state (the Big Bang) “the eventual existence (some 13 billion years later) of human beings; and that these humans are conscious beings.”1 If the main focus of theism is indeed on an explanatory hypothesis of this kind, then I think it is not hard to see how it has lost its appeal. For the features just cited are precisely the kind of thing modern science aims to account for; and so great has been its success to date

1

Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.

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that I suspect a great many people would be inclined to accept the physicist Brian Cox’s claim (in a much-praised television broadcast) that science is “very close” to explaining the general features of the cosmos and our own eventual emergence from the slowly unfolding process since the Big Bang.2 In his broadcast, Professor Cox invoked Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, and the elegant mathematical theory called “inflation” to account for the unfolding of the universe over the last 13 or so billion years. Add to that the success of the Darwinian model of evolution by random mutation and natural selection, coupled with modern genetic science, and we have an extraordinarily rich explanatory structure, worked out in the crucible of a rigorously constrained methodology, and meticulously tested against a formidable body of observational evidence. So brilliant is much of this work that even the gathering and processing of the relevant data is an achievement meriting Nobel prizes in its own right. Set against an explanatory apparatus of this caliber, it’s not hard to see why contemptuous eyebrows are raised when someone says “I actually have an alternative and rather better hypothesis: a person did it, a person willed it all, a person created it all and keeps it in existence.” It has become fashionable for theologians and philosophers of religion to disparage the attacks on religion mounted by militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, but I think integrity requires us to acknowledge just how exasperating the alternative theistic “hypothesis” must seem to Dawkins and to many of those like him who have a detailed knowledge of the magnificent and hardwon achievements of science. Imagine for a moment what a field day an advocatus diaboli would have with the explanatory hypothesis of theism. A person, we are told, is responsible for the cosmos. “A person? What kind of person?” Well, an invisible person. “You mean we can’t see his body?” No, he doesn’t have one. “Doesn’t have one? How then can he exercise any power over the universe?” Well (to quote from Swinburne), “ordinary human persons exist for a limited period of time, dependent on physical causes (their bodies and especially their brains) for their capacities to exercise their powers, forms beliefs and make choices.

2 Second program in the BBC 2 series Human Universe, broadcast in the UK in autumn 2014.

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God is . . . unlimited in all these respects and [does not] depend on anything for his existence or capacities.”3 So we are being asked to suppose there is explanatory force in the idea of a person, who can mysteriously think things and do things without any of the corporeal features that our entire past experience tells us are required whenever persons think or act. I am putting it this way not in any way to disparage the work of natural theologians (many of whose writings, as in the case of Swinburne, are greatly to be admired for their clarity and intellectual rigor), but simply to make a point about explanation. The proposed theistic explanation for why we are here, when set against the intricately worked-out heavy lifting achieved by the scientific theories mentioned a moment ago, seems to many a modern ear radically impoverished. Worse, so far from doing what explanations are normally supposed to do, namely reduce our puzzlement, it seems if anything to increase it. To invoke a person of this invisible and incorporeal kind, operating so completely outside the context in which we normally use and understand the concept of a person, makes it hard to accept that we really understand what we are talking about. And if we add mind-boggling properties like “omniscient” and “omnipresent,” this only seems to push things nearer to the edge of intelligibility. As Anthony Kenny has graphically put it, highlighting one reason for his own inability to retain his religious faith: “the language that we use to describe the [operations] of human minds operates within a web of links with bodily behavior and social institutions. When we try to apply this language to an entity . . . whose scope of operation is the entire universe, this web comes to pieces, and we no longer know what we are saying.”4 Perhaps there may after all be good supporting reasons for holding to a religious worldview—indeed, as I shall shortly be indicating, I think there are. But in the light of what I’ve just been saying, it seems to me best to admit that the supposed explanatory power of theism as a hypothesis is not one of these supporting reasons. The late Dominican writer Herbert McCabe put the point nicely when he remarked that to invoke God is not to clear up a puzzle, but to draw attention to a mystery.5 The existence of the universe that 3

Swinburne, Was Jesus God?, 6. Anthony Kenny, What I Believe (London: Continuum, 2006), 11. 5 Herbert McCabe, God and Evil in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas [1957] (London: Continuum, 2010), 128. 4

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produced us remains a profound enigma, just as each human existence, for the individual subject who reflects on it, is something vertiginous—an existential wonder or horror, a deep mystery. To be religious, in my view, is in a certain way to embrace that mystery, with hope and perhaps with joy, but certainly not to regard it as dissolved by an ingenious explanatory hypothesis called theism. In saying theism fails at the explanatory level, I’m emphatically not implying that modern science has all the answers. If I may refer just once more to Brian Cox and his television series, this is a presenter with impeccable scientific expertise and an infectious sense of the awesome wonders of the cosmos. But on occasion, like quite a few of his physicist colleagues,6 he falls victim to the confused fantasy of the scientific method as a golden key that will unlock every last question that confronts us—as when in the program mentioned he first ventures the (absurd) opinion that modern physics has arrived at a “plausible mechanism” for how universes are made out of nothing, springing into existence out of fluctuating quantum energy, and then goes on to say that since an infinite number of universes are thereby created, it is an absolute necessity that one of them will be of a kind that gives rise to the actual universe in which we live. Two dubious steps seem to be involved here: the first is claiming to offer a solution to the fine-tuning problem—how the physical constants in our universe are exactly calibrated to allow the formation of stars and planets and eventually us—by positing an infinite number of calibrations of which ours is but one; even when dignified with the label “multiverse theory,” this is of course simply a disguised restatement of the finetuning problem, not a genuine solution to it.7 And the second error, or equivocation, is to construe a fluctuating field of quantum energy as the “nothing” out of which universes spring. Fluctuating energy may be “nothing” in the sense that it contains no atoms or molecules, but it is not nothing at all. Quantum theory, for all its impressive

6 Stephen Hawking is a case in point: he speculates, absurdly (though such is our awe of physicists that few dare to say so), that if physicists could manage to formulate a grand unified theory of everything, it “might be so compelling that it brings about its own existence.” A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press, 1988), 192–3. 7 The medieval logical maxim De posse ad esse non valet consequentia (“inferring actual existence from possible existence is not valid”) retains its force. It will not do to try to get around this by arbitrarily stipulating that the (infinite number of ) other possible universes are all “actual” (whatever that can mean).

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success, does not remotely undermine the unshakeable logical maxim “ex nihilo nihil fit”: from nothing, nothing comes.8 There is, however, a more general moral which goes beyond the equivocations of current scientific cosmology. Physics, for all its magnificent achievements, could never be shown to have provided a complete and final explanation of all reality: those who suppose otherwise have stepped outside science and fallen for the seductive dogma of scientism, whose incoherencies are well established. Scientism, the claim that science is the measure of all of reality, or all truth, is a claim that could not possibly be established by scientific means, and therefore, if truly asserted, would be self-refuting. So much is familiar ground; but it needs to be added that even once we grant that science could never furnish a complete account of all reality, it does not follow that theism is equipped to fill the explanatory gap. On the contrary, as I have just been at pains to argue, its resources, if it is interpreted as an explanatory hypothesis, are far too thin to allow it to discharge this role. Part of the problem for classical theism in this context is that the very idea of an immaterial person has lost its power to command any allegiance, outside a small and diminishing minority of theologians and philosophers. The slow decline in credibility started to take hold quite a while ago, so that by the 1970s the Cambridge philosopher of religion and Anglican cleric Don Cupitt was already speaking for many when he declared that he could no longer seriously believe in, as he put it, God as a “Great Spirit.”9 Everything we know from modern biology and medicine indicates that consciousness is a highly complex process that cannot function without intricate physical mechanisms (of a neurological or some other analogous kind) whereby the relevant inputs and outputs are coordinated and the relevant information is managed. For Descartes it was virtually inconceivable that thought and understanding could be realized in a physical process; now the wheel has come full circle and it is virtually impossible to conceive of how they could be realized without it.

8 Nor is Cox’s position rescued by his observing at one point that the mathematical equations “prohibit emptiness”—a bizarre revival, in mathematical guise, of the ontological argument, since it appears to want to derive conclusions about actual reality from conceptual premises. 9 Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1981).

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This does not mean that meaning and cognition can be reduced to neurological events, as some misguided modern philosophers imagine; but it does mean that the notion of thought as the property of an immaterial, non-spatial substance now struggles to retain any appeal. Even within the seventeenth-century Cartesian framework, the notion was already problematic; for although given Descartes’s crude cogs-and-wheels and gas-pipes model of the nervous system, and his complete ignorance of what we now know of the 8 billion neural connections in the brain, it was entirely reasonable for him to doubt that a physical system could possibly perform the functions associated with language and thought,10 he nevertheless left it entirely unclear how making the system a simple, indivisible, immaterial one could make the job any easier. From an explanatory point of view, souls, at least of the incorporeal Cartesian type, are, and always were, thin to the point of emptiness; and although I am no fan of contemporary scientific naturalism, one can in a certain way see why souls are routinely placed by many modern analytic philosophers in the same dustbin as God—outmoded, “spooky” entities that cannot do any useful explanatory work.

RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING So much for the fierce headwinds under which classical theism is struggling to keep afloat in our present-day intellectual culture. My initial tentative conclusion is that something other than theism in its classic theological guise is needed if religious thought is to hold its own in the educated Western world. We need a new model of religious understanding. This means that being religious should not be thought of (or not primarily be thought of) as subscribing to an explanatory hypothesis about the origins of the cosmos and our human nature. Of course people can continue to think of it that way, or to insist that it should be thought of that way (who am I to lay down the law?); but it appears likely that this will only accelerate the decline of religious adherence. (It seems no accident, for example, that the fiercest 10 See John Cottingham, “Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics and Science” in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236–57.

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contemporary assailants of religion tend to insist on construing it in just this way: compare Richard Dawkins’s use of the phrase “the God hypothesis.”11) So what kind of alternative model of religious understanding is available? The phrase “religious understanding” is open to various interpretations, but I propose we construe it in what I think is the most intuitively obvious way, namely adverbially, as it were, as referring to a certain mode or manner of understanding the world. In similar fashion we speak, for example, of “scientific understanding,” of “musical understanding,” or of “psychoanalytic understanding”; and in all these domains what one has in mind is a characteristic way of relating to or interpreting reality, or some part of it. The question about religious understanding then becomes What is it to relate to the world religiously? or What is it to understand things in a religious way? Let us pursue the analogy with musical understanding for a moment. By “musical understanding” someone might perhaps have in mind the kind of theoretical intellectual understanding that musicologists aim at—for example, being able to expound the difference between “just intonation” (where the ratios of notes are related by small whole numbers) and “equal temperament” (where all notes are defined as multiples of the same basic interval). But in contrast to this kind of abstract or theoretical approach to the domain of music, one might be thinking instead of the kind of rich cognitive and emotional awareness we attribute to someone when we say, in ordinary parlance, that he or she is a “very musical” person. These two different kinds of musical understanding seem logically, psychologically, and causally quite distinct. It seems possible, for instance, that someone could score very well in a musicological examination where the candidates are required to write an essay on equal temperament, or some similar topic, while not having much, if any, musical understanding in the latter sense of having a rich musical sensibility; and conversely, it seems clear that someone could be gifted with outstanding intuitive musical awareness without any grasp of theory (an actual example is the opera singer Njabulo Madlala, who at the age of nineteen auditioned at the London Guildhall and was offered a full scholarship even though, as he subsequently informed the adjudicators, he had had no musical education and could not even read music).12 11 12

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006), ch. 2. Financial Times, October 17, 2014.

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The basic thought here is that one can have a kind of direct, intuitive way of understanding something that needs to be distinguished from a detached, analytic way of approaching it. Iain McGilchrist, in his groundbreaking book The Master and His Emissary, explores this in part by reference to the results of scientific research into the differential ways in which our awareness of reality is mediated by the two hemispheres of the brain. (Before we proceed, an important caveat needs to be entered here about how to understand terms such as “left-brain,” “right-brain,” and the like, as found in McGilchrist and others influenced by him. Such terms are best thought of as convenient shorthands for referring to two distinctive human ways of relating to the world; it should not be supposed that the two hemispheres of the brain operate as wholly independent and autonomous systems (as some critics of McGilchrist have mistakenly supposed him to be saying).) The crucial distinction McGilchrist aims to alert us to is to two ways of being in the world, both of which are essential. One is to allow things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of that whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective. The other is to step outside the flow of experience and “experience” our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicitly abstracted, compartmentalised, fragmented . . . essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful.13

The kind of “power” referred to here is very seductive for philosophers. We like to feel we are detached scrutineers, above the fray, mapping out the logical structure of various theories and pronouncing our lordly judgments about their viability. But if McGilchrist is right, there is a danger in always allowing the logical, analytic, detached mode of awareness to predominate in our philosophical thinking (or indeed, as he goes on to argue, in our conduct and our society generally). In similar vein, Eleonore Stump has recently

13 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 93 (slightly adapted).

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deplored the “cognitive hemianopia” of much contemporary analytic philosophy—its blindness to the kinds of insights associated with the right cerebral hemisphere, and its unwarranted tendency to “suppose that left-brain skills alone will reveal to us all that is philosophically interesting about the world.”14 Stump makes a powerful case for supposing that philosophy, if it is to achieve a richer awareness of the world, especially in the moral and religious domains, needs to draw on additional resources, for example those arising from our responses to the multiple resonances of literary, and scriptural, narrative. The key point here is that much moral and religious discourse is multilayered—it carries a rich charge of symbolic significance that resonates with us on many different levels of understanding, not all of them fully grasped by the reflective, analytic mind. Any plausible account of the human condition must make space for the crucial role of imaginative, symbolic, and poetic forms of understanding in deepening our awareness of ourselves and the reality we inhabit. This in turn suggests that it is a serious error to try to reduce the religious outlook to a bald set of factual assertions whose literal propositional content is then to be clinically isolated and assessed.15 So if we are looking for a new model of religious understanding, I think we need to take seriously the possibility that understanding the world religiously is not an attempt to dissect and analyze and explain it in the manner of modern science (let alone to try to control it—for example, by thinking of petitionary prayer as a spiritual alternative to modern technology),16 but rather a mode of engagement, or connection, with reality as a whole. Perhaps the kind of connection it searches for cannot be achieved by the critical scrutiny of the intellect alone, but requires a process of attunement, or Stimmung, to use a Heideggerian term,17 a moral and spiritual opening of the self to the presence of the divine.

14 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24–5. 15 See John Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 1. 16 See Mark Johnston on “spiritual materialism,” in his Saving God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 51. 17 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [Sein und Zeit, 1927], §137, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 177. See also George Steiner, Heidegger (London: Fontana, 2nd edn, 1992), p. 55.

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One of the implications of this is that we need a new epistemology for thinking about religious belief and its basis. Both the Dawkins-type critics of religion, and interestingly many mainstream practitioners of natural theology as well, seem to operate with an epistemology of control. We stand back, scrutinize the evidence, retaining our power and autonomy in a “left-brain” kind of way, and pronounce on the existence or otherwise of God. Now, of course, if the theistic worldview is correct, then one ought to expect that humans have been given the wherewithal to achieve some awareness of God. But it does not follow that the divine presence will be detectable via intellectual analysis of formal arguments or observational data: the ancient Judeo-Christian idea of the Deus absconditus (the “hidden God”) suggests a deity who is less interested in proving his existence or demonstrating his power than in the moral conversion and freely given love of his creatures, and in guiding aright the steps of those who “seek him with all their heart,” in Pascal’s phrase.18 And as soon as we start to think about the means of such conversion, it becomes clear that it could never operate through detached intellectual argument alone, or through the dispassionate evaluation of “spectator evidence,” to use Paul Moser’s label.19 Hence those who insist on casting the “God question” in a form that is apt for evaluation by “left-brain skills” alone may be missing the core issue at stake in the adoption of a religious worldview. The question is not “Can I, while scrutinizing the data and remaining detached and fully in control, satisfy myself of the rational acceptability of belief in God?”; but rather something like the following: “How can I embark on a path of moral and spiritual change which might open me to a deeper awareness of something that I now glimpse only faintly?” In short, this is an area where we need to relinquish the epistemology of control, and substitute an epistemology of receptivity. This is not special pleading, since there are all sorts of other areas of life— appreciation of poetry, or of music, for instance, or entering into any kind of personal relationship—where we need to be “porous,” to use Martha Nussbaum’s term: not hard, detached, critical evaluators, but open, yielding, receptive listeners.20 Otherwise, while we pride

18

Blaise Pascal, Pensées [1670], ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962), no. 427. Paul Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47. 20 Martha Nussbaum, “Love’s Knowledge” [1988], reprinted in Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 281–2. 19

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ourselves on being in control and judiciously evaluating the evidence, we will actually be closing ourselves off from allowing the evidence to become manifest to us.

THE OBJECT OF AWARENESS Revising our model of religious understanding and religious awareness in this way, though it takes us further away from classical academic theorizing about religion, has the advantage of taking us closer to traditional religious thought and practice. If we look at the JudeoChristian scriptures, for example, we find that although God is spoken of as the maker of heaven and earth, there is very little material that emphasizes the explanatory role of this claim, or attempts to demonstrate its theoretical power and scope. Instead, what we often find is language whose focus we would probably classify (in our somewhat impoverished modern vocabulary) as “aesthetic” or “moral,” as in the following verses from a well-known Psalm: Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: let the sea roar, and all it contains. Let the field exult, and all that is in it: then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy Before the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth: he will judge the world in righteousness, and the peoples in his faithfulness.21

God here is not an immaterial force that is supposed to explain the behavior of the oceans and the fields and the woods; rather, the vivid beauty and splendor of the natural world is that which makes manifest the divine. The world is understood religiously—not as a blank impersonal process, not as A.E. Housman’s “heartless witless nature,” not as a manifestation of “blind, pitiless indifference”22 as Richard Dawkins characterizes it, but as “charged with the grandeur of God,” to quote the first line of the famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.23 21

Psalm 96 [95]: 11–13. Richard Dawkins, Rivers Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133. 23 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” from Poems (1876–1889), in W.H. Gardner (ed.), The Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). Compare the following: “All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God, and if we know how 22

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The feebleness of modern labels like “aesthetic” for this type of language is even more apparent in an earlier Psalm, where God is described as the one who “breaks the cedars of Lebanon and makes it skip like a calf,” who “shakes the wilderness and strips the forests bare, while all in the temple cry ‘Glory!’.”24 The cry of “Glory” (in Hebrew kavod ‫ )ד ֹוב ָּכ‬signifies something weighty with significance, sacred, mysterious, a manifestation of the divine, like the pillar of fire and cloud which led the Israelites out of Egypt, or the cloud atop Mount Sinai where God’s law was manifest to Moses.25 We are not talking of “natural beauty” in the attenuated modern sense, but of something fearful that calls forth reverence and awe, like the burning bush, flaming but never consumed, where Moses was told “do not approach any nearer, take the shoes from off your feet, for the place you stand on is holy ground!”26 This is not an “impressive sight,” of the kind familiar from television nature programs, but an event pregnant with moral significance, as is clear from the lines in the first Psalm quoted above, where the forests “sing for joy” not just in pantheistic exuberance, as it were, but rather because the world is to be judged. In psychological or phenomenological terms, what is happening here is an experience where the subject is overwhelmed by the power and beauty of nature in a way that is somehow intertwined with awareness of one’s own weakness and imperfection, and a sense of confrontation with the inexorable demands of justice and righteousness. The “religious understanding” involved here is, in short, the kind of awareness which enables one to see the world transfigured, so that it is irradiated with meaning and value, and the human subject, caught up in that mystery, is unmistakably called on not to be a spectator any longer, a mere “tourist,” but to respond, to be a morally responsive agent, part of a cosmos that is diaphanous, transparent to the divine.27 At this point a major objection might be raised. Even if it is true that the wellspring of religious belief is the kind of awareness just described, will it not also be true that we still need the intellectual categories of classical theism to characterize the object of such to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.” G.M. Hopkins, Note-books and Papers, ed. H. House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 342; cited in Poems and Prose, ed. Gardner, 231. 24 25 Psalm 29 [28]: 5–9. Exodus 13:21 and 24:16. 26 Exodus 3:5. 27 The above two paragraphs draw on material from John Cottingham, How to Believe (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), ch. 5.

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awareness and the content of such belief? Do we not still need classical natural theology if we are to give a proper theoretical account of the nature of the divine—the nature of that which is perceived in the kinds of experience described in language such as that just quoted from the Psalms? After all, to revert to our musical analogy, direct musical awareness of the “right-brain” type does not in any way undermine the validity of the more theoretical “left-brain” language of music theory—on the contrary, it could be said to be complemented by it, with the latter, left-brain terminology specifying genuine formal properties which apply to what is intuitively grasped by the “right-brain” modes of awareness, and did so all along, even though every intuitively musical person may not have been explicitly aware of them. Certainly, if we go back to Iain McGilchrist’s work, although he criticizes the excessive dominance of left-brain modes of awareness in modern Western culture, he nevertheless allows or even insists that in most contexts the left and right-brain modes are complementary and equally necessary (indeed, he speculates that the bilateral modularity of function in the brain may have evolved because of the need for animals both to concentrate in a narrow beam, sharply focused way on specific tasks, such as obtaining and consuming food, and at the same time to maintain a broader, more holistic kind of general receptivity to the environment—both of these modes being essential for survival).28 So can both modes of religious understanding, the classical theistic abstract explanatory mode, and the experiential or “transfigurative” mode, happily coexist? By nature a reconciliationist, I should in principle like to be able to accept such an accommodation, but unfortunately I have doubts about whether it will do all the necessary work. To begin with, if we press a little harder on our analogy with

28 “In Darwinian terms, there is a need to be able to focus on . . . feeding and to keep a look out for predators at the same time. This requires the bringing to bear of diametrically opposed types of attention to the world simultaneously: one, narrowbeam, sharply focussed, fragmentary, already committed to its object; the other, broad, open, sustained, vigilant and uncommitted as to what it might find. This is a difficult feat. The solution adopted by all reptiles, birds, fish and mammals so far studied is a divided and asymmetrical brain, in which the two halves remain sufficiently distinct to function independently, but sufficiently connected to function in concert. This is also, unsurprisingly, the case in humans.” Iain McGilchrist, Summary presented at the Templeton symposium on Ascetical Practice in a Secular Culture, Villa Palazzola, Italy, September 2014.

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musical understanding, I think it becomes clear that it does not succeed in delivering the kind of thing that is required in the religious case. Music theory cannot, in the end, claim to uncover the nature of the reality that is experienced when we exercise our musical sensibilities. The sounds that delight us have certain formal or numerical properties, that is true, but these are merely abstract ratios of various kinds—they do not explain musical experience, or what it is an experience of, except perhaps in so far as they show that what we hear is not a collection of random sounds that happen to appeal to us, but a pattern, a shape, with a mathematically intelligible form. The kind of abstract mapping that the musicologist provides is no doubt of considerable value and importance in its own right, but it hardly provides an explanatory hypothesis to account for the phenomenon we call music. But in any case, there is a further and special difficulty in the religious case, namely that the object of theological inquiry is, so to speak, anomalous—it stands outside our human frame of meaning and reference. On the theologian’s own account, the properties of the divine qua divine are in a radically different category from any of the properties that characterize the empirical world. In this respect, attempts to map its properties and exhibit them as bearing an explanatory relationship to the observed data must remain inherently problematic. As I have argued elsewhere,29 there is some partial analogy here with what we find in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, whose object, the Unconscious, is similarly anomalous, outside the domain of normal observation or introspection—and it is precisely for this reason that many critics of Freudianism have been skeptical about whether the theory has genuine explanatory force. The problem is not merely an epistemic one, about how we can know these hidden processes are occurring—after all, many scientific explanations invoke processes beneath the threshold of ordinary common-sense observation. Rather, the problem is a deeper semantic one, a problem about how we are to understand the ascription of the relevant properties. In the psychoanalytic case, our understanding of concepts like desire, anger, lust, fear, and so on is so deeply rooted in our conscious experience that we cannot be confident we know what we are saying

29

Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, ch. 7.

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when we transfer these to a supposed domain of unconscious mentation. And so, mutatis mutandis, for the concepts applied to God, who is by definition beyond the horizon of direct human apprehension. The worry, corresponding to that raised by Anthony Kenny in the passage quoted earlier, is that we no longer know what we are saying when we transfer to this divine domain concepts whose meaning derives from their use in the ordinary human world. The idea of analogical predication (going back to Aristotle and Aquinas) is often thought to provide the resources to tackle this problem. It is readily admitted by classical theologians like Aquinas that the properties ascribed to God are drawn in the first instance from the human world, so the sense in which personal attributes like love and goodness and rationality are predicated of God is only by analogy with how we use them normally. But there is no reason, according to the supporters of this approach, why this should be a fatal objection to intelligibility. After all, the use of analogical predication is familiar from science—as when physicists speak of the micro world in terms of “waves” or “particles” or “forces,” using terms drawn from the human macro world—but no one supposes this undermines the explanatory value of modern physics. I think it is fair to say that modern science does indeed use such analogical language, and it is by consensus allowed to remain silent about the “real nature” of the phenomena it investigates—the real intrinsic properties underlying the analogies. As Hume put it, the “ultimate springs and principles” of nature remain opaque30 (and he here followed “the incomparable Mr Newton,” who explicitly said he did not pretend to know the real cause of gravity);31 so in this sense one might say that there is an “apophatic” strand, or an “ineffable element,” even in modern science. The fact is, however, that science retains an explanatory legitimacy, based on the fact that modern physics is able to produce a mathematical framework of equations, which, when certain values are plugged in for the variables and the constants, are able in principle to yield results that correspond to the observable behavior of the cosmos, and yield powerful predictions about its future behavior. And our culture has come to associate genuine explanatory power so closely with this kind of precise 30 David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], sectn 4, part 1. 31 Isaac Newton, Letter to Richard Bentley, 1693.

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subsumption, testability, and predictability that, once again, the explanatory pretentions of classical theology have come to seem radically impoverished by comparison. There are many further issues related to the scientific model that would repay further discussion, but these are a subject for a separate paper. Let me instead draw to a close by very briefly developing the comparison just mentioned with psychoanalytic understanding, since I think it does in the end provide us with some useful hints for getting at the new model of religious understanding we are seeking. Suppose we concede that psychoanalytic theory cannot by any effort of ingenuity be turned into an explanatory hypothesis of anything like the kind that is normally expected in science. There is no mathematical modeling, no clear testability or predictive power, and we have only the haziest grasp of the supposed powers or properties involved, since any mentalistic terminology used of the unconscious is severed from the context in which it is normally at home. Yet in spite of that, what is undeniable is there are very many people who have actually undergone the process who will insist that their understanding of their day-to-day mental life, of their thoughts and feelings and psychological struggles, has been illuminated and indeed transformed by seeing it as infused with the unconscious mentation—colored in, as it were, by drives and desires and fears of which our conscious thought is dimly if at all aware. What enables them to say this with confidence is the belief that the hidden powers involved, even if their nature cannot properly be articulated, may nonetheless be something we can dimly sense. The “shadowy presentations” of the unconscious mind, as Jung termed them,32 while remaining beneath the threshold of what is consciously registered, can nevertheless leave their traces in the faint forgotten memories of childhood, or the weird and only partly recoverable deliverances of dreams; and they can illuminate, as Freud brilliantly showed, a whole range of similar phenomena, thereby transforming our selfawareness and allowing us to move toward more hopeful and integrative ways of living.

32

Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Routledge, 1933), 40. For further discussion of Jung’s position, see John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 4.

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There is a close analogy here with what the religious adherent holds with regard to God—the elusive and mysterious source of being who, as Augustine declared, can never be brought fully within the grasp of the human mind. This resistance to being mentally encompassed is, as the long apophatic tradition of religious thought tells us, of the very nature of the divine.33 For the very fact of our encompassing God, bringing him entirely within the horizon of our human understanding, would be the best evidence that what was so grasped was not God but a mere idol of our own construction (perhaps, dare one say it, like the God who is the object posited by explanatory theism). And just as with the mysterious “traces” left by the unconscious, so the divine reality that we cannot fully grasp or describe may be thought of as leaving traces, which, for the religious believer, are manifest for example in the beauty of the natural world and the compelling power of our moral sensibilities—the exaltation of “all the trees of the forest,” as the Psalmist puts it, as they and we sense that we live in a world that is after all imbued with objective value and meaning.34 We thus end with a paradox—that our understanding of existence can be transformed by using a framework of interpretation whose structure does not function like an explanatory theory. How do we solve the paradox? As with Zeno’s paradox, solvitur ambulando: it is solved not by further theorizing but by action. For religious understanding is inseparable from moral action and spiritual practice35— something that gives us yet another striking point of convergence with psychoanalytic understanding. Compare, for example, the following comment from the distinguished philosopher and practicing psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear: How are we to think about the enduring philosophical significance of psychoanalysis? The wrong place to begin is with any of its theoretical claims, for instance the discovery of the unconscious. Rather, the appropriate starting point is practical and ethical: one person comes 33 “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” (“If you grasp him, he is not God”). Augustine of Hippo, Sermons [Sermones, 392–430], 52, vi, 16 and 117, iii, 5. 34 See John Cottingham, “Human Nature and the Transcendent,” in C. Sandis and M.J. Cain (eds.), Human Nature, Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 233–54. 35 Compare Rowan Williams: “Theologians like myself know that their failures of understanding are actually failures of praying,” from lectures given at Bristol 1997–2002, cited in Rupert Shortt, Rowan Williams: An Introduction (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003), 81.

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to another seeking help and, after some preliminary discussion, the other person agrees to join in a working relationship.36

It should be no surprise that the appropriate language for expressing the resulting understanding, whether in the religious or the psychoanalytic case, will not be scientific or quasi-scientific language. Instead (as Rowan Williams has recently argued in the religious case) it is likely to include the kind of dramatic metaphor and resonant narrative that we find so often at key points in Scripture. The parables of Jesus, for example, are not meant to offer explanations or theories, but aim to shock us into new kinds of awareness. And they work on us not atomistically, by giving us a set of propositions or conclusions to be affirmed, but holistically, by radically transforming our awareness. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Commenting on the story of the Good Samaritan, Williams suggests that you cannot distill out of this a descriptive characterization of God; rather, God is represented by the entire narrative: to enter into this story and discover where you as a hearer fit and what role it is possible for you to adopt imaginatively, is to become able to offer a representation that claims truthfulness but not—in the usual sense—verisimilitude.37

In sum, the “religious understanding” we are seeking cannot come about by abstract theorizing, but only through more direct and imaginative forms of involvement and engagement. If this moves religious understanding away from the theoretical and toward the practical domain, this does not at all mean that the practical steps that have to be undertaken are arbitrary or irrational. They may be undertaken in “direst need” [höchsten Not], as Wittgenstein put it,38 but their reasonableness will, if all goes well, be retrospectively validated as the subject finds their understanding growing and their life progressively transformed. And in case our “left-brain” ways of thinking make one last effort to take control here, let it be added 36 Jonathan Lear, “Synopsis” for keynote address to Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Conference, Senate House, University of London, October 17, 2014. 37 Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 149. 38 “[T]he Christian religion is only for one who feels an infinite need . . . . To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart instead of contracting it, accepts the means to salvation in his heart.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, remark dating from circa 1942, in Culture and Value [Vermischte Bemerkungen] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 52.

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that what comes to light as a result of such action cannot be forced into the mold of “confirmatory data,” to be construed as increasing the probability of the theory’s truth. For the framework within which understanding takes shape is not an abstract and theoretical one, involving a set of posited objects and properties that can be analyzed and assessed by our “left-brain” capacities; rather, it is a framework of engagement, something that must be enacted through involvement and commitment, and which offers, through openness and listening, a possible way of achieving that state of attunement where we can hope to glimpse, as through a glass darkly, the light of meaning and truth that irradiates our world and transforms our human existence.39

39 I am grateful to Fiona Ellis, Kyle Scott, and the other participants at the 2014–15 seminar series for the “New Models of Religious Understanding” research project at the Centre for Philosophy of Religion, Heythrop College, University of London, for helpful discussion of an earlier version of this chapter. The research project in question was funded by a generous grant from the Templeton Foundation. I am also grateful for comments received when I presented versions of the chapter at the Philosophy of Religions Workshop series at the University of Chicago School of Divinity, and at the Renard Endowed Lecture at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, in April 2016.

2 Religious Understanding, Naturalism, and Theory Fiona Ellis

INTRODUCTION What is the relation between religious understanding and theory? And what does it have to do with naturalism? According to one interpretation of the first question, it is a matter of clarifying what it could mean to theorize about religious understanding, and determining whether there are any good reasons for denying that there could be such a thing. The title of this volume—“New Models of Religious Understanding”—suggests a theorizing of sorts, and some would insist that any viable model in this context will involve explaining religious understanding in non-religious terms. The implication here is that there are no prospects for explaining it on its own (religious) terms, either because these terms are too puzzling or spooky to be accepted in their own right, or because it would be vacuous to stay at the level of religion—as if explaining something on its own terms amounts to no more than saying that it is what it is. The charge of spookiness is taken seriously by a certain kind of naturalist, namely one who insists that the scientist has a monopoly on reality and explanation, and that reference to a “religious” dimension of reality is excluded on this ground. Scientific naturalism has a claim to be the main programmatic orientation of analytic philosophy.1 However, it is a contestable and problematic position for which 1 For a discussion of the position and the difficulties it confronts see Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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there is no clear philosophical or scientific justification. So it cannot be assumed that explaining religious understanding on its own terms is a task for the intellectually challenged, although there is a question of where the limits of the religious are to be drawn, and how the relevant explanation is to proceed. As for the worry that we shall be confined to vacuity if we remain at this level of understanding, we can note that the scientific naturalist has no qualms about offering a rival explanation which proceeds in purely scientific terms. We are to suppose then that it is the religious dimension of the explanation which generates the difficulty—that a genuine explanation cannot proceed in purely religious terms. We have identified two possible ways of theorizing about religious understanding, but what of the significance of theory to religious understanding itself? Such a question provides the focus of John Cottingham’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 1), and it gives rise to a related and equally important distinction between two ways of comprehending the nature of the understanding which belongs to one who understands religiously. Religious understanding, we are told, refers to a “certain mode or manner of understanding the world.” More specifically, we are concerned with what it is to relate to the world religiously or what it is to understand things in a religious way.2 The first, disputed, position is that being religious involves “subscribing to an explanatory hypothesis about the origins of the cosmos and our human nature,”3 so that “understanding the world religiously is an attempt to dissect and analyze and explain it in the manner of modern science.”4 The second position corresponds to Cottingham’s preferred new model of religious understanding, and it involves taking seriously the idea that “understanding the world religiously is not an attempt to dissect and analyze it and explain it in the manner of modern science . . . but rather a mode of engagement, or connection, with reality as a whole.”5 This mode of engagement “cannot be achieved by the critical scrutiny of the intellect alone, but requires a process of attunement . . . a moral and spiritual opening of the self to the presence of the divine.”6 University Press, 2004). See also ch. 1 of my God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 Chapter 1 of this volume, “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding” (hereafter TS), p. 29. 3 4 5 6 TS, p. 28. TS, p. 31. TS, p. 31. TS, p. 31.

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We have two approaches to the question of how religious understanding is to be explained, and two conceptions of the understanding to be explained. It is not always easy to distinguish these levels of thinking, and in what follows I want to clarify some of the connections and distinctions, and look in more detail at Cottingham’s position. I shall raise some questions about his antipathy toward theory, and propose a model which is compatible with his praxisoriented account, and which draws upon the natural theology I have defended elsewhere.7 I shall conclude that religious understanding must be explained on its own terms, and that it has both a practical and a theoretical dimension. This conclusion is compatible with most of what Cottingham says, and it allows us to clarify in further detail where theory can go wrong and to enter into dialogue with one who opposes the theistic dimension of the picture.

RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: SCIENTIFIC VERSUS NON-SCIENTIFIC When Cottingham takes issue with a scientific approach to religious understanding, he is concerned with the approach of one to whom this understanding belongs, and it counts as scientific in the sense that the subject takes a scientific approach to God.8 She does so by treating God as an explanatory hypothesis in terms of which to explain the origin and nature of the natural world. It is said to be a consequence of this approach that religious understanding becomes “an attempt to dissect and analyze [the world] and explain it in the manner of modern science.”9 Cottingham objects that modern science has called into question the very idea of a theistic explanatory source, and that if this is the main focus of theism, then we have a quick route to atheism.10 Hence: 7

See God, Value, and Nature, ch. 8. In the following two sections I draw on related work I did for the New Models project in the paper “Religious Understanding, Naturalism, and Desire,” in Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays in the Philosophy of Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 9 TS, p. 31. 10 Compare Michael J. Buckley who talks of a conflict between the glory of God and the glory of nature or human nature which, he claims, “will eventually be resolved 8

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The proposed theistic explanation for why we are here, when set against the intricately worked-out heavy lifting achieved by [science], seems to many a modern ear radically impoverished. Worse, so far from doing what explanations are normally supposed to do, namely reduce our puzzlement, it seems if anything to increase it.11

We are returned to a version of the initial worry I raised on behalf of the scientific naturalist, namely that explanations which proceed in religious terms are too puzzling to be accepted on their own terms. It is implied also that modern science and theism are explanatory competitors in this context and that modern science wins out—as if science does what theism is trying to do, only better. However, Cottingham denies that science can explain everything, and I take it that the real point here is that even if we accept, as we may not, that modern science has the potential to explain the nature and origin of things all the way back to a “Big Bang” moment,12 it can tell us nothing about the question of creation in the sense at issue when God is introduced. As Herbert McCabe put it: “[w]hen we have concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific question to ask about what kind of world it is and how, if ever, it began.”13 So it is a mistake to gloss theism in these scientific explanatory terms, and Cottingham likewise defers to McCabe in this context, agreeing with him that the point of invoking God is to draw attention to a mystery rather than to clear up a puzzle.14 For Cottingham, then, a non-scientific approach to religious understanding is a matter of denying that the understanding it involves—of God and/or reality—is scientific, and this is just another way of saying that religious understanding is not the same as scientific understanding, and that it must be explained on its own terms. Explaining it on its own terms is said to involve viewing it as a mode of engagement, or connection, with reality as a whole—one in which the self becomes in favour of the natural and the human. Any implicit, unspoken enmity between God and creation will issue in atheism.” At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 363. 11 TS, p. 25. 12 For some interesting and important caveats about the explanatory pretensions of physics and science see Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smollin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13 “Creation,” in God Matters (London: Continuum Press, 1987), 8–9. 14 H. McCabe, God and Evil in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (London: Continuum Press, 2010), 128.

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morally and spiritually open to the presence of the divine as she embarks upon a path of moral and spiritual change.15 Cottingham notes that this approach takes us away from classical theorizing about religion and closer to traditional religious thought and practice. It involves: the kind of awareness which enables one to see the world transfigured, so that it is irradiated with meaning and value, and the human subject, caught up in that mystery, is unmistakably called on not to be a spectator any longer, a mere “tourist,” but to respond, to be a morally responsive agent, part of a cosmos that is diaphanous, transparent to the divine.16

AN OBJECTION AND A PARADOX Cottingham raises a potential objection to his approach, namely that even if we grant that religious understanding involves the kind of awareness described, we still need classical natural theology if we are to characterize the object of such awareness and the content of such belief, and “give a proper theoretical account of the nature of the divine.”17 We are to suppose that this objection is to be met by conceding to the first, disputed, conception of religious understanding, and hence, that an adequate account requires reference to both. On this way of thinking, “the classical theistic abstract explanatory mode, and the experiential or ‘transfigurative’ mode, [can] happily co-exist.”18 It is quickly made clear that this ambition is futile. It is futile because the object of theological inquiry “stands outside our human frame of meaning and reference. On the theologian’s own account, the properties of the divine qua divine are in a radically different category from any of the properties that characterize the empirical world.”19 So we cannot satisfy the required theoretical aim by reverting to the disputed approach to God, and it cannot be satisfied in any case. However, these limitations are not fatal, for we can relate to God at a non-theoretical level, and this involves religious understanding in Cottingham’s preferred sense. God is not “grasped” at this level of 15 18

TS, p. 31. TS, p. 35.

16 19

TS, p. 34. TS, p. 36.

17

TS, p. 34–5.

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understanding, but there are “traces” of His presence to be discerned “in the beauty of the natural world and the compelling power of our moral sensibilities.”20 Cottingham ends with a supposed paradox, namely “that our understanding of existence can be transformed by using a framework of interpretation whose structure does not function like an explanatory theory.”21 It is left unclear why this should be paradoxical, but the point seems to be that our understanding is transformed by an interpretative framework whose object cannot be pinned down in the manner demanded by explanatory theism. We are told that the paradox is solved not by further theorizing but by action, for religious understanding is “inseparable from moral action and spiritual practice,” and “cannot come about by abstract theorizing.”22

SOME QUESTIONS We have been given two conceptions of religious understanding, one theoretical, the other practical. The theoretical mode corresponds to that of the natural theologian or explanatory theist and it is said to involve approaching God in the way that the scientist approaches reality. Cottingham objects that, on such an approach, we end up relating to something other than God—a “mere idol of our own construction,” as he puts it.23 The practical mode captures the understanding of the ordinary believer, it is inseparable from “moral action and spiritual practice,” and it is at this level that we are said to relate to God. Cottingham doubts that these modes can coexist, and implies that theory must be rejected—understandably so, given that its object “stands outside our human frame of meaning and reference,” and given that “the properties of the divine qua divine are in a radically different category from any of the properties that characterize the empirical world.” The implication here is that God is to be dualistically opposed to anything within the natural/empirical realm. But we know, of course, that this is not Cottingham’s position, for he insists that there are traces of the divine to be found within the natural world, and that we 20

TS, p. 39.

21

TS, p. 39.

22

TS, p. 39.

23

TS, p. 39.

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relate to them when we discern nature’s beauty and feel the pull of morality. The idea that there are traces of the divine within nature seems difficult to square with the claim that the properties of the divine qua divine are in a radically different category from any of the properties that characterize the empirical world. Perhaps, though, the point is simply that God is irreducible to anything within the empirical world, and known only insofar as He is revealed at the level of the relevant “traces.” However, this does not preclude the possibility of the relevant traces being discernable to theory, and Cottingham seems to concede such a possibility when he claims that God “can never be brought fully [my italics] within the grasp of the human mind.”24 So it is not ruled out that theory and practice are on a par in this context, nor, indeed, that God remains utterly inscrutable either way. After all, it is a familiar enough thought that morality and spirituality have nothing to do with God.25 Cottingham claims that we must relinquish “the epistemology of control” for “an epistemology of receptivity,” lest we “clos[e] ourselves off from allowing the evidence to become manifest to us” [his italics].26 Hence, we are told that “[t]he question is not ‘Can I, while scrutinizing the data and remaining detached and fully in control, satisfy myself of the rational acceptability of belief in God?’; but rather . . . ‘How can I embark on a path of moral and spiritual change which might open me to a deeper awareness of something that I now glimpse only faintly?’” We must be “open, yielding, receptive listeners” rather than “detached, critical evaluators.” 27 We can agree that an epistemology of receptivity is required if this is just another way of saying that religious understanding must involve being open to God.28 However, this does not rule out the possibility of our being theoretically receptive in this context, unless there is something about theory per se which precludes the possibility of Revelation. It seems plausible to suppose also that we must operate as detached, critical evaluators in such a context. At least, this is so if being detached and critical is a way of protecting against distortion 24

Compare Descartes: we can touch God but not comprehend him. For two interesting books along these lines see André Comte-Sponville’s The Book of Atheist Spirituality (London: Transworld, 2008) and Robert C. Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Solomon claims to be “naturalizing” spirituality. 26 27 TS, p. 32. TS, p. 32. 28 Presumably the scientist must likewise be receptive to his subject-matter. 25

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and prejudice—being detached in this sense is not the same as being detached from one’s subject-matter. Cottingham has this latter scenario in mind when he talks of being closed off from allowing the evidence to become manifest to us, and we can relate this point to something Emmanuel Levinas says in the context of criticizing what he elsewhere describes as the empty “theological arithmetic”29 which reduces God to something which can be adequately grasped (and controlled) in thought: We have been reproached for ignoring theology; and we do not contest the necessity of a recovery, at least, the necessity of choosing an opportunity for a recovery of these themes. We think, however, that theological recuperation comes after the glimpse of holiness, which is primary.30

The glimpse of holiness is primary for Cottingham, and some of what he says suggests that it is inimical to theory. It will be remembered, however, that his target is a particular theoretical approach to God, and although it is not spelled out in any detail, it is said to involve subscribing to an explanatory hypothesis about the origin of nature, giving a proper theoretical account of the nature of the divine, satisfying oneself of the rational acceptability of belief in God, and, in all of this, approaching reality in the manner of an analyzing and controlling modern scientist. We must consider then what this could really mean.

EXPLANATORY THEISM AND NATURAL THEOLOGY We have been told already that the God hypothesis is rejected by the atheist, and Cottingham expresses sympathy for this response. After all, modern science has called into question the very idea that nature has its source in God, and we can explain what needs to be explained in more adequate, scientific, terms. I have noted that science and “For a Jewish Humanism,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 274. 30 Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), ix. 29

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theism are not best viewed as explanatory competitors in this context, and this means that the theist can accept (or reject) the explanations put forward by science without compromising his own position, and vice-versa. But where does this leave explanatory theism? And where, in particular, does it leave the position of someone like Richard Swinburne who accepts that God’s existence provides the best explanation of the existence and nature of the world, the world in question incorporating some of the ingredients that are so important to Cottingham’s scheme of things, namely the good, the beautiful, the miraculous, and the numinous?31 Swinburne takes all of this evidence together and concludes that it would be “strange and puzzling” in the absence of God;32 a neat reversal of the attitude which leads the scientific naturalist to conclude that it is God’s presence which has this effect. Swinburne’s outlook returns us to religious understanding in Cottingham’s preferred sense, for it presupposes the kind of awareness “which enables one to see the world transfigured, so that it is irradiated with meaning and value.” We can note also that it loads the dice in favor of a theistic explanation, for the world thus understood is, among other things, good, miraculous, and numinous, and Swinburne insists that a non-theistic explanation falls short. Indeed, his conclusion bears comparison with what Cottingham says elsewhere when he argues that goodness is best explained in theistic terms, and inadequately explained otherwise.33 Contrast Swinburne’s atheist opponent J.L. Mackie who sees nothing about the world that demands a theistic explanation, and who agrees with Cottingham’s scientist that such explanations increase rather than reduce our puzzlement.34 So Mackie would insist that religious understanding in Cottingham’s sense cannot be taken at face value, and that science best explains what is at issue.35 Swinburne, by contrast, disagrees, and

31

32 The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Ibid., 291. See Why Believe’? (London: Continuum, 2009), ch. 2. 34 Hence we are told that there are explanations in physics which comprehend the behavior of macroscopic bodies, and explanations in psychology which promise to accommodate our experience of goodness, beauty, and even God himself. To Mackie it is unclear how we might explain any of these things in theistic terms, and doubtful that we gain any advantage by adopting such an approach. The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 253. 35 The science in question here is social science or psychology. Compare James Griffin who considers the possibility that “psychological and sociological explanations 33

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he would claim also—as does Cottingham elsewhere—that theism can be explanatory. The nature and limits of explanatory theism are unclear, and Cottingham is a theorist of sorts. We must consider then whether the approach under dispute can be given a more determinate shape, and, if so, whether his criticisms are justified. Here’s one way of thinking about it which is implicit in some of what Cottingham says, and explicit in the response of his scientist.36 Explanatory theism involves putting forward a theory or hypothesis in terms of which to explain some observational data—the natural world or some aspect of it, where it is not ruled out that these data are better explained in some other, non-theistic, way. (Compare the way in which theories within science are treated in a similar provisional manner.) This is the God hypothesis as dismissed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, and it suggests, as Dawkins himself avows, that “God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe.”37 Now given that this hypothesis is open to question, it follows that the data it purports to explain must be characterized in terms that are neutral with respect to its truth—which means, in the case at hand, that the natural world must be characterized in terms which do not make reference to God, the God hypothesis being just one possible way of explaining it. Add to this that theism has been superseded and that it has been superseded by science—the scientist has no need of that hypothesis—and it follows that atheism must be our starting-point, that theism is for the scientifically ignorant, and that religious understanding in Cottingham’s sense must be explained away. This is the standpoint of Michael J. Buckley’s natural theologian as spelled out in his At the Origins of Modern Atheism.38 Such a figure

of religion may explain it so cogently as to convince us that religious is no more than the entirely natural phenomenon just explained.” Value Judgement: Improving our Ethical Beliefs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 42. Griffin is concerned for the most part with ethics, his response to such explanations in this context being that “one would not advance these reductive explanations if one had a keener appreciation of just how much needed explaining.” 36 I spell out further details and assumptions of this approach in my “God and Other Minds,” Religious Studies, 46(3) (2010), pp. 331–51. 37 The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 36. 38 M. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

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tackles the question of God in abstraction “from any common religious tradition and the experiences it involves,”39 i.e. she ignores religious understanding in Cottingham’s preferred sense, and is said to be informed about God “from the outside,” i.e. from outside the perspective of one who so understands. As Cottingham would put it, she is a detached, critical evaluator. Buckley claims that such an approach turns the question of God into a purely philosophical question,40 and that one who follows this route is compelled to “apply to the philosophers for philosophic information.”41 This information is to be found in the natural world, and it constitutes the putative evidence for God’s existence. We are to suppose that the natural evidence falls short, and that there are good philosophical reasons for insisting upon this negative conclusion. After all, nature can be adequately comprehended in non-God-involving terms, and a move in the direction of God does no more than to introduce a further and highly problematic realm of being which explains precisely nothing.42 The framework is familiar, it presupposes that nature contains no trace of God, and we are encouraged to suppose that this is the philosophically respectable position. Granted then that natural theology and/or explanatory theism are to be comprehended along these naturalistic lines, we can agree with Cottingham that they can be of no assistance in helping us to comprehend the object of religious understanding in his preferred sense, which, of course, is equivalent to saying that they can tell us nothing about God, assuming that it is at this level of understanding that God is revealed.

39

40 Ibid., 348. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 342. The phrase comes from Étienne Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 33. 42 The approach corresponds to what Paul Tillich calls “cosmological-scientific” in his “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 1(4) (May 1946). As John E. Smith puts it: “the point of departure for the cosmological-scientific type is . . . the world of limited things and processes as they are known both through ordinary experience and the precisely formulated knowledge of the natural sciences. This way of approach, often called the ‘way from Nature to God,’ begins the quest with a world of fact beyond the self, although this world is often said to include man as well.” “The Present Status of Natural Theology,” The Journal of Philosophy, 55(22) (October 1958), p. 929. 41

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RETHINKING THEORY The problem with the theoretical approach under dispute is that it is rigged in favor of atheism. God becomes an explanatory posit whose credentials are undermined on scientific and philosophical grounds, these grounds dictating that the natural evidence falls short. It does indeed fall short on the assumption that nature contains no trace of God, and if we accept this assumption then religious understanding is undermined in both of the senses with which Cottingham is concerned. However, this atheistic framework can be questioned, as indeed it is questioned by Cottingham himself when he insists that there are divine traces within nature to which we respond when we understand things religiously in his preferred sense. Yet he seems to agree with our natural theologian that these traces elude theory, and that there can be no theorizing about God. Hence the seemingly antitheoretical approach. This antipathy toward theory is on target as far as the approach just described is concerned. However, if taken to rule out the possibility of theorizing about God in any sense at all, then we play into the hands of one who believes that religious understanding has nothing to do with how things really are, and it threatens to block the possibility of saying anything about what is at issue—or what could be at issue— when we relate to reality in this manner.43 But of course, Cottingham is no anti-realist and, concluding remarks notwithstanding, offers by way of example a paradigm of what it could mean to theorize authentically about God. That is to say—and here I am reverting to his own preferred gloss upon what is at issue in this context—he is telling us something important about the object and content of religious understanding. He is telling us, for example, that it involves relating to God, that the God to whom we relate cannot be comprehended in the way that we comprehend things in a scientific context, and that God is inappropriately modeled on what scientifically explains such things. At a more positive level he claims that religious

43 Compare Sarah Coakley who talks in her recent Gifford Lectures of the importance of reclaiming the notion of natural theology. She claims that it needs to go on and that without it “Christian theology and philosophy of religion [are] disturbingly emptyhanded, or at the best merely defensive and inward looking, in the face of mammoth incursions on its former territory by secular science and philosophy.” Lecture 6, May 3, 2012: “Reconceiving ‘Natural Theology’: Meaning, Sacrifice and God.”

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understanding is best expressed in moral and spiritual terms, and that these terms have an irreducibly practical dimension. The atheist will offer her own preferred interpretation of this positive claim. That is to say, she will insist that religious understanding in this sense is reducible to the moral and the spiritual, and that the moral and the spiritual are best comprehended in non-God-involving terms. Indeed, it is not even necessary for her to justify this stance by insisting upon the truth of atheism. Rather, she can simply repeat the worries expressed by Cottingham when he tells us that God stands outside our human frame of meaning and reference, and that the properties of the divine qua divine are in a radically different category from any of the properties that characterize the empirical world. The implication again is that nature and God are to be dualistically opposed. I want to try to advance the dialectic beyond this stalemate by returning to the question of what could be at issue when we understand religiously in Cottingham’s sense, and defending by way of example a form of natural theology which poses a challenge to the framework of Buckley’s natural theologian. My interlocutor in this context is someone whose conception of nature is anti-scientistic, i.e. she resists the “controlling” fundamentalism of scientific naturalism. She accepts with Cottingham that the world is “irradiated with meaning and value,” and is prepared to grant that the relevant values are in the world—that is to say, that the world itself is valueinvolving.44 She agrees also that these values make normative demands upon us, when, say, we are called upon to be morally responsive agents. What she struggles to see is how the world thus conceived could have anything to do with God. The evidence at our disposal in the present context is nature as revealed to one who understands religiously in Cottingham’s preferred sense. My interlocutor struggles to appreciate this level of understanding in one respect, for she has difficulty with the idea that nature contains traces of God, and she doesn’t herself see it in 44 The figure I have in mind here is someone whose understanding of nature exceeds the limits of scientific naturalism, for example John McDowell (Mind, Value, and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998]), James Griffin (Value Judgement: Improving our Ethical Beliefs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996]), and David Wiggins (Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality [London: Penguin, 2006]). See my God, Value, and Nature for a sustained discussion of this “expansive naturalism.”

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this way. However, she grants that nature is irradiated with meaning and value, this being the way that she sees it herself. So she is happy with Cottingham’s talk of being morally aware, and may even confess to being spiritually aware provided that such awareness is understood in non-theistic terms. She would deny, however, that we are justified in describing this level of understanding as “religious,” assuming that this term demands a theistic interpretation. Clearly it is not enough simply to re-assert, in the face of her skepticism, that nature is God-involving and that she is already open to God. What we can do, however, is to suggest a way of making sense of such a position, making clear that the approach here is invitational and exploratory rather than commanding. We can begin by pointing out that there is a general question of how we are to comprehend the limits of nature, and that once we have resisted the assumption that these limits are to be comprehended in exclusively scientific terms, there are questions of how far we can go, whether there is any scope for moving in a theistic direction, and whether we haven’t already made this move by virtue of acknowledging a level of moral and spiritual awareness. If it makes sense to suppose that such awareness involves being open to God, and that this involves being in personal relationship with Him, then it is surely not a requirement upon relating to God in this sense that one knows that this is what one is doing. As Eleonore Stump puts it in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 9), “knowing God is not a transparent matter. A person can know God, through sensing of beauty or through second-personal connection of however limited or dreamy a means, without being aware that he has this knowledge of God.”45 All of this constitutes “philosophic information” which is relevant to the question of whether and how there could be a way from nature to God, the difference being that these questions are not closed off at the outset by the imposition of a framework which excludes theism. Thus, the philosophy in question is unencumbered by the ideology of scientism, and it grants us the right to take seriously the level of religious understanding with which Cottingham is concerned, albeit Chapter 9 of this volume, “Theology and the Knowledge of Persons,” p. 183. We might also bear in mind Taliaferro’s discussion of the Cambridge Platonists’ rejection of anthropomorphic conceptions of God in favor of an emphasis upon God’s goodness. The idea is familiar from Levinas. 45

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without pre-empting the question of its meaning in the opposite, theistic, direction. (The scientific naturalist does not have a monopoly on prejudice.) So the relevant philosophic information can be appreciated by a non-believer, and she can be said to be informed about God “from the outside” in this sense. However, this is not the same as being closed off from God in the manner of Buckley’s natural theologian, for she is encouraged, though not required, to consider the theistic significance of the moral and spiritual experiences under dispute, one possible outcome being that she comes to see things in a different, and perhaps God-involving light. The idea that God could be revealed in this manner takes us some distance from the supposition that His role is purely explanatory—He is no longer “for us” in this rather self-serving sense. On the contrary, God is “for us” in the sense that He is revealed at the level of our moral and spiritual responses, albeit in a manner which gives equal expression to His inscrutable mystery—we don’t really understand what’s at issue here, and what is at issue slides all too easily into atheism (if it did not then we should be returned to Cottingham’s idol). So there are limits to theory given the nature of the case. Caveats notwithstanding, however, it is possible to engage in meaningful and fruitful dialogue concerning the content of the relevant experiences. Indeed, we have here an illustration of what it could mean to go from abstract theorizing to religious understanding in Cottingham’s preferred sense. However, this means not that one can be argued into the relevant standpoint—as if a bit of theological arithmetic is all it takes to become a beautiful soul. The point is rather that theorizing in the sense I have recommended can lead one to rethink the significance of moral and spiritual experience, and to take seriously the idea that this is what it means to relate to God. The following passage from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is instructive: One morning I was travelling on a new railway line and spent four hours talking on the train with a certain S., having only just made his acquaintance. I heard a good deal about him before and, among other things, that he was an atheist. He’s really a very learned man, and I was glad to be talking with a true scholar. Moreover, he’s a man of rare courtesy, and he talked with me as if I were perfectly equal to him in knowledge and ideas. He doesn’t believe in God. Only one thing struck me: it was as if that was not at all what he was talking about all the while, and it struck me precisely because before, too, however many unbelievers I’ve met, however many books I’ve read on the subject, it has

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always seemed to me that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that, though it looked as if it was about that. I said this to him right then, but it must be I didn’t speak clearly, or didn’t know how to express it, because he didn’t understand anything.46

CONCLUSIONS Religious understanding involves both praxis and theory. Cottingham’s reservations about theory are focused upon a particular theoretical approach, but this approach can be variously interpreted, and there is nothing to show that theory is excluded across the board. There are ways of theorizing about God which seem doomed to miss target, the underlying framework dictating that nature and God remain in permanent opposition. However, theory is not bound to assume this dualistic form, and Cottingham is a theorist of sorts, one, moreover, who addresses some of the issues which must be tackled in the context of comprehending religious understanding. Theory in this sense is to be applauded. It grants us the right to take seriously a conception of religious understanding which gives due weight to the moral and the spiritual, and to consider what could be at issue when we respond to reality in these terms. We do all of these things authentically by being open, yielding listeners who remain at all times critically astute. Have we explained religious understanding on its own terms? Much of the discussion has involved grappling with the question of how these terms are to be understood, but we have challenged the idea that it is a species of scientific understanding, clarified its relation to moral action and spiritual practice, and questioned the assumption that these modes of response demand an atheistic interpretation. So the idea is that religious understanding involves being morally and spiritually open to God, it has an irreducibly practical dimension, and this, of course, has implications for how we think about the nature of the God to whom we relate in this context. As for the worry that reference to God raises insuperable philosophical difficulties, it most certainly does from the viewpoint of scientific naturalism, but 46 Part Two, chapter IV, p. 219. I thank David McPherson for bringing this passage to my attention.

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scientific naturalism can be contested, and it is no part of the position at issue that God can be rendered wholly unpuzzling. Indeed, one of the points of tackling religious understanding in these praxisinvolving terms is to challenge the assumption that its true aim is to clear up the mystery of God, and to make a case for claiming that this mystery is revealed and lived at the level of moral action and spiritual practice.

3 Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament Edward Kanterian

INTRODUCTION Scientistic naturalism is an important current in contemporary philosophy, but it offers a skewed and impoverished account of nature, human existence, and the nature of philosophy. I first present and contrast this form of naturalism with two opposing varieties: extended and expansive naturalism. As I show, extended and especially expansive naturalism point toward a conception of philosophy as an “involved,” hermeneutic discipline, which is incompatible with scientistic naturalism. This conception of philosophy is then enriched by taking into account Cottingham’s religious epistemology of involvement and Heidegger’s elaboration of the hermeneutic circle. As it turns out, a genuinely involved approach to philosophy requires, as its starting-point, a hermeneutics of the human predicament. Key aspects of such a hermeneutics are introduced by means of Luther’s existential theology. Finally, six main points of an involved philosophy, taken as a new model of religious understanding, are formulated.

THREE VARIETIES OF NATURALISM A religious understanding of the world and of human existence faces the challenge of scientistic naturalism. Scientistic naturalism claims

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that everything, including human beings and their passions, beliefs, and actions, can be explained in terms of the core sciences of nature. “Nature” means here simply “the physical universe.” Since science investigates what is in the universe, and humans are part of the universe, human history, culture, and also religion are just subdomains of scientific investigation. The human sciences have no sui generis status. The totality of these laws defines what nature is, i.e. what counts as real, as a physical phenomenon. Since terms like “intention,” “value,” or “God” do not figure in the elementary vocabulary of natural science, either intentions, values, and God do not exist (and atomic predications about them are false or meaningless), or they are identical or reducible to physical phenomena, to “items that can also be found in stones, rivers and other non-special things.”1 This has an anthropological and a meta-philosophical implication. First, human beings are non-special things, mere lumps of matter. Second, philosophy must adopt and emulate the methods of natural science.2 This naturalism has been subjected to critical scrutiny.3 One promising strategy is to argue, with Peter Strawson, that we “can no more be reasoned out of our proneness to personal and moral reactive attitudes in general than we can be reasoned out of our belief in the existence of body.”4 Since these reactive attitudes are inescapable, “deeply rooted in our natures as our existence as social beings,” and therefore a fundamental condition of our humanity, the reductive naturalist’s “detached” perception of us humans as mere lumps of matter (a) can only be sustained for a short while, or (b) lapses into a pathological state. The first option is only possible because it presupposes the existence of moral reactive attitudes from which the naturalist detaches himself “in theory.” Scientistic naturalism, on the first option, is therefore self-contradictory. If, however, the detached attitude is taken seriously and put “into practice,” we slide toward the second option, toward a state which would amount to a “loss of all 1 Papineau, “Naturalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2 As Brian Leiter believes. Quoted in Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 21. 3 See contributions in De Caro and Macarthur, Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4 Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (London: Methuen, 1985), 32.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 61 human involvement in personal relationships.”5 The possibility of such a state does not prove that humans are really mere lumps of matter, but just shows that some humans can become pathological. “Scientistic naturalism” is not the title of a philosophical position, on the second option. Another strategy against scientistic naturalism is to argue that the scientific method and concept of nature, while valid within the specific constraints of the scientific enterprise, does not capture everything there is. In particular, the existence of values cannot be thus captured.6 Their investigation requires a different methodology and concept of nature (or reality). As Akeel Bilgrami writes, “Values, being the sort of thing they are, are not primarily the objects of detached observation.”7 To grasp the existence of values, we need an involved methodology, which correlates with a more encompassing concept of nature; nature is still understood as the totality of things in the universe, but some of these are endowed with values, which are not reducible or identical to physical phenomena, in the narrow sense of “physical.” This “extended naturalism” amounts to a partial “reenchantment” of nature, since parts of nature are now seen as suffused with value and purpose.8 Some, such as Peter Railton, believe that the study of nature, thus understood, is still scientific; but this now includes the human sciences as well, taken as sui generis disciplines. Others, such as Bilgrami and Wiggins, disagree; values and normativity do not reduce even to what the human sciences investigate, because there is more to values than what the human sciences tell us about their role in human behavior. There are evaluative properties in nature and there is an intrinsic, non-instrumental goodness of things, whether or not humans develop attitudes toward them.9 Nature understood in this extended way cannot be studied by the natural or human sciences alone. This implies an understanding

5

Ibid., 34. Scientific naturalism is also unable to account for a priori truths, e.g. in mathematics. Mathematics is not a sub-discipline of physics. 7 Quoted and discussed in Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27. Bilgrami is discussing McDowell’s naturalism in the context of defending his own views. 8 John McDowell is one proponent of this view (cf. Ellis (2014), 52ff.); Dworkin (2013) is another. 9 For references to and discussion of Railton, Bilgrami, McDowell, and Wiggins, see Ellis (2014), 24ff. 6

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of philosophy as a discipline not reducible to science. Philosophy, especially where it studies the realm of values, cannot proceed by means of detached observation, but requires an “involved” approach. The partial re-enchantment of nature proposed by extended forms of naturalism such as Bilgrami’s and David Wiggins’s is not meant to rehabilitate the concept of God and an understanding of nature as his creation.10 Extended naturalism is a naturalism with a human face, but still fully secular. More recently, Fiona Ellis has attempted to develop an even more encompassing notion of nature. She agrees that values have ontological independence from human beings and cannot be comprehended in wholly scientific terms. But, Ellis argues, if we make such an assumption about the existence of values, then there seems to be only a small step from this to assuming the existence of a theistic God. There is no great leap from a conception of nature as enchanted by values to a conception of nature as divinely enchanted. This is because, on her conception (following Levinas), there is a close relation between morality and God, at least in the sense that being moral is just what it is to relate to God. Since we are capable of being moral and are part of nature, God is in the picture, without having to describe God as belonging to nature (in any further sense) or as having a separable reality as the foundation of the objectivity of values. Ellis calls her position “expansive naturalism.” Needless to say, expansive naturalism entails a firm rejection of scientistic naturalism.11 Expansive naturalism is also committed to an involved approach in philosophy, in more than one way. Since it does not reject, but rather supplements, extended naturalism, expansive naturalism subscribes to the view that (a) values are not the objects of detached observation. This resonates with a minimal hermeneutic assumption: certain phenomena, attitudes, and traditions cannot be understood unless they are approached from the “inside.” This applies to the study of religion as well.12 But the involved approach can also mean something more substantive. It can mean that (b) one cannot come to hold certain beliefs in philosophy without a positive predisposition toward them. 10

Bilgrami explicitly rejects this option. See Ellis (2014), 50. For details, see Ellis (2014), 118ff. Ellis’s expansive naturalism, which has a theistic dimension, should not be confused with secular expansive naturalism (such as defended by James Griffin; cf. Ellis (2014), 3). 12 For the hermeneutic approach to religion see Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 35. 11

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 63 Or it can mean that (c) one already holds certain beliefs and one explores them rationally, from the inside. Applied to the philosophy of religion, substantive involvement translates either into an approach of (b) “Reason seeks faith” or an approach of (c) “Faith seeks reason.” Ellis seems to be committed to both varieties of substantive involvement, for she believes that ultimately the theistic aspect of expansive naturalism requires that one approaches God “on one’s knees” or after “the glimpse of holiness.”13

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF INVOLVEMENT An involved approach to philosophy has been also defended by John Cottingham.14 He develops an “epistemology of involvement” primarily with respect to the philosophy of religion, but his arguments can be generalized. The epistemology of involvement too has a hermeneutic and a substantive aspect. The hermeneutic aspect concerns conditions necessary for the understanding of certain phenomena; “we cannot hope to fully grasp the significance of a set of assertions unless we know how they are embedded within a rich web of culture and practice.”15 This position requires only a noncommittal openness toward what is interpreted. The substantive aspect, by contrast, concerns not just conditions of understanding, but of belief acquisition. Cottingham argues that there are areas of human cognition, and religion is one of them, in which there is an intimate “interplay between a change in the subject and the resulting availability of evidence.”16 To come to have certain beliefs, one needs to have undergone such a change. Let us consider an illustration. Cottingham mentions the literary critic as a parallel.17 What he may have in mind is that the understanding of a novel, for example of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is a function of one’s life experience and understanding of 13

Cf. Ellis (2014), 180. See Inwood (2015) for discussion. Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 15 Cottingham (2014), 22. 16 Cottingham (2014), 21. For more discussion of hermeneutics, see also Cottingham, Why Believe? (London: Continuum, 2011), 49ff. 17 Cottingham (2014), 13. 14

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human affairs, which in turn may be shaped by reading such a novel. A reader who is not willing or able to engage, in an imaginative way, with the questions addressed in this book will be puzzled or disturbed by it. A reader untroubled by the widespread suffering in human history, by his own mortality, by the existence of evil, and who has not been puzzled by the fact of love or longed for some sort of salvation from this world will likely fail to comprehend Dostoevsky’s novel. We see from this parallel case that the distinction between the hermeneutic and the substantive element is not entirely sharp. A charitable inclination toward the novel is a general hermeneutic requirement, and does not imply the acceptance of the author’s views. But the more one is attuned to the existential tenor of the novel, the likelier it is that one will sympathize with those views, and maybe even accept them. Conversely, if one already holds those views, one will be sympathetic toward their expression in the novel. In the case of the philosophy of religion, this corresponds to the situation in which the philosopher is already religious. But Cottingham issues a point of caution here. The philosopher of religion must not be a diehard apologist. He must not adopt an “epistemology of submission,” which rules out all critical questioning.18 This is a delicate issue, however, since there is no simple way of determining how far critical questioning may extend. Would it be allowed to lead to the denial of religion, and if not, would this not resort to an “epistemology of submission” after all?

THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE It is now becoming evident that the relation between the hermeneutic and the substantive element of the involved approach are not as straightforward as initially presented. At first glance, it seems that the substantive element merely presupposes the hermeneutic element. To believe that “P” is true requires prior understanding of what “P” means. And understanding what “P” means does not entail the truth of “P” and does not commit to the belief that P. However, Cottingham suggests that the epistemology of involvement has a 18

Cottingham (2014), 23.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 65 certain “porousness” about it.19 The cognition of certain phenomena requires a kind of “focused attention,” “a motivational stance” akin to listening or attunement.20 While listening does not per se command assent, it can be a prerequisite for grasping matters that would otherwise not come into view. But since this listening involves itself a motivational stance, something about the phenomenon we are attending to must have already come into view and caught our interest. Moreover, what is revealed during the process of listening can feed back into the motivational stance underlying the process of listening. This can eventually lead to the acquisition of new beliefs. Overall, this suggests a sort of circle or spiral, in which the hermeneutic and the substantive element mutually enforce each other. It would therefore be more appropriate to call the whole circular movement, rather than one of its aspects, “hermeneutic.” This circular structure implicit in Cottingham’s account is reminiscent of the theory of the hermeneutic circle developed by Heidegger.21 According to Heidegger, ontology deals with “the question of Being.” But Being is not something we approach from without, as an unknown object to be discovered. Rather, we already possess, in our everyday existence, a pre-theoretical grasp or understanding of Being, and the task of ontology is the unearthing of this implicit understanding. Ontology is the making explicit of the existential structures of human life.22 The philosopher partakes in these structures, and this enables him to make them manifest. In its very enacting the hermeneutic exercise makes transparent the hermeneutic structures at stake. Heidegger argues that “philosophical investigation is a certain mode of factual life and instantiates in its very act this very life, its being, and not only in a subsequent ‘application’”; philosophical investigation is “the explicit carrying out of an elementary process of factual life.”23 Not only is this circle not vicious, argues Heidegger, but it reflects the hermeneutic character of our existence, the fact that we are essentially hermeneutic creatures, at all times engaged or involved in at least a pre-theoretical understanding of Being. For this reason philosophical hermeneutics has a very broad scope. It is not

19

20 Cottingham (2014), 169. Cf. Cottingham (2014), 69. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 7f., 152f. 22 Heidegger (1986), 37. 23 Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2005), 351. 21

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concerned with a non-committal understanding of unfamiliar cultural, religious, etc. phenomena, but provides us with the solely adequate method for (a) the cognition of human existence, and, through that, (b) the cognition of Being. In other words, hermeneutics opens up a genuine domain of philosophical cognition, unavailable through other sciences. Although Heidegger does not deal with the issue, it is clear enough that his hermeneutic ontology rejects scientistic naturalism. Scientistic naturalism claims that we are non-special things, to be investigated in physics etc. Following Heidegger, the opposite is the case. Not only has physics no means to make sense of our hermeneutic nature, but it is only through philosophical hermeneutics that we can make sense of physics, of the possibility of its construction, as arising out of the specific structures of our existence.24 We see here a second parallel to Cottingham. Like Heidegger, Cottingham argues that the involved approach is particularly necessary in areas in which we “ourselves are part of the evidence.”25 In such an area an “epistemology of detachment,” which searches for data in a dispassionate, quasi-scientific manner, will not be able to grasp the phenomena in an accurate manner. This implies a rejection, on Cottingham’s part, of scientistic naturalism and its metaphilosophical corollary, the view that philosophy must adopt the methods of science.26 But we must now ask: in which areas are we ourselves “part of the evidence,” according to Cottingham? The early Heidegger is a phenomenologist, appealing to the hermeneutic method to develop a systematic, “detached” metaphysics of Being. His aim is ultimately philosophical cognition, not personal transformation. By contrast, Cottingham cares about the transformative question, which has an ultimately religious dimension. The circle circumscribed by his epistemology of involvement is supposed to help “open ourselves to something that is resistible, something that does not compel our assent, but which if we are responsive has the power to transform us—not in such a way as to enhance our store of knowledge, or to

24 See the analysis of the emergence of Descartes’ mathematical physics in Heidegger (1986), 95ff. 25 Cottingham (2014), 69. 26 For more on this, see Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109ff.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 67 allow us to make better inferences, but so as to irradiate our lives with meaning and value.”27

TWO PROBLEMS Cottingham’s epistemology of involvement gives rise to a number of questions. I focus on two. The first concerns a certain tension in Cottingham. At times he seems to deny the epistemic character of his epistemology. The involved approach he recommends does not enhance our store of knowledge and does not offer a “body of evidence from which there is a logical or probabilistic conclusion to be drawn by anyone who responsibly attends to the data.”28 Rather, the epistemology of involvement points us to certain “transformative experiences” or “transcendent moments,” which are readily and intuitively available to all of us. These experiences are of three kinds: physico-theological, aesthetic, and moral. The “awareness of natural beauty, our responses to the mysterious power of great art and music, and our sense of awe before the authoritative demands of morality” all point to something higher. They either offer a brief glimpse of the beauty and significance of the world as a whole, without a religious gloss, or, alternatively, may strike individuals as revelations of the sacred.29 But surely the epistemology of involvement cannot amount just to (pointing us toward) such sublime experiences. It would not really be an “epistemology” if it did not involve our rational faculties. Cottingham himself invokes epistemic notions in a positive way, and he is engaged in a rational discourse. He speaks about moral, aesthetic, and religious realities as belonging to a “set of truths” that requires “accessibility conditions,” and about a certain kind of evidence becoming available only through an interplay with a change in the subject.30 As discussed above, the fact that there are areas in which we ourselves are part of the evidence justifies the sui generis status of an involved or hermeneutic philosophy. If we let go of this insight, we 27

28 Cottingham (2014), 69. Cottingham (2014), 68f. Cottingham (2014), 60ff. For the first, secular, option, see Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3ff. 30 Cottingham (2014), 21, 66. 29

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lose ground against the naturalistic reduction of philosophy to science. As occasional emotions or moods, those “transcendent moments” would be of psychological interest, but without much philosophical import. What we need to argue, therefore, is not that we find ourselves in an area that excludes knowledge, but rather that we find ourselves in an area that includes a specific sort of knowledge; self-knowledge of a peculiar kind. As Heidegger puts it, “what is decisive is not to escape the [hermeneutic] circle, but to enter into the circle in the right way”— in our philosophical endeavor.31 This brings me to the second issue. In what way should a philosophy of involvement enter the hermeneutic circle? On Cottingham’s proposal this seems to be the spiritual way: we remind ourselves of and reflect on our transformative experiences. However, this starts at too high or sublimated a level, not getting into focus the reason why there is any need for transformative experiences in the first place. The contrast to Heidegger is instructive here. Heidegger starts at a lower level. At the elementary level of analysis he takes into consideration a number of prosaic existential situations, in which we usually find ourselves. Precisely because they are so mundane, they offer an “immediate” entry point for our analysis. Heidegger starts with the phenomenon of the mood (Befindlichkeit, Stimmung), for, he says, it is the most common thing to us.32 He points out that we are at all times in one mood or another. To say that my mood is ruined implies not only that I just was in a certain mood, e.g. of calm or cheerfulness, but also that I am now in a new mood, namely disgruntled. Even the apparent lack of a specific mood, as manifest in boredom (Ungestimmtheit), is still a mood. The analysis of moods such as boredom or anxiety reveals a main characteristic of our existence: the fact that it is a burden.33 For they reveal my “thrownness,” the sheer fact that I exist and need to exist. I may try to obscure this fact to myself, looking for an escape through chatter, entertainment, and so on, but this very evasion betrays the burdensomeness of my existence. “Befindlichkeit discloses Dasein in its thrownness, at first and mostly in the mode of evasive turning away.”34 This leads to the analysis of other phenomena, such as falling, guilt, the “They” (das Man), and care, all of which reveal the temporal structure of man, on the basis of which we can

31 33

32 Heidegger (1986), 153. Heidegger (1986), 134. 34 Ibid. Heidegger (1986), 136.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 69 approach, according to Heidegger, the “higher” ontological question of Being. This seems to me to be the right approach for a philosophy of involvement as well, at the very least from a formal point of view. We need to start with those aspects of our existence which open up the need for transformative experiences. This will ensure not only that we have a better grasp of what needs these experiences are responding to, but also that, in securing a better knowledge of ourselves, essential to the involved approach, we may be more attuned to the experiences at stake. As it happens, the parallels between Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics and Cottingham’s epistemology of involvement are not just formal, but also partly of substance. True, Heidegger does not enter the hermeneutic circle for transformative purposes. But he enters it where Cottingham, in my view, ought to enter his transformative circle as well. Heidegger’s analysis reveals man as a metaphysically homeless, uncanny creature, whose default option is to evade explicit knowledge of himself.35 Heidegger writes: “Hermeneutics has the task of making one’s own Dasein accessible to this Dasein itself, to trace the self-alienation with which it is burdened.”36 Not only is man not a non-special entity, but the fact that he can come to believe that he is a non-special entity betrays what a special entity he is.

THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT Cottingham is not oblivious to our “low-level” existential structures. For example, he describes the “transcendent moments” as disrupting “the drab, mundane pattern of our ordinary routines,” while the beauties of nature are said to offer a “peculiar sense of joy and healing.”37 There is a close parallel here to a point Heidegger makes about the hermeneutic significance of feeling uplifted: to feel uplifted, or in an elevated mood, indicates the burdensomeness and fallenness of ordinary existence.38 If we are non-special things and our mundane existence is perfectly in order (as the naturalist claims), what is 35 37

Heidegger (1986), 39, 97. Cottingham (2014), 60f.

36 38

Heidegger (1988), 15. Heidegger (1986), 134.

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drab about it and what is there to heal? In a chapter titled “Misfortune and Misery” Cottingham addresses the “deep structural problems of human life,” such as arbitrary suffering, aging, our general vulnerability, and mortality.39 They give rise to an urgent need to change our lives. This is indicative of the fact that there is something not quite right with humans, that human nature is problematic and that we must acknowledge the human predicament.40 The problem here is that Cottingham’s chapter on the human predicament comes after he has argued, in the previous two chapters, for a theistic view of the world as fundamentally benign, based on the physico-theological, aesthetic, and moral considerations already mentioned. So his discussion of the human predicament comes after the articulation of “a kind of joyful affirmatory vision” of the goodness of the universe.41 This is problematic in four respects. First, as suggested, this does not provide a fully adequate hermeneutics, since it starts with higher-order phenomena instead of more basic ones. Potentially, this covers up the root of religion, the human predicament, instead of revealing it. It also covers up the roots or motivation of the epistemology of involvement itself. Second, by focusing on momentary, pleasant, or sublime experiences, there is a danger of looking for an “experiential,” almost escapist solution to the human predicament. The worry is that this might fail to address the “large-scale structural defects in human life.”42 Third, as already suggested, this approach does not bring enough into focus the human predicament as a reality, but only episodic solutions to it, visions, ruptures, ways of looking at things. Here, involved epistemology is not epistemological enough and gains no ground against scientistic naturalism. But a fourth issue is the most worrying one. Because the human predicament enters the stage after the establishment of a theistic picture, the human predicament appears like counter-evidence to the theistic picture. As a consequence, the discussion of human suffering and frailty turns into apologetics, rather than offering a hermeneutic elucidation of what gives rise to the theistic picture. Suffering and evil become phenomena in need of explanation and 39

40 Cottingham (2014), 98ff. Cottingham (2014), 6, 100. Cottingham (2014), 98. Note that my point is logical-hermeneutic, not simply about the order of the chapters in Cottingham’s book. 42 This is Mark Johnston’s phrase. Quoted in Cottingham (2014), 114. 41

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 71 justification, given the supposed goodness of the universe. Instead of focusing on the transformative goal of the philosophy of involvement, this shifts the discussion toward theory and rational theology; more specifically, theodicy. This is problematic not only because, as Cottingham himself says, religious “belief has not traditionally been understood in purely intellectual terms,”43 but also because we don’t have a satisfactory theodicy, and we may never have one.44 Cottingham writes: “the existence of massive suffering could never be a logically conclusive refutation of the existence of [a benevolent] God, since even when we cannot conceive what the reason for such suffering might be, there is no possibility of establishing that there could not be such a reason.”45 This agnostic position is problematic. What matters is not the consideration of massive suffering, but of evil, which brings about suffering. Take the intentionally painful killing of a child. Even if it is granted that we are unable to know the reason for such evil, the simple fact of assuming that there can be a reason for it entails, in the last instance, the denial of the existence of evil. For, on the intended reading of “there being a reason for the existence of X,” we are not just considering the causal antecedents of X or engaging in the rational explanation of the motives of the agent (the criminal), but are envisaging a justification of the goodness of X. Agnosticism can only deny us knowledge of whether the concept of “there being a reason for the existence of X” actually applies in specific circumstances, but cannot claim that we don’t even know what the concept is. In fact, the agnostic move presupposes the concept. Hence, to leave it open that there might be positive reasons, unknown to us, for the intentionally painful killing of a child is to deny the existence of evil, given that such a crime is commonly understood as a paradigmatic case of evil. Moreover, the agnostic position implies that perceptions of what we take to be straightforward evil acts are deeply illusory, because we cannot know whether there might not be a providential reason for them. This contradicts common moral sense and also ends up, potentially, with a denial or explaining away of the human predicament.

43

Cottingham (2014), 34. Kant’s misgivings in his 1791 essay “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” remain noteworthy to this day. See Kant, Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24ff. 45 Cottingham (2014), 106. 44

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We see here how the epistemology of involvement can lose touch with what it should aim to address: the human predicament. My suggestion is that we need to reverse the order of the investigation. We should not start with a joyful vision of the universe and then look for an apologetic account of the human predicament, but take the human predicament as our hermeneutic departure point. Cottingham touches several times on this possibility. Using Pascalian terms, he speaks at one point about our “wretchedness” and “redeemability,” and in another context he briefly refers to a passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in which the whole creation is described as “groaning in travail,” “straining towards its future redemption.”46 He also admits that “we inhabit a wild, untameable universe of change and decay” and that, despite attempted theodicies, “darkness remains unbroken by any glimmer of light that might hold out hope of redemption.”47 For this reason, if it is true that “horrific suffering can sometimes, despite all appearances, be a catalyst for redemptive changes in the agent,”48 then an involved philosophy needs to start with the human predicament, remain attuned to it, and avoid any temptation to deny its reality.

LUTHER’S HERMENEUTICS OF THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT To identify the path which involved philosophy might take, we need to observe three constraints. First, we need to remain faithful to the structure of the hermeneutic circle developed by Heidegger. This entails that in its very enacting the hermeneutic exercise makes transparent the existential structures at stake. Second, the circle needs to start with the human predicament. Third, the hermeneutic circle is to be developed not with an eye on general questions of ontology, such as Heidegger’s “question of Being,” but with a transformative aim, in Cottingham’s sense. In this respect, Cottingham’s approach can be seen as a complement to Heidegger’s hermeneutics, since the latter only helps us work out the austere facts of our existence, without indicating any means for a substantive relief from them. (In addition Cottingham considers a wider range of fundamental existential phenomena than Heidegger, most especially love.) 46 48

47 Cottingham (2014), 159, 100. Cottingham (2014), 118. Cottingham (2014), 118. For a similar point, see Cottingham (2010), 23.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 73 Fortunately, our philosophical tradition, stretching from Augustine and Boethius to Kierkegaard and Jaspers, offers numerous examples of this sort of approach. This is because for nearly two millennia the Christian doctrine of the fall of man was taken for granted by most thinkers.49 In this tradition the “wretchedness” of man was no less a given than was his “redeemability.” For reasons of space I will focus on just one, although prominent example, on which we can draw to develop a hermeneutics of the human predicament. I have in mind Luther’s existential theology. The topic of human fallenness became an important focus of theological reflection toward the end of the Middle Ages and informed the nascent movements of humanism and the Reformation. In the fourteenth century Ockham insisted on the absolute independence of God’s will, arguing that we, and our redemption, totally depend on it. The so-called via moderna school of theology stressed “the frailty of human knowing,” undermining overconfident theological speculation.50 Humanists such as Petrarca believed that the real object of philosophy ought to be man and his finitude, which has several aspects: proneness to vice, restlessness, physical frailty and mortality, and a weak mind.51 All of this resonated with a revival of Augustinian pessimism about man’s ability to save himself, paving the way for Protestantism. The general thrust of these developments was not fatalistic, however. It urged humans to know themselves, to explore and understand their predicament, so as to become worthy of redemption. Luther believed in a radical dichotomy between the empirical, isolated, sinful self, and the true, just self, connected through faith with God. He arrived at this conviction based on certain existential experiences he had early in his career. These involved a sense of being lost, of having no faith, coupled with the feeling of guilt and unworthiness. For example, he wrote in 1518, alluding to 2 Corinthians 12: I too know a man who . . . has received similar punishments, for a short while only, but so enormous and hellish . . . that nobody can believe them unless he has experienced them himself. . . . In such moments the

49 For examples from the early modern period, see Tonelli, “The ‘Weakness’ of Reason in the Age of Enlightenment” (1971); Kanterian [forthcoming]. 50 Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 41ff. 51 Petrarca, Secretum meum (Mainz, Germany: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2013), 151ff.

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soul is unable to believe it can ever be saved, and merely feels that the punishment is not finished. . . . There remains only a bare longing for help and direful sighing, and the soul does not know how to beg for help.52

Luther resolved that he must obtain certainty about his salvation again. The usual means offered by the Church, for example the indulgences, were not only not helpful, but actually impediments. As ritualized actions meant to influence God’s judgment, they were just expressions of human hubris. He realized that the solution must lie in himself and so he embarked upon an exploration of his own condition. But he soon realized that there were great impediments to his redemption even in himself. The two faculties he focused on were reason and the will. Both faculties, he found, are deeply corrupted in our natural state. In our ordinary volitional tendencies we are captives of our “concupiscentia.” This term does not simply refer to sexual lust for Luther, but rather to our obsession with ourselves, which may manifest itself, in one form, as sexual lust. Concupiscentia is for Luther, as it is for Paul, our sinfulness.53 We seek in everything our benefit, as we see it fit through our self-love. “For man cannot but seek his own advantages and love himself above all things. And this is the sum of all his iniquities. Hence even in good things and virtues men seek themselves, that is, they seek to please themselves and applaud themselves.”54 Concupiscentia can take many forms. Luther engages in their hermeneutic exploration at great length. Four main forms of concupiscentia are presumption, temporal security, pride, and false selfunderstanding. First, presumption makes us believe that we are already saved or that we can easily save ourselves by following a list of maxims or moral precepts. Natural man, Luther argues, hates God, and he wants himself to be God.55 Following God’s laws is also likely to lead to presumption, since we may come to believe that God owes us our redemption, given that we have done our part of “the deal.”

52 WA 1:557f. References to Luther follow the Weimar edition, Luther 1883–2009, as WA, followed by volume and page number. 53 Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 80f. 54 Quoted in Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 49. 55 WA 1:225, 18:761f.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 75 Second, we are permanently tempted to take refuge in mundane, temporal pleasures, mistaking them for true redemption. This can take many forms, including the performance of religious rituals “to delight us and quiet the fears of our heart,”56 rituals carried for our, not for God’s sake. The indulgences were just an extreme form of this longing for “quick relief,” in Luther’s view. Third, pride (superbia) undermines our moral and theoretical endeavors. We may become smug about our moral achievements, or aim for them to flatter ourselves as to how good we are. “It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his ‘good works’,” Luther writes.57 This self-congratulatory stance spoils our deeds, because they are not carried out with a pure heart. Moral pride feeds back into the presumption that we are already righteous. Our reason does not fare much better, because “it knows nothing about God and the good, i.e. it is blind concerning the knowledge of piety.”58 Reason is one of the most outstanding features of man, Luther believes, but it can also make us proud and arrogant, giving us a feeling of superiority and power. We are then prone to believe that everything is transparent, explicable, open to our cognitive access. That this is not so is demonstrated by the “vain fallacies” of rational theology, where reason deceives itself into thinking that it can investigate God’s mysteries.59 This point was taken up by subsequent Protestant thinkers (e.g. Daniel Hofmann) and eventually given systematic treatment by Kant. The theologian can also be tempted to take aesthetic delight in the miracles of the world, instead of stating in clear terms how things are with us down here.60 Needless to say, since philosophy underwrites rational theology, it can also succumb to superbia. This brings us to the fourth aspect of concupiscentia: false selfunderstanding. This is a tendency all humans exhibit, and is implicit in the other three aspects of concupiscentia. But it is particularly visible, according to Luther, in philosophy. This is because philosophy, given its conceptual character, is naturally inclined to a skewed perspective on the human condition. Philosophers, in their 56

Quoted in Crowe (2006), 50. WA 1:362. A similar thought is expressed by Wittgenstein: “A beautiful garment that changes (coagulates as it were) into worms & serpents if its wearer smugly smartens himself up in it in the mirror,” Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 19. 58 59 60 WA 18:762. WA 18:631, 707f., 19:206. WA 1:362. 57

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theorizing, “bury their gaze so exclusively in the Now of things that they only get to see their What and How.”61 They employ abstract, presentist (Aristotelian) categories such as “essence,” “action,” and “passion,” which fail to capture a creature’s suffering nature and directedness toward a better state. Humans are longing for salvation and are primarily directed toward the future. This temporal-intentional structure cannot be captured by presentist categories. A philosopher employing such categories is like a man who helps a carpenter cut various planks without asking what the planks are for. Philosophy is deaf to “the sighing of the creature,” painting things in a bright light.62 It tends therefore to be a “study of empty illusion.” Because the philosopher is himself a creature, this empty illusion is also an illusion about himself. Philosophers are prone to hermeneutic distortion in their philosophizing. Luther calls this the “cleverness of the flesh”: “It is scholars and theologians who are poisoned by this ‘cleverness of the flesh’, beginning their gay science from dolorous nature and constructing their castles of ideas with remarkable skill on top of sighing nature.”63 We don’t need to go into the details of Luther’s substantive solution to the human predicament, his “theology of the cross.” Suffice it to say that given this sober account of human fallenness, we cannot save ourselves, but need external help, which for Luther is God’s grace. But given our fallenness, we must first make ourselves available to receive grace. To this end we must reach a deep, “involved” knowledge of ourselves and engage in a life-long struggle against our concupiscentia. This struggle involves ways of instilling fear and despair in oneself to reduce our pride, presumption etc., by focusing on and reliving Christ’s suffering on the cross.64 Ultimately, for Luther, one has to “be dead to all things, to the good and the bad, to death and life, to hell and heaven and to confess from one’s heart that one can do nothing by one’s own powers.”65 This solution to the human predicament may sound shocking to our post-modern ears, but if Luther’s analysis of the human condition is correct, it is not illogical. Luther gives us an intriguing example of how a hermeneutic of the human predicament can be done, as a self-involved exploration of one’s own existential structures, tracing the self-alienation with which 61 63

WA 56:371f. WA 56:372.

62 64

See WA 56:371ff., WA 1:224ff. 65 WA 1:359, 361. WA 24:18, 31f.

Naturalism, Involved Philosophy, and the Human Predicament 77 each of us is burdened (to use Heidegger’s terms).66 It is interesting that both Luther and Cottingham cite the same passage in Romans 8:22, in which the whole of creation is described as “groaning in travail,” straining toward its future redemption. But while Luther takes the passage to express the fundamental starting-point for an understanding of the human predicament, the passage, and what it expresses, has a more marginal methodological significance for Cottingham’s epistemology of involvement.

INVOLVED PHILOSOPHY: A MODEL OF RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING Let us take stock. Combining the insights offered by the thinkers discussed in this chapter, I would like to propose a version of involved philosophy as a new model of religious understanding. This version has three major advantages: it offers an alternative to scientistic naturalism, it gives a more accurate account of human existence, and it is open to transformative aims. The following six points seem to me to be key aspects of such a philosophy. (1) Minimal hermeneutics. Involved philosophy starts with a minimally hermeneutic method, aiming to understand phenomena which are not the objects of detached observation, because they belong to areas in which we are part of the evidence. Such phenomena include values, attitudes, traditions, and ultimately human existence as such. (2) Substantive involvement. With the help of, but also going beyond, (1), involved philosophy aims to make it possible for its practitioner to acquire transformative beliefs or defend the values of a given tradition. (3) Hermeneutic circle. Involved philosophy is engaged in a nonvicious circular movement between (1) and (2), which illuminates the structures of human existence and points to ways of transforming it, which inevitably has a religious dimension.

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Edward Kanterian (4) Human predicament. Engaging in (3) involved philosophy comes to an understanding of its own striving for a substantive approach. It realizes that (a) existence is a burden for humans, (b) they have an inkling of this burden at all times, but don’t fully understand it, and (c) they look for ways to escape this burden. The full realization of this predicament helps involved philosophy to adjust the relation between (1) and (2), and makes (3) a more focused and personal exercise, especially if hermeneutic-soteriological motifs of the Christian theological tradition are taken into consideration. (5) Hermeneutic distortion. The investigation in (4) reveals (a) the semi-opacity that human existence has for humans and (b) their tendency to adopt substantive positions that partly cover up the human predicament. (6) Rejection of scientistic naturalism. Involved philosophy rejects (a) the idea that philosophy ought to emulate the method of natural science and (b) the view that we are non-special entities, comparable to things found in stones and rivers.67 Moreover, involved philosophy makes us understand the roots and motivation of scientistic naturalism, by means of (4) and (5). Scientistic naturalism is a self-alienating attempt “to deal with that which is saddened by itself and unhappy.”68

67 Unless these are rivers drenched in blood. Cf. Kanterian, “Das namenlose Dorf” (2015). 68 WA 56:372.

4 Transfiguring Love David McPherson

INTRODUCTION In this chapter I want to build on John Cottingham’s suggestion that we need an epistemology of involvement (or receptivity), as opposed to an epistemology of detachment, if we are properly to understand the world in religious terms.1 I will also refer to these as “engaged” and “disengaged” stances.2 I will seek to show how the spiritual practice of an “active” or “engaged” love is integral to the sort of epistemology of involvement through which we come to a religious understanding of the world.3 Such an understanding is one that gives proper recognition to the sacred or reverence-worthy character of the world. I will discuss how a religiously inflected language of love and the practice it informs can transfigure the world for us and enable its sacred or reverence-worthy character to come into view (supposing it is there in any case). I will also seek to show how this is connected to a process of spiritual formation (or Bildung).

1 Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2 I borrow these terms from Charles Taylor. 3 I make no strong distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” and often use these terms interchangeably. For more on this see my “Homo Religiosus: Does Spirituality Have a Place in Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics?” Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 51(3) (2015), pp. 336–7.

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To illustrate what is at issue here, I want to begin with a discussion of two main characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: viz. Ivan Karamazov, the rationalistic atheist, and Father Zosima, an Elder in the local Orthodox monastery and the spiritual mentor to the youngest Karamazov brother, Alyosha. The difference between the two epistemologies is depicted well in the contrast between these two characters: Ivan represents an epistemology of detachment, while Zosima represents an epistemology of involvement or receptivity. It would be a mistake to say that Ivan represents a stance of pure detachment as he is in fact pulled between engaged and disengaged stances. Consider this beginning portion of his conversation with Alyosha, which is part of the philosophical core of the novel: “Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit. . . . Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts. . . . Do you understand any of this blather, Aloshka, or not?” Ivan suddenly laughed. “I understand it all too well, Ivan: to want to love with your insides, your guts – you said it beautifully . . . ,” Alyosha exclaimed. “I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world.” “Love life more than its meaning?” “Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning.”4

The assertion that we must love life “before logic” to understand its meaning is a key claim that we will be exploring here. But Ivan is clearly skeptical. As mentioned, he is pulled between engaged and disengaged stances. The engaged stance is a natural mode for human beings as we live day-to-day as purposive agents engaging in activities and with objects or persons that are experienced as significant to us. We can see 4 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1990 [1880]), 230–1.

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the naturalness of this stance in Ivan’s remarks above about the things that are dear to him in spite of his doubts about an objectively meaningful order. However, the disengaged stance is also natural to human beings.5 It often arises in the face of experiences that are jarring, disconcerting, bewildering, or otherwise problematic, where we are forced to step back from our engaged mode of experience and reflect upon the nature and significance of this experience.6 This disengaged stance, it must be emphasized, is not something to be shunned. Indeed, it is an integral part of what is most admirable in our humanity. In particular, it is connected to our capacity for and inclination toward the philosophical life, which begins from this kind of stepping back in the face of puzzlement, where one then seeks out a more encompassing view of things that can hopefully make sense of one’s experience. As Aristotle famously remarked: “It is because of wonder [or puzzlement] that human beings undertake philosophy, both now and at its origins,” and they do so to feel no longer “at a loss” in the world.7 As becomes clear, Ivan is certainly someone who is “at a loss” in the world. The most significant problematic experience that Ivan encounters is that of horrendous evil and suffering. More specifically, Ivan is deeply moved by the terrible suffering inflicted upon innocent children by adults, and he goes on to describe to Alyosha a number of such cases, which are from actual newspaper stories collected by Dostoevsky. Ivan remarks: I want to see with my own eyes the [deer] lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I going to do about them? That is the question I cannot resolve. . . . [If] everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering. . . . [If]

5 I am using “natural” here in a “second nature” sense of the term; see discussion of this in the section “Spiritual Formation.” 6 See Heidegger’s distinction between “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand” in Being and Time. 7 Metaphysics II, 982b12–18; this translation is from Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1986]), 259.

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the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. . . . [They] have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket.8

Here Ivan can be seen as challenging standard theodicies (i.e. defenses of God’s ways in the face of evil and suffering), such as the “free will defense” and the “soul-making defense,” by questioning whether free will, soul-making, or some higher harmony is really worth the price of the horrendous suffering inflicted upon innocent children. Dostoevsky himself thought this challenge is unanswerable in detached, rationalistic terms alone, and so instead he sought to address it, as we will see, on an engaged, existential plane through a depiction of the life and teachings of Father Zosima.9 What is important to observe at this point is that Ivan’s own response is that of recoiling from evil and suffering and separating himself from involvement with the world, i.e. “returning his ticket.” Accepting for argument’s sake that there is a God, Ivan remarks: “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”10 Without being able to understand the justifying “logic” of the world, Ivan is unable to love and embrace it fully. In other words, the failure to comprehend this justifying logic or meaning from a detached, rationalistic scrutinizing standpoint (combined with a deep sense of injustice) has an undermining effect on what he loves and on what he might love.11 Thus, he ultimately sides with the disengaged stance in putting “logic” before love. Zosima takes the opposite stance. His two fundamental teachings are that “life is paradise,” even in the face of great evil and suffering, and we are “responsible to all for all,” which requires an engaged or “active” love—i.e. affective identification with others, a profound appreciation of their intrinsic love-worthiness, and wishing and, 8

The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 244–5. See the letters appended to The Brothers Karamazov, trans. C. Garnett, rev. R.E. Matlaw (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976 [1880]), esp. at 757–62. 10 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 235. 11 With regard to what Ivan says he loves (the sticky leaves, some people, etc.), Alyosha asks: “How will you live, what will you love them with? . . . Is it possible, with such hell in your heart and in your head?” (The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 263). 9

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where appropriate, pursuing good for them—that both helps us to see how life already is paradise and enables us to realize more fully this paradise. Thus, whereas Ivan recoils from evil and suffering and ultimately privileges a disengaged stance, Zosima privileges an engaged stance through exemplifying a path of re-engagement as the only route to living meaningfully in the face of evil and suffering, even if one is not able to make sense of it fully.12 I speak of privileging an engaged stance, but it is important that there should be an ongoing dialectic between engagement and disengagement. While philosophy begins with reflective disengagement from our pre-reflective mode of engagement with the world, it should not remain in the disengaged stance but should return to an engaged mode in a more reflective way by attending to the “space of reasons” (or domain of meaning) that arises for us in our purposive engagement with the world and which is enriched by a more nuanced conceptual framework (I will return later to discuss the role of language in opening our eyes to this domain of meaning). Here we try to articulate the nature and significance of this engaged experience and what seems required for making sense of it. For instance, we can attend to our experience of objective moral values, i.e. moral values that stand independent of our desires as things with which we ought to be concerned. We might argue that such experience of objective moral values presupposes a moral teleology at work in the universe, and we can then inquire into whether such a worldview is ultimately believable. If it were not, then this would have a deflationary effect on our moral experience. Something similar might be said for spiritual experience. Charles Taylor writes: “[One] of Dostoyevsky’s crucial insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself. . . . We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for this world. . . . Dostoyevsky . . . gives an acute understanding of how loathing and self-loathing, inspired by the very real evils of the world, fuel a projection of evil outward, a polarization between self and world, where all the evil is now seen to reside. . . . Dostoyevsky’s rejectors [such as Ivan] are ‘schismatics’ . . . , cut off from the world and hence grace. . . . What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility” (Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 451–2). See also C. Guignon, “Introduction,” The Grand Inquisitor: With Related Chapters from The Brothers Karamazov (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993). Both Taylor and Guignon have influenced my interpretation of Dostoevsky here. 12

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We have seen that for Ivan the perceived lack of a justifying “logic” has a deflationary effect on what he loves. Ivan is also well known for his view that God (or a theistic moral teleology) is needed for making sense of our experience of objective moral demands, as seen in his famous claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible. In the same context he also says that without belief in God and personal immortality “there is decidedly nothing in the whole world that would make men love their fellow men.”13 Interestingly, what is less known is that Zosima (who expresses Dostoevsky’s viewpoint) thinks that the relationship first goes the other way: active love is important for coming to affirm a religious worldview. He says: Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain.14

In fact, Zosima enjoins not just love of neighbor but also love of the whole world as a path toward coming to grasp and affirm a religious worldview: Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.15

These are certainly striking claims, and it should be noted that Dostoevsky himself was never without doubt about a theistic worldview. As he remarks in a letter: “I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have always been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin.” And yet despite this, he says: God sends me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others; and it was during such a moment that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is clear and

13 14 15

The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 69–70. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 56. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, rev. Matlaw, 298.

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sacred to me. This symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ.16

The key idea in these passages is that there can be epiphanic experiences, facilitated by the practice of active love, where we come to see the world in a new light, i.e. as transfigured in religious terms: the world is seen as filled with meaning, or “Logos,”17 where “all is clear and sacred” and life is seen as “paradise,” where we “perceive the divine mystery in things” or are convinced of God’s existence (I set aside the issue of personal immortality here for reasons of space). Hence Alyosha says that we must love life “before logic” in order to understand its meaning or its “Logos.” There is a kind of intelligibility in the world that only comes into view when we are properly disposed and attuned to the world through an engaged standpoint of love. We miss this intelligibility if we remain at the level of detached, rationalistic scrutinizing (i.e. detached “logic”). This is not to say that there is not a place for disengaged reasoning, especially for standing back and critically reflecting upon our engaged modes of experience and confronting challenges such as the problem of evil and suffering and seeking to make sure our beliefs are coherent. Here doubt often will be closely linked to the life of faith. As mentioned, there needs to be an ongoing dialectic between the engaged and disengaged standpoints. However, for most people it won’t be merely because of disengaged reasoning that they come to affirm a religious worldview (e.g. by considering the standard philosophical arguments for and against God’s existence); rather, it will involve an engaged mode of attunement and loving responsiveness. The religious path here is not just faith seeking understanding but also love seeking understanding, 16 Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. A. MacAndrew, eds. J. Frank and D.I. Goldstein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987 [1854]), 68. Elsewhere when discussing the powerful case for atheism that he gave through Ivan, Dostoevsky says: “[It] is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt” (quoted in H. de Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, trans. A.E. Nash, E.M. Riley, and M. Sebanc [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1995 (1944)], 296). 17 In regard to seeing the “Logos” (or “Word”) in all things, Zosima remarks: “Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves. . . . All creation and all creatures, every leaf is striving to the Word” (The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, rev. Matlaw, 273–4; cf. the prologue to the Gospel of John).

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where such love helps to transfigure the world for us such that we can come to see the world in religious terms, i.e. where the sacred or reverence-worthy character of the world comes into view. Here we are also guided and sustained by those saintly persons or spiritual exemplars—Christ is the supreme exemplar for Dostoevsky, as we saw18—that are further along in this path of love than we are. To understand better this religious path and the idea of a transfiguring love, we need to consider now in more detail the sort of spiritual formation that makes it possible.

SPIRITUAL FORMATION Transfiguring love is an achievement. It is a matter of coming to see, appreciate, and relate affectively to the world and others differently than one had before; i.e. it is a matter of coming to see things in a new light.19 Sometimes this happens in a sudden momentary experience, as with Dostoevsky’s own experience he describes above. But it is often the fruit of a process of spiritual formation, which aims to effect an enduring change of being and vision. To try to explain this, I will develop John McDowell’s account of Bildung—understood by him as ethical formation—which enables the 18 Zosima says that we would be altogether lost without the “precious image of Christ before us” (The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 320). The “image of Christ,” for Dostoevsky, represents the perfection of the saintly ideal of an all-embracing love, and in a notebook he describes the image of Christ as an “eternal ideal toward which man aspires and is bound to aspire according to nature’s law” (Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, trans. D. Magarshack [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997 (1864)], 305). It is in aspiring after and achieving this ideal—or at least approximating it—that our fulfillment is to be found: “the greatest use a man can make of his personality, of the fullest development of his I, is in one way or another to destroy this I, to give himself up wholly to all and everyone, selflessly and wholeheartedly. And that is the greatest happiness” (306). 19 As Mark Wynn has pointed out, this sort of transfiguration can involve two key changes in our sensory experience of the world: (1) “a deepened sense of the significance of the sensory order considered as a whole,” i.e. a general change in “hue,” and (2) “a deepened sense of the differentiated significance of objects,” i.e. specific changes in “salience” (“Between Heaven and Earth: Sensory Experience and the Goods of the Spiritual Life,” in Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches, ed. D. McPherson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming]; cf. M. Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]).

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recognition of ethical demands “which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” He writes: We are alerted to these demands by acquiring the appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons. Thereafter our appreciation of its detailed layout is indefinitely subject to refinement, in reflective scrutiny of our ethical thinking.20

In short, this is a matter of acquiring a “second nature,” i.e. cultivated forms of action, thought, and sensitivity that enable these ethical demands to come into view. So what we need to consider is how a similar process of spiritual formation can enable a religious understanding of the world, i.e. a religiously inflected account of the space of reasons (or domain of meaning), where the principal ethical-cumspiritual demand pertains to giving proper recognition to the sacred or reverence-worthy character of things (i.e. “the divine mystery in things”).21 I am suggesting that this is centrally a matter of achieving a transfiguring love of the world in general and other human beings in particular. But this is no easy matter. As we see in Ivan’s case, love for the world can be difficult given the way it often seems tragically “out of joint.” Moreover, just as Ivan acknowledges natural affection for particular people, he also acknowledges natural revulsion with respect to those with physical or moral imperfections: “If we’re to come to love [such] a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face—love vanishes.”22 Alyosha responds by noting that Father Zosima has also said that “a man’s 20 J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 82. 21 See Fiona Ellis’s God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) for another attempt to develop McDowell’s work in a theistic direction, especially with regard to a theistic account of second nature. She writes: “we ourselves, qua natural beings, are already open to God. The supernatural . . . is not a spooky superstructure, extrinsic or added on to a nature which is complete in itself. Rather, it is a quality or dimension which enriches or perfects the natural world. This grants us the right to allow that man can be inwardly transformed by God. And precisely because this transformation serves to enhance his natural being . . . we avoid the implication that such divine action spells the destruction of man, severing any connection he might have with ordinary human life” (91). The account that I develop here can be seen as complementary to Ellis’s project. 22 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 236–7.

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face often prevents many people, who are as yet inexperienced in love, from loving him.” For Zosima, the love of those who appear unlovable (or less lovable)—e.g. “the sinner”—is “the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth.”23 However, such heights of love require experience and training (askesis): Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time.24 [Active] love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. . . . Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.25

In this “science” of active love we are especially guided, as suggested above, by saintly persons or spiritual exemplars, who are “saintly” in that they are further along in the path of love and better approximate the ideal of a proper relationship in feeling and in action to the sacred or the reverence-worthy. Zosima is a fictional example of a saintly person (though Dostoevsky based his depiction of him on actual spiritual exemplars).26 But we can also consider a recent non-fictional example, which is drawn from Raimond Gaita’s work. In A Common Humanity, Gaita discusses the behavior and attitude of a nun who came to visit a psychiatric ward at which he worked when he was seventeen, where the patients “appeared to have irretrievably 23

The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, rev. Matlaw, 298. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 319. 25 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 58. 26 Dostoevsky was well aware of the sort of critiques of purportedly saintly persons that find expression in Nietzsche’s later writings and more recently in the work of Susan Wolf, Martha Nussbaum, and others, which claim that there is something other-worldly, life-denying, mutilating, strained, or otherwise harmful about saintly ideals. In The Brothers Karamazov the narrator remarks that ascetic practices, which are commonly tied to saintly ideals, are “a double-edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to fetters and not to freedom” (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 29). Moreover, in the character Father Ferapont, the great faster and keeper of silence, Dostoevsky provides an artistic portrayal of the kind of life-denying “ascetic ideal” that Nietzsche critiques. But for Dostoevsky there is a valid saintly ideal (which includes certain ascetic practices as important for ethical and spiritual transformation; see 314), which is depicted in Father Zosima, and also in Alyosha, who is to live the saintly path outside of a religious order and in family life. For more on this issue, see my “Nietzsche, Cosmodicy, and the Saintly Ideal,” Philosophy, 91(1) (2016), pp. 39–67. 24

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lost everything which gives meaning to our lives” and have qualities to which one might naturally feel revulsion. But Gaita says of the nun: [Everything] in her demeanour towards them—the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body—contrasted with and showed up the behavior of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who want to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.27

Gaita is not religious in any conventional sense and yet he marvels at the power of the nun’s love—as expressed through her demeanor— “to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible.”28 He acknowledges that the disciplines of her religious vocation “were essential to her becoming the kind of person she was” and he doubts that “the love expressed in the nun’s demeanour would have been possible for her were it not for the place which the language of parental love had in her prayers”: “The nun almost certainly believed that the patients with whom she dealt were all God’s children and equally loved by him.”29 However, Gaita doesn’t think that the quality of her love “proves” her religious perspective; rather, it only proves that the patients are “rightly the objects of our non-condescending treatment, that we should do all in our power to respond in that way.”30 To expect proof of a religious perspective here certainly seems like too much ask, since it is not clear that anything could offer a strict proof in this domain. Nevertheless, the way that the nun’s love helps us to see the patients in a new, transfigured light can be a part of coming to affirm a religious vision of the world. In this case, it will be a matter of coming to see and affirm all human beings as sacred and as children of God. The phenomenology of the sacred here involves an experience of a normative demand that—to recall McDowell’s phrasing—is “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive

27

R. Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (New York: Routledge, 1998), 17–19. 28 29 A Common Humanity, 20. A Common Humanity, 20–2. 30 A Common Humanity, 21.

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to [it].” Sacred or holy things are worthy of reverence and as such they place upon us absolute requirements of inviolability (i.e. barriers to action that ought never to be crossed) as well as duties to render assistance where appropriate. Gaita acknowledges that there is something lacking for the person who is moved by the nun’s love but cannot accept her religious perspective, since he thinks that only a religious person “can speak seriously of the sacred,” though “such talk informs the thoughts of most of us whether or not we are religious, for it shapes our thoughts about the way in which human beings limit our will as does nothing else in nature.” However, he thinks that the non-religious person will often have to find some not fully adequate substitute for the religious language of the sacred, such as that all human beings are “inestimably precious,” “ends in themselves,” or “owed unconditional respect,” or that they “possess inalienable dignity.” For Gaita, “these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it” and none of them has “the simple power of the religious way of speaking.”31 I don’t think it is entirely right to say that only a (conventionally) religious person “can speak seriously of the sacred,” since the language of the sacred can be used to describe that which is experienced as reverence-worthy (though we might say that to have such experiences is to be religious in a broad sense). But it does have religious connotations, and it can be one way of trying to capture a sense of “the divine mystery in things.” I also think there are questions that arise here of whether the experience of a strong normative demand that these different terms seek to capture and reveal—whether it is the “sacredness” of all human beings or their “inestimable preciousness” or whatever else—can be adequately made sense of in a world that is devoid of any underlying moral or spiritual purposiveness. If the world is ultimately just the result of “blind,” mechanistic causes, i.e. if we are just what the cosmic cat coughed up, then does it really make sense to speak of strong normative demands which are “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them”? The realization that one lacks such a justifying account (or “logic”) can have a deflationary effect. But at the same time, the fact that we do experience such strong normative demands, and that some of them seem best captured in the

31

A Common Humanity, 23.

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language of the sacred, can itself be a reason for coming to affirm a religiously purposive worldview. Two related points should be emphasized here with regard to the foregoing exploration of spiritual formation and its significance. First, Gaita’s discussion shows the importance of spiritual exemplars (or saintly persons) for helping us come to see the world, especially other human beings, in a new light. And we can think of other spiritual exemplars besides Gaita’s nun who can also have this effect, such as Jean Vanier, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Sister Helen Prejean, and Maximilian Kolbe, not to mention many other less famous examples.32 Second, Gaita’s discussion shows the significance of specific religious language (or “conceptual resources”) and religious practices informed by such language for how we come to see the world, particularly with regard to what we see as love-worthy. We can add that religious works of art—e.g. paintings, music, poetry, novels, scripture, traditional prayers, etc.—also play an important role in shaping the conceptual resources that inform a religious vision of the world. We always love under some description (e.g. the object of love is seen as “sacred,” “precious,” “a child of God,” “made in the image of God,” etc.), and thus Gaita says (quoting Rush Rhees): “there would be no love without the language of love.”33 Moreover, in our culture this is related to saintly love: “Because of the place the impartial love of saints has occupied in our culture, there has developed a language of love whose grammar has transformed our understanding of what it is for a human being to be a unique kind of limit to our will.”34 In his account of Bildung, McDowell also discusses the significance of initiation into a particular language for opening our eyes to the space of reasons (or domain of meaning), since a language “serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what.” This does not mean that we should accept everything within a tradition, since for any living tradition there is a “standing obligation to engage in critical reflection.” But the point is that to have access to the space of reasons and acquire “the capacity to think and act intentionally, at all, the first thing that needs to happen is for [one] to be initiated into a tradition 32 Many of these lesser-known examples are “ordinary” virtuous people who are not members of religious orders. 33 34 A Common Humanity, 26. A Common Humanity, 24.

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as its stands.”35 The lesson for the topic at hand is that to come to see the world in religious terms (i.e. in terms of a religiously inflected account of the space of reasons), one must be initiated (at some level) into a particular religious tradition, with its particular language and set of practices. We have seen that active love is itself a key religious practice. Gaita also shows how this can be connected to one’s prayer life, particularly that which expresses the language of parental love (as in the “Our Father”). In fact, he notes that there is a close connection between parental love and saintly love. Human parental love can also reveal the intrinsic preciousness of human beings, such as when a parent unconditionally loves a child who has become vicious.36 Indeed, we can come to see other human beings, including vicious ones, in a new light when we think of them as somebody’s child, and it can also be helpful to think of them as once being a vulnerable young child and the particular circumstances of their upbringing (we might also think of the whole life-span, where we recognize them as fellow “mortals”). But Gaita believes that to validate the idea that we should extend something like (but not exactly the same as) the partial, unconditional love of parents to all humanity, we need the example of saintly love, which, at least in the theistic case, draws on the concept of parental love in seeing all of us as children of God who are equally and unconditionally loved by God.37 This allows us to speak of the “human family” and see our fellow human beings as “brothers” and “sisters.” Of course, we might try to find secular equivalents, such as the idea that “we are all in it together,” but these seem to lack the resonances and power of the religious idea of being children of God.38

35 Mind and World, 125–6. For more on the “constitutive” role of language in human life, see C. Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). 36 To love someone “unconditionally,” as I understand it, means that this love will not be undermined by what the beloved makes of his or her life. In the words of St. Paul, such love “never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8). 37 A Common Humanity, 24. 38 See, e.g. Bertrand Russell’s remarks about being united in our “common doom” in “A Free Man’s Worship”; a similar idea is also expressed in Albert Camus’ The Plague. Of course, we might instead have what I dub the “Jim Morrison response” and seek to get our “kicks” in “before the whole shithouse goes up in flames”; see: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSlXjrxqDOE. See also, The Doors, The Greatest Hits, “Roadhouse Blues (Live)” Track 7.

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I would like to mention one other, related example here of a religious practice that can help to cultivate a transfiguring love. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the main character John Ames discusses the practice of keeping the Ten Commandments, with a particular focus on the commandment to honor one’s parents. In a letter to his young son, Ames writes: There’s a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conspicuous discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. In the particular instance of your mother, I know that if you are attentive to her in this way, you will find a very great loveliness in her. When you love someone to the degree that you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.39

Again, there is a kind of unconditional love enjoined here that seeks to emulate God’s love, and thus to see people as God sees them. In this case, being attentive to one’s mother so as to perceive her loveliness might involve, among other things, seeing her whole life context and not just her immediate role as mother, and seeing her also as a child of God. We can add that loving and honoring one’s parents can be understood on analogy with love for God. Indeed, insofar as we are understood as children of God and God’s love is seen as an unconditional parental love, we thus grasp God’s love for us first through appreciating and responding to our parents’ love for us, which at its best is unconditional, but which may in many ways be imperfect (as human love often is). So learning to love and honor our parents can train us for loving and honoring God. In other words, filial piety can also be seen as training for religious piety as one seeks to honor the sources of one’s existence and appreciate the giftedness of life. As Robinson puts it through Ames, this is “an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.” 39 Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 139. I thank Kirstin McPherson for bringing this wonderful passage to my attention.

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I want to conclude by considering a potential worry about the idea of transfiguring love. At one point in Gaita’s discussion of the nun’s saintly love he remarks that on her view, as he understands it, “we are sacred because God loves us, his children,” which suggests that God’s love makes us sacred.40 Or in Gaita’s non-religious terms: we are “inestimably precious” or “possess inalienable dignity” because someone can love us in a “pure” or “unconditional” way. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor has suggested a similar thought in his discussion of a kind of “seeing-good” where otherwise the goodness of something or someone is not readily apparent. Taylor says that this sort of “seeing-good” is “a seeing which also helps effect what it sees.”41 Like Gaita, Taylor is especially concerned with the “irremediably broken” and he thinks that religious sources offer a more powerful and illuminating kind of seeing-good than non-religious or “naturalist” sources (unlike Gaita, Taylor is a theist).42 In particular, Taylor discusses the Christian idea of agape, which he says is a love that God has for humans which is connected with their goodness as creatures (though we don’t have to decide whether they are loved because good or good because loved). Human beings participate through grace in this love. There is a divine affirmation of the creature,

40

A Common Humanity, 24; my emphasis. Sources of the Self, 449; my emphasis. 42 Taylor writes: “The question . . . is whether we are not living beyond our moral means in continuing allegiance to our standards of [universal] justice and benevolence. Do we have ways of seeing-good which are still credible to us, which are powerful enough to sustain these standards? . . . Is the naturalist affirmation conditioned on a vision of human nature in the fullness of its health and strength? Does it move us to extend help to the irremediably broken, such as the mentally handicapped, those dying without dignity, fetuses with genetic defects? Perhaps one might judge that it doesn’t and that this is a point in favour of naturalism; perhaps efforts shouldn’t be wasted on these unpromising cases. But the careers of Mother Teresa or Jean Vanier seem to point to a different pattern, emerging from a Christian spirituality. . . . I do think naturalist humanism defective in these respects—or, perhaps better put, that great as the power of naturalist sources might be, the potential of a certain theistic perspective is incomparably greater” (Sources of the Self, 517–18). Similarly, Gaita writes: “reflecting on the nun’s example, I came to believe that an ethics centered on the concept of human flourishing does not have the conceptual resources to keep fully amongst us, in the way the nun had revealed to be possible, people who are severely and ineradicably afflicted” (A Common Humanity, 18). 41

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which is captured in the repeated phrase in Genesis 1 about each stage of the creation, “and God saw that it was good”. Agape is inseparable from such a “seeing-good”.43

Earlier Taylor says with regard to Genesis 1: “The goodness of the world is not something quite independent from God’s seeing it as good. His seeing it as good, loving it, can be conceived not simply as a response to what it is, but as what makes it such.”44 What should we make of the claim that “we don’t have to decide whether [human beings] are loved because good or good because loved”? And what should we make of the more positive suggestion that a certain kind of love or seeing-good “makes,” “effects,” or “brings about” the goodness (or sacredness) of someone or something?45 I find such remarks problematic and thus worrisome insofar as they suggest that we are merely projecting some “goodness,” “sacredness,” “preciousness,” or “love-worthiness” onto something or someone, where such properties are not really there in any case.46 I think that we do have to take a stand on Taylor’s disjunction: human beings are loved, or should be loved, because they are good, rather than being good because loved. In other words, we are responsive here to a normative demand for love that is “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to [it].” This is not to deny that there is a place for a certain kind of “making” or “effecting,” otherwise we would not speak of “transfiguring.” What a particular religiously inflected language of love and the practice it informs can “effect” or “bring about” is the revelation of goodness or sacredness. The point is epistemological rather than ontological: seeing-good here should not be understood as making good but as making manifest a goodness that is there in any case; i.e. as revealing an independent reality that is fit to be valued and loved in particular ways once we have acquired the relevant linguistic capacities and moral and spiritual sensitivity. Moreover, the ontological claim regarding making or creating goodness itself seems dubious: while we can make or foster good things (e.g. a work of art, virtuous character, etc.) that instantiate or embody goodness (and such good things can be brought about through love), 43

44 Sources of the Self, 516. Sources of the Self, 449. See Sources of the Self, 419, 448–9, 454–5, 510, 512, 516. 46 Both Gaita and Taylor seem to be otherwise committed to a realist account of value (as “there in any case”), so their claims about making or effecting a certain kind of value seem odd in light of this. 45

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goodness itself does not seem to be the kind of thing that can be created, but rather it must be discovered or apprehended. It might be objected that God is a special case, since, according to traditional theism, God creates the world ex nihilo and sees it as good. So perhaps God could also create goodness itself ex nihilo. We encounter here a version of the well-known “Euthyphro dilemma” (derived from Plato’s Euthyphro): Is something good because it is loved (or willed) by God, or does God love (or will) it because it is good? On the one hand, if we say something is good simply in virtue of being loved (or willed) by God, then this seems to make goodness arbitrary, as anything (including, e.g. murder) could be good so long as it is loved (or willed) by God. God’s love then loses all intelligibility as it is seen as merely a brute fact rather than a response to something or someone’s love-worthiness. On the other hand, if we say that God loves (or wills) something because it is good or love-worthy, then the concern is that this makes God irrelevant for morality, as goodness is independent of God’s love or willing as something to which this love or willing responds. I think a theist can take this second approach without thereby committing him or herself to God’s irrelevance for morality. There are three main reasons for this. First, God creates the world in light of a perfect understanding of the good and as ordered toward realizing this good. Second, God perfectly exemplifies the good, such that we can say that God is good (or the Good). Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, God perfectly loves the goodness that is inherent in the world, including in humanity, and in doing so helps to make manifest this goodness to us. In other words, God’s agape is the perfect instance of transfiguring love, and on this theistic picture we fully come to see the world in religious terms when we come to see and love the world as God does.47

47 I thank Fiona Ellis, Jared Schumacher, and members of audiences at Heythrop College, University of London and the University of Notre Dame for helpful comments on early drafts of this chapter.

5 Habit, Practice, Grace Toward a Philosophy of Religious Life Clare Carlisle

“WHAT SORT OF PHILOSOPHY DO YOU DO?” When another philosopher asks me what sort of philosophy I do, I’m unsure what to say. Perhaps I’ll answer, rather tentatively, “philosophy of religion,” and then immediately qualify this by explaining that I don’t do philosophy of religion in the standard sense. This is not because my research and teaching are especially original or eccentric: I meet many philosophers with interests similar to my own. But “philosophy of religion” remains closely associated with a certain understanding of what it means to think philosophically about religion—one which focuses either primarily or exclusively on the cognitive aspect of religion, taking as its subject-matter religious doctrines or beliefs. This applies to both analytic and continental philosophy of religion: for several decades both approaches have focused largely on the intellectual content of religious teachings. This model of religious understanding is so entrenched and pervasive that it seems misleading to describe myself as a philosopher of religion. I’ve called the third-year course I teach at King’s College London “Philosophy of Religious Life”—echoing the title of Martin Heidegger’s 1920–1 lecture course, “The Phenomenology of Religious Life”—to distinguish its approach from that implied by the label “philosophy of religion,” which so often amounts to the philosophy

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of religious belief.1 In this course we take Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as a starting-point for reflection on what it means to think philosophically about religion. We consider, for example, the Socratic task of self-knowledge; the role of reason within the religious life; aspects of the human condition—finitude, fragility, uncertainty, love of other finite human beings—that Kierkegaard thinks make the relationship to God both necessary and difficult; the religious significance of virtues such as obedience and courage; the place of silence and contemplation within the spiritual life. Once we begin to think about “lived religion” and to conceive our discipline as the philosophy of religious life, the concept of practice comes into the foreground. What do religious people do—and how does this shape their beliefs, their actions, their states of mind, their emotions, their self-understanding, their world? If being religious makes a difference to a person’s life, then we need to ask what these differences are, how they come about, how they should be interpreted and evaluated. To think through these questions philosophically, we need a properly formulated concept of religious practice, and I am going to work toward this in this chapter. First, though, I want to point to a series of unresolved questions and challenges that confront this new model of religious understanding. Insofar as the philosophy of religion focuses on religious beliefs, its guiding questions seem clear enough: are these beliefs true or false, warranted or unwarranted, verifiable or unverifiable? But which questions are we trying to answer when we think philosophically about religious practices? What precisely is our task, and what is specifically philosophical about it? Are we seeking criteria and methods of critique, which would enable us to distinguish between effective and ineffective practices, or good and bad ways of practicing? The very concept of practice seems to presuppose a goal, or at least an ideal of proficiency that the practitioner works toward—but this goal might not be knowable or conceivable in advance, and might not even be intelligible outside of the practice in question. For example, “union with God” may only make sense after years of contemplative prayer; metta (the Buddhist concept of compassionate love) may only become meaningful under conditions facilitated by meditation; submission to Allah may not be graspable until one has knelt down and 1 See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).

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put one’s head to the ground; we might not understand what forgiveness means until we have asked for it. Certain questions of method follow on from these. What is our source material? Since religious doctrines and beliefs can generally be expressed in propositional form, it seems entirely natural for the traditional philosopher of religion to make texts her primary object of study. And because critical interpretation and evaluation of religious beliefs has been this philosopher’s primary task, her method is the construction and analysis of arguments. But it is not at all obvious that these methods are appropriate to the study of religious practices. Of course, we may read texts written by anthropologists or sociologists who have observed and analyzed religious practices, and the practices encountered in this way will be mediated by the methodology of the social sciences. But what would it mean to study practices ourselves, directly, as philosophers? Should we look at practices from the outside, or from the inside? What exactly are we looking at, and what are we looking for? Should we observe other people engaging in religious practices and document their movements? Should we talk to practitioners about their practices, and then assess their accounts for logical consistency? Should we engage in practice ourselves, and write about our own experiences? And might we combine observational, participatory, dialogical, and introspective research—for example, by spending a week in a monastery or on a meditation retreat, tape recorder and laptop in hand? Would this be an appropriate way of being in a sacred space? Would it be recognized as legitimate philosophical work by our peers? And what would it mean to undertake this kind of observation and reflection philosophically? Having raised these questions, I shall retreat to our familiar territory of texts and concepts. But these questions are important, and they highlight the limitations of this chapter: I have confined myself here to the task of outlining a concept of practice, drawn in part from the philosophical tradition, which provides a starting-point for understanding religious practices in a specifically philosophical way.

THE PRACTICING LIFE Social scientists have been interested in practices for decades, and more recently disciplines such as history, theology, cultural studies,

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art theory, and religious studies have embraced a “return to practice.”2 Philosophers have generally been slow to make this turn by reflecting on how particular practices of thinking, intellectual cultures, training regimes, and academic institutions have shaped—and continue to shape—their discipline. A few prominent philosophers, notably Charles Taylor and Alastair MacIntyre, have emphasized that practices are important, though without providing an extensive philosophical account of practice.3 But two recent books, Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2009; English translation 2013) and Kevin Schilbrack’s Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (2014), have placed practice at the center of a philosophical analysis of religion. Sloterdijk defines practice as “any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or not.”4 Taking as his question “the formation of human beings in the practising life,” Sloterdijk makes some bold historical claims. “It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition,” he announces: “Just as the 19th century stood cognitively under the sign of production and the 20th under that of reflexivity, the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.”5 Perhaps this prediction is correct, though Sloterdijk needs to specify more carefully the distinctively human relationship to repetition—for insofar as they acquire habits, we might say that all animals “result from repetition.” Perhaps Sloterdijk has in mind the concept of second nature that Aristotle recognized as fundamental to our ethical life. If so, the distinction between habit and practice that remains implicit in Aristotle’s account of human formation has to be made more explicit—and I shall address this distinction in the next section of this chapter (“Habit: Receptivity and Resistance, Formation and Flesh”).

2 For an overview, see Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001). 3 See, for example, Charles Taylor’s Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Collected Papers: Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 4 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 4. 5 Ibid., 4.

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The reception of Aristotelian thought into Christian theology—a reception that is especially prominent in the Catholic tradition, notably in the works of Thomas Aquinas and Félix Ravaisson—provides rich philosophical resources for analyzing religious practices. However, Sloterdijk opposes his philosophy of practice to theological thinking as well as to Marxist accounts of human self-production. He argues that human beings are formed not by laboring on the world, but by practicing on themselves: “The ethical programme of the present came into view for a moment when Marx and the Young Hegelians articulated the theory that man himself produces man. The true meaning of this statement was immediately obscured [by the idea that] work [is] the only essential human act. . . . We must suspend virtually everything that has been said about human beings as working beings in order to translate it into the language of practising, or self-forming and self-enhancing behaviour. It is not only the weary Homo faber, who objectifies the world in the ‘doing’ mode, who must vacate his place on the logical stage; the time has also come for Homo religiosus, who turns to the world above in surreal rites, to bid a deserved farewell. Together, workers and believers come into a new category.”6 Sloterdijk’s analysis of asceticism is fascinating: he creates a new conceptual framework for investigating what Nietzsche called “the ascetic ideal,” and identifies diverse elements within this complex phenomenon. Sloterdijk advances his Nietzschean agenda by employing his concept of practice reductively. By conceiving of religious practices as “anthropotechniques,” exercises by which “man himself produces man,” he rejects in advance the way in which most religious practitioners understand their own practices: as responsive to and aided by a power beyond themselves. According to Sloterdijk, “No ‘religion’ or ‘religions’ exist, only misunderstood spiritual regimens, whether these are practised in collectives—usually church, ordo, umma, sangha—or in customised forms—through interaction with the ‘personal God’ with whom the citizens of modernity are privately insured. Thus the tiresome distinction between ‘true religion’ and superstition loses its meaning. There are only regimens that are more or less capable and worthy of propagation. The false dichotomy of believers and unbelievers becomes obsolete and is replaced by the

6

Ibid., 4.

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distinction between the practising and the untrained, or those who train differently.”7 This claim that “religions” do not exist, or at least should be reconceived as patterns of practice, is interesting and worth pursuing (if overstated by Sloterdijk, whose turn to practice seems to treat metaphysics and cosmology as mere conceptual debris). But here Sloterdijk, setting belief in opposition to practice by claiming that the latter replaces the former, invokes a “false dichotomy” of his own. The reciprocal relationship between belief and practice is explored by Kevin Schilbrack in his less substantial but more sober “manifesto” for the philosophical study of religion. Schilbrack diagnoses “an implicit but pervasive mind–body dualism” that separates belief from practice within the academic study of religion, where “the traditional division of labour . . . seems to have followed a tacit rule that the discipline of philosophy of religion studies religious beliefs (the mental) and the social scientific disciplines study religious practices (the bodily).”8 He contests the prevailing view that “religious practices lack the properties found in cognitive activities and are simply mechanical or thoughtless”—a view that causes most philosophers of religion to “leave religious practices for others to study on the assumption that the practices themselves are not philosophical.”9 He suggests that “most of the studies of ritual inspired by Michel Foucault, for example, treat the body as a blank text on which one’s culture inscribes, the body as merely the effect of discourse,” and speculates that “perhaps it is the influence of Protestant opposition to Catholic sacraments and ‘works righteousness’ or perhaps secularist opposition to superstition that leads scholars of religion to take embodied religious practices as unthinking, and this leads to the assumption that such practices do not involve the kinds of cognitive activity that deserve philosophical attention.”10 Schilbrack makes a compelling case for seeing practices as cognitive, “not only as ways to communicate, teach, or inculcate the claims that a religious community wants to make, but as sites of inquiry, exploration and creativity in their own right.”11 Religious practices are, he insists, “social practices that cannot fail to involve learning and exploration.” By participating in a religious ritual, practitioners learn 7

Ibid., 3. Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 32. 9 10 11 Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 32. 8

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about themselves—about how they are changed by their practice, and how they resist these changes. They also learn about the other members of their religious community: who is a good role model, and who is unreliable? And they learn about “the world as the context of [their] action.”12 Furthermore, argues Schilbrack—and here he diverges from Sloterdijk, whose work he does not refer to—“ultimately practices can serve as opportunities for inquiry about the super-empirical resources that make the practice successful. It is this last element that distinguishes between religious practices from nonreligious ones. What super-empirical reality sustains the practice or makes it effective?”13 Regardless of whether practitioners explicitly reflect on their practices—a process of reflection that does of course happen, both formally and informally, within religious communities—Schilbrack argues that the forms of inquiry he describes are embedded in the practices themselves. His point in challenging the disciplinary divide between belief and practice, between cognition and practice, is, he clarifies, “that the practices themselves can provide the cultural prosthetics that let practitioners explore these questions.”14 Having argued that religious practices are irreducibly cognitive, and thus philosophically significant, Schilbrack offers three models for a philosophical understanding of religious practices. First he proposes an “embodiment” paradigm for the philosophy of religion, drawing both on Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and on existential phenomenology, which conceives the body as the “pre-reflective seat of subjectivity.”15 Second, he outlines an account of embodied religious reason based on “conceptual metaphor theory”: physical experiences generate patterns of understanding, he explains—for example, the metaphor of a spiritual path or journey is one such “pattern of understanding.”16 Religious practices, Schilbrack argues, “can not only provide the patterns of experience on which religious teachings draw, but can also deploy those patterns to develop and to teach one way of life or another.”17 Third, he applies the concept of “cognitive prosthetics,” drawn from cognitive science, to religious “material culture.”18 My own philosophy of practice follows a method different from those outlined by Schilbrack—like Sloterdijk’s, my analysis proceeds 12 16

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 42.

13 17

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 42.

14 18

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 49.

15

Ibid., 40.

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historically—but it shares something in common with the first of his three proposed models. I agree with Schilbrack, and disagree with Sloterdijk, in taking seriously the way in which religious practitioners understand their own practice as engaged, or potentially engaged, with a “super-empirical reality” that sustains their practicing, as Schilbrack puts it. Indeed, it is precisely because practices have the cognitive power that Schilbrack claims for them that it becomes problematic for a non-practitioners to dismiss practitioners as mistaken in their beliefs, or to insist on a reductive account of their practices, on purely intellectual grounds—whether this intellectual perspective consists in armchair scientism and positivism, or fluency in Marxist and Nietzschean critique. Although Sloterdijk tends to project the assumptions of his own formation onto religious practitioners in refusing to accommodate theology, he makes a methodological point that is relevant to precisely this issue: “We are dealing here with an object that does not leave its analyst alone. . . . The matter itself entangles its adepts in an inescapable self-referentiality by presenting them with the practising—the ‘ascetic’, form-demanding and habit-forming—character of their own behavior. . . . An anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution.”19

HABIT: RECEPTIVITY AND RESISTANCE, FORMATION AND FLESH My starting-point in thinking philosophically about religious practice is to understand practice as a species of habit. As I have argued in my 2014 book On Habit, drawing on Ravaisson’s 1838 essay De l’habitude, the phenomenon of habit-acquisition connects humans to the whole of nature: all animals—and also, Ravaisson would argue, other organic beings—contract habits in response to the conditions of their environment. Throughout nature, habits are particular, tried-andtested ways of meeting general needs for light, warmth, food, and 19

Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 14.

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shelter. Practice is a specifically human kind of habit, which takes the mechanism of habit and puts it to a purposive use, deliberately cultivating a certain capacity through repeated actions. Approaching practice as a kind of habit makes available a long tradition of philosophical reflection and debate about habit, which we can draw on and build upon in clarifying the concept of practice. Habit is a process of formation. The English word “habit” comes, via the Latin habitus, from the Greek hexis, derived from the verb ekhein: “to have” or “to hold.” Habit signifies the holding of a form through time. Mineralogists refer to the habits of crystals; botanists to the habits of plants; of course animals, including humans, have habits—and in each case “habit” means a shape or pattern of growth, a particular way of moving through space and time, a particular way of moving through the world. In De l’habitude Ravaisson calls habit a “way of being.” Drawing eclectically on sources including Aristotle, Leibniz, Maine de Biran, Schelling, and a mystical Catholicism inflected with vitalist science and pantheist philosophy, Ravaisson conceives being in terms of “nature” and “life”—and he conceives “nature” and “life” in terms of desire.20 Habits are the particularization, the specification, of desire. Habits are the “way” in which singular nature, an all-encompassing unity, expresses or manifests itself in diverse forms of life. A fundamental and thought-provoking feature of habit is the way it combines repetition and change. No being can acquire a habit unless it has the capacity to be changed by repetition. As Gilles Deleuze pointed out in his 1956 book on Hume’s philosophy, Empiricism and Subjectivity, and elaborated ten years later in Difference and Repetition, there is something mysterious and paradoxical about the fact that repetition produces a difference.21 And in the case of religious practices that seek some kind of self-transcendence—liberation from suffering, union with God or a vision of God, redemption from sin, enlightenment from ignorance—we are considering the possibility that not just a change but a transformation might result from repetition.

20

See Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit (London: Continuum, 2008), 71. See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 68; Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 70. 21

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Thinking about how repetition produces its effects is a distinctively philosophical task. The kind of change in question here is a change in the nature of a thing, a change in its powers of motion and rest— roughly in accordance with Aristotle’s definition of a nature, in the Physics, as an inner principle of motion and rest.22 If I chip away at a stone with a hammer and chisel, my repeated movements will change the shape of the stone, but they will not change its nature. However, my own nature will be changed, however slightly, as I practice the art of sculpture and become quicker, more precise, more sensitive in my chiseling. In the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle uses a different example of a stone to illustrate the conditions of habit-acquisition: however many times a stone is thrown up into the air, he explains, it will never acquire the habit of ascending rather than descending—because a stone does not have a nature, in the sense of an inner principle of motion and rest.23 And yet, we might add, the person throwing the stone will be affected by the repetition: she may become fatigued or bored; her arm may become stronger; she may become more proficient in her throwing. We can identify two basic conditions of habit-formation: receptivity to change and resistance to change. If we were not receptive to changes—and by changes I mean both sensations produced by external stimuli, and our own movements—then our experiences and our actions would make no difference to us. In habit, we not only yield to external influence: we are inescapably receptive to ourselves, formed as the (often unintended) consequence of our own movements. But if we were not also resistant to change, each new experience or action would transform us: entirely subject to circumstance, we would be empty, with no stable character of our own. Neither absolute receptivity nor absolute resistance allow a being to have a nature. These twin conditions of receptivity and resistance are captured by the concept of plasticity, now a key term in neuroscience. William James, one of the great philosophers of habit, defines plasticity as “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” James argues that “the

22

Aristotle, Physics II, 192b 20–3; see Sarah Waterlow, Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–45. 23 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1120a–b.

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phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed.”24 One disadvantage of the modern concept of plasticity is that, having been claimed by neuroscientists, it is frequently applied in a narrowly materialist sense to the brain, rather than to a more inclusive conception of embodied life. For example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account “the lived body” includes being-in-a-world, being-with-others, interpretations, affects, and so on. Merleau-Ponty regards habit as fundamental to the formation of this lived body.25 But, as I emphasize in this chapter, following Ravaisson, the lived body—the site of plasticity—is constituted above all by desire. Desires and inclinations permeate all the elements of meaning-imbued experience identified by Merleau-Ponty. With these considerations in mind—the importance of desire, and the requirement to expand our understanding of embodiment beyond a narrowly materialist view—I propose a concept of “flesh” as an alternative to plasticity. For our purposes, this theologically rich term may retain all the ambivalence it has in biblical tradition. Flesh is both receptive and resistant to change: it is weak and yet durable, vulnerable and yet able to heal itself. In James’s words, flesh is “a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” Flesh is all that we are made of: it is both where and how we experience ourselves, inwardly and as the interface with the world. It is the site of feeling, sensation, thinking, interpretation— in a word, subjectivity. This concept of flesh calls attention to the spatial and temporal aspects of our embodiment. As well as moving through the world in a spatial sense, flesh grows, matures, decays, and bears visible signs of our temporality: it is our flesh that reveals to others the duration of our being-in-the-world. And this flesh—as indicated by ancient biblical usage—encompasses our desires and inclinations. It may be opposed to the spirit, as in both the Old and New Testaments, but it also signifies human nature in all its capacities. In Ezekiel, for example, God tells the Israelites: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of 24

William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 105. 25 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 104, 144.

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flesh” (36:26). Paul sometimes uses “flesh” (sarx) to signify weak or unregenerate human nature, but in 2 Corinthians he uses “flesh” and “spirit” (pneuma) interchangeably.26

HABIT AND PRACTICE: GIVING FORM TO DESIRE Emphasizing the role of habit in human life allows us to think of our life in connection with other animals, even plants, and to see this connectivity in terms of both continuity and difference. Because we have language and reflective, reflexive consciousness, habit opens itself up within us in a specific way. We can not only reflect on habit, but also develop habits of reflection and reflexivity: we can cultivate attentiveness, for example. Thus in human life there is the possibility for practice, which is a certain employment and development of our capacity for habit-formation. Within human life, the twin conditions of receptivity and resistance that underlie all habit-formation take on ethical and spiritual significance in addition to—and perhaps thereby altering—their ontological, biological, and psychological significance. Ethical life involves becoming receptive to the good, to what is life-enhancing, and resistant to negative, harmful influences. This receptivity and resistance have a cognitive dimension, of course: through experience, intuition, and guidance from others we may learn gradually to discern how the good feels, and to recognize the warning-signs of a wrong turning which may appear initially to be in our interests. Allowing the ontological, biological, and psychological principles of receptivity and resistance to become ethical principles does not commit us to a specific moral framework. “The good” may be conceived in terms of the will of God, or in less personalist metaphysical terms (as in Plato and Aristotle, for example), or naturalistically (as in Spinoza or in Buddhist ethics), or more pragmatically and subjectively.

26 See Cor. 7:5 and 2:13. The “works of the flesh” contrasted with the “fruit of the spirit” in Galatians 5 include mental attitudes such as jealousy and anger as well as sensual vices like fornication and drunkenness. On the “weakness of the flesh,” see Romans 6:19 and 8:3. In Colossians Paul writes that Christ has “reconciled in his fleshly body” those “who were once estranged and hostile in mind” (1:22).

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As I mentioned in the preceding section of this chapter (“Habit: Receptivity and Resistance, Formation and Flesh”), Ravaisson develops his philosophy of habit according to an ontology of desire. Like many philosophers and theologians—including Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Schelling—Ravaisson regards desire as the fundamental animating principle of existence. All things, he argues early in his essay De l’habitude, desire existence and seek to persevere in their being.27 He develops (in the post-Kantian philosophical context he inherited from Pierre Maine de Biran and Victor Cousin) Aristotle’s conception of hexis, which signifies the having or holding of a certain quality. Ravaisson understands habit as the way in which an entity holds itself in being. This “holding” need not imply a rigid fixing in a certain shape; on the contrary, it may be through movements, shifts, and adaptations that a being preserves itself within a changing environment. For example, flowers change their form from day to night; trees change their form through the seasons of a year. A plant’s pattern of growth—for example, spreading along the ground, climbing and twining, or shooting upwards—is a particular way of expressing a need for light, for water. Ultimately, such botanical habits express the plant’s “desire” to be. This usage indicates how habit in general can be understood as giving form to desire. Habits are specific, particular ways of meeting a general need or desire. To take an example from human life: we all have a need and desire for food, which through custom has been channeled, or particularized, into a desire for food at certain times of day—at lunchtime, for instance. This customary lunchtime hunger is further particularized into a habit of eating certain things for lunch—sandwiches, for instance. More particularly still, an individual may have a habit of frequenting a certain café, perhaps even sitting at a certain table in this café. So here a general or universal desire for food has been particularized within an individual’s life in a highly determinate way. Similarly, human beings have a general desire for love and attention, which through the relationships they form becomes particularized as a desire to be loved by a specific person, and often in specific ways. Habits express and enact desire; desire’s power manifests itself as repetition, and these repetitions can in turn strengthen and clarify 27 See Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008), 27.

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desire, perhaps by converting it into a very specific need—as in the case of addiction—or by inclining an individual’s entire being, her whole existence, in the direction of the desire. This intimate connection between habit and desire is especially important in the context of religious practice. If life in general is animated by desire, the spiritual life is animated by desire for God, or for the Good. But the object of this spiritual desire is often indeterminate and elusive. The character of its indeterminacy is, of course, a theological question. To claim that God is infinite ascribes to this object (or so-called object) of desire a certain kind of constitutive indeterminacy, to which there corresponds a view of this desire’s pursuit as never-ending, or at least lifelong. Alternatively, the satisfaction of spiritual desire may be conceived as attainable, yet dependent on certain conditions that are rarely realized and difficult to maintain. In either case, our spiritual desire is either always, or almost always, open-ended. Indeed, the very concept of a God who is infinite, transcendent, inexhaustible, and who withdraws and hides its nature even as it reveals itself, is a kind of placeholder and also a guarantor of the openness of spiritual desire. Most theologians agree that God is not an object among objects; that God is “not a thing or a kind of thing,” as Herbert McCabe put it.28 Likewise, in a Buddhist context, the quality of Enlightenment is often indicated by its formlessness and irreducibility to whatever can be represented in thought, language, or images. The religious life is structured by a tension between the openness of spiritual desire and the finitude of our human situation. We are temporally finite, of course (at least, we know that we are in this world temporarily), but we are also subject to what Sartre calls the “facticity” of our situation: our physical, social, material, and historical definiteness, and limitation. This tension—between, as Kierkegaard puts it, the finite and the infinite—raises the very practical question of how to be existentially true to our desire for God. How can human beings express, or live out, their spiritual desire in the world? If we have a desire for God, what do we do with this desire? And religious practice is an answer—perhaps it is the answer—to this question. Practice gives determinate, concrete, particular form to our indeterminate spiritual desires. It quite literally

28

Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 2005), 6.

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gives us something to do with a desire that cannot be satisfied by any finite object or experience. If we understand practice as a species of habit, this raises the question of how to distinguish practices—habits we deliberately cultivate—from those habits which, like animals, we fall into. This distinction lies in the way in which repetition gives form to desire. Accidental habits develop because desires for particular experiences—some kind of increase of pleasure or reduction of pain—find expression in repeated acts. This repetition produces a modification: a tendency, a capacity, a proficiency, or a need, which was not explicitly desired. Perhaps it was explicitly undesirable, as in the case of addiction. For example, no one desires to become an alcoholic, but people fall into this habit because they desire a particular drink—the next drink—when they desire the particular experience that this drink will bring about. Each time this desire is satisfied, the craving is strengthened. Few smokers want to smoke thirty cigarettes a day; they may not even want to “be a smoker”—but they want this cigarette, and wanting this cigarette turns them into a thirty-a-day smoker. To take a less unhealthy example: a person may not deliberately aim to be consistently punctual, but he wants to be on time for this meeting, and the repetition of this particular desire generates a habit of punctuality. In practice, by contrast, practitioners desire the outcome of their repeated acts. Practitioners aim for, and seek to cultivate, the lasting modification of their selves which the practice will produce. Therefore they choose to repeat particular acts—for example, a musician or an athlete resolves to practice every day—even when they do not wish to undertake the particular act on a given occasion. The musician desires the capacity, the proficiency, perhaps the greater creative freedom that results from repeated practice, and therefore she sets the intention to play her instrument every day, even when she does not feel like playing. In practice, particular acts become subordinate to the end of repetition, and repetition is itself a means to the selfmodification that arises through it. Practitioners cultivate the difference that repetition makes to themselves as repeating agents. This clearly distinguishes practice from accidental habit, in which repetition and the modification it produces are simply unintended consequences of acting on particular desires. It is common for practitioners to experience inner resistance to the particular acts which constitute their regular practice. This resistance

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may take the form of temptation to skip the practice, or a feeling of boredom or annoyance toward the practice. Such resistance is not essential to practice, but it is a common phenomenon and we encounter it in religious practice too. Some days a practitioner may look forward to the time set aside for prayer or meditation, or to going to Mass; at other times she can’t be bothered, or feels inclined to do something else. In practice, then, we see an elevation of desire beyond short-term appetites and wishes. Sloterdijk calls this “vertical tension,” and argues that without it “no purposeful practising is possible.”29 In practice, the animating desire concerns not just what practitioners want to do, or what they want to experience, but who they want to be.

CONCLUSION: HABIT, PRACTICE, GRACE Here I have outlined an account of practice that offers a naturalistic, humanistic model for understanding religious practices philosophically. This account can enter easily into dialogue with the social sciences, with cognitive and behavioral psychology, with neuroscience, because the concept of habit provides a bridge to these disciplines. The account is also applicable to diverse religious, spiritual, and ethical traditions, and this inclusivity is part of what makes it properly philosophical. On the other hand, philosophy of religion needs to accommodate theological ways of thinking. If a philosopher of religion is unable to engage with concepts such as sin, grace, transcendence, and existential liberation, then she will struggle to do justice to her subjectmatter. As I remarked in the second section of this chapter (“The Practicing Life”), from his Nietzschean perspective Sloterdijk seems to have decided in advance that religious practices are entirely for, by, and of human beings: he calls these practices “anthropotechniques.” This seems to preclude the possibility that some religious practices, at least some of the time, give form not just to a human being’s desire, but to a relationship between human and non-human—let’s say divine—powers. A philosopher of religion needs to accommodate 29

Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 14.

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this possibility, although, unlike the theologian, she is not entitled to assume it. We may, then, supplement the distinction between habit and practice with a distinction between practice and grace. By grace I mean the activities and effects of spiritual powers or forces within our world. This is of course a familiar idea within Christian theology, but there is something like this in Buddhism too: I have heard several Buddhist teachers remind their students that the process of awakening is not wholly, or even primarily, their own doing. They have described the practice as a matter of letting this natural process unfold within each person: “leave it to the dhamma,” counsels one influential Buddhist teacher, just as Christians are taught to put their trust in God. The distinction between habit and practice reveals continuities between them, since they share a structure of repetition which gives form to desire, according to the twin conditions of receptivity and resistance to change. Analogously, the distinction between practice and grace signals continuities between natural and supernatural phenomena. To put this point in more theological terms, practice is the middle term between nature and grace. While habit and practice share an anthropology that views beings as desiring subjects, grace complements this anthropology with the idea that beings are desired as well as desiring: they are objects of desire as well as subjects of desire. That God desires us just as we desire him; that God desires our freedom and happiness on our behalf; that there are cosmic forces at work which give momentum and ease to our spiritual endeavors is, of course, a matter of faith. Such faith might be based on experience, on reason, on trust in a teacher or a text; some people hold this faith while others do not, and some desire faith while others do not; faith may wax and wane, build up or collapse, even in those who desire it fervently. So it is existentially as well as philosophically important that religious practice is intelligible naturalistically, anthropotechnically, while leaving open and respecting the possibility that practice enacts, embodies, gives form to what Catholic tradition calls cooperative grace: the cooperation of human and divine desire, like swimming along with a river’s current. Having admitted, if only provisionally, a threefold model of habit, practice, and grace, we may then begin to think philosophically about continuities and discontinuities between these three forms of repetition within the religious life. How do these repetitions strengthen one

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other, or put pressure on one other, or come into conflict with one another? Kierkegaard, for example, argues forcefully that religious practice should never become a habit.30 This would close down the openness of spiritual desire, which makes it desire for God and not idolatry. At the same time, Kierkegaard insists on the particularity of the religious life: he emphasizes that grace is given and received in the world in a specific moment, in a particular situation, a determinate concrete form. The divine gift is not life in general, or love in general, but this particular existence in all its detail, all its petty cares and pleasures and sufferings. God does not simply give Abraham a son: he gives him Isaac; he does not simply demand faith: he gives precise instructions about the journey to Mount Moriah and what should happen there. For Ravaisson, by contrast, the highest kind of spiritual desire is a “desire that forgets itself,” through becoming embodied and appropriated as a second nature, through repetition, so that it becomes as natural and spontaneous as habit. I’ll end with the image of a spiritual path. This is a powerful image, which Schilbrack illuminates by means of conceptual metaphor theory: this metaphor encourages us to see religious life as embodied life. The account of habit and practice (and perhaps grace) outlined here enriches this metaphor and imbues it with philosophical content—for the pathway is an enduring metaphor for habit. It was invoked by Malebranche and Locke in the seventeenth century, for example, and contemporary neuroscientists make the concept of a neural pathway central to their theories of the brain.31 Reflection on the image of a spiritual path brings to light the communality of religious life, which has remained in the background of my discussion of habit and practice, alongside other structural features such as temporality and virtuality. The pathways we encounter in the countryside are formed collectively: they testify to communal repetition. When we walk along a path, we both follow the steps of those who have gone before us (and so we may remember them with gratitude), and preserve the path for those who will come later. In this respect, the spiritual pathway signifies tradition, which to some extent guides almost all religious practice. The pathway metaphor also discloses the temporality of 30 31

See Clare Carlisle, On Habit (London: Routledge, 2014), 121–9. Ibid., 23–7.

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habit and practice, both within the long durée of a spiritual tradition and within the lifetime of an individual. The steps practitioners have taken both echo and anticipate those of other people; as walkers on the path, practitioners become exemplars as well as followers. Their steps along the path form the direction, the inclination, of their existence: they have come this way, not another, and they are here, not there. The pathway thus gives a determinacy to their existence, a specific shape to their being in the world. On the other hand, this metaphor should not imply an over-determined model of religious life: the open-endedness of spiritual desire is integral to its authenticity. Even though we may be able to see the way ahead, at least on a clear day, the pathway that stretches before us still has a kind of virtuality. This belongs to the ontology of habit, going back to Aristotle’s analysis of dispositions: we can distinguish the (latent, potential) pathway from the (active, actual) walking along the path. In a sense, then, the pathway comes into being anew with each repetition.

6 Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding Mark Wynn

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I consider what kind of understanding is required if the religious or spiritual life is to be ordered not only to moral, but also aesthetic goods. I aim to answer three questions. First of all: what is, or ought to be, the contribution of aesthetic goods to spiritual well-being? Then: what must the spiritual or religious person understand if their life is to be directed to spiritually significant aesthetic goods? And finally: granted that religious understanding has the content that is described in our response to this second question, how is that understanding to be realized? In general terms, my proposal will be that a deepened appreciation of the spiritual significance of aesthetic goods suggests a new and fruitful perspective on the bodily and perceptual character of religious understanding. It is a platitude that moral goods are central to the well-lived spiritual life, and the question of how aesthetic goods may contribute to spiritual well-being has been, by comparison, rather neglected. Here, I shall begin with an account of the spiritual significance of moral goods before sketching a perspective on the importance of aesthetic goods for the spiritual life. Specifically, I shall start by recalling Thomas Aquinas’s category of infused moral virtue before considering how that category may be extended so that it encompasses not only moral but also aesthetic goods.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 117 THOMAS AQUINAS ON THE GOODS OF THE INFUSED MORAL VIRTUES As is well known, Aquinas inherited from his philosophical forebears the idea that there are acquired moral virtues, produced by a process of habituation, and from theological tradition the idea that there are infused theological virtues. When developing his own account of the good life, he retains both categories, but also introduces a further, hybrid category—that of infused moral virtue.1 Aquinas explains the rationale for this intermediate category of virtue in these terms: The theological virtues are enough to shape us to our supernatural end as a start, that is, to God himself immediately and to none other. Yet the soul needs also to be equipped by infused virtues in regard to created things, though as subordinate to God. (Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 63. 3 ad 2)2

The key phrase in this text is “in regard to created things, though as subordinate to God.”3 So the infused moral virtues share their subject-matter with the acquired, or Aristotelian, moral virtues, because they are concerned with “created things,” and their teleology with the theological virtues, since they aim at a mode of life that is “subordinate to” God. Hence, whereas the theological virtues are ordered to the person’s flourishing in relation to God “immediately,” the infused moral virtues are directed to this same end indirectly— that is, via the person’s relations to the created order. To see more exactly how this picture is supposed to work, and its implications for an account of religious understanding, let’s take an example of how Aquinas conceives the relationship between an acquired moral virtue and its infused counterpart. In the following passage, he is considering the virtue of temperance:

1 Aquinas was not the first to think of moral virtues as infused. His Dominican predecessor, Peraldus, was exercised by similar issues and drawn to somewhat similar conclusions. For an exploration of the relationship between the two, and the background to Aquinas’s thought on these subjects more generally, see John Inglis, “Aquinas’s Replication of the Acquired Moral Virtues,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 27 (1999), pp. 3–27. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, I am following the Blackfriars translation of the Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964–74). 3 Aquinas’s text reads: “Sed oportet quod per alias virtutes infusas perficiatur anima circa alias res, in ordine tamen ad Deum.”

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It is evident the measure of desires appointed by a rule of human reason is different from that appointed by a divine rule. For instance, in eating, the measure fixed by human reason is that food should not harm the health of the body, nor hinder the use of reason; whereas [the] divine rule requires that a man should chastise his body and bring it into subjection [1 Cor 9:27], by abstinence in food, drink and the like. (ST 1a2ae. 63. 4)

From these remarks, it is clear that the acquired and infused moral virtues differ in their epistemology, as well as in their teleology. To take Aquinas’s example, in the case of acquired temperance, a dietary regime will be appropriate insofar as it is consistent with the health of the body. And this measure of right consumption, and right desire, is relative to human nature, and accordingly knowable by reason: one kind of diet will make for health in a human being, and another kind for health in a porpoise or tortoise; and to determine, in general terms, what kind of diet is appropriate for a creature of our nature, it is enough to defer to the relevant empirical inquiry. By contrast, in the case of the infused form of the virtue, the measure of right consumption will be provided by a theological narrative. And typically, this narrative will be inaccessible to human reason. To take the example that Aquinas gives here, the appropriateness of dietary “abstinence” rests on a truth that is disclosed in scripture, namely the truth that human beings are called to share in the life of God, post-mortem, in the beatific vision, where this teaching yields a measure of right conduct that is relative not simply to human nature, but to our “supernatural” end.4 So on this perspective, the infused moral virtues share their epistemology and teleology (and also their etiology, as infused) with the theological virtues, and their subject-matter, so far as they are concerned with “created things,” with the acquired moral virtues. For our

4 The role of the afterlife in this account is evident if we set the passage that Aquinas quotes from 1 Corinthians within its original literary context. The full text reads: “25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27 No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave [chastise my body and bring it into subjection] so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” (New International Version) Paul’s reference to a “crown that will last forever” indicates that his concern here is with the person’s postmortem life with God.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 119 purposes, what matters in this account is the idea that, in our relations to the material world, we can realize a good that is different from the goods that Aristotle recognized in his account of the virtuous life, because here the measure of the appropriateness of our relationship to the material world is provided not simply by our human nature, but by reference to our relationship to God in eternity. Let us think further about the nature of this additional kind of good, which will arise insofar as our engagement with the world is theologically appropriate. In this way, we can arrive at a fuller picture of what the spiritual practitioner needs to understand if their life is to be ordered to the goods of the infused moral virtues. Granted this account of the structure of the goods of the infused moral virtues, it is natural to ask: how can a theological truth, such as the truth that we are called to share in the life of God in the beatific vision, provide a measure of right action, and right desire, in our relations with the created order? If we follow Aquinas and take the case of infused temperance, we might answer: our dietary habits will count as appropriate relative to a divine rule insofar as they improve our chances of attaining the beatific vision. And perhaps that is partly what Aquinas has in mind. After all, in the text from 1 Corinthians that Aquinas cites here, Paul is comparing the spiritual disciplines that are needed to secure a “crown that will last forever” to the physical disciplines that are required for an athletics contest. And the measure of the appropriateness of disciplines of this second kind is, presumably, their tendency to raise the probability of success in the games.5 But there is a further way of thinking about how a theological narrative might ground a divine rule. In the following text, Aquinas is considering the rationale for neighbor love, a virtue which we can assign to the same family as the infused moral virtues insofar as it concerns our relations to the created world (specifically, to rational creatures), where those relations are treated as “subordinate to God.” In this passage, Aquinas is considering, in particular, whether neighbor love is rightly extended to the angels. This might seem a somewhat arcane concern, but the account he provides here has the same 5

For the passage from 1 Corinthians, see footnote 4 of this chapter. In the New Testament, Jesus remarks: “blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5: 8, NIV). And we might, perhaps, take this teaching to imply that the disciplining of desires is in some way a metaphysical precondition for attaining the vision of God.

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general form as the answer he gives when considering a range of other questions concerning the scope of neighbor love, such as the question of whether neighbor love is rightly shown to our enemies, to nonrational creatures, to our bodies, and to ourselves. So this answer bears on the question of who, in general, is to count as an object of neighbor love. Aquinas writes: the friendship of charity is founded upon the fellowship of everlasting happiness, in which men share in common with the angels. For it is written (Mt. 22:30) that “in the resurrection . . . men shall be as the angels of God in heaven”. It is therefore evident that the friendship of charity extends also to the angels. (ST 2a2ae. 25. 10)6

In this passage, Aquinas seems to be taking for granted that human beings will share with the angels in the beatific vision; and his suggestion is that an account of how we should relate to them here and now, so far as we have an opportunity to do so, can be “founded upon” this truth.7 And on the same basis, we could say that an account of how we are to relate to our fellow human beings, here and now, can be grounded in the truth that we will one day share with them in “the fellowship of everlasting happiness.” To judge from this text, my treating other human beings, or the angels, as my neighbor is appropriate, therefore, not because it makes my participation in the beatific vision any more likely, but because it is, in some way, fitting relative to the already established truth that we will one day share in the beatific vision.8 Let us call this kind of appropriateness “existential” rather than “causal” or “metaphysical,” as here the fittingness of my conduct

6

Here I am following the Benziger Bros. translation (1947), available here: http:// dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/index.html. 7 Aquinas’s text reads: “amicitia caritatis, sicut supra dictum est, fundatur super communicatione beatitudinis aeternae, in cuius participatione communicant cum Angelis homines.” 8 In the article that follows the passage I have quoted here, Aquinas writes: “In this life, men who are in sin retain the possibility of obtaining everlasting happiness: not so those who are lost in hell, who, in this respect, are in the same case as the demons” (ST 2a2ae. 25. 11 ad 2). From this article, it is clear that for a person to be entitled to neighbor love, it is enough for them to “retain the possibility” of sharing in the beatific vision. Accordingly, if we take this text as our starting-point, then we may wish to say that the relevant theological teaching, against which we are to measure our relations to others in the present, is not the truth that one day we will share with them in the beatific vision, but the truth that, possibly, we may do so. The case I develop in the body of the text could be re-formulated in these terms.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 121 is a function of its sensitivity to an already established theological context, rather than of its making certain outcomes more likely. We are all familiar with the case where we reason from truths concerning the history of our relations to another human being to a truth about how we are to relate to them in the present. (To take a simple example, if I have broken a promise to someone, then that truth can condition the quality of my moral relations to the person in the present, for instance by placing me under an obligation to make reparation.) In this text, Aquinas seems to be appealing to a structurally similar, although less familiar, kind of thought, by taking truths concerning our future relations to a person to ground a truth about how we are to relate to that person in the present. Such future truths may be hard to anticipate in the ordinary course of life, but the implication of this passage is that revealed truths concerning our eschatological future can play a role in determining how we ought to relate to others in the present. In sum, Aquinas reiterates the story, familiar from Aristotle and theological tradition, that the well-lived human life comprises those goods that are realized insofar as our relations to the created order are appropriate relative to our human nature, and those goods that are realized insofar as our relations to God are appropriate “immediately”, that is, independently of our relations to the created order. And using the category of infused moral virtue, he is able to elaborate on this story, by suggesting that, in addition to these two kinds of good, there is another, hybrid kind of good that is integral to the spiritual life, namely the kind that arises insofar as our relations to the created order are appropriate relative to our theological context. As we have seen, the notion of appropriateness relative to theological context can be spelt out in various ways. In the following discussion, I shall mostly be concerned with the kind of appropriateness that is implied in Aquinas’s account of neighbor love—that is, the kind that I have termed existential, rather than causal—but this is not to say that the other kinds of appropriateness have no relevance for an appreciation of the contribution of aesthetic goods to the spiritual life. Granted this general picture, we should say that if a person is to attain the goods that are the object of the infused moral virtues, then they will need to understand the relevant theological narrative, and also the normative implications of that narrative—which is to say, to keep our focus on the case that is of particular concern here, they will need to understand which

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world-directed habits of thought, desire, and action are existentially appropriate relative to the narrative. On Aquinas’s account, these hybrid goods are integral to the moral dimension of the spiritual life: to the extent that we succeed in realizing such goods, then our relations to the created order will be morally appropriate relative to our theological context. For instance, if I treat other human beings as my neighbor, then my relations to them will be morally fitting, relative to the truth that we will one day share in the beatific vision. In the next phase of this discussion, I want to build on Aquinas’s conception of the infused moral virtues by considering whether a story of this kind might be relevant to the question of whether there are any theologically grounded aesthetic goods.

EXTENDING AQUINAS’S CASE INTO THE AESTHETIC DOMAIN: BODILY COMPORTMENT AND THE SPIRITUAL LI FE Religious communities are commonly concerned to regulate the disposition of the body in worship and other devotional contexts. There are also, of course, iconographical traditions which take a keen interest in the representation of the posture and facial expressions of figures of acknowledged sanctity, such as the Buddha and Christ. Or again, we might think of depictions of the annunciation, and the attention to the inflexions of Mary’s body that is evident in a picture such as Botticelli’s Cestello Annunciation.9 It is worth distinguishing this kind of interest in the comportment of the body from the kind that we have already encountered when discussing neighbor love. If I am to treat someone as my neighbor, then in relevant circumstances, I need to treat them with beneficence; and in standard cases, beneficent action will require that I move my body appropriately. For instance, love of neighbor may require me to offer someone a drink, and to do that I may need to extend the person a cup of water. Here, the movements of my body turn out to be appropriate, relative to theological context, insofar as they are morally efficacious. But the 9 For an illustration of the painting, see www.virtualuffizi.com/the-cestelloannunciation-by-sandro-botticelli.html, accessed July 5, 2017.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 123 interest in the body that is evident in, for instance, depictions of the annunciation does not seem to be of this merely instrumental kind. In the case where I hold out a cup of water, there is no interest in the body as such: all that matters is that its motions should secure the desired moral outcome. By contrast, in his depiction of the annunciation, Botticelli’s interest is evidently in the gracefulness that is displayed in the inflexions of Mary’s body. Here, and similarly in representations of, say, Christ or the Buddha, the focus seems to be not on the body’s role in bringing about good outcomes, but on its capacity to register directly, in bodily terms, the significance of the relevant religious context. Let’s mark this distinction by talking on the one side of “behavior” and on the other of “bodily demeanor.” Aquinas’s account of neighbor love invites us to suppose that a person’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and desires, and in the relevant sense behavior, are all open to assessment as more or less adequate relative to the theological context. But Aquinas’s discussion, and standard treatments of the idea of neighbor love, do not, so far as I can see, touch on this further way in which a person’s dealings with the world may turn out to be appropriate relative to the theological context. Accordingly, by introducing the notion of bodily demeanor, we can identify a further kind of hybrid good, in addition to those that are involved in Aquinas’s account of the infused moral virtues. There is some discussion of these matters in the philosophical and theological tradition. For instance, C.S. Lewis remarks that the “new” humanity of Christians is evident in their bodily demeanor, suggesting that: “Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant.” And famously, bodily comportment, in the sense that concerns us, is integral to Aristotle’s account of the properly “proud” or great-souled man. As he says: “a slow step is thought proper to the proud man, a deep voice, and a level utterance.”10 Similarly, Raimond Gaita writes of the “demeanor” of a nun in her interaction with the patients on a psychiatric ward—glossing “demeanor” as “the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body.” Gaita comments that the nun’s comportment 10 See respectively C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Glasgow: William Collins, Sons & Co., 1944), 186, and Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book IV, Section III.

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toward the patients “revealed” their “full humanity.”11 But while he is evidently concerned with the moral import of the nun’s demeanor, for Gaita too, it is the movements of the body themselves, and their appropriateness relative to context, rather than their tendency to bring about good outcomes, that is the focus of interest. My references to worship, and depictions of the saints, or of a scene such as the annunciation may have suggested that the interest of spiritual traditions in bodily comportment extends only to certain special individuals, or to rather restricted domains of thought and action. But as these examples—from Lewis, Aristotle, and Gaita—indicate, ideals of bodily demeanor can be applied very readily in our everyday relations with other human beings and the wider world, where those ideals are understood once again in terms of existential fittingness. So we might seek to elaborate on Aquinas’s account of the goods of the infused moral virtues by supposing that a person’s demeanor, as well as behavior, can be deemed more or less adequate relative to their theological context. And for our purposes, it is important to note that this further variety of good appears to have, in some instances, an aesthetic character. Let’s take again Botticelli’s depiction of the annunciation. Here, the inflexions of Mary’s body constitute a fitting response to the relevant theological context—namely, the context that is revealed in the angel’s address. And in this case, the resulting hybrid good has inherently an aesthetic dimension. Why? Because, here, the appropriateness of Mary’s bodily demeanor is partly a matter of its constituting a graceful acknowledgment of the angel’s address. Of course, from a purely secular point of view, it will also be evident that the movements of Mary’s body are graceful. But in this scene, there is, in addition, a further kind of beauty, one which cannot be identified independently of reference to the relevant theological context—namely, the beauty that is evident insofar as the disposition of Mary’s body constitutes a graceful response to that context. In his discussion of the goals of the religious way of life, Richard Swinburne has drawn attention to the contribution of aesthetic goods to spiritual well-being. For instance, speaking of “beautifying the universe,” he remarks: “If there is a God, such tasks will necessarily 11

Raymond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (New York: Routledge, 1998), 18. As it happens, Gaita associates the nun’s example with “the impartial love of saints” (24), and we might reasonably suppose that he considers her conduct a paradigmatic example of neighbor love.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 125 be vastly more worthwhile than secular tasks—for there will be a depth of contemplation of the richness of life of a person, God, open to us which would not be open if there is no omnipotent and omniscient being.”12 Here, “beautifying the universe” turns out to have a further dimension of significance if there is a God, because it can then prepare the way for, or perhaps in some respects just be a form of, the contemplation of God. Similarly, Swinburne notes how “artistic creativity” will be obligatory if there is a God, and for this reason, too, we should suppose that aesthetic commitments will have a further dimension of significance in a theistic universe, for they will then satisfy an obligation that would not otherwise obtain (and a particularly weighty obligation—one that is owed to God).13 In these ways, Swinburne shows how aesthetic goods will have an additional importance if a theistic worldview proves to be true, and how the truth of theism gives us additional reason, therefore, to pursue such goods. But in these remarks, Swinburne is concerned with the additional non-aesthetic goodness that will attach to aesthetically significant activities, if there is a God—and not, at least not explicitly, with the idea that a further kind of aesthetic goodness may be realizable if there is a God. Our discussion has been concerned with this latter possibility. To take again the example of the annunciation, it is not just that the gracefulness that is evident in Mary’s bodily response to the angel’s address will be additionally good if there is a God, because it will then, for example, satisfy an obligation to God, or in some way contribute to her friendship with God. In this case, we should say that if there is a God, then the inflexions of Mary’s body will realize an additional kind of aesthetic good, because they will now count as graceful not only for the reasons that are evident from a secular perspective, but also considered as an acknowledgment of the theological truths that are disclosed in the angel’s address. So here is one way in which we may extend Aquinas’s discussion of the goods of the infused moral virtues, namely by allowing that bodily comportment, and not only bodily “behavior,” can stand in a 12 Richard Swinburne, “The Christian Scheme of Salvation,” in Michael Rea (ed.), Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology. Volume 1: Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 305. 13 “The Christian Scheme,” 304. The relevant obligation will certainly be “objective” if there is a God, and may also be “subjective”: for this distinction, see 296.

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relation of existential congruence to theological context. And in some such cases, I have suggested, the resulting hybrid good will have an inherently aesthetic character. I shall turn shortly to the implications of this extension of Aquinas’s account for the theme of religious understanding. But first of all, let us see if we can identify a further example of a hybrid good that is fundamentally aesthetic rather than moral in nature.

PERCEPTION OF THE SENSORY WORLD AND THE SPIRITUAL LI FE It is a commonplace of reports of conversion experience that it is not simply the person’s beliefs, desires, and behavior that have changed following conversion, but also their perception of the everyday world. As William James puts it: When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we . . . see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth.14

Illustrating this general tendency, one of the converts cited by James remarks: Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe.15

And Jonathan Edwards, as reported by James, comments: The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind.16

14 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), 151. 15 16 Ibid., 250. Ibid., 249.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 127 These reports are puzzling, and we might well wonder what exactly has changed in the person’s experience of the world. However, the prevalence of this sort of testimony should lead us to suppose that some such change does indeed occur in, or in close association with, conversion experience. Let us see whether it is possible to understand the spiritual significance of this sort of perceptual change in the terms provided by Aquinas’s discussion of the infused moral virtues. If we want to describe the shift in the perceptual field that is reported by converts, two phenomenological categories seem to be of very direct relevance. First of all, it seems that there is a change in the “hue” of the convert’s perceptual field, so that the world now appears brighter or more vivid. And in addition, in some cases, there seems to be a change in the patterns of “salience” that structure the perceptual field: before conversion, the world had appeared relatively “flat,” whereas following conversion, the patterns of salience that inform the perceptual field are more boldly defined, so that objects now stand out more clearly relative to one another.17 It seems that in both these respects—that is, with respect to hue and salience—the appearance of the world can be assessed, in principle, as more or less adequate relative to our theological context. Let’s take first the case of salience. In our everyday dealings with the world, some objects stand out as relatively salient, while others are consigned to the margins of our awareness. And implied in a given ordering of the perceptual field of this kind is a judgment about what is properly deserving of attention. Hence, we can assess patterns of salience both in moral and theological terms: a particular pattern will be morally appropriate insofar as it affords most prominence to those objects that are morally of most importance, and will be theologically fitting insofar as the salience of objects is directly proportional to their significance relative to the relevant theological narrative. Accordingly, we might understand conversion experience as a matter of the patterns of salience that inform the convert’s perceptual field coming to track a divinely ordered hierarchy of values.

17 Compare James’s description of Tolstoy’s experience of a period of existential crisis: “Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead”: ibid., 152. See too his description of the experience of the man “sick with an insidious internal disease” whose experiences of laughing and drinking “turn to a mere flatness” (141).

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To the extent that the world’s appearance is so structured, then it will hold up a kind of mirror to the divine mind: the relative significance of objects, as that is recorded in the patterns of salience that inform the perceptual field, will now match the relative importance of these objects from the divine vantage point. This is one way of thinking about Jonathan Edwards’ comments, as cited by James. Following his conversion, Edwards takes the divine wisdom to be manifested in the everyday world. And perhaps this possibility can be understood as, in part, a matter of the patterns of salience that are inscribed in the perceptual field coming to reflect the relative importance of things in the divine conception of the world. Some reports suggest that as well as the relative salience of objects changing following conversion, the patterns of salience that inform the perceptual field become, in general, bolder or more sharply defined. Perhaps this development can be understood in similar terms: if the perceptual field is relatively flat, then it will fail to register any significant difference in the importance of objects and this, it might be said, must contrast with the divine perspective on the world, which involves, surely, a profound sense of the differentiated import of things. So in this case, too, we can understand the change in the perceptual field, so far as it involves a generalized deepening in patterns of salience, as a matter of the field coming to mirror a divine scale of values. Perhaps we can give a similar kind of account when thinking about the change in hue that seems to be a recurring feature of conversion reports. These reports speak of the world as seeming brighter following conversion, or, as the account I mentioned above has it, as seeming newly “glorified.” In this respect, too, it seems that we can assess the appearance of the world as more or less fitting relative to our theological context. For if God is the creator, and if the world bears at least in part the vestiges of its divine origins, then, it might be said, it is only appropriate that it should appear to us as bright or vivid, rather than as dull or lacking in luster. As with the other cases we have just discussed, this appropriateness is best understood in existential rather than causal terms. These reflections suggest that a person’s experience of the everyday world, as well as their bodily demeanor, can in principle be judged as more or less adequate relative to their theological context. If that is right, then Aquinas’s account of the structure of the goods of the infused moral virtues will be relevant in this further case too.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 129 Moreover, it seems clear that the new appearance of the world following conversion commonly has a strongly aesthetic dimension: converts report that the world appears newly beautified, or newly glorified, or as James puts it in his summation of such reports, as “transfigured” or such that “a new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth.” Are these aesthetic goods of the kind that Swinburne has described in his account of the goods of the religious life, or should we suppose, rather, that they have a distinctively theological ground? There is some reason to take the latter view. The brighter appearance of the world that converts report could be appreciated as beautiful, no doubt, from a purely secular point of view.18 Similarly, we might think of the bolder, more vivid definition of the contents of the perceptual field as beautiful independently of reference to theological considerations. But it is also clear that some converts see the world in its post-conversion guise as beautiful, at least in part, on account of its participation in the divine beauty or divine glory. Hence Edwards writes that “there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.” And as we have seen, James remarks that the experience can be represented in terms of a new heaven shining upon a new earth. The language of “glory” also invites the thought that the new-found beauty of the world involves in some way a breaking in of the divine beauty. So if we take these reports at face value, as a record of the phenomenology of such experiences, there is some reason to say that the new beauty that is encountered in the world, post-conversion, is taken to be beautiful, at least in part, because of its perceived relation to a primordial divine beauty. To the extent that these experiences can be read in these terms, then we should say that this new-found beauty has inherently a theological structure: the experience of this beauty consists, at least in part, in material objects appearing as translucent to their divine source. Once again, we can understand this phenomenology in terms of hue and salience. As we have seen, using these categories, we can give some sense to the idea that the world as it now appears, postconversion, holds up a kind of mirror to the divine mind. We might say, then, that the experience of the divine beauty being manifest in the beauty of ordinary things is a matter of the convert 18 Aquinas is explicit that “brightness” (or claritas) is a constituent of beauty, along with “integrity” and “proportion”: see Summa Theologiae 1a. 39.8.

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registering the character of the divine mind in visual terms—or following Edwards’ formulation, we could say that, here, the material order appears as diaphanous to the divine “wisdom” and “excellence.” So bodily demeanor and the appearance of the everyday world can both be assessed as more or less adequate relative to theological context, and accordingly both can realize hybrid goods of the kind that, on Aquinas’s account, serve as the object of the infused moral virtues. And by contrast with the examples that Aquinas gives, there is some reason to suppose that in these further cases, the hybrid good has, sometimes, an inherently aesthetic character. Allowing for this similarity in the structure of the goods that are realized by bodily demeanor and the appearance of the everyday world, there remain some differences. In the annunciation scene, the relevant beauty rests on the body’s agency: it is as minded and purposeful, rather than as simply a set of movements, that the inflexions of Mary’s body count as a graceful, and therefore beautiful, acknowledgment of the angel’s address. By contrast, from the convert’s perspective, the new-found beauty of the world, following conversion, does not appear to supervene on anything they have done, but seems instead to be a consequence of God’s agency, at work in them. Moreover, in this case, the beauty that is encountered in the world is taken to be beautiful, at least in part, because it is translucent to a divine beauty. And there is no parallel for this relationship in the annunciation scene, where the beauty in the inflexions of Mary’s body, although theologically grounded, can be identified independently of any reference to the divine beauty. So while the relevant aesthetic value has a theological structure in each of these cases, there are also some notable differences. It is worth observing that these theologically grounded aesthetic goods are, potentially, both pervasive and deep—pervasive because they can be realized, in principle, whenever we perceive the world, and whenever we adopt one or another bodily demeanor in our dealings with the world, which is to say in much of our lives; and deep because they concern the appropriateness of our lives not simply in relation to some finite good, or localized context, but with respect to the divine good and our ultimate context. Accordingly, there is some reason to suppose that these hybrid goods are of fundamental importance for the spiritual life. And in that case, they will be of corresponding significance for an account of the nature of religious or spiritual understanding.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 131 RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING AND THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE It is time to return to the three questions I posed at the outset. Let’s take them in turn. What is, or ought to be, the contribution of aesthetic goods to spiritual well-being? On the basis of our discussion here, we may say, to put the point concisely: aesthetic goods are integral to the spiritual life because of the inherently aesthetic character of some hybrid goods (and perhaps for other reasons too). And what must the spiritual or religious person understand, if their life is to be directed to these spiritually significant aesthetic goods? In brief, we may say: they must understand both the relevant theological narrative, and what constitutes an appropriate disposition of the body, and ordering and coloring of the perceptual field, relative to that narrative. That leaves the third of our questions: how is this understanding to be realized if its object is as just described? Let’s approach this question by considering first of all the case of bodily demeanor. When I am at a football ground or graveyard, or in a classroom, or wherever it may be, the movements of my body need to be properly adapted not only to the physical contours of the space, so that I don’t bump my head or trip over, but also to its social significance, so that I am not the source of confusion or offence, or some such failing. And the social significance of a place can sometimes be, as with a graveyard, a function of its history. In such cases, we are sensitive to the social, and storied, meaning that attaches to the place. And this sensitivity is not typically a matter of rehearsing various thoughts about the place and its significance in a purely mental way, before reading off the implications of those thoughts for the proper orientation of the body in the place, before then enacting the relevant bodily disposition. Rather, when in a graveyard, for example, or equally when in a football ground or shopping center, if I am functioning in the normal way, then I apprehend directly, in the responses of my body, how I should be oriented in the space, if I am to give due recognition to its social and storied significance.19

19 Compare Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the habitus, and its role in guiding the body’s orientation in the world. See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990; first published in French, 1980), 53.

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In this discussion, we have also been concerned with the storysensitive disposition of the body. Of course, we have been interested, in particular, in theological stories, such as the story of the beatific vision, where those stories are taken to condition the significance of the objects we encounter in the world, including our fellow human beings, and food and drink. But allowing for this difference in subjectmatter, these theological examples seem to be of the same general character as the more familiar, everyday cases I have just mentioned, where we orient ourselves in graveyards and so on, by taking stock of the storied identity of a material context in bodily terms. And it seems reasonable to conclude that the same kind of understanding is at work in both the theological and the everyday case. Accordingly, we should say that if a person is to attain those hybrid goods that are conditional upon the orientation of the body in space, then their understanding of the relevant relations of congruence, between the body’s movements and a given theological narrative, will need to be, fundamentally, in the body. That is, whether we are concerned with the cast of the person’s facial expression, or their bodily comportment, or even, if we follow Aristotle, with the rhythms and timbre of their speech, in each case alignment with the theological context will require, in the normal case, that the person’s body be capable of tracking the relevant place-relative meanings directly, rather as when in a graveyard, I do not give my body instructions about how to move in ways that give due acknowledgment to the storied identity of this place, but instead simply reckon with its significance directly in bodily terms. The same sort of perspective seems to be relevant when we move from bodily comportment to perception of the everyday world. In the usual case, I register the importance of objects directly, by reference to their salience and hue in the perceptual field.20 Of course, a more inferential understanding is also possible, but standardly, when I move about in the world, my understanding of the relative significance of items in my environment is realized in the first instance not in some relatively discursive or theoretical mode, but directly in perceptual terms. And it seems reasonable to suppose that the same kind of competence is displayed when my assessment of the relative 20 Compare Lawrence Blum’s account of “moral perception” in his Moral Perception and Particularlity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); for instance, 31–3.

Aesthetic Goods and the Nature of Religious Understanding 133 importance of objects in the perceptual field tracks their theological significance. Here too, the understanding will be realized in the first instance in perceptual terms. In sum, our understanding of the ways in which the body’s demeanor may be properly aligned with a theological narrative is, standardly, not available in some relatively abstract, discursive mode, but realized directly in the dispositions of the body. And similarly, our understanding of the ways in which the appearance of the world may be appropriate relative to a theological narrative is, in the normal case, realized directly in the ordering and coloring of the perceptual field. So in brief, if the aesthetic goods we have been examining here are indeed of some spiritual importance, then in central cases, religious understanding will take as its object relations of existential congruence between the body, both as moving and as perceiving, and our theological context. And that understanding will be realized, primordially, in the body’s tendencies to orient itself in space, and in its habits of perception. Such is the understanding that is displayed, we may surmise, in the lives of the saints, in their relations with the created world.21

21 I am grateful for comments I received on drafts of this chapter following presentations at Heythrop College; the Northumbrian Triangle in Philosophy of Religion workshop on “religion and the arts,” held at the University of Leeds in January 2017; and at a workshop on “faith and reason,” convened by Paul Lodge and Mark Wrathall at the University of Oxford in March 2017. I am especially grateful to my colleague Víctor Durà-Vilà for his detailed and constructive comments. I am also grateful to the John Templeton Foundation, and to the Philosophy Department of St Louis University, for a grant forming part of the Happiness and Well-Being project, which enabled me to develop some of the ideas in this chapter.

7 Religious Knowledge versus Religious Understanding Kyle Scott

INTRODUCTION Contemporary religious epistemology has much to say about topics such as knowledge, rationality, evidence, and experience; but it has much less to say about understanding. This observation alone is not especially interesting—no doubt there will always be new topics to discuss in any area of philosophy, many of which will be important and fruitful. I will argue, however, that religious epistemology is neglecting a topic that should be central. This is because understanding is of greater epistemic value than knowledge, and because understanding plays a more important role in the lives of religious believers. My aim in this chapter is to persuade the reader that religious understanding has greater epistemic value than religious knowledge, and that this should make a difference to debates in religious epistemology. I will offer support for this claim by comparing the importance of having an account of religious understanding with that of having an account of religious knowledge. First, I argue that religious understanding is distinct from religious knowledge—what I mean by this is that an account of religious knowledge will not thereby offer us an account of religious understanding, and neither can we construct an account of religious understanding by simply adding to an account of religious knowledge. Second, I will argue that religious understanding has greater value than religious knowledge because of the connection between understanding and action; and because of the difference that religious belief ought to make to a religious believer’s

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epistemic life. The third and final support I wish to offer is that by neglecting to discuss understanding, debates in religious epistemology can be misunderstood and possible responses to arguments can be left out—I will achieve this by briefly considering one example.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING It is difficult to say exactly what understanding is, and how it differs from knowledge. Throughout this chapter I will attempt to describe the two as clearly as possible and use simple examples. It does not seem to be possible to give precise definitions, but fortunately we seem to have a good intuitive grasp of what understanding is and examples of it, and that will hopefully be sufficient for our purposes. I will attempt to explain understanding by contrasting it with knowledge. To know something means to have a belief that is properly related to the truth in some way. For example, I believe that the ceiling in this room is white and I believe this because I have seen it; I believe that the postman’s name is Phil because my neighbor told me that; and I believe that the product of 385 and 26 is 10,010 because I just worked it out on a piece of paper. As long as everything is going well, I will have knowledge in these cases. This is because there is an appropriate connection between my belief and the truth of the matter. Knowledge, therefore, concerns beliefs and their connection to the truth. Understanding is different; it involves something broader. Wayne Riggs offers a helpful description of understanding: The kind of understanding I have in mind is the appreciation or grasp of order, pattern, and how things “hang together”. Understanding has a multitude of appropriate objects, among them complicated machines, people, subject disciplines, mathematical proofs, and so on. Understanding something like this requires a deep appreciation, grasp, or awareness of how its parts fit together, what role each one plays in the context of the whole, and of the role it plays in the larger scheme of things. (Riggs 2003: 217)

Here Riggs highlights how understanding involves more than just what beliefs we have and whether they are appropriately connected to the truth. Understanding involves more than just the beliefs you have; it also requires being able to grasp how they fit together.

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For example, understanding how a car works means being able to grasp how the parts work together and why they are arranged the way they are. Understanding the French Revolution involves more than having true beliefs about the French Revolution; it involves things such as being able to identify the causes of this historical event and having an appreciation of why they led to the French Revolution. Understanding requires more than simply getting things right; it requires that you are able to fit things together and see the connections. Knowledge requires simply that your beliefs match up to reality in the right sort of way, but understanding involves more than that. It requires us to grasp the structure or shape of things. The difference is often observed in students. As Philip Kitcher (1989: 437–8) points out, a student can have knowledge of Maxwell’s equations or Newton’s laws without understanding them.1 The student can have knowledge simply by learning from her teacher the relevant claims, but understanding requires something like an awareness of how these equations and laws describe the world and being able to apply them to solve problems. This also highlights how knowledge can—at least sometimes—be easy to attain; whereas understanding requires some cognitive effort to see how things fit together. This same difference can be illustrated for religious matters as well. Suppose that a religious believer believes that God created the world and that she in fact knows this. Such a belief may not involve much in the way of understanding even if it is known. For the believer to have understanding it would require her to situate this belief in a broader context. For example, because of her belief that the world is created by God she may come to view her environment differently: as sacred or worthy of respect. It may also change her behavior because she believes that she now has a duty of care for the world. In this case, these beliefs manifest understanding because the religious believer does not simply give assent to a certain proposition, but recognizes and grasps the connections between things and sees the implications of her beliefs. The overarching aim of this chapter is to persuade the reader that the topic of religious understanding ought to have more attention in religious epistemology. A possible response to this claim would be 1 The relevance of this observation to the literature on knowledge and understanding is discussed by Stephen Grimm (2012: 106).

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that religious epistemology already does have a significant amount to say on this topic, it is just that it does not go under that heading. From the way that understanding has been described above, it may appear that it is a kind of knowledge or that understanding builds upon knowledge. If this is the case, then there may be no problem after all— focusing on knowledge does not mean neglecting understanding; rather, the two go together. On this way of looking at the topic, any progress we make in our discussions about religious knowledge is also progress toward an account of religious understanding. So, the problem is not that religious epistemology has neglected understanding; it is merely that the progress on this topic has not been properly highlighted. I will argue, however, that this is not correct. The reason for this is that knowledge and understanding are distinct—a person can have knowledge while lacking understanding, and also understanding while lacking knowledge. This is enough to show that offering an account of one is not enough on its own to provide us with an account of the other. Duncan Pritchard (2010) has offered some thought experiments to show that knowledge and understanding are distinct. He has argued that there are cases where a person has knowledge and lacks understanding; and also where a person has understanding and lacks knowledge. Take first a case of knowledge without understanding. Knowledge without Understanding. Suppose that Duncan has a house and it burns down because of faulty wiring. His son asks him why the house burned down and he tells him that it is because of faulty wiring. His son believes truly that the house burned down because of the faulty wiring but due to his age he has no idea how faulty wiring could cause the house to burn down. It seems clear in this case that Duncan’s son can come to know why the house burned down in this way. Were someone to ask him why the house burned down, he could tell them, and we can suppose that his basis for this belief is a good one. But if his son has no conception of how faulty wiring could lead to the house burning down, then he does not seem to understand why the house burned down—he is not able to grasp the connection between the faulty wiring and the house burning down. This should not be surprising because intuitively understanding seems to be a much greater feat than knowledge.

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These sorts of cases seem to establish that knowledge and understanding are not the same thing. But one might still think that in cases where one has understanding, one must also have knowledge. This would be the case if knowledge is a component of understanding or if understanding is a special case of knowledge. There are, however, also cases where a person has understanding but lacks knowledge. Pritchard develops an example offered by Jonathan Kvanvig. Understanding without Knowledge. Suppose that an agent visits a library to learn about the Comanches. They select a book and read it. The book is very scholarly and full of well-researched accounts about the Comanches. As a result our agent gains lots of true beliefs about the Comanches. Unbeknownst to the agent, the library they visited is full of completely unreliable books, which nevertheless appear just as scholarly as the one reliable book in the library—the book on the Comanches. This agent can accurately answer questions about the Comanches, and is able to do such things as explain why they were so dominant in the southern plains of North America from the late seventeenth until the late nineteenth centuries. This example is similar to some Gettier examples such the barn façade thought experiment that are used to show how a person’s environmental surroundings can deprive her of knowledge.2 The agent in this example has gained many correct beliefs about the Comanches by reading this book. This is an ordinarily reliable method, but in this case she could have very easily got things very wrong. Had the agent picked up any other book in this library she would have believed it, and ended up with mostly false beliefs. This means that she lacks knowledge even though her beliefs are true. But what about understanding? Should we think that this also undermines the agent’s understanding? The agent in this case has many true beliefs about the Comanches but we can suppose that she also has more than this. It is compatible with the example above that she is able to talk very sensibly about the Comanches and to explain to others various aspects of their culture and history. She may also be able to engage fruitfully in counterfactual reasoning and discuss things such as what would have happened

2

See Alvin Goldman (1976).

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if the early Comanches had not acquired horses. This would only be possible by grasping the connections among a variety of facts. Such a scenario seems to be a clear case of understanding even if she might have easily picked up a different book and gained mostly false beliefs. This fact seems to undermine her knowledge, but not her understanding. These examples help to show that knowledge and understanding come apart, but they also help to give us insights into what knowledge and understanding are. A person knows when they have a certain sort of connection to the truth, a connection that means you could not easily have been wrong. What is important to notice here (for our purposes) is that knowledge picks out a certain relation between one of your beliefs and the fact of the matter, not a relationship among your beliefs. Understanding is different—it is more holistic; it is a matter of having a network of beliefs and being able to grasp the connections between those beliefs. The connection between your belief and the fact of the matter is still important (one cannot gain understanding through guessing), but what is different is that there is a stronger internal component that involves not only being connected to the truth but seeing the connections between one’s beliefs. This has implications for the value of knowledge and understanding. As Pritchard has argued, understanding is more valuable than knowledge because understanding necessarily involves a cognitive achievement whereas knowledge does not. Knowledge can be viewed as an achievement, but only if we adopt a very weak reading of achievement. When we have knowledge it will always be the case that we have engaged one of our abilities, so in that sense it will be an achievement. Consider examples such as knowing what color the wall is by looking, knowing the time by asking your colleague, or knowing what you had for breakfast by remembering. Typically, these sorts of examples will involve no overcoming of an obstacle—the knowledge in these examples is very easy to gain and the way they have been reached adds nothing to the value of having the knowledge. Understanding is different. Having and forming beliefs in the right way is not sufficient to have understanding—one could memorize a long list of related facts from a reliable source and this still would not constitute understanding. What is required of the agent is to be able to grasp the inferential connections and explanatory relationships among their beliefs. There are cases of knowledge where all one has to do is form the right belief and that will be enough to know the

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proposition. Pritchard uses the example of a visitor to Chicago wanting to know the way to the Sears Tower.3 The visitor asks a local where the Sears Tower is and gains a true belief. The visitor has knowledge but all the cognitive work is being done by the local; the visitor is benefiting from someone else’s effort. The analogous case of understanding is not like this. A person can help you to understand by trying to describe the connections between propositions for you, but without grasping those connections for yourself you will lack genuine understanding. Seeing these connections is a significant achievement because having the right beliefs is not enough to have the understanding; one must always do something further. The fact that understanding involves achievement, whereas knowledge does not, shows us that understanding is more valuable than knowledge because achievements are valuable. To see this, consider a person whose life is full of great value such as fame, fortune, and happiness (or whatever the reader thinks is valuable), but that all these things come about for the agent through luck, and not through any effort on her own part. Such a life, it seems, would be lacking in some way. A life filled with the same things, but where the agent has had to overcome obstacles to achieve these goods, is more valuable. We also tend to judge the value of an action differently depending upon a person’s circumstances and abilities. For example, walking to the local shop for a healthy, able-bodied person is unremarkable, but for a person with a disability, or who has a severe illness, this may be regarded as a significant achievement that we judge to be worthy of praise. The reason for this is because achievements themselves are valuable. Knowledge requires being connected to the truth in the right way, which may or may not involve much cognitive effort on the part of the agent, whereas understanding requires grasping how things fit together, which always requires cognitive effort by the agent. For this reason, Pritchard argues that understanding is more valuable than knowledge. So, then, our first reason for thinking that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge is because understanding is more valuable than knowledge. I do not wish to stop there, however. In the remainder of this chapter I want to add to this by arguing that there are additional reasons in the case of religious belief for thinking that understanding is more valuable

3

This example is borrowed from Jenifer Lackey (2007).

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than knowledge. This is because of the role that understanding plays in the religious life compared to religious knowledge.

THE VALUE OF RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING My claim is that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge. My claim is not that all instances of religious understanding are more valuable than all instances of religious knowledge; rather, it is that religious understanding of some particular matter is of greater value than religious knowledge of that same matter. Particular instances of knowledge may be very valuable and may be instrumentally very valuable, but we should align our epistemic goals in such a way that we place greater value on attaining understanding than on attaining knowledge. In this section I will present two arguments for thinking that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge. The first is that there is an important connection between understanding and action that gives understanding value. The second argument relies on the distinctive value of understanding in a religious context.

Understanding and Action Religion is very clearly not just a matter of belief. Religion is also about action. This can be seen in the rituals and ceremonies that religious communities engage in, but also in their approach to ethics. All of the major world religions have something to say about morality and religious believers are urged to think about their actions and consider the right way to live. Actions are important in religious observance; the beliefs that you hold should affect the way you act, and the actions that you engage in should affect your beliefs as well (which seems to particularly be the case for religious rituals). This is relevant to the present discussion because this connection between belief and action is enhanced by understanding. To see this, consider the following examples: Action without Understanding. Suppose that maintaining a good level of health is a morally good thing to do. Anne has been told by her friend Bill that exercising is a morally good thing to do

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because it will help her to stay healthy. Anne knows that Bill is very reliable on these matters and she trusts him and thereby comes to know that exercising is a morally good thing to do and she exercises. She does not, however, understand why exercising is a morally good thing to do—she sees no connection between exercising and why she ought to do it. In this example, what Anne does is good (supposing that the details of the story are correct), and she knows that what she is doing is good, but she does not understand why it is good. Anne is unable to grasp the connection between the behavior and goodness. This does not mean that her actions are bad or morally worthless, but it is lacking in some way because she is not motivated to act the way she does by appreciating the goodness of the action. Let’s consider a slightly different version of the story: Action with Understanding. Charlotte reflects on the goodness of being healthy and her trying to maintain her health and sees that doing so would show respect to herself and others around her. From this she concludes that she ought to exercise and that doing so would be the morally right thing to do. She knows that exercising is good and she also understands why exercising is good and this motivates her to behave in the way that she does. In this example what Charlotte does is good and she knows that it is good; but she also “sees” that it is good, and her seeing that it is good motivates her to act in the way that she does. Charlotte is able to grasp why exercising is good and that leads to her action. This is a kind of understanding. Charlotte understands why exercising is a good thing to do. This means that her behavior is likely to be more stable because it is motivated directly by her grasping its goodness rather than, as in the case of Anne, being mediated via another person. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three requirements of a virtuous act: a person’s action is virtuous only if she knows what she does; she chooses the action for its own sake; and the action proceeds from a firm and unchangeable character.4 According to Aristotle, a truly virtuous act requires more than simply doing the right thing; the 4

Aristotle EN II.4, 1105 a17–b18, trans. Ross.

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agent must also be rightly motivated and her action must come from a stable disposition. It is possible that Anne meets Aristotle’s requirements, depending upon how we interpret them. Does Anne choose her action for its own sake? She is choosing it because it is good, so in that sense she seems to be choosing it for its own sake. She is not, however, fully acquainted with its goodness so she does not know why it is good. This means that Anne’s choosing the action for its own sake is partly dependent upon Bill. Charlotte chooses the action for its own sake because she knows why the action is good, and that motivates her to behave the way she does. Charlotte’s action is superior to Anne’s because there is direct connection between the goodness of the action and her acting the way she does. This is possible because of her understanding. Moral improvement and acting well are clearly important in the major world religions. Religious believers are encouraged not just to do the right thing but also to think about the connections between their actions and the reason why they are good—whether this is because they are pleasing to God or are achieving their salvation or some other reason. People from different religions or from none may be in relative agreement about what is right and wrong, but disagree over why these actions are right or wrong. This is a disagreement at the level of understanding, and it is important. We want to have a grasp of why something is right or wrong and to be motivated by the good itself, not just know what is good. This involves developing a deeper understanding of morality, and it is often central within religion.

Understanding in a Religious Context D.Z. Phillips points out that in a religious context we are not merely concerned with extending our knowledge of facts; the cognitive impact of religious belief is supposed to be more wide-reaching than simply adding to our list of beliefs: Coming to see that there is a God is not like coming to see that an additional being exists. If it were, there would be an extension of one’s knowledge of facts, but no extension of one’s understanding. Coming to see that there is a God involves seeing a new meaning in one’s life, and being given a new understanding. The Hebrew-Christian conception of God is not a conception of being among beings. Kierkegaard

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emphasized the point when he said bluntly, “God does not exist. He is eternal”. (Phillips 1970: 17–18)

Religion is not a hobby—like having an interest in 1930s automobiles, or stamp-collecting—it is supposed to make a big difference to your life and to the way you think about things. A religious person, and a non-religious person, may be in relative agreement concerning what exists and events that have taken place, but yet disagree over the significance or interpretation of these things and events. This difference is a difference in understanding. There is a difference in the connections among their beliefs. In religious matters it is not important to simply believe that certain beings exist or that certain events took place, but to grasp the difference this makes to the other things one believes. Joining a religion requires a change in your life. This change may manifest itself in the way you act, the things you say, where you go, and the people you spend time with. It should also, however, make a difference to your epistemic life. This difference may be relatively minor at first—it need not involve giving assent to a certain list of claims. But, over time, there should be a difference as one approaches questions and topics differently. Religious faith should involve thinking about the world differently; and this will, over time, lead to a different epistemic life. This difference is a difference in understanding. The religious believer sees things in the world as fitting together differently and as having a different significance to the non-believer. Knowledge alone has relatively little religious value, but what is valuable is religious understanding—it is seeing the world and one’s place in it differently.

RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING VERSUS RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE: AN EXAMPLE So far I have been making the case that religious knowledge and religious understanding are distinct and that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge. We have seen that a person can have religious knowledge while lacking religious understanding and vice versa. I have also argued that religious understanding is more

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valuable both because of the nature of understanding in general and because of the role understanding plays in the religious life. Given the lack of discussion of religious understanding in the recent literature, this suggests that religious epistemology has neglected some very important topics and questions, but I will also argue that the problem goes deeper than this. In this section I will show, using an example, that neglecting religious understanding can mean that we do not explore all the possible responses to arguments in religious epistemology. Much of religious epistemology is concerned with skeptical arguments about religious beliefs. This, in turn, often leads to a discussion about whether religious knowledge is possible or about related notions such as justification and rationality. But if understanding is a more important epistemic concept, then we really ought to be asking whether these skeptical arguments give us reason to believe that religious believers do not have understanding because, as we have seen, it is possible to lack knowledge while still having understanding. One such skeptical argument is the accidents-of-birth objection. This is an objection to the rationality of religious belief based upon the observation that there is often a correlation between the time and place of a person’s birth, and their religious beliefs. Consider the following observation in John Hick: [I]t is evident that in some ninety-nine per cent of cases the religion which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres depends upon the accidents of birth. Someone born to Buddhist parents in Thailand is very likely to be a Buddhist, someone born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia to be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in Mexico to be a Christian, and so on. (Hick 1989: 2)

Hick observes that most people adopt the religious beliefs of the community they are born into. This observation has been thought by many to undermine the religious believer’s claim to have knowledge of any of her religious beliefs. There are a number of ways to understand this objection, but I do not have the space here to do this objection, and responses to it, justice.5 My intention is not to give the definitive version of this argument, or to settle the debate; rather, I wish to persuade the reader that even if the argument successfully 5 Recent discussions of a variety of versions of this argument and responses to them can be found in Tomas Bogardus (2013) and Max Baker-Hytch (2014).

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calls into question religious knowledge, it does not undermine religious understanding. One way of construing the argument is as showing that religious belief-forming methods are unreliable. Religious believers form beliefs about topics such as what God is like, what happens when we die, and how we should spend our time. They form beliefs on these topics by reading sacred texts and consulting religious leaders. The trouble with forming beliefs in this way, says the objector, is that in different circumstances this method of forming beliefs would lead to very different, often contradictory, results. Had you been born in a different place, at a different time, then you would have ended up with different beliefs. This suggests that religious belief-forming methods are far too sensitive to surrounding circumstances, and are therefore not a reliable method for finding the truth. This, if correct, gives us a reason to doubt all religious beliefs, even if they happen to be correct. The strength of this sort of objection is that it does not require showing that any religious beliefs are false in order to show that they are subject to doubt. The problem here is not just that one could easily have had different religious beliefs. It is obvious that in a different time and in a different place you would have lots of different beliefs. Alvin Plantinga points out that had he been born in Madagascar rather than Michigan, it is likely he would not have believed that he was born in Michigan, but this hardly gives him any reason to doubt that belief.6 The difference with religious belief is that there are many religious beliefs that are supposed to be universal truths. They should not be so sensitive to the time and place of a person’s birth in the way we think it is fitting that a person’s beliefs about where and when they were born should be. It seems, initially at least, that humans are being affected by irrelevant local factors when they form and maintain religious beliefs, and this gives us reason to doubt them. This version of the argument suffers from at least one serious failing. The argument generalizes over all religious belief-forming practices. It groups them together and we are asked to observe that the many members of this single group produce different results, so how are we to trust any of them? Is it really reasonable to group all such practices together? On closer examination there are many

6

See Plantinga (1995), 207.

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differences, and variations—even within a single religious tradition. Religious believers use different religious texts, and the way they interpret them can differ. They also accept the authority of different religious leaders. The role of personal reflection can be different in different religious traditions. Furthermore, the way that these aspects of religious belief-forming practice interact varies greatly. For example, some religious traditions regard religious leaders as proper interpreters of religious texts, whereas others believe that the individual believer can interpret the text on her own. Once we begin to understand the variety of practices that exist, it is hardly surprising that these belief-forming practices produce different beliefs, because they are so different. This does not show that any actual belief-forming practice is unreliable since the differences in religious beliefs can be explained by the differences in the beliefforming practices of each of the groups. This is not enough to fully remove the worry, however. There is still a concern here about what these facts tell us about the rationality of religious belief. Although there are many very important differences between the epistemic practices of religious believers, there are a number of commonalities. Human beings are not born with an ability to form beliefs about the world—we must learn and develop over time. This involves a process of trial and error, practice, learning from others, and reasoning. When it comes to religious matters, we are very dependent on others for our beliefs and belief-forming practices. Although the resulting practices may be very different, they have a common origin—we learn them from those around us.7 Over time we may amend them through experience, reflection, and reasoning, but their origin provides an important influence in shaping their character. This is clear because there does not seem to be any convergence in religious belief-forming practices over time. What this means is that Hick’s observation does not give us any reason to think that any particular religious belief-forming practices are unreliable, but it does give us reason to doubt religious beliefforming practices because they have an unreliable origin. It is clear 7

This is not universally true. Some will claim that their religious belief-forming practices are not learned from others around them. This is most notably the case for founders of religions. But these examples are rare, and what I have to say is true in the vast majority of cases.

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that the way that humans learn and develop their religious beliefforming practices is highly sensitive to the surrounding social environment. Had you been born at a different time and in a different place, you would likely approach religious questions in a different way and form different beliefs as a result. No doubt there are many questions and issues that still need to be addressed here, but my intention is not to convince you that this gives us reason to doubt all religious knowledge. Rather, I wish to highlight that there is a serious concern here, and I hope I have done enough to establish that. Rather than explore possible responses to this objection, I wish to point out that if we shift our focus from thinking about religious knowledge to religious understanding, this problem is not so serious, and a response is readily available. The problem here is that the way we humans learn and develop our religious belief-forming practices seems to be very strongly influenced by our surroundings and there is no clear non-question-begging way of identifying any one of these environments as being preferable to all the others. This means we have a reason to doubt our beliefs, and this undermines knowledge—at least for those sufficiently aware of the objection. This environmental luck undermines the claim that religious knowledge is possible, but does it undermine understanding? Consider the following example:8 Understanding and Environmental Luck. Kate is a scientist and she is conducting experiments on a certain chemical reaction. Through these experiments she is able to make observations about the cause of the chemical reaction. Kate is able to form many true beliefs about what takes place during the chemical reaction and the conditions necessary for it to take place. Furthermore, she is able to offer explanations for her beliefs. Unbeknownst to Kate, when she went to select the scientific instrument for the experiments, she selected it from a shelf that contained mostly malfunctioning instruments. She selected one of the few properly functioning instruments and so was able to gain reliable results, but had she selected a malfunctioning instrument it would have produced inaccurate results and she would not have realized.

8

Adapted from an example offered in Pritchard (2014).

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In this example it seems clear that Kate has genuine understanding of the chemical reaction she is studying. Through her experiments she has gained accurate information about the reaction and is able to integrate this into her wider set of scientific beliefs. As a result, she now has understanding of why this reaction occurs and what circumstances are necessary for it to occur. The fact that she could have easily employed a different method that would not lead to understanding does not undermine this. Likewise, we can draw the same conclusion about religious belief. What matters in the case of religious belief is whether the religious texts, religious authorities, and practices of the religious believer’s community are a reliable way to access religious truths; and whether the individual is able to integrate this information into a wider set of beliefs to form a religious understanding. Just as it does not matter in the Kate example above that she could have easily gone wrong, so too it does not matter to religious understanding that the religious believer could have easily gone wrong. The objection offered by Hick raises a serious doubt about the possibility of religious knowledge, but it does not undermine religious understanding. If religious knowledge is the most valuable epistemic state, then this would be a significant problem; but as I have been arguing, religious understanding is more valuable. So, if the religious believer should be more interested in attaining understanding than knowledge, then this argument is not a reason to abandon her religious beliefs. This does not mean that the objection is not worth considering, or that it shouldn’t be of concern to religious believers; but by recognizing the differing implications this objection has for knowledge and understanding, we can better appreciate the seriousness of it. Skeptical worries in religious epistemology have frequently led to a focus on knowledge, but if understanding is more valuable then we ought to reanalyze these objections and ask whether they undermine religious understanding as well.

IS THIS A NEW FORM OF FIDEISM? Broadly speaking there are three responses to any skeptical challenges to religious belief. The first is to accept that the challenge is successful and give up religious belief; the second is to reject the challenge and show how religious belief can be rational—either by showing that the challenge does not succeed or by offering sufficient reasons to accept

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religious belief in spite of the challenge. The third is to accept the objection but reject the claim that religious belief needs to be rational. This third response is fideism; it is the claim that religious belief is not governed by the norms of reason and must be accepted on faith instead. At first glance the view I am articulating bears some resemblance to fideism since I have argued that we can accept the skeptical objection above, but yet not reject religious belief as a result. This would be a misunderstanding of what is being argued for. Some might say that we have an epistemic duty to give up our beliefs if we have reason to believe that we do not have knowledge. This duty is likely to be held by someone who believes that knowledge is the only, or primary, epistemic good. If, as I have been arguing, there are greater epistemic goods than knowledge, then why should an argument that shows we do not have knowledge be a reason, on its own, to give up any of our beliefs? In such a case, we need to ask broader questions about what other epistemic goods are involved. What is being argued is that we can accept objections that show that religious knowledge is not possible because what is of greater epistemic value is religious understanding. This view should not be thought of as a version of fideism since I am not advocating judging religious belief by some non-rational standard, but instead I am arguing that we should be willing to give up religious knowledge to achieve the greater epistemic good of religious understanding.

CONCLUSION Religious knowledge involves being appropriately connected to the truth, whereas religious understanding involves having a set of beliefs and grasping the connections between them. I have argued that religious understanding is more valuable than religious knowledge. It is more valuable because understanding is more valuable than knowledge; but also because of the role that religious understanding plays in action and in the religious life in general. If this is correct, then it should affect the way we approach religious epistemology—we ought not to think primarily about the possibility of religious knowledge but about the possibility of religious understanding. I have also tried to demonstrate—using an example—that this should change the way we think about some of the traditional arguments in this area.

8 Modal Structuralism and Theism Silvia Jonas

INTRODUCTION Theism is not popular among philosophers.1 There are a number of reasons for this, but the most important one is certainly that the empirical sciences have taken over many of the explanatory roles that used to be fulfilled by the concept of God. Assuming the existence of an all-knowing and all-powerful being is no longer needed to explain nature in all its complexity: physics, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, biology, and so forth offer not only explanations for the vast majority of observable phenomena, but also theories and models that allow their precise prediction. Naturalism is the philosophical position that pays homage to this stunning success of the sciences by considering only those philosophical positions viable that are, in some vaguely defined sense, “consistent” with them. It is easy to see why traditional monotheistic interpretations of theism appear to be in tension with the natural sciences: the properties classically ascribed to God are incompatible with the scientifically 1 Not so among non-philosophers: according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, only 2% of the world’s population self-identify as atheists, a figure that decreased on average by 0.17% per year between 2000 and 2010 (www.britannica.com/topic/religionYear-In-Review-2010/Worldwide-Adherents-of-All-Religions). However, the distribution of theism and atheism differs, of course, from country to country. According to the Global Index of Religion and Atheism, atheists are in the majority, for example, in Scandinavia, Germany, and China, whereas in almost all African countries, less than 10% of the population self-identify as atheists (https://web.archive.org/web/20121016062403/ http://redcresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RED-C-press-release-Religion-andAtheism-25-7-12.pdf).

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defined preconditions for having such properties. For example, biological, neurological, and medical evidence seems to indicate very clearly that consciousness, identity, and person-hood require some kind of underlying physical structure, which stands in contradiction to the classical interpretation of God as an immaterial yet conscious person. Also the idea of a being that exerts causal influence on the physical world (for example, by performing miracles that breach the laws of nature) without being physical itself is scientifically hard to maintain, and has only minimal appeal in light of science’s “extraordinarily rich explanatory structure, worked out in the crucible of a rigorously constrained methodology, and meticulously tested against a formidable range of observational evidence.”2 However, more than one conclusion can be drawn from the apparent incompatibility of science with classical interpretations of God and theism. The first one is to reject theism; but this is an unacceptable route for theists. The second one is to reject naturalism; but this is an unacceptable route for many philosophers. A third one is to argue for an interpretation of naturalism that doesn’t preclude theism.3 A fourth one is to argue for an interpretation of theism that doesn’t preclude naturalism. This is the route I explore in this chapter. I argue that we need to develop new ways of theorizing about God and theism that are compatible with naturalism,4 and I demonstrate what such a way could look like. Drawing an analogy between mathematical realism and theism, I offer an account that treats God like modal structuralists treat numbers. More precisely, I argue that, rather than trying to settle questions of ontology, theists should focus on the structural relations that implicitly define theistic belief (such as the logical priority relation implicit in theistic concepts like “sin,” John Cottingham, “Transcending Science,” Chapter 1 of this volume. This strategy has recently been defended by Fiona Ellis in her God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). She argues that (a) there is a way to expand philosophical naturalism in such a way that it becomes compatible with theism, and that (b) this way is already implicit in the concept of a particular reading of naturalism. 4 By “naturalism” I do not mean “scientific naturalism,” according to which every aspect of reality can be explained by the methods of the natural sciences, but “expansive naturalism,” according to which there are aspects of reality, such as human values and moral facts, that cannot be understood in terms of physical facts alone. See Ellis (2014) for a detailed discussion of these different kinds of naturalism, and their respective ability to accommodate theism. 2 3

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“revelation,” or “prophet”; the metaphysical priority relation implicit in the story of divine creation and in characterizations of God as omnipotent; and the epistemic priority relation implicit in characterizations of God as omniscient), and on the preservation of objective truth-values for theistic statements. Preserving objective truth-values is crucial for the theist to avoid a whole range of undesirable interpretations of theistic discourse, such as non-cognitivism (according to which theistic statements do not express genuine propositions at all); error-theory (according to which theistic statements do express genuine, though universally false, propositions); and subjectivism (according to which the truth-values of theistic statements are determined by the attitudes or conventions of religious people). A structuralist reading of theism achieves exactly that: it preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology. Cashing out theism in structuralist terms may not accommodate everything the theist was hoping for. In particular, my account doesn’t offer an argument for the existence of God, but only for the possibility of the existence of God as characterized by our relations with God. I think that showing the possibility of God’s existence may be the best thing a theist can hope for. However, I don’t think that this is a trivial result at all. To the contrary, it constitutes a straightforward refutation of the view, implicit in most forms of naturalism, that scientific evidence seems to imply the impossibility of the existence of God. Arguing for the possibility of God’s existence and objective truth-values for theistic statements in entirely naturalistic terms constitutes a genuine step forward, toward an interpretation of theism that is compatible with naturalism. Moreover, because of its ontological neutrality, a structuralist account of theism provides a discursive basis for the theism–atheism debate, thus enabling a discourse that would otherwise be impossible. As a consequence, it allows theism to reclaim center-stage in the philosophical arena.

COMPANIONS IN GUILT Mathematical realists and theists are companions in guilt. Their guilt consists in a stubborn conviction of the existence of entities E with the following properties:

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1. E’s are not spatiotemporal. 2. E’s exist independently of our minds and language. 3. Empirical science neither implies the existence nor the nonexistence of E’s. 4. Statements about E’s have truth-conditions and truth-values. 5. Truths about E’s are objectively true. 6. Truths about E’s are not reducible to truths about something else. 7. It is possible for us human beings to attain truths about E’s. Mathematical realists believe in many such entities: numbers, sets, functions, and so forth. Theists believe in only one—God. Since it seems much more difficult to explain and justify belief in the existence of entities like E than in, say, tables, chairs, and beer mugs, mathematical realists and theists also face identical philosophical problems: first, how to explain the ontology of E’s and thus, the semantics of E-truths, and second, how to account for our knowledge of E-truths. For many theists, investigating the ontology of God means trying to figure out the fundamental properties of God (omniscience? omnipotence? immateriality?). For mathematical realists, investigating the ontology of mathematics means trying to figure out the fundamental properties of numbers and other mathematical objects (are they best characterized in terms of sets? categories? structures?). Each of the many ontological stories we can tell about what numbers really are, and what God really is, then gives rise to a corresponding epistemological question: how do we acquire knowledge, on this or that particular ontological reading, of the truths about God and mathematical objects respectively? These are difficult questions, so it is not surprising that, just like there is a great deal of disagreement among theists, there is a great deal of disagreement between mathematical realists. As John Bell and Geoffrey Hellman, two eminent philosophers of mathematics, put it: Contrary to the popular (mis)conception of mathematics as a cut- anddried body of universally agreed-on truths and methods, as soon as one examines the foundations of mathematics, one encounters divergences of viewpoint and failures of communication that can easily remind one of religious, schismatic controversy. (Bell and Hellman 2006: 64)

For example, just like theists disagree on how God is best characterized, and consequently what the fundamental truths about God are,

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mathematicians disagree on what the correct way of axiomatizing set theory is (with or without the Axiom of Choice, the Axiom of Regularity, and higher-cardinal extensions?); whether set theory or category theory is the ultimate foundation of mathematics; and what the correct logical rules for mathematical proofs are.5 Since it is not clear that disagreements like these will ever be settled conclusively, it would be a problem if our evaluations of mathematical realism and theism respectively depended on agreement about questions of ontology. Fortunately, however, they don’t. In the philosophy of mathematics, adopting a structuralist view of mathematics has become a popular way of avoiding entanglement in ontological questions, while at the same time preserving what the mathematician is most concerned about, namely (1) objective truthvalues for mathematical statements combined with (2) a plausible story for how mathematical knowledge is possible. In the following, I will briefly explain the core points and merits of a structuralist philosophy of mathematics. I will then outline what a structuralist approach to theism could look like, and what the merits of such an account would be.

A STRUCTURALIST VIEW OF MATHEMATICS Structuralist positions in the philosophy of mathematics emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a way to offer a middleground between Platonist (i.e. robust realist) and nominalist philosophies of mathematics. Very roughly, mathematical Platonists hold that mathematical objects (such as numbers or sets) exist independently of us, our linguistic conventions, our practices, etc., whereas mathematical nominalists believe that mathematical objects do not exist (at least not independently of us, our linguistic conventions, our practices, etc.). Platonists explain mathematical semantics and ontology in a straightforward way (mathematical statements refer to, and are true in virtue of, the existence of abstract mathematical objects), but have trouble explaining the epistemology of mathematics (how do we acquire knowledge of those objects, given that they are abstract, 5

Cf. Bell and Hellman (2006); Feferman et al. (2000).

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causally inert, and non-spatiotemporal?). Nominalists, on the other hand, can tell a straightforward story about mathematical epistemology (we have knowledge of mathematics because we “invented” it as a language to simplify and systematize cardinality assertions about the physical world), but have a hard time explaining mathematical semantics and ontology (if there are no mathematical objects, what do mathematical statements refer to, and what exactly makes them true?).6 Structuralists about mathematics share the nominalist intuition that simply postulating the existence of mathematical objects is contentious, yet agree with Platonists that mathematical statements do have objective, non-vacuous, mind-independent truth-conditions. There are several different forms of mathematical structuralism,7 but the form that carries least ontological weight is modal structuralism, which was developed by Geoffrey Hellman (1989, 1990). Its core idea is that to explain (a) why mathematical statements are objectively true and (b) how we acquire mathematical knowledge, it is not necessary to commit ourselves ontologically. All that is required is a plausible story about (and thus a commitment to) the possibility of the existence of mathematical structures. The following sections summarize that story.

Mathematical Ontology What is the subject-matter of mathematics? Platonists believe that it involves mind-independent abstract objects, each of which has a number of properties uniquely characterizing its intrinsic nature. Structuralists about mathematics, on the other hand, argue that mathematicians are in no position to commit themselves to the existence of such objects. This is not only because it would be impossible to explain how we acquire knowledge of them, but also because there are different, mutually exclusive ways of characterizing them, so that the idea of a unique, intrinsic nature for each mathematical object becomes untenable. Benacerraf (1973) was the first to explicitly formulate this trade-off between Platonism and nominalism. 7 For an overview of their main differences, see, for example, Reck and Price (2000) and Hellman (2005). 6

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For example, following the work of a group of French mathematicians working under the pen name “Nicolas Bourbaki,”8 it is now widely accepted that all of mathematics (numbers, relations, functions, theorems) can be reduced to, or formulated in, the language of set theory. However, it is indeterminate to which sets exactly, say, the number three reduces: it can be expressed as {{{∅}}} (this reduction was suggested by Ernst Zermelo), or as {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} (this reduction was suggested by John von Neumann). These two different characterizations of the number three are not simply different ways of saying the same thing—because they have incompatible consequences. For example, von Neumann’s reduction entails that the number one is a member of the number three, whereas on Zermelo’s reduction, the number one is not a member of the number three. So every possible choice in characterizing the number three in terms of a set of sets will entail further, often mutually exclusive conceptual and ontological commitments. Consequently, the choice between different set-theoretic characterizations of the number three is far from trivial.9 And since we don’t know of any way to settle the question of which sets “lie at the foundation” or uniquely characterize the number three, the mathematical Platonist who wishes to argue for the existence of uniquely characterizable mathematical objects is left with a seemingly insurmountable problem. Note the similarity of this case of mathematical disagreement to some of the classical disagreements between theists: should we comprehend God as unipersonal (as Jews believe) or triune (as Christians believe)? Defenders of both views are convinced they have good reasons for their view, yet God cannot be both unipersonal and triune at the same time. Similarly, while traditional theists believe that God intervenes in the human world, deists believe that God does not intervene—and, of course, both claims cannot be true at the same time. In the absence of agreement on such problems, it is indeterminate which attributes “lie at the foundation” or uniquely characterize God—a serious problem for the theist who wishes to argue for the existence of a uniquely characterizable God.

8

See, for example, N. Bourbaki, Elements of Mathematics I: Theory of Sets (Berlin: Springer, 2004). 9 This problem, now known as the Identification Problem, was first formulated by Paul Benacerraf (1965).

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Back to mathematics. Mathematical structuralists hold that, in light of such problems of indeterminacy, it is pointless to continue puzzling about unique characterizations for mathematical objects in terms of other mathematical objects. Rather, the mathematical structuralist argues, we should focus on the relations that hold between mathematical objects, and use those for an implicit characterization of mathematical objects. Let’s stick to the example of the natural numbers. Instead of wondering what the correct set-theoretic reduction of the number three is, mathematical structuralists suggest that we should focus on the properties of the natural-number-structure, i.e. “the pattern common to any infinite collection of objects that has a successor relation, a unique initial object, and satisfies the induction principle” (Shapiro 2000: 258). On this view, the subject-matter of arithmetic is not a collection of mathematical objects (the natural numbers), but a single abstract structure, call it SN, with the following properties: 1. SN has a unique initial object, 2. all objects in SN have a unique successor, and 3. all objects in SN satisfy the induction principle, such that if a statement p is true of n, then it is also true of n+1. On this characterization of the natural-number-structure, the number three is thus implicitly defined as the third position within that structure. Compare this way of thinking about mathematics to the way in which we understand a game like chess. It is true that each chess piece has a particular shape: the king has a little cross on its top, the queen a little crown, each pawn a little sphere, etc. However, when we play chess, we abstract from the particular features of the pieces and focus solely on those that matter for the game, namely the possible moves each piece can make on the chessboard in relation to the other pieces. In this sense, the game of chess is fully determined by its “structure,” which consists in (all configurations of) the spatial and “possible moves” relationships that obtain between the pieces. The intrinsic features of the chess pieces themselves, on the other hand (their material, shape, or color), are completely irrelevant for the game—the pieces are mere reference points for the spatial and “possible moves” relations.10

10

The chess analogy is Shapiro’s (2000), 260ff.

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In the same way, the mathematical structuralist argues, the subjectmatter of mathematics is not determined by mathematical objects with intrinsic properties, but by a network of relations holding between mere positions, or points of reference, thus constituting a manifold of different structures. This view not only sidesteps difficult questions about the ontology of mathematical objects by focusing solely on the relations that hold between them; it also reflects a crucial fact about mathematical practice, viz. that mathematical progress consists in discovering new interrelations between, and not new intrinsic features of, mathematical objects.

Mathematical Semantics The second question for the mathematical structuralist concerns semantics: do mathematical statements have definite truth-values, and if so, what is it that makes mathematical statements true? Clearly, the mathematical structuralist cannot hold that mathematical statements like “2+2=4” are made true by anything like Platonic mathematical objects—reference to Platonic objects whose identity and existence are difficult or even impossible to determine, and knowledge of which seems inexplicable on a realist picture, is precisely what the structuralist wants to avoid. Rather, the structuralist provides a modal semantics for mathematical statements, i.e. a way of explaining the truth of mathematical statements purely in terms of logical possibility. Take, for example, any arithmetical statement A, such as “2+2=4.” The structures constituting the subject-matter of arithmetical statements are progressions (what the mathematician calls “ω-sequences”). The modal-structuralist “translation” of a statement like “2+2=4” has two parts. The first part is hypothetical: it says that, if there were a structure SN satisfying the natural-number-requirements,11 then A would hold in SN (Hellman 1989: 16ff). The second part of the 11 What I call the “natural-number-requirements” here are essentially the axioms of Peano-arithmetic: 0 ∈ N (“Zero is a natural number”); n ∈ N ) ń ∈ N (“Every natural number n has a successor ń which is a natural number”); n ∈ N ) ń 6¼ 0 (“Zero is not the successor of a natural number”); m, n ∈ N ) (ḿ = ń ) m = n) (“Natural numbers which have the same successor are identical”); 0 ∈ X ∧8n ∈N: (n ∈ X ) ń ∈ X) ) N  X (“If X contains the number zero, and with every natural number n also its successor n, then the natural numbers are a subset of X”).

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modal-structuralist interpretation of A is categorical: it asserts that it is logically possible for there to be structures satisfying the naturalnumber-requirements (Hellman 1989: 24ff). Slightly more formally, the two components of the modal-structuralist interpretation of a simple arithmetical sentence A consist of the following two parts: Hypothetical: □8SN (SN is a structure satisfying the naturalnumber-requirements ! A holds in SN) Categorical: ◊∃SN (SN is a structure satisfying the naturalnumber-requirements) The hypothetical component is relatively innocent: it does nothing but provide a translation pattern according to which statements in mathematical language (in our case: a statement of arithmetic) are converted into statements of second-order modal logic.12 The categorical component, however, is less innocent: it asserts the logical possibility of the relevant structures (in our case: the natural-numberstructure).13 To be justified, this assertion must be derived from uncontroversial facts, and the way Hellman achieves this is by inviting us to imagine any kind of mark, for example a brush stroke, plus a constructive rule for generating infinitely many “next marks”: Let “A(x,y)” mean “y is generated after x in accordance with rule R”, and consider the sentence, ∃x∃yA(x, y) & “A is asymmetric and transitive” &8x∃yA(x,y) &8x∃!y(A(x,y) & ¬∃z(A(x,y)&A(z,y)). . . . Now this may not in fact hold in the real world, but I can see no reason why it should not be logically possible (much as classical Newtonian models of infinitely extended space or time are possible). (Hellman 1990: 317)

In other words, Hellman argues that it is physically (and thus logically) possible for there to be an initial brush stroke plus a rule for creating additional brush strokes, and that it is logically possible to apply this rule an infinite number of times, thus creating an infinite 12 I say “relatively” innocent because not everyone considers second-order (modal) logic ontologically innocent, given that it seems to imply a commitment to universals. 13 Without the categorical component, modal structuralism would be indistinguishable from ordinary “if-then-ism,” or fictionalism, about mathematics, and would inherit the latter’s major problem of vacuous truth. Just as “if-then-ism” about mathematical objects renders all mathematical sentences true if in fact no mathematical objects exist—because conditionals with false antecedents (F ! T) are always vacuously true—a modal “if-then-ism” about mathematical structures would render all mathematical sentences true if the relevant mathematical structures are impossible (cf. Hellman [1990], 316).

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sequence of brush strokes. But if an infinite sequence of brush strokes is logically possible, then (given that an infinite sequence of brush strokes exemplifies the natural-number-structure) the naturalnumber-structure is also logically possible—just like the categorical component asserts. The modal-structural interpretation of a mathematical statement like “2+2=4” thus involves no commitment to the actual existence of mathematical structures, but only to their logical possibility. The modal structuralist has thus presented a semantics for mathematical statements that comes at no ontological cost, yet preserves what the mathematician is most concerned about, namely objective truthvalues for mathematical statements. Note that the modal-structural translation scheme nevertheless involves no explicit rejection of mathematical ontology: for all that has been said, mathematical objects might in fact exist. Modal structuralism is thus a position that avoids interpreting mathematics in ontologically committal terms, but that clearly embraces truth-value realism for mathematical discourse. As such, it is a position that is silent on, but fully compatible with, ontological commitment. We can think of the modal structuralist as someone who sidesteps questions of ontology by extracting the nominalistic (i.e. ontologically neutral) content from mathematical assertions to provide a minimal semantics for mathematical discourse. The introduction of modal operators preserves verbal agreement with the Platonist and thus, enables a meaningful exchange between Platonists and nominalists. This is an important point to note with regard to the following sections, where we will investigate the possibility of providing a modalstructuralist translation scheme for theistic assertions.

Mathematical Knowledge Finally, a modal-structural interpretation of mathematical statements offers a straightforward explanation of how we acquire knowledge of mathematical structures: (i) we perceive objects or constellations in the concrete world that exemplify a portion of the natural-numberstructure (for example, a sequence of brush strokes or a line of trinkets in a row); (ii) we then abstract from the intrinsic features of the brush strokes or trinkets and zoom in on the structural relations holding between them; finally, (iii) we generalize these relations into a

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purely structural picture. In this way, our knowledge of mathematical structures is a direct consequence of our perception of concrete structured objects and constellations in the physical world, combined with our ability to abstract from particular intrinsic features and to generalize structural relations. Take again the number three, for example. Given that the natural-number-structure is exemplified by countless collections in the physical world—for example, sequences of brush strokes or trinkets—the mathematical structuralist has no difficulty explaining how we come to have knowledge of the natural-number-structure and specific “positions” in that structure: we perceive instances of it everywhere around us. Consequently, we also perceive instances of the third position of the natural-numberstructure, which we commonly refer to as the number three. Let’s now turn to see whether we can construct a structuralist picture of theism that is equally philosophically advantageous.

A STRUCTURALIST VIEW OF THEISM What does all of this mathematical talk have to do with theism? Just as it is nonsense, from the structuralist point of view, to consider a mathematical object like the number three in isolation from its relations to other mathematical objects, it is, I submit, nonsensical to think of God in isolation from God’s relations to the world and all other beings. A modal-structuralist account of theism accommodates the atheist’s intuition that simply postulating the existence of a supreme yet imperceptible, causally inert being is philosophically contentious. At the same time, my account provides a way to substantiate the theist’s conviction that theistic statements have objective, non-vacuous, mind-independent truth-conditions under which the assertion that God exists is true. Consider again the chess analogy: can we meaningfully imagine a chess piece, for example one that plays the role of a rook, independently of a chess game? No, we cannot. This is because, in the absence of other pieces, a chessboard, and two players, we wouldn’t know how to think about its moves, its position, etc. In other words, we can only comprehend a chess piece like the rook in conjunction with all other constituents of the game, just like we can only understand the number three in relation to the rest of the natural-number-structure.

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A structuralist view of theism formulates the exact same intuition for the case of God.

Theistic Ontology What is the subject-matter of theology? God, of course. However, it is not at all clear what we mean by that term. For example, theists disagree strongly on which properties exactly characterize God’s nature (is God omnipotent? simple? immutable?), and indeed, on whether God can be analyzed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions at all.14 The view I propose acknowledges such disputes as potentially unresolvable. Instead of demanding ontological commitment to a supreme being whose nature can, and has been, defined in a number of mutually exclusive ways, structuralist theists suggest that we focus on the structure of theism—the structure composed of the relations in which we stand to God, thereby implicitly defining God. My account thus aims to be a response to the question what God is for us, rather than to the question what God is in essence. Focusing on the relations between God and its creatures rather than on definitional aspects not only avoids problems of indeterminacy, but also reflects the fact that it is in virtue of those relations rather than in virtue of definitions that most theists initially come to believe in God. For instance, many theists would agree that love, contemplation, and prayer are prime examples for relations rooted in, and therefore leading to, God. Others consider awe, submission, and even fear to be the characteristic features of their relationship with God. And yet others think that it is primarily through joy, gratefulness, and praise that we relate to God. 14 Already Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3–11) and Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed, 1.51) were skeptical of the idea that God’s nature can be captured in terms of a list of divine attributes, and a number of contemporary philosophers of religion defend related viewpoints. Howard Wettstein (2012), for example, argues that the focus of contemporary philosophy of religion on conceptual analysis ignores and thus obscures the fact that religious scriptures tend to promote a purely affective, emotionbased approach to religious practice, not a commitment to firm metaphysical beliefs. Relatedly, John Cottingham (Chapter 1 of this volume) rejects a philosophy of religion based entirely on conceptual analysis, and suggest a praxis-oriented approach that reflects the reality of religious life. See also Williams (2002) and Kyle Scott’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 7).

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Every theist thus has her own individual relationship with God. However, there are three basic relations that are arguably implicit in all of them. It is these three relations that, according to my account, implicitly define theism. The first one captures the fact that all religious concepts defining a theist’s life derive from the assumption of there being a God in the first place. For example, an action cannot be sinful without there being a God who defines which actions constitute sins. This is to say that, before there can be any theistic concept at all, there must be God. Without God, religious concepts are meaningless. Let’s call this very basic relation the relation of logical priority: God is logically prior to all theistic and possibly to all religious concepts that determine a theist’s beliefs and actions. The second basic relation captures the fact that all religious concepts defining a theist’s life derive from the assumption that God’s existence is fundamental to all other objects and beings, whose existence is consequently dependent on and grounded in God’s existence. Let’s call this the relation of metaphysical priority: God is metaphysically prior to all creatures. This relation is implicit in the story of creation; in characterizations of God as all-powerful; in the belief that God resurrects the dead; in principles concerning the right way to worship God and to live one’s life, etc. It is arguably also a relation in which further relations such as awe and submission, love and contemplation are rooted. The third basic relation that arguably characterizes every theist’s relationship with God is that God’s knowledge is superior to the knowledge of every other being. In particular, God knows everything that every being thinks and does at all times, so that it is not possible to ever think or do something without God knowing it. Let’s call this relation between God and all other beings the relation of epistemic superiority: God is epistemically superior to all creatures. This relation is implicit in all principles of religious ethics and morality (which are grounded in the belief that God knows who acts right and who acts wrong), most notably in the belief that God rewards the righteous and punishes evildoers. As indicated above, there are certainly many more relations that characterize a theist’s relationship with God, but these are, I submit, the three fundamental ones: the logical and metaphysical priority as well as the epistemic superiority of God over all other objects, beings, and their actions.

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Now, just as in the case of numbers and in the case of chess, we can picture the structure of theism as determined by the relations between a central position, commonly referred to as “God,” and infinitely many other positions (referred to as beings, objects, etc.). The central position stands in a relation of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority to all the other positions, which, in turn, stand in countless relations to one another. On this picture, the structure of theism, call it ST, can be described as follows: 1. ST is a structure holding between infinitely many objects and beings that stand in relations of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority to one another, 2. ST has a unique, central object G (conventionally referred to as “God”), such that 3. G is logically prior to all objects and beings of ST, 4. G is metaphysically prior to all objects and beings of ST, and 5. G is epistemically superior (prior) to all objects and beings of ST. God, on this picture, is implicitly defined as the central point of reference in the theism-structure, which is in turn defined solely in terms of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority relations. Unlike all other objects and beings, God is unique in that God is the only being that is prior in all three respects to all other objects and beings. Again, we can compare this way of thinking to the way in which we understand a game of chess and the roles of each chess piece. Just like we do not need to know anything about the intrinsic features of the chess pieces (their material, color, or shape) to understand their role in the game and their meaning for one another, we do not need to know anything about the intrinsic features of God to understand God’s role as the central point of reference in the theism-structure, and God’s meaning for all other “positions,” occupied by other beings, in this structure. God is thus fully determined by the structure of theism, which consists in (all configurations of) the logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority relationships that hold between the central position of the structure, and all other positions. The intrinsic features of God (and consequently, of all other positions in the structure), on the other hand, are irrelevant to understand the structure of theism—as is the question whether God has any intrinsic features at all.

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Theistic Semantics Just as in the case of mathematical realism, also in the case of theism there is one question that has particular importance: do theistic statements have objective truth-values, and if so, what is it that makes theistic statements true? Recall that the preservation of objective truth-values is crucial for all theists who want to avoid noncognitivist, error-theoretic, or subjectivist interpretations of theistic assertions. The commitment to objective truth-values is thus essential for the theist. Consequently, the central question becomes: what is it that makes theistic statements true? Clearly, the structuralist theist cannot hold that a theistic statement like “God is omniscient” is made true by a uniquely characterizable object God—reference to such an object whose identity and existence are difficult or even impossible to determine, and knowledge of which can seem inexplicable on a realist picture, is precisely what the structuralist theist wants to avoid. Rather, the structuralist theist can provide a modal semantics for theistic statements, i.e. a way of explaining the truth of theistic statements purely in terms of logical possibility. Take, for example, the theistic statement T, “God is omniscient.” Just as in the case of mathematics, the modal-structuralist “translation” of this statement has two parts. The first part is hypothetical. It says that if there were a structure ST satisfying the theismrequirements, then T would hold in ST. The second part is the categorical component of the modal-structuralist interpretation. It asserts that it is logically possible for there to be a structure satisfying the theism-requirements. Slightly more formally, the two components of the modal-structuralist interpretation of a theistic assertion like T are: Hypothetical: □8ST (ST is a structure satisfying the theismrequirements ! T holds in ST) Categorical: ◊∃ST (ST is a structure satisfying the theismrequirements) The hypothetical component is metaphysically innocent: all it does is provide a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language (in this case: a statement about God’s omniscience) are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. As in the mathematical case, it is the categorical component that involves a substantial assertion, viz. the logical possibility of the structure in

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question. And just as in the case of mathematics, this categorical assertion must be derived from uncontroversial facts to be justified. What are these uncontroversial facts? Recall that Hellman derives the logical possibility of the naturalnumber-structure from the physical possibility of there being an infinitely extendible series of brush strokes, generated by a repeated application of a constructive rule to an initial brush stroke. Put differently, Hellman argues that it is physically (and thus logically) possible for there to be an initial brush stroke plus a rule for creating additional brush strokes, and that it is logically possible to apply this rule an infinite number of times, thus creating an infinite sequence of brush strokes instantiating the natural-number-structure. Also in the case of theism, we can derive the logical possibility of a structure satisfying the theism-requirements from uncontroversial facts about the physical world, combined with uncontroversial facts about counterfactual reasoning. We begin with the assertion that it is physically possible for there to be a being that is logically, metaphysically, and epistemically prior to another being in the sense described above. One example for this is the relation between mother and child. The concept of a child implies the concept of a mother; hence, the concept of a mother is logically prior to the concept of a child. Moreover, the existence of a mother is fundamental to the existence of a child, whose existence is, in turn, dependent on, or grounded in, her mother’s existence. The mother is thus metaphysically prior to the child. Finally, at least up to a certain age, a mother’s knowledge is clearly superior to that of her child; hence, she is epistemically superior to her child. From the physical possibility of the mother–child structure, which is determined by relations of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority, we can infer the metaphysical possibility of a structure in which all beings stand in a relation of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority to one central being. How can we do that? Generally speaking, we are justified in asserting the metaphysical possibility of an object, being, or structure just in case a counterfactual derivation of the assumption that this object, being, or structure is possible does not yield a contradiction.15 The assumption of there existing a structure in which all beings stand in a relation of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority to one central being does not yield a contradiction. 15 For a detailed discussion of the way in which we generate knowledge of metaphysical modality, see Williamson (2007: 134ff.).

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Therefore, we are justified in asserting the metaphysical possibility of such a structure, which, in turn, entails the logical possibility of this structure—just as the categorical component asserts. Note that this view involves no commitment to the actual existence of the theism-structure, but only to its logical possibility. Nevertheless, it involves no explicit rejection of theistic ontology: for all that has been said, God might exist. The modal structuralist about theism has thus presented a semantics for theistic statements that comes at no ontological cost, yet preserves what the theist is most concerned about, namely objective truth-values for theistic statements. Modal structuralism about theism is thus a position that avoids interpreting theism in ontologically committed terms, but that clearly embraces truth-value realism for theistic discourse. As such, it is a position that is silent on, but fully compatible with, ontological commitment to God. We can think of the modal-structuralist theist as someone who sidesteps questions of ontology and extracts the nominalistic (i.e. ontologically neutral) content from theistic assertions to provide a minimal semantics for theistic discourse. The introduction of modal operators preserves verbal agreement with the traditional theist and thus enables a meaningful exchange between theists and atheists. By focusing on the nominalistic content of theistic assertions only, modal structuralism about theism thus vindicates theistic belief by making it a rationally defeasible option. It takes seriously both the concerns of the theist (by honoring the importance of providing definite truth-values for theistic statements) and the concerns of the atheist (by honoring the importance of refraining from ontological commitments).

Theistic Knowledge Finally, just as in the case of mathematics, the advantage of characterizing God and theism in structuralist terms is not only that it avoids problems of indeterminacy by avoiding questions of ontology throughout. It also offers a straightforward explanation of how we acquire knowledge of the theism-structure. In the first step, we perceive constellations of beings in the concrete world that exemplify a portion of the theism-structure ST. Recall the example of mother and child. The mother stands in a relation of logical and metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority to her

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child. Thus, mother and child exemplify the theism-structure. However, they exemplify it only partly. This is because, unlike God, the mother is not logically, metaphysically, and epistemically prior/superior to all other beings. The theism-structure is thus only partially instantiated. Again, compare this case to the case of the natural numbers. The natural-number-structure is exemplified by countless collections of objects (such as a sequence of trinkets in a row). However, the natural-number-structure is only ever partially instantiated. After all, the natural-number-structure is infinite, whereas no collection of objects in the physical world is. Hence, the natural-number-structure can only ever be exemplified partially in the physical world. However, these partial instantiations suffice to give us knowledge of the structure in its entirety. How so? In the second step, we abstract from the intrinsic features of the specific mother-and-child example, focusing only on the structural relations holding between them. In other words, we zoom in on the relations that hold between mother and child, while at the same time ignoring the two specific beings (“objects”) instantiating these relations. We thus focus our attention solely on the set of the three relations: logical priority, metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority. In the third step, we then generalize these relations into a purely structural picture of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority relations. From this purely structural picture, we finally derive the logical possibility of there being a constellation exemplifying the theism-structure in its entirety, i.e. of there being a structure with one central object, God, standing in logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority/superiority relations to all other objects and beings in the structure—the full structure of theism. To sum up: just as we acquire knowledge of the natural-numberstructure by perceiving partial instantiations (e.g. sequences of brush strokes) of that structure in the physical world, and by generalizing that structure into a full picture of the structure, we acquire knowledge of the theism-structure by perceiving partial instantiations of it (e.g. mother–child relations) in the physical world, and by generalizing it into a full picture of the structure.16 On this view, our 16 Note that the partial instantiations of the theism-structure we perceive in the physical world also inform our way of talking about God: we refer to God as a “father” or “mother,” to human beings as God’s “children,” etc.

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knowledge of the logical possibility of the theism-structure is thus a direct consequence of (1) our perception of constellations of physical objects or beings standing in logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority/superiority relations to one another, (2) our ability to abstract from particular objects or beings instantiating that structure, and to generalize structural relations, and (3) our ability to derive, from uncontroversial assumptions, the logical possibility of there being a constellation exemplifying this structure.

CONCLUSION This way of characterizing theism may seem very unconventional— perhaps too unconventional for a traditional theist who believes in God as uniquely characterized by traditional divine attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc. However, it really is nothing but a formalized description of what I take to be the core of many religious people’s beliefs: the experience of themselves as standing in a relationship to a being whose nature cannot be grasped conceptually, but whose relation to themselves is perfectly clear. The reason we may not be able to understand God’s nature while at the same time having no doubt about our relationship to God is that, as constituents of this relation, we experience it first-hand and thereby generate an immediate, phenomenal knowledge of what it is like to stand in such a relation. We can illustrate this point by returning to the example of mother and child, who stand in relations of logical, metaphysical, and epistemic priority. While the child probably does not know everything about the nature of its mother (much less about the correct conceptual analysis of the concept “mother” or “motherhood”), it does understand the nature of its relation to its mother perfectly because it is a constituent of this relationship and thus experiences it first-hand. Just as we can say many more things with certainty about the way in which numbers relate to each other than we can say about the intrinsic nature of numbers, there are many more things we can say with certainty about the way in which we relate to God than we can say about the nature of God. Structuralist theism accommodates this fact by offering an interpretation of theistic assertions in terms of the logical possibility of structural relations between beings.

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Consider further that nothing in this view prevents the theists from ascribing any of the classical properties to God, in addition to the structuralist view. A structuralist view of theism extracts the shareable, nominalistic content from theistic assertions through its modal-structuralist translation schema, and thus provides a minimal semantics for discourse about God. The introduction of modal operators preserves verbal agreement with the atheist and thus enables a meaningful exchange between theists and atheists on the subjectmatter of the possibility of God and theism. This is already much more than what is granted by most scientific naturalists, who are convinced that science holds the “monopoly on reality and explanation,”17 and that theistic belief is consequently untenable.18 A structuralist view of theism demonstrates the rational viability of theism in purely naturalistic terms. It does not offer anything beyond that. In particular, it does not offer an argument for the existence of God. However, as the history of philosophy shows, it is not clear that God’s existence could ever be proved or disproved by means of an argument. While traditional theists may find this view unacceptably deflated, it does achieve the goal of rendering theism compatible with naturalism. And perhaps showing that theism is possibly true is not as modest a result as it may at first seem. To put it in Peter De Vries’ words, “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”19

17

Fiona Ellis, Chapter 2 of this volume. Note the similarity of this line of argument to the familiar Quinean view that we should be ontologically committed to all and only entities quantification over which is indispensable to our best scientific theories—the implication being, of course, that both the “entity” God and truths about this entity are dispensable to the scientific project of explaining the phenomena of the world. 19 Peter De Vries, The Mackerel Plaza (1958). 18

9 Theology and the Knowledge of Persons Eleonore Stump

INTRODUCTION What is the right methodology for studying theology? This question is of course dependent on another: what is theology? The right methodology for any discipline depends on what the discipline is studying. If you are studying molecules, the methods of economics or psychology are unlikely to be helpful. So what is theology, what is its subject, and what methodology is useful for understanding its subject? In contemporary times, theology has often been regarded as philosophy with a special set of authorities to which it defers. On this characterization of theology, it differs from philosophy mainly by being insufficiently open to reason. On this view, philosophy takes its premises from reason alone, whereas theology is willing to take some of its premises from religious authority, from revealed texts, from creeds, or from some other magisterial source. On this view, because philosophy takes its premises from reason alone, it is shareable by everybody. And because theology takes its premises from authority of some sort, it will be acceptable only to people who share some particularity, of religious identification or church membership or something else of the sort. On this characterization of theology, then, philosophy is universal and impartial; theology is particular and partisan. This is an Enlightenment sort of view of both theology and philosophy, of course. The Enlightenment thought that all reputable learning is a universal or generically human enterprise based on reason

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alone. This belief is part of the view now generally called “modernism.” In philosophy as in science, modernists have thought we should put aside all our particularities—of gender, race, nationality, religion, and social class—and enter impartially into the project of learning just as the generic human beings we are. But it is hard to know who would now whole-heartedly endorse this way of identifying philosophy and theology. On the contrary, we have learned to be skeptical of the whole Enlightenment view that seemed to support it. Post-modernism, of course, rejects the entire modernist picture. On the view of post-modernists, there is no such thing as universal, impartial reason. All reason is particularist and perspectival, and philosophy can differ from theology only in hiding from itself that it is as particularist as theology is. On this postmodernity perspective, philosophy and theology both begin with authoritative teaching of a particularist kind. They just pick different particularities as their starting-points. The ongoing debate over post-modernism has brought to the fore the relativism lurking not far below the surface of most ordinary forms of post-modernism, a relativism that even many postmodernists would like to deny. But whatever the right resolution of the debate over post-modernism may be, what post-modernism has made everyone self-conscious about is the way in which claims to rely only on universal and impartial reason are unrealistic. All human learning and reasoning have to begin somewhere, with some set of assumptions; and those assumptions are typically drawn from authority of one sort or another. In fact, philosophers are now increasingly interested in the fact that much of what we think we know comes from the testimony of others. Human cognition, like many other human activities, is a social matter and relies on the activity of a community; it is not the work of any one individual in isolation. The transfer of information and perspectives through authority and testimony is crucial to human knowledge. So it is not any longer promising to see the difference between theology and philosophy as a matter of philosophy’s employing reason alone and theology’s being bound to authority. In my own view, the names of the disciplines give us a more promising way to think about each of them and so also a more profitable way to think about the nature of theology. The name “philosophy” in its etymology means something like the love

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of wisdom. The name “theology” in its etymology means something like the word with regard to God.1 Now wisdom is well suited to be thought of as an abstract universal. In this respect, it is like redness or love. It is not a substance; it does not have any particular dimensions; and it cannot exert causal power or receive the effects of anything else’s causal action. In this respect, wisdom is different from a wise person, say, or a loving person or a red thing. A red thing will have a certain dimension, and it will have certain causal powers that it can exercise, and so on. A red thing, a loving person, and a wise person are concrete particulars. Wisdom, which philosophy seeks, is not. On the other hand, it is clear that the God with regard to whom theology seeks the word cannot be construed as an abstract universal. On the view of all the Abrahamic monotheisms, God is characterized by mind and will. But nothing that is an abstract universal could have mind and will. In fact, the God of the major monotheisms is omniscient and omnipotent; but no abstract universal can know anything at all or do anything at all. So whatever the God of theology is, God is not like wisdom in being an abstract universal. Rather, in virtue of being characterized by mind and will, God is more nearly a person (in our sense of the word “person”) than an abstract universal. (I am not forgetting the doctrine of divine simplicity here. But even so committed an adherent to the doctrine as Aquinas nonetheless supposes that a simple God is characterized by mind and will.2) The wisdom philosophy seeks is impersonal. A philosopher can seek wisdom, but wisdom cannot seek him. A philosopher can love wisdom, but wisdom cannot love him back. The God of the major monotheisms, however, can seek a theologian and love her before she seeks or loves him. In my view, the nature of theology is illuminated most centrally in this difference between philosophy and theology. It makes a great difference to one’s method of seeking and one’s view of the nature of 1 I have picked this clumsy rendering of the etymological sense of “theology” in an attempt to preserve the amphiboly of the expression. The word in question can be either the output of reason with respect to God or the Logos, who is the second person of the Trinity. 2 I have discussed in detail the connection between the doctrine of simplicity and this understanding of the nature of theology in my “Athens and Jerusalem: The Relationship of Philosophy and Theology,” Journal of Analytic Theology, 1.1 (2013). This introduction is largely taken from that paper.

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depth in understanding whether what one is seeking is an abstract universal such as wisdom or a person with a mind and a will.

GOD AS A PERSON: THE DOCTRINE OF SIMPLICITY Some people will resist this characterization of theology because of their adherence to the doctrine of simplicity. Simplicity is standardly accepted as one of the divine attributes by virtually all Christian thinkers in the Patristic and medieval periods, as well as by major philosophers and theologians in the Jewish and Islamic traditions. It is one of the most difficult divine attributes to understand but also one of the most important. The doctrine of simplicity is sometimes interpreted as implying that God is being itself, or esse alone (to put the point in Latin). On this interpretation of the doctrine, contrary to what I have been claiming in characterizing theology, it is false to say of God that God is a concrete particular, a being—an id quod est (a “that which is”). And if God is not a concrete particular or a being at all, then a fortiori God is not a person with a mind and a will. But, in my view, this is an interpretation of the doctrine of divine simplicity that is seriously misleading at best and false at worst.3 Aquinas is one of the primary promoters of the doctrine of divine simplicity, and we can see a more suitable interpretation of the doctrine by looking at his exposition of it. On Aquinas’s view, we cannot know the quid est of God. That is, we cannot know what kind of thing God is, even when it comes to the distinction between an abstract universal and a concrete particular. So, for example, Aquinas says,

3 I have argued for this claim in detail elsewhere. See my The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers, Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016). See also my “God’s Simplicity” in Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135–46; and “Simplicity and Aquinas’s Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger (ed.), Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter—Rezeption und Transformation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 191–210.

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With regard to what God himself is (secundum rem), God himself is neither universal nor particular.4

On Aquinas’s view, God’s nature is such that there is something false about conceiving of it either as esse alone or as id quod est alone. For this reason, Aquinas thinks, we have to exercise care in the way we frame our claims about God. It is acceptable to say that God is esse, being itself, provided we understand that this claim does not rule out the claim that God is id quod est, an entity, a concrete particular. Aquinas puts the point this way: Those material creatures that are whole and subsistent are composite. But the form in them is not some complete subsisting thing. Rather, the form is that by means of which some thing is. For this reason, all the names imposed by us to signify some complete subsisting thing signify in the concrete, as is appropriate for composite things. But those names that are imposed to signify simple forms signify something not as subsisting but rather as that by means of which something is, as for example “whiteness” signifies that by means of which something is white. Therefore because God is both simple and subsistent, we attribute to God both abstract names—to signify God’s simplicity—and concrete names—to signify God’s completeness and concreteness. Nonetheless, each kind of name falls short of God’s mode [of being], just as our intellect does not know God as he is, in this life.5

And so, on Aquinas’s view, it is correct to say that God has a mind and a will, even though nothing could have a mind and a will unless it were a concrete particular. The doctrine of simplicity does not require rejecting as false the claim that God is a being, a concrete particular. It requires only a recognition that it is also correct to say that God is esse itself. As I have argued elsewhere, the doctrine of simplicity mandates a kind of quantum theology, an analogy to quantum physics.6 It is correct to say that light is a wave; it is correct to say that light is a particle; and nothing about these claims implies that one and the same thing at the same time is both a wave and a particle. Since the analogous claims hold as regards God, on Aquinas’s view, then the doctrine of simplicity does not rule out the claim that God is a being with a mind and a will. Consequently, even on the doctrine of

4 5 6

ST Ia q.13 a.9 ad 2. The translations of Aquinas’s texts in this chapter are mine. ST Ia q.13 a.1 ad 2. Cf. also SCG I c.30. See, for example, my “God’s Simplicity,” 135–46.

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simplicity, it is correct to say that God is a person, in our sense of the word “person.”

THE KNOWLEDGE OF PERSONS In this connection, it is important to see that propositional knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge possible for human beings. As I have argued in detail elsewhere,7 there is a different kind of knowledge available to human beings which is not reducible to knowledge that something or other is the case, and it does not depend on the grasp of the quiddity of a thing. This is the knowledge of persons.8 To get some intuitive feel for this non-propositional knowledge of persons, imagine a woman Mary, who has been kept in isolated imprisonment since birth by some mad scientist. Imagine that Mary, in her imprisonment, has had access to any and all information about the world which can be transmitted in terms of propositions.9 So, for example, Mary has available to her the best science texts for any of the sciences, from physics to sociology. She knows that there are other people in the world, and she knows all that science can teach her about them. But she has never had any personal interactions of a direct and unmediated sort with another person. She has read descriptions of human faces, for example, but she has never been face-to-face with another person.10 And then suppose that Mary is finally rescued from her imprisonment and united for the first time with her mother, who loves her deeply. 7 See my Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapters 1–4. 8 Or, more accurately, it includes the knowledge of persons. For a discussion of the other varieties of this non-propositional knowledge, see Stump (2010), chapter 4. 9 I am here adapting Frank Jackson’s original thought experiment. For this thought experiment and the extensive discussion it has generated, see Peter Ludlow, Yukin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 10 More than one person has suggested to me that if Mary had been kept from all second-person experiences, she could not have learned a language, and she would be unable to read. But this objection seems to me insufficiently imaginative. We can suppose that Mary has been raised in a sophisticated environment in which carefully programmed computers taught her to speak and to read.

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When Mary is first united with her mother, it seems indisputable that Mary will know things she did not know before, even if she knew everything about her mother which could be made available to her in expository prose. Although Mary knew that her mother loved her before she met her, when she is united with her mother, Mary will learn what it is like to be loved. And this will be new for her, even if in her isolated state she had as complete a scientific description as possible of what a human being feels like when she senses that she is loved by someone else. What will come as the major revelation to Mary is her mother. Even this way of putting what Mary learns is misleading, because it suggests that Mary’s new knowledge can be expressed in a third-person description of her mother. But neither first-person nor third-person accounts will be adequate for Mary to describe what is new for her. What is new for her, what she learns, has to do with her personal interaction with another person. What is new for Mary is a second-person experience. This thought experiment thus shows that we can come to know a person and that this knowledge is difficult or impossible to formulate in terms of propositional knowledge. The rapid, perplexing increase in the incidence of autism has led scientists and philosophers to a deeper understanding of the knowledge of persons and a new appreciation for its importance in typical human functioning. Various studies have demonstrated that the knowledge which is impaired for an autistic child cannot be taken as knowledge that something or other is the case. An autistic child can know that a particular macroscopic object is her mother or that the person who is her mother has a certain mental state. But the autistic child can know such things without the knowledge that a typically developing child would have. For example, an autistic child might know that her mother is sad, but in virtue of the impairment of autism she will not be able to know the sadness of her mother. And these are different items of knowledge. An autistic child might know that the person she is looking at is sad because, for example, someone who is a reliable authority for the child has told her so. But this is clearly not the same as the child’s knowing the sadness in the face of the person she is looking at.11 See Derek Moore, Peter Hobson, and Anthony Lee, “Components of Person Perception: An Investigation With Autistic, Non-autistic Retarded and Typically Developing Children and Adolescents,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15 (1997), pp. 401–23. 11

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In these cases, and in many other cases of perfectly ordinary human experience, it is arguable that it is not possible to express adequately what is known in terms of propositional knowing. Rather, it is a knowledge of persons. Mutatis mutandis, the same distinction applies where God is concerned. Consider, for example, these two claims: (1) Thomas Aquinas knew that God is really present in the Eucharist. and (1’) Thomas Aquinas knew the real presence of God in the Eucharist. These are clearly not equivalent claims, and the second cannot be reduced to the first. Obviously, the first could be true and the second could be false. Or consider this pair of claims: (2) Thomas Aquinas knew that God exists. and (2’)

Thomas Aquinas knew God.

Here, too, the claims are not equivalent, and the second cannot be reduced to the first. In both these cases, what is at issue in the first sentence is propositional knowledge, and what is at issue in the second is the knowledge of persons with regard to God. Because what theology seeks to know and understand as its object is something with a mind and a will—a person, in our sense of the word “person”—then theology has to be sensitive to the fact that the knowledge of persons is not reducible to propositional knowledge. The methodology of theology cannot be the same as the methodology of philosophy, or the methodology of the empirical sciences either. It is obviously possible to get to know a person by studying his biology, chemistry, and physics; but one will not know him by this means. Even a study of his psychology is no substitute for knowing him, as the thought experiment about Mary makes clear. Insofar as the subject-matter of theology is a person, then, the methodology it employs must be different from the methodology used by the sciences or even the methodology customary in philosophy. The sciences and philosophy can contribute useful and important information about a person. The sciences can give information

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about whether a person has cancer, for example; philosophy can yield understanding about whether a person has free will. But to know a person requires more than information of this sort, and the ordinary methodologies of the sciences and philosophy are insufficient to provide what is lacking. In addition, and equally importantly, knowledge of persons is susceptible to its own particular kinds of fragmentation. So, for example, just as it is possible to know that p without knowing that one knows that p, so it is also possible to know a person without awareness of having knowledge of that person, under some other description of that person. So, for example, a person Paula could know the pauper Jerome and still believe sincerely of herself that she does not know the prince, even if Jerome is the prince, only in disguise as a pauper. And this is only the beginning of the list of the particular characteristics of the knowledge of persons. That this kind of knowledge has its own features, not identical to the features of propositional knowledge, makes a difference to the methods of theology too.

KNOWLEDGE OF PERSONS AND DIVINE HIDDENNESS To illustrate the way in which reflection on the knowledge of persons makes a difference to theological discussion, consider, for example, the problem of divine hiddenness. Beginning with a forceful statement of the problem by John Schellenberg,12 this has been the subject of much discussion in the recent literature. Schellenberg argued that the fact of divine hiddenness could support an argument for the nonexistence of God. Basically, stripped of many careful nuances, his argument goes like this. Suppose that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God. Then: (1) An omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God is able to give every person knowledge of God’s existence and wants to do so. 12

John Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); paperback with a new preface 2006. His most recent views on the topic of divine hiddenness can be found in his The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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(2) If there are people who do not know that God exists, then either (a) those people are resistant to the knowledge of God’s existence, or (b) God is unable or unwilling to give them that knowledge. (3) There are some people who do not know that God exists. (4) Therefore, either those people are resistant to that knowledge or God is unable or unwilling to give them that knowledge. (5) There are some people who do not know that God exists but who are not resistant to that knowledge. (6) Therefore, God is unable or unwilling to give some people this knowledge—reductio (since 4 contradicts 1). (7) Therefore, it is not the case that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God. Schellenberg assumes what many people would find uncontroversial, namely that the God of the major monotheisms wants a loving relationship with human beings but that a person’s loving relationship with God requires that that person have knowledge of God’s existence. Then the heart of Schellenberg’s argument is this dilemma: when a person lacks knowledge of God’s existence, either that person is responsible for this lack of knowledge or God is. But God can’t be responsible for this lack of knowledge, since he is able to give the knowledge and he wants loving relationships, which require knowledge of God’s existence. So the only alternative is to suppose that an atheist is himself responsible for his lack of knowledge of God’s existence. But this alternative is unpalatable to most people, because it seems to assign culpability for disbelief or blameworthy resistance to belief to every atheist; and so this alternative seems not only false but reprehensible. Consequently, we have Schellenberg’s conclusion: the hiddenness of God argues for the non-existence of God. Schellenberg’s argument is typically cast in terms of knowledge that. The question concerning Schellenberg is how to understand the fact that there are people who do not know that God exists. But what is essential to a loving relationship with another person is not knowledge that but knowledge of a person. And knowledge of a person can be had without propositional knowledge that that person exists. Return to the example of Mary isolated by a mad scientist and revise the example a little. Suppose that when Mary first meets her mother, the mad scientist contrives somehow to send her evidence

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that she is hallucinating. And suppose that, on the basis of this evidence, Mary believes that her perception of her mother is a hallucination. Then, in fact, Mary will have knowledge of her mother without believing that her mother exists, and so she is also without knowledge that her mother exists. In this case, Mary has full and robust knowledge of her mother without knowledge that her mother exists. It is also possible to have a more attenuated knowledge of another person without knowledge that that person exists. So, for example, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo is rescued from Black Riders by an Elf Lord who carries him off on his horse while Frodo is delirious with fever. Frodo is conscious enough to know the Elf; but in his delirious state he supposes that he is dreaming his rescue. He has some knowledge of the Elf, even in his delirious condition, but he nonetheless does not know that the Elf exists because he supposes that he is dreaming. Finally, it is also possible to know a person and know that that person exists but to know that person under only one description and not under other relevant descriptions. So, for example, a child living next door to the mayor of his town, but not knowing that his nextdoor neighbor is the mayor, may know that his neighbor Frank exists but not know that the mayor exists. It is noteworthy that in none of the three cases above is there anything culpable about the person who lacks knowledge that someone who is known to him with knowledge of persons exists. And there is nothing in these cases either to suggest that a person who lacks such knowledge that must be resistant to it. There is nothing to blame, no aspersions to cast, in this lack of propositional knowledge. On the contrary, as the examples show, it is even possible for someone to have a loving relationship with a person while lacking knowledge that that person exists. Even in the last case, the child who does not know that the mayor exists nonetheless might have a loving relationship with his neighbor, who, unbeknownst to the child, is the mayor. In fact, actual cases like this with respect to God can be found. So, for example, consider an incident related by the eminent anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his study of Pygmies. On one occasion, the Pygmy serving as Turnbull’s aide and guide crossed paths with a Catholic priest, Father Longo, while the Pygmy was guiding Turnbull. Father Longo, unaware of the prime directive of anthropologists not to alter the character of the native people under study, took the opportunity of the meeting with the Pygmy to try to

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evangelize him. According to Turnbull, the Pygmies have a religion of their own. Without much in the way of theology or established religious institutions, they believe in a god of the forest in which they live and whose children they hold themselves to be. In general, the Pygmies Turnbull knew were entirely insulated from contact with Christian beliefs. Apart from connection to Turnbull and this one contact with a Catholic priest, the Pygmy guiding Turnbull had no contact with Christian culture. Nonetheless, as Turnbull himself tells the story, after the encounter with the priest, the Pygmy guide told Turnbull, “Pere Longo was right; this God must be the same as our God in the forest.”13 Whether or not this anecdote is trustworthy, it makes the point. On Turnbull’s story, before the Pygmy met the Catholic priest, it would not have been true to say that the Pygmy believed that an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God exists; but it was still true, on the Pygmy’s view of it, that the Pygmy knew God. And here it is also important to remember the other implication of the doctrine of simplicity: that it is true to say that God is being, as well as true to say that God is a being with a mind and a will. Being is correlative with goodness;14 and therefore, on the doctrine of simplicity, it is also true to say that God is goodness. Furthermore, beauty is goodness under a particular description; as Aquinas puts it, beauty is goodness perceptible to the senses (where intellectual vision counts as a kind of sight, too). So in knowing goodness or in sensing beauty, a person is also knowing God, to one degree or another. So from a person’s sincere self-report that he does not believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God, it does not follow that he does not know God in any way or to any degree. And, clearly, knowing God is not a transparent matter. A person can know God through sensing beauty or through second-personal connection of however limited or dreamy a means, without being aware that he has this knowledge of God. A fortiori, it is not clear how others would determine whether a person had knowledge of God. As far as that goes, it is in theory possible, and compatible with the data that many people report themselves to be atheists, that all persons have some 13

Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (1961; repr. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 258. 14 For an explanation and defense of this claim, see my Aquinas (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 2.

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knowledge of God. I am not claiming that it is true that all persons have some knowledge of God; I am claiming only that it takes more than self-reports of atheism to show that it is false. Of course, one might suppose (as Schellenberg does) that an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God could unilaterally provide a human person with awareness of God powerful enough to bring a person to conscious awareness of God, so that there would be no self-reports of atheism. But here too it makes a difference if we think in terms of knowledge of persons. Central to Schellenberg’s thought is the claim that God wants loving relationships with human beings. But if the knowledge requisite for such a relationship is knowledge of persons, then it seems clear that God cannot unilaterally bring about such knowledge in a human person. Consider just two human persons, Jerome and Paula, and suppose that Jerome wants loving relations with Paula. Then certainly Jerome can jump out in front of Paula and yell “Hi!” to bring it about that Paula acknowledges his existence. But Paula will hardly get to know Jerome by this means. Furthermore, knowledge of persons comes in degrees. If Jerome wants Paula really to know him, not only will he have to go slowly, but he will also have to proceed with her consent. Without her consent, he may bring it about that Paula knows that Jerome exists, but this knowledge on Paula’s part will not give Jerome want he wants. To know Jerome, Paula has to be willing to know Jerome. Unlike propositional knowledge of Jerome’s existence, the knowledge of Jerome is not something that Jerome can unilaterally produce in Paula. Without Paula’s willingness to be open to Jerome, she will not get to know him.15 By parity of reasoning, the knowledge of God is not something that God can produce unilaterally in a human person. But, contrary to Schellenberg, it does not follow either that if a person Paula does not have knowledge of God, she must be somehow resistant to having such knowledge or, if she is resistant, she must be somehow culpable for being resistant. It is, of course, possible that she might be culpable for her resistance. She might, for example, hate people and so try to avoid knowledge of them. But then again she might not. There are many reasons why Paula might be resistant to being willing to know Jerome, and not all of them are culpable. She might just be highly introverted by

15

For more discussion and defense of this point, see Stump (2010), chapter 6.

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nature, for example. In such a case, she might be closed to another person like Jerome without being blameworthy for her condition. Furthermore, it might be the case that Paula is closed to Jerome without being particularly resistant to knowledge of him. She might be too overwhelmed by life to be available for personal relations, or she might be traumatized by earlier experience, or she might be broken by sorrow and grief. In conditions such as these, Paula will not be available for knowledge of Jerome, but for reasons other than her being resistant to belief that Jerome exists. As far as that goes, it might even be the case that a person who sincerely believes of herself that she longs for Jerome might nonetheless also be unwilling to be open to Jerome. Paula might be unwilling to know Jerome even while she believes truly that she wants to know him, because Paula is internally divided within herself. When Catullus says of his beloved Lesbia, “Odi et amo” (“I hate her and I love her”), no one has difficulty understanding what he means. The tendency to be internally fragmented, to will against what one also wills or even against what one wants to will, is a common human condition, as Augustine pointed out long ago.16 So from the fact that a person believes of himself that he is willing to be available for personal relationships with others, including God, it doesn’t follow that he is not also unwilling. And his unwillingness need not be a result of any culpable defect or an indication of any resistance to a particular belief, such as belief that God exists. The complexity of human psychology allows for many other sources of such internal division in the self. Consequently, Schellenberg is wrong. There are more alternatives available for explaining the apparent hiddenness of God than the two he gives, namely either that human beings are culpably resistant to belief, or else that human beings haven’t been given belief, or the basis for belief, by God, so that there is no omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God. It makes a huge difference to theological discussion, then, if we think of the subject of theology as a God who is somehow both being itself and also a being, something which has a mind and a will. And if we recognize that knowledge of a person is different from propositional knowledge with regard to that person, we will see even some much-discussed theological problems in a new way.

16

For further discussion and defense of this view, see Stump (2010), chapter 7.

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The preceding reflections illuminate the role of the knowledge of persons in particular theological discussion, but focusing on the knowledge of persons also makes a difference to a more general understanding of the methodology useful to theology. We are not yet in a position to give a clear and complete account of the knowledge of persons; but however exactly we are to describe it, it cannot be captured appropriately as knowledge of either a firstperson or a third-person kind. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, it is more nearly accurate to describe it in terms of a second-person experience.17 In earlier work, I characterized the second-person experience one person Paula has of another person Jerome in this way.18 Paula has second-person experience of Jerome only if Paula is aware of Jerome as a person; her awareness is direct, intuitive, and unmediated; and Jerome is conscious. The knowledge enabled by such an experience is the knowledge of persons. Knowledge of persons is therefore a kind of second-personal knowledge. One of the noteworthy things about the second-personal knowledge of persons is that it can be transmitted by means of stories. While a person cannot express the distinctive knowledge of his second-personal experience as a matter of knowing that, he can do something to re-present the experience itself in such a way that he can share the second-person experience to some degree with someone else who was not part of it, so that at least some of the knowledge of persons garnered from the experience is also available to her.19 And this is generally what we do when we tell a story.20 So a story can be thought of as a report of a set of real or imagined second-person experiences that does not lose (or at least does not lose entirely) the distinctively second-person character of the experiences.

17

See Stump (2010), chapter 4. For more discussion of the second-personal, see Stump (2010), chapters 4 and 6. 19 In this respect, a second-person experience differs from a first-person experience of the sort we have in perception. There is no way for me to convey to someone who has never seen colors what I know when I know what it is like to see red. 20 I am not here implying that the only function, or even the main function, of narratives (in one medium or another) is to convey real or imagined second-person experiences. My claim is just that much less is lost of a second-person experience in a narrative account than in a third-person account, ceteris paribus. 18

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A story does so by making it possible, to one degree or another,21 for a person to experience some of what she would have experienced if she had been an onlooker in the second-person experience represented in the story. That is, a story gives a person some of what she would have had if she had had unmediated personal interaction with the characters in the story while they were conscious and interacting with each other, without actually making her part of the story itself.22 What is noteworthy here, then, is that, to one degree or another, a story about a person Jerome can connect another person Paula with Jerome in such a way that, although Paula is not face-to-face with Jerome, she nonetheless has a kind of second-person experience of Jerome;23 and because of that experience gained through the story, she has some knowledge of persons with respect to Jerome. (How much knowledge she has will be a function of how well the story is told and of how competent Paula is at the comprehension of stories.24) When the knowledge of persons has to do with God, then it is worth noticing that most people acquire that knowledge, at least originally, from biblical stories, either by hearing or reading the stories for themselves or by hearing the stories in brief as summarily recounted by others. So, for theology, narrative is central to the pursuit of the knowledge that is theology’s object. And this makes a huge difference to the methodology suitable for theology.

21 The degree will be a function not only of the narrative excellence of the story but also of the sensitivity and intelligence of the story-hearer or reader as well. 22 I do not mean to say that the storyteller or artist does not contribute something of her own in the narrative presentation. On the contrary, part of the importance of narrative is that its artistry enables us to see what we might well have missed without the help of the narrative, even if we had been present as bystanders in the events recounted in the narrative. It is for this reason that the quality of the artistry in a narrative makes a difference to what there is to know on the basis of it. 23 Or an analog to a second-person experience. Whether it is a real second-person experience or an analog to one is a complicated matter that can’t be dealt with adequately in passing here. 24 For the sake of space, I am here simply presupposing that the story in question is historically true in its details. It is an interesting but complicated question what happens to these claims if the story is fictional in every respect. There are certainly some people who suppose that these claims remain entirely true even in such a case. That is, there are people who suppose one can have a second-person experience and knowledge of persons with regard to, for example, Trollope’s endearing Duchess of Omnium. It would take me too far afield here, and it is not necessary for my purposes in any case, to pursue this issue in this chapter.

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In this connection, consider again the difference between theology and philosophy. Philosophical work, especially in the analytic tradition, commonly has a certain sort of tight order to it because it is structured around arguments, and philosophical discussion typically proceeds in an orderly way designed to try to command agreement. By contrast, interpretations of narratives—for that matter, interpretations of people and their actions—do not admit of rigorous argument. We can definitively rule some interpretations out, but it is hard to make a compelling argument that only this interpretation is right. Even a carefully supported interpretation of narratives is, in effect, only a recommendation to look at a text in a certain way. It invites readers to consider that text and ask themselves whether after all they do not see the text in the way the interpretation recommends. Interpretations present, suggest, offer, and invite; unlike philosophical arguments, they cannot attempt to compel. Furthermore, the interpretation of narratives is itself an art; it requires its own kind of expertise. And for narratives, as for philosophy, there is a community of scholars in whom that expertise is vested. Although communal expertise can certainly be mistaken, it is not generally wise to jettison it wholesale. It represents the results of many minds working in community over a considerable period of time. This is the case for the study of narratives just as it is for the study of philosophy. In the case of narratives, one thing this communal expertise typically gives us is a plethora of interpretations of a text. It shows us the range of interpretations possible as regards that text, and so it makes us more thoughtful and more sophisticated in our interpretation of that text. It also shows us what needs to be done to support a particular interpretation of a text. It helps us understand what interpretations need to be argued against if one particular interpretation is to be put forward as the most plausible or most fruitful one. These remarks apply to narrative texts in our own culture and language, but they are especially pertinent when the narratives in question are written in a language very different from our own and stem from a culture very different from our own. In the case of the biblical texts, even before the difficulties of interpreting the text, there is the difficulty of finding the right reading of it. Just understanding what a line means can take considerable expertise. For such texts, the work of generations of linguists, historians, and literary scholars can yield insight into readings and interpretations that would be hard to

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come by otherwise. In the case of the stories in the Bible, the texts have been studied for centuries by some of the best minds in the Jewish and Christian traditions; and many of the commentaries of those scholars, with their philological and literary competences, are still available to us. And, of course, the biblical texts are still very much under discussion today, not only by historical biblical scholars and literary critics but even by philosophers. Finally, many ancient and contemporary studies make clear to us that the biblical narratives in particular have neutron-star density. For example, Eric Auerbach has famously contrasted the narratives of the Hebrew Bible with the narratives of Homer, to bring out the biblical narrative’s ability to convey an enormous amount with a tiny bit of text.25 The noted literary scholar Robert Alter has made contemporary readers aware of what can be done with the Hebrew narratives when their detail is unfolded by someone trained in the analysis of narratives and attentive to the nuances of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose.26 So theology needs to consider narratives, and especially biblical narratives, as well as philosophical or theological issues. And then it needs to treat those narratives not just as historical artifacts but rather as the stories they are. To consider them as stories is to bring to bear on them all the tools scholars of narrative have developed for such study and to avail oneself of the archive of scholarship produced by others engaged in the same enterprise.

CONCLUSION Considered as a discipline, then, theology differs from philosophy in having as its subject-matter a God who has a mind and a will, even on the doctrine of simplicity, which takes God to be somehow also being itself. Consequently, what theology seeks with respect to God includes the knowledge of persons; it needs more than knowledge that. But the knowledge of persons is a special kind of knowledge that cannot be 25

Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003). 26 See, for example, Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

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captured completely or even at all in expository, propositional prose. Even so, this special kind of knowledge is sharable, particularly through the medium of narratives. For theology then, unlike philosophy, narratives are central to its methodology. For this reason, it needs to avail itself of all the skills and expertise of those sensitive to narratives. History and philosophy matter to theology, but the understanding of narrative matters more. Elsewhere I argued that philosophy is impoverished if it does not avail itself of the knowledge of persons mediated by narratives. But I meant that, in some cases, philosophy will be enriched in its propositional knowledge of universals such as wisdom if it makes its way to that knowledge through narrative. But the case for theology is different. Because the end point for philosophy is the knowledge of one concrete particular who is God (however else God is also to be described), the goal for theology includes centrally the knowledge of persons. That is why it makes sense that Judaism is centered on stories, in the Torah and the Talmud; and that is why the heart of the Christian evangelium is in the stories of the Gospels. The propositional knowledge of philosophy will be useful to theology, but only as part of the means for the knowledge of the person who is God, and that knowledge cannot be appropriately conveyed without narratives.

10 Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context Keith Ward

INTRODUCTION I agree with and accept virtually all that has been said in this book by my fellow-contributors about the fact that an adequate account of religious understanding requires something very different from a purely scientific understanding of religion. By an account of religious understanding I mean an analysis of what it is like to interpret all human experience from what might be called a religious point of view. Religious understanding is, as I think all the contributors to this book agree, based on the postulate that there is a spiritual dimension to experience. A major problem is that what is meant by a “spiritual dimension” is hotly contested. Many people would deny that it makes sense to speak of such a thing, since one can speak of morality, art, deep human feelings, and so on without the use of any such term. On the other hand, the term “spirituality” is quite widely used in twenty-firstcentury Western societies. For some, it is a way of referring to nonscientific aspects of human experience, to the “inner” or “higher mental life” of human beings, and perhaps especially to evaluational, moral, and aesthetic aspects of experience. For others it suggests disciplines of meditation or mindfulness. And for some it implies the postulation of some metaphysical reality, whether it is “Spirit” or “the Infinite” or something like an objective realm of values. I think that most religious believers, and some of those who would not call themselves religious, would think of a spiritual dimension as

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objective in that it is held to be independent, in some sense, of human cognition and feeling. It is non-naturalistic, in the sense that it is not fully amenable to the methods of empirical scientific investigation, or reducible to purely physical elements. Furthermore, it is usual to ascribe special and significant value to it, and to believe that human apprehension of this value can have a transformative influence on human awareness and action. That is a case that has been fully argued by my fellow-contributors. The problem I wish to deal with is rather different. It is the problem of how to account for the large number of differing, indeed conflicting, interpretations of religious understanding. Even among religions, there are many different ways of understanding the spiritual dimension. For instance, such a conception can be worked out, as it is in Christianity, by speaking of a God of supreme goodness who can infuse special virtues, like faith, hope, and love, into human lives. It can be worked out, as in Buddhism, by speaking of a “liberated state” of supreme value, which is attainable by meditative practices. It can be worked out in a more Confucian or Taoist context by speaking of the Tao or “Way of Heaven,” reflection on which can enable one to live in a more balanced and harmonious way. And it can be worked out in many other ways too, as the wide range of world religions show. On most of these views, a religious understanding is an understanding of all human experience as ultimately concerned with the transformative realization of a conscious relationship to this spiritual dimension. But there is a problem with the fact that there are so many different interpretations of this relationship. Can we reasonably speak of “religious understanding” if different religions seem to understand things in such different ways? The first part of this chapter will address that problem. Then I shall suggest that there are new factors today that mitigate the problem of religious diversity, and which give rise to new models of religious understanding. I will mention three such factors. One is the rise of critical historical methodology, which puts traditional accounts of the origin of religions in a new light. Another is the clearer understanding of the variety and sophistication of different spiritual traditions which are able to encounter and understand one another better through modern methods of communication. And a third is the new awareness of the immensity of the universe in time and space and of the evolution of the cosmos, which forms a very different context for all ancient spiritual traditions.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 193 RELIGION AND THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION I shall begin with a question which inevitably arises in contemporary discussion of this topic. Is religion a form of understanding at all, or is it a species of ignorance? The modern world includes proponents of both views. Those who think religion gives understanding might claim that it understands the world as open to a transcendent dimension of meaning, value, and purpose. Those who think religion is a species of ignorance may say that there is no such dimension, or that if there is, it is a dimension of a purely natural world, and religion often misunderstands it by objectifying it as a separate “supernatural” realm and thinking that it plays some causal or even conscious and intentional role in what happens in our everyday world. Fiona Ellis’s book God, Value, and Nature1 analyzes in depth some sophisticated versions of these views. She argues that there is a dimension of reality which could be called “spiritual,” but that it does not necessarily refer to a clearly definable supernatural realm that is quite different from this natural world, requiring special esoteric techniques to access it. Ellis does not speak explicitly about religion in the book, but it is clear that religions on the whole deal with this spiritual dimension in a number of different ways. In doing so, they need not refer to a separate supernatural reality, and indeed one of the themes of her book is that the word “supernatural” is a very ill-defined term. Religions, one might think, typically deal just with this one world in which we live, but see this world, and our experience of it, as expressive both of objective values in art and morality and of divine transformative power that can enrich and fulfill human lives. For Ellis, someone who has such an understanding need not subscribe to any religion, but it is clear that many religious believers would see such an understanding as central to their faith. Believers in God would usually add that spiritual reality plays an active causal role in how the world goes, but it is just such an active role that many opponents of religion deny.2 Ellis seems right, however, in claiming that if self-declared “naturalists” are prepared to speak of objective values, they have already made a crucial move in allowing more than purely physical or scientifically describable facts to be parts of our 1

Fiona Ellis (2014). See Iris Murdoch (1970), 71, where she denies that “the Good” has any causal power in the world. 2

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everyday world. This is a very helpful move in showing that the gap between religious and secular views of the world is not as great or as clear as is sometimes thought. Religious understandings cannot just be dismissed as “spooky” superstitions. It is not just religions which postulate realities (values, for instance) which are not purely physical, or which do not fall under some natural science. Religious and naturalistic thinkers alike (at least if they are of an expansive disposition) may assert that there is a spiritual dimension to reality, that to see reality truly is to be aware of this spiritual dimension, and that human fulfillment can be achieved through conscious relation to it. The fact is, however, that many religions derive their interpretations of how to achieve such fulfillment from some authoritative source. And these authorities often seem to contradict each other. The three examples I have already mentioned illustrate this. In Christianity there is a non-physical reality, God, who promises eternal life to faithful devotees, and the right relationship to whom is revealed by Jesus. Here the spiritual is construed in terms of a personal reality, love of which for its own sake is the supreme good. In Buddhism there is a non-physical reality, Nirvana, which gives release from suffering, the nature of which is taught by Siddartha Gautama. Spiritual reality is thought of as impersonal and as liberation from rebirth in a world of suffering. And in Confucianism there is a not-purely-physical reality, the Way of Heaven, which is the way to harmony and justice in society, and is taught by Master K’ung Fu-Tzu. The spiritual is seen as the moral dimension of the natural world, and as providing a pattern of fulfillment for a balanced life in earthly society. These are very different ways of describing the spiritual and the supreme good that can be obtained by conscious relation to it, though they are all ways of achieving fulfillment by relating to spiritual reality in a way revealed by someone thought to be in a special position to know it (Buddhism and Confucianism do not use the term “revelation,” but they do appeal to an authoritative teacher). If there is no such thing as a spiritual dimension, if conscious relation to it cannot bring about human good, or if there are no persons who are trustworthy guides to what such a relation should be, then religion, even in this vague sense, is founded on a basic mistake. The mistake would be huge and spread through almost every human population, and it may seem odd that so many humans, many of them of high intelligence and wide knowledge, are subject to such a large mistake. Of course, as this book has argued, many atheists and

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 195 people who would not describe themselves as religious may agree that there is a spiritual dimension, but they too disagree about its nature. In particular, they will often protest that the dimension should not be conceived in terms of some active personal being or beings. It is hard to see how it could be shown, from some neutral position, that some of these disagreements are due to identifiable mistakes. But on the other hand it may also seem odd, if there is a spiritual dimension, that humans should be so divided in their opinions about the existence and nature of a spiritual dimension, and that there should be no obvious way of settling their disputes. Perhaps there is no such thing as a general “religious understanding of reality” after all. I believe that such a conclusion would be too hasty. Yet “religion” is a term which covers hundreds of possible cases, some of them very different from each other.3 Indeed, it is a standard criticism of any particular religion that its teachings contradict those of some other religions, and that there seems no neutral way to choose between them. Many of their teachings are, as far as this world goes, unverifiable. David Hume criticizes claims to truth in religion by pointing out that many religious claims contradict each other, and there seems to be no way of resolving the disagreement. Therefore, he says, any religious claim loses credibility.4 “In matters of religion whatever is different is contrary,” he writes, and the evidence for any religious claim is undermined by contrary evidence from another religion. From the point of view of one religion, many other religions must actually seem to be religious misunderstandings, not religious understandings. This undermines any claim that there is such a thing as an agreed form of religious understanding. Hume goes too far in saying that whatever is different is contrary, since many differences may well be complementary insights. There certainly are contradictions between religions, but there is rarely, if ever, conclusive evidence to settle the issue. Such contradictions do suggest that human understanding in this area is imperfect, but it is hardly sensible to say that wherever there is such a contradiction one cannot reasonably believe either of the two contrary claims. So Hume’s point is not decisive. Yet if a religion makes claims to divine revelation—that is, to some active communication of information 3 Eric Sharpe (1983), ch. 3, 33–48, provides a valuable discussion of defining “religion.” 4 David Hume (1955), Section X, “On Miracles,” 129.

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from the spiritual dimension to humans—the problem of diversity gets more severe. If one tradition claims that revelation, being from God, is inerrant, final, and complete (and some do), that might be persuasive if that tradition is well evidenced and clearly superior in content to other traditions. But if, as seems to be the case, a number of traditions each claim such revelation with more or less equal plausibility, there is a major problem of why God (if there is a God) did not make divine revelation clearer and better evidenced. In this case, competing claims to inerrant divine revelation do seem to weaken the claims of each competitor. That is a problem for any general account of religious understanding.

THE DIVERSITY OF BASIC HUMAN PERSPECTIVES There is, then, a basic dispute about whether there is a spiritual dimension to existence and, if there is, how we are to interpret its nature. Such a dispute could only arise among equally reasonable and informed people when the facts of which they are aware are such that they allow of reasonable yet diverse interpretations. However, it seems that this is not solely a feature of religious understanding. Such basic diversity of interpretations is a feature of many sorts of human understanding. It is common in the arts, history, morality, politics, and philosophy. In all these disciplines, there are basic disputes that there is no agreed way of settling, even by people of ability and knowledge. For instance, within philosophy, on such matters as the relation of the mind and brain, the existence of moral freedom, the nature of punishment, the importance of equality in society, and the moral distinctiveness of human persons, arguments may get more sophisticated, but it does not seem likely that they will ever cease. Some of these matters are of great practical importance, but only a person of incorrigible self-confidence and a certain amount of contempt for the beliefs of others could claim that they have been conclusively settled (that does not stop some philosophers from making such a claim). There are disputes in the natural sciences, too, but they do not usually go so far as to dispute the very foundational claims of science. For instance, anyone who rejected the theory of general relativity would be simply ignored by the vast majority of competent physicists.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 197 In humanities disciplines this is not the case. In morality, arguments about the moral status of the human embryo are hotly disputed between Catholic and many secular ethicists. There seems to be no way of resolving the disputes, and the scientific data in the relevant areas can be known and accepted by both sets of disputants. So it is not really surprising that there should be basic disputes about the interpretation of the spiritual dimension too. This is not a problem peculiar to religion. But it is a problem, nonetheless, for it may seem odd if one religious believer claims to know that there is a God, while others who are happy to accept a spiritual dimension of reality deny that such a claim about God even makes sense. One way of mitigating this feeling of oddity is to advert to the familiar fact that values and perspectives change and differ in accordance with the sorts of experiences that people and societies have had, and the ways in which they integrate those experiences into a general assessment of the world they experience in general. Religious understanding does involve a general assessment of the sorts of entities or things that can meaningfully be said to exist (e.g. “there is a God” or “values exist, as well as physical objects in space”). If the arguments of this book are correct, religious understanding affirms a spiritual dimension in which aesthetic and moral values have an objective place. It is thus almost always evaluative—it ranks acts and states as good or bad, wise or unwise, admirable or detestable. Where such evaluative considerations are involved, there is a lot of room for diverse perspectives to flourish. Of course discoverable factual evidence should limit plausible interpretations, but there can be, and in fact there clearly are, a number of varying evaluative judgments, from a sense of the futility of existence, to a sense of the possibility of transcending the transience of time by its incorporation into eternity. In between there is a whole spectrum of more or less finely grained possibilities. These are fundamental human options. We do not clearly and consciously choose them, but the sorts of experiences we have, and the way we respond to them, may gradually form such general attitudes in us. We are no doubt partly responsible for the nature of our responses to experience, but it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be sure just how much responsibility we have for the views we consciously form, and how far they are laid down by unconscious forces and influences. So it is not reasonable to praise or blame people for their most basic beliefs, as though we could say,

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for instance, that belief in the spiritual was a sign of virtue and unbelief a sign of vice. The situation could, in particular cases, be quite the opposite. Skepticism about the existence of a God could be a sign of intellectual honesty, whereas fervent belief in God could be a symptom of fear and wishful thinking. Of course people do not have to take such general views about the alleged ontological implications of such things as a commitment to moral values. They may concentrate solely on particular problems of survival and well-being, and they may be, and sometimes clearly are, skeptical about the objective existence of moral values. That of course precisely expresses one way in which personal inclinations and interests will influence very basic evaluations of the world, and therefore a decision about what it is worthwhile to do. A down-to-earth, pragmatic attitude is itself a definite personal inclination, which influences the sorts of inquiries that are thought worthwhile. So a study of diverse streams of human experience and their development in very different historical and social contexts helps to explain how different and apparently incommensurable interpretations build up into what may seem to be bluntly divergent traditions, in the arts, history, philosophy, morality, and religion. In the case of religion, a number of historical factors have combined to make the existence of a spiritual dimension highly contested in modern Western culture. In this culture, the spiritual dimension was construed in terms of a personal creator God, and alleged experiences of that God were recorded in a text, the Bible, which saw the earth as central to the cosmos, as small in both time and space, and as replete with the actions of angels and demons. Advances in science have rendered that worldview obsolete, and advances in historical method have made reliance on the Bible as an inerrant text, when it seems to contain so many contradictions and obscurities, more difficult to defend. Consequently, some who are devoted to science may develop views that insist on the reduction of everything to the scientifically explicable; that is, to the purely physical. And some who are committed to the truth of the Bible may find themselves opposing science. Many, however, have found it possible to reformulate ancient religious views, and find that new scientific discoveries do not entail any sort of reductive physicalism, but actually give new life to a spiritual view of the universe. A historical account helps to explain the divergence, but it does not resolve it one way or another.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 199 A TRUTH THAT LIES AHEAD What is one to do in the face of this plethora of divergences? In the arts, history, philosophy, and morality, one does not and cannot simply give up and opt out of having a view. In fact, each person already has an initial view, which they have been taught and which shapes their basic beliefs and values. Each person has an initial temperament—reflective or practical, conservative or radical, bold or timid—with which they were born and which constrains what they think and do. And each person has a unique set of experiences, good or bad, which will affect their outlook on life. These points may seem obvious and trivial, but they undermine any account that one can begin to assess basic questions about reality and value from a “tabula rasa,” an initial position of neutrality, from which pure reason—supposed to be the same in all rational people—will be able to construct a value-free account of reality and value. There is no such thing as a neutral initial position, and there is no such thing as pure reason which will lead to identical conclusions from all reasonable people who have access to the same information. Reason has an important affective and evaluational component, and education, temperament, and personal experience—each of them different in differing individuals and societies—will influence what anyone thinks to be rational and plausible. It may seem that the space for free personal responses and decisions—for what some philosophers have idealized as “autonomous decision-making”—is rather small, so the question of deciding between competing basic views does not even arise. Most of us start from a basic evaluational stance which will affect how we interpret spiritual experiences, or even prevent us from using such a conceptual category. If we have a religious understanding, the main outlines of its interpretation will have been taught to us, temperamentally embraced or rejected, and confirmed or queried by our life-experiences, even before we come to reflect seriously about them. If we do have an area of autonomous reflection—and I think we do—it will be influenced, even constrained, by such factors to an important degree. In view of these factors, the problem of diversity of religions is mitigated, and appears as one natural expression of the general human condition that seeking understanding is a difficult and gradual progress (we hope it is progress) toward an only dimly foreseen goal. But maybe this licenses a rather

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different religious understanding than has often been commended in the past. That is a possibility I will proceed to explore. Many people are now faced with a real choice between directly competing religious claims. In this circumstance, there is a moral responsibility, so far as one is able, to articulate the nature and basis of one’s own inherited beliefs—something that is much more difficult than one might think. There is a responsibility to be open to criticism, and to cultivate an initial sympathy with the views of others—at least being able to state those views in ways that those others would accept—and to widen one’s knowledge and experience as much as possible.5 Yet to say that already presupposes a certain evaluative view, a view that is not universally shared. Some views would describe any attempt to be self-critical as disloyal, would oppose being sympathetic to the views of others, and would insist on staying solely within one’s own tradition. An “open” approach arises precisely from reflection on the diversity of beliefs, the lack of an overwhelmingly rational defense of one set of beliefs, and the observed amount of historical change in systems of belief, which is often the result of interaction with other forms of belief. Yet those facts do not entail the “open” moral approach. It is perhaps the predisposition to form an open approach that leads to the selection of those facts as morally relevant and important. Evaluative beliefs, like philosophical beliefs, fall into incommensurable systems, and so they do not offer tradition-free principles for thought and action. Basic values just differ basically. Moralities based on honor and hierarchy differ fundamentally from moralities based on equality and direct democracy. From one point of view, this could be explained by saying that values are just “chosen” or prescribed, with objective truth not being at issue. That, however, entails a downgrading of any strong sense of objective moral obligation. The alternative explanation is that there is an objective moral truth, though it has become very difficult to discern, perhaps because of widespread human egoism and pride. There may be a most adequate view of how to be “truly” human, but basic personal commitments have to be made from positions of 5

Alasdair MacIntyre (1985) defends the view of values as tradition-dependent, and, in the course of a long and complex argument, he says, “It is only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are” (164). That is, traditions need to encounter and understand one another to realize what they themselves truly are.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 201 uncertainty and ambiguity, commitments that determine what sort of persons we decide to be, in a world of greed, hatred, and ignorance. We do not first discern the facts from some neutral and disinterested vantage point, and then decide how it is right to act. But neither do we first discern a set of clear moral principles, and then select the facts to accord with them. Our discernment of relevant and important facts and our commitment to a specific set of moral principles interact and develop together. In addition, we are parts of constantly changing social groups that seek to instill their values in us, and must respond to specific problems that arise in these groups at specific times. This may suggest that our grasp of what is good and true, in religion as in morality and politics, is always partial and corrupted, but that we are objectively challenged to pursue the most just and loving course we know, sometimes at some personal cost. Those who accept that this is the case may come to have a rather distinctive model of religious understanding.

RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING AND THE EXPERIENTIAL DIMENSION I began by saying that an inquiry into religious understanding is an inquiry into what it is like to interpret all experience from a religious point of view. But I then noted that there are many different interpretations of a religious point of view, even though all, or most, of them assume that it makes sense to say that a spiritual dimension exists, and that some sort of experience of it is possible. On this account, experience plays a crucial role in the formation of religious understanding. John Cottingham points out that the experiences that are characteristic of religion do not have to be specific identifiable types of experience—like Schleiermacher’s “sense of absolute dependence”6 6 Friedrich Schleiermacher (1989). In his 1799 “Speeches on Religion,” Schleiermacher wrote that religion is “the sensibility and taste for the infinite” (Schleiermacher [1988], 103). Later, in his “Glaubenslehre,” published in English as “The Christian Faith,” he spoke instead of the “sense of absolute dependence” (Schleiermacher [1989], chapter 1, section 4, 12). His main point was that religious understanding is based on the occurrence of certain types of experience—Anschauung, best translated, in my view, as “apprehension.”

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or Otto’s “mysterium tremendum.”7 Such experiences occur, and they are of great importance, but they are not, as Otto sometimes held, both necessary and sufficient for being a religious believer. For religious believers, there will in a much broader sense be personal experiences which seem to be most adequately interpreted as experiences of transcendence. They could be experiences of beauty, in the natural world or in the creative arts. They could be experiences of goodness, in the transfigured lives of saintly people or in the compelling power of demanding human ideals of life. They could be experiences of rational elegance and intelligibility, in the complex structures of the natural world. They could be experiences of a personal depth in others, as one comes to see other people in ways that enable one to relate to them in genuine love and compassion. Or they could be experiences of an inwardly known personal presence of overwhelming grandeur and glory, or of an inner “enduring power not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.”8 Many such experiences may occur to people who would not call themselves religious. Perhaps all of them could be seen, in John Cottingham’s words, as cases of “privileged receptivity” which may require “long years of habituation and training, and sharpening of emotional and aesthetic sensibility,” a preparedness to transcend self and receive apprehensions of transcendence.9 This may require what Cottingham describes as “conversion . . . the working of an interior change that generates a new openness.”10 So in religion those who understand religion most deeply—and perhaps one person can only really understand one or two religions out of the vast array of faiths— are those who know what such experiences “are like,” and they have been to some extent transformed by them. Serious religious believers follow a practice or discipline which is intended to facilitate the depth and frequency of such experiences, and which integrates them around a focal concept or set of concepts. For instance, for most theists all such experiences of transcendence are integrated and united around the central idea of an objective mind-like and causally active reality 7 Rudolf Otto (1917). Throughout his book, Otto speaks of the “mysterium tremendum,” but he stresses that there is also an element of “fascinans” in the basic religious experience, which he terms experience of the “numinous”—“the numinous in its aspects of mystery, awefulness, majesty, augustness, and energy; nay, even the aspect of fascination is dimly felt in it” (Otto, ch. 4, 54). 8 Matthew Arnold (1924), chapter 10, section 4. 9 10 John Cottingham (2009), 108. Cottingham (2009), 124.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 203 underlying and expressed in and through the whole world of human experiences, and drawing that world into a deepening awareness of its inherent spiritual reality. This experiential dimension is, I think, an essential part of “religious understanding.” An emphasis on the centrality of experience in religious faith is an insight that owes much to Schleiermacher, who emphasized that religious understanding builds on experience of the spiritual. In this respect religious understanding is different from scientific understanding. Scientific understanding is dispassionate: it is concerned with constructing theories to show the regular behavior of physical objects. Religious worshippers do not typically construct mathematically formulated laws of nature or observe physical objects very carefully in laboratories and under rigorously controlled experimental conditions. Central to religious understanding is a particular sort of mental attitude of apprehension, or of preparedness to apprehend in a specific way. One way of characterizing this is to speak of openness to experiences of transcendent value and meaning. Such experiences are both natural and frequent in many human lives. They exist in many degrees and in many forms, and they may become constituent parts of a religious or spiritual understanding of the world.

THE RISE OF NEW WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING I have argued that the fact of religious diversity does not undermine the claim that there is such a thing as religious understanding. But there is still a problem that arises when particular traditions claim to have revealed inerrant, final, and complete truth. I think that there are three new factors in the modern situation that, when they are taken seriously, force a qualification, though not necessarily a complete abandonment, of such religious claims. These are the rise of historical consciousness, of global awareness, and of cosmic expansiveness. The rise of global awareness and historical consciousness since the seventeenth century in Europe has made many people more aware of the inescapable limitations of their own views, and may prompt a new response to that awareness. That new response can be, and perhaps should be, characteristic of our religious understanding as well as of our general philosophical and moral understanding. We will then see

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religions as paths to an awareness of spiritual reality, opened up by various outstanding teachers, and we will be wary of assuming that one of these paths is the only obviously right one for all humans, while all the others are misleading. As I have stressed, we will still find ourselves inclined to choose one path for ourselves, even if that path is the way of agnosticism. So I suppose what may seem most appropriate is a committed, critical, and open understanding of religion. This means that individuals may belong to a specific tradition (say, Protestant Christianity), and be committed to its major practices and beliefs. But they may be critical of some of its characteristic claims and values, and may accept many insights from other traditions of which they become aware. Others may not feel comfortable in committing themselves to any single tradition, and this may naturally lead to a stance which is often now known as “multiple belonging.”11 They may take insights from many different spiritual strands of thought, from many religions, and build them into a personal overall understanding. The negative term for this approach is syncretism, but a less negative description would be the adoption of a global perspective on religion. The perspective would still be from a particular historical and social point of view, but it would be global in receiving input from many perspectives, and being prepared to find one’s initial view changed, perhaps in unpredictable ways. There are many notable practitioners of such a global spirituality, John Hick, Huston Smith, Raimon Panikkar, and Bede Griffiths among them. They are not founders of some “new” religion, but people who, in various rather different ways, exemplify a global approach to the religious life. In Indian mythology “Indra’s Net,” or “Indra’s Web,” is a jeweled web, belonging to the god Indra, in which the whole web shines with its fullest and truest light only when each jewel reflects all the other jewels in itself. This seems an appropriate symbol for a way of religious understanding, a global understanding, which is appropriate for our historical situation.12 The amazing development of the scientific method of experimental observation, controlled experiment, and mathematical description has undermined the cosmologies of all ancient religions, and it requires a non-literal or metaphorical interpretation of parts of 11 Shirley du Boulay (2014) speaks of this idea in chapter 9, and especially on page 138 and following. 12 See Keith Ward (2004), 232–3.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 205 many ancient religious texts. The emergence of the disciplines of critical history, requiring close attention to sources and knowledge of the differing cultural and social contexts in which documents were written, has effectively undermined uncritical acceptance of ancient historical religious records. Various religious responses are possible to this emergence, but no informed believer can remain untouched by it. The recent possibility of almost instantaneous global communication, which breaks down the isolation that has characterized many traditional religious communities, has undermined the assumption that there is only one uniquely trustworthy tradition of revelation in the world, and it has for many made it seem appropriate to take religious revelations as culturally and historically limited human attempts to respond to a widely perceived but differently interpreted spiritual dimension of human experiences.13 Professor John Hick is perhaps foremost among philosophers who have called for an adoption of what he terms “pluralism”—the view that the major world faiths are different and, at their core, equally valid ways of responding to the one spiritual “Real.”14 This he opposes to “exclusivism,” the view that only one religious tradition is true and makes salvation or liberation possible for humans. He also opposes it to “inclusivism” (though he does not use the word), the view that one religious path is superior, and is the true way to salvation, though others can have parts of the truth. This could fairly be called a form of exclusivism which is more charitable to those who disagree with it. One form of inclusivism is well represented by Pope John Paul II’s “Redemptoris Missio,” which states that “God loves all people and grants them the possibility of being saved (1 Timothy 2, 4).”15 “Followers of other religions can receive God’s grace and be saved by Christ,” but “The Church is the ordinary means of salvation and she alone possesses the fullness of the means of salvation.”16 For John Hick, however, religions are “historical totalities” which “may each mediate the Real to different groups of human beings; and which in fact do so, as far as we are able to judge, to about the same extent.”17 I do not think that Professor Hick’s form of pluralism, which owes much to a particular interpretation of Immanuel Kant, follows from 13 15 17

14 John Hick (1989), chapter 14, 233–52. Hick (1989), 235–6. 16 John Paul II (1990), para. 9. Ibid., para. 55. Hick (1989), 375.

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the acceptance of modern cosmology, critical history, or global awareness, though it is one carefully considered interpretation of those features of modern thought. For most major world faiths, some historical truths (for instance, that Jesus died on the cross) and some metaphysical truths (for instance, that there is a personal creator) are very important and exclude their denials. However, I do think that no religious believer should be unmoved by our new understanding of the vastness of the cosmos within which human existence is placed, by a degree of agnosticism about the precise details of the past that critical history suggests, and by a recognition of the existence of intellectually sophisticated and morally transformative spiritual paths differing from one’s own. Taking due account of these factors does not require that we see all religions as more or less equally valid paths to knowledge and enlightenment. But it does require that most religious traditions will need to be interpreted consistently with modern developments in moral and scientific thinking, and that they ought to take more account of the seriousness and sincerity of religious views and belief-systems other than their own. Such an approach adds a fourth approach to the widely used triad of pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism. It might be called “expansivism,” since it commends expanding one’s own beliefs by incorporating relevant elements of scientific thought, and by attending to important insights from other traditions. It will not seem appropriate to everyone, and many religious believers may refuse to go down such a route. In the modern world it is clear that they do so refuse, and many of them are prepared to resort to violence to make their point. But I believe that this understanding of religion is both inherently reasonable and is one plausible interpretation of the phenomenon of religion in our world. It is important to recognize that holding such a view is wholly compatible with affirming that there exist absolute truths with regard to religion. It is not relativism; the claim that there are no truths except what some group of people thinks are truths. All that is required is the recognition that the discovery of truth is difficult, often arduous, and our statements of spiritual truths are rarely if ever completely adequate in all respects. This implies a rather flexible and open view of revelation, and would be for many believers a new model of religious understanding of what it is like to see all experience from a religious point of view.

Religious Understanding in a Contemporary Global Context 207 CONCLUSION Religious beliefs rest upon sorts and interpretations of human experience that are widely but not universally shared, that can be greater or lesser in range and intensity, and that are spread over a spectrum of human possibilities, recognition of which renders impossible any simple sharp distinction between the “rational” and the “irrational,” or the “natural” and the “supernatural.” A concern for discovering truth remains important, and a recognition of the diversity of religious interpretations of experience, their intellectual sophistication and spiritual depth, can, and I think should, lead to seeing religion as a search for truth rather than a final disclosure of unchangeable truth. It suggests, as this book has argued, that authentic religious understanding involves transformative personal encounter with a reality of transcendent value. I have stressed the fact that this reality is perceived in many diverse, culturally and historically influenced ways. Commitment to one specific religious tradition remains appropriate, since it seems unduly arrogant simply to insist on one’s own personal views without admitting their dependence upon a wider and wiser context. But each such tradition can now be affected by overt recognition of its place in a wider spectrum of religious possibilities, which may both expose limitations in one’s own tradition and introduce new depths to it. In our world, there are new forms of religious understanding that have arisen in response to changing knowledge of the cosmos, which implies that ancient sources of revelation are not final in all respects; the rise of critical historical method, which implies that ancient religious texts are not inerrant in all respects; and greater knowledge of the varieties of human culture, which implies that no tradition has a complete understanding of spiritual truth. These forms of understanding can be termed global in that they seek to enrich understanding by more expansive knowledge, and by a greater creative engagement with other traditions of thought. My view is that it is some form of global religious belief that comes nearest to truly understanding the rich and complex reality that all humans experience and interpret in so many different ways.

11 Love and Philosophy of Religion Lessons from the Cambridge Platonists Charles Taliaferro

INTRODUCTION In this chapter I highlight and defend an important element in the methodology and substance of the earliest philosophers to reflect on religion in the English language: the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century.1 I propose that they offer us a model for philosophy of religion today in which the virtues, especially the virtue of charity or love of the good, have a central place. Unfortunately, such love is not evident in the field of philosophy of religion in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century as it was in this school of thought in early modern philosophy. This chapter is a plea to recover their exemplary valorization of love of the good and an effort to put that love into the practice of philosophy today. We have inherited a great deal in the philosophy of religion from the Cambridge Platonists. In fact, the very term “philosophy of religion” was probably first used in English by Ralph Cudworth. Other terms that are as central to the literature as any, such as “theism” and “consciousness,” also come from their work, along 1 For an overview, see G.A.J. Rogers et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997); Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008); chapter 1 of my Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and the introduction to C. Taliaferro and Alison Teply (eds.), Cambridge Platonist Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2004).

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with topics such as theistic arguments, philosophical reflection on divine attributes, the problem of evil for theism, and reflections on religious diversity.2 Perhaps some who criticize philosophy of religion today as being too focused on the philosophy of Christianity may lament this inheritance (along with the influence of their successors from Locke to Christian philosophers or philosophers who are Christian today). Still, I hope to draw attention in the first section of this chapter to their philosophy of love and human nature that led them to emancipatory views (of their time) on race and equality that may be appreciated by philosophers of many persuasions well outside the Christian community. In the second section I highlight several occasions in the contemporary literature when I believe there is cause to hope that there might be a bit more charity. I have elected to paraphrase four cases of (ostensibly) uncharitable philosophy of religion to illustrate four lessons for us from the Cambridge Platonists. The paraphrase is crafted to accurately bring to your attention recognizable types of claims in the literature but also to protect (or not to directly identify) the philosophers making such claims.

CAMBRIDGE PLATONIST PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION The Cambridge Platonists were philosophers and theologians (and several were poets) who flourished in Cambridge University before, during, and after the great English Civil Wars that resulted in 190,000 deaths, the decimation of 150 towns and villages, and the military occupation of the city of Cambridge. Despite the violence and the surrounding social upheaval, Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Henry More (1614–87), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (1618–52), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51), Anne Conway (1630–79), and others developed a model of religious understanding in the (broadly speaking) Platonic tradition. They stressed the interwoven relationship of truth, goodness, and beauty in their philosophy of God and creation, and insisted upon the importance of living a life of virtue in 2

See my Evidence and Faith, chapter 1.

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the pursuit of philosophy understood as the love of wisdom. On this point, they were in the Platonic tradition as articulated in Plato’s Seventh Letter: It is barely possible for knowledge to be engendered of an object naturally good in a man naturally good, but if his nature is defective, as is that of most men, for the acquisition of knowledge and the socalled virtues, and if the qualities he has have been corrupted, then not even Lynceus could make such a man see. In short, neither quickness of learning nor a good memory can make a man see when his nature is not akin to the object, for this knowledge never takes root in an alien nature; so that no man who is not naturally inclined and akin to justice and all other forms of excellence, even though he may be quick at learning and remembering this and that and other things . . . will ever attain the truth that is attainable about virtue.3

Using the term “strategy” in its oldest sense (in war), the Cambridge Platonists advanced the practice of philosophy (understood to be the love of wisdom) as, ideally and fundamentally, non-strategic, and a virtuous undertaking that involved respect, non-manipulation, and a renunciation of self-will and deception.4 In war, as in a great deal of sports and business, strategies such as deceiving opponents and setting up ambushes are routine, but (for the Cambridge Platonists) among lovers of wisdom, one ideally should not resort to such tactics (e.g. disguising a known weakness of one’s own arguments, seeking to disguise one’s own fallacies with bewildering, distracting claims one does not actually accept, and so on). Their stress on the importance of philosophers forming a community of inquiry was partly reflective of their fallibilism. That is, their arguments were often advanced not on the grounds of apodictic certitude, but as reasonable positions for fairminded inquirers to weigh.5 The Cambridge Platonist rejection of the pursuit of power for its own sake was part of their philosophy of God. They believed that God’s very nature is non-manipulative, not a matter of vanity or self-will. Their model for understanding God was grounded on recognizing God as

3 Plato’s Epistles, trans. G.R. Morrow (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 240–1. 4 See C. Taliaferro and T. Churchill, “Is Strategic Thinking Desirable in Philosophical Reflection? Honoring Morteza Mutahhari, a Martyr to the Practice of Philosophy without Strategy,” Philosophia Christi, 17(1) (2015), pp. 213–24. 5 See my Evidence and Faith.

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essentially (non-contingently) good with a self-conscious rejection of anthropomorphic concepts of the divine. Cudworth writes: And it is . . . a mistake which sometimes we have of God by shaping him out according to the model of ourselves, when we make him nothing but a blind, dark, impetuous Self-will, running through the world; such as we ourselves are furiously acted with, that have not the ballast of absolute goodness to poise and settle us.6

Cudworth and his companions were decidedly aligned with Plato on the Euthyphro question, as he made clear when he addressed the House of Commons in Westminster on March 31, 1647: “Virtue and holiness in creatures, as Plato well discourses in his Euthyphro, are not therefore Good, because God loves them, and will have them be accounted such; but rather, God therefore loves them because they are in themselves simply good.”7 So, when the Cambridge Platonists sought to address the central topics in their philosophy of God, they sought to pursue their topic not with the cultivation in themselves of self-will, but lovingly and even with beauty. John Smith claimed: “As the eye cannot behold the sun, unless it is sunlike, and has the form and resemblance of the sun drawn in it, so neither can the soul of man behold God . . . unless it is Godlike, has God formed in it, and is made a partaker of the divine nature.”8 If “God is beauty,” as Cudworth thought, God must be approached by way of seeking to live a life (and philosophy) of beauty.9 The Cambridge Platonist view of virtue and God’s goodness was articulated with sensitivity to the social and political implications of their views. Their opposition to thinking of God as being worthy of worship because of bare omnipotence was parallel to their opposition to the view that human authority is worthy of obedience due to sheer power, whether such power is vested in Parliament or the Crown.10 Readers may wonder what might be appropriated from the Cambridge Platonists today if one is either non-theistic or atheistic. It may be

6 Cudworth, “A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons” in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C.A. Patrides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 102. 7 8 9 Ibid. Ibid. Cudworth, “A Sermon . . . ,” 113. 10 On the interwoven nature of the philosophy of God and earthly power, see F. Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 669–90.

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conceded that if we have reason to believe that the essence of God is goodness and the love of goodness, this would provide ample reasons for us to love God and goodness in our practice of philosophy of religion. But how many philosophers of religion today believe the following? Love is the supreme Deity and original of all things. . . . Eternal, selforiginated, intellectual love, or essential and substantial goodness . . . having an infinite overflowing fullness and fecundity, dispenses itself uninvidiously, according to the best wisdom, sweetly governs all, without any force or violence (all things being naturally subject to its authority, and readily obeying its laws), and reconciling the whole world into harmony.11

Those who would not adhere to such a metaphysics of love might still appreciate how the Cambridge Platonist stress on charity or love made them instrumental in recognizing the goodness and dignity of all persons, including non-Christians, during a time when this was not at all the norm. While their capacious approach to humanity as a whole may have stemmed from their theistic cosmology and metaphysics, such charity may be seen (at least in retrospect) as progressive and in line with liberal republicanism. Consider, for example, the admirable way in which the Cambridge Platonists challenged some of the prejudices of their day. The Cambridge Platonists have been credited with establishing a foundation for recognizing the basic goodness of native peoples in the highly authoritative history, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. David Brown Davis writes: For beneath a superficial diversity of cultures one might find a universal capacity for happiness and contentment, so long as man’s natural faculties had not been perverted by error and artificial desire. We must look to primitive man, said Benjamin Whichcote, we would seek man’s moral sense in its pristine state. Natural Law, said Nathaniel Culverwe[l], is truly recognized and practiced only by men who have escaped the corruptions of civilization. If traditionalists objected that savages were ignorant of the Gospel, the answer was that heathen might carry within them the true spirit of Christ, and hence be better Christians than hypocrites who know and professed all the articles of faith.12

11

Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (2006), I, 179–80. D.B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 351. 12

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Michael Gill similarly underscores the Cambridge Platonist recognition of human dignity at a time of race-based slavery and anti-Semitism: The Cambridge Platonists . . . thought that all people—not only Christians and ancient Greeks, but Africans and Jews as well—retained within themselves principles that did not preclude them from virtue. And they taught that most of those who had become corrupted still had within themselves the capacity to undo the corruption.13

The lessons outlined in the section “Some Philosophical Charity Cases” inspired by the Cambridge Platonists involve looking for goodness in others, exercising intellectual humility, and being mindful of the social and political implications of one’s philosophy. Before turning to this, however, let us consider whether non-Platonists (and non-theists) might have reason for adopting the main thesis of the Seventh Letter (cited on p. 210). The thesis that (for example) to come to know about justice you must be just invites epistemological questions that stretch from the Meno to Aristotle on sensation but, forsaking some of the technicalities of the theory of knowledge in the Ancient and seventeenth-century worlds, in this context I defend the thesis by appealing to ordinary experience and intuition. Assume a common-sense understanding of virtues such as being just, humility, fairness, patience, impartiality (or at least a good faith effort to minimize ungrounded prejudice), a principle of charity (believing the best of one’s interlocutors and their positions, when possible), and a renunciation of vices such as intellectual envy, jealousy, a tendency to diminish others and their positions (without evident justification), unwarranted anger, and acting on the desire to manipulate, deceive, and dominate others. I assume it is also a vice to be cowardly in terms of never questioning one’s deep convictions or averting one’s gaze from serious philosophical challenges to one’s beliefs (religious or secular), especially when these beliefs are suspected to be malignant. The list is (obviously) incomplete, for we can readily think of cases that would require us to fill out and refine this list of virtues and vices (and test our concepts with examples and counter-examples). In any case, I shall assume a sufficiently sympathetic (or at least non-hostile) reader when I ask you to consider a quest to understand some good, such as justice or intellectual integrity. Would you more readily trust an inquirer who had the above 13 Michael Gill, “From Cambridge Platonism to Scottish Sentimentalism,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 8 (2010), p. 20.

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virtues or the above vices? I suggest that the least trustworthy inquirer would be one that has the vices—intellectual envy, jealousy, a liability to diminish others and their positions (without evident reasons) who is irascible, and so on. These (ostensible) vices have built into them elements that at least would tend to diminish or obscure grasping (fairly) the merit of reasoning. It is, of course, possible that someone with these vices would be more motivated to reach a successful account of intellectual integrity. There is some empirical evidence that those seeking personal glory and fame do better science than those who are less self-advancing.14 But I submit that it borders on being tautological (or conceptually essential) that reasoning on intellectual virtue (or almost any topic) is going to be tainted to the extent that inquiry is motivated by vanity, self-aggrandizement, and so on, than being motivated by seeking to establish conclusions based on a fair-minded inquiry and the renunciation of the desire to manipulate, and so on. Consider an objection. The Cambridge Platonists contended that philosophy is best done by not just thinking virtuously but living virtuously. What about notorious cases of when brilliant philosophers are famously uncharitable with (or even contemptuous of ) their opponents? To pick a case of some notoriety, consider this passage from Kenneth Clark’s epic Civilization in his description of a key figure in twelfth-century Paris: “At the centre of it was the brilliant, enigmatic figure of Peter Abelard, the invincible arguer, the magnetic teacher. Abelard was a star. Like a great prize-fighter, he expressed his contempt for anyone who met him in the ring of open discussion.”15 Moreover, we might imagine that if a virtuous philosopher had no experience of vice, she might be hard pressed to offer a plausible philosophy of vice. Consider this story about Bertrand Russell introducing G.E. Moore to a man at a hotel, when they were on a walking tour: We made friends with a man we met in the hotel, who was very well informed in various matters and a very good linguist, but whose talk consisted almost wholly of his own and his friends’ immoralities. Moore

See James Woodward and David Goodstein, “Conduct, Misconduct, and the Structure of Science,” reprinted in Charles Taliaferro (ed.), Environmental Ethics; Contemporary Prospectives (New York: Linus Publishers, 2017), 427–38. 15 Kenneth Clark, Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 44. 14

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is very ignorant, so I drew this man out for Moore’s instruction and my amusement, and [the man] poured forth beastly stories, one more horrible and disgusting than the other, till Moore could hardly contain himself. Afterwards Moore was tremendously excited, and realized for the first time what men are. He was merely an average specimen, but Moore said he was the most wicked man he had ever met or even read about, and couldn’t have a spark of good in him, which was amusing. Moore said he had never known till this hour what it was to hate a man, that he had hated one other for a similar reason, but not nearly so much as this one.16

It is a pity we do not have a record of the man’s stories to see how they may have impacted Moore’s subsequent philosophy of values! A full account of a Cambridge Platonist reply would take us deep into their theological anthropology: they believed that the whole telos or end of human life is virtuous flourishing with fellow creatures and in harmony with the will and nature of the supremely good, loving Creator, and that a life of vice involves an effective slavery to improper desires, and (ultimately) the loss of freedom to live and think.17 In other words, they had some theological reasons for thinking that Abelard-like cases are aberrations. But because, at this stage in this chapter, I am seeking to appeal only to common sense and intuition, I hope we might agree that having contempt for your philosophical interlocutors is often a path toward failing to be open to justified objections. While Abelard cases may occur and a philosopher’s contempt for interlocutors might provide the energy and motivation to achieve success in philosophy, there is some reason to think a philosopher would be more admirable (and perhaps brilliant) if they were receptive to their interlocutors, seeking their assistance rather than seeking to best them “in the ring.” On the case of virtuous philosophers being ignorant of vice, there are (alas) ample opportunities for us to learn, as Moore did, about villainy. So, at this point, I concede that one need not adopt Cambridge Platonism to believe in the above virtues and vice. I also concede (obviously) that Cambridge Platonism was not essential in the seventeenth century or now to be anti-slavery or oppose the racism of (regrettably) some of the great giants of modern philosophy, including 16 Bertrand Russell, cited by Paul Levey in Moore; G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 135. 17 See my Evidence and Faith, chapter 1.

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David Hume and Immanuel Kant.18 The authority (or normative force) of the principle of charity (and related principles such as what philosophers have referred to as the principle of rationality and principle of humanity) may be neutral in terms of one’s philosophy of religion or metaphysics. Perhaps the authority of the Golden Rule as applied to philosophy (treat the philosophy of others as you would like yours to be treated) can be secured on prudential grounds, and the same might be the case for a philosophical application of the good of being a Good Samaritan (it is often good to come to the aid of another philosopher who is in intellectual trouble). Still, the Cambridge Platonists were exemplary, in my view, in bringing charity and love to the foreground in their work and they bolstered a model of practicing philosophy that was integral to their religious practice. That is, they were committed to reflecting on religious life as it is found in practice, and not as a bare abstraction.19 Although it is difficult to document the extent to which the Cambridge Platonists achieved the following portrait of exchanges between philosophers, this description by an older Platonist, Augustine, is (in my view) ideal: There were joys to be found in their company which still more captivated my mind—the charms of talking and laughing together and kindly giving way to each other’s wishes, reading elegantly written books together, sharing jokes and delighting to honour one another, disagreeing occasionally but without rancour, as a person might disagree with themselves, and lending piquancy by that rare disagreement to our much more frequent accord. We would teach and learn from each other, sadly missing any who were absent and blithely welcoming them when they returned. Such signs of friendship sprang from the hearts of friends who loved and knew their love returned, signs to be read in smiles, words, glances and a thousand gracious gestures. So were sparks kindled and our minds were fused inseparably, out of many becoming one.20

18 I have compared Hume and Kant with the Cambridge Platonists in “Black Lives, Sex, and Revealed Religion Matter! Contrasting Kantian Philosophy of Religion with Cambridge Platonism,” Philosophia Christi, 18(2) (2016), pp. 81–97. See also the paper, co-authored with Anders Hendrickson, “Hume’s Racism and his Case against the Miraculous,” Philosophia Christi, 2 (2002), pp. 427–41. 19 To bear this out, see C. Taliaferro and Alison Teply (eds.), Cambridge Platonist Spirituality. 20 Augustine, Confessions 1V, 8.

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Of course, Augustine was not always so affable with his interlocutors in philosophical and theological debate, but I commend the above account as a worthy ideal promoted by the Cambridge Platonists (and the Florentine Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century, who influenced our circle of Platonists emanating from Cambridge).21

SOME CASES OF PHILOSOPHICAL CHARITY I am using the term “charity cases” to refer to philosophical contexts or sites in which some charity (or more charity than is evident) would be good. As I am citing four cases of (ostensibly) uncharitable philosophy of religion, it might be fitting to preface this investigation by citing four contemporary cases of when it seems to many of us that charity is still in evidence in philosophy of religion. At the risk of seeking to curry the favor of a rather important editor in this context, I propose that the work of Fiona Ellis shows a gracious charity in addressing the theism–naturalism debate in seeking to find a synthetic, constructive engagement. Her views are more conciliatory than some of my own published positions and I am in her debt for her expansive perspective. In my view, William Rowe’s writing displays exceptionless charity on virtually every topic addressed. Even the term he coined, friendly atheism, explicitly suggests a non-dogmatic attitude to the effect that it is acknowledged that while atheism is (according to Rowe) more reasonable for some than theism, cases can arise when theism is more reasonable for a person than atheism or agnosticism. Two other bodies of work that also stand out, in my view, as offering charitable views of the positions addressed are by William Alston and Michael Ruse. I now turn to four cases of when we might gain from a perspective more in line with Cambridge Platonism. 21 See, for example, Meditations on the Soul; Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. and ed. the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1997). M. Pontoppidan and I offer a light-hearted appreciation of Ficino’s work in “Platonic Lovers” in a book with an arresting title: What Philosophy can Teach You about Your Lover, ed. Sharon Kaye (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2012).

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The lessons from the Cambridge Platonists include the value of not denying or depreciating the philosophical standing of one’s interlocutors unless one has very good reason for doing so; intellectual humility is important in light of human fallibility; and while we should critique a philosophy of God when it has ill cultural and social consequences (as when the Cambridge Platonists critiqued theistic voluntarism for the political consequences of exalting pure power), we should be cautious in attributing ill will of philosophers without compelling reasons. I unpack these points in terms of four lessons or precautionary principles. A first Cambridge Platonist Precautionary Principle: It is desirable not to accuse ostensible philosophers of religion of not being bona fide philosophers without compelling evidence. Here is a paraphrase of a published claim: Among so-called philosophers of religion there is a group of, obviously biased, covert Christian apologists who are so embarrassingly unaware of current religious studies that they are merely masquerading as philosophers of religion. They have no legitimate claim to being called “philosophers” . . . . Their supernatural concept of God involves the concept of a disembodied, invisible entity, a conceptual aberration from the standpoint of contemporary science.

In the original claim which I have paraphrased, it is not clear that the author is charging that every ostensible philosopher who is a Christian is biased, masquerading, unaware of what the author holds to be the dominant, well-grounded view in religious studies (an anti-theistic naturalism), and so on. If it is actually the case that the author has good evidence that persons are masquerading as philosophers (perhaps there are a group of Christians who claim to have Doctorates from Oxford, Notre Dame, Nottingham, and Yale, but this is a fraud), then exposing the fraud is eminently sensible and important. But in the absence of good forensic evidence, the charge of masquerading seems unjustified, assuming that Christian philosophers (or philosophers who are Christians) show reasonable skills at the doctoral level of reasoning, philosophical literacy, and so on. More specifically, if such persons can read with comprehension the majority of entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; they can reasonably interpret some of the major works in the philosophical canon; they have papers that are published in mainline philosophy journals (analytic or continental); and they participate in major

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philosophical societies (like the British Society for Philosophy of Religion), then I think the evidence that they are not philosophers of religion would have to be quite substantial. Before moving to a second Cambridge Platonist Precautionary Principle, let us address the issues of apologetics and bias. The charge that persons are not philosophers if they are apologists is not easy to assess. If an apologist is someone convinced of a philosophically significant position and who presents philosophical arguments to convince others of the position, then it seems difficult to find philosophers who are not apologists. To see how vexing it is to distinguish apologetics and philosophy, consider the following passage from the work of Daniel Dennett in which he declares himself an advocate of evolutionary theory in quasi-religious terms. He wants to convince people of evolutionary theory for their “salvation”; to spread the love of evolution; to cultivate humility, delight, and even “the glory of the evolutionary landscape.” I, too, want the world to be a better place. This is my reason for wanting people to understand and accept evolutionary theory: I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No; there is a major difference. We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! On the contrary, we are particularly critical of those whose misunderstandings and romantic misstatements of these great ideas mislead themselves and others. In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the service of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion.22

I am inclined to think that Dennett’s statement is completely acceptable as a philosophical position. He is pursuing what he believes to be the love of wisdom and we have no reason to think he is lacking in the virtues listed in on p. 213. So, I suggest that the bare fact that a philosopher aims to convince others of a position (whether this 22

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Penguin, 2006), 265.

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is Christian theism, secular or religious naturalism, or Buddhist epistemology) should not alone discredit someone from being recognized as a bona fide philosopher. On bias: Given the list of virtues and vices on p. 213, if being biased involves a failure to be fair-minded and open to questions and challenges of one’s own position, then being biased would count (from a Cambridge Platonist point of view) as being un-philosophical or sub-philosophical. As I shall note below, it is not always easy to determine whether someone has such a bias. In this context, however, I stress the enormous literature in bona fide publications to the effect that science and theism are compatible. To cite only one example: Michael Ruse, an atheist, has written compellingly about the compatibility of theism and science in Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.23 And I add one further suggestion about bias and charity. One way to show philosophical charity and shun bias is to portray positions you oppose sympathetically or at least without language that suggests one’s interlocutor is employing terms that she would shun. Consider this terminology: a supernatural concept of God involves the concept of a disembodied, invisible entity. First, and somewhat controversially, I suggest that describing theistic philosophers as believing in (or positing) a “supernatural” reality is vexing. The standard term (going back to the Cambridge Platonists) is “theism,” not “supernatural entity.” The “supernatural” covers entities such as poltergeists and thus suggests (without implying) superstition. “Supernatural” may also be ill fitting insofar as its use suggests we have a clear-headed notion of what is “natural” or “nature” as opposed to the divine, whereas the God of theism (historically and today) is thought of as immanently (and intimately) omnipresent through and in all creation. Second, to describe the God of theism as “disembodied” suggests that God is somehow disfigured or unnatural. Better, I suggest, to describe the God of theism as incorporeal or non-physical. These may also carry a cost; they suggest we have a sound understanding of what is corporeal or physical. I have argued elsewhere that there is no clear consensus on this.24 23

M. Ruse, Science and Spirituality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See Contemporary Philosophical Theology, co-authored with Chad Meister (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 1. 24

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Third, it is odd to describe the God of theism as either visible or invisible. David Hume and Bertrand Russell describe the God of theism as invisible, and there are occasional religious texts that apply the term, but it suggests (without implying) that theists hold that God is not experienced in and through the world (as experienced visually, and through hearing, taste, smell, and tactile sensation). The term “invisible” seems as distracting in terms of the concept of God as describing numbers as not having an odor or abstract objects like propositions as not having a sweet taste or the concept of justice as not having a certain weight. In this first lesson, then, I suggest that the spirit of Cambridge Platonism would have us addressing the philosophers and positions we oppose more charitably. A second, closely related Cambridge Platonist Precautionary Principle: One should be reluctant to claim that an ostensible philosopher, while not masquerading, is not as much of a philosopher (or not as thorough or not as consistently) as oneself. Here is a paraphrase of a published claim: There is no question that Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne are philosophers or that they employ philosophical methods when they engage in reflection on religion. But when they engage in religious topics they do not engage as philosophers in terms of the vulnerabilities and movements expected of philosophers. They are, rather, engaged in theological apologetics or theology.

This claim is immanently less uncharitable than the first. Moreover, in the statement itself there is no suggestion that practicing theology or theological apologetics is unworthy or base. So, this claim may not be uncharitable, and may simply be making a point about how to classify what some thinkers do when they claim to be doing philosophy but may not be. Still, even if the claim is correct, I suggest that if a colleague is a self-described philosopher and appears to be practicing philosophy when addressing religious themes, we should only reluctantly claim that they are not actually practicing philosophy. Why? For two reasons: first, the virtues that make up the practice of philosophy—as articulated on p. 213—are often subtle and not obvious to detect and, second, the above position could lead to unmerited exclusion of thinkers from philosophy of religion. On the first point, the claim references movements and vulnerabilities. I believe a sympathetic interpretation of these terms involves

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seeking the virtues cited on p. 213 and shunning the vices. The virtues include being open to criticism, objections (and thus being vulnerable), and so on. I believe it is very hard indeed to tell whether another (ostensible) philosopher is actually open to criticism, objections, and so on. Presenting to an ostensible philosopher an argument you find decisive but the ostensible philosopher does not is only evidence that the ostensible philosopher is not open to objections if you are right (which, as I note below, is seriously open to question, given our fallibility). I suggest that charity should prompt us to believe (or not to call into question) someone’s (apparent) sincere claim (explicit or implied) that they are actually open to your counter-claims or objections but find them unpersuasive. A second reason for resisting the above (paraphrased) claim is that it can be used to exclude what appears (at least superficially) to be bona fide philosophers and positions from being counted as such, e.g. when Plantinga or Swinburne submit a paper to be published in a philosophy journal, they might be informed that the paper is better suited in a theology journal or a journal devoted to apologetics. Such a policy would, in my view, be a dangerous way of some philosophers imposing their own commitments over the resources (journals, conferences, academic appointments) of philosophy. If one has absolutely compelling reasons for thinking of when (for example) Swinburne and Plantinga are not being philosophical (perhaps they have submitted a paper filled with hymns and prayers but with no philosophical content), then exclusion seems proper but, short of this, exclusion (or re-direction and classification) seems arrogant. A third Cambridge Platonist Precautionary Principle: I suggest that we should be reluctant to claim that our interlocutors are deluded, profoundly immoral, or contemptuous of others unless there are very good reasons for doing so. Here is a paraphrase of a published claim: We can be certain that the God of Christianity does not exist and that those who claim to experience this God or even believe that such a God exists are deluded, immoral, and contemptuous about the suffering of others. Those who claim to believe in such a God have corrupt minds. One can conclude this by ordinary inferences once you understand that such a God is supposed to be all good, all powerful, and all knowing, and that there is suffering.

I suggest that there are four reasons to be reluctant to make such a claim.

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First, I suggest that the Cambridge Platonist view that our cognitive faculties are fallible needs to be taken seriously. “Certainty,” in philosophical contexts, is usually understood to be the highest of epistemic states, implying that the one claiming to be certain is infallible and incorrigible. On this point, it should be noted that certainty is different from confidence. We may be confident about a position without being certain, but once one claims to be certain, then (if one is right) maximal confidence is deemed fitting and unquestioning. Few philosophers today claim in almost any domain of philosophy such a level of certitude. Peter van Inwagen has maintained and provided some evidence that no substantial philosophical argument in any area has been successful in terms of convincing all ostensibly fair-minded, competent philosophers: There are certainly successful arguments, both in everyday life and in the sciences. But are there any successful philosophical arguments? I know of none. (That is, I know of none for any substantive philosophical thesis.)25

Anthony Kenny ends his classic A New History of Western Philosophy cautiously, noting that the one claim that Bertrand Russell makes at the end of his History of Western Philosophy turned out to be quite tenuous. Russell claimed that we can know that Kant showed us why the ontological argument fails (existence is not a predicate). Kenny notes that soon afterward there was a revival of versions of the ontological argument. Another reason to be cautious about claiming certitude emerges in Gary Gutting’s study, What Philosophers Know. Gutting examines ten cases of when philosophers in the twentieth century thought they had attained successful, virtually compelling arguments, but (on further scrutiny) we can now see that they were all unsuccessful.26

25 Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52. 26 “How often have we heard or told others that Quine refuted the analyticsynthetic distinction, that Kripke proved that there are necessary a posteriori truths, and that Gettier showed that knowledge cannot be defined as justified true belief? But, although I entirely agree that Quine, Kripke, and Gettier have achieved something of philosophical importance, a careful reading of their exemplary texts does not reveal any decisive arguments for the conclusions they are said to have established.” What Philosophers Know (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.

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Second, there is some reason to think that the claim relies on what these days is called the logical problem of evil. In this schema, the existence of any evil at all is taken to be incompatible with an allgood, omnipotent, omniscient God. This has been challenged by what is called the Free Will Defense, according to which some evil emerges from free agency and God may have a reason to create free agents whom God cannot prevent from doing evil without violating their freedom. The issues are vast, but the point is that there is a vast literature (with great attention to the nature, value, and disvalue of suffering) that a responsible engagement with the problem of evil would require engaging.27 Third, to claim that colleagues are deluded, immoral, and contemptuous of the suffering of others is radical and would require a great deal of evidence to justify. To know a colleague is deluded in some psychological sense may require some psychological skills that go beyond graduate training in philosophy. As for being immoral, one might observe a colleague committing vile, evil acts—molesting children, killing professors—but this will be rare. I suggest the charges may gain their energy by the assumption that a Christian theist contends that all suffering or evil is justified or somehow good. But for the most part Christian philosophers (theologians and, I assume, ordinary believers) claim that evil is unjustified; it should not occur. They believe in redemption, the bringing of good out of evil. Yes, they believe (as did the Cambridge Platonists) that an all-good God does not annihilate all evil and evildoers (or has not yet), but they believe that the existence and continuation of evil are wholly against God’s will. The charge of contempt for the suffering of others is difficult to square with the long tradition (for the beginning) of the Christian lamentation over evil. Most recently, one may see this in great evidence in Christian philosophers such as C.S. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Eleonore Stump, Marilyn Adams, and others. Lewis’s book, A Grief Observed, in which he records his devastation over the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, is a profound testimony to the

27 See, for example, M. Peterson (ed.), The Problem of Evil (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Chad Meister and Paul Moser (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. In a chapter in that volume, “God and Beauty,” I address extensively the author of the passage I am paraphrasing in this chapter.

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painful process Christians properly show in response to suffering and loss. A fourth reason to be reluctant to make the above claim is that it seems almost designed to shut down dialogue. As noted earlier, a claim to certitude is a claim to have irrefutable knowledge. It suggests that one’s (would-be) interlocutors have corrupt minds and are not worthy of argument. Even if one is certain that Christian theism is wrong, can one really be certain that there is no Christian philosophy worthy of engagement in an effort (perhaps) to persuade them that their views are false?28 Cambridge Platonist Precautionary Principle, number four: It is desirable not to accuse colleagues of promoting a philosophy of God that marginalizes women or homosexuals, unless there is a very good reason to do so. Here is a paraphrase of a published claim: Anselmian philosophers of religion, conceiving of God as omni-perfect, are not aware of the fact that they are idealizing a patriarchal ideal which fosters the domination of men over women and persons who are marginalized such as homosexuals. Their concept of rationality involves collective self-deception: they think they are being fair and impartial when they are really idealizing male-centric values.

Unlike the three other cases, I think that there are some good reasons why a philosopher might make (or has made) the above claim. There is little doubt in the history of philosophy that there has been serious male domination and it is regrettable that in philosophy of religion, as in so many other areas of philosophy, there has not been more work exposing the ills of patriarchy and providing more sites for women— and persons of all ethnicities and sexual orientations—to flourish. Perhaps claiming that colleagues are self-deceived, rather than simply wrong or ignorant, may not be the best way to engage in open dialogue, but one can (or I think one should) appreciate the passion behind claims like the above. The only point where, in the spirit of Cambridge Platonism, I think more charity would be fitting is in appreciating how conceiving of God along Anselmian lines can bolster the case against patriarchy and for emancipation.

28 To claim one’s colleagues have corrupt minds recalls G.E.M. Anscombe’s notorious essay: “Modern Moral Philosophy,” originally published in Philosophy, 33 (124) (1958), pp. 1–19.

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If one believes, as the Cambridge Platonists did, that God is supremely good and loving, and one believes that patriarchy is vile and wrong, then one has every reason to believe that patriarchy is contrary to the will and nature of God. I suggest, then, the problem is not with conceiving of God as maximally excellent, but in the misconception of what counts (among human beings) as excellent or even acceptable. So, in this last class, I suggest a little more charity might be shown to Anselmian tradition, while retaining as much or more outrage at the ways in which women and others have been marginalized in traditional philosophy, and in the surrounding culture.

A CAMBRIDGE PLATONIST INVITATION I close by paraphrasing the testimony of Augustine about his festive, affective community of philosophers in an invitation. It is to be hoped that we might find joy in each other’s company, talking and laughing, exposing (when appropriate) those who are merely masquerading as philosophers, coaxing them to take up the virtues of loving wisdom and to shun the vices of strategic thinking. Let us assist one another in the vulnerability and movements of philosophical discourse, seeking to correct without rancor (when evident) any cases of when we might be immoral, deluded, or contemptuous of others. May we also relentlessly expose and uproot philosophical obstacles to emancipation and true friendship. And even if, out of many, we do not form a unified philosophical community, may there nevertheless be (as Augustine put it) sparks kindled between ourselves.29

29 I presented some of the material on philosophical methodology in this chapter in an Oxford Brookes Philosophical Public Lecture, “Philosophy Can Help You Keep Your Head,” March 2017. I thank Daniel O’Brian, Andrew Lupton, and others present for comments. I also thank Fiona Ellis for the invitation to contribute to this project and her support.

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Index Abelard, Peter 214–15 Action 122, 140–3, 150, 164 Adams, Marilyn 224 Aesthetic 33, 67, 70, 75, 191, 197, 202 good 17–18, 116–33 Analogy 29, 35–7, 93, 152, 176 Anselm, Anselmian 225–6 Apologetics 219, 221 Aquinas, Thomas 18, 37, 101, 109, 116–30, 163n, 174–9, 183 Aristotle 37, 81, 100, 105–9, 115, 119, 121, 123–4, 132, 142–213 Atheism 4n, 6, 14, 44, 51, 53–4, 56, 85n, 151n, 153, 184, 217 Augustine 39, 72, 109, 185, 216–17, 226 Beauty 33–4, 39, 55, 67, 124, 126, 129–30, 183, 202, 209, 211 Bildung 79 Body 17–18, 60, 89, 102–3, 107, 108n, 118, 122–33 Boethius 72 Botticelli, Sandro 17, 122–4 Brain 28, 30, 35, 107, 114, 196 Left-brain 31–5, 40–1 Right-brain versus left-brain 35 Brown Davis, David 212 Buckley, Michael J. 44n, 51–2, 54, 56 Buddhism 17, 98, 110, 113, 145, 192, 194, 220 Buddha 122–3 Buddhist ethics 108 Cambridge Platonism 21, 208–26 Catholic, Catholicism 101, 105, 113, 182–3, 197 tradition 16, 189 Christian, Christianity 32–3, 40n, 53n, 73, 78, 94, 145, 175, 190, 192, 194, 204, 222 culture 183 faith 201n philosophers 209, 218, 224–5 theology 101, 113 tradition 16, 189

Coakley, Sarah 3n, 6n, 53n Cognitive prosthetics 103 Concupiscentia 74–6 Confucianism 194 Conway, Anne 209 Cottingham, John 1, 8, 11–22, 23–41, 43–57, 63–77, 79, 201–2 Cox, Brian 24, 26 Cudworth, Ralph 208–11 Culverwell, Nathaniel 209, 212 Cupitt, Don 27 Davidman, Joy 224 Dawkins, Richard 15, 24, 29, 32–3, 51 God hypothesis 15, 24, 29 Deleuze, Gilles 105 Dennett, Daniel 219 Descartes, René 27 Desire 13, 108–15, 213–14 Doctrine of simplicity, the 174–6, 183, 189 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 16, 56, 63–4, 80–8 Karamazov, Ivan 16, 63, 80–6 Zosima 16, 80–8 Edwards, Jonathan 18, 126–30 Ellis, Fiona 1–22, 41, 42–58, 62–3, 87n, 152n, 193 Engagement and disengagement 79–85 engaged stance 79–85 disengaged stance 79–85 Epistemology 32, 118 of control versus epistemology of receptivity 32, 48 of detachment 66, 79–80 of involvement 15–16, 59, 63–72, 77, 79–80 of mathematics 155–6 of receptivity 15–16, 32, 48 religious 18, 59, 134–7, 145, 149 Euthyphro 96, 211 Fideism 149–50 Foucault, Michel 102

242

Index

Gaita, Raimond 16, 18, 88–95, 123–4 Gill, Michael 213 God 1–226 passim Deus absconditus 32 divine hiddenness 32, 180–5 Hebrew-Christian conception of 143–4 of philosophy 2, 5 traces of 39, 47–8, 52–4 union with 98, 105 Grace 17, 76, 83n, 94, 97–115, 123–5, 205 Griffin, James 9, 13n, 50–1n, 62n Habit 105, 108, 112 and practice 105, 108–15 Heidegger, Martin 2–5, 12, 31, 59, 65–77, 81n, 97 Hermeneutics 59, 65–6, 69–73, 77 hermeneutic circle 59, 64–5, 68–9, 72, 77 Hick, John 145, 147, 149, 204–5, Hume, David 13, 37, 105, 195, 216, 221 Infused Moral Virtues 18, 116–30 Inwagen, Peter van 223 Islam 175 Muslim 145 James, William 106–7, 126–9 Jaspers, Karl 72 Jesus Christ 40, 76, 85–6, 108n, 119n, 122–3, 194, 205–6, 212 Judaism 7, 190 Jung, Carl 38 Kenny, Anthony 25, 37, 223 Kierkegaard, Søren 72, 98, 110, 114, 143 Knowledge 1–226 passim of persons 172–90 propositional 177, 181, 184–5, 190 religious 134–50 religious understanding versus religious knowledge 134–50 second-personal 20, 55, 185–6 Lear, Jonathan 39–40 Lewis, Clive S. 123–4, 224 Levinas, Emmanuel 3n, 5–7, 10, 13n, 14, 49, 55n, 62 Love 17, 20–2, 32, 37, 64, 74, 79–96, 98–9, 109, 114, 126, 163–4, 174, 177–8, 185, 192, 194, 202, 205, 208–25 active love 16, 84, 88, 92

and philosophy of religion 208–25 love seeking understanding 20, 80–6 see also wisdom of neighbour 119–24 saintly love 16, 18, 91–4 transfiguring love 16, 79–96 Luther, Martin 16, 59, 74–7 MacIntyre, Alasdair 100, 200n Mackie, James L. 50 Macquarrie, John 3n, 5n Manley Hopkins, Gerard 33 Marion, Jean-Luc 3n, 5 Marx, Karl 101, 104 Mary 17, 122–5, 130, 177–82 Mathematics 24, 27n, 36–8, 61n, 66n, 135, 154–68, 203–4 McCabe, Herbert 25, 45, 110 McDowell, John 9n, 13n, 54n, 86–91 McGilchrist, Iain 30, 35 McGinn, Colin 3n McPherson, David 16, 18, 79–96 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 107 Minimal semantics 161, 168, 171 Moore, George E. 214–15 More, Henry 209 Morality 48, 62, 67, 96, 141, 143, 164, 191, 193, 196–201 moral action 7, 39, 47, 58 Moser, Paul 32 Narrative 20, 31, 119–22, 127 and theology 20, 119–22, 131–3, 186–90 interpretation 20 Naturalism 5, 8–11, 15–17, 42–58, 59–78, 94n, 151–3, 171, 217–20 expansive 10, 54n, 62–3, 152n scientific 11, 16, 28, 42, 54, 57–8, 61n scientistic 8, 59–62, 66, 70, 77–8 supernatural and natural 7, 113, 193, 218–20 Nature (natural world) 7–10, 21, 34, 37, 44, 48–62, 69, 76, 90, 104–5, 113, 126, 151–2, 203, 220 Newton, Isaac 37, 136, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4n, 18–19, 88n, 101, 104, 112 Nirvana 194 Nussbaum, Martha 32, 88n Otto, Rudolph 202

Index Pascal, Blaise 32, 72 Phillips, Dewi Z. 18, 143–4 Philosophy 1–226 passim analytic 2–6, 8, 11–12, 15, 21, 31, 42 analytic versus continental 4, 6–7, 97 continental 4, 6–7, 97 humane philosophy of religion 11–15, 23 of religion 1–22, 41, 52n, 63–4, 97–8, 102–3, 112, 208–25 of religious life 97–115 Physics 26–7, 37, 50n, 66, 106, 151, 176, 177, 179 Plantinga, Alvin 146, 221–2 Plato 108, 211 Post-Modernism 173 Priority 152–3, 164–70 Pritchard, Duncan 137–40 Protestant/ism 75, 102, 204 Psychoanalysis 39 Freudian 36, 38–9 Rahner, Karl 5n, 10n Ravaisson, Félix 101, 104–9, 114 Redemption 72–7, 105 see also salvation Relativism 173, 206 Religion/religious 1–226 passim belief 13, 23, 34, 98–9, 102, 134, 146–50, 207 diversity 21, 192, 203, 209 embodied 102–3, 114, 218 epistemology 18, 59, 134–7, 145, 149 exclusivism 205–6 expansivism 206 experience 13n, 126, 202n inclusivism 205–6 life 97–8, 113–15, 129, 141, 145, 150, 163n, 204 lived 17, 98 multiple belonging 21, 204 pluralism 205–6 practice 17, 91–3, 97–115, 163, 216 theistic and non-theistic 4, 10, 15, 21, 23–5, 32, 35, 44–6, 50–1, 55–8, 62–3, 70, 84–7, 94–6, 125, 151–3, 161–71, 209, 211, 218 true 101 understanding 10–22, 28–9, 31–41, 42–58, 59, 77, 80, 87, 97–8, 117–33, 134–50, 191–207, 209

243

Repetition 17, 100, 105–6, 109–15 Revelation 48, 67, 95, 153, 178, 194–6, 205–7 Riggs, Wayne 135 Robinson, Marilynne 93 Rowe, William 217 Ruse, Michael 217, 220 Russell, Bertrand 92n, 214, 221, 223 Sacred, the 16, 34, 67, 79, 89 Sacredness 16, 90, 93, 95 Saints 91, 124, 133 saintly ideal 86n, 88n saintly person 88, 91 Salvation 40n, 74, 76, 143, 205, 219 see also redemption Schellenberg, John 180–1, 184–5 Schelling, Friedrich W. J. 105, 109 Schilbrack, Kevin 17, 100, 102–4, 114 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. 201, 203 Science(s) 9–17, 23–41, 49–53, 60–2, 66, 68, 76, 88, 99, 103, 105, 151–4, 171, 173, 177, 179–80, 194–8, 214, 218, 220, 223 modern 23, 26, 31, 37, 43–5, 49 natural 52n, 60, 78, 151–2, 194, 196 neuro 106–7, 112, 114 Scientism 8–9, 12, 27, 55, 104 Scripture 33, 40, 91, 118, 163n Smith, John 209, 211 Sloterdijk, Peter 100–4, 112 Spectator 34, 46 evidence 32 Spinoza, Baruch 108–9 Spirit/spiritual 10–225 passim exemplar 86, 88, 91 experience 56, 83, 199 formation 79, 86–7 life 18, 98, 110, 122, 126, 130–1 path 103, 114, 206 practice 16, 39, 47, 58 quest 12–14 well-being 17, 116, 124, 131 Strawson, Peter 3n, 60 Structuralism 151–71 modal structuralism 151–71 Stump, Eleonore 17, 20, 30–1, 55, 172–90, 224 Suffering 64, 70–2, 76–7, 81–5, 105, 114, 194, 222–5 Supernatural/ism 7–10, 87n, 220 Superstition 101–2, 194, 220

244

Index

Swinburne, Richard 23–5, 50, 124–5, 129, 221–2 Taylor, Charles 79n, 83n, 94–5, 100 Theism 8, 14–15, 19, 23, 25–8, 34, 39, 44–55, 125, 151–71, 209, 217, 220–1, 225 classical 23, 27–8, 35 explanatory 39, 47, 49–52 structure of 165, 169 Theodicy 71–2, 82 Theology 1–3, 6–7, 13, 15, 19–21, 38, 49, 71, 221–2 analytic 6 methodology of 20, 172, 179, 186–7, 190 natural 32, 35, 44, 46, 49, 52–4 onto-theology 2 versus empirical science 151, 179 versus philosophy 179, 188–90 Theory 7, 15, 19, 26, 29, 39, 41, 42–57, 60, 65, 71, 103, 153, 183, 196, 213 art 100 conceptual metaphor 103, 114 evolutionary 219 music 35, 36 set theory 155, 157 theory versus practice 57 Turnbull, Colin 182–3

Understanding 1–226 passim musical 29, 36 religious knowledge versus religious understanding 18, 134–50 Value(s) 8–9, 21, 37, 50, 54–5, 60–2, 77, 83, 95n, 127–30, 140, 191–4, 197, 199, 204, 207, 215, 224–5 and meaning 34, 39, 46, 50, 54, 67, 193, 203 epistemic 18, 134, 139, 150 moral 198 objectivity of 39, 62 of religious understanding 141 religious 144 truth-value realism 161, 168 truth-values 153–5, 159, 161, 166, 168 Ward, Keith 21, 191–207 Whichcote, Benjamin 209, 212 Wiggins, David 13–14, 61–2 Williams, Rowan 40 Williamson, Timothy 3, 8, 11 Wisdom 7, 20, 91, 126, 174–5, 190, 210, 212, 219, 226 divine 128, 130 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 224 Zahavi, Dan 4, 6