The William James Problem

Throughout his writings, William James makes the (irrefutable) observation that faith is an ordinary part of human cognitive function. No one operates in the world on the basis of complete information. Instead, human beings rely heavily upon present sense data, past experience, reason and "common sense," in order to make judgments about how to proceed with their daily lives. Acting on the basis of this amalgam of information and interpretation involves assumptions about the reliability of all of its elements--in a word, "faith." For James, faith is very much a practical matter.

To this point, there is nothing problematic about James's thinking in this regard: he accurately describes ordinary human cognition and its attendant behaviors. An accurate description of cognitive behavior, however, is not the same thing as an epistemological justification of any given proposition. But James may be said to send mixed messages to students of religion who seek to move beyond the description of faith-in-action to a justification of that faith per se. One can always justify a particular instance of faith as an ordinary human response to a given situation--as one possible response among many. But that is a very limited notion of justification. It does not entitle one to conclude that faith as such is necessarily justified--only that it is practical. And yet this is precisely what many readers of James's writings on the psychology of religion claim that his thinking has authorized them to conclude. Is such a claim warranted? The answer may depend on what portion of James's work one reads (e.g., The Will To Believe may support this claim).

It is for this reason that I am often chary about the use of William James in the academic study of religion. I call this subtle slip from description to justification the "William James Problem" and, I am afraid, it is not a problem that we will be rid of any time soon.

Sacred Time, Sacred Space

Despite the fact that human beings often report experiencing "the sacred" or the Divine "break through" mundane time and space, such reports cannot be taken at face value. Human beings make time and space for that which they consider Divine or sacred. And there is no way to distinguish the construction of such time or space from the "event" which is said to occupy it.

The history of religions is the history of human subjectivity and its interpretation. It is through such interpretations that subjective experience is turned "inside out" as it were: made public via performances (verbal, physical). The residuum of these performances, where preserved, become artifacts--evidence of human activity, most certainly, but evidence of extra-human activity? This is something one can neither rule in or out.

The honest historian of religions cannot sing the old hymn "Glory, glory/Somebody touched me/Must have been the finger of the Lord" with any real conviction. She is denied the "first naivete," and Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete" isn't naivete at all: it is a consciously creative act, like midrash.

Religion is spilled poetry. It is a prayer-rug woven with impassioned intelligence, with "heart-sense," and put to daily use.

As the Romantics understood, "supernaturalism" is only natural.

From Spinoza Through Friedrich Schlegel To Wallace Stevens

In his "Talk On Mythology" (1799-1800), Friedrich Schlegel attempted to address the difficulty that the "modern poet" faces now that the scientific imagination has replaced the mythological one of "the ancients." This problem is analogous to that which faces the modern religious imagination: with the miraculous no longer credible, what is one to believe? It is a problem peculiar to Protestantism because of its emphasis upon belief, but all traditions are affected by this problem insofar as they depend upon the inculcated credulity of their adherents.

In response to the modern poet's dilemma, Schlegel proposed the invention of a new mythology developed from "that great phenomenon of our age," idealism. And yet, for Schlegel, it was an idealism that would give birth to "a new and infinite realism," one that "hover[ing] as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real."

Interestingly, Schlegel considered Spinoza the great exemplar of this idealistically generated realism--most likely because, in his Tractatus, Spinoza looked to Nature as the ultimate source of the imagination, and he regarded the imagination as the stuff of prophecy.

This kind of Spinozistic/Romantic naturalism would inform the philosophy of George Santayana who would influence, in turn, the 20th century American poet, Wallace Stevens. Stevens would posit a tension between "the imagination" and "reality," and the "whole of Harmonium" that issued from it would, ultimately, fulfill Schlegel's prediction of a "new" [Modernist] mythology. Moreover, with Stevens we encounter an Alfarabian turn from metaphysics to rhetoric and from sui generis religion to spilled poetry.

[Quotations from Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, State College, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1968), pp. 81-88].

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, And Our Fathers That Begat Us (Ecclesiasticus 44:1)

"Ethically, the historian is obligated to follow historical subject matter wherever it leads and to appreciate its own inherent values, even if those values clash with the value system of the historian. Historicism means the acceptance of the relativity of human life. It is the insight that humanity lives not at the behest of static being and absolute truth, but rather forges itself in a constant process of becoming in which individuals and institutions struggle over competing truths, each vying for its place in the sun" Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg writing on the legacy to historical studies of Ernst Troeltsch in The Bible in Modern Culture, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1995), 156-157.

Troeltsch was a key figure in the articulation of a modern historical consciousness. We neglect him at our peril.

A Tale of Three Cities (and Possibly Four...)

When elaborating what we might term his "eschatological" hope for a "coming contestation of religions" in chapter 6 of The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger imagines that the key players in this contestation/conversation will be those committed to religious transformation as an exoteric or public and world-historical phenomenon and those committed to religious transformation as an esoteric or private and trans-historical process. He identifies the former contestants with those who adhere to the religious traditions that arose in the ancient to late ancient Near East (the so-called "Abrahamic" triad of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and the latter are identified with those traditions that look to Mother India as their source (Hinduism and varieties of Buddhism). Why he ignored Confucianism and Daoism is not entirely clear, however, it probably had something to do with the impact of Indian religions upon the West in the 18th-20th centuries. In any event, Berger symbolized these two streams of religious thought and experience with reference to two cities:

Jerusalem

and Benares.

Now, the first thing that is to be noticed (and criticized) about this particular dichotomy is that neither of the religious tendencies represented can be adequately characterized as wholly "exoteric" on the one hand or wholly "esoteric" on the other. Berger acknowledges this unfortunate glossing of the evidence and reminds the reader that his intention in constructing these Weberian "types" is, as with all Weberian types, heuristic in nature, not exhaustively descriptive. He also contributes a shrewd historical observation: "...the conflict between the confrontational [exoteric] and the interiorized [esoteric] types of religious experience was carried on in the Islamic context with particular intensity--and also, to the benefit of later students of the matter, with particular sophistication. Indeed, if it was argued earlier in this book that Protestantism constitutes the paradigmatic case of the encounter between religion and modernity, one might argue that Islam constitutes a comparably paradigmatic case of the encounter between Jerusalem and Benares" (pp. 160-161).

It is important to notice here that Berger (quite refreshingly) managed to avoid the temptation to regurgitate the tiresome Western stereotype that pits a monolithic "Islam" against an equally monolithic "modernity." As a sophisticated student of both religion and modernity, Berger recognized that every tradition with pre-modern roots has struggled (and continues to struggle) with the implications of modernity--with Protestant Christianity having had the historical luck (or misfortune) to be positioned most squarely at the front. What Berger does not discuss in his otherwise very fine treatment of this issue is the crucial role of a third "city" in the gradual unfolding of what is, in fact, a world-historical drama:

Athens.

Ancient Athens, ironically. But it must be recalled that it was the "return" (as it were) of ancient Athens to European intellectual life (courtesy of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals) in the late Middle Ages that would spark the revival of humanism in Europe and, with it, the Renaissance as well as the Protestant and scientific revolutions. The first five chapters of The Heretical Imperative presume the critical importance of this third "city" in their treatment of the "contestation with modernity" (p. 160).

And so, it is a tale of three cities that Berger tells in a still thought-provoking book written roughly 35 years ago. Were the book to be written (or re-written) today, it would have to account--at minimum--for the criticisms that I have included in my last several blog posts. In addition, it might be useful to add a fourth city into the mix--if one were to indulge in a little prognostication:

Istanbul.

For it is from the heights of contemporary Istanbul, if anywhere on the planet, that one can take in view all three of Berger's cities. Istanbul, city of Auerbach: where Europe meets Asia, and where modernity and tradition come to dance.