Grace and Philosophy: Understanding a Gratuitous World 9780773557635

Table of contents :
Cover
GRACE AND PHILOSOPHY
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE GRATUITY
1 Gratuity and Philosophy
2 Gratuity and Religion
PART TWO PHILOSOPHY
3 Understanding Gratuity
4 Modern Philosophy
5 The Return to Life
Appendix: Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Acknowledgments

grace and philosophy

i

preface

Grace and Philosophy Understanding a Gratuitous World

hunter brown

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

iii

iv

preface

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 isbn 978-0-7735-5658-4 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5659-1 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-5763-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5764-2 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Grace and philosophy : understanding a gratuitous world / Hunter Brown. Names: Brown, Hunter, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190047356 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019004747X | isbn 9780773556591 (softcover) | isbn 9780773556584 (hardcover) | isbn 9780773557635 (epdf) | isbn 9780773557642 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Grace (Aesthetics) | lcsh: Grace (Theology) | lcsh: Life. | lcsh: Wonder. | lcsh: Philosophy. Classification: lcc bh301.g7 b76 2019 | ddc 113/.8—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 11/14 Sabon

Foreword

For my children, Mary-Elizabeth and Andrew May your wings take you to edifying places beyond my imagination

v

preface

vii

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3

part one

gratuity

1 Gratuity and Philosophy 13 2 Gratuity and Religion

part two

29

philosophy

3 Understanding Gratuity 75 4 Modern Philosophy 91 5 The Return to Life 105 Appendix: Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism 131 Notes 143 Bibliography 149 Index 155

Acknowledgments

ix

Acknowledgments

There is an African proverb which says that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So many people have helped me with the writing of this book over a long period of time that I cannot name everyone individually here. I am deeply grateful, however, and realize that without their advice and support the project would never have been completed. I am also very grateful for the encouragement I received from Philip Cercone at McGillQueen’s University Press, and for the unwavering commitment of my editor, Khadija Coxon, who has been tireless in her guidance of the manuscript to publication.

The Backstory

grace and philosophy

1

Introduction

The idea of grace is a familiar one. There are grace periods in some legal contracts, opportunities to be in someone’s good graces or to fall from grace, and lives destined for misfortune but for the grace of God, as the saying goes. Related words such as “graceful” come often to mind in response to certain kinds of movement, as does the word “gracious” in the presence of special hospitality, unexpected acts of kindness, and tempered responses to rudeness. Inquiry into the meaning of such words finds the notion of favour arising often. What is distinctive of such favour is its propensity to go beyond what is deserved or warranted. It possesses, in other words – to use yet another word related to grace – a distinctively gratuitous character, which the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as the quality of something having been done “without good or assignable reason,” or even as having “no cause,” as the Cambridge Dictionary of American English puts it. The idea of a behaviour for which there is no good reason or a natural occurrence for which there is no cause both seem odd, especially after several centuries of science when everything appears to be causally determined. Nonetheless, the notion that aspects of the world, and perhaps the world itself, are somehow unhinged from normal causal influence has a very long and persistent presence in the histories of philosophy, religion, cultural stories, poetry, literature, art, music, and drama. Recently, philosophy has exhibited little interest in such traditions or in the gratuity toward which they gesture. Such disinter-

4

Grace and Philosophy

est is the result of certain characteristics that the modern discipline has acquired which I will illustrate and critique. This book, then, is not only about grace – to which I will often refer under the heading of “gratuity” – but about philosophy as well; about the ways in which certain aspects of the world such as gratuity may change the way we think, if they are allowed to do so. Unfortunately, they are often not allowed to do so. This is not because of any explicit prohibition or obstacle placed intentionally in the path of change. It is because of a propensity among philosophers to make their subject matter conform to familiar ways of thinking rather than making their thinking conform to the sometimes-elusive ways in which their subject matter actually exists in the world. This happens even at levels as simple as that of ordinary language. “Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense,”1 Freud once complained. In the case of religion, for example, they “give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves … notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.” Religion is not the only domain in which the subject matter of philosophy can become an insubstantial shadow of the phenomena about which it purports to be speaking. Many other aspects of life including moral challenges, belief acquisition, and encounters with evil and suffering, are often more richly represented and engaged intellectually by literature, art, and film than by philosophy, and it is no accident that it is to these sources rather than to philosophy that so many people turn in grappling with their own philosophical challenges. Perhaps the deepest and most widespread of such challenges is puzzlement about why we exist – or why anything at all exists, for that matter. Outside the academy there is not much time to grapple with a question of such magnitude, but rare are those who are not struck at least periodically with deep and spontaneous wonder about why there is a world rather than nothing at all. It is a question that “just will not go away.”2 But the question

Introduction

5

has largely gone away in much contemporary analytic philosophy, apart from a handful of studies in metaphysics of little relevance to most people, including philosophers who do not specialize in that area.3 The question is often seen as “unanswerable, meaningless, answered by branches of empirical science, the purview of theology … boring, ill-formed, outdated, misguided or just plain silly.”4 The wide gap between such judgments among professional philosophers and the enduring vitality, depth, and persistence of the question outside the philosophical community comes as no surprise to philosophers, who understand the technical reasons why the question has been so widely abandoned in the discipline. It might also be the case, however, as this book will propose, that it is modern philosophy’s preoccupation with such technicalities that has caused it to lose touch with a subject worthy of attention. I will begin by illustrating differences between the way in which the question has traditionally been engaged by academic philosophy and the way in which it is experienced by many people, including a minority of philosophers. Most philosophers have treated it as a routine manifestation of causal curiosity. We do not know what, if anything, has caused the universe to exist, so we seek a cause in roughly the same way, initially at least, as we seek the causes of train derailments or computer malfunctions. What is almost always missing from this pattern of inquiry is its deeply personal element. That anything at all exists, as Derek Parfitt once put it, “can take one’s breath away.”5 Routine causal curiosity does not take anyone’s breath away, philosophers are rarely short of breath, and it is not at all clear what it is about the world that would evoke such a reaction. A small group of philosophers is notable for having insisted upon keeping this reaction in view when engaging the question. They have concluded that it is a unique one calling for a correspondingly unusual way of thinking and doing philosophy. Exactly what kind of question it is, and what kind of thinking would be appropriate in response to it, they are unsure. They do seem sure, however, about the appropriateness of using metaphors such as

6

Grace and Philosophy

“gift” and “miracle” – which I will place under the heading of “gratuity” – to describe what it is about the existence of the world which evokes such a response. I will illustrate a religious example of the same reaction in the second chapter, in which gratuity emerges under the heading of grace and the ancient Greek tradition of charis. That contemporary philosophers have shown almost no interest in such reports is not altogether surprising, for the discipline largely avoids first-hand accounts of immediate experience as well as nonliteral figures of speech such as metaphor. Because personal reports are largely excluded from the discipline, they exert little influence upon philosophy’s understanding of natural reason or indeed, of the world. My interest in affording them a more prominent and influential place in philosophy, therefore, requires challenging certain aspects of the modern discipline which are responsible for their exclusion. After displaying such reports in the first two chapters and engaging the subject of gratuity itself in the third, I will deploy a position in the remainder of the book which involves three elements. The first is a demonstration that the narrowness which excludes such reports is not characteristic of the discipline of philosophy as such, but rather uniquely characteristic of its modern form. Second, the modern narrowing of philosophy is the result of decisions to privilege certain technical activities of reason, such as the formation of formal argument and theory, over other activities such as those exemplified in the aforementioned reports. Decisions of this kind, I argue, are vulnerable to serious criticism. There are only two alternatives available to philosophy in this connection. It can simply declare a particular form of reasoning to be superior to others, which begs the question of which form of reasoning should enjoy such a status. Alternatively, it can attempt to support its choice to privilege certain behaviours but, in order not to beg the question, to do so on the basis of appeal to other behaviours. These other behaviours, however, will then require support themselves, and so forth, triggering a regress ending in radical scepticism. In the end, the way in which modern

Introduction

7

philosophy has decided to understand the naturalness and autonomy of reason and its proper relationship with the world is highly questionable. The third element of my position argues in favour of broadening philosophy by beginning with an entirely different starting point. I will propose a form of common-sense, pragmatic thought which integrates more deeply into philosophy the authority widely given, in day-to-day life, to certain spontaneous, observable behaviours of reason in the context of action. Philosophers may be sceptical about perception in the seminar room but they always bow to its authority when trying to cross a busy street. Why does the authority of such behaviours by reason in practice not make itself felt within philosophy as forcefully as it does outside of philosophy? It does not make itself felt because of modern philosophy’s extensive privileging of theory over practice. This privileging forces the discipline into a loop of theorizing ending in scepticism toward even the most enduring and observably authoritative behaviours of reason. I will identify and critique these features in the fourth chapter. This will open the way, in the final chapter, to a broadening of the discipline which makes room for the philosophical and religious reports about gratuity illustrated in the first two chapters. My general case will be augmented by detailed support from William James’s Radical Empiricism. This school of thought is highly critical of modern philosophy for failing to distinguish adequately between the way in which reason functions within the very complex context provided for it by actual experience in its immediate occurrence and the way in which it appears to function when subject to retrospective philosophical analysis. Immediate experience, which provides the context for the actual behaviour of reason, is co-constituted by many relata as well as by many intertwining relations among those relata. Such relations and their coconstitutive role in such experience are routinely neglected in most philosophy, for they are resistant to being stabilized as objects of attention and analysis. As a result, it is the relata which receive the lion’s share of attention. This leads to an understanding of

8

Grace and Philosophy

experience as an atomistic aggregation of autonomous elements rather than an indissoluble unity of deeply interdependent ones. Such a conventional way of proceeding then underwrites confidence that some such elements can and should be segregated from others in the name of allegiance to the naturalness and autonomy of reason. Radical Empiricism exposes the deficiencies of confidence in such a philosophical dismemberment and compartmentalization of reason’s actual behaviour and the understanding of reason’s naturalness and autonomy associated with it. Drawing extensively upon the resources of empirical psychology as well as philosophy, it shows how far this kind of philosophy strays from the actual functioning of reason, and how this error can be corrected. The alternative view of philosophy which emerges is not only more defensible than its mainstream counterpart, but much more accommodating both of gratuity and of the reports and traditions attesting to it. There is a strong affinity between James’s understanding of the naturalness and autonomy of reason and Iris Murdoch’s position on the same subject. Murdoch’s view of reason’s natural behaviour includes the integration of contemplative and experiential elements largely absent from mainline philosophy. Her inclusion of such activities also provides a vehicle for bringing reports and traditions about encounters with the gratuity of existence within the purview of philosophy, as well as engaging that existence in the light of this encounter. In sum, I will argue that there are viable models of philosophy which do not suffer from the limitations of its modern analytic form, and that these alternative models make possible an integration of traditions about gratuity and its imputation to the fact that there is something rather than nothing. My position is certainly dissident by the standards of modern philosophy, but less so in the light of Plato’s appreciation of the limits of theory and the language of theory, and the long tradition of philosophers who followed him in this respect. There are features of the world, they argue, which cannot be captured adequately by theoretical lan-

Introduction

9

guage but which should nevertheless be included within the domain of philosophy. This is why the discipline should sometimes make room for non-literal language – precisely the sort of language found in the reports I cite in the first two chapters of this book. By contrast, modern philosophy has driven a deep wedge between technical and figurative language, forcing the latter into the domain of the poetic and artistic, whereupon it is discounted for its alleged imprecision by comparison with philosophy and the sciences. It is my intent to foster an understanding of philosophy which will bring these two ways of describing experience together once again.

The Backstory

part one Gratuity

11

1 Gratuity and Philosophy

Why there is something rather than nothing is an old and remarkably persistent question in Western philosophy. While some philosophers find it a profound question involving the very origins of existence, to others it seems not to be a real question at all. There is some merit in this latter judgment. If the question is inviting one to imagine that at one time there had been nothing at all – absolutely nothing, including matter, God, or anything else – then there is good reason to have serious reservations about it. Asking such a question requires one to conceptualize “nothing” without treating it as “something.” Bede Rundle’s book on the subject points out that such a treatment of the idea of nothingness always involves a residual image of something that is empty, something that was present prior to the world’s existence.1 William James argues, from a slightly different point of view, that the question cannot be asked coherently because analysis always involves the relating of things which requires, in this context, that the concept of “nothing” become a counterpart for the idea of “everything.” Accordingly, once again, nothing is actually treated as something. Having set up a juxtaposition between nothing and something in this way, reason oscillates back and forth between the two until it becomes bewildered and reaches a dead end. When it eventually recognizes what is happening, observes James – that nothing is being treated as something – it comes to understand the futility of its efforts. If by something, in the “something rather than nothing” question, then, is meant everything –

14

Gratuity

really everything – philosophical analysis will eventually find itself bankrupt, for it cannot produce anything meaningful to which everything can be related. In the end, concludes James, conventional causal inquiry into existence as the whole of reality should not even be undertaken. Philosophers have also been skeptical about the prospect that anything could arise from absolutely nothing. What would it mean to assert that something has sprung spontaneously into existence? Spontaneous activity must be predicated of something behaving spontaneously, a something which would seem to be precluded by the notion of complete nothingness. Thomas Aquinas and many other philosophers have contended over the centuries that from nothing, nothing can come. As Carl Hempel observes, there is no way of explaining nothing without presupposing something else that exists.2 If, then, the “something rather than nothing” question means by nothing the absence of absolutely everything, there are good reasons for suspecting that it may not be a meaningful question at all. If by nothing one is actually referring to the imagined absence of one particular thing – the universe, for example – then the “something rather than nothing” question would be asking why there is a universe instead of some prior state of affairs from which that universe was at one time absent. This way of understanding the question leaves conceptual room for another something such as God, which might turn out to provide a causal explanation for why there is anything now. If this is what the question is really about, then it is asking what possibly existing thing or things other than the universe might be responsible for there being a universe. Far from being one of the deepest of questions, however, this seems to be a pedestrian one, analogous to asking why my house exists rather than not. The question is often engaged by philosophers in concert with the famous cosmological argument which creates a decidedly causal approach to it. That argument can be formulated in many different ways, but it usually focuses upon the claim that things in the world do not explain themselves. I exist, for example, because of my parents and by means of the elements of the world which

Gratuity and Philosophy

15

sustain me day to day. Beginning with observation of such natural objects and events and the causal relationships among them, the argument contends that every such object or event appears to be indebted for its existence and character to some other object or event. Each time one offers a causal explanation along such lines, however, a new question arises: how is one to explain that explanation; what caused that cause? There are only two alternatives when faced with such a new question, proponents of the argument assert. The causal influence being considered either explains itself or it does not. If it does not, then one must seek further. If there is no end to the search, then there is no fully sufficient explanation of the phenomenon. The same applies to the universe if one treats it as an object in need of causal explanation. For the purposes of this book, there are just three things about this common way of treating the “something rather than nothing” question to which I wish to call attention. The first involves its starting point. Cosmological arguments begin with observation of the natural order and assume that whatever comes into existence has a cause. Such an approach controversially treats the collection of all such causally dependent beings as itself causally dependent. It envisions the world, as Peter Geach puts it, as a “great big object.”3 Treating the world as a great big object, Geach observes, encourages a certain sort of thinking: If one views the world as such an object, then it seems sensible to ask about it the same sort of questions that one might normally ask about other objects in the world. Many philosophers have objected that just because every component of the collection of all things in the universe requires a cause does not mean that the collection itself also requires a cause. A wall made of large bricks is not necessarily a large wall; a universe made of dependent beings is not necessarily a dependent universe. It is quite possible that the universe itself is simply a brute fact while all its parts are explicable in relation to one another. Proponents of the cosmological argument resist this recourse to brute facticity, arguing that it does not provide what they deem to be a fully sufficient response to the “something rather than nothing” question. Every time one being is invoked to explain another,

16

Gratuity

they protest, a new unanswered question arises, namely: what explains that being? A series of such limited explanations involves a regress that has no end. Terminating this regress in an assertion of brute facticity does not respond adequately to the regress. The upshot of the foregoing patterns of thinking and debate can be seen clearly in Gottfried Leibniz’s work, which gives the “something rather than nothing” question the form in which it is most familiar to modern philosophers. Matter exhibits certain patterns of behaviour, Leibniz observes. The existence of each phenomenon appears to be brought about by phenomena preceding it. Those phenomena, in turn, exhibit the same process. If we follow this process backwards we will never make any explanatory headway, for the same causal question will keep arising over and over. Every causal explanation will raise another causal question, as Immanuel Kant also observes. It is possible to imagine, Leibniz concedes, that this sequence of phenomena has no beginning. Consider, he suggests, a series of geometry textbooks, each one copied from a textbook written before it. Imagine further that such a sequence of books has no beginning; there is no first book. Now suppose that every book in the sequence can be explained as having been copied from the book before it. If there were no beginning to such a sequence, then it would seem that the sequence as a whole has been accounted for because every member of that sequence can be explained as having been copied from the one prior to it – and there is no first book because the sequence has no beginning. David Hume considers the same possibility. But even if this were the case, proposes Leibniz, as did Aquinas, the “something rather than nothing” question would still stand. It would still be meaningful to ask why there is such an infinite sequence of books rather than nothing at all. Replying that it just is – a brute fact – would not be a sufficient answer to this particular form of the question, in Leibniz’s judgment. I offer the foregoing observations in the service of the first point I wish to make about the “something rather than nothing” question when it is framed in terms of the cosmological argument. This way of framing it begins with observations of the natural order

Gratuity and Philosophy

17

which are dominated with concerns about causal relationships among the parts of that order, and about whatever might be responsible causally for it as a whole. This brings me to my second point about the question, which has to do with what would constitute a satisfactory answer when it is framed within such widely familiar terms of reference. Here one encounters the principle of sufficient reason, according to which, says Leibniz, nothing happens without there being a fully adequate reason why one particular state of affairs rather than something else has taken place. A sufficient reason, he says, is one which leaves the philosopher desirous of no further explanation. He illustrates this principle in correspondence with Samuel Clarke by invoking Archimedes’ observation that if equal weights are hung on two ends of a balance, the balance will not move. There are certain discoverable conditions that are responsible for this phenomenon, he observes, and when these are understood, one has come into possession of a fully sufficient understanding of it. It is not necessary to understand everything about the phenomenon in order to have a sufficient explanation of it. In the case of the balance, one need not understand the metallurgy of the weights, or how balances are manufactured, or who owns them. John Searle concurs that causal explanations purporting to be sufficient can take for granted many aspects of the larger context within which those explanations stand without compromising sufficiency of explanation.4 While there are important matters of controversy among philosophers involving the principle of sufficient reason, it suffices for the purposes of this chapter to underscore only one point: sufficiency of explanation is related to the context of a particular line of inquiry. Context provides two things. First, it provides the terms of reference within which one can determine what limits of an explanation will not interfere with its sufficiency – what can be taken for granted, in other words. Second, it provides a direction in which inquiry will be inclined to move in its pursuit of explanatory sufficiency. This idea of direction will become increasingly significant as this book unfolds. The terms of reference created by the cosmological argument are focused upon observation of the natural order. This, then,

18

Gratuity

directs inquiry toward causality among the parts of that order and then to the possible causal dependency of the whole. Such a pattern of thinking, by focusing on the explanatory insufficiency of normal causal relations, orients analysis away from such contingent relations and toward a possible cause which does not involve such contingency – a being which requires no further explanation because it explains itself. In other words, when such argumentation starts with a context which identifies causal dependence as the main problem, which it usually does, it is oriented thereby toward the pursuit of an explanation which does not involve causal dependence. This observation brings me to the third feature of the “something rather than nothing” question to which I would like to draw attention, namely, the being toward which such an orientation leads, a being which purportedly does not exhibit dependence. There is nothing in normal human experience which allows one to understand what such a being may be, and arguments leading to the existence of that being have been faulted on this count by many philosophers, among whom Kant has been particularly influential. Kant observes that when reason begins its engagement of the natural order with a view to causal dependency, it finds itself moving from one explanation to another, each of which raises new causal questions; nothing is itself wholly responsible for the state in which it is found. That state always points to an antecedent cause, which in turn raises questions about that cause. Faced with the prospect that there will be no end to such inquiry, reason eventually considers the possibility that what it seeks may lie outside the natural world. Here a distinctive challenge arises, Kant notes. By what means might reason be able to pass from the natural order to a point outside that order? The bridge allowing for such passage at first appears to be provided by careful reflection upon the natural order. However, Kant argues, there is no bridge from the natural order to the transcendent. Argumentation which begins with observations of the natural order ends up, in its journey to the transcendent, following a path that is not provided by empirical experience after all. The mind’s movement from the natural to the

Gratuity and Philosophy

19

transcendent takes place not upon a well-constructed, empirically grounded bridge spanning the two, but by means of a leap it makes on its own. Reason does not discover the noncontingent; it provides the idea of the noncontingent. With the use of this idea, reason is able to experience the world in a way which would be impossible without it, for that idea contributes to experience a unity and coherence which experience would not otherwise have. The intellectual efficacy of the idea of the noncontingent for Kant, in other words, does not reside in some form of philosophical content upon which reason can meditate with benefit. On the contrary, reason finds itself incapable of forming a specific concept of the ultimate cause of the world. The idea of the supreme cause has no correlate in actual experience, and cannot be understood in a concrete way. That idea has almost no specific content, and says nothing about the nature of such an ultimate. Rather, that ultimate, being inaccessible to empirical inquiry, is represented only by a vague and abstract concept. The lesson to be learned here, proposes Kant, is that the idea of the noncontingent is intellectually efficacious not because of its content, of which there is almost none, and not because it represents a reality which has been discovered, but because of its function in making possible a unity and coherence in experience which experience would not otherwise possess. For Kant, then, the abstraction of the idea of a noncontingent being only means something if one views it not in terms of content but in terms of function. Kant was not the only one to recognize the challenges of the idea of a noncontingent being which emerge from a conventional causal approach to the world. Scholastic proponents of theistic arguments recognized it as well. The noncontingent, they argued, can only be understood apophatically. That is to say, in terms of what it is not – not material, not mortal, not temporal, and so forth. This involves a certain view of analogy. The first stage of analogy, the via affirmationis, attributes certain properties to the noncontingent. One might propose, for example, that it is good. This stage is then deliberately subverted at the second stage, the via negationis. At this stage the properties of goodness, as they are nor-

20

Gratuity

mally understood, are denied of such a being. The final stage, the via eminentiae, then qualifies this negation by affirming the noncontingent’s possession of the attribute of goodness in an eminent, but unknown way. The final stage says something positive about the negation but only to the point of recognizing that this is a being which cannot be known. There is here no focused and specific idea of such a being, but only a form of learned ignorance. Analogy, in this tradition, provides no foundation for natural theology, if one understands natural theology as furnishing a purely philosophical concept of God. Rather, it points beyond itself in the direction of something it does not understand. It would be difficult to find a more forceful articulation of such apophaticism in connection with the noncontingent than that offered by Étienne Gilson’s characterization of Aquinas’s work. Even the famous Five Ways, claims Gilson, represent an extraordinary effort by the human mind to realize that it does not and cannot know the transcendent. Philosophy in this respect only directs reason toward something which transcends its capacities. Reason tenaciously resists this lesson, Gilson argues, because it desires knowledge, not ignorance. It also has vested interests in particular concepts of the transcendent which fit its purposes. What one finds in Aquinas, Gilson points out, is a mysticism as radical as that of the twelfth-century Benedictine abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, which resists these spontaneous natural propensities. The hard work of reason is to keep reminding itself that it does not know and cannot know, in this instance, and is prone to creating deceptive images of a transcendent.5 Such apophaticism works for the scholastic tradition in part because that tradition understands the modest achievements of the theistic arguments to be augmented by revelation, which is seen as supplementing their conclusions with otherwise unattainable insight into the nature of the noncontingent. A connection between the theistic arguments and actual religious traditions was recognized by Kant but is widely neglected in modern philosophical analyses of the arguments, and the success of early modern critiques of the arguments is indebted to such neglect. Philosophers such as Hume do not have a difficult time showing

Gratuity and Philosophy

21

how those arguments, detached from a religious context, fail to provide foundations for the unitary, infinite deity of classical theism. Throughout much of their history, however, such arguments were offered in a broader religious context which recognized and sought religiously to compensate for their limitations. I will have more to say about this historical context later in the book. For now, I wish simply to describe the third feature of the way in which the “something rather than nothing” question is often engaged in connection with the cosmological argument; that is, the way in which its starting point in the contingency of natural causal relationships eventually moves it to posit an unintelligible noncontingent being. Altogether, then, there are three features of the “something rather than nothing” question, as it is commonly encountered in connection with the cosmological argument, which are directly relevant to this book. The first is a point of departure in attentiveness to the natural order, and especially the causal contingency of natural objects both individually and collectively. The second has to do with expectations about what would constitute sufficiency of explanation when the question is directed toward a cause which, in order to be sufficient, would have to eliminate such contingency. The third has to do with the idea of a noncontingent being which results from such thinking, an idea which has been rightly subject to widespread criticism for its conceptual shortcomings, much less religious irrelevance. With these three features of a conventional engagements of the “something rather than nothing” question in hand, I turn my attention to another way in which the question has been engaged in the work of a few philosophers, and the altogether different kind of thinking to which this engagement leads. In the process of grappling with the “something rather than nothing” question, Richard Taylor’s Metaphysics offers a brief summary of the cosmological argument which more or less corresponds to the patterns of thinking I have described in the foregoing pages.6 Just before that summary, however, Taylor supplies a preamble. We are accustomed, he observes, to ignoring things with which we are familiar. We do so sometimes even in the case of very

22

Gratuity

odd things which would otherwise attract attention. William James also makes a related point to the effect that familiarity often creates the false impression of intelligibility. At the top of Taylor’s list of things that are mysterious but are rarely experienced as such is the simple fact that there is something rather than nothing; it is a strange thing that the world exists at all. What is not strange, he proposes, is that such a world might never have existed. Reason exhibits no spontaneous impulse to explain the prospect that there might never have been anything in the first place. It does, however, exhibit a powerful impulse to find an explanation of why there is a world. Unfortunately, familiarity with the world breeds indifference toward the strangeness of that fact, and most people take the existence of the world for granted. These observations by Taylor provide a preamble and context for his summary of the cosmological argument. They are very consequential, however, for they shift the focus of thinking away from the usual preoccupation with causal dependency and toward strangeness instead. The universe is engaged first by Taylor, in other words, not as just a great big object analogous to little objects in need of a causal explanation, but as a strange phenomenon whose strangeness most often goes unnoticed because it is so familiar. This theme of strangeness is echoed in comments once made by J.J.C. Smart in connection with his experience of the “something rather than nothing” question. At the end of an essay criticizing theistic arguments which adopt causal approaches to the existence of the world, Smart observes that notwithstanding what he judges to be the dismal failure of such arguments, he finds himself still beset by a peculiar form of puzzlement about the strangeness of there being something rather than nothing. Though I know how any answer on the lines of the cosmological argument can be pulled to pieces by a correct logic, I still feel I want to go on asking the question [why there is a world rather than no world at all]. Indeed, though logic has taught me to look at such a question with the gravest suspicion, my mind often seems to reel under the immense significance it

Gratuity and Philosophy

23

seems to have for me. That anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe. But whether other people feel this sort of awe and whether they or I ought to is another question. I think we ought to. If so, the question arises: If ‘Why should anything exist at all?’ cannot be interpreted after the manner of the cosmological argument, that is, as an absurd request for the nonsensical postulation of a logically necessary being, what sort of question is it? What sort of question is this question ‘Why should anything exist at all?’ All I can say is, that I do not yet know.7 Professional philosophers are not much given to reeling at anything, and the language of mainstream analytic philosophy leaves little room for vocabulary such as Smart’s. Nonetheless, Smart’s language does seem to be appropriate if one is trying to describe the distinctive state normally designated by the term “awe.” It is difficult to know how one would convey the depth and profundity of that state without some such vocabulary. Reactions of awe are often, admittedly, a function of naïveté or unfamiliarity. A young child may be awestruck by her first encounter with a power lawnmower. Such forms of awe usually dissipate with time. Smart’s awe, however, did not dissipate with time or familiarity. The passage above was published in 1955, and Smart reiterates its substance in a 1996 exchange with John Haldane. While expressing reservations about some of his earlier comments, he remains no less astounded than he had been decades before about the fact that there is something rather than nothing. “Is it not a matter for great awe that there is anything at all, let alone our vast and complex universe?”8 he muses. In this connection he expresses admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made similar observations. In the end, Smart remarks: “I do think that there is something ultimately mysterious in the fact that the universe exists at all, and that there is something wrong with us if we do not feel this mystery.”9 In other words, even after having satisfied himself fully that the causally-oriented theistic arguments are failures, he still finds reason exhibiting a strong spontaneous propensity to seek some further form of understanding.

24

Gratuity

Smart’s acknowledgement of Wittgenstein is apropos in this connection, for Wittgenstein offers a number of comments on the “something rather than nothing” question which are relevant here. In his Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein wonders why, in the midst of a mundane world in which nothing appears to be absolute, human beings are disposed to use language about absolute goods and absolute values. Is there anything about the context of such language, he wonders, which might shed some light upon what it is intended to mean? He is reasonably sure that within the context of conventional philosophical discussion, including discussion of ethics, such language does not make much sense. It seems, rather, to point beyond conventional discourse toward a distinctive form of experience, the philosophical import of which is not easily articulated. Wittgenstein judges that the best way of describing that experience would be to frame it in terms of wonder why there is a world at all. This should be expressed in ways which convey a sense of how extraordinary that fact is.10 Such extraordinariness, he emphasizes, is not the same as one would experience when encountering an enormously large dog, or an unusually blue sky. What he is trying to get at, rather, is an elusive experience which philosophers who have tried to write about ethics or religion have often encountered. He reports that the language he uses in trying to describe his experience of reason’s propensities in this respect is trying to convey the sense that the mere existence of the world is a “miracle.”11 In other words, the language of absolutes, when it arises in connection with religion and ethics, is not conventional philosophical or scientific language at all. It is a use of language closely linked to the experience of something that strikes one as miraculous. It is about intellectual states which have seemed to those who have had them – among whom Wittgenstein includes himself – to have an intrinsic and absolute value. The oddness of such experiences ought not to encourage a dismissive relegation of them to the esoteric, even if they do raise questions about whether or not they belong within philosophy. They are part of the ordinary furniture of human experience, intellectual events that have happened at particular places and times, having specific durations and descrip-

Gratuity and Philosophy

25

tions. They represent, for Wittgenstein, a propensity of human reason for which he expresses deep respect, an experience of the fact of existence which he can only describe metaphorically. It is this experience, in Wittgenstein’s judgment, that provides the context for language about absolutes when such language arises, as it often does, in connection with ethics and religion. If this is the case, he concludes, then ethics can only be engaged by philosophy in a way that is analogous to the manner in which a teacup can hold only so much water even if a gallon were to be poured into it. This is why, he says, if anybody could write a book fully expressive of what is involved in ethics, such a book would explode, destroying all the other books in the world. At the heart of such a book would be the elemental and miraculous thatness of there being a world at all rather than nothing, and it is this realization which would ensure that such a book was truly about ethics. It would be a thatness, as I cited Derek Parfitt in the Introduction as having once put it, which would take one’s breath away, a thatness which William James once described as a pure gift.12 It is important to note here that Wittgenstein, like the other philosophers mentioned, not only describes subjective reactions to the fact that there is anything at all, but also proposes that those reactions are appropriate responses to a characteristic of existence itself warranting the use of metaphors of miracle and gift. In other words, we have in the reports of these philosophers not only a description of subjective states but also the imputation to existence itself of a characteristic best described in such terms. The inclusion by Taylor, Smart, Wittgenstein, Parfitt, and James of strangeness and awe in the point of departure for engaging the “something rather than nothing” question orients thought in a different direction than one finds in the conventional domination of the question by concerns about causality. In the conventional approach, reason attends from the outset to causal dependence, and then from such dependence it goes in search for something that is not dependent. A point of departure in a powerful sense of strangeness, however, orients reason to inquire into what it might be about the world which causes such a reaction. Reason is preoccupied here not so much by a regress of causal explanations as by

26

Gratuity

the intuition of a peculiar gratuity about the fact of existence. I use the term “gratuity” here to designate the apparent absence of causal antecedents sufficient to cause or explain a particular phenomenon, a connotation plainly evident in the choice of metaphorical language about miracle and gift. There seems to be a peculiar spontaneous disposition on the part of reason on display here. It is reminiscent of Paul Williams’ description of a resemblance between the “something rather than nothing” question and a Zen Buddhist koan. The question, like a koan, pesters the mind, badgering it toward understanding the world in some unfamiliar way.13 This notion of a perplexing impulse on the part of reason toward a different way of seeing things, and perhaps, by implication, a different way of doing philosophy, is not entirely alien to the area of natural theology, although it has a relatively peripheral presence. Harold Netland responds to Williams’ analogy between actually experiencing the “something rather than nothing” question and a Zen koan, for example, by claiming that Williams’ perspective exemplifies what is really going on with the traditional cosmological arguments.14 Anthony Flew, nearing the end of a lengthy and careful analysis of the cosmological argument in God and Philosophy, comments that the “something rather than nothing” question is probably the moving force behind the cosmological argument.15 Flew, however, like Smart, admits to being uncertain about what the question is really asking. Perhaps it is not the question it appears to be at all, he speculates. Maybe it is a way of expressing an impulse toward greater metaphysical profundity such as one sometimes finds in Arthur Schopenhauer’s work, and in Wittgenstein’s sense of the mystical. Ian Crombie also sees a link between the cosmological argument and spontaneous puzzlement about something rather than nothing, but describes it in terms of an orientation by reason toward an unknown state rather than the argumentative justification of theism. He suggests that the purpose of such arguments is to expose more clearly the intellectual impulses behind religious language, and the peculiar meaning of such language under such conditions.16 The font of those impulses, Crombie proposes, is the

Gratuity and Philosophy

27

way in which the human being encounters itself as, at one and the same time, an integral part of the natural order while also, in subjectivity and freedom, somehow deeply different from that order. Puzzled by its own apparent emergence out of nothing, it is also puzzled about the emergence of the natural order generally. The task of natural theology, on such a view, is to point reason toward an unknown goal – to orient reason in a particular direction – and to provide placeholders in philosophy for that elusive goal. Notwithstanding these suggestions that there may be a kinship between natural theology and the peculiar experience of the “something rather than nothing” question, this is not a kinship which is recognized widely in contemporary analytic philosophy. The discipline has generally kept such experience separate from the theistic arguments, assigning the former, if it takes any notice of it at all, to the domain of religious experience. Such experience does not normally play a role in connection with analyses of theistic arguments, or an understanding of natural theology generally, or even of philosophy, for that matter. To be sure, the account of spontaneous puzzlement I have offered above is vague, from a philosophical point of view, and so it is not surprising to find Richard Swinburne, for example, implying that the philosophical formalization of such experience is a major step forward to the extent that it moves away from such vagueness. Before disparaging vagueness, however, it might be worth noting that the goals after which reason aspires are almost always encountered as vague and imprecise. Because of this, the context within which reason encounters those goals is very important, for it is that context which provides signposts and markers orienting reason away from such vagueness and toward an unknown goal. It was for this reason that James calls for the reinstatement of a certain sort of vagueness to its proper place in philosophy. This chapter has proposed that engagement of the “something rather than nothing” question has occurred among philosophers in two decidedly different forms. If the question is taken as asking why something has emerged from absolute nothingness, then it is likely not a meaningful question. If it is asking simply what might

28

Gratuity

have caused the universe to exist, it may be a meaningful question analogous to asking why my house exists, but it is not a particularly deep one. If it includes a subjective sense of strangeness and awe, an imputation of gratuity to existence itself, and a powerful propensity on the part of reason to inquire further, then reason moves in a different direction than one usually finds in philosophy. Such a spontaneous propensity on the part of reason has a long and storied history. Its deliverances have enjoyed significant authority in the philosophical and religious traditions and practices of many cultures over a very long time. The authority of such behaviours counts for little, however, in the context of modernity’s understanding of natural reason and its relationship with the world. The use of metaphorical language about miracle and gift to describe the characteristic of existence which evokes a unique form of awe does not endear these reports to such philosophy. Neither does the personal and first-hand nature of their descriptions of the experiences involved. Before exploring the relationship between these reports and philosophy further, however, I turn my attention to one of many forms of the religious encounter with gratuity.

2 Gratuity and Religion

Philosophers are not the only ones who respond to the fact of existence in the ways I have described in the previous chapter. Many religious traditions also exhibit this pattern. While I have been a reader of such traditions for years, I have genuine expertise only in the Christian one. For this reason, I will engage that tradition. I hope that other individuals will write about the subject in connection with non-Christian traditions. I am going to focus my attention initially on the historical Jesus and then, in part II of this chapter, explore the philosophical significance of my historical findings. Given the vast range of historical scholarship about Jesus, I should first clarify my approach. There have been several waves of inquiry into the historical Jesus since the eighteenth century. These have come to be known as “Quests.” The first is closely associated with the eighteenth-century philosopher Hermann Reimarus, who proposes that Jesus had been a failed Jewish reformer. The early Christian community, Reimarus contends, had concealed this fact, developing a narrative of its own which portrayed Jesus as a risen Messiah who had given his followers the responsibility and power to form a church. The central idea of Reimarus’s position is quite simple: there exists a substantial gap between the actual Jesus of history and the messiah presented by the canonical sources. This idea would acquire much influence in theological scholarship for many years.

30

Gratuity

It was nourished by the increasingly widespread recognition of the extent to which the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus but are self-described evangelion – good news – a mode of literature found in the ancient world in the form of announcements about momentous occasions such as military victories. The elements making up the Gospels had circulated orally for many years before acquiring a written form. During that time, they had been constantly adapted to the distinctive pastoral needs of various communities. They had also been tailored to fit the theological perspectives of the evangelists responsible for putting the tradition into writing. Many theologians, assuming that such social and authorial mediation must inevitably involve factual distortion, were convinced that the canonical tradition is much more reflective of the mindset of the early communities and the individuals responsible for it than of the historical Jesus. While there were gestures of resistance to such historical skepticism over the years, it was only in the 1980s, in connection what has come to be called the Third Quest, that one finds the most serious and sustained scholarly challenge. There is controversy about who should be designated as representing Third Quest scholarship, or even whether the term should be used. For present purposes, however, I understand it to be represented by the work of people such as N.T. Wright, E.P. Sanders, and John P. Meier, among others. Such scholars, while diverse in their approaches, represent the emergence of a cautious optimism about the recoverability of at least some aspects of the historical Jesus if he is located knowledgeably within the terms of reference of his cultural and religious setting. The work of Third Quest scholars is neither reactionary nor naïve as an historical undertaking. It takes fully into account the wide range of biblical scholarship over recent centuries. Third Quest scholars agree that the canonical Jesus is heavily mediated by the communities and evangelists responsible for the Gospels. They know that trying to get behind the cultural and theological elements of those sources in the pursuit of an unmediated historical figure is futile. What they resist is too hasty an inference from all this to the conclusion that such mediation must inevitably

Gratuity and Religion

31

lead to a distorted picture of the historical Jesus on all counts. Their work has made it increasingly apparent that many aspects of his life can be found in and through the sensibilities of the early communities by whom his story was told. Capitalizing upon the ever-improving scholarly resources in a wide variety of fields including history, anthropology, archaeology, and more, Third Quest scholars have committed themselves to historically rigorous analysis. It is against the background of such scholarship that I turn my attention now to the historical Jesus in connection with this book’s interest in the theme of gratuity. Just as the philosophers discussed in the previous chapter chose metaphor as a vehicle to express themselves, the canonical tradition too relies heavily upon figurative language, particularly stories and parables. My analysis of these will be guided as much as possible by the available evidence.

i I begin my inquiry with a puzzling feature of Jesus’s life. It is almost certainly an historically reliable part of the tradition about him that he had a bad reputation. Careful inquiry into why he had such a reputation, I propose, will lead to an understanding of how central the notion of gratuity is to the tradition that formed around him. The bad reputation of Jesus is closely related to his relationships with morally disreputable people. “To what shall I compare this generation?” he is cited on one occasion as having said. “It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”1 Echoes of such criticisms can be heard in Mark as well. “As he sat at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were sitting with Jesus and his disciples; for there were many who fol-

32

Gratuity

lowed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’”2 The same theme recurs in Luke. “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’”3 There is considerable agreement among major exegetes that this feature of the canonical sources is reflective of the historical Jesus. It is found in independent strands of the tradition and is sufficiently embarrassing that it is unlikely to have been included in the tradition unless actual historical states of affairs required that inclusion. W.D. Davies and E.P. Sanders have judged that such criticism of Jesus likely goes back to events in his own lifetime,4 and John Meier has forcefully challenged the suggestion that the early community would have created a tradition which is so antagonistic toward Jesus.5 It is important, Meier adds, to understand just how serious these charges against Jesus were. The morally disreputable people to whom the foregoing passages refer are designated as hamartoloi. The term does not represent individuals who experience moral lapses from time to time or even to people whose vices are so powerful that they dominate their lives in spite of ongoing efforts to resist. Nor is it likely that the term refers to the so-called people of the land who were looked down upon by many of their pious Jewish contemporaries. While such people of the land were criticized by Pharisees for what was seen as their lukewarm relationship with the law and purity codes, they were not seen, on that account, as sinners in the sense of hamartoloi. What is not designated by the term hamartoloi, in other words, are people who sometimes or even often transgress. What is designated by the term hamartoloi are people whose transgressions are rooted in an explicit intent to defy the covenant or misrepresent the law as that law was generally understood. The term refers to thieves and other deliberately wicked people whose company was rejected by their fellow Jews. They are the ones, it appears, with whom Jesus dined, who were attract-

Gratuity and Religion

33

ed to him in significant numbers, and whose company with him appears to have been a source of sustained criticism from the broader community. Popular Christian thought assumes that Jesus’s relationship with such people was a function of his efforts, as a religious leader, to bring them to reform their lives. Jesus is said to have responded to someone critical of him for spending time with such people: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”6 Seeing Jesus as a moral physician calling sinners to repent is attractive for many reasons, not least of which is that it fits so well with comfortable stereotypes of religion nowadays which portray all religions as having to do, in one way or another, with a summons to some kind to moral improvement. Unfortunately, the hypothesis that Jesus associated with the hamartoloi primarily for the purpose of calling them to repentance is untenable from an evidential point of view. Moreover, that hypothesis obscures the radical gratuity at the heart of what he had to say. It is notable, to begin with, that in the passage above about Jesus as a spiritual physician, Mark, the oldest of Gospels, has nothing to say about repentance. While it is true that Jesus describes himself metaphorically as a physician for the hamartoloi, he does not specify what constitutes the therapy being offered in this connection. He has come to call the hamartoloi, he says, but it is not stipulated exactly to what they are being called. Most Christians have been taught to read repentance into the story based, in no small part, upon Luke’s writings. Luke’s Gospel and Acts, however, exhibit a unique interest in the theme of repentance, as I will show in greater detail below. The only thing conveyed by invoking the metaphor of a spiritual physician in the older Markan passage is that the spiritually sick are being offered health. How that health is to be achieved is not stipulated, so it is important to be open to unexpected possibilities here. It is well worth considering in this connection that every constituency of Jesus’s society, notwithstanding the many theological disagreements among them, would have welcomed efforts by him or any other religious person to bring the hamartoloi to repen-

34

Gratuity

tance. This was precisely what John the Baptist had done, as had many prophets before him. If this had been the main aim and message of Jesus, there would have been nothing particularly novel or interesting about him. He would simply have been replicating what had been done many times before over the centuries and in his own time by John. The offer of reconciliation with God would boil down to an individual exhibiting behaviours which are pleasing to God, and which therefore trigger an appropriate divine response. As the Baptist puts it, they ought to exhibit behaviours which would make them fit for the kingdom. If the hypothesis that Jesus kept company with the hamartoloi for the purposes of calling them to repentance is not as firm as may have been expected, where might one turn for an explanation of his message, and especially the bad reaction to it among many people? Some plausible conjectures based on what is known about the hamartoloi may furnish a starting point. It could be safely assumed that the hamartoloi would have been accustomed to criticism and rejection by pious members of the community. Their attraction to Jesus in what is said to have been considerable numbers – “there were many who followed him”7 – would indicate that he did not react to them in this way. It would appear, in other words, that he was somehow accommodating of them in ways that they appreciated and welcomed. What form might such accommodation have taken? One possible answer to this question is that such accommodation reflects a less than rigorous allegiance, on his part, to the Jewish laws and practices being ignored by them. One can certainly find canonical passages in which Jesus seems to have been critical of his own tradition in a number of respects, including law, temple worship, and purity codes. Such behaviour on his part might seem to support an explanation that Jesus was sympathetic toward the hamartoloi because he himself had reservations about the laws and practices being ignored by them. The evidence, however, speaks forcefully against this hypothesis. If there is anything that has been established by Third Quest scholarship and by Jewish scholarship preceding Third Quest work, it is that Jesus was, from birth to death, deeply and faithfully committed to his tradition

Gratuity and Religion

35

with respect to the Mosaic law, a largely pharisaic understanding of the authority of the oral interpretation of that law, the purity codes, and participation in temple observance. This strident fidelity to his tradition is not always apparent to readers of the canonical sources because those sources abound with passages describing friction between Jesus and religious authorities concerning such matters. Careful scholarship in connection with Second Temple Judaism, however, has made it progressively clearer that such disagreements resemble common, in-house theological debates among Jesus’s contemporaries. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and others had deep differences of opinion on many subjects. Most of the disagreements in the pages of the canonical sources fit well within the parameters of those day-to-day disputes although, as I will indicate further one, in one respect conflict between Jesus and the authorities went far beyond such matters. The participation by Jesus even in heated debate, then, is not necessarily an indicator of antagonism on his part toward his tradition. On the contrary, his vigorous participation plausibly suggests serious interest in being part of the community’s efforts to understand its tradition more deeply. Such interest would have been shared by many of Jesus’s theological adversaries in the wake of the Babylonian captivity in the 500’s bce. That disastrous event in Jewish history was interpreted by a significant number of his fellow Jews to have been precipitated by moral failure on the part of the community. There was understandable concern, therefore, to encourage covenant fidelity lest further infidelity bring yet more disasters in the future. Debates among Jesus’s contemporaries in this spirit were often as heated as the debates one finds in the canonical sources. Read in this light, the canonical sources exhibit many indications of Jesus’s deep and at times unusually strict fidelity to his tradition, which I will address in greater detail below. Such indications speak forcefully against the hypothesis that the congenial relationship between Jesus and the hamartoloi was reflective of indifference or antagonism on his part toward the Jewish laws and practices being ignored by them. Since Jesus’s Jewishness is not always recognized clearly within Christian circles, I will expand briefly upon it in

36

Gratuity

connection with my claim that, in many respects, Jesus was far more Jewish than he is often portrayed as having been. This fact seriously undermines any suggestions that his openness to the hamartoloi was a function of antagonism on his part toward his own tradition. Law

There is no evidential support for the view that Jesus would have been indifferent to the ways in which the hamartoloi ignored the requirements of the Decalogue. On the contrary, there is much in the canonical Christian tradition, especially in Matthew, which emphasizes Jesus’s sympathy with both the law and the pharisaic practice of “building a fence” around the law in order to strengthen fidelity to it. Building a fence around the law involved an amplification of its demands on the assumption that striving to meet these exaggerated demands would increase the likelihood of fidelity to its actual demands. Commenting on the laws regarding murder and adultery, for example, the Jesus of Matthew calls for the cessation even of anger and lust, the presumptive soil in which murder and adultery flourish.8 Matthew’s Jesus even accepts an often-overlooked support for fastidious pharisaic practices in connection with tithing. What most people notice in this connection are his criticisms of the Pharisees: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” he is described as saying. “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done”9 What he is also described as saying immediately after this, but which is much less often acknowledged in Christian circles, is that they should have practiced the latter, justice, mercy, and faithfulness, “without neglecting the others” – the fastidious computation of tithes on tiny spices. Jesus’s criticism, in other words, is not aimed at a religiosity which includes attentiveness to the minutiae of such pharisaic practices. It is aimed at the way in which such practices can sometimes lead to the neglect of other morally significant matters. There is nothing in this passage which would discourage enthusiasm for the

Gratuity and Religion

37

precise computation of tithes and other such habits. This is a far more pharisaic Jesus than many people are accustomed to, and there is little evidence of a dissident message on his part which would involve hostility toward such practices. There are additional signs that Jesus took the law very seriously. Jews of the Second Temple period, like all communities committed to the rule of law, were faced with the need to develop an understanding of the ongoing relationship between written and oral traditions. The Jewish Decalogue is often vague in its directives, as are foundational norms in most juridical systems. The Mosaic Law, for example, while counseling respect for parents, maintenance of the Sabbath, prohibition of murder, and so forth, does not always provide sufficient detail regarding what the application of such directives would look like under particular circumstances. Consider, for example, the relationship between the Sabbath and warfare. By the second century bce the concept of work, in connection with Sabbath observance, had come to include fighting. Fighting, therefore, was prohibited on the Sabbath. During the Hasmonean rebellion in the 160s bce, however, conformity to such an interpretation of Sabbath observance led to the death of many good people who refused to defend themselves. One finds in the aftermath of these events a reinterpretation of the law allowing for self-defense on the Sabbath. Social debates about matters of these kinds are always protracted, as they are to this day within religious as well as civic communities, and such debates involve much conflict, disagreement, and strong feelings of the sort that one finds reflected in the pages of the Gospels when Jesus is debating theologically with his contemporaries. The larger picture here is that the Judaism of Jesus’s time is faced with developing an understanding of its founding traditions. The gradual emergence among the Jews of an interpretive body of thought complementing the Decalogue raised broad questions for the contemporaries of Jesus about the authority of this parallel tradition. Many views of Jesus do not seem to have been particularly countercultural or innovative in this respect. He appears to have favoured the authoritativeness of an interpretive tradition in

38

Gratuity

the construction of Jewish self-understanding. This would have alienated him from the Sadducees, who did not favour the imputation of such authority to a parallel tradition, but it would not have alienated him from the Pharisees. Matthew’s Gospel, in particular, contains strikingly explicit endorsements of the Pharisees by Jesus: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so, practice and observe whatever they tell you,”10 notwithstanding their dubious personal conduct. There is much else throughout the canonical sources suggesting that Jesus was taken seriously by a significant number of Pharisees, even being invited on occasion to dine with them.11 It is telling, as well, that the Pharisees are not included among the antagonists arrayed against Jesus at the time of his death. From the point of view of the law, then, the canonical sources paint a picture of a Jesus who, while involved in a good deal of theological conflict with his contemporaries, gives no indication of having been indifferent to the law, antagonistic toward it, or even hostile to most pharisaic interpretations of it. On the contrary, the main indicators are that he may have been even stricter in his allegiance to the law than popular understanding suggests, especially in connection with sexual and marital matters. Such a position would surely have moved Jesus to find the behaviour of the hamartoloi reprehensible, a reaction at odds with his apparent indulgence of them. Purity Codes and Temple

Perhaps Jesus’s bad reputation in connection with the hamartoloi reflects, in part at least, indifference or antagonism by him toward the temple and the system of purity codes associated with it, which presumably were being ignored by the hamartoloi. The preponderance of evidence, however, favours the view that Jesus supported temple worship throughout his life, and likewise supported the purity codes. While the exact chronology of his life and the number of trips he made to the temple in Jerusalem is difficult to establish from the canonical sources, there is significant evidence of approval, by him, of temple worship. He certainly participated

Gratuity and Religion

39

in temple at Passover near the end of his life. After his death, moreover, his followers are reported to have continued temple worship and associated practices. If Jesus had counseled them clearly to do otherwise, such behaviour would be incomprehensible. There are also clear records of disputes among his followers, following his death, over the relationship of potential gentile converts with Jewish practice, including temple worship. It is true that Jesus seems to have spoken in an apparently antagonistic way about the temple near the end of his life, claiming that he would replace it. One should ask, however, what would be entailed by an interpretation of such passages which ignores their larger context. The temple was one of the oldest institutions of the Jews, and directions for its operation are described in detail in the Pentateuch, to which Jesus repeatedly exhibits allegiance. It was an enormous and complex operation covering 169,000 square feet. This size allowed for the presence of thousands of people. Sacrificial activity required extensive commercial operations without which the obligations laid out in scripture could not have been executed by the large numbers of pilgrims who visited Jerusalem annually. These pilgrims brought their own currencies, which needed to be converted in order to buy the sacrifices required by scripture. Without systems of currency conversion and the sale of sacrificial animals, the religious function of the temple could not have taken place. Moreover, temple tax from Jews throughout the world flowed into Jerusalem year-round, making the temple and its activities a major business. Practically speaking, it is hard to imagine what an alternative system to the temple might look like, much less one run by the small gaggle of Jesus’s rural followers. What other institutional and business mechanisms would have allowed for fulfillment of the requirements of scripture? Who would have taken care of the enormous administrative challenges involved in temple taxation and commerce? There are no plausible answers to these, or to many other questions which arise if one interprets Jesus’s words about replacing the temple as expressing his rejection of it. There is much more evidential support for understanding Jesus’s comments about the temple as dark apocalyptic predictions

40

Gratuity

that it was going to be destroyed again, and that Jews who followed him would find in him an alternative focal point for their religiosity in the aftermath of that catastrophe. This would fit well within the context of debates about the future of Judaism known to have taken place after the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 ce and reflected in the canonical Gospels themselves. Such an interpretation, however, makes no room for an understanding of Jesus as having been indifferent toward the temple, much less as having rejected it altogether, as one assumes the hamartoloi would have done. On the contrary, it would make more sense to impute to him profound concern about what he anticipated as yet another disastrous development in Jewish history exceeding even the Babylonian tragedy. In this light, there seems to be little support for the hypothesis that Jesus was accepting of the hamartoloi’s neglect of temple worship on account of his own indifference to such worship. On the contrary, the evidence reads in the other direction, suggesting that he would have been offended by their neglectful habits. Temple worship was closely connected with the purity codes, and one finds in the pages of the canonical sources some vigorous arguments between Jesus and his contemporaries in connection with those codes. Such disputes, however, do not provide support for the idea that Jesus was indifferent to such codes in a way that would explain his leniency toward the hamartoloi, who presumably ignored them. An important part of attending the temple was the process of making oneself fit for worship. The codes had to do with ritual purity, not moral purity. For citizens of Galilee, most of whom were agricultural workers living in rural areas far from the temple and visiting it rarely, being in a state of ritual impurity was a normal condition, given their ongoing contact with animals, corpses, blood, and so forth. Apart from the relatively rare circumstances on which such people would go up to Jerusalem and be involved in temple worship, this kind of ritual impurity had no religious or moral significance whatsoever. Nor, therefore, would their failure to meet the demands of the purity codes have had any particular significance either. The same would apply to Jesus.

Gratuity and Religion

41

Why, then, are the Pharisees critical of Jesus on occasion for neglecting the codes even when he is far from Jerusalem? Part of the answer may have to do with a particular feature of Pharisaism. Pharisaism was a lay movement which sought to elevate the spiritual integrity of the entire community. Greater fidelity to the covenant, the Pharisees reasoned, could be achieved, in part, by having laypeople take upon themselves obligations which were distinctive of the priestly life but which were not normally binding upon the laity. The Pharisees thought that the voluntary adoption by laypeople of such practices would elevate the covenantal integrity of the community as a whole, strengthening religious fidelity and reducing thereby the prospect of further covenantal breakdowns such as those which were presumed by many to have led to the Babylonian exile and the destruction of the temple. Nowhere does Jesus explicitly criticize the Pharisees for holding such a view. His criticisms of them, rather, are targeted at the ways in which the development of their practices in this connection sometimes undermined allegiance to the very aspects of the tradition which those ancillary practices were intended to support.12 This pattern in Jesus’s attacks upon the Pharisees suggests that he himself accepted many of their practices when such practices did not conflict with the tradition. Moreover, pharisaic criticisms of Jesus for neglecting the purity codes suggest that the Pharisees expected him to adopt their activities in this respect even apart from preparation for temple worship. The Pharisees would scarcely have been critical of Jesus for neglecting the purity requirements apart from temple worship if they had considered him a reprobate belonging among the hamartoloi or even a non-Pharisee. Implied in their criticisms, rather, seems to be the expectation that he would behave as they did. With respect to the purity codes, then, as with the temple and the law, one does not find evidence supportive of the hypothesis that the apparent leniency of Jesus toward the hamartoloi was rooted in laxity, on his part, about those aspects of Judaism.

42

Gratuity

Apocalyptic Tradition

Law, temple, and purity codes are institutional elements of Judaism which exist at the service of an underlying covenantal self-understanding. The covenantal view, for its part, is deeply informed by the theme of exile and return. This theme is a central part of the long-standing apocalyptic tradition of the Jews which anticipates the great return involving the advent of the kingdom. Since covenant fidelity is an integral part of the apocalyptic tradition, one could assume that the irreligious behaviour of the hamartoloi would run afoul of that tradition as well, and would evoke the disapproval of those who give their allegiance to it. Was Jesus tolerant toward the hamartoloi because he was indifferent to the expectations implicit in the apocalyptic tradition? Once again, the evidence speaks against such a hypothesis. Apocalyptic thought had been developing among the Jews for centuries prior to Jesus’s lifetime. It can be found throughout the major and minor prophets, later narrative and wisdom literature, and intertestamental writings. The background of such literature is the tragic and perplexing cycle of exile and return in the history of the Jews, a cycle of which Jesus’s contemporaries were much aware, being not so far removed historically from the painful Babylonian years. During Jesus’s life, the temple was still being reconstructed, and the residual effects of the exile continued to be played out in many theological debates and disputes, as well as in social phenomena such as the sour relations between Jews and Samaritans. An abundance of recent scholarship illustrates how central is the anticipation of the kingdom in the teaching of Jesus, as he taught his followers to pray for it to come, designated disciples as future judges of the twelve tribes, and anticipated them rejoining one another in the soon-to-arrive culmination of Jewish history. That the centerpiece of his teaching anticipates the imminent arrival of the end times is beyond serious doubt. There is nothing in Jesus’s message here which would indicate a rejection of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.

Gratuity and Religion

43

I have explored the relationship between Jesus and his own tradition in the foregoing pages in order to debunk the idea that his openness to the hamartoloi can be explained as rooted in his antagonism toward the traditions they were neglecting. There is simply no solid evidence supportive of such a view. Jesus was a far more conventional Jew than is often recognized by Christians. Why, then, do so many hamartoloi find him attractive while his pious contemporaries are antagonistic toward him? The key lies partly concealed in the figurative language of parable and story by means of which Jesus gestures in the direction of something which he is either unwilling or unable to express in a more literal way. In those parables and stories there is a pattern of pointing beyond conventional ideas about justice, entitlement, and the moral life toward something which listeners to the parables are invited implicitly to think through on their own, if they are willing to do so. Consider, to begin with, a parable about agricultural day labourers seeking employment.13 Early one morning, the story goes, an employer hires some workers. They agree to the socially accepted daily wage of one denarius. The owner then goes out some hours later and finds other available workers standing idly in the marketplace. He hires them. Yet again, still later, he finds more and hires them as well. At the end of the day all the workers line up to be paid. Those who had arrived late, and who had worked the least, stand at the front of the line. They are paid a denarius. Observing this, the workers farther back in line, who had laboured much longer, anticipate excitedly that they will receive more. Undoubtedly, this would also have been the expectation of those listening to the parable, who would have shared the common-sense conviction of the workers that justice requires compensation proportionate to services performed. The listeners would anticipate, as did the workers farther back in line, that those who had worked longer would be paid more, and the parable is structured in a way which encourages such expectations. Having evoked these expectations, the parable then suddenly turns the tables on the listener. When the workers who had

44

Gratuity

laboured for so long reach the front of the line, they receive the same compensation as those who had worked very little – to their great dismay and, no doubt, to the dismay of the listeners as well. When the workers protest, their employer is not only unsympathetic but is sharply critical of them. Their complaints, he charges harshly, are manifestations not of concerns about justice but of mean-spirited jealousy. It is a jarring response, and one which would undoubtedly have evoked from listeners anger as vivid as that of the aggrieved characters in the story. It would likely be no less offensive today to suggest that concern about apparently inequitable compensation of workers under such conditions is a reflection of jealousy. This parable’s attack upon conventional thinking regarding justice and desert is accompanied by an explanation from the employer. Those who had worked all day, he says, were paid the wage to which they had readily agreed at dawn. There is no injustice. Payment of that same wage to those who worked less, or hardly at all, the explanation goes on, is an act of generosity on the part of the employer. It is the good fortune of the workers who are recipients of such generosity which is the object of others’ jealous resentments. The conceptual challenge seems to be this: is such generosity unjust? So deeply committed are the workers and listeners to a close correlation between justice and entitlement that what is described by the employer as generosity seems to them to be injustice. The parable, however, exhibits no sympathy toward such a view. On the contrary, the theme of gratuity makes its appearance in the midst of a stinging critique of conventional ideas. As a teaching device, the parable cleverly manipulates those listening to it into identifying with the offended workers on the basis of shared beliefs about justice and entitlement. In doing so, listeners unwittingly set themselves up to be targets of accusations lodged by the employer against the workers. They are clearly being challenged to rethink their ideas about justice and desert – or angrily refuse to rethink those ideas and attack the messenger. The parable does not articulate the desired outcome of such a rethinking. If the angry response of the workers in the story is reflective of a comparable

Gratuity and Religion

45

response among listeners, which is probable, one would expect resistance to such rethinking, and hostility toward the storyteller’s suggestion that the undeserved – gratuitous – generosity of the employer is just. Consider now the famous parable of the prodigal son.14 One son loyally stays at home to help his father while the other leaves with his inheritance, which he proceeds to squander on typical forms of self-indulgence. The son that has left, eventually finding himself in far worse condition than his father’s employees, decides that there may be an opportunity to be hired as a worker back home. On his travels homeward, he rehearses what he will say to his father when he arrives. He plans to emphasize how clearly he recognizes that he has lost all entitlement to being treated as a son. He resolves to convey to his father that his return is aimed only at securing employment. Upon meeting his father, who has come out enthusiastically to greet him while he is still some distance away, he gives precisely this account of himself. He acknowledges his loss of entitlement and emphasizes that he has returned only to obtain a job. The father does not gainsay this recitation. He does, however, ignore it, showering the young man with luxuries and arranging a feast which would never be given to an employee. This parable is often read as a lesson in repentance by the young reprobate. As such, it is uninteresting. Given the near-universal association of religiosity with moral reform, such an interpretation simply reiterates what was already widely believed by the contemporaries of Jesus, and is still believed today: that repentance is good, that Jesus was calling for repentance in anticipation of the kingdom, and that divine favour may be generous but is conditional upon reform. It is to the loyal son who remained at home, rather, that one would be best advised to look for clues to the intent of the parable, and it would be better if the story were named after him rather than his brother. That son is furious at the behaviour of his father and wants nothing to do with his brother. He complains bitterly that his brother is not deserving of the reception he has received, as most listeners to the story would agree.

46

Gratuity

What is notable here is not the anger of the young man that his brother has received a welcome home which he did not deserve. All the characters in the parable know this, as would listeners as well. What is really annoying to the angry son is that the reception of his delinquent brother represents an implicit devaluation of his own fidelity to his father. If the disloyal son is as welcome in his father’s house as the loyal son, what is the point of loyalty? This is evident in frantic efforts by the offended son to emphasize to his father that he has remained loyal for many years, implying, thereby, that he has earned a status which has been given to his brother gratis. The parable, then, is not about repentance, and certainly not about divine good will responsive only to repentance. It is clear that the delinquent son had always been welcome to return home. The response of the father to his return is not a reward for returning. Returning is simply the material condition for receiving what had been awaiting him all along if he decided to come home, namely, his father’s love. The centrepiece of the parable lies, rather, in the faithful son’s reaction to this. So offended is he by the magnitude of his brother’s reception that he refuses to participate in the celebrations. He disowns his brother and, even more shockingly, in a patriarchal honour-shame society, attacks his father. The father, in response, patiently listens to the complaints, acknowledging what is really bothering the loyal son by pointing out how much he has valued that son’s loyalty. Like the employer of the day labourers, however, the father also stands his ground, resisting the commonplace assumption that the acts of good and evil people should be responded to in kind not only by their neighbours but even by God. He reminds the loyal son that his errant brother has lost much on account of his delinquency, and that the loyal son retains his inheritance. He chastises him, however, for his failure to understand a father’s entitlement, as paterfamilias, to express his love and bestow favour as he pleases. The father rejects the idea that his behaviour toward the truant son should be governed by desert.

Gratuity and Religion

47

In so reacting, the father, like the employer of the day labourers, raises difficult questions about the nature of justice, entitlement, and desert. The parable makes no effort to answer these questions. It does, however, clearly and forcefully reject the loyal son’s conventional way of understanding the situation, thereby directing the listener to seek another way of thinking, which the parable does not identify apart from noting the father’s affection for his delinquent son and his joy in bestowing favour gratuitously upon him. It is not a stretch to imagine many a listener being offended by this challenge, attacking the storyteller, and refusing to think further about the matter. Nonetheless, the theme of the employer of day labourers and the father of the delinquent son bestowing favour where they please, regardless of desert, retains its dissident force. One encounters a similar pattern in another parable, this one about a wealthy man whose invitation to a feast has been declined by those invited.15 The host, angry but undaunted by this response, dispatches his servants to invite alternate guests. The instructions to his servants are clear: Go to the highways and byways, he says, and invite everyone you find there – “bad and good.” The centerpiece of his instructions is the indiscriminateness with which the servants are to carry out their work; they are not to pick and choose. The invitation has nothing to do with the worthiness of those who are encountered on the road. Everyone is to be invited to the lavish event. Those who choose to come will come, and those who choose to decline can decline. It is a wealthy man’s prerogative to bestow favour as he wishes, whether or not the way in which he does so is conventionally acceptable. A similar pattern can be found in yet another parable about a slave who has executed his allotted duties with admirable diligence.16 His exemplary performance is met by his owner’s striking indifference. The slave, he says coolly, is entitled to nothing. The completion of previous tasks means only that he should now get on with the next tasks. In the end, the owner treats the slave well. The clear intent of the story, however, is to sever such treatment from any entitlement on the part of the slave arising from

48

Gratuity

his exemplary behaviour. The owner’s regard for the welfare of the slave is a function entirely of his own good will. Slaves have no rights. There is another passage worth noting in connection with this one. “Now they were bringing children to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the Kingdom of God.’”17 The followers of Jesus are dismissive of the children, seeing nothing in them as moral or religious agents deserving of attention. This makes all the more striking Jesus’s identification of the children as paradigmatic recipients of the kingdom. The reason children enjoy this status, he seems to be proposing, is neither their capacity to accomplish moral deeds deserving of reward nor their supposed innocence, but their capacity to receive: “Whoever does not receive the kingdom like a child will not enter it.” It is on account of the children’s capacity to receive gratefully something that is offered freely, regardless of entitlement, that they are singled out. The dismissive reaction of the apostles to the children is reminiscent of a comparable reaction to children as moral agents in the history of philosophy. The reasons for this would seem to be obvious. The young are not capable of forming the judgments and executing the behaviours normally associated with entitlement to moral praise and blame. In this canonical passage, however, the glaring contrast between Jesus’s singling out of children as paradigmatic recipients of the kingdom, and the dismissiveness of the children by the apostles, raises questions about such a long-standing tradition in the thought of both Jewish and Greek civilizations. This passage exhibits once again the propensity of the canonical Jesus to attack widely and deeply held convictions about justice, entitlement, and desert among his contemporaries, including his closest followers. In so doing, he points toward another way of thinking in which a gratuitous gesture of favour unrelated to desert moves toward center stage. This brief survey of some parables and stories provides a sense of how they not only critique commonplace ways of understanding

Gratuity and Religion

49

justice and desert, but also implicitly point beyond those forms of understanding toward some other way of thinking, for which the listener is expected to search. At one level, they support conventional beliefs which see the moral life as the basis of entitlement to the kingdom. The day labourers are paid the agreed-upon wage and the prodigal son’s brother retains his inheritance, as promised. Such conformity to familiar ways of thinking, however, serves a pedagogical purpose in the stories, for it makes listeners more vulnerable to being affected when the monopolization of thinking by those ways is suddenly subject to stinging attack. The notion that resentment of the generous payment of some of the labourers is a function of jealousy, not of concern for justice, is shocking. So too is the treatment of the prodigal son, which is far beyond the welcome he would have imagined. What is the significance of hard work and loyalty if the outcome is the same for those who work little and are disloyal? Having disarmed listeners by beginning in a conventional way, the parables then quickly turn the tables, attacking them for their beliefs. Those in the stories who are undeserving of good fortune become its recipients, and this is presented as cause for celebration, not resentment. One could expect anger, however, from those who have struggled long and hard to be deserving. But it is not a stretch to imagine that the hamartoloi would have had a keen ear for such stories, for they knew full well that they deserved nothing from their fellow religionists and even from God. The prospect that they might be the recipients of divine favour anyway would have been more than a little appealing. If this is, in fact, the basis for Jesus’s popularity among the hamartoloi, it is not difficult to understand why many of his contemporaries, especially those who had worked hardest in developing their moral and religious entitlement to reward, would have been offended. The complaint to the employer lodged by those who had worked all day about people who had not worked all day is very clear: “you have made them equal to us.”18 This is precisely the reaction that one would expect on the basis of conventional thinking about justice and desert even nowadays. From that point of view they are not at all equal, and treating them as equal is

50

Gratuity

unjust. What is more, the religious systems which guide the efforts of the pious appear to have been made redundant by free access to the kingdom for those who have rejected those systems. Nonetheless, the sources suggest that Jesus, as Wright says, was “claiming to admit all and sundry to the renewed people of Israel’s God … welcoming sinners no matter whether they have passed all the normal tests for membership.”19 Given the very long-standing tradition even among Christians of viewing Jesus as a dispenser of justice in conformity with desert, these parables are challenging. While many theological beliefs may be up to the individual, beliefs about the historical Jesus are like any other matters of history; evidence is important. Such evidence is very helpful in assessing Jesus’s long-standing reputation as primarily a preacher of repentance. Consider, in this connection, the careful work of E.P. Sanders. Sanders has cautioned repeatedly that Jesus would have encouraged repentance and would have wanted to see moral outcasts change their lives. However, as Sanders also points out, this does not make Jesus primarily a preacher of repentance like John the Baptist. A close examination of the canonical sources, particularly with a view to the number of times that the term “repentance” occurs in connection with Jesus in the Gospels by comparison with the number of times that the term “kingdom” occurs, lends a great deal of support to that conclusion. The term “kingdom” can be found fifty-five times in Matthew, twenty times in Mark, forty-six in Luke, and five in John. That makes for a total of 162 in the New Testament as a whole.20 One could safely assume that the theme of kingdom, then, played a prominent role in what Jesus had to say. Was he, however, like John the Baptist, calling people to repent in preparation for and as a condition of entry into that immanent kingdom? Consider the occurrence of repentance language. To be sure, such language can be found in all the Gospels, with Matthew giving examples such as Jesus’s criticisms of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum for their failure to repent. These are not found in Mark. Luke and Acts exhibit significantly greater interest in the theme than John. Notwithstanding these patterns, however, notice the number of

Gratuity and Religion

51

occurrences of repentance language overall. The main word in Greek for “repent” is found sixty-two times in the New Testament altogether. Fourteen of these are in Luke’s Gospel, eleven of them are in Acts, and a dozen in Revelation. In addition, there are ten occurrences in Matthew, three in Mark, and none in John. If we focus solely on repentance language associated directly with Jesus, leaving aside John the Baptist and other instances, the numbers decrease to six in Matthew, one in Mark, and eleven in Luke’s Gospel and Acts. If we then count passages containing such language rather than focusing on the word itself, we find four directly associated with Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, one in Mark, and eight in all of Luke. A comparison of these numbers with the occurrence of kingdom language quickly reveals a great disproportion between the two. This supports the contention that while Jesus was not uninterested in repentance, his principal concern was with kingdom, and he did not link kingdom as tightly to repentance as John the Baptist and John’s prophetic predecessors had done.21 This pattern of loosening the relationship between repentance and acceptance by God also turns up in the behaviour of Jesus’s followers after his death. John Meier has observed that in the ancient world, the formation of communities around central figures such as major philosophers or religious leaders was commonplace. The hallmark of such communities was their exclusivity. Members of these groups, assuming their superiority and anticipating ostracization from outsiders, tended to become inwardlooking. What is peculiar about the communities formed in the name of Jesus after his death is their eccentricity from this point of view. While setting themselves apart in a way that is reminiscent of other special communities, the Christian groups do not display the expected exclusivism. On the contrary, reminiscent of Jesus’s association with the hamartoloi, they can be found gathering together with not only strangers but even the most disreputable characters in the community.22 Paradoxically, it appears that the exclusivity of these groups is constituted, in part at least, by their extraordinary inclusivity – by their propensity to welcome strangers and even those blatantly in defiance of the moral law; those who have not

52

Gratuity

repented. Of course, the community would have hoped for repentance, but repentance was not a condition of inclusion. The countercultural blindness of such communities to moral as well as familial, tribal, gender, and other important boundaries in the ancient world is striking. The diversity of these early groups is reminiscent of a recent description of an inner-city London England Christian community offered by the vicar that community: “Nowhere else will you find local Nigerian matriarchs, gay students, bankers and mentally ill people forming friendships over fried chicken and rum punch.”23 The considerations in the foregoing pages speak against the hypothesis that Jesus consorted with the hamartoloi principally for the purpose of calling them to repentance, although he would have welcomed repentance. Those considerations speak also against the hypothesis that he behaved congenially toward them because he shared their indifference to their religious tradition. The picture that has emerged, rather, portrays a Jesus deeply committed to the importance of moral effort, purity, and conservative practices associated with the Pharisees, and sometimes even the Essenes. On the other hand, it also portrays a Jesus telling the hamartoloi that they are the recipients of unprecedentedly gratuitous favour from God, notwithstanding their disregard for the values of all these communities. No doubt Jesus expected them to respond to this message in some way. It is frequently assumed, however, that such a response would be a display of behaviours typically associated with allegiance to the Torah. It is also usually assumed, at least implicitly, that such behaviour is pleasing to God and therefore evokes divine favour. In the parables, however, divine favour precedes the behaviour of its beneficiaries, and the only condition of its reception is acceptance of it. The relationship between acceptance and a conventional religious life, however, is deserving of deeper inquiry, and I will return to it below. Before doing that, it is important to observe that nowhere does one find Jesus suggesting that it is necessary to choose between the strictness of his own allegiances to his tradition and the apparent leniency of his message to the hamartoloi. On the contrary, he seems to see his behaviour toward

Gratuity and Religion

53

the hamartoloi as congruent with his own rigorous allegiance to the traditions ignored by the hamartoloi. How is one to make sense of this? How can Jesus have coherently supported and waived the same requirements at the same time? The only situations I can think of in which simultaneous support and waiver of law and practice occur involve invocations of mitigating circumstances which seek to exempt one from obligations while protecting the obligations themselves. If a police car is accompanying me and my critically ill child to the hospital, I am released from my obligation to obey the legal speed limit. That release does not subvert the law regarding the speed limit, however, which continues to be binding. No one should construe my driving behaviour, under such circumstances, as subversive of the law itself. Nor would one construe the decision of the policeman accompanying my speeding car to the hospital as subversive of the law. Is this example helpful in understanding Jesus’s waiver of the normal demands of Jewish religiosity in the case of the hamartoloi while he himself remains deeply committed to them and approves of others who do so? It seems to me, as it has to E.P. Sanders, that it is helpful. Appeal to mitigating circumstance by Jesus himself is not unknown in the canonical portrayal of him. There is one incident, for example, in which he and his disciples are attacked for failing to display the ascetical disciplines typical of followers of the Baptist and the Pharisees, both groups being known for going beyond what would be normally required by the law.24 Jesus is portrayed as taking the complaint against him seriously, implicitly accepting the suggestion that his followers ought to behave like the disciples of the Baptist and the Pharisees, and that he is at fault, as their teacher, for their failure to do so. His explanation for why they are acting as they are takes the form of an appeal to mitigating circumstances. A temporary hiatus from such practices by his followers, he argues, is justified by the unusual events in which they are involved. He uses the analogy of a wedding celebration. The friends of a bridegroom ought not to behave penitentially and ascetically under the celebratory conditions typical of a wedding. The implication is that

54

Gratuity

the present situation is analogous to a wedding. Wedding imagery is paradigmatic in connection with Jewish messianism which anticipates the union of God with his people at the advent of the kingdom. It is not necessary to engage the thorny topic of messianic or other titles of Jesus, for the point at hand has to do with the mode of argumentation he uses. The implication of Jesus’s analogy between the present time and a wedding is that under the exceptional conditions pertaining at the moment, a temporary waiver of ascetical desiderata is appropriate. The exceptional conditions are created by his own presence. The time will come after he is gone, he says, when it will once again be fitting for his inner circle to adopt the rigorous practices of the communities embracing the views of John the Baptist and the Pharisees. The clear implication is that Jesus expects them to do so, which in fact they are known to have done after his death. In the meantime, however, his presence constitutes the mitigating circumstance releasing his followers from such obligations. There is no hint, in such an argument, of an attack upon the obligations themselves, or upon the groups that endorse them. On the contrary, the implication is that Jesus is sympathetic to them. Might it be that something analogous to this is going on in the case of the hamartoloi? Does Jesus present himself to them as the mitigating circumstance which releases them from the normal obligations of the tradition to which his own allegiances remain unshaken? This would make sense of the hostility toward Jesus of his contemporaries, especially the pious. As I have suggested with the parables of the day labourer and the prodigal son, what offends the workers who have laboured all day and the son who has been loyal to his father is not that the obligations to them have not been met; those obligations have been met. What is offensive is that the undeserved treatment of those who worked little, and those who were disloyal, is perceived as implicitly vacating the merit of the efforts of those who have worked much, and those who have been loyal, and compromising the significance of their reward for such behaviour and the institutions representing the way of life supposedly providing entitlement to it.

Gratuity and Religion

55

One could easily imagine Jesus’s pious contemporaries reacting angrily if the hamartoloi were being offered the kingdom without fulfilling the normal requirements, as N.T. Wright suggested. One can no less easily imagine the compounding of such a reaction by the recognition that Jesus would seem implicitly to have vacated the value of the religious institutions which guided their efforts. As Wright observes, Jesus acts, in this respect, as though he is indifferent to the entire temple system.25 Not only would such institutions and moral effort appear to have been made redundant by Jesus’s prodigious generosity toward the unworthy but his extension of such generosity on his personal authority would have compounded the offense. That this is what did happen has been proposed by a number of scholars, including Wright, who depicts Jesus as having offered the kingdom to anyone, even the hamartoloi, who would accept him. Paula Fredriksen echoes these remarks, noting that according to the tradition even the most notorious of sinners, if they are responsive to Jesus, will enter the kingdom before the priests themselves.26 One must be careful in connection with these comments by Wright and Fredriksen, for it is all too easy to read them in a way which identifies acceptance of Jesus himself with acceptance of a message demanding repentance and conventional religious conformity as a precondition of divine favour. Such a reading would put us right back where we were at the beginning of this chapter, reinstating the repentance hypothesis which has proven to be evidentially untenable. Part of the problem here is a very widespread propensity to identify Jesus principally as the purveyor of a message. This is something Rudolph Bultmann warned about many years ago, in New Testament and Mythology.27 Bultmann pointed out then that the canonical sources, understood in their Jewish setting, are primarily about Jesus himself, not about a message. If there is a message, it is about him, personally; it is not about a theological teaching. On this point Bultmann remains worthy of attention, even if there is reluctance to endorse the way in which he responded theologically to the point. One can add to the foregoing picture of the canonical Jesus a number of other behaviours on his part. It appears that Jesus, on

56

Gratuity

his own personal initiative, also ignored many important social and cultural markers that were deeply involved in the identification, by his contemporaries, of those who constitute the people of God and who are thereby deserving of divine favour. These include social structures of family, tribe, and nation. Jesus appears to have been quite willing to run roughshod over conventions about women, for example, who were normally considered ineligible to move beyond the court of the Gentiles in the temple, to act as witnesses at law or to be students of theology. He was accompanied on his travels by women in the absence of their husbands, and by husbandless women who provided him with food and money, a practice that undoubtedly would have evoked widespread disapproval in a traditional rural society.28 Jesus’s behaviour also cuts across treasured lines of blood relationship. The canonical tradition includes one incident in which he leaves his mother and brothers waiting outside a house where he is teaching.29 He pointedly – and offensively in an honourshame, tribal, and familial society – designates those inside with him, and others who respond positively to him, as his true mother and brothers. There appears here, at least, to be a stunning rejection of the all-important bonds of blood and family. After this incident, the brothers of Jesus disappear from the Gospel.30 That Jesus behaved in a way so offensive to the sensibilities of his contemporaries and family seems likely to be historically true, for, as John P. Meier has observed, it is astonishing that such an embarrassing tradition would have been preserved otherwise.31 The considerations in the foregoing pages lead to an important conclusion described this way by Davies and Sanders: “Here we have the basis for a real conflict between Jesus and the contemporary religious Jews; for … he was pressing the position that, in the coming kingdom, those would be redeemed who disregarded (not just transgressed) the covenant with Moses. If there was a debate about authority between Jesus and the leaders of Judaism, it may not have been merely about who had the right interpretation of the Mosaic law (the sort of debate that separated the Pharisees from the Sadducees), but about whether or not obedience to the Mosaic law was the necessary and sufficient condition for ‘entering

Gratuity and Religion

57

the kingdom of Heaven.’”32 These judgments are echoed in Meier’s observations about Jesus’s behaviour.33 Integral to this picture is that a waiver of the Mosaic Law is connected by Jesus not with instructions about how to attain that waiver – through repentance – nor through a head-on attack upon his contemporaries’ largely conventional ways of understanding their religion. It is connected with loyalty to him, personally,34 exemplified by thankfully accepting the gratuitous divine favour on offer. It is not difficult to see why this would have evoked widespread antagonism, and that such antagonism would be seen as a holy and faithful Jewish response to such behaviour by him. “Those who rejected Jesus surely saw themselves as thereby following the will of God as it was revealed in the Torah. Jesus had on his side his own certainty as to what the will of God was; against him was not only the weight of centuries of sacred tradition, but perhaps the Torah itself. But who was this Jesus who made such claims? … There is no adequate title from Jewish history for a person who claimed what Jesus claimed, and it is likely that he gave himself none.”35 The centrality of Jesus’s own certainty in this respect raises once again the subject of authority, centering this time not on the relative weights to be accorded to the written and oral traditions, but on this particular individual. The canonical sources depict Jesus as someone who astonished those who listened to him because he disregarded the usual theological and scriptural sources, preferring to convey what he had to say with the force of personal authority. Jesus invites – one might even say taunts – those who originally listened to the parables and observed his behaviour toward the hamartoloi to rethink widespread and deeply held views on a number of subjects, especially those having to do with justice, entitlement, desert, and the moral life. My inquiry into Jesus’s bad reputation so far has led to an examination of behaviour on his part which was found offensive by his contemporaries and would likely be found no less offensive today. Jesus waives the requirements of his beloved tradition in connection with his message of the imminent arrival of the kingdom, sin-

58

Gratuity

gling out children and hamartoloi as paradigmatic of those who will enter that kingdom, and he does all this on his own personal authority. This certainly conforms to the Oxford Concise Dictionary’s definition of gratuity as, in part, “got or given freely; not earned or paid for.”

ii The picture I have presented so far of the canonical sources proposing a gratuitous extension of welcome to the kingdom was clearly intended by the parables to be shocking. It points beyond conventional thinking about justice, entitlement, and desert toward some different way of thinking which it does not identify clearly. The widespread bad reaction to Jesus suggests that many who listened to him were unwilling to do the hard work of trying to think their way through to the intellectual goal implied by the parables. There is no reason to believe that there would be any greater appetite for doing so today. This should raise concerns about stereotypes of Jesus’s message which make few intellectual demands on those who hear it. One such stereotype, I propose, is the simple identification of Jesus’s message with divine forgiveness. While there is a wide range of opinion in philosophical literature about what constitutes forgiveness, there is a serious recent study by Charles Griswold which argues plausibly that while forgiveness may appear to graciously relax the relationship between bad behaviour and the appropriate response to that behaviour, what it really does is shift attention from past misdeeds to recent behaviour and then apply conventional standards of justice and desert to the recent behaviour.36 In other words, it inquires into whether, since their past offenses, offenders have exhibited attitudes and behaviours which deserve forgiveness. It asks whether offenders have identified with their victims, for example. Have they recognized honestly and earnestly the significance of what they have done to those victims, and come to regret the damages arising from their deeds? Have they expressed that regret in a public way and compensated their victims in whatever manner they were able? Have they exhibited new

Gratuity and Religion

59

and positive trajectories in their lives which represent a break from the past? In Griswold’s analysis, it is on the basis of these kinds of assessments that judgments are then made about the worthiness of offenders to be forgiven. Rendering forgiveness is giving to the offender what has now become the offender’s due; rendering to the offender that which the offender has come to deserve under changed circumstances. While forgiveness, then, may at first appear generously to waive conventional standards of judgment and desert, what it actually does is apply such standards to a different time in the life of the offender. As such, it represents no fundamental change in the underlying ways of understanding justice, desert, and entitlement, which are precisely the targets of Jesus’s criticisms in the parables which got him in so much trouble. If Griswold is right about forgiveness, then Jesus’s efforts to bypass considerations of worthiness and entitlement in reaching out to people, especially the hamartoloi, are not well represented by it. Talk about forgiveness may actually function as a Trojan horse by means of which comfortable ideas about justice and desert are imported into the religious sphere and read into the Gospels. The divine reaction to human behaviour, on such a view, is assumed to track the deeds of an agent, responding to what is pleasing and not pleasing. Corrupt behaviour is displeasing, on account of which, it is so often said, God responds punitively because God is just. Attentiveness to God by a repentant heart, however, is said to be pleasing, and it is this quality which is thought to evoke divine favour. If corrupt behaviour is followed by such repentant, attentive, and pleasing behaviour, in other words, the divine response changes accordingly. Such thinking is more reminiscent of Plato’s Euthyphro than of the Jesus depicted in the canonical sources. Euthyphro, a religious expert, tells Socrates that the religious life is all about behaviour which is attentive and pleasing to God. Socrates, puzzled by such a view, says he does not understand why God would want attentiveness and pleasing acts from human beings. He can understand how cattle would be pleased by attentiveness; it is in the nature of cattle to respond this way. But God is surely not like

60

Gratuity

cattle. What need would God have of pleasing attentiveness from human beings? In response, Euthyphro scurries through a series of definitions of the religious life before ending up with his original one, reasserting that the religious life is constituted by the performance of acts attentive and pleasing to God, to which God responds in kind. Euthyphro never does address Socrates’ concerns but remains unshaken in his conviction that the divine attitude toward human agents is responsive to the kinds of actions performed by them – the same basic pattern of thinking that is often implicit in stereotypes about a forgiving Jesus who rewards the good with heaven and punishes the wicked with hell. Immanuel Kant, like Socrates, had concerns about a view of the religious life exemplified by accounts such as Euthyphro’s. If people know that certain acts are pleasing to God, and that the performance of such acts will make them potential beneficiaries of divine favour, how can their decision to act in accord with the good be untainted by the prospect of such benefits? How can selfinterest be expunged so that they will be choosing the good for its own sake and not for personal advantage? The aim of genuine moral commitment, says Kant, should be that it remains entirely disinterested, based upon duty alone. It should not be about fear or hope, for such emotions destroy the moral value of actions. To be sure, Kant concedes, the idea of the summum bonum after which the moral life aspires is inclusive of one’s own happiness, but such happiness is not its principal aim. Morality is not, first and foremost, about the achievement of happiness. It is about becoming worthy of happiness, says Kant. One can anticipate a degree of happiness in proportion to one’s moral achievement.37 While Kant raises good questions about the prospect of personal benefit tainting the motives of one who seeks to please God, he remains committed to a conventional view of divine largesse which has nothing to do with gratuity. Such largess is dependent upon the agent becoming worthy of divine favour. Such thinking is strikingly in line with the angry labourers and the disgruntled brother of the prodigal son, who think it unjust that those who have worked little and have been disloyal should be the beneficia-

Gratuity and Religion

61

ries of favours out of proportion to their behaviour. They are unworthy of what they have received. While the Gospels are never reluctant to distinguish between good and evil and use powerful language to describe figuratively the devastating individual and social consequences of evil, they nevertheless single out the hamartoloi, children, and other unexpected characters as future participants in the kingdom, notwithstanding their lack of conventional entitlement to such participation. Once it is understood exactly who the hamartoloi were, it is apparent that they are not offered this in exchange for anything. But what sense is to be made of this? How can it be just to turn a blind eye to the wicked behaviour of some people, responding no differently to them than to those who behave well? Better, surely, is the view of John the Baptist, whose message is replete with ferocious warnings to wrongdoers and accompanied by calls for repentance that would make them fit for acceptance by God to be participants in the soon-to-arrive kingdom. According to the best picture we can reconstruct of the historical Jesus, however, he displays a startling indifference to the standards by which such entitlement is calculated by John – and by everybody else. It is not just in the parable tradition or in Jesus’s dealings with the hamartoloi that such indifference emerges. Jesus also counsels his followers to ignore conventional criteria of desert by extending favour to those undeserving of it, including enemies and people incapable of reciprocating. This they should do, he explains, because it will replicate the behaviour of God, who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the evil as well as the good without differentiation.38 The idea of gratuity in the Gospels, in other words, turns out to be much more difficult to fathom than would be suggested by stereotypes of generous forgiveness on the part of God toward those who have become entitled to leniency on account of their repentance. It raises hard questions which are not readily answered. One is left to undertake an intellectual struggle of one’s own. How can moral outcasts be offered and receive gratuitous entry into the kingdom without blurring any differentiation between good and evil?

62

Gratuity

It is often said in religious circles that one must distinguish between the offer of the kingdom and the response to that offer, and that it is the latter upon which one’s destiny depends. The Gospels, on such a view, may portray an offer made to those who are undeserving as well as those who are deserving, but a generous offer, in and of itself, is not offensive. That Jesus was extending an offer of the kingdom to the repentant certainly would not have aroused the ire toward him which one finds among so many of his contemporaries. It is Jesus’s prediction, more likely, that the hamartoloi will also become the recipients of that offer – will enter the kingdom in the absence of appropriate behaviour and even ahead of priests and other pious members of the community – which would certainly arouse such ire.39 This prospect is startling in a world dominated by educational, legal, parental, religious, professional, and other activities informed by calculations of desert, for reasons that Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics. Justice in relationships among people, he observes, involves a kind of equality, and injustice, an inequality.40 The achievement of such equality is the aim of penalizing and awarding compensation. The law scrutinizes the nature of an injury caused by one person upon another. The infliction of such an injury creates a kind of inequality. It is the task of a judge to reinstitute equality. This the judge does through the imposition of penalties and compensations. Such activity is important, Aristotle emphasizes, because it is a prerequisite of social coherence among citizens who expect justice, in the absence of which they become resentful and divided. Aristotle’s observations do not square well with Jesus’s apparent reluctance to make repentance a precondition of receiving his offer. This is worrisome, because it appears to reject desiderata such as the maintenance of an adequate distinction between good and evil, full representation of the dignity of victims, the protection of social harmony, and more. It would seem as though Aristotle’s view should carry the day in competition with the Gospels. Is there anything in day-to-day experience which might help in coming to terms with this challenge? There may be a clue in the typical behaviour of victims of crimes. In interviews on the news,

Gratuity and Religion

63

for example, they often report that they are delighted by strong punitive measures, since these seem to them appropriate to the harm brought about by wrongdoers. No less frequently, however, they assert that there does not exist a punishment great enough to mitigate the actual damage that has befallen them: “Nothing will ever bring our Lucy back.” They emphasize that nothing can undo the past as often as they emphasize their satisfaction with strong punitive measures. Paradoxically, it seems, they commend harsh punishment while at the same time emphasizing the futility of such punishment because even the harshest punishment can do nothing to reverse the damages that have been done. The limitations of Aristotle’s remediation are apparent here. Such reactions recognize implicitly a phenomenon that faces us all. In a material world, notwithstanding efforts at reparation, restitution, reform, compensation, and so forth, original damages forever remain what they are. Moreover, it is in many cases impossible to stop the ongoing destructive consequences of such damages. One can not even begin to calculate the harm, for example, that was done and continues to unfold generation after generation following the world wars of the twentieth century. Hannah Arendt talks about this unidirectionality of history as the predicament of irreversibility, which creates an aporia from which it is impossible to escape. If the release of wrongdoers from the consequences of their destructive behaviour were to require a fullfledged eradication of those consequences, “our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”41 No matter how much a wrongdoer may change subsequent to her misdeed – which is the basis upon which forgiveness is normally seen as justifiable, according to Griswold – that misdeed remains an ineradicable part of the historical record, and her responsibility for its original and continuing damage is unalterable. Griswold’s work on forgiveness claims to accommodate this challenge. Here is what he says: “The idea of narrative helps to explain just how the past can nonetheless change without pretence to undoing it, or ignoring, avoiding, rationalizing, or forgetting it.

64

Gratuity

One may adopt a different perspective on it, attach a different meaning to it, respond to it in a different way, adapt it to one’s evolving life ‘story.’ In this restricted but crucial sense, the narrative of forgiveness is a solution to what Arendt aptly calls … the ‘predicament of irreversibility.’”42 What does it mean to say that “the past can nonetheless change without pretense to undoing it?” How can a past which cannot be undone be changed? There can be changes of narrative as the past comes to be understood differently in the light of subsequent events, to be sure, but these events do not change the past itself. Nor do such changes of narrative necessarily mitigate the impact of past damages, which often becomes evident only with time. If justice demands that truthfulness and honesty be integral elements of changing narratives, how can narrative disconnect agents from an irreversible past and the unfolding damages for which they are responsible but over which neither they nor anyone else has any power? It is true that forgiveness normally involves persons, not past states of affairs: “I forgive him.” Nonetheless, it is not so easy to separate agents from their deeds or from the consequences of those deeds. The perpetrator is, after all, the author of real damages, which seems to be why victims are so insistent upon punitive measures in accord with the impulses described by Aristotle. A kind of equality does appear to be achieved when the life of the perpetrator is diminished in proportion to the diminishment of the victim’s life by the damage done. Even the harshest punitive measures, however, are powerless to undo past damages, and victims know this perfectly well. In a material, historical world compensation after the fact is possible, but the shortcomings of such compensation are obvious, as victims are quick to point out. Even if a perpetrator comes personally to regret the damage he has done, such damage is no less still part of the real world, the lives of real people, and the historical record. The perpetrator is still responsible for those damages no matter how much his personal life may have developed in a positive way since. An individual who has set off a bomb at a public event may come later to regret what he has done. The lifelong

Gratuity and Religion

65

pain and disability of his victims caused by shrapnel wounds, however, are in no way altered by this change in the bomber’s attitude, nor can they be undone by subsequent reparation or compensation. While few human beings set off bombs in public places, all human beings bring about harm in the lives of others. How, then, can anyone escape being trapped forever in the aporia described by Arendt? This problem is faced by everyone, and many respond to it with a distinctive form of behaviour. They willingly and graciously provide those who have harmed them an escape route. They surrender their legitimate entitlements to compensation, retribution, punishment, and other forms of equalizing response, and simply turn away from the harm done. Day to day one sees among spouses, friends, co-workers, citizens, and even complete strangers a genuinely gratuitous, self-sacrificing willingness to release others, without condition, from the significance of their destructive behaviour. On such occasions a deliberate willingness to turn away from wicked behaviour is much on display, even when it is not deserved. Such indifference, however, is not widely deemed to be unjust or an implicit denial of the broad significance of the evil done. It is recognized, rather, as something that human beings can and must do for one another if they are together to escape the aporia described by Arendt. What the recipients of such a response choose to do with these gestures is an entirely different matter, and I will return to this shortly. The point here is that whether they actually become recipients of such largess is not a matter of desert and entitlement; it is there for the taking. There is much scholarship in philosophy and other disciplines which would have one believe that such apparently altruistic generosity must be rooted somehow in self-interest. It is impossible, such literature contends, for human beings to extricate themselves sufficiently from the network of power relationships within which they live, and on account of which any action will involve personal benefit or loss. Contemporary analyses of this kind are hardly news, however. Ancient Greeks understood the nature of such power relationships, including their utility in the maintenance of public order and political relations. They were

66

Gratuity

well aware of how the bestowing of favour can obligate the recipient of such favour. Pericles, for example, understands the political advantages of Athenian favour toward other communities. Such largess, he knows, will place those communities in debt to Athens, a debt which can be collected when needed. Aristotle says that when one has been the recipient of favour, such favour should be returned, and on other occasions initiated. The giving of favour in such a tradition is a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of social and political order. It underwrites systems of relationships aimed at promoting the recognition of reciprocal benefits and duties. In this context, the appearance of altruism in connection with the giving of favour, if there is such an appearance, is indeed misleading. Favour obligates the recipient, to the advantage of the giver. There is nothing gratuitous about it at all. This is not the only form taken by the giving of favour according to the Greeks, however, who left room for another kind of interpersonal relationship associated with the idea of charis. The word charis derives from the Indo-European root gher, indicating something that brings about joy. This is reflected in the names of the gods of charis, names designating deep joy, social grace, fellowship, and radiance, often occurring with an enchanting unpredictability. Charis has a wide range of associations with good will, kindness, gracefulness, attractiveness, the giving of pleasure, and the thankful response to kindness and pleasure received. It has a strong aesthetic element which is integral to its capacity to evoke a distinctive kind of response from those to whom it is offered. The phenomenon is not difficult to understand. Who, after all, has never been moved spontaneously by the exceptional beauty, gracefulness, generosity, or joy of another person, and who has not felt the distinctive way in which the positive response to these qualities emerges effortlessly, is uniquely uplifting, and draws one out of oneself? Charis has a singular power to evoke reactions which are very different from the reactions elicited by commercial, political, legalistically religious, or other forms of relationships

Gratuity and Religion

67

which bring about their desired responses by means of duties, obligations, incentives, or sanctions. Accompanying this unique evocative power of charis, however, is a distinctive powerlessness and fragility on the part of the giver that is not found in other sorts of contractual relationships. Charis lacks the mechanisms for coercively bringing about one response rather than another. As such, it involves a vulnerability on the part of the offerer. As Bonnie Maclachlan has observed of the Greek poetic tradition, on the one hand genuine charis was seen by ancient Greeks as “disarming: it broke down the barriers that confined the self, and it demanded that the beneficiary reach out to another.”43 On the other hand, it was also recognized that “if this did not happen, the party who was responsible for conferring the pleasure was left exposed and vulnerable. This was cause for alarm.” The offerer of charis places herself in the hands of the potential recipient, in this respect dependent upon the recipient’s freedom to be responsive or unresponsive to her offering. All this is familiar in a world in which gifts can be offered but are not necessarily accepted. This capacity to reject a gift leaves plenty of room for traditional language about evil, darkness, suffering, and punishment which has nothing directly to do with conventional ideas of desert and the imposition of penalties by humans or by God. The rejection of beauty, goodness, and gift which is on display throughout life speaks for itself. There is abundant religious imagery describing gift-refusal and rejection of the good and the beautiful as resulting in darkness and suffering. The charis tradition leaves room for such choice, and there is much fearful language in the monotheistic religions describing the results of such rejection not as a consequence of divine outrage and the imposition of sanctions but because of the personal state to which such voluntary rejection naturally leads and is known in advance to lead. The power of the charis gift to evoke, then, lies not in the promise of reward or the threat of sanction but in its gratuitous charm, beauty, and graciousness. Upon those who have immunized themselves to such things, or reject them outright, it falls to

68

Gratuity

no effect, and the opportunity to be drawn out of the darkness of self-centredness is lost. Faced with such resistance, the offerer of charis is powerless. Charis is about a unique and extraordinary but limited power to evoke from those who are open to it a reception unlike any other. The reception has to do with the capacity or willingness to respond spontaneously in a way that is in keeping with the beauty, gracefulness, and generosity of the giver. The reception of the gift is contingent not upon the fulfilment of stipulated conditions or even the performance of specific behaviours, but upon the willingness to receive the gift in the generous spirit in which the gift is given, and this willingness has nothing to do with desert. Does this phenomenon shed any light upon the specter of an unworthy recipient of the divine offer of the kingdom coming into possession of that gift? The prospect of the hamartoloi’s possession of that gift alongside those who are deserving of it certainly seems to have disturbed the contemporaries of Jesus, and appears to be deeply disruptive of the equality sought by justice according to Aristotle. The gratuitous blindness of charis to considerations of desert, however, is what underwrites its startling power, and provides its potential to evoke a uniquely spontaneous and uplifting reaction. While justice often demands arduous efforts to meet certain standards of performance, the gratuity of charis evokes a spontaneous, free, and uplifting response unlike any other. The gratuity of genuine gift-giving has been recognized and enshrined by many cultures throughout the world, as Lewis Hyde has illustrated in his book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.44 It is in the nature of something received as a gift, Hyde shows, that it can be received but not possessed unless the reception of it overflows into sharing it. Hyde illustrates that this phenomenon has been grasped and articulated in the form of mythologies and stories in many cultures. The Brothers Grimm’s fairytale, The Ungrateful Son, is a good example. The story portrays a man and his wife at their home having had the good fortune of coming into possession of a roasted chicken which they are about

Gratuity and Religion

69

to eat. When the man sees his elderly father approaching in the distance, he hides the chicken so that he will not have to share it. The father visits briefly, then leaves. The son, expecting now to enjoy his good fortune, finds that the chicken has become an enormous toad. The toad jumps onto his face, from which it cannot be removed. The son must feed the toad daily, for if he does not it will feed itself on his face. The son’s hoarding of his good fortune, as it turns out, has led to the loss of that good fortune, and to ineradicable disquiet. This story has many cultural parallels, all of them bearing the same paradoxical message: The attempt to maintain possession of a gift by hoarding it selfishly will lead to the loss of the gift, while the sharing of it with others will lead to ongoing possession of it. The message distilled in this literal description of it, however, lacks the power of the stories which are the normal bearers of that message. The centrality of gift and sacrifice rather than performance and entitlement emerging in the foregoing considerations is reminiscent of comments George Mavrodes makes about the moral life in response to Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship. “I come more and more to think that morality, while a fact about the world, is a distorted and twisted fact. Or perhaps better, that it is a barely recognizable version of another fact, a version adapted to a twisted and distorted world. It is something like, I suppose, the way in which a pine tree that grows at the timberline, wind blasted and twisted low against the rock, is a version of the tall and symmetrical tree that grows lower on the slopes. I think it may be that the related notions of sacrifice and gift represent (or come close to representing) the fact, that is, the pattern of life, whose distorted version we know here as morality.”45 As in the figures of speech of the philosophers cited in the previous chapter, the parables of Jesus, and the Greek poetic charis tradition, so here one finds Mavrodes resorting to metaphor to represent the failure of conventional ethics to come to terms with the fact that in times of emergency, people may seek one another’s welfare without any thought about entitlement. They display utter indifference to considerations of duty, obligation,

70

Gratuity

incentive and disincentive, and even to the worthiness of those to whom they are reaching out. Such people, Mavrodes says, “for a time pass largely beyond morality and live lives of gift and sacrifice. On those occasions nothing would be lost if the moral concepts and moral language were to disappear … It seems to me to suggest an ‘economy’ more akin to that of gift and sacrifice than to that of rights and duties. If something like that should be true, then perhaps morality, like the Marxist state, is destined to wither away (unless perchance it should happen to survive in hell).”46 Again, the metaphor of the gift recurs, replacing the usual mainstays of moral thought such as rights, duties, justice, desert, and entitlement. This represents, argues Mavrodes, not an abandonment of the moral life but a reappropriation of that life in a different form. In this light, one might say that the hamartoloi’s frequent failure to exhibit the behaviours normally associated with repentance and the formalities of reintegration into the religious community does not necessarily preclude behaviour on their part which, in some unexpected form, shares the gift they have been given. It is possible to use repentance language to talk about such responses, but repentance has become so closely identified with religious formalism as a precondition of divine generosity rather than a result of it that it may not be the best term to use. Its close association with the conventions of what Mavrodes calls “morality” may also render it unhelpful. Exactly what unconventional form the passing on of the gift may take among the hamartoloi and their like is an important question, and its neglect in many religious circles represents a failure of moral imagination – and a failure to understand the intellectual demands of radical gratuity in the Jesus tradition. The absence from the lives of the hamartoloi of the behaviour expected of them by their co-religionists should not be grounds for assuming that their lives were entirely unaffected by their encounter with Jesus, for there are many unusual and subtle ways in which otherwise flawed lives can exhibit such effects. Further exploration of this subject, however, would draw this chapter too far afield, for its purpose has been to reflect upon the centrality of gratuity in one reli-

Gratuity and Religion

71

gious tradition, which has come to be expressed by the notion of grace. At the heart of that tradition seems to lie an understanding of creation and redemption undertaken “without good or assignable reason,” as the Oxford Concise Dictionary describes gratuity, evoking an analogous response even from some conventionally wicked people.

The Backstory

part two Philosophy

73

3 Understanding Gratuity

It is a curious thing that human beings are able to think and speak about gratuity in connection with philosophy and religion. After all, we are organisms immersed in a natural world which appears to be structured in an entirely causal way, even if we do not always understand fully the relationships involved. Gratuity, however, has to do with the absence of good or assignable reasons and causes. David Hume calls attention to the intellectual elusiveness of even normal causal relationships. How, then, within the system of nature and under such conditions, could the idea of gratuity even be formed, much less be distinguishable from causal ignorance? In this chapter, I will argue that first-hand acquaintance with both causality and gratuity, and the differences between them, is available through immediate acquaintance with the exercise of agent causation, and that apart from such experience we would have no concept of it at all. I noted in chapter 1 Gottfried Leibniz’s invocation of Archimedes in order to explain the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz illustrates that principle by talking about Archimedes’ observation that if equal weights are hung on two ends of a balance the balance will not move. There are certain discoverable states of affairs in the world, he observes, which are responsible for the behaviour of the balance under such conditions, and which allow that behaviour to be understood fully and sufficiently. Samuel Clarke agrees, in his correspondence with Leibniz, but cautions that this is not always the case. While it may be so in con-

76

Philosophy

nection with natural objects in the world, it is not so in connection with human action. A balance is passive as weights are added to it and taken away, and the results are entirely predictable and certain. The relationship between human action and the motives inspiring it, however, says Clarke, does not exhibit such fixity, for action seems to possess a certain independence from the influences which bear upon it. It appears to involve a form of self-movement which Clarke takes to be the essence of liberty. Clarke does not deny the influence of motives and other states in connection with action, but emphasizes the limits of such influence. While it is widely said that motives and reasons play a determinative role in behaviour, he concedes, such language is metaphorical, intended to leave room for the peculiar phenomenon of self-determination. Reasons and motives may be occasions of action, but, he argues, the efficient cause of action is the agent. Sufficiency of understanding in the case of such self-determination, then, will be significantly different from sufficiency in the case of natural objects. An agency responsible for its own activity may be affected by various influences, then, but these will not be sufficient to determine or to explain fully that activity. Many philosophers today would challenge Clarke, but the question remains a live one. John Searle has recently characterized it as the most important one facing contemporary philosophy: How is it possible to square the human form of nature, with its apparent capacities for reason, meaning, and freedom, with an apparently mindless physical universe?1 The scholarly atmosphere in which this challenge is occurring today has developed under the influence of the remarkable success of scientific and empirical inquiry into the natural order. Such influence has understandably fostered a propensity to begin the search for a fit between human and nonhuman nature by looking first to the nonhuman, and then fitting the human into that context. This is reminiscent of the pattern I illustrated in the first chapter of engaging the “something rather than nothing” question by beginning with natural causal relationships. The issue of where to begin inquiry in connection with human agency, however, is deserving of careful thought. Should the process begin

Understanding Gratuity

77

introspectively, examining the exercise of agency with a view to fitting one’s understanding of the natural order into the result of that examination, or should one begin by examining the natural order? David Hume believed the latter procedure would be best, although he conceded that one might be more inclined to begin introspectively. Such an introspective approach, Hume cautioned, is prone to making a particular kind of error that can be avoided if one begins by examining the occurrence of causality in the natural order. Human beings, he observes, have a propensity to be superficial in their understanding of causality; they think they see more than they actually see. They believe that they can see a necessary connection between an effect and its cause. A recognition of their error in this respect, cautions Hume, can be brought about by astute attention to what is not experienced in the encounter with natural causality. That encounter involves no experience of a necessary connection among causally related phenomena. What is actually experienced are only patterns of proximity, temporal sequence, and so forth. Experience of such patterns may give an initial impression of necessary connection, but upon closer scrutiny the deceptive character of that impression becomes recognizable. It is this lesson, Hume thinks, which should be brought to introspective inquiry in connection with human agency. What does one actually find in such introspection? I decide to raise my hand, and my hand goes up. What is the relationship between the decision and the bodily movement? One may at first be struck by the apparent absence of necessary connection between the decision and the behaviour of the hand. It is tempting, Hume notes, to interpret this absence of necessary connection as the presence of freedom. It is here, however, that the lessons learned from the natural order should be remembered, for in the experience of the natural order there appears also to be an absence of necessary connection. That absence, when it is encountered in the case of natural causality, triggers further inquiry into why belief in necessary connection persists. Since that further inquiry has been so fruitful, it would be appropriate to be comparably thorough in exploring the apparent

78

Philosophy

absence of necessary connection in the case of human agency before attributing it to freedom. Consider as well, Hume says, the way in which certain patterns of human behaviour resemble analogous patterns in the natural order. Everyone recognizes that human activity, and its relation to motives, principles, and psychological states, seems to exhibit the same patterns generation after generation. Whenever vain people walk by mirrors, they look in them as predictably as the ground becomes wet after a rainfall. To be sure, Hume concedes, there are sometimes exceptions. As often as not, however, there turn out to be previously unrecognized causal influences at work in such cases, ignorance of which explains why they were initially surprising. It is the stuff of great literature and scholarship, says Hume, to observe and articulate age-old patterns exhibited in human behaviour. So uniform is such behaviour historically and around the world that nothing new or odd is encountered. This should encourage a clearer recognition of the close resemblance between human behaviour and the behaviour of the natural order. Such recognition is supportive of the imputation to motives and psychological states of causal roles in relation to human behaviour. Even careful inquiry, however, Thomas Reid responds, raises a puzzling question which he does not think can be answered within the terms of reference offered by Hume. Reid agrees that human beings enjoy no special insight into causal relationships in the natural order. What, then, he asks, can account for the extraordinary persistence with which people seem disposed to believe in such a connection anyway? Reid also agrees with Hume that an important role is played by constant conjunction, temporal sequences, and so forth. He agrees with Hume as well that we cannot see beneath the surface of natural occurrences. We recognize one event following another, and we are accustomed to designating the first as a cause, and the latter as an effect, although we do not comprehend the relationship between them. As I watch a plant growing from seed I believe that something is causing its development, but I do not know what that is. Reid concedes that empirical observation of the natural order does not include a direct en-

Understanding Gratuity

79

counter with causal power. All that can actually be experienced is observable patterns. Why, then, is belief in some unseen causal power found universally among human beings, and why is it so deeply held that it cannot be overturned? How is one to account for this conviction, which appears to have no basis in empirical observation? Is the simple recurrence of patterns enough to explain the tenacity of human convictions about some kind of underlying necessity?2 Hume does not have a satisfactory answer to this question, according to Reid. An answer does emerge, however, when one reverses Hume’s order of inquiry, beginning introspectively with agent causation and then moving back to natural causation. Human beings believe tenaciously in an underlying, unseen power in nature because they bring to the natural order an existing familiarity with such a power. The reason certain patterns in nature lead to inferences about an underlying causal power is that observers already have direct experience, introspectively, of such power in themselves, and they appreciate that they are an integral part of the natural order. Apart from this feature of our own experience, concludes Reid, we would have no idea whatsoever of causality in the natural order. At the end of the day, then, the encounter with constant conjunction, priority in time, and other characteristics singled out by Hume in connection with causality, cannot account for the universal conviction about necessary connection. The only plausible explanation is the direct encounter with one’s own agency. There is no other candidate in experience which would account for the tenacity of human belief that beneath the appearance of some relationships in the natural order there exists a special connection. In the end, then, whereas Hume attempts to fit agent causation into terms of reference derived from an empirical consultation of the relationships among natural objects, Reid shows that this order must be reversed so as to see, in the subjective encounter with agent causation, the font of human convictions regarding an underlying but unseen connection between causes and effects in the natural order.

80

Philosophy

I propose that it is not only causality with which one becomes familiar in the direct encounter with agent causation, but gratuity as well. Introspection does not provide convincing evidence of antecedent causal influences sufficient to determine or explain actions designated as free. Such actions, rather, as Clarke observes, present themselves as possessing a gratuitous character. In acting, not theorizing about or analyzing action, I feel as though I am bringing about some state of affairs in a way which does not occur when I experience something happening to me, as in the case of sensation. The difference between action and perception, observes Searle, is reflected in the logic of explanation routinely applied to the two. Analysis of natural causation portrays event A as fully responsible for, and hence as providing a sufficient explanation of, event B. Underwriting such analysis is the presupposition that everything in nature takes place as a consequence of antecedent causal influences. Assuming a wide variety of other contextual circumstances, such antecedent conditions are designated as being sufficient to explain the phenomena involved. An explanation of agent causation within these terms of reference, however, which depicts states antecedent to action such as circumstances, motives, and reasons as accounting fully for such causation, cannot be reconciled with the actual experience of agent causation. To be sure, this is a deeply anomalous phenomenon in a world increasingly understood deterministically. Under such cultural conditions, it is tempting to interpret such apparent gratuity as representing ignorance of causal influences. What has not been interpreted in the first place, however, Searle protests, cannot be reinterpreted. The experience of gratuity in connection with freedom is not an interpretation; it is a phenomenon encountered directly in immediate experience, even if it may not be as forcefully present in the philosophical reconstruction of such experience. Finding himself faced during the American presidential election of 2000 with having to decide whether or not to vote for George Bush, Searle discovers in himself reasons for and against each alternative.3 He eventually makes his decision and acts. What was the

Understanding Gratuity

81

relationship, he asks, between such reasons and the decision he took? He did not, he reports, experience any antecedent causal influences which he would understand to have been sufficient determinants of how he ended up behaving. Such antecedent conditions, rather, appeared to be influential but not fully determinative of his choice. His experience in this respect, he says, is appropriately reflected in logical descriptions of it by contrast with descriptions of natural phenomena. While reasons and motives figure prominently in the explanation of his action, their role has a distinctive form which underlies the conviction that such states are not determinative of choice. The explanation that an agent performed action A for reason B implies that the agent performed A by acting on reason B, and that this is an integral part of the phenomenon itself as it is encountered in the immediacy of actual experience. So recalcitrantly integral is this feature of the experience of action that it cannot be reinterpreted plausibly, and can therefore be judged, Searle concludes, to be the foundation of the universal and ineradicable belief among human beings concerning their possession of free will. What does such “acting on” involve? Reasons and conscious states related to action seem to exhibit a waxing and waning of influence over time, Searle observes. Out of this waxing and waning there emerges eventually a domination of consciousness by one such state over others, and from this domination action seems to flow. In such waxing and waning, however, the conscious states at any particular stage are not felt to be sufficient to determine fully the states at the next stage. The philosophical challenge of agency, in this light, is not about the connection between conception and action. It is about the way in which some conceptions come to prevail over others in consciousness in a manner that subsequently leads directly to action. Agency appears first and foremost, in other words, to involve a space between one conscious state and the state which follows it, not between conscious states and the physical behaviours of the body. What is one to make of that space? So great is the historical tenacity and longevity of its appearance, in Searle’s judgment, that

82

Philosophy

it constitutes a genuine scandal in the history of philosophy for those who would treat freedom as illusory. Such tenacity and longevity suggest that the appropriateness of reinterpreting the apparent gratuity of agent causation as ignorance about causes which, were they known, would explain sufficiently the actions involved, is questionable. So deeply ingrained is the feeling of indeterminacy as an integral feature of human action that it cannot plausibly be treated as an interpretation of what is going on which is available for reinterpretation; it is a direct encounter with a genuine gratuity. Any account of such agency which expunges indeterminacy from it, Searle concludes, changes the very nature of the phenomenon itself; it does not just reinterpret it. If first-hand experience is forced out of the purview of philosophy, however, theory and analysis will be far less constrained by this phenomenon. In the end, concludes Searle, a nonlibertarian interpretation of the experience of an apparently gratuitous element of human agency is untenable, however anomalous such gratuity may seem. First-hand evidence indicates that motives and other antecedent influences acquire a role in decision-making when and to the extent that they are allowed to do so. But the only thing with which we are familiar that is capable of allowing is a self. This leads inevitably to the conclusion, Searle argues, that human beings must have a genuine self, an ego, that is capable gratuitously of orchestrating the conscious states involved in action. The Humean self falls far short of being able to function in this way. So anomalous is the apparently gratuitous behaviour of such a self in an otherwise causally structured natural order, and so often is it subject to sustained philosophical attack, that it is still very tempting to believe that the experience of such gratuity is somehow misleading. A closer scrutiny of the aforementioned processes, therefore, would be helpful. For this purpose, I turn my attention to the work of William James which is more fine-grained, both philosophically and psychologically, than what has been considered so far. For James, the pragmatist, philosophical inquiry should begin, whenever possible, by looking to experience as represented by the

Understanding Gratuity

83

normal forms of language which are often overlooked by scholars in their preoccupation with abstraction and theory. In the case of human agency, such language includes vocabulary, for example, about striving. Descriptions of striving are accompanied by words involving a sense of direction; striving is going somewhere. There is also talk about expenditures of effort which sometimes encounter resistance. Such expenditures are described as ending in failure or victory. In short, what is actually found and described in normal language is reference to aspiring, to the enjoyment of success, to the surrender of giving up, to the passage of time, and to other such concrete experiences.4 Such ordinary language involves an often overlooked personal component. In theoretical discussions one hears endlessly about actions, thoughts, conscious states, decisions, motives, reasons, and so forth. What usually goes unnoticed, however, is that nontheoretical descriptions always depict such occurrences in possessive language; they are depicted as belonging to a specific individual. That is to say, abstractions about feelings and thoughts are missing one of the most important components of actual feelings and thoughts: their inherently personal character. In my life there is never just feeling or thinking. It is always the case, rather, that I feel and I think, and the same applies to every other individual. The feelings and thoughts I have are always experienced as mine. The most basic element of actual psychological life, then, is not thought, but thought that is owned by me. Ordinary language, by contrast with the often-contrived language of theorizing, indicates that conscious life is always actually experienced as personal. Even Hume, the consummate empiricist, seems to have overlooked this elementary fact in his otherwise careful search for a self. Finding no self available as an object of introspective scrutiny and analysis, he developed his well-known theory of selfhood. What Hume failed to recognize was the pervasively personal character of all the psychological states he encountered in his search for a self. It was right in front of him all along but he looked past it, seeking an object upon which he could focus philosophically rather than an inherent characteristic of all conscious states. Con-

84

Philosophy

structing a theory of self based upon past events, he fails to recognize that the memory of past events already involves not just those events, but the sense that they were experienced by me. I do not remember just a state of affairs, although a state of affairs is involved. I remember a state of affairs as having been part of my life. What Hume failed to recognize is that the integral role he gives to the memory of past events, in connection with identity, already has within it the sense of self. Unfortunately, James laments, scholars often neglect this fundamentally personal feature of actual experience. He recalls a French writer, who he does not identify, claiming that we personify the flow of ideas subsequent to having those ideas, and that such personification is a great mistake on our part.5 The mistake, James protests, is the other way around. Scholarship, in its propensity for abstraction and theorizing, depersonalizes conscious states which were originally personal. This represents a failed form of empiricism resulting in false theories of the self. Moreover, it sets the stage for protracted and futile debates about personhood. This matter could be settled much more straightforwardly by a radically empiricist examination of experience in its immediate occurrence, not as reconstituted for the purposes of philosophical analysis. In its immediate occurrence it is always personal. This recognition raises important questions about the capacity of philosophical reflection to replicate all that is involved in actual experience. In addition to the widespread neglect of immediate experience’s personal character, there is no less widespread a neglect of its physiological elements when considering agency. James was a physician and professor of physiology at Harvard, a background which made him alert to physiological phenomena often overlooked in abstract analyses of human action. Consider something as elementary as learning to ride a bicycle. A person mounts the bicycle for the first time with the intent of riding it. What, exactly, is the object of such intent? One must form a concept of the specific bodily movements required in order to ride. Unfortunately, people new to bicycle-riding have no kinesthetic memory of such movements. They will be forced, therefore, to imagine

Understanding Gratuity

85

whatever movements might most closely resemble the ones required. This imagination will be based upon kinesthetic memories acquired from previous physical activities analogous to those needed to ride a bicycle. It is likely that initial efforts will be unsuccessful because the surrogate movements imagined are not the exact ones needed. They may be close enough, however, to allow for the brief experience of actually riding before falling over, which will provide useful physiological feedback. Through an ongoing series of subsequent successful and unsuccessful experiments, more adjustments will be made to build up a collection of kinesthetic memories which can then become the object of intentions. Having thus acquired a repertoire of motor skills and memories, the novice rider will go on to repeat these many times. Such repetition leads to the formation of physiological habits. Habits make possible a decreasing intellectual attentiveness to the specific behaviours involved, allowing the mind to attend to other things. When one first tries to ride, it is necessary to pay close attention to braking, turning, surrounding traffic, curbs, gravel, and many other things. First-time riders find it taxing to focus attention on so much at once. With repetition, however, comes the gradual formation of habits which make possible an increasingly selective and efficient inattentiveness. The experienced rider, when setting out to visit a friend, no longer needs to pay attention to the elements of riding which were initially necessary. It is sufficient simply to form the intention of riding to the friend’s house, and all the physiological activities required will take place habitually. It is not uncommon, having arrived at a destination, for an experienced cyclist to discover that she has paid no attention whatsoever to the cycling itself. The lesson to be learned from these observations about the physiology of human action echoes Searle’s comments about the centrality of conscious states in connection with action. Consciousness is inherently impulsive.6 That is to say, every neurological conception of a movement triggers that actual movement by the body unless some conflicting movement is conceived of simultaneously. The occurrence of a particular form of physiolog-

86

Philosophy

ical activity following upon the conception of that activity, in other words, does not need to be explained philosophically. It is a neurophysiological phenomenon which can be understood fully on the basis of appropriate scientific inquiry. The neurological representation of every bodily act triggers at least the beginnings of that act. This close connection between conceptualization and physiological activity is often underappreciated because conscious life so frequently involves the simultaneous occurrence of many ideas, each conducive spontaneously of a particular form of action. These ideas may be diverse, however, creating conflicting propensities to act. When this happens, they cancel one another out. So often is this the case that the link between conception and action is obscured. Failure to recognize this link results in questions about agency focused upon the connection between conception and bodily movement rather than the relationship among conceptions. The real problem of agency is not the connection between intention and bodily movement; it is how some conscious states come to dominate others, becoming thereby determinative spontaneously of bodily movement. It is to such domination of consciousness, then, that philosophy should look in its engagement of volition and the attendant matters of freedom and gratuity. The effort of will is an effort to form a certain kind of attentiveness – a theme which will reemerge in the final chapter of this book as particularly significant. The philosophical engagement of volition becomes fruitful only when one inquires into how the idea of a particular action is subject to stable and sustained attention. What the will brings about in situations which would normally be described as voluntary is this attentiveness. Action is a mere physiological incident following upon such attending. Volition, then, boils down to the effort to be attentive in a particular way. This is what is responsible for the domination of consciousness by one object at a particular time. In short, the strain and effort that one sometimes feels attempting to sustain attentiveness is what is being referred to in talking about an act of will.

Understanding Gratuity

87

The ascendancy to dominance of some states of consciousness over others is a complex process, it turns out, involving many influences. I may, for example, form the idea on a sunny autumn morning of making a road trip to the village of Tobermory. I begin to pack the car. As I am doing so, I hear a weather report warning of the imminent arrival of a cold front. This reminds me that I have been postponing a badly needed furnace service. The shift of my attention away from the pleasures of the drive and toward potentially frozen pipes weakens awareness of the road trip and strengthens thoughts about the consequences of a broken furnace. My packing of the car becomes more hesitant and less single-minded. While this is going on, my child wakes up with a fever. Concerns about this fever immediately trump all thoughts about both the trip and the furnace, precipitating a visit to the doctor. All such shifts of attentiveness illustrate the ever-present multitude of possible objects of attention. Thoughts about a road trip ebb and wane relative to thoughts about the village, the furnace, frozen pipes, and the child. What is more, the processes involved in the eventual privileging of one of these focal points are very complex. The initial domination of consciousness by the intention to visit Tobermory is much indebted to the aesthetics of that part of the country, to my memories of the village, and to personal attachments based on a long history of visiting there. The subsequent domination of consciousness by concern about frozen pipes and a flooded house is much indebted to previous plumbing problems and budgetary challenges. Highly complex paternal concerns are at work in the rapid shift of attention to my child’s welfare. While attentiveness is a cognitive activity, then, that activity is inextricably intertwined with many other forms of the organism’s response to its surroundings. These intertwining cognitive and noncognitive influences also involve a multitude of cultural influences. On one occasion, James describes an exercise undertaken by kindergarten children who are asked to point out as many features as they can in pictures portraying flowers and birds.7 They attend effortlessly to the beaks of

88

Philosophy

the birds and the petals of the flowers. They are altogether inattentive, however, to the nostrils or the claws of the birds. This pattern of attentiveness and inattentiveness correlates closely with their previous education, which has emphasized beaks and petals but not nostrils and claws. Following the experiment their attention is called to these new phenomena, after which their attentiveness to them becomes spontaneous. Human beings, in other words, are attentive to what they “preperceive,” as James calls it – to what they have been trained socially to note. Attentiveness, then, in addition to involving a simultaneity and mutuality of many influences at work in the individual organism, is also deeply informed by enculturation. Given the foregoing complexity of influences, it is very difficult to identify with reliability when, if at all, genuine freedom is actually being exercised, as Marilyn Adams has argued in her challenge to conventional free will theodicies.8 The presence of freedom in very early life, she points out, is largely precluded by the demonstrable ignorance, weakness, helplessness, and lack of psychological development of childhood. The eventual emergence from early life is characterized by a slow piecing together of an image of the world on the basis of which subsequent decisions will be made. This process, however, takes place under the powerful influence not only of mature individuals who are worthy of emulation but also of immature ones hobbled by deficient capacities for decisionmaking who are nonetheless innocently mimicked by the young. Youthful development is often faced with challenging situations which demand quick decisions within the context of naïveté and ignorance. These decisions, repeated as they often are, become embedded in habits which last long into adulthood. Only very slowly, if ever, do the deleterious effects of these bad habits become apparent, and even more slowly, if ever, can they be changed. Let the proud philosopher sitting at the bedside of someone whose flawed decisions in life have brought them to a premature death, cautions Adams rhetorically, confidently make judgments about the form that freedom actually took. There may still be room to argue on behalf of genuine freedom somewhere in this mess, but

Understanding Gratuity

89

the customary detachment of philosophy from the chaotic particularities of real life makes it seem more straightforward than it actually is. It is in this spirit of including the complexities of life that James reaches his conclusions about freedom. The work of volition in connection with the domination of consciousness by one particular focal point seems to take place in concert with physiological, social, affective, aesthetic, moral, and many other factors such as those sketched by Adams. It often seems that the domination of consciousness is causally determined by such factors, and James addresses this possibility squarely. In his day, such determinism was represented by what was called the “mechanical” theory. According to this theory, the peculiar feeling of effort encountered when one tries to attend in a particular way is fully determined by the influences described above. It is impossible, James judges, to gainsay such a theory.9 Empirical psychology, at any rate, cannot demonstrate its falsity. At the end of the day, psychology and philosophy are limited to observing that there are numerous influences involved in the experience of effort to attend, but these are so many in number, and often so subtle, that they cannot be disentangled and assessed in detail. It is possible that those influences do in fact determine fully the conscious states from which action flows, and that common-sense convictions about the determinative role of a gratuitous freedom are an illusion. James agrees, then, to grant that advocates of the mechanical theory, who propose that such freedom is an illusion, may be right. At the same time, however, and by reason of the same limitations of empirical inquiry, the determinist must concede to the libertarian that the appearance of freedom may not be an illusion. The result is a standoff which cannot be resolved empirically. This standoff, however, is a theoretical one. In the conduct of actual life, the spontaneous deliverances of reason affirm intractably the presence of a peculiarly gratuitous element. This is only one of many domains in which reason, in practice, asserts an authority which trumps the authority of conflicting theory. I will

90

Philosophy

make the case in the following chapters that a more prominent place in philosophy be made for such authority of reason in practice. For now, I simply observe its pivotal role in the positions of James, Reid, Searle, and others, on the subject of freedom. That subject is the most important one in metaphysics, in James’s estimation, for it will determine one’s picture of the world in broader terms – materialistic, monistic, libertarian, spiritualist. As such, it is a subject worthy of most serious engagement. The results of such engagement by James’s Radical Empiricism resemble Reid’s in pointing towards a gratuity involved integrally in the exercise of human agency which renders the self who is exercising such agency analogous to Aristotle’s unmoved mover. The human being appears able to cause states of affairs without having been caused to do so. This, I am proposing, is the origin of its capacity to form a concept of gratuity, to distinguish such gratuity from causality, and to distinguish the experience of gratuity from causal ignorance. The upshot of this chapter’s inquiry into gratuity, then, is that there exists, in direct acquaintance with the life of action, an encounter with both causality and gratuity which leaves the agent with an understanding of both, as well as with a capacity to distinguish between them.

4 Modern Philosophy

The reports by philosophers illustrated in the first chapter of this book describe three observable, spontaneous behaviours by reason in response to the fact of existence. The first is awareness of a philosophically unspecified characteristic of that fact which elicits astonishment. The second is a judgment that metaphorical language about miracle and gift best describes that characteristic. I have used the term “gratuity” to represent these uses of language which convey an apparent absence of causal antecedents sufficient to determine or explain fully the object of experience. The third behaviour is a tenacious propensity to seek deeper understanding of the phenomenon even after causal inquiry has proven insufficient to the task. My focus upon such reports rather than the metaphysics of gratuity does not bode well for a philosophical project. The reports are vague in a way which modern philosophy avoids. They are firstperson accounts of private experiences which, as such, do not lend themselves to the third-person analyses of public phenomena preferred by philosophy. Their recourse to metaphor falls outside normal language use in the discipline. They involve subjective and religious elements which conflict with the near-universal commitment by philosophers to detachment from such influences. They exhibit a fog of incomprehension about exactly what metaphysical phenomenon has evoked the powerful responses they record and how they are able to distinguish that phenomenon from causal

92

Philosophy

ignorance. They do not explain how the phenomenon of gratuity usually encountered in personal contexts would also be encountered in the existence of a largely impersonal universe. Considering these liabilities, most philosophers would likely say that such reports belong, at best, to the domain of poetry but certainly not philosophy. The ease with which such a distinction between poetry and philosophy can be made at the expense implicitly of the latter is indebted to unique ways in which modern philosophy understands what constitutes the natural functioning of reason and its relationship with the world. Such an understanding involves deficiencies which I will illustrate and then critique in this chapter. What constitutes reason’s natural functioning is nowadays generally understood to include activities free from religious, subjective, and other influences which are considered potentially subversive of truth-seeking. Such a view is a child of early modernity and is deeply influenced by the rise of the modern sciences. There is much support for it even among philosophers engaging matters of religion, as can be seen in a recent study of the discipline.1 As a participant in the academy, the study observes, philosophy is required to take upon itself a commitment to an independence and autonomy of reason which will replicate the impartiality of the sciences. It is incumbent upon a scholar to set aside all personal and religious propensities and undertake work built upon considerations completely apart from such influences. Analytic philosophy of religion is viewed more or less approvingly, on account of the apparent precision and rigour of its analyses and argumentation. Philosophers of religion housed in religious studies departments, however, are under greater pressure to replicate the detachment of their analytic counterparts, for religious studies, as the new kid on the academic block, still has to prove itself worthy. It has aspired to accomplish this, the report observes, by vigourously maintaining an arm’s-length relationship with the religious phenomena it studies, treating its subject matter as cultural artifacts which can be understood with indifference to the first-hand experience of the actual forms of life involved, as well as any claims to revelatory assistance. In a recent

Modern Philosophy

93

book on natural theology, for example, Kelly Clark speaks for many philosophers when he characterizes medieval and modern natural theology alike as “the project of articulating, defending and criticizing arguments for the existence and nature of God without the aid of special revelation.”2 Detachment from such revelatory influence is no less widespread in philosophy of religion, which is typically seen, as Alan Padgett puts it, as a discipline which “makes no central appeal to special revelation.”3 The same can be said even for philosophical theology, which Merold Westphal has portrayed as being concerned with “what can be established about the existence and nature of God by means of human reason unaided by revelation.”4 It is true that some philosophers weaken allegiance to such detachment in the case of philosophical theology by allowing greater theological latitude. It is notable that the high-water marks of early modern philosophical theology identified by Derek Pereboom, however, are Descartes’ ontological argument, Leibniz’s cosmological argument, Hume’s challenge to theistic arguments in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Kant’s critique of the ontological argument.5 These are hardly examples of theological latitude. Westphal observes that there does not appear to be a satisfactory distinction between philosophical theology and philosophy of religion on this count. There is, in any event, an observable family resemblance among natural theology, philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology in connection with a commitment to religious detachment conforming to modernity’s understanding of the naturalness and autonomy of reason and what constitutes reason’s proper relationship with the natural order. There is little resemblance between this view of natural reason and its premodern counterparts, however, notwithstanding common beliefs among philosophers that modernity’s views of reason enjoy premodern support, particularly in Aquinas’s work. They do not. Even in Aquinas’s Five Ways, no less a Thomist than Brian Davies has shown, there is no evidence of a modern understanding of reason. “Not one of the Summa Theologiae’s initial 13 questions fails to presuppose that there is a God who is to be thought of in

94

Philosophy

certain ways. st 1, 1–13 is not a discussion of God’s existence that is open to the suggestion that there might be no God after all.”6 Walter Kasper likewise establishes that the current emphasis upon detachment is a distinctively modern phenomenon, very different from its medieval antecedents.7 Stanley Hauerwas echoes Davies and Kasper in this respect, arguing in his Gifford lectures that the modern understanding of reason would be alien to Aquinas, for whom scientific knowledge is not a reliable alternative to or foundation for religious belief.8 A careful reading of Vatican I’s (1869–70) thomistically inspired position reinforces the voices of Davies, Kasper, and Hauerwas. The council was responding to modernity on two fronts involving two different challenges. On one front were the emerging modern philosophical and scientific rationalisms which impute to reason a very deep autonomy tantamount to self-sufficiency. It is this particular view which is in play when the council expresses concern about the limits of reason’s autonomy. On an entirely different front, the council is reacting to the development of religiously fideistic skepticism. It is in response to such anti-intellectual movements that the council expresses optimism about reason and is supportive of its autonomy. The council, in other words, is trying, at one and the same time, to defend the autonomy and reliability of reason in opposition to fideistic skepticism while resisting what it sees, in the emerging modern philosophical and scientific rationalisms, as an untenably exaggerated understanding of it. The council does not claim that the existence of God can be proven. It says, rather, that it may be possible to know God (certo cognosci posse) but says nothing about whether such knowledge in fact exists.9 Even in High Scholasticism, Kasper shows, one does not find pretensions to having established intellectually neutral foundations for religious belief. The natural functioning of reason in relation to the world, for Aquinas and others of his time, involves a confluence of numerous intellectual activities and influences involving religion as well as different forms of ancient thought. This confluence is under-

Modern Philosophy

95

written by a pivotal analogy between objects in the world and the written word. That analogy depicts such objects as similar to the words in a book insofar as both are bearers of meaning. While God may communicate through scripture, Aquinas says, it also lies within divine power to express meaning in and through objects. It is the task of human beings, Hugh of St Victor says in De tribus diebus, not to decide or invent such meaning but to discover it. Because words refer to things which are bearers of meaning, a determination of reference in language is only a preamble to an engagement of creatures and, through them, the acquisition of knowledge about their creator. This is the case, says Origen, because of a certain likeness between creatures and their creator.10 For this reason, human beings are able to discover not only causal characteristics of the natural order but its meaning and significance as well. The underlying metaphor of nature as a book stands behind the medieval practice of allegorical interpretation. Today, allegory is thought of in terms of multiple possible meanings of words. By contrast, the premodern understanding of allegory is oriented not just toward words but also toward objects in nature, which are considered to be richer in meaning than the terms representing them. The word “pelican” refers to the bird designated by that word, as the word “Jerusalem” refers to the city designated by that name. An actual pelican and the city of Jerusalem, however, are believed to have many possible meanings, and those meanings are often expressed in rich, diverse, and complex ways not only in literature but in architecture, liturgy, and spiritual practice as well. To discover the meaning of natural phenomena, on such a view, reason must read the book of nature properly. In the same way that an illiterate person may behold a written page but not understand its significance, so too a person may see natural things without comprehending their meaning. Belief that the work of reason involves the acquisition and exercise of such literacy, and involves a confluence of many different philosophical, religious, and poetic activities, persists into the seventeenth century.11

96

Philosophy

Consider in this connection an anecdote provided by Peter Harrison involving the work of ornithologist John Ray. The naturalist Francis Willughby died in 1672, cutting short a promising career which had involved collaboration with Ray. Ray wrote a tribute to his friend entitled The Ornithology of F. Willughby. In the preface, Ray describes the methodological characteristics of the work they had done together. That work, Ray emphasizes, was genuinely novel in having completely omitted relationships between natural phenomena and theology, relationships that would normally be found in ornithological studies at that time. Ray insists that his work with Willughby was concerned solely with natural history, by which he means observation of natural phenomena entirely severed from the influence of traditional authorities. What is significant about Ray’s comments is how novel they were even in the seventeenth century when, under the aegis of the humanities, study of the animal kingdom continued to be undertaken in the context of the scriptures, church fathers, poets, and philosophers. Such study was still governed by the presupposition that recognition of the true significance of living things requires the assistance of considerations beyond observation. The commitment by Ray and Willughby to emancipating the study of nature from those considerations anticipates the gradual narrowing of Western culture’s way of understanding natural reason and its relationship with the world. Prior to the advent of modernity, a major contributor to reason’s engagement of the natural world was religion, for it was widely believed that the scriptures provide a special form of guidance in comprehending the true significance of what is found there. Of course, many people today would not recognize such guidance, but that is beside the point for present purposes. The point is that the underlying metaphor of nature as a book requires that decisions be made about how to acquire the requisite literacy to read that book. While most philosophers today would see religious, poetic, and other such influences as compromising the impartial use of reason in this connection, the assistance of such influences was seen by their medieval counterparts as enhancing its natural function.12

Modern Philosophy

97

Various medieval cultural and social developments brought about a gradual shift away from such a broad understanding of reason’s natural function. Intellectual engagement with the world came to focus more and more upon empirically discernible relationships among phenomena. This process did not immediately overturn the previous breadth of intellectual activity presumed to be necessary in approaching the world by natural reason. It did involve, however, an incremental shedding and abandonment of what previously had been accepted as the broad scope of reason’s proper engagement of the world. What was also abandoned was a moral understanding of reason’s relationship with the natural order. The premodern view was that inquiry is at the service of reclaiming a lost resemblance between human beings and God. Knowledge was seen to be at the service of virtue. The horizon of such belief is the presumption that the loss of such likeness has compromised the capacity of human beings to read the natural order aright. That presumption weakens along the path to modernity. One finds increased attentiveness to the natural order in its own right with less and less influence being exerted by moral considerations. The emancipation of reason’s engagement of the natural world from the influence of scriptural, poetic, moral and other considerations runs parallel to religious developments initiated by Protestant reformers. Analogous to the way in which consultation of the natural order was becoming emancipated from traditional authorities, the consultation of scripture was also becoming emancipated from such authorities. This also involved a detachment from the many rich, nonliteral forms of expression found among those authorities. Consider as symbolic of this development, Harrison suggests, a custom adopted by Martin Luther in connection with his weekly lectures on the Psalms. Luther instructed the university printer to prepare his students’ copies of the Psalms by removing all the usual glosses and commentaries. This left large blank margins in which students were invited to write down their own thoughts. The disappearance of such glosses symbolizes the extrication of biblical texts from their millennium-long association with philo-

98

Philosophy

sophical, literary, and ecclesiastical authorities. The emancipation of the scriptures from these traditions, however, subjects them to the authority of the individual. Reformers such as Luther and Calvin understood that, in this respect, they had opened the door to a potential plurality of irreconcilable interpretations. Their response was to support simplicity of interpretation through a literal engagement of the scriptural word independent not only of the influence of traditional authorities but also of the rich forms of expression found in sacramental practices, religious objects, rituals, symbols, figurative literary devices, and a host of other ways through which the meanings of the scriptures had previously been expressed. These developments would come to greatly affect the influence of scripture in connection with reading the book of nature. The increasing detachment from traditional authorities of both scriptural exegesis and intellectual consultation of the natural order was accompanied by a weakening of the metaphor of nature as a book. Gradually words and texts, not things, became the principal bearers of meaning. The natural world itself slowly ceased to mean anything. These trends, as Harrison says, “would make orphans of all natural objects, stripping them of all those associations from which they had derived their meanings, and abandoning them to that silent and unintelligible realm which was to become the subject of the modern science of nature.”13 This eventually led to the modern reversal of Hugh of St Victor’s contention that that the meaning of things is to be discovered by humans, not invented by them. Even when, on occasion, the metaphor of nature as a book resurfaces, it no longer designates the possession by natural things of meaning and significance. Consider, for example, what Galileo says when he makes use of the metaphor. The book of nature, he observes, is something which all can behold but no one can understand apart from fluency in the language in which it is written. What is decisive about his use of the metaphor is his assertion that the language in which the book is written is the language of mathematics and geometry.14 The confinement of the metaphor

Modern Philosophy

99

of nature as a book to such particular activities of reason symbolizes the end of seeing it as possessing a broader meaning. Knowledge of that order is no longer valued for its moral potential but rather for its utility in advancing the aspirations of humans, regardless of moral considerations. In addition, the study of nature becomes divorced from any contemplative appreciation of its aesthetic marvels, and the possible meaning of those marvels. There is nothing about the study of nature, in other words, which would explain the reports and traditions cited in the first two chapters of this book. The effect of this sea change ushering in modernity can be seen vividly in philosophy’s engagement of religion. Instead of seeking God in and through the things of nature, philosophy shifts its allegiances toward the sciences and their detached study of the natural order from which, it is believed, the existence and nature of God can be inferred. Religious experience is replaced by religious propositions awaiting justification by arguments based upon knowledge gained through scientific study of the natural order. This shift is reflected in the growing influence, in natural theology after the seventeenth century, of arguments for the existence of God based upon the apparent design of the natural order. There is no longer anything to be seen in the things of nature. Nature provides not meaning and significance but a set of mathematically and taxonomically describable relationships purportedly offering a foundation for justifying assent to religious propositions. One finds in the work of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Johannes Kepler expressions of the optimistic conviction that this approach to the natural order will be eloquent in defending theistic belief. What is involved in that defence, however, is entirely different from what had previously been involved. Such natural theology represents a striking departure from premodern forms of understanding the relationship between knower and world. The increasing association of detachment with reason’s naturalness and autonomy comes to inform the academy more and more as modernity develops, enveloping even philosophy’s engagement of religion today.

100

Philosophy

The upshot of the foregoing picture is that the concept of reason’s naturalness and autonomy and its relationship with the natural order undergoes profound changes as the medieval world gradually develops into the modern one. By the end of the seventeenth century, the objects of nature have been stripped of their intrinsic meanings, and even their qualities and essences have gone. In the physics of Descartes and Newton, simple natural objects are denuded of all but basic quantitative properties. In this new language of nature, syntax has triumphed over semantics. Henceforth the science of nature will deal with the mathematical or classificatory rules which govern the relations between natural objects. The meaning of the things of nature will survive only in those vestigial, figurative expressions which are now the sole preserve of the poets. The two books, which were once of necessity read in unison and assigned meanings according to a single universal hermeneutic, now take separate paths.15 With time, philosophers such as David Hume will recognize very clearly the significance of this new engagement of the natural order, and especially its liabilities when invoked for the purposes of defending theism. Darwin’s work will flourish in the vacuum of meaning created by the transition from medieval to modern thought. The divorce between words and things will be reflected in a separation of science and the humanities and the expunging of poetic influence from philosophy. Such developments continue the abandonment of the underlying metaphor of nature as a book in which creatures themselves, as bearers of meaning independent of the meaning that human beings might wish to impute to them, have a story of their own to tell about the sort of place the world is. If there is no such story, then neither will there be anything in the natural order which correlates with the striking intellectual and emotional responses reported in the first two chapters of this book; responses which can be found in various forms throughout the history of human existence. Philosophy becomes inhospitable

Modern Philosophy

101

to such reports even though, or perhaps because, there is no doubt that they are asserting the possession by the natural order of a meaning and significance best described in language I have represented by gratuity. One may argue that the language used in these reports is actually projecting onto existence meaning and significance invented by human beings, but there is nothing whatsoever in the actual language use itself which supports this. In the end, those reports are forced by modernity onto another path, a poetic path generally understood by philosophers to be intellectually deficient by comparison with reason’s functioning in the sciences and philosophy. The story I have told in the foregoing pages can be retold as a story of some behaviours on the part of reason being elevated above others in the formation of an idea of what constitutes reason’s autonomy and its relationship with the natural order. When the story is retold in this form, it becomes easier to see a serious problem with modernity’s position. The attempt to distinguish among reason’s behaviours requires a complex process of judgment. By what capacity is such judgment exercised? The obvious answer is that it is only reason itself which is capable of making such judgments. This means that in the process of determining what constitutes reason’s naturalness and autonomy, reason must pass judgment on itself by distinguishing among its various possible behaviours. But how could any such judgment be justified? On what basis would reason be able to single out some of its own activities, such as those involved in mathematics, as paradigmatic of its proper relationship with the natural order, while designating others, such as the poetic and the reports in the first two chapters of this book, as inferior by comparison? Reason would seem to be faced here with two equally unsatisfactory alternatives. On the one hand, it can make an ad hoc declaration of preference for particular functions of reason, but this will beg the question of which such functions should enjoy that status. On the other hand, it can try to justify its choice. Such justification, however, must appeal to some function of reason other than those being defended in order not to beg the question. Con-

102

Philosophy

fidence in that other function will then require justification, and so on. Consider how the problem surfaces in the following recent comments by Nicholas Humphrey. I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjurer and why is s/he doing it? The conjurer is natural selection and that purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we place on our own and others’ lives. If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed, ‘mysterian’ philosophers – from Colin McGinn to the Pope – who bow down before the apparent miracle and declare that it’s impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in the material brain, are responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe … The Catch-22 is that, just to the extent that Nature has succeeded in putting consciousness beyond the reach of rational explanation, she must have undermined the very possibility of showing that this is what she’s done. But nothing’s perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem – and even be – impossible for us to explain how a brain process could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give rise to the impression of having this quality.16 It is indispensable to the effectiveness of such an evolutionary process, on Humphrey’s version of it, that reason be unable to recognize the illusory character of its beliefs in this respect. In other words, reason is functioning properly, on such a view, only so long as it remains deceived. The proper evolutionary functioning of reason, in this connection at least, requires that reason malfunction from the point of view of truth. If there should come a time when reason recognizes such deception for what it is – if it should stumble upon what actually is the truth – the result would be a decrease

Modern Philosophy

103

in self-valuing and the valuing of others, accompanied by socially destructive effects. Alas, in Humphrey’s story, reason has malfunctioned in exactly this way; it has stumbled upon the truth. One function of reason has exposed a previously hidden flaw in another function. Reason, while theorizing about neurological evolution, has come to the realization that the appearance, to other activities of reason, of a mysterious complexity on the part of consciousness is an illusion. It has also supposedly come to understand the evolutionary purpose of that illusion. Regardless of how reason has reached this conclusion, on Humphrey’s account, it has come to recognize the deficiencies of other of its behaviours. In arriving at this new purported truth, reason has come to understand that its previous activity was flawed, for its proper evolutionary function would have been to sustain ignorance about itself in this respect. This malfunction has been made possible by what Humphrey calls a loophole in the otherwise effective, self-deceptive, evolutionary development of reason. Oh well, he responds stoically, nothing is perfect. If one function of reason has malfunctioned by discovering a truth hidden from another function, we will simply have to live with the consequences. But might there not also be as-yet undiscovered flaws in the activities of reason which have yielded this result? The conclusion at which Humphrey arrives is presented by him as a truth; consciousness is not mysteriously complex after all. The widely held belief that it is complex, therefore, he proposes, should now be recognized as an untrustworthy deliverance of one form of reasoning. But how would one know that the operations of reason which have led him to characterize present conclusions as the truth are not also sources of deception? What is it about the activity of reason in the production of current evolutionary theory which allows for it to be deemed trustworthy without a defense based upon yet some other activity? Any position deployed in response to this challenge will itself also then need to be justified, and so on and so on. The problem with trying to identify some other reliably natural and autonomous function of reason within such terms of refer-

104

Philosophy

ence, in other words, is that it triggers an infinite regress of justifications – or an ad hoc declaration of one form as superior, which begs the question – both of which end up in a radical skepticism. One either presupposes, without defense, that a chosen activity of reason will be deemed reliable or one seeks justification for that activity on the basis of another activity, thereby triggering the regress. Where, then, is one to turn? If evolution has somehow brought it about that the proper functioning of reason requires a malfunction of reason from the point of view of truth, how is one to know, in connection with any function of reason which generates a truth claim, whether or not that claim involves yet another illusion? This will be the case with all attempts by reason to determine what constitutes its own naturalness and autonomy unless it seeks refuge in begging the question. The emergence of modern thought contributes nothing substantial to dealing with this challenge, for that challenge is beyond the methodological scope of the sciences and unresolvable by the processes of formal argumentation which contemporary philosophy so prizes. In the next chapter, I will propose a way to circumvent this apparent impasse which also provides a significant place for the reports of gratuity excluded presently from philosophy.

5 The Return to Life

In the first chapter of this book I provided reports by philosophers which record spontaneous behaviours on the part of reason in response to the fact that there is a world rather than nothing at all. These behaviours are quite different from normal causal inquisitiveness and analysis. Those who report them adopt the metaphorical language of “gift” and “miracle” – which I have placed under the heading of gratuity – to describe whatever it is they have encountered. The use of such language is clearly intended to designate not just subjective reactions to existence, which are also described with appropriate language, but to designate something about existence itself. Being “opens itself to us as a gift,”1 as William James once put it. The reports also portray a persistent and tenacious disposition by reason to seek the intelligibility of such gratuity even after traditional philosophical analyses have run their course: “I still feel I want to go on asking the question,”2 Smart says, following his extensive critique of causal approaches. Such spontaneous and persistent reactions have a long historical pedigree, as have traditions about charis and gift. The vocabulary of these reports, which imputes some kind of extraordinary significance to existence, collides head-on with modernity’s abandonment of the metaphor of nature as a book, and the attendant abandonment of belief that nature possesses any inherent meaning or significance. Contrary to Hugh of St Victor’s caution that an inherent meaning is to be sought in things, not

106

Philosophy

simply imputed to them by human invention, modernity often sees such meaning precisely as an invention and considers its expression as belonging to the domains of poetry and the arts. It is worth revisiting, in this connection, Peter Harrison’s observation that, in the transition to modernity, natural objects are stripped of their intrinsic meanings, and even their qualities and essences have gone. In the physics of Descartes and Newton, simple natural objects are denuded of all but basic quantitative properties. In this new language of nature, syntax has triumphed over semantics. Henceforth the science of nature will deal with the mathematical or classificatory rules which govern the relations between natural objects. The meaning of the things of nature will survive only in those vestigial, figurative expressions which are now the sole preserve of the poets. The two books, which were once of necessity read in unison and assigned meanings according to a single universal hermeneutic, now take separate paths.3 On what basis, I asked in the previous chapter, can the discrimination among reason’s activities by reason itself be executed without being forced into either an infinite regress of justifications or into begging the question? Notwithstanding modern philosophy’s appetite for formal argument, there cannot be a satisfactory argumentative response to this challenge, for any argument relies upon the rational capacities involved in the production of it, which would then need to be justified. Nor can there be any religious strategy, such as René Descartes’ appeal to God as a guarantor of the reliability of the rational capacities created by such a God, for this would require accepting, without adequate justification, the trustworthiness of reason’s convictions about the existence and goodness of such a God. It is not surprising, then, to find much modern philosophy labouring in the shadow of deep scepticism. The peculiar thing about such scepticism is that it rarely carries the day outside the academic community, or even among academics themselves when they step outside that community. To be

The Return to Life

107

sure, the skilful arguments of philosophers are often forceful and persuasive. In the end, however, they are often unable to match the force and persuasiveness of the deliverances of reason in practice when these conflict with argument and theory. No one is actually capable of Cartesian doubt about existing, and there is something to be said for Thomas Reid’s judgment that arguing with someone who treats such doubt as an actual possibility is as useless as arguing with a person who thinks she is made of glass.4 In the seminar room I can raise doubts about beliefs arising from sensation, but outside the seminar room, if I get caught in a thunderstorm, reason generates beliefs about the weather spontaneously, regardless of whatever theoretical doubts I may have had. In my office I may sometimes have philosophical doubts about human freedom. Upon leaving the office, however, reason irresistibly generates belief in such freedom as I go about the daily business of child-rearing, teaching, and other forms of activity which require an evaluation of people presupposing their capacity for responsible action. While I sometimes grapple philosophically with the relationship between knower and world, reason always gives rise to beliefs in the existence of a world independent of me as I walk home from the office – as even David Hume himself would agree. Reason also exhibits no less tenacious and consistent a propensity, in practice, for metaphysical inquisitiveness, especially about why there is something rather than nothing, a question characterized in the introduction to this book as one which refuses to go away. Belief arising in the context of such day-to-day life “sticks fast,” as Reid puts it, “and the greatest skeptic finds that he must yield to it in his practice, while he wages war with it in speculation.”5 This contrast between the authority of practice and the authority of speculation is central to the position I am proposing. The adoption by most philosophy of the field of speculative battle as the point of departure for its work, and a corresponding demand that even the deliverances of reason in practice be justified theoretically, plunges philosophy into a loop of endless and inconclusive theorizing. The subordination to theoretical supervision of the universality, spontaneity, and recalcitrance of reason’s actual

108

Philosophy

behaviours in connection with metaphysical inquisitiveness and with beliefs about freedom and an independent world is what results from such a point of departure. One wonders whether this loop has much to do with what Socrates had in mind when encouraging a reflective life. The context in which the authority of theory tends most readily to dominate the authority of practice is not experience in its concrete occurrence but a context created by the intellectual reconstructions of such experience after the fact. The frequent conflicts between the authority of theory and the authority of concrete experience, however, raises questions about whether such reconstructions are able to accurately replicate reason’s actual behaviour in its living context. It can be argued, of course, that a subjection of reason’s actual behaviours to theoretical adjudication is always legitimate, because even the authoritativeness of its practice does not preclude the possibility of cognitive deficiencies too deep to be recognized. Hume certainly thought so, and even Reid agreed with him about this. Reid also admitted that he could not come up with justifications sufficient to meet the challenges of his critics in the case of the aforementioned sorts of consistent and involuntary beliefs, which he gathered together under the heading of First Principles. As philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have argued, however, at some point inferential justification must come to an end, and this applies as much to a determination, by philosophy, of where philosophy itself should begin, as it does to anything else. Descartes sets the tone for much modern philosophy when he generalizes from the observation that reason sometimes gives rise to false beliefs to the conclusion that all beliefs should be treated as unreliable. Escape from scepticism under such circumstances requires the production of criteria on the basis of which reason can recognize when it is being deceived. Nobody accepts the methodological criteria which Descartes put in place in response to this need. His sweeping scepticism, however, has remained widely influential. There is nothing in the actual behaviour of reason in practice which would justify Descartes’ broad generalizations about its fal-

The Return to Life

109

libility. On a day-to-day basis, the majority of beliefs generated by the actual behaviours of reason are vindicated in practice. This would suggest that the authority they acquire through such vindication be accorded a larger role in philosophy than is presently the case. I am proposing this position, but am not doing so by means of a theory or argument. To do so would require acquiescing implicitly in the privileging of theory as a point of departure for doing philosophy and would trigger demands for justification which would never be satisfied. Rather, I am pointing in the direction of reason’s actual behaviours, in the context of a relationship with the world informed by action, which are in fact treated as authoritative by most of us most of the time. I am proposing, in other words, a redirection of attention toward certain features of actual experience which possess a genuine authority in day-to-day life, by contrast with philosophical theories based upon the retrospective reconstructions of such experience. At one level, the authoritativeness of the behaviours of reason toward which I am gesturing is observable in a way once nicely described by Reid: “If a man pretends to be a skeptic with regard to the informations of sense, and yet prudently keeps out of harm’s way as other men do, he must excuse my suspicion, that he either acts the hypocrite, or imposes upon himself. For, if the scale of his belief were so evenly poised as to lean no more to one side than to the contrary, it is impossible that his actions could be directed by any rules of common prudence.”6 At another level, the basis of such authoritativeness is accessible only in one’s own actual experience as such experience is transpiring. My gesturing toward that experience rather than theorizing or arguing about it is powerless to persuade anyone to consult it. The force of argument and theory which I surrender with such a strategy, however, I surrender in anticipation that the authoritativeness of the actual behaviours of reason encountered in their living context will reveal their credentials to being accorded a greater authority within philosophy than is customarily the case. My directing of attention to certain behaviours of reason in actual practices has a certain kinship, I believe, with what Reid was dri-

110

Philosophy

ving at in responding to his critics’ demands for justification even of First Principles. Beliefs such as those populating the class of First Principles, he replied, “require to be handled in a way peculiar to themselves. Their evidence is not demonstrative, but intuitive. They require not proof, but to be placed in a proper point of view.”7 Such language about intuition and points of view in response to calls for justification never gets far in philosophy, and it has certainly not won Reid a status in the discipline comparable to Hume’s. But Reid was not offering these words to satisfy demands for justification, which he was convinced were generated by starting philosophy in the wrong place. His words, rather, were intended to encourage an alternative point of departure altogether, and it is this which he characterizes in terms of intuition and points of view. I too am proposing an alternative starting point, which involves giving to behaviours of reason widely treated authoritatively in practice a greater authority within the discipline. This has far-reaching implications in connection with the reports I recorded earlier in this book, for they represent behaviours of reason which have exhibited great longevity and breadth of occurrence. Of course, reason does not always behave with the sorts of patterns found in connection with beliefs such as those populating the class of Reid’s First Principles. Its activities are often much messier than this – far from what William James liked sarcastically to call the “clean-shaven” theories in philosophy – although such messiness exhibits certain patterns as well. The actual engagement of the world involving such activities is more conceptually creative, adventurous, and experimental than the picture one gets in much epistemology. The inquisitive impulses involved display unsettling and disturbing discontent more often than intellectual clarity. Those impulses often lead to conceptual fumbling prone to excessive discouragement or optimism requiring the intervention of volition. Unsteady experimentation with conceptual devices available culturally can be hit and miss, and the goals of inquiry are rarely envisioned with precision. The result of such spontaneous behaviours by reason may be expressed in many different kinds of language, figurative as well as literal.

The Return to Life

111

So many and so varied are the intellectual behaviours involved, and so far do they fall short of having their theoretical trustworthiness secured in advance, that a consistent application of demands for their justification in advance would cripple the life of reason not only outside the academy but within it as well. Reason’s endeavours in the academy require a broad range of creative and sometimes chaotic behaviours. The development of conceptual models, the formation of hypotheses, sustained trust in hypotheses far in advance of demonstrating their trustworthiness, personal tenacity in the pursuit of intellectual possibilities, and much else, are indispensable elements of intellectual life across disciplines, pretences to the contrary notwithstanding. Overall, then, I am gesturing toward a wide range of behaviours exhibited consistently and perennially by reason, behaviours which are accorded authority in everyday life, including, in some instances, authority over conflicting theory. They possess such authority for reasons that immediate acquaintance with one’s own experience, I am anticipating, will make known. Modernity’s narrowing of its understanding of the naturalness and autonomy of reason to privilege theory and abstraction has not taken the full measure of such authority, in great part, because the intellectual reconstruction of such experience after the fact does not replicate it. What I have sketched out here in broad terms finds strong, detailed support in the Radical Empiricism of William James. Radical Empiricism is committed above all to a starting point for philosophy in the human being as a living organism already immersed in an ecosystem requiring adaptation at every turn. It begins, in other words, with a relationship between the entire organism and its surroundings, not with a theorizing and analysing mind. Mind is just one of many capacities, along with sensation, memory, opposable thumbs, and others, working together in the organism’s aspirations after a fruitful rapport with the world. From this process are distilled lessons about the successes and failures of relating to the world, and such lessons come to inform not only the individual’s acquisition of maturity but a cultural repository of wisdom as well. Given the involve-

112

Philosophy

ment of these many elements in an enormously complex process of belief formation, including the unique circumstances which shape the experience of each individual, we often have no idea where individual beliefs actually come from or precisely how reason functions. Radical Empiricism holds that this fact should have a major impact upon how reason’s naturalness and autonomy are understood, and how philosophy should understand itself and proceed. The single most important element of Radical Empiricism, in this respect, is its amplification of a distinction between experience in its immediate occurrence, involving all the foregoing elements, and the very different character exhibited by experience when it is subject, retrospectively, to philosophical reconstruction and analysis. It is the former, immediate experience, which provides the context for virtually all actual operations of reason. James called his position a Radical Empiricism in order to underscore this point, and to distinguish it from empiricisms which are not committed to this distinction. Principal among these other empiricisms is the British variety which treats experience as an aggregation of simple elements which, when related to one another by the mind in various ways, yields ever greater complexity. It is not surprising to find confidence among philosophers of this view that such a process of aggregation can be reversed analytically for the purpose of scrutinizing its component parts and encouraging detachment from those judged to be less deserving. Radical Empiricism is deeply opposed to this view. Finding extensive support not only in philosophical argument but also in empirical psychology, particularly in James’s Principles of Psychology, it demonstrates that immediate experience, even in its most elementary and basic forms, is already an enormously complex constellation of interrelated elements. Its singular character at any one time is constituted not only by relata, which normally attract most philosophical attention, but also by a sea of relations among such relata which receive little or no attention. Those relations are most often neglected by analysis because they are deeply resistant to being singled out and stabilized as objects of scrutiny. It is extremely difficult, James observes, to

The Return to Life

113

see the transitive parts of immediate experience for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait for the conclusion to be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching a feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to produce these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno’s treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply. The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought’s stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream.8 What is especially important about immediate experience in this respect is the simultaneity and mutuality with which such

114

Philosophy

relations bring about a confluence of physical, affective, aesthetic, moral, sensational, cognitive, and many other influences which together constitute its character at any one time. The confluence of individual circumstances, notwithstanding certain commonalities in human experience, gives rise to a certain unique thickness in each encounter with the world. While everyone wishes to be spoken to intelligibly by the world, therefore, James observes, not everyone wants to be spoken to in exactly the same way. In this complexity and thickness, actual experience bears almost no resemblance to the portrayal of it by John Locke and David Hume as an atomistic assembly of discrete elements. It is better represented, rather, by the metaphor of an orchestra. While it is true that each individual instrument and player in an orchestra is responsible for a distinctive and disciplined contribution to a performance, it is the ensemble that is responsible for the music. James’s determination to include in philosophy the complexity of actual experience was met with sustained resistance by his critics, and such inclusion continues to be resisted in philosophy today. No aspect of the discipline better exemplifies its preferences in this respect than the ubiquitous epistemological formula: “S knows that p.” “Who is S?” Lorraine Code once asked9 – a daring question in the subculture of philosophy, where almost everyone is committed to the belief that S does not have a specific identity, is not supposed to have an identity, and functions in a way precisely designed to exclude any physiological, social, or personal characteristics. Its purpose is to be a featureless abstraction. But it is not a featureless abstraction at all, Code protests. Even if it has no explicit attributes, it has many implicit ones which it receives from the contexts within which the formula is used. In many such contexts, S turns out to be a solitary individual. It is selfsufficient. It has the social and educational attributes of a white, middle-class, adult male. Its perceptual experience is more important than other forms of its experience, on the assumption that perceptual experience is uniform among all S’s. It has no intellectual context, notwithstanding the obvious fact that every actual intellectual achievement, from Thales to a struggling undergraduate, is much in debt to the intellectual achievements of others. In fact,

The Return to Life

115

then, S has many distinctive characteristics to which philosophers, Code contends, simply choose to turn a blind eye. Why would philosophers do this? They do it, Code contends, because the inclusion of the details and particularities of the actual life of reason impedes the development of theory and pushes philosophy toward a relativism which many philosophers are keen to avoid. But relativism comes in many different forms, she responds, which have different effects upon philosophy. Concerns about relativism should be subordinated to an appreciation of these effects and the different challenges made by them. Such a way of proceeding would lead to a clearer recognition of the fact, as James would put it, that much of the time reason is able to offer only an intuition, a feeling of which direction to take, “a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather than another.”10 This requires a willingness on the part of the individual, and sometimes the community, to adopt beliefs and undertake actions upon such impulses, even though they may not yet be justified. Much of lived life, in other words, is a gamble. This means that traits of character such as courage or risk-aversion cannot be separated from reason’s actual behaviour as it deliberates about whether or not to acquiesce to vague intellectual impulses. Moreover, the action demanded in real life, as seen in chapter 3, requires a domination of consciousness by a relatively simple intellectual focus. The inherent complexity of immediate experience even in its most elementary forms requires, therefore, that such experience be scaled back, not built up out of simple parts, in order to acquire such a focal point. This calls, in turn, for volitional involvement as well as purpose, intention, interest, culture, and many subjective elements whose contribution to immediate experience was described in chapter 3. What reason ends up singling out and attending to even in sensation is what interests it. Everything else is subject to inattention. Such inattention, however, is not at all the same thing as what is thought of today as detachment. Elements of immediate experience from which attention is temporarily diverted continue to have an influence even if it is not noticed.

116

Philosophy

These characteristics of reason’s actual behaviour extend into the academic world as well. None of the great accomplishments in the history of science or scholarship, James observes, would have taken place without subjective traits of character such as tolerance for risk and confidence in vague ideas. So obvious is this, thought James, that he marvelled at how widely it is ignored in academia’s persistent association of the naturalness and autonomy of reason with detachment. It is astonishing, he once remarked, that professional philosophers carry out their work as if subjective influences had been – or could ever be – expunged entirely from reason’s behaviour. James was well aware that the central role in his philosophy of such complexity bothered his contemporaries, as it still bothers many philosophers today. The world appears unacceptably vulnerable, under such conditions, to being given whatever identity and meanings human beings may arbitrarily and self-interestedly wish to give it – to be a suitcase without a name, a dog without a tag, as James once described it. He knew that such concerns were deepened by his close association of truth with utility, and his controversial Will to Believe. Those concerns, however, he responded often, underestimate the independent role played in Radical Empiricism by the world, through action, in the operations of reason. This underestimation is a function of most philosophy beginning its work with mind rather than with a relationship between the mind and world already informed by action. Within such actual relationships, the world exercises an extensive recalcitrant effect upon thought. In this respect James stands with Reid, who frequently chided philosophers for developing theoretical positions that could not be reconciled with lived life. So confident is James about the world’s recalcitrant influence upon human conceptual creativity and belief that he once even accepts his opponents’ correspondence theory of truth as agreement between ideas and reality.11 But where, he then asks, does such a theory come from in the first place if not from the history of practical successes and failures in relationships with the world based upon particular conceptual possibilities? In these relationships, the world and the knower have each

The Return to Life

117

made contributions which are constrained by the other. Over time, all conceptual possibilities are eventually put to the test, James argues repeatedly. Intellectual inventiveness is always sooner or later hedged in by perception, by demands for intellectual coherence, by common sense and cultural pressure, by linguistic consistency, by action, and more. All beliefs require direct verification somewhere, at some point, without which the entire system of belief would collapse like a bankrupt economy. These curbs on human creativity and self-interest are the forms in which the world can be seen having its say, although they may not always be recognized as such immediately. James’s essay “Pragmatism and Common Sense” spells out the historical and communitarian dimensions of his thought in this respect. Action continually brings the agent up against a world which sometimes resists certain ways of thinking and believing about it, and sometimes proves to be malleable and receptive. Either way, in action – pragma – the world is encountered as something which must constantly be taken into account. The fact that not every individual takes account of it in the same way does not speak against the presence of such independent influence by the world. Nor does the fact that such influence is often ignored. It speaks, rather, for the world’s receptivity to conceptual pluralism. Working against modernity’s abandonment of the metaphor of nature as a book, Radical Empiricism sees in these relationships between the knower and world an encounter with meanings which do not originate entirely with the knower. Because the world’s influence upon conceptual development is mediated through experience in its immediacy, it cannot be readily singled out in the interests of quelling philosophers’ perennial theoretical fears about the possible intrusion of distorting influences. It is no less real on that account, however. The impossibility of disassembling immediate experience in order to isolate and display a given does not justify the conclusion that no such given exists. On the contrary, the concrete successes and failures of action attest vividly to the constant presence and influence of a nonhuman element. For philosophers to keep demanding a segregation of the respective roles played by world and knower, responds

118

Philosophy

James, is like demanding an identification of which leg is more essential in walking or which bank of a river is most important to its flow. In the context of Radical Empiricism, it is much more difficult to sustain modernity’s abandonment of the metaphor of nature as a book with a story of its own to tell, albeit through the stories that human beings creatively develop about it. This context also opens the door to reports about the gratuity of existence which are worded clearly to suggest that this is part of the story that existence has to tell about itself. Although immediate experience, from its very inception, is already so complex that it is impossible analytically and retrospectively to disentangle the exact contribution of all the influences that constitute it, this does not mean that analytic activity has no good purpose or that theoretical philosophical reflection upon it is of no value. James was, after all, one of the premier empirical psychologists of his time, a physician and professor of physiology as well as a philosopher. It was not analysis of which he was critical but the chronic forgetfulness by the scholarly classes about the limitations of analysis. Analysis, like a still photo or slow-motion replay of an athletic event, undoubtedly contributes to a deeper appreciation of some details which might otherwise escape notice. It does so, however, at the expense of failing to represent the larger context in which such details occur. The attempt to extricate reason’s operations from the context of immediate experience for the purpose of analysis, then, may sometimes be warranted but such attempts must be accompanied by a vigilant recognition of its limitations. James eventually realized how much the centrality of immediate experience and action in Radical Empiricism would marginalize his philosophy. Given the indebtedness of actual experience at any one time to an incalculably complex set of active interrelationships, such experience cannot be recaptured retrospectively and described accurately in a literal way. It can, however, be known directly and intuitively, and then shared indirectly. The challenge of such sharing lies in the manner of communicating – a pointing toward, a gesturing in the direction of – a form of communication at which the arts excel. Whether in the visual, musical, dramatic, or

The Return to Life

119

literary arts it is the deliberate distortion of the literal and the conventional which frequently proves effective in gesturing toward that which escapes literal description, and it is in this light that James’s frequent use of metaphorical and figurative language should be understood. Such language is not the manifestation of philosophical imprecision and lack of rigour that it is frequently accused of being by professional philosophers. It represents, rather, a deliberate creative manipulation of concepts at the service of immediate experience. On one occasion, near the end of an address about the continuity of immediate experience, James pauses and admits that he knows he has been taxing his listeners with metaphors. What he has been trying to do with such a use of language, he explains, is to get at “the mere that of life.”12 This is the most difficult of tasks, he says, for while language functions well for many purposes, representation of the “that” of life, as this makes itself known in immediate experience, is not one of them. The best he can do, he says, is to distort language like a poet in order to point toward what he is trying to talk about. If an audience is willing to respond sympathetically to such efforts and seek out in their own immediate experience that to which such language points, progress is possible. Without such reciprocation, however, nothing is going to happen. James confesses to having denied such cooperation to others in years past. It was his encounter with Bergson, he reports, which finally moved him to abandon such resistance and to make a radical change in his understanding of philosophy itself. This required him to accept that conventional philosophy’s very method is profoundly limited in ways that would call upon him to adopt a different approach entirely. He knew he would not be able to make the case for such a drastic change by means of formal argumentation, for that would simply smuggle in the back door of Radical Empiricism the very methodological deficiencies that he had thrown out the front door. He could no more critique mainline philosophy on its own terms than Bergson could demonstrate analytically the merits of intuition, or Reid could justify inferentially his First Principles. Engagement with immediate experience can-

120

Philosophy

not be executed with the normal analytic tools of philosophy because the attempt to capture immediate experience as an object of analysis always ends up abridging it to the point that its original character is lost. This is why so many people do not like philosophy, James proposes. The human being can feel subjectively the full force of immediate experience, and will shun intellectual abstractions which purport to represent that fullness but do not in fact do so. The insights provided by immediate experience are often known only in the bone and the marrow, as James puts it, and few people will exchange these insights for the abstract substitutes offered up by the academy. It is no coincidence that James spent many years studying to be an artist, and it is also no surprise that one finds him criticizing philosophical literature for its lack of creativity and imagination. Philosophy must resemble poetry and art when engaging immediate experience, he argues repeatedly, proceeding the way great artists have proceeded. In spite of the limitations of their efforts, such poets and artists have earned a place in history for the services they have rendered. Their work is preserved from generation to generation on account of the ingeniously creative ways in which they have drawn attention to features of experience which would otherwise have remained inaccessible and unshared. This interpenetration of the philosophical and the poetic, however, defies modernity’s driving of the two apart, to the detriment of the latter. The accommodation by Radical Empiricism of the impulse of reason to gesture beyond itself with the use of figurative language is what opens the door to the inclusion of religiosity in philosophy, in opposition to scholarly calls for detachment from it. Real religiosity, argues James in his famous The Will to Believe, is not about modern philosophical questions concerning whether theistic propositions are or can be justified, and The Will to Believe is certainly no attempt to respond to such an approach by sponsoring assent based upon emotion and volition. The focus of that essay, rather, is “the actual psychology of human opinion,”13 especially in connection with religion. Religious belief involves a distinctive spontaneous propensity on the part of reason, James argues, and

The Return to Life

121

the real philosophical question about religion has to do with how to respond to that propensity. James characterizes such a propensity as near-universal among human beings, and as emanating from their very nature. It involves a vague sense that the world itself invites a religious response and involves, as well, an intuitive inclination to respond to that invitation in kind. This inclination takes the form of an impulse to understand the world as though there were a “more” to it than appears to be the case. It is accompanied by a persistent conviction that one will be able to enter into a relationship with that “more” only through obedience to the impulse. Such obedience, in other words, will lead to intellectual insight which would otherwise remain inaccessible, and as often as not will be described figuratively. James argues for a particular epistemic relationship between present and future in this connection. He provides two analogies for that relationship, the first being weaker than the second. The first looks to the indispensability, sometimes, of adopting beliefs in the present in order to bring about states of affairs in the future, the truth about which can only be known once they are brought about. James uses the example of an individual having to believe, in the present, that the future may give rise to a fruitful relationship with another person. The justification of a present belief about that future state, in other words, is dependent upon the creation of the future state. The second analogy is with the scientist who cannot proceed without an investment of trust in a hypothesis which anticipates justification in the future. In this second analogy the state of affairs and the truth about it already exist. What does not yet exist are the conditions for fully grasping that truth. The second analogy better represents the relationship between present and future in the experience at the centre of James’s treatment of religion. The truth involved already exists. Action in the present is not required in order to bring it about. The fully adequate grasp of that truth, however, does not already exist. Action in the present is required in order to bring about that grasp. This cognitive relationship between present and future is central to the

122

Philosophy

character of the religious experience. That experience takes the form of a peculiar intuition, a hunch not only that there is a “more” to the world than most often appears to be the case, but also that a relationship with the world informed by that intuition will position one, in the future, to discover evidence justifying the decision to have adopted such a relationship in the first place. His position in this respect is reminiscent of Ian Crombie’s depiction of natural theology as being tasked not with providing argumentative foundations for theism but with pointing in the direction of, and making a placeholder in philosophy for, a goal toward which reason already exhibits a spontaneous propensity but about which it remains as yet unclear. The main religious question for philosophy according to Radical Empiricism, then, is this: How should one react to that impulse, and to the many philosophical and religious reports of those who have acquiesced in it? It is here that issues about volition make their appearance in The Will to Believe. Volition has nothing to do with making a decision to believe or not to believe theistic propositions in the absence of sufficient justification, much less to do so on the basis of emotion. Volition cannot bring about belief in any domain. Can we will ourselves to believe that Abraham Lincoln never existed, James asked rhetorically, or believe, when sick in bed, that we are actually healthy and vigorous? Can we believe that two one-dollar bills are worth $100? So too with theistic propositions. All the volition in the world cannot create assent out of whole cloth. Volition exerts its influence more subtly in an often-unrecognized openness or resistance toward particular ideas and intellectual impulses, including the religious impulse. This is what “liveness” is about in James’s essay. One form commonly taken by such resistance can be seen in the work of W.K. Clifford, to which The Will to Believe is responding. Why would one even consider trusting such an intellectual impulse, Clifford would ask, about whose origins even James admits little is known? Why, James would respond, would one consider trusting most intellectual impulses, for their origins are no less obscure and confused than the reli-

The Return to Life

123

gious one? Beliefs emanate from formation processes so complex, jumbled, and confused, James argues, that they could be plausibly characterized as pathological. But this does not matter to the genuine empiricist, because the origins of ideas are of no account in empiricism. The worthiness of a particular conceptual possibility has nothing to do with its origins. It has to do with the promise of the intellectual relationship with the world to which it leads, not the origins from which it comes. It is irrelevant whether the religious impulse is the issuance of a genuine sensus divinitatis, a hunch, a guess, the subconscious, an intuition, or any number of other possible sources. Even if one is not an empiricist, James would add, it is notable that the skeptical refusal to acquiesce to a particular idea on the basis of its theoretically unauthenticated origins, and in the name of allegiance to reason’s naturalness and autonomy, is usually indebted to an underlying emotion – fear of error – in contravention of the skeptic’s usual commitment to detachment from emotion. As for such detachment itself, it was James’s judgment, as a working scientist, that future generations would come to see it as representing an untenably naïve stage in modernity’s gradual development of a genuinely scientific culture. Those generations would recognize in the commitment to such detachment a failure of their predecessors to see what James calls the full fact of all human experience, scientific or otherwise – the presence in it not only of the object of attention but also of the entire field of conscious awareness within which that object stands. That field includes a horizon of personal and cultural influences, an indirect consciousness of self, and the many other elements at work mutually in immediate experience, as described in chapter 3. There is no way of extricating any object of inquiry entirely from this array of influences always present in immediate experience. As a physician, for example, James knows that he understands more about the physiology of intoxication and addiction than most addicts. He also acknowledges, however, that they understand far better than he, by virtue of their participation in that form of life, the full fact of the phenomenon. Likewise, scholars of religion may

124

Philosophy

sometimes have a better theoretical grasp of the doctrines and beliefs of particular traditions than those who adhere to those traditions, but they do not understand such traditions as deeply as those participating in them. The fact that modernity decided to celebrate detachment from actual forms of life as paradigmatic of the natural and autonomous functioning of reason amazed James. It seemed to him analogous to serving diners a picture of food from the menu in lieu of the food itself. In the end, the Jamesian engagement of religion and its inclusion in philosophy stand far outside the main line of the modern preoccupation with propositions, justification, and detachment. Such engagement is focused upon what he claims is an observable impulse among human beings to respond religiously to the world. The philosophical question raised by this asks what response to that impulse is appropriate. In James’s day, as in our own, many philosophers would not even consider trusting and acting upon such an impulse, assuming it exists, given the apparent room it leaves for error and the intrusion of wishful thinking. Surely, they would say, Clifford is right to counsel sceptical restraint until it is determined whether the trustworthiness of that propensity can be vindicated argumentatively and evidentially. Crombie can have his placeholders, Anthony Flew once said to him, but argumentative justification for the acceptance of what those placeholders represent is what really counts. Crombie’s placeholders, Flew contended, simply signify a philosophical possibility that would likely have been conceded in advance anyway, but is unlikely ever to be vindicated argumentatively – and such argument is what philosophy is all about.14 But this a priori scepticism built upon a methodological commitment to detachment from subjective and religious influence is unique to modernity and, Radical Empiricism would respond, flies in the face of the full fact of all human experience, which is irreducibly subjective and religious as well as conceptual. My position in this chapter and my invocation of James in support of it represent a premodern vein in philosophy which understood the limits of theory, the creativity of language in gesturing

The Return to Life

125

beyond such limits, and the preservation of a place both in philosophy and in personal life for that which lies beyond our present grasp. Today, as David Burrell puts it, what seems to defeat philosophers is the practice of ‘Socratic unknowing.’ This practice of Plato’s Socrates is linked with displaying a mode of discourse beyond the theoretical (Plato’s dianoia), which Plato called ‘dialectic’ and usually articulated in a mythic manner. What philosophical discourse could not realize had to be displayed in another idiom, gesturing toward something which language could only intimate … So the virtues which Socrates’ interlocutors had to develop would have prepared them to respect the limits of the univocal discourse which theory (dianoia) requires, yet do so in such a way as to recognize that the very élan of their inquiry pointed beyond such language. So philosophical dialogue, as exercised by Socrates, represents a mode of doing philosophy which is also a spiritual exercise, and which calls forth from its participants a palpable sense of ‘something more,’ something toward which inquiry is directed and which can be said to guide it to the outcomes which it can attain. Plato called this lure ‘the Good,’ and the tradition which traced itself to Plato demanded of its adherents a way of living in relation to that Good which could not but affect the way in which they carried out intellectual inquiry. Medieval philosophers were often themselves participants in a vowed community life which made similar demands on them.15 The idea that allegiance to the naturalness and autonomy of reason is exemplified by a way of living involving spiritual exercise and even participation in a vowed community is long gone, eclipsed by the modern allegiance to a methodological rather than ascetical detachment from subjective and other such influences. Much analytic philosophy now is primarily about propositions and the assessment of their entitlement to assent through a process of formal analysis. As such, it leaves little room for a metaphysical hori-

126

Philosophy

zon represented by Socratic unknowing. Nor does it leave room for the reports by Richard Taylor, J.J.C. Smart, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Derek Parfitt, and the poetic and religious traditions of charis. Nor does it leave room for the tenacious and perennial impulse on the part of natural reason, generation after generation, to inquire further into what it is about the world which might explain the unique response reported by the aforementioned philosopher and by participants in religious traditions. Nor does it leave room for reports that when reason has undertaken the further inquiry it feels compelled to make, it encounters something which Wittgenstein describes as miraculous, Parfitt describes as breathtaking, and James describes as pure gift.16 The gratuity of existence may have the character of a brute fact, James says, but that fact is something “to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave.”17 Such a reaction does not, for James, represent the imputation to existence of meanings human beings might wish it to have. Rather, “wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing of it will continue to be an ingredient best suited to represent the philosophic industry of the race.”18 This sentiment is not prominent in much contemporary philosophy, however. Many philosophers would say that such fuzzy language has no place in the discipline, and that it is the job of philosophy to vet these kinds of reports before placing confidence in them. But this assumes that there are activities of reason which have already secured justified inclusion in an understanding of its naturalness and autonomy which can be relied upon to support that scepticism. I have proposed that there is no way of justifying such scepticism. In practice, reason will place its natural and autonomous behaviours on display in ways I have described earlier. A refusal to embed such behaviours deeply in the understanding of reason’s naturalness and autonomy requires clear justification, and I see no prospect for producing such justification. In the end, my proposal relies upon what James once referred to as the “return to life.” By this he meant the return to experience in

The Return to Life

127

its immediacy, including the spontaneous behaviours by reason in the context of living which have long enjoyed de facto authority. Sometimes, as in the case of Reid’s First Principles, these will generate consistent patterns of belief. Sometimes they will generate nuances and shades of meaning which differ from individual to individual. This variation among individuals is normal and inevitable, given the ways in which enculturation and language acquisition inform the encounter with the world. Language acquisition always occurs in concrete contexts which leave distinctive stamps upon individuals’ understandings. To the artist who has been working with colour for decades, red means something far more than it means to the general public. The uniformity of public meanings renders them ill-suited to communicating such nuances. For this reason, James declares, “the return to life can’t come about by talking.”19 It can only be articulated metaphorically: that is, in a way which invites others to seek in their own experience what is being described. The unwillingness to consult one’s own experience in this way constitutes an insuperable obstacle. The return to life involves a form of engaging the world in which the problems that beset modern philosophy regarding knower and world, self, freedom, and so forth, no longer exert the same influence, for in immediate experience the endless distinctions, divisions, separations, and other characteristics of analytic language disappear. I cannot illustrate this unity in the language of analysis but I can point toward it, and toward the distinctive relationship between reason and the world in that intellectual posture. It is well worth pondering the work of Iris Murdoch in this connection. The actual life of reason, she argues, admits of a wide range of ways of attending. The adoption of one or other of these takes place in a sequence of innumerable, scarcely-noticed acts of volition day to day about what to pay attention to and what to ignore. The consequences of this process are enormous if, with Murdoch and James, one holds that behaviour will always reflect the way in which one sees the world. To be sure, subjectivity and volition play major roles in this process, but their involvement does not necessarily pose any threat to reason’s functioning.

128

Philosophy

Whether or not their involvement is positive or negative depends, rather, upon whether they have been co-opted by the “fat relentless ego”20 and its self-serving purposes. In Murdoch’s judgment, most of the time they have been thus co-opted, and methodological commitments to detachment are not going to solve this problem. It is not detachment from subjectivity and volition which should be the aim of philosophy – assuming that it were even possible – but the detachment of subjectivity and volition from ego. One way of attending is especially important in this respect, for it represents a unique release from both ego and from the domination of theory over practice, and makes possible the return to life. Murdoch describes it in a story which begins with her sitting by the window brooding angrily about petty annoyances and grievances. Without noticing, she slips into concentration upon a kestrel (sparrow hawk) outside her window. She becomes lost in attentiveness to the bird, no longer aware of herself, of competing thoughts, of petty grievances, of the passage of time, and of the many other elements normally at work in the field of consciousness. The state of attending into which she has drifted inadvertently – although it can also be brought about by volition, she holds – is the state of contemplation. It has both immediate and extended effects. Its principal immediate effect is to exclude from consciousness everything but the object of attention: “In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel.”21 The extended effect is a continued diminution of the ego’s influence even after contemplation has ended. According to Murdoch, the centrepiece of the contemplative state is a selflessness which yields a union of knower and world unavailable to analysis, and alien to the dualisms of modern philosophy. Its pleasure resides in self-forgetfulness and the abandonment of possessiveness. In such undivided and selfless attending, the relentless ego is left far behind. Such a state contrasts strikingly with the modern paradigm of reason’s functioning as described by Harrison in chapter 4, where the dualism of knower and known leads to a manipulative relationship with the world in which

The Return to Life

129

knowledge is not valued for its promotion of insight or virtue but solely for its usefulness to human endeavour, whatever that endeavour may be. By contrast, it is in the contemplative state, argues Murdoch, that the real world is truly encountered. Here alone it is truly seen and loved,22 and here alone one finds the answer to the “something rather than nothing” question.23 It is here that the yawning chasm between knower and world, which has dominated so much philosophy in recent centuries, disappears. Only here, in the selfless encounter with objects as simple as sparrow hawks, does a genuine appreciation of beauty occur: that beauty which, according to Plato, is loved spontaneously and by instinct – a virtuous seeing conducive of virtuous action. This seeing, on account of its single-minded and appreciative character, leaves the ego behind, although the simple person enchanted with a sparrow hawk would not likely recognize virtue in such effortless attending. Murdoch laments, however, that this state will not be of interest to contemporary philosophy, which is much more concerned with propositions and reasons than with immediate experience. This relationship between reason and the world, and the insights into the world’s meaning and significance it provides, can be described only figuratively. Such language has a place of prominence in philosophy, for Murdoch and James, as representing the Socratic unknowing to which I have referred above. Murdoch’s combining of the analytic, artistic, contemplative, and Platonic eliminates the choice between the philosophical and poetic paths demanded by modernity. In this respect her work, like James’s, leaves the door open for a philosophically unconventional engagement of the “something rather than nothing” question. This engagement is rooted in the propensity of reason in practice to seek a form of understanding beyond the limitations of causal inquiry and theory, a propensity attested widely in the histories of both philosophy and religion. In this it leaves the door open as well for the peculiar state of understanding to which acquiescence in such an impulse is said to lead. If it is in these states alone

130

Philosophy

that gratuity is encountered, then participation in such states will be indispensable to any meaningful discussion about whether one is dealing, in this peculiar world, with the just-thereness of the naturalist, or the just-thereness of a self-sharing kenotic deity, or the just-thereness of a Platonic Good, or any other religious or philosophical possibility.

appendix

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

The premodern idea that religious influence can enhance the natural and autonomous functioning of reason rather than compromise it has survived in contemporary thought in the most recent official Catholic statement on the relationship between the two: Fides et Ratio.1 For most philosophers, reference to Catholicism in connection with philosophy will conjure up scholastic thought as well as antagonism towards modernity generally and towards pragmatism specifically. While such stereotypes were warranted until recently, they no longer are, for reasons I will describe in this appendix. Catholic philosophy’s commitment to scholasticism and its antagonism towards modernity and pragmatism were on clear display throughout the modern period, including much of the twentieth century. Several example of twentieth-century encyclopaedic entries bear witness to it. Consider, for example, William Turner’s 1911 article on pragmatism in The Catholic Encyclopedia.2 It is clear that the strident criticisms of pragmatism in this analysis have their origins in a scholastic perspective and a broad antagonism toward modern thought generally. Turner characterizes the practical orientation of pragmatism as leading inevitably, like much modern philosophy, to an epistemology unable to distinguish sufficiently between reason and a world independent of it. Reason’s role is thereby reduced to the production of conceptual devices instrumental of relations with the world – relations which may turn out to be useful, but do not provide the basis for strong truth-

132

Appendix

claims. In this respect, pragmatism, says Turner, embodies what many Catholic scholars in the early twentieth century saw as a regrettable modern abandonment of theory in favour of subjectivity. Such a development is portrayed as being exacerbated by a post-Darwinian understanding of conceptual progress as an indefinite series of provisional intellectual adjustments to the relationship between human beings and the world in which truth is nothing more than a transitory satisfaction of adaptive needs and desires. These features of pragmatism are deepened, claims Turner, by the temperamental activism of its American creators, and an excessive integration of action into philosophy found as well in French thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel. While Turner appears at the outset to be sincere in his engagement with pragmatism, he sometimes characterizes it with a startling lack of subtlety. He says, for example, that pragmatism has no interest in the evaluation of evidence, nor in sober judgment of competing positions. It is willing to sacrifice logical consistency, laws, and principles at the altar of utility, and refuses to acknowledge a reality independent of the mind. It leaves no room for an understanding of truth as conformity between human concepts and the world independent of them, which it considers to be a naïve and dated aspiration. In sum, “the pragmatist rejects the notion that concepts represent reality,”3 and in place of such correspondence substitutes an always incomplete adjustment of both present and past convictions to the circumstances at hand. Turner does acknowledge the recognition by pragmatism of the special stability of long-established beliefs, but argues that these remain fallible conceptual devices, always vulnerable to revision. While Turner recognizes that there is a metaphysic of sorts operating in pragmatism, he criticizes it for its purported resistance to monotheism in favour of a meliorism supporting the indispensability of human participation in the co-governance, with God, of creation. The limitations of deity on such a view is characterized by Turner as offensive to all Christian philosophers, and prevents pragmatism from participating in what he considers

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

133

to be the premier battle of modern times: that against agnosticism and religious scepticism. This battle will not be won, Turner declares, by anything short of proving the existence of God, and to this end pragmatism has little to contribute. It certainly cannot assist in strengthening the theistic arguments required, for the justification of religiosity in pragmatism rests entirely in its edifying personal effects. Turner’s criticism is softened somewhat by J.A. Mann in a 1967 piece in the New Catholic Encyclopedia4 which exhibits a cautious new openness to pragmatism, albeit only to the form espoused by Charles Peirce. Mann sees in Peirce’s account of the relationship between the human being and the world formed by action a potential basis for genuine knowledge claims. The promise of this relationship is strengthened by the communitarian and extended nature of inquiry in Peirce’s position, which signifies to Mann an increase in the likelihood that such pragmatism can produce knowledge and not simply transitory adaptation. Like Turner, however, Mann exhibits both a firm allegiance to a scholastic correspondence theory of truth and a residual resistance to modernity. He observes with regret the influence of Kant’s amplification of practical reason, late nineteenth-century life philosophies, Darwinism, and the activist ethos of American culture in pragmatism. Pragmatism is seen as sharing with these a fluidity of intellectual approach which “renders impossible any final and all-inclusive philosophical system of the real.”5 Overall, while Mann’s analysis of pragmatism exhibits more subtlety than Turner’s, it still bears the unmistakable marks of scholastic influence and Catholic antagonism toward modernity. In the mid-1970s, Clemens Schoonbrood’s analysis of pragmatism in Karl Rahner’s Encyclopedia of Theology6 portrays pragmatism as anticipating logical positivism’s metaphysical scepticism, and philosophy’s growing preoccupation with language. As with Turner and Mann, so Schoonbrood too complains about the absence in pragmatism of a strong correspondence theory, and the resources to undertake a “comparison of the proposition with the object of which it is asserted.”7 The concreteness of prag-

134

Appendix

matism also, charges Schoonbrood, precludes the possibility of access to the supernatural, as well as the establishment of stable moral norms. One can see in the three foregoing analyses an enduring commitment to scholasticism and an antagonism to modernity and pragmatism enduring into the later decades of the twentieth century. This is the Catholicism still widely familiar to many philosophers. What is much less familiar is the Catholicism that turns up in the encyclical, Fides et Ratio. It is hard to imagine that this document comes from the same tradition as the analyses above. Pragmatism is nowhere subject to criticism and in fact, as I will show, there are many pragmatic currents implicit in its argumentation. The encyclical exhibits no interest in theistic arguments, no interest in establishing deductively the credentials of theism in an increasingly atheistic age, no concern with revelation as a largely propositional matter, no attention to the need for strong justifications of revelatory propositions by extrinsic sources such as miracles, church authority, and so forth, and no preoccupation with Aquinas or his Five Ways. There is also no interest in defending a correspondence theory to underwrite a strong distinction between knower and world, and not even a hint of interest in the scholastic ethos forming the obvious horizon of the three analyses of pragmatism above. At the heart of the encyclical lies not the capacity of reason to produce certainty based upon correspondence between mind and world, and theistic arguments building upon that capacity, but a tenacious and irresistible natural curiosity on reason’s part, and a spontaneous optimism that such curiosity can eventually be satisfied. The document’s engagement of this core behaviour of natural reason is everywhere accompanied by an acknowledgement of the messy, inventive, and often painful ways in which reason goes about seeking to satisfy its curiosity, especially in the area of metaphysics. It is within such terms of reference that Aquinas makes a brief appearance, being commended for a harmonization of faith and reason consisting of an intellectual adventurousness in seeking for the satisfaction of reason’s curiosity “wherever it may be

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

135

found.”8 In this respect, Aquinas is seen as standing in the tradition of certain strands of classical Greek philosophy which are likewise taken to exhibit a deep allegiance to reason’s metaphysical curiosity, and its persistent efforts to make room in philosophy for an elusive “more” about reality, typified by Plato’s idea of the Good. Nowhere is there a single word about assent to purportedly revelatory propositions beyond the ken of natural reason and justified by extrinsic signs and wonders. The encyclical is overtly critical of modern philosophy, but not, this time, for its turn to the subject, to practical reason, to the influence of Darwin or to life-philosophies, but for what it designates as philosophy’s “presumption”9 – its failure of intellectual imagination. Philosophers confine themselves within patterns of thinking deeply ingrained in their professional subculture, it charges. In connection with their understanding of the naturalness and autonomy of reason, the encyclical urges philosophy to focus instead upon the observable behaviours of reason, especially long-standing and widespread patterns of its activity such as its metaphysical inquisitiveness. Principal among such patterns, it contends, is reason’s incorrigible pursuit of intelligibility in all domains ranging from simple day-to-day matters to profound metaphysical ones. It is a spontaneous characteristic of reason in practice, the encyclical observes, that it is curious why things are as it finds them, and one form of such curiosity is puzzlement about why anything exists at all. This question becomes more acute with age, and kindles deeper wonder and astonishment. The impulse to understand why there is something rather than nothing, in other words, is observably among the most enduring and irrepressible impulses of reason in practice. The encyclical’s descriptions of it are reminiscent of the citations from Ludwig Wittgenstein in the first chapter of this book. Such puzzlement is so recognizably a characteristic of reason in its spontaneous operation, the encyclical argues, that the onus for justifying an exclusion of that puzzlement from a characterization of reason’s autonomy and naturalness – or, for that matter, of humanness itself – falls to anyone who would wish to

136

Appendix

endorse such an exclusion. In the absence of such justification, an understanding of reason’s autonomy and naturalness should be developed accordingly. Accompanying metaphysical puzzlement, the encyclical observes, is a no less empirically observable and tenacious optimism anticipating that reason’s aspirations can eventually be fulfilled – although little is said about what such fulfilment would look like, and it is never connected with assent to revelatory propositions or indubitable truth claims. Such spontaneous optimism is observed to accompany all forms of inquisitiveness, each of which anticipates a different form of fulfilment. Exactly what form of activity on the part of reason would be sufficient in the case of metaphysics remains conspicuously unspecified, by contrast with the scholastic optimism of an older Catholicism. Moreover, the tone of deep hostility toward modernity has disappeared. The many modern obstacles facing allegiance to reason are not only described clearly and even-handedly, but with sympathy. Among these are growing cultural subjectivism and relativism. The document finds these regrettable not because of their departure from scholastic certainty but because they signify a loss of confidence in reason. The encyclical targets its criticisms in this respect not only at certain contemporary forms of philosophy but at the intellectual pessimism implicit in the religious fideisms, traditionalisms, and biblicisms which it sees flourishing nowadays. Such religious movements exhibit the same failure of confidence in natural reason as one finds in relativistic secular movements. In a religious context no less than a secular one, it is proposed, natural reason’s spontaneous inquisitiveness and optimism lead to legitimate questions deserving of serious responses. Natural reason’s spontaneous optimism is faced with other forms of resistance as well. Among these is an acceleration of academic research involving a dramatic and often bewildering proliferation of conflicting ways of understanding the world. This is accompanied by a rapid increase of specialization which has had the effect of undermining the broad spirit of inquiry involved in metaphysical inquisitiveness. Far from characterizing these devel-

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

137

opments in the dismissive ways in which Catholicism had sometimes previously responded to them, the encyclical portrays such developments as having raised understandable doubts about the capacity of natural reason to adjudicate among claims to truth, much less to move forward metaphysically. There has been a great fragmentation of knowledge, it observes, and reason is understandably prone to becoming overwhelmed by the magnitude and diversity of such developments. We live in a tsunami of data so overwhelming that it has raised serious doubts about whether it even makes sense to seek meaning. The ever-increasing proliferation of theory exacerbates this tendency, breeding not only scepticism but indifference and nihilism. To this intellectual overload which has encouraged a decline of confidence in reason, the encyclical observes sympathetically, one can add the proliferation of evil in modern times which has also encouraged nihilism. So appreciative is the document of such contemporary challenges to confidence in reason that it characterizes the modern propensity toward nihilism as something which is actually justified, at least in part, by those developments. But, it adds, truth-seeking in metaphysics has always been arduous and uncertain. It involves a journey which is extremely demanding, a journey depicted in the Jewish scriptures as involving strain, weariness, and toil in a process of protracted and sometimes painful inquiry. Nowhere does the encyclical offer any source of permanent respite from all this. Having acknowledged sympathetically various factors in the modern decline of intellectual optimism, the encyclical digs in pragmatically, establishing a beachhead in the empirically accessible fact that almost all human beings still crave an understanding of why there is a world rather than nothing, and why they themselves are alive. The human being is spontaneously philosophical, it asserts on more than one occasion, and human metaphysical propensities continue today to be as tenacious as ever. While it may be possible to engage in sophisticated theoretical debates about such propensities, it is impossible for human beings actually to relate to the world in a way from which all metaphysical inquisitiveness, and at least a vestigial hope for its satisfaction, is expunged.

138

Appendix

Such empirically observable propensities of reason set the stage for the encyclical’s view of how religious influence can have a bearing upon reason without impairing its naturalness and autonomy. To the extent that the document sees trends in modern thought as having moved in the direction of excluding such propensities from an understanding of reason, the encyclical charges them with having strayed from the deep commitment by early modernity to the autonomy and naturalness of reason. The encyclical boldly puts itself forward as a dissident and authentic representative of modernity in this respect, and of philosophy itself. It announces repeatedly its intent to defend reason’s autonomy against modern philosophy. There is no hint here of the heavy-handedness and scholastic abstraction which once characterized Catholicism’s demands for assent to purportedly revelatory propositions whose truth or falsity were thought of as transcending the capacities of natural reason. The role of religious influence in connection with natural reason, rather, is closely linked to spontaneous metaphysical curiosity. That curiosity will be satisfied, the encyclical proposes, only by very unconventional ways of thinking, echoing earlier criticisms of mainline philosophy for being too staid, and echoing as well its commendations of Aquinas for being especially imaginative and open. Revelatory influence is of value, it claims, because it is subversive of familiar patterns of thinking, including those one often finds in philosophy. Under religious influence, reason begins to think in ways that it is unlikely to have discovered by itself, and which contrast with what the encyclical sees as the intellectual stodginess of philosophy. Religious influence, in this context, in other words, may help one to see the world in different ways by virtue of changing one’s intellectual orientation to it, a theme central to the philosophical work of William James and Iris Murdoch, as well as to Plato’s notion of education in the Republic as involving intellectual conversion. The role of religious influence, including a revelatory tradition, is to draw reason’s attention to certain features of the

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

139

world around it, and to the relationships among those features to which reason might otherwise remain oblivious. It is about being attentive in an unconventional way and exercising conceptual inventiveness to articulate what emerges from such attentiveness. The encyclical does not preclude this orientation being acquired by people uninfluenced by its religious tradition, but predicts it will be relatively rare. The underpinning of an account of religious influence so contrary to modern philosophy’s call for religious detachment is an emphasis upon the limits of modernity’s assumptions about reason’s autonomy. All exercises of natural reason are enculturated, the encyclical argues; natural reason is never capable of functioning apart from culture. All human beings are immersed in their cultures. They are dependent upon those cultures and contribute to them. They are both their children and their parents, and the diversity of cultural traditions involved in this feature of human life is welcomed. Along with this welcome, however, is a caution about its implications vis-à-vis the autonomy of reason. Such enculturation creates a challenge, for reason is faced with a variety of possible intellectual orientations. The Christian orientation is depicted as pointing reason in a distinctive direction. It is described, for example, as something which “liberates reason insofar as it allows reason to attain correctly what it seeks to know and to place it within the ultimate order of things, in which everything acquires true meaning.”8 The effect of this religious tradition, in other words, is not to furnish propositions justified by extrinsic sources such as miracles, as one would find in Locke and Aquinas, but to exert a creative effect upon reason’s orientation toward the natural order; to see differently and to think differently. Elsewhere the document contends that a natural reason which is religiously immature “is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being”10 in a way leading to genuine understanding. Theological insight can be of benefit to the foolish person because the foolish person “is incapable of fixing his gaze on the

140

Appendix

things that truly matter. Therefore, he can neither order his mind (Prov 1:7) nor assume a correct attitude to himself or to the world around him.”11 How is one to adjudicate among the many competing intellectual orientations? If all human reflections and beliefs have their point of departure within some culturally and historically situated frame of reference, how can one make intelligent judgments about their differences, especially when such views are mutually exclusive? The propensity of contemporary culture to shy away from such questions is perplexing to the document because such evasion exhibits reluctance to wrestle with the greater or lesser practical fruitfulness of competing orientations. Reason, it insists, is forced to confront competing orientations toward the world because they lead to contrary courses of action, not just of thought, and for the human organism swimming through an ecosystem demanding action at every turn, choosing how to act is unavoidable. The encyclical acknowledges that the religious position it represents is one among many possible orientations toward the world, and that there is no acultural place to stand in responding to it. Why, then, should one be receptive to this invitation from an institution which, in the past, has often demanded assent to largely unintelligible propositions with a heavy hand and sometimes robust threats? The encyclical’s response is that one should be receptive not because of the authority of the institution itself but because evidential support for the way of seeing the world that it is sponsoring will become apparent to natural reason after prolonged and open-minded consideration of it. If natural reason is allowed to embrace such an orientation toward the world, in other words, the eventual fruitfulness of that orientation will be perceived by natural reason on its own, and this will vindicate the decision to have adopted that orientation in the first place. This position has a striking kinship with James’s analysis of religion. Such fruitfulness will emerge especially, so the logic of the encyclical seems to go, in connection with puzzlement about many

Philosophy, Religion, and Gratuity in Catholicism

141

metaphysical questions, including why there is something rather than nothing, and why evil and suffering exist. Reason will gradually become better able to make headway on these matters, says the encyclical, if it connects them with the deeply peculiar idea that Jesus’s death and suffering may be the expression of a divine love which gives itself unreservedly, expecting nothing in return. Within such terms of reference, the encyclical proposes, there emerges the possibility that here, philosophy and religious influence may intersect fruitfully if they are allowed to, much to the benefit of reason’s naturalness and autonomy. The peculiar religious idea of kenosis – divine, loving, self-emptying – can provide a key to the “something rather than nothing” question because it points in the direction of the unique gratuity of both creation and redemption. A promissory note is being offered, in other words, to the effect that natural reason, if it is allowed and encouraged to struggle intellectually with the world around it in this light, will eventually recognize for itself the fruitful philosophical results of the kenotic tradition. The general upshot of the encyclical, then, is that the adoption by reason of some orientation toward the natural order is an indispensable element of any engagement of that order. The onus falls upon someone who would deny this to identify any actual engagement of the natural order which represents an exception. If there is no exception, then one is faced with the question of why to adopt one orientation rather than another. Advocates of a modern two-stage form of natural theology, which understands revelation in propositional terms and calls for its exclusion from philosophy, might contend here that it has been the purpose of their method all along to deal with this challenge by establishing a foundationally agreed-upon point of departure for all interlocutors. There can only be meaningful debate, they would say, if all the participants share a common viewpoint involving empirically obvious things such as the existence of the world, its exemplification of natural laws, and so forth. Even Richard Swinburne, however, acknowledges that such impartiality may not amount to as much as it appears, for experience of these agreed-upon elements of the world

142

Appendix

is deeply informed by a larger hermeneutical context.12 The capacity to recognize the significance even of arguments based upon elemental features of the natural order, he concedes, is often dependent upon deeper and broader influences, including religious and personal ones. In the end, the encyclical purports not only to honour modernity’s commitment to the autonomy and naturalness of reason, but to do so in a way which recognizes the growing anti-foundationalist sentiment in contemporary philosophy. It accepts that there can be no entirely acultural, ahistorical, or foundationally impartial intellectual engagement of the natural order. It is in this context that it offers its kenotically-based religious tradition as a source of orientation leading to a comprehension of the gratuity which lies at the heart of both creation and redemption. The role of such religious influence is not to provide philosophical premises upon which to build arguments or positions. Its role is to make available an unconventional intellectual orientation and context for reason’s natural metaphysical propensities which, in the end, will enhance the naturalness and autonomy of reason’s functioning. The shift of substance and tone from the three analyses of pragmatism with which I began this appendix to Fides et Ratio is remarkable, although not widely familiar among philosophers, many of whom still see Catholicism in terms represented by those three analyses. The centrality in the encyclical of a kenotic Christology rather than dogma and church authority, and the twinning of this with the question about why there is something rather than nothing, is striking. Given a prolonged and serious reflection upon the relationship between these two, and the corresponding effect of such reflection upon one’s philosophical perspective on the world, the encyclical is proposing that natural reason, on its own, will come to understand the gratuity which underlies both.

Notes

introduction 1 Freud, Illusion, 51–2. 2 Maitzen, “Questioning,” 252. 3 Goldschmidt, Puzzle; Krauss, Universe; Wippel, Question; Rundle, Why There Is Something. 4 Bliss, Review. 5 Parfitt, “Why Anything?” 26.

chapter one 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Rundle, Why There Is Something. Hempel, “Science Unlimited?” 341. Geach, “Aquinas,” 112. Searle, Freedom, 44. Gilson, Elements, 110–11. Taylor, Metaphysics, 105–8. Smart, “Existence,” 149. Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, 35. Ibid., 36. Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” 8. Ibid., 11. James, Varieties, 405. Williams, Unexpected Way, 29. Netland, “Natural Theology,” 515.

144

Notes to pages 26–57

15 Flew, God and Philosophy, 98. 16 Crombie, “Theological Statements.”

chapter two 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Mt. 11:16–19 (Revised Standard Version). Mk. 2:15–17. Lk. 15:1–2. Davies and Sanders, “Jewish Point of View,” 636, 640. Meier, Rethinking, 150. Mk. 2:17. Mk. 2:15. Mt. 5:21–33. Mt. 23:23. Mt. 23:2–3. Lk. 7:36. Mt. 15:4–6. Mt. 20. Lk. 15. Mt. 22. Lk. 17. Lk. 18:15–17. Mt. 20:12. Wright, Victory, 130. Sanders, Historical Figure, 232. Meier, Mentor, 72. Meier, Rethinking, 72. “Revving Up,” Economist, 22 April 2014. Mt. 9:14–17. Wright, Victory, 130. Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 103. Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology. Meier, Companions, 79–80. Mk. 3:31–5. Meier, Companions, 69. Ibid., 71. Davies and Sanders, “Jesus,” 643.

Notes to pages 57–94

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Meier, Mentor, 149. Davies and Sanders, “Jesus,” 643. Ibid., 675–6. Griswold, Forgiveness. Kant, “The Immortality of the Soul.” Mt. 5:45. Mt. 21:31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1132a1. Arendt, Human Condition, 237. Griswold, Forgiveness, 100. Maclachlan, Grace, 11. Hyde, Gift. Mavrodes, “Queerness,” 586. Ibid.

chapter three 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Searle, Freedom. Reid, “Active Powers,” 337. Ibid, 42. James, “Experience of Activity.” James, “Stream of Thought,” 23. James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 367. James, Principles, 420. Adams, “Hell,” 301–27. James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 391.

chapter four 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wainwright, Academic Culture. Clark, Knowledge of God, 1. Padgett, “Theologia Naturalis,” 494. Westphal, “Emergence,” 111. Pereboom, “Philosophical Theology,” 103–11. Davies, Review. Kasper, God. Hauerwas, With the Grain.

145

146

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Notes to pages 94–129

Kasper, God, 69. Origen, Song of Songs, 218, 220. Harrison, Bible, 3. For a contemporary version of such a position see the appendix of this book. Ibid., 107. Galileo, “Assayer,” 237. Harrison, Bible, 263–4. Humphrey, “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?”

chapter five 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

James, Varieties, 405. Smart, “Existence of God,” 149. Harrison, Bible, 263–4. Reid, “Human Mind,” 53. Reid, “Active Powers,” 340. Reid, “Human Mind,” 86. Reid, “Intellectual Powers,” 152. James, “Stream of Thought,” 237. Code, “Sex of the Knower.“ James, “Sentiment,” 78. James, Meaning of Truth, 3. James, “Continuity of Experience,” 131. James, “Will to Believe,” 15. Flew, God and Philosophy, 93, 94. Burrell, “Analogy,” 64. James, Varieties, 405; Some Problems, 75. James, “Sentiment,” 65. Ibid., Emphasis mine. James, “Continuity,” 131. Murdoch, Sovereignty, 52. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 85, 93.

Notes to pages 131–42

appendix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

John Paul II, “Faith and Reason,” 317–47. Turner, “Pragmatism,” 333–8. Ibid., 335. Mann, “Pragmatism,” 662–5. Ibid., 664. Schoonbrood, “Pragmatism,” 1266–8. Ibid., 1266. John Paul II, “Faith and Reason,” §44. Ibid., §76. Ibid., §48. Ibid., §18. Swinburne, “Natural Theology.”

147

Bibliography

Adams, Marilyn McCord. “The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians.” In Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, edited by Eleonore Stump, 301–27. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Aristotle. “Nichomachean Ethics.” In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon and translated by W.D. Ross, 935–1112. New York: Random House, 1941. Bliss, Ricky. Review of The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? edited by Tryon Goldschmidt. 18 October 2013. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 3 September 2014. http://ndpr.nd .edu/news/43760-the-puzzle-of-existence-why-is-there-somethingrather-than-nothing/. Bultmann, Rudolph. New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, edited by Schubert M. Ogden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Burrell, David. “From Analogy of ‘Being’ to Analogy of Being.” Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002): 53–67. Chisholm, Roderick. “Human Freedom and the Self.” In Free Will, edited by Derek Pereboom, 172–85. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009. Clark, Kelly James, ed. Our Knowledge of God: Essays on Natural and Philosophical Theology. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.

150

Bibliography

Clifford, W.K. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, edited by T. Madigan, 70–96. Amherst, ma: Prometheus, 1999. Code, Lorraine. “Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant?” In What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, 1–26. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Crombie, Ian. “The Possibility of Theological Statements.” In Faith and Logic, edited by Basil Mitchell, 31–83. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957. Davies, Brian. Review of “Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on the Divine Nature, Summa Theologiae I, 1–13” by Brian Shanely. 3 June 2006. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 4 September 2014. https://ndpr.nd .edu/news/25039-the-treatise-on-the-divine-nature-summa-theologiaei-1-13/. Davies, W.D., and E.P. Sanders. “Jesus from the Jewish Point of View.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 3, edited by W.D. Davies, 618–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Economist. “Revving Up.” 22 April 2014. https://www.economist .com/britain/2014/04/22/revving-up. Flew, Anthony. God and Philosophy. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1966. Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews. New York: Random House, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by W.D. RobsonScott. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957. Galileo, Galilei. “The Assayer.” In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, edited by Stillman Drake, 229–80. New York: Anchor Books, 1957. Geach, Peter. “Aquinas.” In Three Philosophers, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and Peter Geach, 69–125. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963. Gilson, Étienne. Elements of Christian Philosophy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960. Goldschmidt, Tyron, ed. The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? New York: Routledge, 2013. Grillmeier, Aloys. Christ in the Christian Tradition. Westminster: John Knox Press, 1988.

Bibliography

151

Griswold, Charles. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. – “The Book of Nature and Early Modern Science.” In The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History, edited by Klass van Berkel and Arjo Vanderjagt, 1–26. Leuven: Peters, 2006. Hauerwas, Stanley. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. Hempel, C.G. “Science Unlimited?” In The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation, and Rationality, edited by J.H. Fetzer, 329–44. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hugh of St Victor, De tribus diebus (migne 1844–1905, 122, 176.814 B–C). Translated by Peter Harrison. In Harrison, “Hermeneutics and Natural Knowledge in the Reformers,” in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700, edited by Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote, 341–462. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Hume, David. “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” The Harvard Classics. Vol. 37. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 2001. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. John Paul II. “Faith and Reason: Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Relationship between Faith and Reason.” Origins 28 (1998): 317–47. James, William. “The Continuity of Experience.” In A Pluralistic Universe, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 125–37. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1977. – “The Experience of Activity.” In Essays in Radical Empiricism, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 79–96. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976. – “Preface.” In The Meaning of Truth, edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 3–10. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1975. – Psychology: Briefer Course, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1984.

152

Bibliography

– “The Sentiment of Rationality.” In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 57–89. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. – Some Problems of Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. – “The Stream of Thought.” In Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 219–78. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1981. – The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1985. – “The Will to Believe.” In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 13–33. Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kant, Immanuel. “The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Practical Reason.” In Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, 218–20. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889. – Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan and Company, 1958. Kasper, Walter. The God of Jesus Christ. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Crossroad, 1984. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Five Letters to Samuel Clarke.” In Philosophical Works of Leibniz, edited by G.M. Duncan, 238–86. New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor Publishers, 1890. – “On the Ultimate Origin of Things.” In Philosophical Works of Leibniz, edited by G.M. Duncan, 100–6. New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor Publishers, 1890. – “The Principles of Nature and of Grace.” In Philosophical Works of Leibniz, edited by G.M. Duncan, 209–17. New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Publishers, 1890. Maclachlan, Bonnie. The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Bibliography

153

Maitzen, Stephen. “Questioning the Question.” In The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?, edited by Tyron Goldschmidt, 252–71. New York: Routledge, 2013. Mann, J.A. Pragmatism. Catholic University of America. New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 12. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967–96. Mavrodes, George. “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Robert Audi and William Wainwright, 213–26. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles. New York: Doubleday, 1994. – A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 3: Companions and Competitors. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1970. Netland, Harold. “Natural Theology and Religious Diversity.” Faith and Philosophy 21 (2004): 503–18. Origen. The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, translated by R.P. Lawson. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957. Padgett, Alan G. “Theologia Naturalis: Philosophy of Religion or Doctrine of Creation?” Faith and Philosophy 21 (2004): 493–502. Parfit, Derek. “Why Anything? Why This?” London Review of Books 20, 2 (1998): 24–7. Pereboom, Derk. “Early Modern Philosophical Theology.” In A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, 103–11. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Reid, Thomas. “Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind.” In Inquiry and Essays, edited by Ronald Beanblossom and Keither Lehrer, 297–360. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. – “Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.” In Inquiry and Essays, edited by Ronald Beanblossom and Keither Lehrer, 127–296. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. – “Inquiry into the Human Mind.” In Inquiry and Essays, edited by Ronald Beanblossom and Keither Lehrer, 1–126. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Rundle, Bede. Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

154

Bibliography

Sanders, E.P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. London: Allen Lane, 1993. Schoonbrood, Clemens. “Pragmatism.” In Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi, edited by Karl Rahner, 1266–8. London: Burns and Oates, 1975. Searle, John. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. – Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Smart, J.J.C., and J.J. Haldane. Atheism and Theism. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Smart, J.J.C. “The Existence of God.” In God, 2nd edition, edited by Timothy A. Robinson, 134–49. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002. Swinburne, Richard. Evidence for God. London: Christian Evidence Society, 2012. – “Natural Theology, Its ‘Dwindling Probabilities’ and ‘Lack of Rapport.’” Faith and Philosophy 21 (2004): 533–46. Taylor, Richard. Metaphysics. 4th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1992. William Turner. “Pragmatism.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia: International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, Vol. 12, edited by Herbermann et al., 333–8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. Wainwright, William J., ed. God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Westphal, Merold. “The Emergence of Modern Philosophy of Religion.” In A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, 111–20. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Williams, Paul. The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism. Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 2002. Wippel, F., ed. The Ultimate Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review 74, 1 (1965): 3–12. Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

Index

abstraction: Freud on, 4; of idea of noncontingent, 19; scholarly preoccupation with, 83–4, 111, 114, 120; scholastic, 138 Adams, Marilyn, 88 aesthetics, 66, 87, 99, 114 agnosticism, 133 allegory, 95 analogy, 19–20, 54, 95 analysis: and contemplation, 128; of causation, 103, 105, 120; and freedom, 82; and immediate experience, 112–13, 120; language of, 127; in philosophy, 7, 84, 118, 125; of self, 83; and the “something rather than nothing” question, 13–14, 18, 26; in Third Quest scholarship, 31 Aquinas, Thomas: in Fides et Ratio, 134–5, 138–9; Gilson on, 20; on natural reason, 93–5; on the “something rather than nothing” question, 14, 16 Archimedes, 17 architecture, 95 Arendt, Hanna, 63–5 Aristotle: on favour, 66; and human agency, 90; on justice, 62–4, 68; and justification, 108 art, 3–4, 120

attentiveness: and action, 85, 88; in contemplation, 128; in the Euthyphro, 59–60; in Fides et Ratio, 138–9; and intellectual creativity, 139; in Murdoch, 127–8; to relations in immediate experience, 138, 159; and volition, 86–8, 115 authority: of Jesus, 55, 57–8; of reason in practice, 7, 10–11, 28, 89–90, 127 awe, 23, 25, 28 Bacon, Francis, 99 beauty, 129 Bergson, Henri, 119, 132 Bernard of Clairvaux, 20 Blondel, Maurice, 132 Boyle, Robert, 99 Bultmann, Rudolph, 55 Burrell, David, 125 Calvin, John, 98 charis, 6, 66–9, 105, 126 character, 115–16 Clark, Kelly, 93 Clarke, Samuel, 17, 75–6, 80 Clifford, W.K., 122, 124 Code, Lorraine, 114 codes, of Jewish purity, 32, 34–5, 38, 40–2

156

Index

common sense, 7, 43, 89, 117 contemplation, 8, 99, 128–9 context: of action for reasoning, 7, 80, 107; of charis, 66; of the cosmological argument, 22, 76; and explanatory sufficiency, 17–18, 80; of freedom, 88; of immediate experience for reason, 7, 112; of natural theology, 142; and radical empiricism, 118; of return to life, 127; of theistic arguments, 21; of theory in philosophy, 108–9; in Wittgenstein 24–5 correspondence theory, 116, 133–4 cosmological argument, the, 14–18, 22–3, 26 Crombie, Ian, 26, 122, 124 Darwin, Charles, 135 Davies, Brian, 93–4 Davies, W.D., 32 Descartes, René, 93, 100, 106, 108 desert: and forgiveness, 58–62, 65; and gift, 67–8; in moral life, 70; in parables, 44, 46–50, 57 detachment: in the academy, 92; ascetical, 125; from emotion, 123; and inattention, 115; in Murdoch, 128; and natural reason, 99, 112, 116, 124; of philosophy, 89, 91–2; in radical empiricism, 112, 120 dialectic, 125 dianoia, 125 ego, 82, 128–9 empiricism, radical: freedom in, 90; immediate experience in, 118, 124; and modern philosophy, 7–8, 111–12, 119; and nature as a book, 117–18; religion in, 120, 122 enculturation, 88, 127, 139 entitlement: and hamartoloi, 54, 61; in

the moral life, 69–70; in parables, 43–9 epistemology, 110, 131 experience, immediate: complexity of, 112–13, 115, 117, 120; context for reasoning, 7, 112; and gratuity, 80; and language, 119; and philosophy, 6, 119–20, 129 Essenes, 35, 52 Euthyphro, 59–60 evolution, 103–4 evil, 4, 46, 61, 67, 137 fact, full, 123–4 favour: and charis, 66; divine, 55–7, 59–61; and grace, 3; and hamartoloi, 49, 52; in parables, 45–8 fideism, 136 Fides et Ratio, 131, 134, 142 film, 4 first principles, 108, 110, 119, 127 Flew, Anthony, 26, 124 forgiveness, 58–9, 61, 63–4 form of life, 92, 123–4 Fredriksen, Paula, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 4 freedom: in Adams, 88; and charis, 67; and consciousness, 86; in Crombie, 27; in Hume, 77–8; in James, 89; and the return to life, 127; in Searle, 76, 80, 82; and theory, 107–8 Galileo, Galilei, 98 Geach, Peter, 15 geometry, 16, 98 gift: in Hyde, 68–9; in James, 25, 126; in Mavrodes, 69–70; metaphor of, 6, 28, 91, 105 Gilson, Étienne, 20 Griswold, Charles, 58–9, 63 habits, 85, 88 Haldane, John, 23 hamartoloi, 32–70

Index Harrison, Peter, 96–8, 128 Hauerwas, Stanley, 94 Hempel, Carl, 14 Hugh of St Victor, 95, 98, 105 humanities, the, 96, 100 Hume, David: on causality, 75; on the cosmological argument, 16, 20, 100; on human agency, 77–9; and immediate experience, 114; on scepticism, 108; on self, 82–4 Humphry, Nicholas, 102–3 Hyde, Lewis, 68 inattention, 115 inquiry, causal, 14, 91, 129 intuition, 26, 110, 115, 119, 122–3 justice: in Aristotle, 62, 68; and forgiveness, 58–9; in Mavrodes, 70; in parables, 43–4, 47–50 justification, 99, 101–2, 108–11, 121–2, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 18–20, 60 Kasper, Walter, 94 kenosis, 130, 141–2 Kepler, Johannes, 99 language: and the book of nature, 98, 100; and culture, 127; of gratuity, 101; in James, 119–20; metaphorical, 26, 28, 76, 91, 105; moral, 70; of motives, 76; in Murdoch, 129; nonliteral, 9, 31, 43, 119, 124; ordinary, 4, 83; and Plato, 8, 125; reference of, 95; of repentance, 50–1, 70; in Smart, 23; in Wittgenstein, 24 Leibniz, Gottfried, 16–17, 75 literature, 4, 78, 95 liturgy, 95 liveness, 122 Locke, John, 114, 139 love, 46, 141 Luther, Martin, 97–8

157

Mann, J.A., 133 mathematics, 98, 101 Mavrodes, George, 69–70 Maclachlan, Bonnie, 67 McGinn, Collin, 102 Meier, John P., 30, 32, 51, 56 messiah, 29, 54 miracle, 6, 24–5, 91, 102, 105 modernity: and Catholicism, 94, 131, 133–4, 136; and the poetic, 101, 120, 129; and reason, 28, 92, 97, 111, 138; and religion, 96, 99 morality, 60, 69–70 motives, 60, 76, 78, 80–3 Murdoch, Iris, 127–9, 138 nature, the book of: and allegory, 95; literacy in reading, 95; in Galileo, 98; and radical empiricism, 117–18; and the sciences, 98–100 Netland, Harold, 26 Newton, Isaac, 100 nihilism, 137 noncontingent, the, 19–21 Origen, 95 Padgett, Alan, 93 parable, 43–4, 61 Parfitt, Derek, 5, 25, 126 Pereboom, Derek, 93 pessimism, 136 Pharisees: and hamartoloi, 32; and Jesus, 32, 38, 41, 52; and theology, 35 philosophy of religion, 92–3 Pierce, Charles, 133 Plato, 8, 125, 129 poetry, 3, 92, 106, 120 presumption, 135 principle of sufficient reason, the, 17, 75 psychology, 8, 89, 112, 120

158

Index

Rahner, Karl, 133 Ray, John, 96 reason, natural: and culture, 139; in Fides et Ratio, 134, 136–142; and metaphysical inquiry, 126; modern challenges to, 137; and modernity, 28, 96; and premodern philosophy, 93, 97; and relativism, 136; and subjectivity, 6 relata, 7, 112 relations, 7, 18, 100, 112, 114 relativism, 115, 136 Reid, Thomas, 78–9, 90, 107–10, 116, 119 Reimarus, Hermann, 29 revelation, 20, 92–3, 134, 141 Rundle, Bede, 13 Russell, Bertrand, 69 Sadducees, 35, 38, 56 Sanders, E.P., 32, 50, 53, 56 scepticism: and natural reason, 106, 108, 126; in philosophy, 6–7, 106, 124; religious, 133; and theory, 137 scholasticism: and Catholicism, 131, 134, 136, 138; in Kasper, 94; and theistic arguments, 19–20 Schoonbrood, Clemens, 133–4 scribes, 32, 36, 38 science: and action, 86; in Aquinas, 94; and causality, 3; James on, 123; methodological scope of, 104; and natural reason, 92; and nature, 76, 98, 100; and religion, 94, 99; and subjectivity, 116; in Wittgenstein, 24 scripture, 39, 95–8, 137 Searle, John, 17, 76, 80–2, 85 self: and action, 82, 90; and charis, 67–8; in Hume, 83–4; in James, 123; and kenosis, 141; in Murdoch, 128; and philosophy, 127

sensation, 80, 107, 111, 115 sensus divinitatis, 123 Smart, J.J.C., 22–3, 25–6, 105 subjectivism, 136 subjectivity, 27, 127–8, 132 supernatural, the, 134 suffering, 4, 67, 141 Taylor, Richard, 21–2, 126 temple, 34–5, 38–42, 55–6 Thales, 114 theology, natural, 20, 26–7, 93, 99, 122 theory: in Catholicism, 132; correspondence, 116, 133–4; of evolution, 103; and freedom, 82–4, 89; in Murdoch, 128–9; in philosophy, 6–7, 107–9, 111, 115; in Plato, 8, 125; and scepticism, 137 Third Quest, 30–1, 34 theism, 21, 26, 100, 122, 134 traditionalism, 136 Turner, William, 131–3 utility, 65, 99, 116, 132 vagueness, 27, 91, 115–6, 121 Vatican I, 94 virtue, 97, 129 volition, 86, 89, 110, 122, 127–8 Westphal, Merold, 93 Will to Believe, 116, 120, 122 Williams, Paul, 26 Willoughby, Francis, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23–5, 108, 126, 135 wonder, 4, 24, 126, 135 Wright, N.T., 30, 50, 55 Zen, 26 Zeno, 113