Theosemiotic

Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa

• Editorial: Fordham University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823289530
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Theologie

In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce's semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce's thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce's ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is "perfused" with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs.Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce's logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by "musement" illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.

1

A Brief History of Theosemiotic

I

One brief but rather prominent account of the tradition of American religious thought that stretches from Jonathan Edwards through Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James and beyond focuses on its distinctive character in promoting a form of “esthetic spirituality”—that is, in fostering a “consciousness of the beauty of living in harmony with divine things.”¹ My own “history” borrows from but also expands the scope of this earlier account: first of all by moving outside of (while nevertheless still emphasizing) specifically American intellectual life; second, by recognizing that the religiously meaningful experience of beauty is only one, albeit rather a significant, kind of theosemiosis. Moreover, I want to begin with Peirce as central to my narrative, rather than starting with Edwards, moving both backward and forward in time in order to trace a lineage of individuals, the thought of each displaying features regarded as relevant for the purposes of this inquiry. Finally, consistent with a Peircean perspective on the unity of the normative sciences, any emphasis on the beautiful here is intended to expose rather than to obscure the peculiarly moral significance of that religious worldview held in common by these thinkers; “living in harmony” is to be conceived as both an aesthetic and an ethical desideratum.²

To contemplate the world as a great work of art, divine in origin, while also considering the idea of divinity itself to be compelling by virtue of its supreme beauty, is to frame religious experience as being aesthetic at its core. The encounter with evil and suffering in the world will challenge this picture, sometimes in ways that the classical American pragmatists were not always best equipped to understand. Theology in its apophatic mode will also delimit and counterbalance any line of reflection that focuses on the beauty of religiously meaningful representations (although to observe this is not simultaneously to deny that there is a certain dark beauty toward which only such a theology is equipped to gesture). Notwithstanding these qualifications, religious experience has an important aesthetic dimension, attending to which often marks the birthplace of theological insight.

Whatever its alleged imperfections, the status of its composition, or the limits of human interpretive ability to probe its meaning, Peirce did conceive of the universe as a vast, divinely inspired work of art. The “book of nature” metaphor has roots that run historically deep, extending at least as far back as the late medieval period.³ Peirce seems to have tapped into these roots, his thought flowering into a worldview that displayed several distinctive emphases. Indeed, the metaphor shades toward the literal, given the power and scope of Peirce’s semiotic theory, his central insight that ours is a world veritably perfused with signs. From this vantage point, the universe is less adequately perceived as something that could be treated like a text, than as an actual book, still incomplete, being written in a language so extraordinarily complex that in many instances it remains indecipherable.⁴ Moreover, it is hardly just any kind of text in Peirce’s view, but rather, a “great poem,” so that the reading of it is not merely informative, but also provides the occasion for a powerful kind of aesthetic experience. This is what Peirce had in mind when he described and then prescribed for his own readers the activity of musement (CP 6.458–67 and 6.486). When later pressed by one reader, Victoria Lady Welby, to say a bit more about what he meant by musement, he immediately linked it to Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic theory—in particular, to the latter’s talk about the Spieltrieb, with which Peirce confessed that his own notion was “thoroughly soaked.”⁵

The idea of God, albeit vaguely conceived, arises naturally in the process of reading the book of nature. This result occurs, Peirce suggested, only if the reading is performed in a certain way, with an appropriate disinterestedness and quality of attention. The divinely authored text is sufficiently vast and complex that we can hope to catch but a “glimpse” of God’s nature and purposes. Yet this negative moment in Peirce’s religious thought is balanced by a more positive claim; if what God is and plans for creation cannot be readily discerned, that God is should appear obvious to anyone appropriately disposed to see the truth of the matter. For such a person, it will be as difficult to doubt the reality of God’s “living personality” as it is to doubt one’s own existence (CP 6.436). Moreover, among the more prominent features of the idea of God that make it “irresistible” to the person who contemplates it in genuine musement is the extraordinary beauty of that idea. The more carefully and consistently you consider such a notion, the more it “grows on you” or, more accurately, in you. Its meaning does not emerge all at once in a single reading, but is enhanced through rereading. Growing in power, it also manifests itself as an ideal so luminous that one will desire “to shape the whole conduct of life” in conformity with it (CP 6.467). The attractiveness of this idea is hardly limited, then, by the muser’s inability clearly or completely to understand the nature of God or the divine plan for creation. Instead, its extraordinary vagueness actually contributes to the power and persuasiveness of the idea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an occasional guest of Charles Peirce’s father, Benjamin, in their Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, when Charles was a very young boy.⁶ Despite his midlife reservations concerning transcendentalism as a philosophy, it is important to consider Peirce’s admission, in remarks appearing at the beginning of his 1892 essay on “The Law of Mind,” that he was influenced by some of its doctrines. There he reported that “it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations” (CP 6.102; W8: 135). Here, Peirce’s characterization of transcendentalism as a “virus,” along with his identification of thinkers who had been stricken by this “monstrous mysticism of the East,” are comments that were probably made with his tongue pressing at least lightly against his cheek. In any event, toward the end of that same essay, Peirce concluded that “if there is a personal God, we must have a direct perception of that person and indeed be in personal communication with him” (CP 6.162; W8: 156). The transcendentalist germ of an idea that embedded itself in his mind and gradually developed there was obviously one not lacking in religious significance. Peirce’s recognition of transcendentalism’s influence on his own mature philosophy, albeit modified in form, establishes Emerson as an important precursor in the history of theosemiotic.

Even if Peirce had never made this admission, evidence for an affinity between these two thinkers could readily be gleaned without having to look much further than Emerson’s early essay on Nature.⁷ On the account that Emerson developed there, our human words are to be regarded as the “signs of natural facts,” while nature itself is to be perceived as “the symbol of spirit.”⁸ Nature is able effectively to mediate between spiritual reality and human discourse precisely because natural facts are themselves a type of meaningful utterance, divinely inspired. Thus, “the world is emblematic”; moreover, “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”⁹ This thoroughly semiotic character of nature is complemented by its great beauty; for Emerson, the language of nature was a language of art.¹⁰ In most persons, the contemplation of natural beauty will produce delight. For some, the love of beauty is so great that “not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms.”¹¹ These latter are the artists and poets, each one of whose creative works can be understood as “an abstract or epitome of the world”—that is, as “the result or expression of nature, in miniature.”

Emerson’s theological aesthetic reserved a place of special prominence for the creative artists among us. Yet for any person who seriously and properly contemplates the beauty of nature, there will be significant and self-transformative consequences. This hardly means that everyone who is touched by nature is thus dramatically affected. On the contrary, early in his essay Emerson bemoaned the fact that “few adult persons can see nature.”¹² What is required in order to see is a certain kind of “discipline” (the title of Nature’s fifth chapter)—not one pursued in the abstract, as preparation for reading the book of nature, but rather one developed in the actual process of reading and rereading, in the living encounter with nature itself. Here Emerson anticipated Peirce’s suggestion in the Neglected Argument that musement is both an act of reading the signs embedded in God’s great poem and a practice designed to sharpen the reading skills that effective interpretation presupposes. And Peirce echoed his distinguished precursor when he commented on a widespread blindness among human beings, their inability to perceive the divine personality displayed in nature. Rather than attributing this inability to the remoteness or hiddenness of God, Peirce simply asserted “that facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily discerned” (CP 6.162; W8: 156–57). Nor was Emerson’s God, despite the difficulty that many people might experience in perceiving the Deity, in any sense a “hidden” God. Indeed, in 1869, Emerson confessed his “simple belief” that the “Author of Nature has not left himself without a witness in any sane mind.”¹³

Wrestling with this problem of discernment—not only with the articulation of such a problem but also with the formulation of effective strategies for addressing it—constitutes a fundamental task for theosemiotic. This task is to be subtly distinguished from those philosophical projects—either atheistic or apologetic—that share certain basic assumptions about the problem of “divine hiddenness.”¹⁴ For Emerson and Peirce, the God whose presence and purposes are difficult to discern is always necessarily “hidden in plain view.” (Indeed, in order for any discernment even to be possible, for the meaning of any sign to be interpretable, Peirce insisted that the interpreter must already have some “collateral” or “previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes” [CP 8.179].)

In certain utterances attributed to Jesus, he warned his disciples that they must become, in some relevant sense, like “little children” in order to be able to enter the kingdom of heaven.¹⁵ Both Emerson and Peirce echoed these remarks when they suggested that the key to discernment is the ability to see the world as a child sees it, to become childlike in one’s contemplation of nature. It was “adult” persons, in Emerson’s judgment, who have a special difficulty with perceiving the natural world in any way other than superficially. Yet, while the sun is visible only to the eye of an adult, it “shines into the eye and heart of the child.” Emerson alluded here to the cultivation of an “inward sense” that, when properly adjusted to the outward senses, permits a person to retain “the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”¹⁶ This process of adjustment is not a casual task, not something quickly or easily accomplished, but is achieved only by someone for whom the regular “intercourse” with nature has become “part of his daily food.”¹⁷ Only a life lived “in harmony with nature will purge the eyes to understand her text.” This process of purgation, of self-transformation, occurs gradually, “by degrees,” with the eventual result that “the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”¹⁸

Peirce was equally convinced that, while the child possesses a certain “wonderful genius,” regrettably, “as he grows up, he loses this faculty” (CP 1.349). The character of this lost capacity was not described by Peirce in any great detail, only sketched with broad strokes. At the very least, however, it incorporated an instinctive awareness of the ideality of nature, an appreciation of “the great truth of the immanent power of thought in the universe.” Elsewhere, Peirce suggested that the adult recovery of such an awareness was most likely to be accomplished, exactly as Emerson had recommended, by someone whose prayerful communion with the divine personality revealed in nature was “incessant” rather than “sporadic” (CP 6.437). It is reasonable to conclude here that what Peirce had in mind was an ongoing practice very much like the one that he later described as musement. Understanding the effects of regular engagement in musement—or of any interpretive exercise that is both playfully disinterested and consistent—should be considered essential for the purposes of theosemiotic inquiry. Both Emerson and Peirce recommended this kind of practice to their readers, understood its gradual influence to be in some sense the recovery of a certain childlike attitude toward the world, and doubted that a religiously meaningful relationship to nature could be established in the absence of such an attitude.¹⁹

Returning to the insight that religious experience has an important aesthetic dimension, this observation captures a certain tension between the claim that the beauty of God’s poem is something that human beings are naturally capable of appreciating and the warning that this natural capacity may easily atrophy over time or, even if it survives, that it may be difficult to utilize due to certain distractions. At the same time, the ideal of a child-like attitude toward the world, present in both Emerson’s and Peirce’s reflections, should not be misunderstood. It may be worthwhile asking precisely what it is about “little children” that enables their access to the kingdom of heaven, while still insisting that the qualities considered essential for perceiving the divine beauty in nature are those that a properly trained adult will be most likely to possess. That is to say, presumably Jesus (or whoever originated the biblical warning), as well as Emerson and Peirce, were not suggesting that one must be or become a child in order to be properly disposed for religiously meaningful experience, but rather that one must become like a child, once again, supposedly not in every way but only in some relevant sense. A childlike freedom from bias, from well-entrenched, habitual modes of thought and perception, a certain playfulness, and a capacity for wonder even in the encounter with seemingly ordinary things—these are the qualities that make possible an appreciation of nature’s beauty. In the play of musement, these qualities are cultivated by the adult practitioner, exposing beneath those habitual tendencies that typically shape human experience whatever natural instincts may lie dormant and restoring them to life.

Recall that Peirce predicted how the muser would be moved by the beauty of the idea of God to the point of desiring to shape all of life in conformity with it; thus, the religious experience of beauty can be regarded as foundational for human morality. This theosemiotic insight was already in evidence more than a century earlier, displayed in the work of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’s thought is relevant to the present inquiry in a number of important respects. His detailed analysis of those “signs” that should be considered as the most reliable indicators of authentic religious experience deserves careful scrutiny here.²⁰ It is also important to gesture toward Edwards’s own life-long reading of the “book of nature,” fragmentary meditations published posthumously as Images or Shadows of Divine Things.²¹ More immediately, consider his argument about how “true virtue” is grounded in the saint’s innate sense of beauty.²² That argument by no means limited the relationship be...