Tolstoyan Naturalized Theology

Where love is, there God is also.

Theology Naturalized

Abrahamic yoga.

John Dewey: Tolstoyan Theologian

In March 2012, I wrote a series of posts on Tolstoyan ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. It was a difficult task since so little of the scholarship on Tolstoy is conducted by individuals who have actually committed themselves to his teaching. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since "true believers" tend to forgo criticism in favor of reverential apologia. Critical piety of the sort that Tolstoy himself manifested is, unfortunately, beyond the reach of most people--including (some might say especially) his own, self-styled followers. That being the case, scholars who avoid treading where fools rush in deserve credit for exercising restraint. Lacking Tolstoy's feeling for piety, however, such scholars neglect it; this neglect is made evident by a kind of "tone-deafness" about Tolstoy's lifelong intellectual project: the articulation of critical religion.

John Dewey was an exception to this general rule. Whether or not Dewey read Tolstoy is a matter for further research, though it hardly matters. His little book A Common Faith (based upon the Terry lectures he delivered at Yale in 1933-34) is a consummate expression of Tolstoy's critical piety.

Like Tolstoy, Dewey had little patience for "supernaturalism" (what Tolstoy did not hesitate to call "superstition"). For Dewey, "... the word 'God' means the ideal ends that at a given time and place one acknowledges as having authority over his volition and emotion, the values to which one is supremely devoted, as far as these ends, through imagination, take on unity" (A Common Faith, 42). The tendency exhibited by human beings to invest their ideals in a pre-existing Being "agrees with all we know of human psychology" (ibid., 44), but does not justify a simple-minded continuation of this age-old habit. Indeed, Dewey made a strong case that such time-honored habits ought to be abandoned, for they "...[divert] attention and energy from ideal values and from the exploration of actual conditions by means of which they may be promoted. History is testimony to this fact. Men have never fully used the powers they possess to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing" (ibid., 46).

When Tolstoy, on his death-bed, told his daughter, "God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists" (see Mazeppist post of 3/2/12), he was anticipating Dewey's arguments by a couple of decades.

The task of Tolstoyan theology in the wake of Dewey is the Rortian project of re-describing concepts of supernaturalist religion in pragmatic and naturalistic terms: theology naturalized.

Richard Rorty on the End of Inquiry

Post-Foundationalist Religion

In a lecture delivered in Turin, Italy, on September 21 2005, Richard Rorty invoked George Santayana in an effort to describe "post-foundationalist religion." Rorty noted that Santayana defined "superstition" as "the confusion of an ideal with power. Superstition, he said, is the belief that any legitimate ideal must somehow be grounded in something already actual, something transcendent that sets this ideal before us. What the pope calls the structure of human existence is an example of such a transcendent entity. Santayana said, and I agree, that only the source of moral ideals is the human imagination."

"Santayana hoped that human beings would eventually give up the idea that moral ideals must be grounded in something larger than ourselves. He hoped that we would come to think of all such ideals as human creations and none the worse for that. Santayana's claim that imagination is a good enough source for the ideal led him to say that religion and poetry are identical in essence. He used the term 'poetry' in an expansive sense to mean something like 'product of the imagination.' He used the word 'religion' in an equally large sense to include political idealism, aspirations to make the life of a community radically different, radically better than it had been before. Poetry, Santayana said, is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion when it merely supervenes upon life is seen to be nothing but poetry. Neither poetry nor religion, Santayana believed, should be thought of as telling us about something that is already real" Richard Rorty, An Ethics For Today, New York: Columbia University Press (2011), 8-9.

Post-Foundationalist Ethics

Albert Schweitzer, like Leo Tolstoy, attempted to ground an ethics in a universal impulse. For Tolstoy, that impulse was the unmistakable call of conscience; for Schweitzer, it was the "will-to-live." The desire to locate a universal foundation for ethical thought and action is understandable because it can be argued to obligate every human being. All philosophical foundationalisms, however, fail on empirical grounds. After Rorty, foundationalism ought to have little purchase on our thought--no matter how much it may continue to lay claim to our affections. Ethical principles, on the other hand, remain viable insofar as they have qualities that recommend them. In The Philosophy of Civilization (first English translation, 1949), Schweitzer articulated an ethical principle that stands on its own (despite his attempt to ground it in his notion of the will-to-live):

"The basic principle of ethics, that principle which is a necessity of thought, which has a definite content, which is engaged in constant, living, and practical dispute with reality, is: Devotion to life resulting from reverence for life" (POC, 306).

One can omit Schweitzer's assurance that this principle is "a necessity of thought" without losing much. The key to his understanding of ethics is that, founded or not, ethics involves "constant, living, and practical dispute with reality" (as it has come to be accepted in a given community, i.e., the status quo). Whenever and wherever the status quo fails to show a "devotion to life resulting from reverence for life," it becomes subject to ethical engagement and conscientious dispute.

The "definite content" of this principle is devotion resulting from reverence. Tolstoy would argue it is the "golden rule." The relative merits of these alternatives is a meditation for another time.

A Naturalistic Idealism in Ethics

A further widening of the circle...

The degree or depth to which Albert Schweitzer studied the later writings of Leo Tolstoy is a subject for future research. That Schweitzer read the later Tolstoy is evidenced by his reference to that portion of Tolstoy's oeuvre in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (1952).

In a 1962 study of Schweitzer's thought (The Ethical Mysticism of Albert Schweitzer), Henry Clark credits Georg Simmel with planting in a young Schweitzer's mind "the conviction that the will-to-live manifests itself in man as a drive towards self-transcendence. This means that self-perfection seeks to overcome the actual self of any given moment, in order that one may become the higher self that he is potentially" (Clark, 26).

This notion bears remarkable similarity to the view that Tolstoy expressed in The Law of Love and the Law of Violence: "We possess a single infallible guide and this is the Universal Spirit that lives in men as a whole, and in each one of us, which makes us aspire to what we should aspire; it is the spirit that commands the tree to grow towards the sun, the flower to throw off its seed in autumn, us to reach out towards God, and by so doing become united to each other" (Tolstoy, 112).

Both thinkers articulated a naturalistic idealism in ethics, though Schweitzer's commitment to Christian mission occasionally compromised his candor in this regard.