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.