Paying Attention To The Sky

William James

It began as a simple enough query from a reader, Gordie, in Ypsalanti, Michigan (I lie, I have no idea where Gordie comes from. I just like the name of the town.). Gordie had asked “Do you know what William James thought of Catholicism?” I checked a couple of books in my library and came up with the fact that William’s brother Robert had converted to Catholicism but the other members of the James family appeared to have never been part of the Church and R.D. Richardson had never devoted any space to answering the question. An abstract of a dissertation on the net gave an exhaustive approach to exploring what that question really meant:

In their responses to the works of the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), American Catholic thinkers have developed at least five different approaches: Neo-Scholastic, Neo-Traditionist, Radical, Liberal, and Academic. Investigation of these responses may suggest some answers to the general question, In what ways have Catholic intellectuals related to American culture and society during the twentieth century?

This dissertation is a study of the Neo-Scholastic and Neo-Traditionist responses. It begins with an account of the American Catholic intellectual scene in 1900 and an exposition of James’s religious philosophy. Next, the Neo-Scholastic and the Neo-Traditionist responses are analyzed separately; the development of their major themes is traced; their distinctive characteristics are defined; and their historical and ideological relationships are described.

Finally some implications of the study are suggested regarding the historiography of American Catholicism and the conduct of systematic theology by American Catholics. Catholic writers have regularly responded to James’s religious philosophy from the beginning of the century to the present.

The earliest responses came from those who associated themselves with Neo-Scholastic (usually Neo-Thomist) philosophy and theology; and this variety was dominant from 1900 to 1960. It developed through four stages:

(1) Naive, dominant before 1907, which evaluated James by his usefulness to Catholics;

(2) Religious, typical until 1920, which condemned James for his Protestantism, Modernism, immoral teaching, and Americanism;

(3) Rational, dominant from  to 1910, which judged James’s logic, epistemology, and metaphysics to be radically incompatible with its own; and

(4) Reflective, dominant among Neo-Scholastics since the 1960′s, which tolerated James’s radical differences and encouraged more extensive inquiry and dialog.

A major alternative to Neo-Scholasticism was embodied in the Neo-Traditionism formulated by Robert Channon Pollock (1901-1978) of Fordham University beginning in the 1940′s. Relying on Augustinian themes, he detected radical sympathies and compatibilities between James’s philosophy and the intellectual and moral heritage of the Catholic tradition.

For the historiography of American Catholic intellectual life, a chronology of its development and a taxonomy of its varieties are suggested. For American Catholic theology, this dissertation suggests greater emphasis on the value and practice of pluralism; greater commitment to professional standards in the practice of scholarship, philosophy, and theology; and greater involvement with the main currents of American intellectual life–including the religious philosophy of William James.

If you read the above carefully you begin to see the lines of an adversarial relationship between James’ religious philosophy and the Church. Yet I am want to see that, preferring my own blind Catholic fandom of faith. I’m ashamed to admit to it but basically anyone I have considered my intellectual mentors have crossed into the Church along with my conversion in 2006 . So I’m obviously not the person who should be addressed that question, its baseball equivalent would be “Do you think the Red Sox can beat the Yankees in 2012?”  

Many years ago I read Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll With William James which was Barzun’s tribute to James as mentor and I found it impossible not to come away from it without a deep appreciation for the masters who lead us to develop our intellects. I’m just selfish enough to protect those whom I feel that debt/affinity for. I doubt there is anyone I dearly love whom I would not consider in some way Catholic since my conversion, even while  others may muster all sorts of reasons why they could never be considered as such.

So it is not that I couldn’t give Gordie a good answer, but it needs a little explanation and it is very different from the dissertation writer noted above. Here are four reasons I can muster for James’ favorable view of Catholicism:

1. Richardson writes in his introduction to The Heart of William James that James possessed  the most free-ranging mind of any American thinker, and the chief source of his liberty, as his student, friend, and colleague Santayana put it in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,

“was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality, similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultramodern, radical world.”

Those very notions of “free-ranging” and spontaneous I find very Catholic. Obedience is extraordinarily freeing, almost synonymous with freedom to me and most thinkers I am drawn to exhibit that kind of character. Let’s face it, Jesus was like that, read Chesterton on the Sermon on the Mount, if you don’t believe me. This is the kind of character that Santana is referring to above. Even while reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, you knew the author was religious but not in any way attached to a particular denomination although paradoxically you knew that he would be an ecclesial Christian.
R.D. Richardson, The Heart of William James

To me the only real ecclesial Christians are Catholic but their ecclesiality is often compromised and paradoxical from the start. I know of no other religious grouping where the modifier “Cafeteria” can be attached. For some reason “Cafeteria Jews”, Cafeteria Muslims,” or “Cafeteria Baptists” doesn’t sound right. “Cafeteria Catholic” appears to mean that the person in question doesn’t accept all of the beliefs of the Church. I’m not sure how others think about it, but I see the person as someone still working on accepting their faith and obedience. Even as something fundamental as abortion and right to life we see Catholics like E.J. Dionne and Peggy Noonan on opposite sides of the question.

2.  Emerson, in his essay “Experience,” listed what he considered “the lords of life”; they were illusion, temperament, succession, surface, surprise, reality, and subjectiveness. Nicolas of Cusa, that pluralist in Christian clothing, thought “the precondition for the abundance of nature lies in what is restless, limited, changeable, and composite.” Italo Calvino projected six lectures (and completed five) on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. In like manner, William James defended “incompleteness, ‘more,’ uncertainty, insecurity, possibility, fact, novelty, compromise, remedy and success” as being authentic realities.

James further thought of the organization of the self as “a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments, and disappointments.” And he declared that philosophy “has always turned on grammatical particles, with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my.” These words, he said, “designate types of conjunctive relations, arranged in a roughly ascending order of immediacy and inclusiveness.”
R.D. Richardson, The Heart of William James

Having insight into the human condition strikes me as being very Catholic. It’s not so much the insights per se that affect me as much as the fact that the insights are right. “Right and practical,” as Richardson puts it and I can’t disagree with his assessment. Who decides what is right? Well, we do.

3.  William James believed, as Emerson had, that self-trust is the quality on which a good life is best built, and — again like Emerson — James gave us the reason why we may safely trust our best impulses: “If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess” (The Principles of Psychology, vol.2).

As neurophysiology and neurobiology make rapid strides — almost daily — in showing us precisely how the brain works, all the while minding us just how fantastically complicated the brain really is, we see, as no previous generation has, a clearer and clearer form in the slowly dissolving mist. We see that we each have within us a something, call it a brain or mind or process, that reflects, thinks about, and responds and thus, in a sense, contains the world. When and if there is a final reality, something on which everyone will eventually agree, it will be seen to be commensurate with powers we in fact possess.

James stood for the individual, and he argued that each individual matters. Beyond that, James believed that we are connected, though not always in ways we see or understand. “Our lives are like islands in the sea,” he said in the late essay Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,

“or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other’s fog-horns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”
R.D. Richardson, The Heart of William James

That’s almost perfect, if you ask me. It strikes the same balance that I see in Jesus telling us “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

Regard that and juxtapose the image you have of  the mystical body of Christ —  is it not the roots of the trees in the forest commingling in the dark subsoil that James is suggesting above? The only thing I would change in Richardson’s assessment is not that James stood for the individual, and that each individual matters but that James stood for the person, and he argued that each person matters.

And just to repeat the line that limns our imago dei: “The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.” Isn’t that beautiful? And doesn’t it just define why we are all human adorans? It saddens me that so many of my fellow men are ignorant of that.

4.  And in his next breath, James refused the easy notion that man is the measure of all things. “I firmly disbelieve, myself,” he wrote in the concluding paragraphs of Pragmatism,

“that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things.”
R.D. Richardson, The Heart of William James

There is in that assessment of man-as-dog-or-cat, a very wise view of the human condition as creature. You can’t get very far away from it. Without the forgiveness of sins that Christ made possible for us there is damnably little that recommends us to God’s Kingdom of Heaven. Once again James seems to have it right on. See this in his plea for how teachers should treat their pupils:

“I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal’s inner springs of joy.”

It’s positive reinforcement over the rolled-up newspaper, but he spares us that liberal twaddle of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. There is very little in man that one could self-congratulate and describe as “elevating.”

It’s not very academic, Gordie, and really nothing more than flaming opinion, but it is why you will find William James Paying Attention to the Sky. Thanks for the question (the short answer is “No,” by the way), but now you know better than to ask me stuff.  ;-)