Ritual and Thought: Spirituality and Method in Philosophy of Religion
Abstract
:1. The Religious Problem and the Question of Anthropology
The religious problem, in the 19th century, has only one or the other of the following four solutions:Disappearance of the faith before science; Appearance of a new faith; Conservation of the old and traditional faith in France and in Western Europe: the Catholic faith; Evolution of the transformed Catholic faith.
The present crisis unprecedented perhaps in depth and extent—for it is at the same time scientific, metaphysical, moral, social and political—is not a ‘dissolution’ (for the spirit of faith does not die), nor even an ‘evolution’ (for the spirit of faith does not change), it is a purification of the religious sense, and an integration of Catholic truth.’
2. Critical Method in Philosophy of Religion
the self, which exists or perceives itself internally as one, simple, identical… abstracts itself from them by the act of internal apperception that distinguishes and separates to a certain extent the individual or the one from the collective and the multiple; the acting force or the cause, from the produced effect; the action, from the passion; in a word, the subject which resists and undergoes the various modifications.
From then on, it can no longer be a question, as with Kant, of the conditions of the possibility of experience, but rather it becomes a task of deepening our experience of being: not the sense of being as required by the mind, but the being that is and that imposes itself upon us. Instead of an abstract metaphysics, the source of interminable disputes, one is led to institute ‘a positive science of ideas, or of the use and circumscribed object of human faculties.’
2.1. Maurice Blondel and the Tradition of the Masters of Sympathy
2.1.1. Immanence
The atheistic materialist current resolutely directs speculations on morality towards a scientific and social morality; deism and theism seek to unite morality and religion in a sort of natural catechism of human conscience. What unites these tendencies, beyond their disparity, however, is the criticism of religion. In other words, the systems of non-confessional morality were able to assert themselves all the better in the eighteenth century because they were built up in relation to their opposite: religious morality. Indeed, they were built as an alternative to religious morality.
…we are trying to see on what terms one can purchase not just a reasonable conviction but one which is strictly and, if I may so put it, technically rational. How can the enquiry be brought to the critical point where the debate can be decided, without falsifying the proper objects either of reason or of faith?
In all modern philosophy there is in effect a radical vice which is to believe, without even recognizing it, that the speculative solution of the problem of life—in whatever form it presents itself—is equivalent or superior to the effective solution.
The notion of immanence, with which rationalism wishes to dominate ‘modern thought’ has made this the basis and the condition of any philosophy, and far from excluding requires, if it is to be fully developed, the transcendent truths to which it seemed at first radically hostile.
That which does not correspond to a summons, or to a need,—that which does not have its interior point of contact, its prefiguration or its foundation (pierre d’attente) in man, that which is purely and simply from without, which can neither penetrate his life nor inform his thought, is radically inefficacious and at the same time is unable to be assimilated.
...it is not the business of philosophy to provide us with the absolute of truth, with the truth which is substantial and salutary, whereas its duty is to investigate the conditions in which this truth can be made known to us, it follows that it is not its business to elaborate the principles of faith as if these were, in the ultimate analysis, nothing but the discoveries of reason or more or less symbolic and mythical intuitions.
…the immanent affirmation of the transcendent, even of the supernatural, does not prejudge in any way the transcendent reality of the immanent affirmations—a radical distinction which no one, perhaps, has preserved with complete consistency, and which enables us to construct in a scientific manner, without distracting preoccupations or fruitless or premature discussions, the entire phenomenology of thought and of action…. Formally identical with objective faith, subjective faith is entirely at the mercy of rational criticism, while objective faith remains untouched…. It remains to show—perhaps to the surprise of certain philosophers and equally of certain theologians—that the only possible religious philosophy, which is truly religious and truly a philosophy, results from these principles.
2.1.2. Moral Psychology
…philosophy is the integration, special and technical in its form, universal and popular in its subject matter, of the ordered efforts of human life, to produce our being by producing being and beings within us, that is to say, by knowing them, by adapting ourselves to them, by assimilating them into ourselves.
Whatever may be the mysterious foundation beneath phenomena, the order in which they follow each other is exclusively determined by the requirements of our own thought. According to this hypothesis, the most elevated item of knowledge is neither sensation nor an intellectual intuition but a reflexive act by which our thought achieves an immediate grasp of its own nature and the relation which holds between it and phenomena. From this relationship we are able to deduce the laws which thought imposes on phenomena.
We can call, in a general way, spiritualism, any doctrine that recognizes the independence and the primacy of the spirit, that is to say of conscious thought. There is a kind of spiritualism of the first degree, which consists in simply placing the spirit above nature, without establishing a relationship between the one and the other. But there is a deeper and more complete spiritualism, which consists in seeking in the mind [l’esprit] the explanation of nature itself, in believing that the unconscious thought that works in it is the same one that becomes conscious in us, and that it works only to produce an organism that allows it to pass (by the representation of space) from the unconscious form to the conscious form. It is this second spiritualism which was, it seems to me, that of Ravaisson.
According to Ravaisson both the empiricists as well as the intellectualists, the English school as well as Kantianism itself, are only able to know the outside of things; they understand things only by their limits; they do not know the interior, the interval: the living work being done in the interior of these structures, the living activity that connects the limits through their intervals.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the milieu of French-speaking philosophy, there was a question endowed with an urgency difficult to evaluate in all its nuances: was metaphysical knowledge still possible after the skeptical outcome of the Enlightenment, after the gnoseological despair of David Hume and the phenomenalism attributed to Immanuel Kant?
The vain and interminable disputes of the scholastics did not come …from the fact that they used regular forms of reasoning, which would, to the contrary, only help in contributing to better understanding and agreement, but rather from the fact that they spoke of badly determined principles, of only apparent definitions, which one could always evade by distinctions.
When we enter into ourselves, as we say, we find ourselves in the middle of a world of sensations, feelings, imaginations, ideas, desires, wills, memories, a boundless and bottomless moving ocean, which remains all ours, which is none other than ourselves. How ours, how ourselves? Because, at each moment and in each place of this multiple interior whirlpool, we form assemblies and sets from all the elusive diversity, whose link is a unity which is nothing other than the very operation by which we form them. If, in fact, we look for the way in which this cause, which is ourselves, does what it does, we find that its action consists in the determination, by the thought, of an order or of an end to which concur and adjust unknown powers that envelop, latent within our complex individuality.
Thus, the problem was posed in quite the same way by Kant and by Biran. Both thought that there must be a middle term between the thing-in-itself, inaccessible to experience, and the phenomenon, added and juxtaposed in time and space; both agreed again in seeking in the thinking subject this middle term, this root of a new metaphysics.
There is here a tradition whose origin Ravaisson related to the thought of Maine de Biran in the famous Report on philosophy in France of 1867 where he announced and defined the work of his successors under the name of ‘spiritualist positivism.’ Seen from afar, there is indeed a tradition that manifests the resistance of the conscience to the scientism of the century. Seen closely, the story is less simple, and it is in this less simple story that the originality of the young Blondel appears. The Biranian discovery of the I had inaugurated a philosophy of the spirit. Certainly, it was not a question of an I thinking even if my body does not exist. This I incarnated was however posing itself as an I distinct from its body within its very embodiment. And by that, it became the first fact of a philosophy of the spirit independent of a philosophy of nature.
…in order to understand doctrines in depth, which were a matter of soul and principle of life, one would expose oneself to ignore the main thing if one limited oneself to the linkage of concepts, to the external form of systems: if it is good not to offend against scholarly exactitude and against dialectical intelligence, it is still better to go beyond the letter, beyond the very organization, to the spirit of doctrines, to the soul of thoughts.
2.1.3. A Science of Thought
There is a way of knowing and affirming according to notions which are acquired by study, by theory, by science, uno modo per modum cognitionis, secundum quod per studium habetur. And there is another way, whose specific characteristics, and normal procedures we must describe; a concrete, synthetic mode, which is based on the very disposition of the subject who judges as much as on the intimate nature of the object that is affirmed and appreciated. As distinct as these two modes are, let us notice that the second one is no less ‘knowledge’ than the first one, and that the clarity which accompanies this kind of sure and palatable ‘judgment,’ to be quite other than the light of a logical analysis, is still a no less lucid view; on the contrary, we can say.
If a note is sounded in a luthier shop, where the various instruments are all tuned in unison, the same note will spontaneously vibrate in all of them; among beings, there are likewise ready harmonies, not in the order of phenomena only, but in what concerns deep realities.
It seems to me, when I am in Fontainebleau, that I sympathize with all my strength with the powerful vitality of the trees that surround me… by reflecting well on it, it does not seem to me unreasonable to suppose that all the forms of existence sleep more or less deeply buried in the bottom of every being, because under the well-fixed features of the human form of which I am covered, a slightly piercing eye must recognize without difficulty the more vague outline of animality, which veils in its turn the still more floating and more indecisive form of the simple organization or one of the possible determinations of the organization is the arboreality, which generates in its turn the oakeness. Where oakness is hidden somewhere in my depths and can sometimes be tempted to come out and appear in its turn dias in luminis oras, although the humanity that has taken the lead over it forbids it and blocks its way.
3. Thinking in Terms of Ritual Practice
…the religious feeling, always present even under the most aberrant forms, has recourse to rituals, beliefs, sacrifices, attesting the need, the hope, the confidence, the expectation of a possible alliance, of a desirable communion, of an intervention of the divinity regarding human beings.
Our human thought could not indeed be born, develop, or subsist without images or symbols. But it has a deeper cause; it therefore needs to look for and affirm, under the signs and the representative substitutes that only serve as clothing or vehicles, a present and hidden reality.
For an explanation to be successful, it was necessary above all that the child understood that a sign made by a tactile impression was related to a specific object, or that a specific tactile impression had the value of a conventional sign for a specific object… The child understood that there was a relationship between a sensitive sign and an external object. One will observe that the child already revealed thus an activity of soul, suprasensible and spiritual: here was already manifested an intelligence which rises above what falls under the senses and can draw abstractions from it. Because the tactile impression, the sign, is something which is under the senses; the external object is concrete and sensible. But the idea, that between the sensible sign and the sensible object there reigns a connection, according to which the one becomes exactly the sign of the other, that itself is no longer a sensible representation.
Thus, when one analyzes, in the case of a deaf-mute-blind girl from birth, the way to bring a trapped soul out of confused immediacy and to realize in it the conditions of the most rudimentary mental operation, one is led to complete Maine de Biran’s views on the primitive fact and the intimate sense, and to see that the conditions on which he makes the reflective life depend are involved in the first really distinct sensation.
Animals or pre-religious men could only ‘passively endure’ suffering or other limitations imposed by the conditions of their existence, but religious man can to some extent ‘transcend and dominate’ them through his capacity for symbolization, and thus can attain a degree of freedom relative to his environment that was not previously possible.
At this point in history, this system of representations evidently had nothing to do with a conceptual and discursive mode of thought. We can recognize that the ‘symbolic forms’ … that are then codified and socialized through mythology and religion relate to an intuitive and immediate intelligence. It is an intelligence that nonetheless has its own internal logic and above all its own ability to regulate certain aspects of fundamental human behavior.
…it seems that ‘religion’, far from being purely irrational, first developed a sort of ‘transcendental logic’ at a non-utilitarian level, a logic that was then applied to the real world, imprinting on it new significances in a novel and different system of relations. This cognitive aspect of the Revolution of Symbols is fundamental.
What he meant by a ‘psycho-cultural’ revolution and his ideas about symbolic representation and the evolution of religion would be a juicy topic for research, for Cauvin had originally studied philosophy, and his thinking was certainly not the imaginative speculations.
(1) to describe religious structures according to a method of understanding;(2) to not neglect, for that reason, any instruction from the positive disciplines, in particular that of history;(3) to join to phenomenology an ontology or an axiology, allowing its description to be rooted in the spiritual dynamism and to be justified by it.
How could a stone, fashioned and set up by man’s hand, have the significance of a double that would relate it to such uncontrollable and mysterious psychic phenomena as dream figures and supernatural apparitions? How is it that a rough-hewn slab of stone can in certain circumstances appear double and ambiguous, with one face turned toward the invisible? What is it about the kollosos that makes it stand in such contrast to the world of the living that it seems to introduce into the earthly landscape where it has been erected not simply a stone, a familiar object, but the very power of death, in all its uncanny strangeness and terror?
For the Greeks, therefore, the kolossos and the psuchē are closely related. They fall within a category of very clearly defined phenomena to which the term eidola was applied. As well as the psuchē, which is a shade, and the kolossos, which is a crudely formed idol, this category includes the dream image (oneiros), the shade (skia), and the supernatural apparition (phasma). These phenomena, which to us seem so disparate, are unified in the sense that within the cultural context of archaic Greece they are all apprehended in the same way by the mind and thus take on a similar significance. It is therefore justifiable, where they are concerned, to speak of a true psychological category–the double–which presupposes a different mental organization from our own. A double is completely different from an image. It is not an imitation of a real object, an illusion of the mind, or a creation of a thought. For the person who sees it, the double is an external reality, but one whose peculiar character, in its very appearance, sets it in opposition to familiar objects and to the ordinary surroundings of life. It exists simultaneously on two contrasting planes: just when it shows itself to be present, it also reveals itself as not of this world and as belonging to some other, inaccessible sphere.
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1 | Translation provided by (Dru 1963, p. 226). |
2 | Labelled as “the philosopher of Vatican II”, Blondel proved to have a lasting impact in the council’s official dogmatic declarations, particularly regarding the notion of “tradition”, and especially through one of the council’s intellectual architects, Yves Congar (1904–1995), who remarked that Blondel, in his History and Dogma, furnished “one of the finest descriptions of tradition that exist.” (Congar 1964, p. 26) For further literature on Blondel’s impact upon the intellectual life of the Church, see (Dru 1963; Henrici 1999; Portier 2011; Hannan 2015; Koerpel 2019). |
3 | See for instance, (Van der Leeuw [1938] 1963; Eliade 1958; Otto 1923, 1931). Walter Burkert, has noted: “The impact of ‘ritual’ on classical studies can be dated to the year 1890, when within twelve months there appeared those three books which inaugurated the ‘Cambridge school’ of anthropology: Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites, Jane Harrison’s Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, and the first—and slim—edition of The Golden Bough by James Frazer.” (Burkert 1979, p. 35; Smith 1889; Harrison 1890; Frazer 1894) Burkert remains one of the most productive scholars of religion when considering the advancement of these themes and methodologies, and the present article is a philosophical response to his suggestion that, “It seems promising… to see to what extent metaphysical ideas can be derived from ritual.” (Burkert 1979, p. 38). |
4 | This is in reference to Dominique Janicaud’s classic, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ (1991), which has led to a rich examination of the French phenomenological tradition. A recent work provides a comprehensive look at how one of the leading philosophers in the wake of this turn, Emmanuel Falque, has advanced the endeavor to employ phenomenological method towards the question of religious experience. (Koci and Alvis 2020; Falque [2013] 2016). See also (Horner and Romano 2021). |
5 | Christine M. Gschwandtner recently published an article that draws a very similar point, where she indicates this division between the tradition of French phenomenology and that of phenomenology of religion. She remarks that French phenomenology suffers from a lack of engagement with other disciplines, and suggests that “both fields might profit from more dialogue and that taking account of some of the insights developed by the religious studies approach to phenomenology of religion would help expand the French projects beyond their at times rather narrow focus without losing the real and unique contribution they are making to the discussion.” (Gschwandtner 2019, p. 48) I would emphasize her point that the method of interpreting experience from a first-person singular perspective “seems to miss something essential in the very nature of religious experience.” (p. 52) She argues how such an approach is “incapable of providing an account … of the ways in which religion has shaped and continues to influence communal identities in entire cultures.”(p. 52) She identifies how the French approaches “are curiously short on analysis of actual experiences or concrete religious phenomena.” (p. 52) While I would agree with her critiques, I might disagree with her if the conclusion is that phenomenology is itself a sufficient paradigm for responding to these methodological issues, as while her call for a “phenomenology of ritual practice” is certainly a fruitful suggestion, I intend to argue in this essay that an understanding of ritual requires more than a phenomenological approach, as there are certain ontological judgements concerning the nature of human thought that are necessary for understanding how it is that rituals function. In this article I wish to show how the earlier conceptual framework of the French spiritualist tradition, to which French phenomenology is bound in a number of ways, provides a philosophical model that may help to orient the contributions of the phenomenological tradition to provide a more complete understanding of religion, one that is sensitive to the ‘deep realities’ involved in ritual practice. |
6 | This position was prompted by, and this essay inspired in part from, the suggestion made by Jean Danielou that Henry Duméry had brought to “the phenomenology of religions the philosophical justification which it lacked.” (Danielou 1959, p. 68). |
7 | Henri de Lubac indicated the promise of Blondel’s thought in doing just this: “Maurice Blondel’s work, however much it is still fought over, has prepared the ground and created the atmosphere in which the close connection between the problems of the spiritual life and those of anthropology and metaphysics is made manifest.” (de Lubac and Ravier 1965, p. 9). |
8 | The term “the masters of suspicion” was coined by Paul Ricœur in reference to these three figures, who he characterizes as representing a general “opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation of meaning…” (Ricœur [1965] 1970, p. 32) With the risk of extending this term beyond its immediate context, I wish to argue that this characterization nevertheless identifies a prevailing attitude and pervasive methodological orientation that has functioned to obscure the deeper realities of the spirit, to which I wish to argue a tradition of the “Masters of Sympathy” may be introduced to help remedy. |
9 | For a reflection upon his influence in the twentieth century, see (Harris 2000). As one scholar has noted: “Vere Gordon Childe, although dead since 1957, remains the most renowned and widely read archaeologist of the twentieth century…. Most European archaeologists recognized him as the leading expert on the culture-history of prehistoric Europe. In the United States, he was acknowledged to be one of the foremost cultural evolutionists of his time….” (Trigger 2000, p. 9) Despite his vast influence, the materialistic orientation of his thought has been largely abandoned, nevertheless, he is still considered an essential predecessor of the field, particularly with “processeual archaeology.” (Trigger 2000, p. 20) His work also “helped to renew the relationship between archaeology and anthropology”, which his proteges have continued to develop, as with Colin Renfrew who will be discussed later in this paper. (Trigger 2000, pp. 20–21). |
10 | A prime example of such a general consensus can be found in the summary conclusion of a study conducted by a group of leading natural scientists, archaeologists, philosophers, and theologians, brought together to work on a research project entitlted, “Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study,” where it was judged that, “Our overall conclusion, then, is that there is much both general and specific data to support the notion that changes in spiritual life and religious ritual are a prelude to or accompany the social and economic changes that lead to ‘civilization’.” (Hodder 2010b, p. 340). |
11 | These claims will be taken up in the third part of this essay. |
12 | For another branch on this tree with a rich and fruitful approach in philosophy of religion, see the work of Emmanuel Falque, particularly his Crossing the Rubicon (2016) and his Tridum Philosophique (1999–2013). (Falque [2013] 2016; Falque [2004] 2012; Falque [2011] 2016; Falque [1999] 2019) Cutting to the heart of where Falque stands within this tradition, Victor Emma-Adamah notes how Falque’s work opens up “before two competing understandings of finitude: one defined by the Heideggerian tradition and the other represented by Blondel.” (Emma-Adamah 2020, p. 176) Ultimately Falque has chosen to develop his thought more according to the framework of Heidegger in terms of the horizon of finitude, at the expense of Blondel’s paradigm of immanance. Emma-Adamah raises the crucial question, “of whether a Heideggerian … determination of finitude as a closed horizon is the only or even most enlightening option for this experience of something beyond finitude.” (p. 183) I would whole-heartedly agree with his suggestion that “there is more to be read from Blondel and the ‘other phenomenologies’ explored by Gabellieri as alternative accounts for finitude” and that: “[t]he direction opened for such alternatives must turn to a rich tradition informed, since ancient Greek philosophy, by a thought of an internal polarity in individual things and a resistance to coincidance.”(p. 183; see also Gabellieri 2019) This is an acute charaterization of Blondel’s thought, which certainly accords itself along the lines of such a philosophia perennis, whereas many other trends in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, with Heidegger and ‘the masters of suscpicion’ being prominent examples, represent a distinct and sometimes conscientious break within this philosophical tradition. Certain aspects of Falque’s thought, it must be said, betray any attempt to pin him too firmly within any set school or tradition of thought. See in particular (Falque 2019a, 2019b, 2020, 2021). For my own critique of Falque’s thought, see (Connelly 2020b, pp. 158–61). |
13 | |
14 | Cf. (Chevalier 1966, p. 176) |
15 | Cf. (Chevalier 1966, p. 179) |
16 | |
17 | Cf. (Greisch 2002, p. 445) |
18 | Blondel’s 1893 thesis was entitled, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. (Blondel [1893] 1984). This text would be rewritten into two new volumes as a part of his trilogy. (Blondel 1936, 1937). |
19 | This phase of his work would come together most clearly at the turn of the century with his 1903 essay, The Elementary Principle of a Logic of the Moral Life. (Blondel [1903] 2000) |
20 | Long in development since his 1893 thesis, this dimension of his philosophy is brought out most clearly in his two volumes published in 1934 entitled, La pensée. (Blondel 1934a, 1934b) |
21 | Blondel’s philosophy may be, I would argue, cleanly divided between a philosophy of religion, and a religious philosophy, where the former is outlined above, and the latter is encapsulated in his two volumes of La philosophie et l’esprit chrétien (1944–46), in addition to his capstone work, published in 1950 just after his death, The Philosophical Exigencies of Christian Religion. (Blondel 1944; Blondel 1946a; Blondel [1950] 2021) The translation of this last volume would fatefully be published just before the death of one of the greatest Blondel scholars to have ever lived, Oliva Blanchette (1929–2021), whose Maurice Blondel a Philosophical Life (2010), is both the best biography, and commentary, of Blondel’s life and work to have ever appeared. (Blanchette 2010) Beyond his extensive commentary and translation, Blanchette was able to synthesize his own insights from within this Blondelian lineage, with the 2003 publication of his, Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics. (Blanchette 2003) |
22 | These critiques are typified in what was, at the time, an anonymous review of Blondel’s 1893 thesis, written by Leon Brunschvicg, where he states that “for modern rationalism the notion of immanence is the base and condition of all philosophical doctrine” and proceedes to accuse Blondel of breaching this norm “by attaching himself to action in order to see in every act an inevitable transcendence.” (Brunschvicg 1893, p. 49) |
23 | Blondel points to “On the Emendation of the Intellect” (Spinoza and Curley [1661] 1985, pp. 10–11) in addition to the preface to the second part of “Ethics,” entitled “On the Nature and Origin of the Mind,” (de Spinoza and Morgan [1674] 2002, p. 243) as the prime examples of the Spinozan doctrine. |
24 | To better understand the particularly fruitful dynamic between French philosophy and the administrative state see (Loeffel 2000, 2014). |
25 | For a contemporary overview of this difficult subject, see (Petit 2019). |
26 | See for example the “notes philosophiques,” (Henrici and Raffelt 2005, p. 8; Blondel [1880–1884] 2005, p. 6). |
27 | For a contemporary treatment of this philosophical history, see (McGrath 2020, p. 162). |
28 | It is worth noting that Blondel’s assesment of Spinozism, drawn almost entirely from his close friend, the then leading authority of historical philosophy and of post-Kantian thought, Victor Delbos (1816–1916), in his Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme (1893), lines up squarely with contemporary assesments of Spinoza and Spinozism, see (Delbos 1893; Beiser 2017, p. 34; Giovani 2011, p. 15; Israel 2006, p. 44). Blondel’s shrewdness can be seen in isolating this development of Spinoza’s thought, and showing how, in ‘the evolution of spinozism’, there was a movement away from the authors original doctrine, leading not only to a corruption of Spinozan thought, but of philosophical thinking more broadly speaking. |
29 | Translation provided by (McGuire 1976, p. 259). |
30 | This is to, once again, take the terminology of Paul Ricœur in his book concerning the French school of Husserlian phenomenology. (Ricœur [1986] 2016) For a contemporary treatment of this school, and its development into ‘the theological turn’ announced by Janicaud, see (DeLay 2019). |
31 | For a clear account of Blondel’s understanding of phenomena, see the work of Michael A. Conway, and Claude Troisfontaines. (Conway 2004, 2006; Troisfontaines 1998). |
32 | For an account of how Blondel’s thought relates to the more proper “phenomenology” of the twentieth century and especially in light of the ‘theological turn’ see my own (Connelly 2020a), and also the recent article by Jonathan M. Ciraulo (Ciraulo 2021). No major work has been done that would more formally connect the “École” of twentieth century French phenomenology with the “École” of nineteenth century French Spiritualism, with the latter—I would argue— representing a much more rich and perrenial form of philosophy than the former. The beginnings of such a rapproachment has been started with the work of Christian Dupont. (Dupont 2014, pp. 21–97) Andrew Sackin-Poll has helped to show the influence of French spiritualism upon the phenomenological tradition, particularly in the work of Michel Henry. (Sackin-Poll 2020) Falque has shown interest in the tradition of French spiritualism, and clearly recognizes its influence upon French phenomenology, especially through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though this influence remains largely muted. (Falque [2014] 2018, p. 49, and pp. 53–54; Falque 2016). |
33 | The meaning of “religious history” is here determined by the field of historical criticism which, by the early twentieth century, had become a dominant branch of theology. One of the leading historical critical thinkers of Blondel’s time was Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), whose historical reflections upon the biblical tradition served to occaison Blondel’s essay History and Dogma. For a penetrating analysis of Loisy, and the field of historical criticism more broadly, see (Morrow 2019). |
34 | Blondel develops this theme in terms of a “general logic” and conceives of it as an “ontological norm,”which he argues goes beyond “abstract dialectic” and “the uses of thought” to focus instead more fundamentally upon “the internal cohesion and the constitutive laws of beings in themselves, from an ontological and realist point of view.” (Blondel [1935] 1963, p. 468) |
35 | Jules Lachelier was the inspector general of education and directly oversaw the philosophical aggregation, or testing, which was and still continues to be the mechanism by which philosophers are inducted into the administrative apparatus of the French state to be public teachers. |
36 | See also, (Bellantone 2012a). |
37 | |
38 | For an account of how this kind of ‘pan-psychic’ philosophy is itself already represented in Neoplatonism and certain strains of Patristic thought, see the work of Kevin Corrigan. (Corrigan 2005, pp. 112–16; Corrigan 2009, pp. 39–51) |
39 | The story of Marie Heurtin has been recently made into into a film entitled, Marie’s Story (2014). |
40 | Bellah also helps to show how modernity “entails a gradual erosion of the sacred as expressed in ritual” and further suggests that “anti-ritualism” is an important subject for the social sciences to grapple with, as he suggests there has been just such a bias, linked to Protestant anti-ritualism, that has skewed the academic study of ritual. (Bellah [2005] 2006, p. 165) This is another point of entry for the tradition of French spiritualism, as it is a philosophical tradition coming from philosophers who have kept alive the deep religious sense of ritual, in the Roman Catholic Mass. |
41 | Here, Bellah follows the lead of Roy Rappaport, whose book Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1995), makes the claim that “…in the absence of what we, in a common sense way, call religion, humanity could not have emerged from its pre- or proto-human condition.” (Rappaport 1995, p. 1) He lays out his major claim, saying that “religion’s major conceptual and experiential constituents, the sacred, the numinous, the occult and the divine, and their integration into the Holy, are creations of ritual.” (p. 3) Rappaport’s book goes far to lay out the basic anthropological ground to warrant such a claim, though the real crux of the matter—it must be argued—remains within the domain of philosophy, with the current paper seeking to sketch out such a philosophical rapproachement. His notion of ritual is a solid starting point for an understanding of ritual, denoting it as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” (p. 24, and p. 137) Nevertheless, this definition appears to describe more the shell of ritual action, or its secondary or derivative aspects, and does not touch upon the internal states implied by these acts, these internal states being the vital core at the heart of “ritual.” |
42 | For an overview of the scholarly discussion of Göbekli Tepe, see: (Peters and Schmidt 2004; Schmidt 2010; Banning 2011; Watkins 2019). |
43 | This is something well understood in applied psychology, particulary in the field of sport psychology, as the notion of “the quiet eye” represents a mechanism of eye control that can be mesured and trained, with a major impact on focus, attention, and concentration. (Vickers 2007) |
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Connelly, W.L. Ritual and Thought: Spirituality and Method in Philosophy of Religion. Religions 2021, 12, 1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121045
Connelly WL. Ritual and Thought: Spirituality and Method in Philosophy of Religion. Religions. 2021; 12(12):1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121045
Chicago/Turabian StyleConnelly, William L. 2021. "Ritual and Thought: Spirituality and Method in Philosophy of Religion" Religions 12, no. 12: 1045. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121045