My presentation is about the personal, not about the political, at least not directly. It is a contribution, like much of Eric Voegelin’s work, to spiritual philosophy. My reflections are based on an epistemics of trust and an emphasis on spiritual agency. With due care, we are right to trust our own epistemic faculties and to live by our own reflective judgments.[1]
Each of us has a spiritual autobiography, a series of profound moments, crises met and hopefully endured, insights and epiphanies, often in connection with the texts and participants in a religious tradition. We either accept the tradition into which we are born, or we discover another faith, or perhaps we come to understand what is ultimate outside the familiar faith traditions. One of the remarkable traits of Eric Voegelin, especially for a thinker so profoundly spiritual, is that he did not identify with a particular religion or even with „religion“ as such. He admired what he called „the open soul“ in William James and other American thinkers. He understood that spiritual epiphanies can be difficult for established religious authorities, who are “loath to admit that the spirit listeth where it will….”, viewing “spiritual outbursts and insights” as merely „disorder.“ [2]
To get our bearings, and to distinguish break throughs from mere disruptions, we must, says Abraham Joshua Heschel, „rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer.“
How do we do that? The first step, according to Heschel, is to recognize „two types of thinking, one that deals with concepts and one that deals with situations.“ „Conceptual thinking is an act of reasoning; situational thinking involves an inner experience; in uttering judgment about an issue, the person [too] is under judgment.“ It is situational thinking that is needed when we are „engaged in an effort to understand issues on which we stake our very existence.“ The problem is „not how does man arrive at an understanding of God, but rather how can we arrive at an understanding of God.“ „We are never pure spectators,“ says Heschel, „The challenge devolves onto each of us.“
When spiritual thinking becomes intensely personal, it places almost unbearable weight on spiritual discernment. Is it too much weight? Given our limitations, wouldn’t it be prudent to „outsource“ our discernment to one of the established religions? Perhaps, but „outsourcing“ does not avoid these challenges:
How are you going to discern which is the right religion?
How, within a religion, are you going to discern which strands and leaders to follow?
How, at the beginning, was it discerned that Jesus or Gautama or some other great figure marked the correct path and not, say, Akhenaten or Zoroaster?
Finally, on what basis were certain texts anointed as authoritative, truth-revealing scriptures and others rejected?
To say that attunement and judgment are deeply personal is not to say that „anything goes.“ To say that the person is the site of spiritual truth is not to say that the person is the source of spiritual truth. Voegelin notes the Greek discovery of „the psyche as the site of divine presence.“ To be evidential, anexperience must pass tests of spiritual discernment and critical judgment. We stake our souls, as it were, on our own spiritual attunement and agency. One’s life depends on getting it right.
Of course, this emphasis on personal agency raises the specter of disaffiliation, the aimless Nones, various iconoclasms and anarchisms, individuals abandoning a shared world and retreating into their own inner sanctums. This is the concern that motivated the study by Robert Bellah and his colleagues, Habits of the Heart. „The fundamental question we posed … was how to preserve or create a morally coherent life.“
As an example of troublesome disaffiliation, they cite a woman to whom they give the name, Sheila Larson, „a young nurse who describes her faith as ‘Sheilaism.’“
„I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. … It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.’
Bellah asks: „How did we get from the point where Anne Hutchinson, a seventeenth-century precursor of Sheila Larson’s, could be run out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to a situation where Anne Hutchinson is close to the norm?“
The standard Bellah holds up seems to be the Puritan village. Really? We are told: „America itself had a religious meaning to the colonists from the very beginning.“ „They were seeking religious uniformity, not religious diversity.“ The Puritan colonists valued „order, harmony, and obedience.“ Bellah seems to offer these traits as the civic conditions of „a morally coherent life.“ But are they?
Let’s look again at Sheila. She works in a healing profession. She brings to her work and her life the following beliefs: to try to love oneself and be gentle with one self, and to take care of others. Why? She is not just a secular humanitarian — she thinks that this is what God would want us to do. These beliefs come to her through her own inner promptings, which she modestly describes as „just my own little voice.“
Does Sheila lack a „morally coherent life“? Did Anne Hutchinson, to whom she is compared? Or Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman? Or Gandhi, who told an interviewer, „There are as many religions as there are individuals“? Does Sheila Larson provide a confirmation of Bellah’s standard or is it a counterexample, perhaps even a disconfirmation?
Spiritual breakthroughs regularly disrupt social arrangements. Might not an open society that permits personal exploration be more desirable than the closed one of a Puritan village, at least from a spiritual point of view?
Ethics of Authenticity
A similar concern with excessive individualism is central to Charles Taylor’s diagnosis of what he calls „the malaises of modernity“ in The Ethics of Authenticity. In spite of this concern, Taylor readily admits that we live in a culture „where people have a right to choose for themselves their own pattern of life, to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, to determine the shape of their own lives …. In principle, people are no longer sacrificed to the demands of supposedly sacred orders that transcendthem.“ He would not „want to go back on this achievement.” Still, he confesses to feeling ambivalent. „People used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was acosmic order, a ‘great chain of Being,’ in which humans figure in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures.“ „Modern freedom came about through the discrediting of such orders.” But „these orders gave meaning to the world and to the activities of social life.“ Things had a significance given them by their place in the chain of being. „The discrediting of these orders has been called the ‘disenchantment’ of the world. With it, things lost some of their magic.“
Well, surely, the aim of spiritual philosophy is not to fabricate a worldview that gives us a comfortable place in a cosmic hierarchy. A radically personal approach does not itself endorse any of the discreditings Taylor mentions. We may well find ourselves in vibrant connection with a cosmic order or great chain of being. Still, we have no obligation to re-enchant the world or help things regain their magic. Nothing Taylor has said so far bears on what is truly ultimate or divine or living in attunement with it.
However, there is more to Taylor’s critique: “… the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.” Conceivably, but understanding that each of us must find our own access to the divine does not make life flat or narrow or self-absorbed, any more than does relying on personal judgment in deciding to whom to marry or what career to pursue. After all, these too used to be determined by our place in the chain of being. Taylor goes on to criticize the Romantic view that expressing the authentic self, not relating to the divine, is the proper goal. But the necessity of personal spiritual judgment does not imply this Romantic displacement. On the contrary, correctly discerning the divine and our relation to it is the goal. It is our personal responsibility to get it right, or as right as we can.
Epistemic Authority
How do we do that? The epistemics of trust begins where knowledge begins – with experience, memory, reasoning, intuition, in their many modes. We correct mistaken experiences, memories, andreasonings, by using those same epistemic faculties. Linda Zagzebski, a leading virtue epistemologist, notes that critically monitoring our beliefs requires such traits as „intellectual attentiveness, carefulness, thoroughness, and openness to new evidence“ that manifest „epistemic conscientiousness.“
Self-trust is where we start, but not where we end. Zagzebski shows that „epistemic self-trust is both rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others [who responsibly use the same faculties], that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities [in areas in which we recognize their judgment or expertise to be superior], and that some of these authorities can be in the moral and religious domains.“
Zagzebski continues to trace the implications. „I have reason to trust those who are conscientiously trusted by those I conscientiously trust.“ Hence, „epistemic trust can form a network.“
Here, epistemology desists from thought-experiments about evil geniuses and brains in vats. Instead, our pursuit of knowledge and trust-worthy beliefs happens in the real world, with friends and neighbors, colleagues and co-workers, experts and institutions that speak to our cognitive, emotional and spiritual concerns. Such a world of trustworthy networks could also allay the concerns of Bellah and Taylor. For trust, she notes, „can inhere in a community of persons, not simply a chain of individuals leading back to a single source. The bonding of a community through mutual epistemic trust is an important element in the conscientious spread of beliefs.“ This is precisely the way the scientific community, for example, works, as Michael Polanyi has shown.
Zagzebski has provided the grounds for communal authority and yet, she notes, it is not a coercive vision. It is compatible, she says, with John Locke’s dictum, which has been regarded as fundamental to liberty of thought, „Nobody is obliged in that matter to yield obedience unto the admonition or injunctions of another, further than he himself is persuaded.“ She celebrates the Rule of St. Benedict, which requires that a person’s joining the monastic order must be based on the uncoerced movement of the soul, discerning that this is where God wants them.
Back to Personal Agency
Communities, even when trustworthy cannot take over responsibilities that remain, in the last analysis, personal. Even when we trust someone, it is important to keep in mind that „We are two different persons …“ „The ultimate authority over me is still myself, and what I take to be the authority is an extension of myself.“ So she is not claiming that we can „outsource“ our beliefs, since it would be we ourselves who are choosing the authority to whom to defer. „When I adopt a belief from another person, I am still the one who has to add that belief to my total set of beliefs …”
Like Heschel, Zabzebski distinguishes two kinds of reasons. Theoretical reasons, like estimations of probabilities of an event, „are relevant from anyone’s point of view.“ They connect facts about the world to the truth of a certain belief. Deliberative reasons, like judgments about whom to marry connect me to the truth of a certain belief. They are not reasons for other persons at all. „They are irreducibly first personal.“ Others may draw conclusions from your experiences, but „you and you alone had the experience.“
„Trust in the self and trust in others are deliberative, first-person reasons.“ In fact, the entire structure of trusts in one another, in community, traditions, and religious institutions rest finally on deliberative, first-person reasons. They are reasons for the person making the decision, not for others. Even if a particular religion is indeed the one I should adhere to, that does not imply that others should also.
In radically personal spiritual philosophy, we are not mapping the surface of Mars, we are locating our relation to the divine or ultimate reality and its implications for our lives in particular. We are living at „X marks the spot“ and trying to discern which direction will reach the correct destination for us. These are personal decisions, though not arbitrary ones. We can do it well or badly. We can get it right or we can get it wrong. To live in truth, we must get it right.
This paper was presented at the Eric Voegelin Society meeting at the APSA 2023 conference and on the VoegelinView portal under the title Radically Personal? Challenges from Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor and Linda Zagzebski.
© VoegelinView (2023). Originally published in the partner portal the Voegelinview and it is republished here with permission from. Writings express only the views of the contributor and not the Eric Voegelin Society.
References
Robert N. Bellah and Hans Jonas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1985.
Abraham Joshua Heschel. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955.
Karl Jaspers. Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953 (German edition,1949).
Michael Polanyi. Science, Faith, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Charles Taylor. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Eric Voegelin. Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Eric Voegelin. Order and History, vol IV, The Ecumenic Age. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,2000.
Eric Voegelin. The Collected Works, vol. 11: Published Essays, 1953-1965 , ed. Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.
Linda Trinkhaus Zagzebski. Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 2015.
[1] In the Theology Without Walls context, I use a broadened sense of the word „theology“ for what Iam here calling „spiritual philosophy.“ As a theist, the former term has more precise resonance forme. Comparative theologians sometimes speak of „Buddhist theology“ also using the term in anextended sense.
[2] Even someone as conservative as Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking to the bishops, discussed the emergence of visionary charismatic movements among Catholics in Africa. These movements makeyou uncomfortable, he said (as I recall), „they make me uncomfortable too, but we must be open to new movements of the spirit.“
