Reason, community and religious tradition Book

Studying Royce's Religious Philosophy With Frank Oppenheim

Josiah Royce (1855 -- 1916) was an American idealist philosopher who taught at Harvard for over thirty years together with his friend, William James. With his idealistic commitments, Royce has been an obscure figure since his death (unknown even to many professional philosophers). There has been a revival of interest in his work in recent years as part of a revival of interest in American philosophy.

In a career spanning 40 years, Frank Oppenheim, S.J. (1925 -- April 3, 2020) was a tireless interpreter and champion of the thought of Royce. As a Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Oppenheim wrote four detailed book-length studies of Royce together with many papers and introductions to books. He also worked indefatigably in organizing the Royce papers at Harvard. With the exception of the small group of scholars interested in Royce, Oppenheim's work has mostly been unrecognized. His work has great value in understanding Royce and in making a case for Royce's continued importance.

Oppenheim's studies focus on what he describes as the "mature" Royce -- the works Royce wrote in the last few years of his career beginning about 1911. In these works, Oppenheim argues, Royce developed and deepened his philosophical and personal arsenal beyond its scope in his earlier and middle-period writings. Most but not all Royce scholars agree that Royce's most lasting work came in his late period. The late works differ from Royce's earlier studies in downplaying his commitments to absolute idealism , in their greater attention to formal logic, and in their tendency to avoid allegedly knock-down deductive argument.

Oppenheim's book "Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion" (1987) shows how Royce's thinking about religion developed in his late works. Oppenheim devotes attention to two of Royce's books. The first is "Sources of Religious Insight" (1912) in which Royce developed seven ways in experience that individuals came to understand their religion, both for themselves and communally . This book was written in part as an answer to William James' famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience" which, Royce believed, unduly emphasized individualism and private feelings in its approach to religious experience. Royce's "Sources" is one of the most accessible of his works and he said that "it contains the whole sense of me in a brief compass."

The second book Oppenheim studies, and in much more detail than the "Sources" is the 1913 work "The Problem of Christianity" which he views, together with most contemporary Royce scholars, as Royce's masterpiece. The "Problem", I have found, is a difficult book and Oppenheim approaches it from a variety of perspectives.

Oppenheim stresses throughout Royce's engagement with the thought of the brilliant, if eccentric, American thinker Charles S. Peirce. Peirce wrote an article called "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" in which Peirce coined the term "musement" for wide-ranging, non-deductive thinking about religion. Royce, for Oppenheim, practiced and developed "musement" in the problem. More importantly, Peirce attacked the standard philosophical distinction between subject and object by arguing that there was a third factor in knowledge -- interpretation. In his late religious philosophy, Royce took Peirce's insight and ran with it. He saw religious knowledge as triadic rather than as dyadic and as always involving interpretation rather than a subject somehow coming in direct contact with an object. This adoption and broadening of Peirce became the critical factor in Royce's late thinking about religion. It gave his thought a hermeneutical, communal focus. It was non-relativistic, for both Royce and Peirce, in that interpretation always was directed towards truth and, in Royce's case towards an interpreter-spirit that appears a descendant, at least, of the Absolute of his earlier writings.

Royce's book, and more so Oppenheim's study, is unclear about the nature of the Christianity it studies. Oppenheim is far more committed as a practicing Christian than Royce ever was or became. Oppenheim's analysis sometimes straddles between the Christian Church and an ideal form of religion not limited to Christianity. Both Royce and Oppenheim recognize the difference, but Oppenheim's interpretations for me sometimes slide too close to Christianity and to the Catholic understanding of Christianity.

Oppenheim describes well how Royce worked at developing a system of formal logic that was less purely extensional than the logics beginning to be developed in his day and how he tried to state his religious philosophy in terms of the logic. The result is basically a communal approach in which individuals function on a dual level: by themselves but more importantly as a member of a community, which for both Royce and Oppenheim is ontologically real. Oppenheim understands Royce as adopting an experiential, historical approach, to find the basic teachings of Christianity in the doctrine of community, sin, and atonement which both Royce and Oppenheim suggest are important in different ways to all forms of religious life, not merely Christian. The ultimate goal is to love and trust life and community as opposed to seeing oneself as an isolated, "lost" or "alienated" individual as was common in Royce's time and remains so today.

I have learned a great deal from Royce over the years, and I learned a great deal from thinking about Royce with Oppenheim. Oppenheim sees Royce as a pilgrim of sorts, similar to John the Baptist or John Bunyan, pointing the way to a fuller conception of religious spirit and of possibility than was common among his peers. Oppenheim's care, patience, and devotion to his subject, together with his own philosophical and religious commitments, make him a valuable guide even for those readers who may not fully share either Royce's or Oppenheim's own religious or philosophical understandings.

Robin Friedman