Reviews for Visions in Late Medieval England: Lay Spirituality and Sacred Glimpses of the Hidden Worlds of Faith

The average rating for Visions in Late Medieval England: Lay Spirituality and Sacred Glimpses of the Hidden Worlds of Faith based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-14 00:00:00 Alan Fooks This book is unlike the vast majority of books contemporary philosophers write, for a number of reasons. It deals with a topic that has been written off as belonging to the domain of religious dogma or of fuzzy-minded new age folk: spirituality. It invokes a panoply of philosophers across traditions, including Buddhist, Indian, Chinese, and Islamic traditions. It is written in a general but to-the-point tone; there is none of the hairsplitting analysis, typical of contemporary philosophy, that can distract from the main point at hand. And yet it is not written in a wishy-washy way; the points are never overstated, and are backed by minimal but convincing argument. Solomon examines key components of spirituality in a manner that is agnostic with respect to any faith tradition and that is compatible with scientific and atheistic world views. He never explicitly defines spirituality, for any sentence definition would be either uninformative or reductive, given how embodied and experiential spirituality is. Let me summarize the key components Solomon identifies include these. Spirituality is based on an emotional/passionate attitude through which the world shows up, and emotions have been falsely distinguished from reason. In fact, emotions are necessary, meaning-making frameworks, which determine the significance of objects in our world. So emotions precede our reasoning capacities. In order to reason about something, we must start off with certain premises about that thing, and such premises will be influenced by our emotional states. Spirituality consists in an emotion of love and reverence, towards people and the world. Love involves identifying ourselves with the beloved people or objects, e.g., wishing for what they wish. Reverence involves recognizing our limitations in the face of the profundity of the existence of an other; it also involves responsibility and action for the other. Spirituality is also based on an attitude of trust towards the world. Trust, in this context, is not a relation towards a specific person or thing. Rather, it is a dimension of any relationship whatsoever. If we are trusting, we feel secure in our own existence and confident in our place in the world. This is a necessary attitude to be open and loving; the opposites, paranoia and resentment, are incompatible with spirituality. We should not be blindly trusting towards anything, however; a mature attitude of trust involves the wisdom to more or less trust something at any particular moment. Spirituality is rationality, when this latter term is understood appropriately. Solomon examines how the western philosophical tradition has developed a highly inappropriate and misleading conception of rationality, a conception on which reason is opposed and superior to emotion. This conception is tied to modern notions of self-interestedness and utility maximization as the principles of reasonableness. Solomon shows how these notions are antithetical to spirituality. Instead, we need to understand rationality as emotional to the core, and to understand spirituality as finding the right rational/emotional stance that refuses to take people and objects for purely their instrumental values. Spirituality involves acknowledgment of tragedy, or the fact that painful events in our lives can be unpredictable and happen due to sheer arbitrariness or contingency. We need to overcome the temptation to identify people or things as targets of blame, for any of our sufferings. Doing this is essential to spiritual wellbeing because it allows us to overcome resentment and paranoia; and it is also simply acknowledging a truth about life, which will allow us to live more skillfully, with less self-deception. Spirituality, however, also involves a certain, delicate understanding of fate and fatalism. Not everything is sheerly arbitrary; there are explanations that can be given for many events, and often these explanations appeal to variables that are beyond our control (e.g., Heraclitus's dictum that a person's character is her fate). Acknowledging that forces beyond us can necessitate aspects of our life should not lead to despair. We still have a role to play in many parts of our and each other's lives. That something was necessary can provide a sense of direction or meaningfulness to that event; the higher order narrative that explains the event is a sort of power that we can have reverence towards and trust our lives to. And throughout this, we can be committed to contributing to that narrative. Solomon also discusses the sort of relationship we should be towards death that is conducive for spirituality. We should not deny death, or think that it will not happen to us but only happens to others. We should also not avoid existential grappling with death, by instead focusing on sociological analyses about people's attitudes towards death, a trend Solomon saw in his time. But there is an opposite, extreme relationship with death that is perhaps even more destructive. There is a way of fetishizing or romanticizing death, on which death is the most sublime experience in all of life, or that one can choose when to have it. Instead, Solomon recommends that our acknowledgment the inevitability of our personal deaths could be a way to feel united with humanity and sentient beings at large; we all share this in common. Also, awareness of the fact of death gives us a space to recollect and make meaning of our lives. My only gripe with this book is that some parts of it seem to be just orderly collections of general truisms about what a good life looks like. I sometimes found myself wanting deeper explanations of the facts about our existential situation that make certain truisms hold; or, I wanted more specific guidelines regarding how to realize a certain truism in one's own life. Nonetheless, there are many points of elegant, penetrating analysis of commonplace ideas, which delightfully renew and make these ideas more concrete (e.g., conceptual analyses of reverence vs. awe, and of luck vs. fate; a survey of different cultural attitudes towards death). I'd recommend this book to anyone who (1) wants to see a legitimate philosopher talk about spirituality, or (2) is looking for a light, easy read, but that is still substantial and enlightening.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-20 00:00:00 Kimberly Game A reaction against the new atheist movement of the time, this poignant work offers a means of finding personal meaning in rituals while continuing to remain agnostic about metaphysical matters