Pragmatist Scripture: Peirce and The Book of Acts

A few months ago a friend who is interested in both scripture and philosophy asked me which scripture mattered most to Charles Peirce.  One obvious answer would be the writings of John, the gospeller of agape love, since agape plays such a great role in Peirce's philosophy.

The Book of Acts has recently come to mind as another strong candidate, for several reasons.  I plan to write about all this in more detail soon, but I'll use this space to jot down my thinking quickly, in order to make it available to anyone who might be interested, in the Peircean spirit of shared inquiry.

The Greek title of the Book of Acts is Praxeis Apostolon, or the Deeds of the Apostles.  We guess that the author of the text was the same as the author of the Gospel attributed to Luke.  The title might well have been added after the book was in circulation for a while, but that's probably inconsequential.  It occurred to me recently that this text begins with reminding us that the author wrote a previous book about "the things Jesus began to do and to teach," and then it narrates, without further introduction, the things that the first Christians did after Jesus' death and resurrection.

In other words, it is a book of acts, of deeds.  It is a book of narratives about what people did.

Which is to say that it is not primarily a book of prayers, or of songs, or of doctrines.  It tells a story, without much attempt to interpret that story.  And it is the story of a community learning to work together, and learning how it must adjust its doctrines in light of the community's expansion across and into cultures, and in light of the surprising things they find the new community is empowered to accomplish.

This is appealing to Pragmatists like Peirce, who are more concerned with the way decisions lead to actions than with fixing metaphysical doctrines and whose notions of truth, ethics, and metaphysics are more experimental and transactional than systematic and permanent.  Pragmatists are given to the idea that it is good for communities to work with tentative, revisable and fallible tenets, ever striving to improve their practices as the community grows.

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Peirce is not exactly easy to read, which helps to explain why most of what he wrote remains unpublished even a century after his death.  Nevertheless, the patient reader of Peirce is often rewarded by a writer who took words very seriously.

Some of the words he used to great effect in his lectures and essays are derived from the Book of Acts.  Among these phrases are a phrase he uses in his 1907 essay "A Neglected Argument For The Reality Of God," and one that comes at the end of his Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898.  The phrases are "scientific singleness of heart," and "things live and move and have their being in a logic of events."   See Acts 2.46 and 17.28 for the sources of these two phrases.  (The first one might also have come to Peirce through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as I have argued elsewhere.)

Two such phrases are not enough to make the case that Peirce was dependent on the Book of Acts, but thankfully that's not the case I'm trying to make.  Peirce was well read and he cited other portions of scripture and, of course, many other books, after all. I only want to suggest that Peirce might have found the Book of Acts to be a scripture that resonates with his Pragmatism.

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That being said, I wish to point to one figure in the middle of the Book of Acts who might be taken to be a kind of Pragmatist saint: Epimenides.

I won't belabor that point here, as I have already written about it elsewhere.  I'll only add that Epimenides appears to be the unnamed source that St Paul appeals to and cites in Acts 17.28.

The Cost of War

What is the true cost of war?  It is not the cost of the materiel, training, salaries, and post-war reconstruction.  It is not factored in costs of healthcare, in the rise or fall of GDP or due to manufacturing losses or gains.  The true cost of war - which I cannot begin to calculate - must be in the dreams of those who survive.

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My grandfather wore a .45 caliber pistol at his hip when he fought in the Pacific theater in WWII.  The trigger guard was shot off.  He kept that pistol until he died. It was a kind of reverse sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible wound, of a bullet that nearly ended his life, of the bullets and bombs that ended so many others.  To me, he was a hero, but I wonder if he was ever able to see himself that way.

As a young child I asked him, in wonder, if he had ever seen a man die in war.  I did not know what I was doing.  He was a good man, and a kind one, but that question drew from him the most anger I ever saw in his eyes or heard in his voice.  "Of course I have!" he shouted.  He got up from his chair and left the room, leaving me with my firmest impression of war, of anger and pain stored up for thirty years, like the shrapnel in his back that set off airport metal detectors until his death in the late 1980s.

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My neighbor Bob died a little while ago.  His father fought in the first World War, and when Bob wanted to sign up to fight the Germans, Bob's father begged him not to go.  Bob went, and entered the war at the Battle of the Bulge, "my baptism by fire," Bob once told me.  When Bob's son signed up to fight in Viet Nam, Bob begged him not to go.  Jim went anyway.  Three generations of men survived wars, each one eager never to see it again.

I sat next to Bob at a Christmas party ten years ago.  On his other side sat another veteran of the Great War.  They huddled close and whispered loudly, as old men do, thinking I could not hear.  I looked away to preserve their imagined secrecy, but could not help hearing bits of the stories they could speak of only with one another.  The war was sixty years behind them, but their voices still trembled as they unburdened themselves in that moment only brothers in arms can share.  I recall Bob saying this:

"...I checked on my men, and they were fine.  I turned and began to walk away when the shell fell, right between them in their machine gun nest.  All three were killed instantly.  I had been speaking to them just a moment before, and now they were gone...."  Both men were silent for a while after that.  The men were gone, but their deaths lived on and on in Bob's dreams.

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That cost, that's what I find impossible to calculate: the cost of asking men to carry in their hearts and in their dreams all of the deaths of other men.  I do not know how they carry it all. I do not know how we can lightly ask others to carry it anew.

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If you don't know his work, let me recommend Brian Turner's book Here, Bullet.  He's a young veteran and a brilliant poet who writes about his experience as a soldier in Iraq. 

All Your Deeds

I just read the seventy-third psalm.  I don't understand much of it, but it begins with a complaint about injustice, and I certainly feel like I get that part.

The last line caused me some trouble, though. In it Asaph, the psalmist, says "I will tell of all your [God's] deeds."

Okay, what exactly are those deeds?  What can we ever reliably say about God's deeds?  If God had done something in history that were not open to historical doubt, there would be no atheists.

The tradition gives us stories about God, and a century of biblical criticism calls those stories myths.  Still, as I have argued elsewhere (here, and here, for example) myth is not - or should not be taken as - a synonym for falsehood.  Stories may be myths and true, even if not historically true.


As Howard Wettstein argues in his Significance of Religious Experience,

The Bible’s characteristic mode of ‘theology’ is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language.  Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach.  When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties.  Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology.  One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text.  Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God’s roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like.  Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause. (108, emphasis added)

The stories may not be about historical "deeds" but may be about the character, the roles of God.

Which makes me wonder: what roles does God play in my life?  What "deeds" may I speak of?

The preface to the complaint in Psalm 73

Before I reply, let me hasten to say this: I am often reluctant to write too strongly about this sort of thing because I do not want to say that others must believe what I believe.  If God has led me to belief, (grant me that for the sake of argument for a moment) God has not strong-armed me into belief but allowed me to arrive at my beliefs over time, letting them be shaped by experience.  I do not see why I should allow you less liberty than God has allowed me. 

So I write the following admitting that I do not know what I am writing about.  As Augustine confessed, when I speak of my love for God, I do so simultaneously wondering what I mean by "God."  What can I compare God to?  What is God like?  I do not know how to answer those questions, except by telling stories, expositing roles. So here goes:

When I was a child, belief in God motivated a family in my neighborhood to care about me and to welcome me into their home when my family was falling apart. Without that love...I shudder to think what I would be today.

God gives me a name for what I pray to.  God gives me a focal point for my attention in the vast cosmos, and God gives me a sense that in such a cosmos persons matter.  And because persons matter, justice matters.  This is not to say one cannot be just without belief, or that belief makes one just - far from it! - only that I find for myself the two ideas closely bound together.

God gives me solace in my mourning and hope when I pray. My mother is dead, but when I speak to God about her, she is not lost.

God gives me a story about the centrality of nurturing love.  A reason to think all things are related.  Someone to thank.  Someone to be angry with.  Rest for my soul.  Quietness, and in it, trust.

God gives me a story about giving, and why giving and receiving should matter so much.

A story about why, and how, to turn a guilty conscience into repentance.  A reason to forgive, and, very often, the strength to forgive.  And to hope that I too am forgivable.

A reason to hope that no one is beyond redemption, beyond all hope, completely unworthy of love.

Belief that every person matters.  More than that, belief that a teenage girl could be a vessel of the divine; that a third-world martyred prophet could save the world; that an inarticulate foreigner could be a world-historical lawgiver; that a persecuting zealot could get hit so hard by grace that he lives the rest of his life to preach good news for all people everywhere.

Hope that prison doors could be opened, that tongues could be loosed, that great art and great music might be signs of the divine.

I could be wrong about all of this, I know.  I know there are other explanations of what I have written above.  I also know those explanations apply to music, too, and I'm not interested in hearing about them there either if the reason for offering them is to help disabuse me of my love for good music.  I know that people use the same word I use here to justify violence, self-interest, and hatred.  I cannot help but feel angry and disgusted when it is used for those ends, ends which seem so contrary to what the word means for me, ends that make me think someone has read the wrong script, mis-cast the character, not known what deeds God has done.

Worries Incompatible With Wisdom

Here is a thought-provoking perspective on the value and aims of studying the liberal arts.  Imagine a university promoting itself in this way today, saying, in effect, "You should study the liberal arts, and most likely this will help you not to worry about the wrong things."

“While there are many sorts of arts, the first to proffer their services to the natural abilities of those who philosophize are the liberal arts….The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution….They are called “liberal” either because the ancients took care to have their children [liberos] instructed in them; or because their object is to effect man’s liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom. More often than not, they liberate us from cares incompatible with wisdom. They often even free us from worry about [material] necessities, so that the mind may have still greater liberty to apply itself to philosophy.”*

This is one of the things you don't need to worry about.

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It may not be immediately obvious that there are cares that are "incompatible with wisdom," but it doesn't take too much reflection to see that there are certain kinds of worries that we really are unwise to cling to.

My dog worries about hot-air balloons. I do not know why, but that's okay.

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I don't think that "cares incompatible with wisdom" means "foolish cares." John is not simply being polite; he is also being compassionate, and acknowledging that we do not generally choose our troubles, and it can take training, and hard work, not to worry about them.  Sometimes, worrying isn't even a choice, and we should be slow to damn those who worry uncontrollably.

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*John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon. Daniel D. McGarry, trans. (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2009) Book I, ch 12. P. 37.

Steinbeck and Greene On Respect For Enemies

These two passages seem like they ought to be put together somehow.  The first is from Steinbeck, the second is from Greene. Although the first is non-fiction and the second is fiction, they both deal with the same thing: soldiers who found themselves lamenting the deaths of their enemies, and who admired their enemies' fighting.  The two passages remind me, in turn, of Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty, where he claims that soldiers may be loyal to their fellow soldiers but also to the same spirit of loyalty in their enemies, even though they are not loyal to their enemies themselves.  I am also reminded of William James's point in "The Moral Equivalent of War" where he says that no one would repeat the American Civil War, but, just as surely, no one would erase it from history.  The conflict engenders virtues and sacrifices that it would be just as wrong to seek as to destroy.

“Some years ago my neighbor was Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who wrote Heavenly Discourse.  He was a very old man when I knew him, but as a young lieutenant just out of military academy he had been assigned to General Miles and he served in the Chief Joseph campaign.  His memory of it was very clear and very sad.  He said it was one of the most gallant retreats in all history.  Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés with squaws and children, dogs, and all their possessions, retreated under heavy fire for over a thousand miles, trying to escape to Canada. Wood said they fought every step of the way against odds until finally they were surrounded by the cavalry under General Miles and the large part of them wiped out.  It was the saddest duty he had ever performed, Wood said, and he had never lost his respect for the fighting qualities of the Nez Percés.  ‘If they hadn’t had their families with them we could never have caught them,” he said.  “And if we had been evenly matched in men and weapons, we couldn’t have beaten them.  They were men,” he said, “real men.”

And here's Greene:

“Trouin said, ‘Today’s affair—that is not the worst for someone like myself.  Over the village they could have shot us down.  Our risk was as great as theirs.  What I detest is napalm bombing.  From three thousand feet, in safety.’  He made a hopeless gesture.  ‘You see the forest catching fire.  God knows what you would see from the ground.  The poor devils are burned alive, the flames go over them like water.  They are wet through with fire.’  He said with anger against a whole world that didn’t understand, ‘I’m not fighting a colonial war. Do you think I’d do these things for the planters of Terre Rouge?  I’d rather be court-martialled.  We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt.”

These are things that I, who have never had to fight a war, can only gaze at from afar, with wonder, and sadness, and gratitude.

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John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley In Search Of America, (New York: Penguin, 1983) 159-160.  
Graham Greene, The Quiet American, (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 196-197.

Epimenides, Or Religion Without Metaphysics

This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.

At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17.  The phrase is "live and move and have our being."  It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers.  Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.

The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere.   Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."

Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit.  The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it.  As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.  

The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants?  What are the proper prayers?  What are the right sacrifices?  Who should make them?

Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge.  In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice.  As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.

To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends.  And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later.  Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God.  And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that.  Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics.  I hope so.

Foreground: Agora of Athens; Background: Acropolis (L) and Areopagus (R) of Athens.

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I took this photo from the temple of Hephaestus on the West end of the ancient agora of Athens.  The ruins in the foreground are the old marketplace and civic buildings.  At the top left is the Acropolis and the Parthenon; just to the right of the Acropolis is the Areopagus, which currently hosts no buildings, though if you look closely you can see some tourists walking around on the hill.  Presumably Epimenides built his altars on the slope leading up to the Areopagus.  According to the story in Acts, St Paul preached first in the agora and then on the Areopagus, walking up past an altar left by Epimenides. 

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* We also find reference to the altars erected by Epimenides in Pausanias (I.i.4); and in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius.  Lucian's Philopatris alludes to it as well, but it is possible that he is referring to Acts 17.  Epimenides is quoted more than once in the Greek scriptures; he is also quoted in Titus 1.12.

An Ounce Of Prevention

An old Chinese legend tells about a man who was searching for the world's greatest physician.*  He learns of a man who can heal any illness, and he assumes that this healer must be the one he is seeking.  The healer denies this, saying that another physician is even greater.  The greatest physician is the one who can heal any disease before it even begins.

I've lost track of how many times I've heard someone say recently that the point of the Second Amendment is, first of all, to safeguard the other rights enumerated in the Constitution, and second, that a well-regulated militia is necessary in case we ever need to overthrow a government that has turned into a tyranny.

I have a little (though not much) sympathy with the second of those positions, but the first is, I think, simply wrong.  Here's why: the First Amendment is itself an extremely powerful tool, and it is fitting that it should precede the Second, because an attempt to solve problems by reasonable words should always precede the attempt to solve our problems by force.  In other words, if we exercise our First Amendment rights responsibly, we will never need to invoke the Second to overthrow our government. One of the beautiful things about our Constitution is the way it provides means for us to address unjust power grabs by our government officials without starting an insurrection.

But the bigger problem is one of what fills our hearts and minds: Focusing our attention on preparing to overthrow a future tyranny is like a physician preparing to euthanize a patient who might someday become ill. Yes, it is possible to "cure" any illness by killing the patient, but it's not good medicine.  We need more than just preparedness to kill a disease; we need to promote good health as well.

If you're concerned about the nation becoming a tyranny, buying more guns is a poor response.  Here are some far better responses:

1. Support good schools. One of the best defenses against a nation falling apart is a well-educated populace.  People who are able to think for themselves are less likely to let others do their thinking for them, which is one of the surest defenses against abdicating to a tyrant.  People who know their rights and their history will be well-prepared to fight to defend them.  People who only know how to fight but don't know what they're fighting for promote instability in government.
2. Promote economic opportunity for everyone.  We celebrate Dr. King as a promoter of equal rights, but it's worth remembering that for him those rights were closely tied to the opportunity to exercise them and to help one's family to flourish.
3. Encourage bright people in your community to become teachers. Public school teachers play too important a role for us to not want our brightest minds in our classrooms.  I'm not just talking about STEM fields, either.  Literature, history, social sciences and arts are the disciplines that shape our imaginations.  Without good art and good stories, you don't have a nation, period.   
4.  Subscribe to your local newspaper. Here are two of the most important professions for any democracy: law and journalism.  Without defense attorneys to defend rights, equal rights don't mean much.  And without investigative journalism, power will corrupt governors unchecked.  Your subscription is your share of the paycheck of people who will watch the custodians of the state.  There's not much more important than that.

Democracies are not just defended by military might; the first lines of defense are in those places where the diseases to which democracies succumb are cured before they begin: teachers, lawyers, and journalists all practice preventive medicine for democracies.  If your sole response to the threat of tyranny is to pick up a gun, you should rethink your political medicine, and begin to practice like the world's greatest physicians, eliminating the diseases before they begin.

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* Thomas Cleary tells this story in the translator's introduction to his edition of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War (Shambhala: Boston and London, 1988) p. 1.

The Howler Monkeys of Petén, Guatemala

Each year I co-teach a January-term class on tropical ecology in Guatemala and Belize.

One of the wonders of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve

One of my favorite experiences when I return to Guatemala is hearing the howler monkeys at night.  Their voices travel for miles through the forest, it seems.  My students are often alarmed by the noise, because the monkeys will approach silently and then begin to howl in the treetops overhead with voices that seem to belong to something much bigger than a mono aullador, as they are called in Spanish.

During one of my last trips I made this video.  We were setting up camp in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, or Biosfera Maya, en route to Tikal, when several troops of howlers began to sing nearby.  We followed the voices to one of the nearest troops so we could get a closer look at these gentle beauties, our placid arboreal cousins.  Enjoy the sound.

 

If you're interested in bringing your students to this fairly well-preserved rainforest and arranging local guides, you might check out the Asociación Bio-Itzá, an indigenous Mayan group dedicated to preserving their forest, their ancestral knowledge, and their language.  They have a small rustic facility on their rainforest reserve and a Spanish-language school for foreigners (with very reasonable prices) on the north shore of Lake Petén Itzá, not far from the airport at Flores and from the beautiful ruins of Tikal. 

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(A friend tells me he extracted the sound from this video of mine and uploaded it to the wikipedia page on howler monkeys.)