Sources of Religious Insight

Josiah Royce And The Invisible Church

Josiah Royce (1855 - 1916) was a great American philosopher in the idealist tradition whose work has been overshadowed by that of his colleague and dear friend at Harvard, William James. I recently had the good fortune to attend an academic conference at the Harvard Divinity School with the theme "Pragmatism and Idealism in Dialogue: James and Royce 100 years later" which explored the close relationship of the work of these two thinkers. Royce was raised in frontier California as an evangelical Christian and, although he abandoned this particular creed in adult life, he remained preoccupied with religious questions and with the Christian heritage of his youth. Royce's "The Sources of Religious Insight" (1912) consists of seven lectures delivered at Lake Forest College, Illinois. Royce said that the "Sources" "contains the whole sense of me in a brief compass". And the Roycean scholar, Frank Oppenheim S.J. has written in his book "Reverence for the Relations of Life" (2005 at p. 265) that the "Sources" "constitutes one of the most valuable yet tragically neglected works of the twentieth century."

The Sources is written in an accessible, non-technical style that tends to mask the complexity of its thought. Royce makes use of stories and anecdotes, historical figures, homely examples, poetry, and the popular literature of his day. Royce characterizes religious life as concerned with the salvation of man. The idea of salvation means, for Royce, that there is some end or aim of human life that is far more important and fundamental than other aims and that people live in great danger of missing this goal by devoting themselves to trivialities. (p. 12) Royce endeavors to study "insight into the way of salvation and into those objects whereof the knowledge conduces to salvation." (p. 9). The "Sources" is much less based upon a Christian approach to religion than is Royce's subsequent book, "The Problem of Christianity." Royce disclaims any doctrinal teaching. This gives the "Sources" a much broader scope than the "Problem" even though it does not show the influence of the thought of Charles Peirce and the possible curtailment of Royce's idealistic tendencies that are apparent in the latter work.

Much of the "Sources" can be viewed as amplification and modification of the project William James began in his "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902). In the "Varieties" James identified individual private experience, the experience of a person "alone with the divine" as the fundamental religious attitude. In accordance with his pragmatism, James believed the value of this experience could be measured in terms of its fruits for life, rather than by abstract considerations of truth and falsity.

In the "Sources", Royce agrees with James about the experiential, personal character of religion. He also agrees, to a point, with James's emphasis on pragmatism and the individual will. But Royce finds James's approach insufficient. He proceeds in the "Sources" to identify seven sources of religious insight: 1. the individual in his solitude, as identified by James, 2 social community, 3. reason, 4. will, 5. loyalty, 6. responses to certain forms of evil and sorrow in human life, 7. the unity of spirit and the individual church. (Oppenheim discusses these factors at p. 258 of "Reinventing Pragmatism".)

Royce has much to say about each of these factors. The most striking difficulty for the modern reader, and the point of greatest divergence from James, lies in Royce's consideration of reason and in his attempt to construct a source of religion through an argument for the philosophy of absolute idealism. Royce's philosophy culminates in what he calls the "Religion of Loyalty" which combines individualism and communalism, ethics and religion to the service of "the spiritual unity of all the worlds of reasonable beings." (p. 205) Individuals may be devoted to different causes, in terms of their countries, families, and work and to different religions - or to no formal religion at all. But through loyalty to the good and a willingness to respect the facially diverging goods of others, individuals may reach an understanding of the bases of the religious search.

In his final chapter, Royce distinguishes the visible church - the community of believers in an established religious tradition - from the invisible church which he describes as the `spiritual brotherhood of the loyal." (p. 282) Membership in the invisible church requires tolerance for the individual loyalties of others which we do not share and an attempt to further their just loyalties as well as one's own. There is an ultimate unity among all believers in the good, regardless of their superficial differences. Loyalty, for Royce, "implies genuine faith in the abiding and supreme unity of the spirit." (p. 297)

There is a great deal to be learned about religion from this wonderful book as it shows a fallible humanity in quest of the transcendent. Royce does not attempt to foist a creed upon his readers but rather to help provide a basis in which people may come to specifically religious conclusions of their own. As Royce exhorts at the end of the "Sources", "seek insight where it is to be found."

Robin Friedman