SPIRITUALITY AND COMMUNITY
- Prescott Johnson
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
XI, 1 (1997) New Series
The Pennsylvania State University Press
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ABSTRACT
This article is a consideration of the spiritual basis of society. First, attention is given to the question of the relation between Church and State in our early American history. Jefferson’s critical response to the claims of a biblical commonwealth and, further, his positive view of the spiritual foundations of society are considered in some detail. His individualistic and utilitarian presuppositions, shared to considerable extent by seventeenth century and eighteenth century European political thought, is appraised critically. Second, a concept of spirituality, which emphasizes self-awareness in the focus of social cohesion, is set forth. It is argued that such a concept of spirituality provides the conditions of community without the negative affects of imposed religious belief.
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“Religion is what the individual does with his own
solitariness.” “Religion is the art and the theory
of the internal life of man, so far as it depends
on the man himself and on what is permanent in the
nature of things.” ‑‑Alfred North Whitehead.
“A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence
of the ideal, and whether he eat or drink does so
for the sake of a true and ultimate good. He is
spiritual when he envisages his goal so frankly
that his whole material life becomes a transparent
and transitive vehicle, an instrument which scarcely
arrests attention but allows the spirit to use it
economically and with perfect detachment and freedom.”
‑‑George Santayana.
“Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and
myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to
be sought in my life. If that life has been honest and
dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated
it cannot be a bad one.” ‑‑Thomas Jefferson.
“And other sheep I have which are not of this fold.”
‑‑Jesus.
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A society and its government lives and flourishes only when its people are united in a concord of sentiment, a common espousal of significant values.
The first settlers in the new land, America, realized this. The “Mayflower Compact” of 1620 acknowledged that the Pilgrim quest was “undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith . . .” (Bradford [1620] 1952, 76). A decade later, John Winthrop, writing while aboard his flagship, the Arabella, gave eloquent voice to the ideal of Christian love, a bond of perfection, uniting people in a civil commonwealth. According to him, the civil order is based in, and supported by, a religious order. He wrote:
We must love our brethren without pretence; we must love one another with a pure heart and fervently; we must bear one another’s burdens; we must look not only on our own things but also on the things of our brethren. . . .
Thus stands the case between God and us. We have taken out a covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as His own people. . . . we shall be like a City upon a Hill . . . ([1630] 1868, 114-15).
Both Bradford and Winthrop identified the social bond with a particular religious doctrine and way of life. For this reason, should anyone depart from the authorized faith, he or she would forfeit the right of membership in the civil order. Thus, on the grounds of their religious dissension, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams were banished from the Massachusetts colony.
Winthrop’s 1630 “Modell” breathes with kindness and consideration. In this work, Winthrop speaks of a higher love, “the law of the gospel in the estate of regeneracy . . . .” the love of an enemy: “‘if thine enemy hunger, feed him: love your enemies; do good to them that hate you’ (Matt, 5:44)” ([1630] 1968, 110). A more strident voice is heard in his 1637 “The Exclusion of Heretics,” a treatise whose purpose was to justify the expulsion of the Hutchinsonians and, more explicitly, to stem the tide of other dissenters. Winthrop’s argument is that dissenters destroy the common good, “the welfare of the body,” and therefore must not be admitted to the colony. “If we are bound to keep off whatsoever appears to tend to our ruin or damage, then we may lawfully refuse to receive such whose dispositions suit not with ours and whose society (we know) will be hurtful to us . . .” ([1637] 1968, 154).
It soon became evident that an enforced consensus of belief was incapable of uniting people in a society. Indeed, a biblical commonwealth, which permits the rejection of those who do not hold the authorized beliefs, destroys the moral foundation upon which an order of human well-being depends. No person in our history saw this truth more clearly than did Thomas Jefferson. Accordingly, some attention to his philosophical thought, couched mainly in addresses and letters, will be instructive for us as we consider the problem of the spiritual basis of community.
With respect to this problem, there are two lines in Jefferson’s thought. First, the imposition of formal and organized religion upon society is inimical to social health because it contradicts an inalienable human right. Second, there is, notwithstanding the first line, a respect in which religion, as spiritual experience, is essential to society. We shall consider these two lines in the order just mentioned.
Religious freedom an inalienable human right.
Jefferson’s attitude toward religion was, as we shall see, a quite complicated one. He wrote, in an 1800 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” ([1800] 1903, 173). Jefferson believed that in any and all of its forms coercion in religious matters is tyranny over the mind. According to him, it is destructive, not only of society, but even of religion itself. For Jefferson, religious freedom is not merely a matter of convention, something devised and granted by political process; it had its roots deep in the very fabric of human nature. He wrote In the Notes on Virginia (1781) that it is “. . . a truth, and a natural right, that the exercise of religion should be free” ([1781] 1903, 219). In distinction to the positive and changing affairs of state‑‑constitutions, enactments, and so on‑‑religious freedom is a person’s essential and inalienable heritage, to be in force as long as humans shall exist. Further, Jefferson elsewhere wrote, it has nothing less than a divine foundation and sanction:
. . . Almighty God has created the mind free, so that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, . . . ; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others ([1779] 1903, 300-01).
Josephus Daniels writes this about Jefferson in the 1903 memorial edition of Jefferson’s Writings:
He acquired his deep‑seated hostility to religious bigotry and to church establishment‑‑(nearly always twin brothers)‑‑when he saw dissenting preachers carried to jail for what Patrick Henry called “the crime of preaching the gospel.” The sense of outrage that a man should be imprisoned for not accepting a creed which he could not believe,‑‑that seemed to his tolerant mind the un‑pardonable sin‑‑the sin that loomed above all other transgressions. His resentment toward those who would compel men to worship according to dictation from priest or politician was so deep that the pendulum of his mind swung in the opposite direction so far, that his intolerance for church establishment and clerical persecution and religious tyranny‑‑(the trinity of abortions upon Christianity)‑‑was construed into hostility to religion (1903, iii-iv).
In the Notes on Virginia Jefferson describes the religious situation as it existed in Virginia before the Revolution. The Virginia statute of 1705 had made the Anglican church the established church in the colony. The statutory oppressions enacted by Parliament were in force in Virginia. However, as Jefferson noted, the influx of dissenters, combined with the lethargy of the Anglican clergy, brought on a climate of moderation, so that “. . . no execution took place here, as did in New England . . .” ([1781] 1903, 218). But the laws were on the books, and they were oppressive. For example, heresy was a capital offense, although, Jefferson doubted “. . . whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three year’s imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity” ([1781] 1903, 224).
After Jefferson served in the Continental Congress of 1776, having authored the Declaration of Independence, he returned to Virginia. There he assumed his duties as a member of the Assembly of Virginia and was appointed first position on a committee of five to make recommendations for the revision of the laws that had been in force while Virginia was a colony. He served concurrently on the committee on religion. The committee submitted their report to the Assembly in 1779, but it was not adopted by the Senate until 1786. As a member of the committee on religion, Jefferson drew up the Statute of Religious Freedom. The statute provided for the liberty of religious opinion and the separation of church and state. It abrogated once and for all what he later called “. . . this loathsome combination of Church and State” ([1815a] 1903, 234), “. . . thus building a wall of separation between Church and State” ([1802] 1903, 281).
Jefferson’s bill was one, not of detailed specification, but of a comprehensive statement that sums up everything:
Sect. II. We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, burthened in his body or goods, or shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or beliefs; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities ([1779] 1903, 302-03).
Especially in our time, it is important to understand precisely what Jefferson’s bill, which became the model for the religious clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, both did and did not do. It provided for the liberty of protestant sects and Christian groups, prohibiting the establishment of a national church and governmental preference for one religious group over other such groups. There are those today who would wish to restrict both the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment to this limited extent, so as to permit the government to favor religion as such in distinction to irreligion or secularism. But that was not Jefferson’s intent. These documents extend freedom in religious matters to all without any qualification whatsoever. They guarantee liberty, not only to believe, but also not to believe. The government must be altogether neutral in matters of religious belief and preference. In sum, the “wall of separation,” as Jefferson conceived it, is absolute, not relative.
Jefferson concluded the Virginia Statute by declaring “. . . that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind” ([1779] 1903, 303). For him, these rights, timeless and eternal, are not limited to religion. By nature, the mind is free and insusceptible to coercion. Intellectual freedom is, indeed, the foundation of religious freedom. Freedom of religious opinion and of conscience are, accordingly, natural rights. They cannot be surrendered or transferred to others. For this reason, they cannot be assumed by civil authority. “But our rulers,” Jefferson stated, “can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God” ([1781] 1903, 321). Thus, civil interference in religious opinions and exercises “. . . will be an infringement of natural right” ([1779] 1903, 303). With a justifiable sense of pride, Jefferson wrote to Madison in reference to the Virginia act for religious freedom: “. . . and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions” ([1786] 1903, 10-11).
Jefferson never wavered in his insistence that the state must not involve itself in religious affairs. As President, he would not recommend even a day of prayer and fasting. His explanation of his refusal to do such is instructive, and perhaps quite relevant today. In a letter to Samuel Miller, a Presbyterian minister, Jefferson wrote:
I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. . . .
But it is only proposed that I should recommend not prescribe a day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U. S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded from them. . . .
I am aware that the practice of my predecessors may be quoted. . . . Be this as it may, everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the U. S. and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents ([1808] 1903, 428-30).
With respect to the separation of church and state, there is, Jefferson believed, another side to the coin: the church must not interfere in the affairs of state. In a letter to P. H. Wendover, he argued that the interference of the church in affairs of state, under the guise of political sermons, is as menacing as the interference of the state in the affairs of the church. Referring to a Mr. Mcleod, Jefferson said: “On one question only I differ from him, and it is that which constitutes the subject of his first discourse, the right of discussing public affairs in the pulpit” ([1815b] 1903, 279-80).
The letter is very witty, as well as instructive. Jefferson believed that the ministry had a religious function to perform and ought not to assume a competency in other areas, such as chemistry, medicine, and government. He continued:
I am aware that arguments may be found which may twist a thread of politics into the cord of religious duties. So may they for every other branch of human art or science.
Thus, for example, it is a religious duty to obey the laws of our country; the teacher of religion, therefore, must instruct us in those laws, that we may know how to obey them. It is a religious duty to assist our sick neighbors; the preacher must, therefore, teach us medicine, that we may do it understandingly. It is a religious duty to preserve our own health; our religious teacher, then, must tell us what dishes are wholesome, and give us recipes in cookery, that we may learn how to prepare them. And so, ingenuity, by generalizing more and more, may amalgamate all the branches of science into any one of them, and the physician who is paid to visit the sick may give a sermon instead of medicine, and the merchant to whom money is sent for a hat may send a handkerchief instead of it.
But not withstanding this possible confusion of all sciences into one, common sense draws lines between them sufficiently distinct for the general purposes of life, and no one is at a loss to understand that a recipe in medicine or cookery, or a demonstration in geometry is not a lesson in religion ([1815b] 1903, 280-81).
Jefferson’s point needs little elaboration. If a “lesson in religion,” brings injurious results when given as instruction in medicine, then that lesson is also injurious when it assumes a competence in government and politics.
Since religious views and practices spring from the liberty of the individual’s intellect and conscience, religion is a strictly private matter. It is restricted, Jefferson wrote, “… only from acts of trespass on that of others” ([1823b 1903, 489). In a letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith, Jefferson expressed the personal and private nature of religion: “But I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we are accountable to Him, and not to the priests” ([1816a] 1903, 60). He was reluctant to publicize his own religious views. To Miles King, he wrote, “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our God alone. I inquire after no man’s, and trouble none with mine . . .” ([1814b] 1903, 198). As President he would not make his views public because he felt that this would tend to encroach upon the conscience of others: “I am averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public, because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them out before that tribunal, and to reduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience which the laws so justly prescribe (Calish 1903, iii).
The place of religion in society.
In sum, Jefferson’s thought is unequivocally clear with respect to the issue of individual freedom. Here there is a remarkable progression in this thought: the inalienable right of the individual’s intellectual freedom entails the individual’s right of religious freedom. This, in turn, places upon the church, as an agency of religious life, the obligation to refrain from imposing its fiduciary claims on society and the state.
The question is then raised as to the place of religion in society and the state. Since Jefferson’s thought, which mandates the separation of church and state, leads to this question, it may be appropriate to consider the issue in connection with his own views on the matter.
Edward Calish says of Jefferson:
Far from being an infidel or an atheist Thomas Jefferson was a deeply reverent and religious spirit, a firm believer in God and in the supreme justice of His overruling providence. . . . But he was not a dogmatist. His religion was a rational faith and not a theological creed. He believed firmly in the existence of God, and he believed just as firmly that every human being had the right to believe as he chose, or to disbelieve if he chose (1903, iii).
On many occasions, public and private, Jefferson expressed his religious faith. Indeed, he concluded his first inaugural address with these words: “And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe, lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity” ([1801] 1903, 323). In the April 21, 1803 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, he wrote:
To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other ([1803a] 380).
With respect to theology, Jefferson was a rationalist. To be more precise, he was a deist. He did not, however, press deism to the extreme, such that God becomes wholly removed from a purely mechanical universe to which He has no immanental and providential relation. On the contrary, Jefferson believed in God’s immanence in the world and providence in the affairs of humankind. He accepted the teleological argument‑‑the argument from order and design‑‑for God’s existence: “. . . a Fabricator of all things . . . , a superintending power to maintain the universe in its course and order.” “Of the nature of this Being,” he went on to say, “we know nothing” ([1823a] 1903, 427-28). Yet Jefferson did suggest in this letter that God’s nature must be akin to mind. He translated the term “Logos” in the Gospel of John, not as word, but as reason, the creative and immanent author of the world (see [1823] 1903).
Genuine religion, then, must be reasonable, not absurd or incomprehensible. “. . . I suppose,” Jefferson said, “belief to be assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition” ([1813] 1903, 350). In the Notes on Virginia, he wrote: “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation” ([1781] 1903, 221). By “true religion,” he meant, for one thing, coherence. The absence of self‑contradiction, however, is but a negative test of truth. That is, the logical coherence of a proposition is not a positive guarantee of its truth. Jefferson realized this, and recommended to his Nephew, Peter Carr, that, when possible, religious statements be checked out on the basis of scientific information. In such matters Jefferson insisted upon the appeal to empirical knowledge; However, as to the truth of a religious system as such, he made it clear that no purely intellectual test is possible. “Your own reason,” he wrote to Carr, “is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision” ([1787] 1903, 261). The inability to know final truth in religion is even more pointedly stated in a letter to Miles King: “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our God alone. I inquire after no man’s and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friends or our foes, are exactly the right” ([1814b] 1903, 198).
In consequence of his rationalism, Jefferson defined religion in moral terms. This is indicated by his expression, “uprightness of decision.” And the uprightness of decision in regard to religion is certified, not in any assurance of final truth apprehended, but in the beneficial effects of religion upon and in society.
Since, for Jefferson, the validity of religion lies in its utilitarian character, it follows that sectarianism and divisiveness, which bring harm to society, do not qualify as genuinely religious in nature. In this regard he wrote:
When we see religion split into so many thousands of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into it’s thousands also, who are disputing, anathematising, and where the laws permit, burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself ([1816b] 1903, 381).
In a letter to Reverend Thomas Whitmore, he expressed the same idea: “I have never permitted myself to meditate a specified creed. These formulas have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, it’s own fatal invention which, thro’ so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughter house, and at this day divides it into Casts of inextinguishable hatred to one another” ([1822] 1903, 373-74). And, when writing to Adams in 1817, Jefferson had remarked in the same vein: “If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, ‘that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it'” ([1817] 1903, 109).
Jefferson believed, however, that, while religion is essentially a matter of morality, it is not the foundation of morality, either individual or social. He wrote to Thomas Law:
Some have made the love of God the foundation of morality. This too is but a branch of our moral duties . . . . If we did a good act merely from the love of God, and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say as some do, that no such being exists. . . . Their virtue then must have had some other foundation than the love of God ([1814a] 1903, 139-40).
Further, Jefferson continued, neither is truth the foundation of morality. Rather, truth itself requires a moral foundation. Taste is an aesthetic activity, not a moral one. Finally, self‑love, or egoism, “. . . is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart” ([1814a] 1903, 140). In distinction to all of these, the foundation of morality is the “moral sense, or conscience.” This essential element of human nature is, as for Shaftesbury and Hume, a feeling of benevolence. It is this feeling that impels people to society and socially beneficial actions. Writing to Carr, Jefferson explained: “Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature . . .” ([1787] 1903, 257). He expressed the same view in his letter to Law: “. . . nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short. . . . The creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without implanting in him social dispositions” ([1814a] 1903, 141-42). In consequence of this moral sense, or feeling of benevolence, “. . . nature has constituted utility to man the standard and test of virtue” ([1814a] 1903, 143). Jefferson realized, however, that different cultures have different definitions of what is useful to them, and that impulsive feeling needs the guidance of reason, among other factors. Stripped of even the element of moral sense, Jefferson’s moral philosophy is altruistic and utilitarian.
If the feeling of benevolence impels men to virtue, what then is the need for religion? Jefferson dealt at length with this issue, and, his detractors notwithstanding, found an essential and indispensable place for religion in the affairs of people and society. In fact, his animadversions upon religions, in the plural, were designed to insure against improperly situating religion in life and society.
In 1803 Jefferson composed a “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus.” He found the moral philosophy of classical times, the Greeks and Romans, to be defective for two reasons. First, classical thought developed an individual ethic, but not a social one:
Their precepts related chiefly to ourselves, and the government of those passions which, unrestrained, would disturb our tranquility of mind. In this branch of philosophy they were really great.
In developing our duties to others, they were short and defective. They embraced, indeed, the circles of kindred and friends, and inculcated patriotism, or the love of our country in the aggregate, as a primary obligation: towards our neighbors and countrymen they taught justice, but scarcely viewed them as within the circle of benevolence. Still less have they inculcated peace, charity and love to our fellow men, or embraced with benevolence the whole family of mankind ([1803b] 1903, 381-82).
Second, Greek and Roman morality, and also the Hebrew morality, were formal and external, failing to reach the inward spirit. He wrote: “The precepts of philosophy, and of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only” ([1803b] 1903, 385).
These defects, Jefferson asserted, were corrected in the teachings of Jesus, “. . . the most sublime edifice of morality which had ever been exhibited to man” ([1803b] 1903, 384). Christian morality, providing for sympathetic impulses toward others, was, he believed, a true social morality:
“His [Jesus’] moral doctrines went far beyond . . . to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids. A development of this head will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others” ([1803b] 1903, 381-85).
The moral teachings of Jesus also placed proper and sufficient emphasis upon inward motive and intention. Jesus exemplified and taught the spirit of love and benevolence, radiating outward from the individual spirit to encompass the vast brotherhood of mankind. “He pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head” ([1803b] 1903, 385). As in no other system, Jefferson found in the ethics of Jesus the moral ideal of benevolence and love as the spiritualizing force for moral conduct.
Jefferson’s position on religion and society is now becoming clear. Fanaticism and divisiveness in religion bode ill for culture and society; yet, as properly construed, religion is vital to mankind and society. Religion in its moral essence, as primarily found in primitive Christianity, is not only compatible with the aims of society but is absolutely essential. Jefferson wrote to Thomas Leiper:
As to myself, my religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ, all have a different set. The former instructs us how to live well and worthily in society; the latter are made to interest our minds in the support of the teachers who inculcate them ([1809] 1903, 236-37).
And to Adams Jefferson later expressed the same position:
If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, “that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, “something not fit to be named, indeed, a hell” ([1817] 1903, 109).
Jefferson is on solid ground with respect to his insistence upon intellectual and religious freedom and the separation of church and state. He is also on solid ground with respect to his insistence that religion must work as a beneficial leaven in individual and social life. However, his view that, finally speaking, individual and social morality are founded in a Humian “feeling of benevolence” creates a difficulty with respect to his view that religion is necessary as the actuating force in morality. We can grant that Greek and Hebrew morality, individualistic and formalistic, do not reach the inner springs of action. Why do those springs even have to be reached, if individuals are possessed of a feeling of benevolence for one another? Why religion at all?
Jefferson’s view of community has for its focus the individual’s self-awareness in individual isolation. As it was for Locke, the primary reality is the individual, whose rights and interests the community is constructed to serve.
As I have already pointed out, Jefferson grounded the feeling of benevolence in the moral sense. The moral sense is an innate endowment of human nature, but, Jefferson argued, it may, and often does, exist in individuals to a degree insufficient to prompt benevolent action and establish social concord. This is as much a condition of one’s natural, bodily existence as is a defect of any other natural faculty. There are various ways of strengthening the moral feeling: “. . . by education, by appeals to reason and calculation, by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed, other motives to do good and to eschew evil, such as the love, or hatred, or rejection of those among whom he lives; and whose society is necessary to his happiness and even existence . . . ([1814a] 1903, 141). Here Jefferson united the principle of utility with the moral sense. The final impulsion to community is the value of community to the individual. The justifying condition of society is wholly a matter of its instrumental value to the individual. This Jefferson made clear in his letter to Adams: “The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing; as a wise creator must have seen to be necessary in an animal destined to live in society; that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to an other . . . ([1816c] 1903, 76).
Virtue, he went on to say, “does not exist in the act we do, but in the end it is to effect” ([1815c 1903, 76). This means, then, that the exercise of benevolence, directed to the well-being of others, is, in the final analysis, supported by the pleasure the individual finds in acting benevolently. While an individual may be incited to a disposition of benevolence by an education in the example afforded in the ethic of Jesus, it is only the pleasure the individual experiences in being benevolent that ultimately supplies the motivation.
Jefferson truly saw that an inner and spiritual dimension of personal experience was somehow involved in the moral fabric of humanity and the society it may create. But his extreme individualist and utilitarian thought made it impossible for him to bring the view to a consistent clarity. He left unanswered the question as to how even a refined and calculated egoism is capable of establishing social concord.
In distinction to the predication of community on individualist and utilitarian assumptions, my argument in this paper is that community must have for its focus the individual’s self-awareness in social cohesion. Carried to its farthest reaches, this experience is what is meant by spirituality.
To the extent to which we embrace individualist and utilitarian assumptions in our thinking, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to grasp the nature of spirituality and to define its role in the creation of community. Thus, it is appropriate here, in our effort to get at the central issue of this discussion, to examine briefly those assumptions, namely, the nature of spirituality and its power in the establishment of community.
European political thought of the seventeenth century and eighteenth century was primarily individualist and utilitarian. Society and government exist as a compromise in which individuals give up some of their rights in order to secure certain other ones. The basis of society and government is a calculating selfishness; that is what holds people together in social intercourse. The bond of social accord is egoistic and utilitarian. Thus, the individual is given priority over the community. Everything exists in order to secure the well-being and happiness of the individual, not of the community. Moreover, as Max Weber showed in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), the material values and rewards associated with individual acquisitiveness and enterprise are given divine sanction.
Given this political individualism and utilitarianism, backed with a measure of religious justification, it is not surprising that our history as a people has been characterized by an often excessive preoccupation with the single‑minded pursuit of material ends, the amassing of wealth and the consumption of material goods. Nevertheless, there has also been, and is yet today, another quality and tendency in the psyche of the American people: the desire for true community, an order of over‑arching well‑being in which people share their sorrows and their joys, assist one another in the care and concern of shared life.
The fact remains, however, that there has been, and now is, a deep split in our consciousness as a people. We are impelled by two dreams: the largely material dream of individual happiness and well‑being and the altruistic dream of true community and the betterment of community. We have not been able to reconcile these dreams adequately, and our national experience has been one of vacillation between them. This circumstance is not one that falls to our lot alone; it besets other cultures and nations as well. And, more to the point, the duality of individualism and community seems to reflect, as A. N. Whitehead has eloquently shown, two basic, well‑nigh irreconcilable strands of human nature and destiny. We are driven by the demand for both “strength of individuality” and “harmony of community.” Bringing these strands of impulsion together is never easy. At best they are but held in fragile and tenuous union, ever destined then to break apart and yet to call for new and fresh embrace. Amidst our great national problems and difficulties our greatest task is just this: once again to shape our character as a people by tempering our preoccupation with equality and individualism, our utilitarianism, with the vision and realization of the common good. It is as true today as it was at the time Madison wrote: “The public good, the welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued” ([1788] 1945, No. 45, 307). Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart (1985), has characterized the matter well in language more familiar to us today: “The tension between self‑reliant enterprise and a sense of public solidarity espoused by civic republicanism has been the most important unresolved problem in American history” (236).
As I earlier indicated, Jefferson saw in religion, particularly in the teachings of Jesus, the ethical qualities, touching the inward spirit, that restrain individual egoism and foster the outreach of benevolence and the concord of social harmony. In certain respects, Jefferson’s view of the nature of religion is close to Kant’s. Kant, too, defines religion in moral terms. It may be helpful, therefore to consider his view, since it bears on the question of spirituality and community. In his work, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone ([1793] 1934), Kant argues that the individual, within and out of his or her own reason, prescribes the moral law and thus legislates the right to which he or she is obliged. Within the individual’s own rational nature lies what Kant called “the Good Principle.” But there lies within the individual also “the Evil Principle.” This radical evil is not, as the classical Stoics held, the natural, bodily desires. Rather it is the subversion of the two principles of reason and desire, desire assuming the dominant place in the economy of human nature and experience. For this subversion, an individual is alone responsible in a “timeless act” of his or her own freedom. An individual’s task, an endless one, is to restore the rightful relationship between these two parts, the rational and sensual, of his or her nature. For this task the individual alone is responsible. Thus religion, in particular Christianity, must be reinterpreted in the terms of individual moral endeavor.
Now the point in Kant’s theory that is particularly relevant to our inquiry has to do with the relation between the individual and other individuals. There are, Kant says, two orders, or kinds, of human association. There is what he called “a juridico‑civil (political) state” ([1793] 1934, 87). The social and political condition, in which individuals equally stand under laws, is, however, “one of war of every man against every other” ([1793] 1934, 88). The social and political organization of humankind is, accordingly, doomed to be one of egoism, aggrandizement, conflict and aggression. Further, the evil in a person, for which in some kind of timeless act of freedom that person is responsible, exerts power over the person, not because of passions and desires, but because of the rivalry and conflict between individuals in society. Social relations are the great hindrances to the triumph of the good in the individual. The fault of evil is not “in his own gross nature, so far as he is here a separate individual, but because of mankind to whom he is related and bound” ([1793] 1934, 85). In their social and political relationships individuals “lack a principle which unites them” ([1793] 1934, 88).
The remedy for this deplorable state of humankind is what Kant calls “an ethico‑civil state . . . in which they are united under non‑coercive laws, i.e., laws of virtue alone” ([1793] 1934, 87). Now, and this may seem surprising given Kant’s insistence that social relations are originally divisive, the creation of an ethical commonwealth is essentially social in its nature. It “requires a union of . . . individuals into a whole toward the same goal‑-into a system of well‑disposed men, in which and through whose unity alone the highest moral good can come to pass . . .” ([1793] 1934, 89).
Kant’s problem, then, becomes that of showing how such an ethical commonwealth can be, even partially, brought about. Since the new, ethical union of individuals is precisely the result to be achieved and since the basic social situation in which individuals find themselves contains no principle of unity, it follows that the ethical commonwealth has its basis in the individual who is alone in his or her freedom. The faith that saves is, Kant says, a moral faith, not a religious faith: “Moral faith, in contrast, presupposes that a morally good disposition is requisite” ([1793] 1934, 106). That is, moral goodness, the disposition to act on the maxim of the right, is the doorway into the ethical commonwealth, the union of people in the one, universal, true, pure, and invisible Church. While we can never expect to see it fully realized, or become completely visible, it is yet the ideal that, founded “in the idea of reason,” lures humanity on towards its “social goal, namely, the promotion of the highest as a social good” ([1793] 1934, 89). Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, even for Kant, to explain just how, even with the pressures coming from other individuals, the disposition to virtue, which is native to man’s reason, becomes subjected to the passions and desires. That is, how is it that a native moral virtue is displaced and supplanted by the “evil principle?” Why should an individual in his or her freedom even allow himself or herself to be overthrown by an evil? And, how is it that an individual can by his or her own moral efforts regain moral purity? Why should the individual leave the ethical state of nature and opt for membership in the ethical commonwealth? How is this conversion possible? These are the serious questions that Kant confronted, none too successfully, in his attempt to define, or reduce, spirituality and religion to morality.
Kant admits that there is no strictly causal explanation of an individual’s ethical redemption, for that redemption issues forth from the individual’s freedom, and causal explanation is contradictory of that very freedom. Furthermore, no coercion from the side of the political commonwealth to compel its citizens to enter the ethical commonwealth is possible since the ethical commonwealth is ordered by and in freedom. For this reason Kant says that the idea of God is required: “We can already foresee that this duty will require the presupposition of another idea, namely, that of a higher moral Being through whose universal dispensation the forces of separate individuals, insufficient in themselves, are united for a common end ([1793] 1934, 89).
There are some difficulties in Kant’s analysis. The first difficulty concerns the postulate of Deity. The postulate is necessary for Kant to explain the creation of the ethical community. In this respect, Kant brings religion into the moral picture. However, it would seem that religion is only an external supplement to morality, for God is conceived merely as an external creator and governor who abandons his created beings to the care of their own destiny and controls them merely by external rule. In short, the relation between God and individuals is, like that of other persons and things in the world, merely external. God is a deus ex machina. Accordingly, spirituality has little, if any, import in community.
The second difficulty concerns the postulate of the moral life. The moral life is one of abstract individual self-determination. There is nothing in the world of objects experienced as objects of desire and ends of action that bears relevance to the moral life. Instead, these but destroy the individual’s freedom, and, since morality is a matter of freedom, they are destructive of moral character. The upshot is that the moral life is one of individual self-determination, governed by the pure idea of oneself as an end, negatively related to all objective ends of desire.
The Third difficulty is that Kant’s analysis devalues social relationships. Social relationships are limited to those of competitiveness and hostility. Accordingly, society is destructive of individual morality, the result being that the solitary individual must enter an ethical union with others in which, in an invisible kingdom, the social content of actual life is eliminated. The social order is thus deprived of moral content. It becomes vacuous in that it leaves actual, historical society caught up in its irremediable avarice and conflict.
Much of our contemporary talk‑-one should not say “discussion”‑-that reflects on the ethical and social import of religion is all too “Kantian.” Spirituality is often thought of as an individual inwardness isolated from and unrelated to the activities and relationships of actual behavior. All too often we separate the inwardness of spirituality from the ends that we pursue, believing that they are but externally related to oneself. As a consequence, we allow ourselves to satisfy our desires, often giving over to selfishness, acquisitiveness, and self-aggrandizement, but thinking all the while that we are morally commendable. We speak of a concern for others, ask the disenfranchised to espouse our own values, but all the while we ignore the material conditions that hold them in moral bondage.
There is certainly a spiritual inwardness to religion. But it is an inwardness that recognizes that the ends we pursue and the activities in which we engage are the particular forms in which the self in its freedom seeks satisfaction and realization in the Good. As such, they are but the partial goods and therefore call for a continuing readjustment to place them in proper context and relationship. The spiritual life is not one of isolation from things and material ends, but rather one of incorporating them harmoniously and hierarchically in the inner life of spiritual experience. This is the spirituality that holds the beginning of salvation from selfishness and avarice.
The spiritual life is not one that brings an ethical union with others in which, in an invisible kingdom, all content of actual life is eliminated, in which competitiveness and hostility obtain. Rather, it is a union of spirits, each viewing the other as end, in which we pursue a continuing adjustment and readjustment of the pursuits of life so as to assist one another in our common quest for the Good, for the incorporation of our partial goods in an inner life in which we all share in a communion of subjectivity. In this kingdom, we are lifted out of our own individuality and are empowered to live in each other’s lives.
Spirituality is a quality of individual, personal existence. The term spirit refers to this quality. But, besides this abstract meaning, the term has a concrete meaning. In this respect, spirit connotes subjective and inward self-existence.
The distinctive reality of spirit is indicated by the circumstance that human consciousness of objects entails the consciousness of the experiencing subject. Objects of experience are objects of my experience. “My own self-consciousness” is given amidst my consciousness of the object-world. And it is given as irreducible to the object-world, as a distinctive mode of reality.
There is a marked difference between the physical and the spiritual, between nature and spirit. Both nature and spirit are systems. A physical system is marked by uniformity. Uniformity is essential to the maintenance of the system. Even a slight departure from the uniformity of the processes of the solar system would mean its destruction. In the case of an atom, as the displacement of an element by its isotope, the change would be destructive of its identity.
The spirit, or the self, is a subjective system. Here the incitement to its maintenance is, not uniformity, but vicissitude. The changes and disruptions that would be ruinous of a physical system are handled differently by the self as subjective system. The self is able to assert its identity in and even in spite of the vicissitudes that pose a challenge to that identity. Thus, vicissitude is of the essence of spiritual selfhood.
The spirit, the self, is a capacity for comprehensive experience. It is the articulation of an experience that retains its identity and unity throughout the temporal structure of individuated experiences. Nevertheless, the individual’s capacity for comprehensive experience is never fully realized. There is a measure of fragmentariness and brokenness that pervades our lives. In the full implication of its meaning, we are not persons. We do not in and of ourselves have the right to that claim. Yet, for this we strive, and in our striving we cannot abandon the claim that we cannot make good. If we are to continue to lay hold on that claim‑-and we cannot and will not give it up‑-we must anchor it in a supremely comprehensive experience. We must acknowledge a perfection of experience.
It is for this reason that we entertain the idea of Deity. The idea of God is not something artificially introduced from outside the context of human experience. It is, rather, an acknowledgment required by the impulsions of experience. Experience, then, yields, in a manner native to it, an awareness that in the brokenness of our finite and limited experience of personality we are sustained in a wider, fuller experience of comprehension and co-presence. Spirit yields from its inner depth the pervading sense of perfection and loveliness, of the supreme Spirit, in whose life and embrace we are sustained.
The life-transforming realization of God as perfection of experience, as comprehensive experience, is what is meant by spirituality. Spirituality is not a belief or a dogma. Indeed, the idea of God is not a concept of God. The concept of Deity is a symbol. For this reason, no conceptual formulation can stand as the definitive meaning of the spiritual. Here lies much of our contemporary problem concerning the relation of religion and society, of church and state.
In one of its modes of experience, spirit is cognitive. Thus it is that we attempt to form a conception of God. The idea of God, as co-implicate of experience, is thus transformed into a concept. The point that requires emphasis here is this: that the concept of God is filled with the meanings and intensions of our own “community of subjective form.” It thus expresses, or may express, the best and highest of which we are capable of conceptually entertaining. But we must not suppose that the concept is fully or finally adequate to the disclosure of God, that it expresses the final truth about God. Rather, we must realize that in the differences of formulation there lies a common strand of significance. And it is this common strand to which we must, while living in the light of religious faith, appeal in our effort to elicit the spiritual foundations of society and community. This common strand is often overlooked by those who adopt a religious tour de force in the attempt to impose a particular religious frame of reference upon the nation.
This is what prompted Jefferson to insist that credal and organized religion be kept separate from the state. Rather, spirituality is, as we have just indicated, an envisagement of a perfection of experience the scope of which excludes none but embraces all. It is the vision, in Whitehead’s memorable language, of “perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity” (1929, 532). Spirituality is an envisagement of beauty, of harmony, that views one another, not as many and mutually conflicting creatures, but as gathered into a unity of all human life. In his own way, Jefferson saw this. Although he put the subject in his own idiom, he saw that there is a spirituality that is the true essence of all religions, that serves to touch the inward spirit, to purify “the waters at the fountain head,” to subdue “our propensities to self-gratification,” and that is impelled by active affection, to secure “peace, charity, and love to our fellow men,” and that embraces “with benevolence the whole family of mankind.” Again, spirituality “. . . is not a message to be believed, but an experience . . . which becomes a message, and as an explicit message seeks to offer a new life experience to others who hear it from within their own experience” (Schillebeeckx 1981, 50).
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