Walking the “Path of Piety”: Charles Peirce, Religious Naturalism, and the American Literature of Transformation

The Appreciation of Charles Peirce’s religious dimension has been slow to mature, due in part to the disparate nature of his prodigious output, but also due to a certain blindness of his interpreters. Michael Raposa, in his essay “Peirce and Modern Religious Thought” (1991), argues: “Some early interpreters of Peirce, like Hartshorne and Goudge, argued that his religious perspective was inconsistent with the basic thrust of his philosophy. Many later commentators have implicitly endorsed this argument by systematically ignoring the religious dimension of his thought.” In contrast, Raposa suggests “that what Peirce had to say about religion is remarkably continuous with what he wrote about a variety of philosophical, mathematical and scientific topics… Peirce fashioned his conception of God out of the very materials that his semiotic and his synechism supplied” (Peirce’s Philosophy 349). Raposa offers a fuller account in Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (1989), while other systematic accounts of Peirce’s religious perspective include Robert S. Corrington’s An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (1993) and the more recent Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (2011) by Leon J. Niemoczynski.

Identifying Peirce as a theologian with a spiritual cosmology of the sacred may require a leap of faith, though less of a leap if one considers Peirce’s religious musings within his architectonic of evolutionary realism, evolutionary love, and his interweaving of spontaneity and creativity (Hausman 18–19). Corrington defines his own overview of Peirce as an “emancipatory reenactment” (Introduction to C. S. Peirce xii), and Niemoczynski terms his own study a “constructive interpretation” and creative extrapolation of Peirce (ix), while Raposa’s systematic account elaborates “a conception of theological method, a task that Peirce clearly never himself assumed,” requiring “a sketch of how this might look as it takes shape” (Pierce’s Philosophy 357).

This essay will endeavor a synthesis of the accounts of Peirce as a religious naturalist, applying aspects of his philosophy to three Willa Cather novels as inductive tests, grounding and clarifying the theological concepts and constructions generated by Peirce’s pragmaticism, demonstrating their potential evolutionary realization. Dimensions of his work invoked by Peirce’s “emancipators” include the basic conceptions of triadic semiotics; the relative roles of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; habit, abduction, and musement; universals or laws; an evolutionary cosmology; and the reconciliation of science and religion. One area of contention is in Corrington’s extension beyond theosemiotics and religious naturalism to his ecstatic naturalism, a “radicalization of naturalism” where Peirce’s “own pragmaticism can be reconfigured to better correspond to the abyss within nature, an abyss that comes to meet thought in an ecstatic naturalism that lets go of the panrationalism that blocks the path to piety” (Introduction to C. S. Peirce 219).

As an unfolding, extended narrative, the novel lends itself to accounts of evolutionary personal transformation, growth from conflict, and the consequences of habit. Potentially, literature resonates with philosophy, and the novels of Willa Cather offer a testing ground resonant with Peirce’s religious naturalism and theosemiotic. As Martha Nussbaum suggests, a work such as a novel or tragedy, “unlike a schematic philosophical example making use of a similar story, is capable of tracing the history of a complex pattern of deliberation, showing its roots in a way of life and looking forward to its consequences in that life” (Nussbaum 14). The literary work adds to the philosophy, adds “to its content a picture of reason’s procedures and problems that could not readily be conveyed in some other form” (14).

Richard Poirier, in Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), also writes of the promise of the literary imagination for progressive, evolutionary Pragmatist purposes, as does Peirce himself: “So the poet in our days—and the true poet is the true prophet—personifies everything, not rhetorically but in his own feelings. He tells us that he feels an affinity for nature, and loves the stone or the drop of water” (“Place of Our Age” 13). In perhaps the fullest account of Peirce’s semiotics and literature, The Fate of Meaning: Charles...