Body as Spirit: The Nature of Religious Feeling by Charles Davis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Body as Spirit: The Nature of Religious Feeling. By CHARLES DAVIS. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976). Pp. 181. Index. $8.95. Grown out of an intimate acquaintance with the Christian faith and an increasing disenchantment with some of its expressions, Charles Davis's plea for a more sensuous religion bears the marks of a profound ambiguity. It presents the achievement of a mature, disciplined theologian who raises all the pertinent questions about Christianity today and refuses to be satisfied with simplistic answers. The first chapter and especially the last chapter of his book display a discerning mind and an unusual acumen in dealing with the intricate questions of religious epistemology. Yet Davis's study also articulates (though not always articulately) a longing for the kind of religion which Christianity has never been and probably never will be: a religion in which feeling is primary. Part of its ambiguity results from a romantic vagueness about the question how far the tradition within which the discussion takes place can be stretched without breaking. The term " romantic " does not suggest that Davis is naive whenever he is not critical. Even while defending a thesis reminiscent of the early Schleiermacher, Davis insists on adequate distinctions. He refuses to equate religion with religious feeling and, unlike his romantic predecessors, remote and recent, he does not posit an identical feeling at the root of the variety of religious traditions. As we learn in the first chapter, religious feeling is always mediated by a specific tradition, since it has no perceptible object to specify it as other feelings do, including the feeling of finitude. Its awareness of wholeness or totality or depth or dependence takes man " out and beyond his ordinary self, out of and beyond the limited world in which he lives and opens him to what is unlimited and unapprehensible, though felt as utterly real and blissful" (p. 31). A similar theological sophistication is displayed in the last chapter's discussion of how critical questions must be raised in a religious tradition, a thoughtful exposition of the complex issues involved in a critical reflection upon a historical faith. All too often such a reflection forgets its own historical character. " There is no absolute reason, stripped of all prejudgments , allowing us to engage in a critical reflection that would dominate the cultural materials through purely objective techniques" (p. 149). Precisely! One finds oneself wishing the same self-conscious criticism had been applied to the questions raised in chapter two and continued to the next to last chapter. Unfortunately here we fail to detect the same toughminded determination to go to the bottom (that is, by Davis's own definition , the formative processes) of the problems besetting the Christian religion . The problems are real enough. Who would deny that Christianity 441 44~ BOOK REVIEWS has granted the body at best a grudging recognition and that it has thereby created major conflicts in the areas of sexual morality, religious spirituality and the belief in an afterlife? But Davis seldom moves beyond the questions as we actually confront them today and remains mostly content with hinting, in one or two paragraphs, at the direction where a possible solution may lie. He concludes his chapter on sexuality by declaring sexual love the most common path to mystical union and self-transcending dedication (a statement that must remain unconfirmed in any religious faith known to me) and has nothing more to say about the traditional cult of celibacy than " that it is possible to conceive of it as a genuine call, though a rare one" (p. 142). A similar abdication of a genuine critique in Davis's own, tradition-conscious, sense appears in the chapter on death where he simply suggests the possibility of a "conditional immortality," that is, one reserved to those "whose deepest identity is a dynamic relationship to God " (p. 103) . A conclusion as momentous and revolutionary would appear to require some justification of its ability to be incorporated within the Christian tradition. In the interesting chapter on the isolated ego the author advocates as sole remedy for our disastrous objectivism "the expansion of consciousness outward into the world to rediscover God as immanent in...