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Chapter 10 The Religious Insights of Josiah Royce  I n the context of the present work, Royce’s ideas on religion can best be explained by comparing them to William James. Royce discerned connections , which William James missed, between ordinary consciousness and the highest levels of religious experience. In his Varieties of Religious Experience, James portrayed religion as a dynamogenic force but one that could not be well understood in terms of ordinary experience. He examined extraordinary experiences of individuals “in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine” (VRE, 42). Italics in original. As biographer Linda Simon put it: “(James) set himself the task of locating those places where the ‘ideal religion’ forced itself into the real world’s details, to cause experiences—prayer, epiphany, or visions, for example—that generated faith” (Simon, 309). A discontinuity stands between religion and our ordinary consciousness of “the real world details.” Religious experience presents an alternative form of consciousness and has mysticism as its prototype . James defines the essential characteristics of mysticism as ineffability, passivity, transience, and authority only for the one who has the experience. The ineffability of mystical experience means that it cannot be expressed in speech or writing. Our ancestors developed language to express the experiences of our ordinary waking life, and the mystical experience transcends these describable experiences. Mystics may try to communicate the meaning of their experience by poetry, paradox, and parable, but they testify that their words are inadequate. James calls mysticism passive, not in the sense that it makes the experiencer passive—it often has the opposite effect—but he  103  means passive in the sense that the experience happens to the mystic who cannot call it up at will. The characteristics of mystical experience apply in various degrees to other religious experiences such as unification of the divided soul, conversion , and sainthood. These experiences are passive in that they happen to the person rather than the person consciously producing them. And like mysticism , these experiences cannot be explained in rational terms. Unlike the mystical experience, unification conversion and sainthood usually have a permanent rather than transient character, but they do not follow any known or controllable time sequence. Observers may know them indirectly by their effects, but the actual experience, although positively authoritative for the individual, remains opaque to anyone else. Royce by contrast, describes religious insights as communal rather than exclusively individual, communicable in ordinary language rather than ineffable, and explainable without recourse to the subconscious. In his 1912 book, The Sources of Religious Insight,1 Royce defined insight as a specific kind of knowledge characterized by a breadth and richness of facts, unity and coherence of the facts, and personal intimacy with both the facts and with the whole. His general examples of insight include a successful businessman and his business, an artist and the details of a landscape , and a biographer in relation to the life of the subject. Before applying the definition of insight to religion, Royce stipulates what he sees as the essential characteristic of religion. He identifies “the need for salvation” as the defining mark of religion. Religious insight therefore means insight into the way of salvation and knowledge of those objects that lead to salvation (SRI, 8–9). In defining salvation, Royce steers away from tying his interpretation to the teaching of any one religion, although he affirms that his idea describes Christianity and Buddhism specifically and could also apply to other world religions. Royce reached for an understanding of religion that grows out of the natural needs of all humanity. Among the various needs that human beings have, many people have a sense of some great good, a goal to be achieved without which our life is doomed to meaninglessness and failure. Further, we may sense that as naturally constituted, we stand in great danger of missing the good that we crave. Salvation means escaping the danger of the ultimate failure (SRI, 12). Religious insight consists of the rich, unified, and intimate knowledge of the great good that would lead to fulfillment. But religious insight must also include knowledge of the danger of loosing the great good and so the need for salvation, and finally, insight includes knowledge of the way to salvation. Royce confronts his own development of religious insight with the “religious paradox.” The human condition leaves us incapable of saving ourselves and so we need help from outside; this need marks the difference...

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