Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight (review)

First, a brief overview of the chapters of the book: Part 1, consisting of four chapters, is a revised and expanded version of Tunstall’s master’s thesis (ix). Therein, Tunstall situates Royce’s ethico-religious insight within the American personalist tradition. Part 2, which has three chapters, consists of a chapter addressing Randall Auxier’s interpretation of Royce’s thought as advancing a fictonal ontology; a chapter comparing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophical theology with Royce’s metaphysics of community; and a chapter critiquing Royce’s temporalism through the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas. In the “Closing Remarks,” Tunstall suggests that Royce committed a form of cultural, anti-black racism and questions whether this taints Royce’s ethico-religious insight.

The question of what unites these discussions may very well arise, as Tun stall is aware, referring to his book as an “apparent hodgepodge” more than once (6, 131). Tunstall responds to this question in myriad ways. He regards the book as “a concise reevaluation of Royce’s thought from the vantage point of his ethico-religious insight” (xii); it “aims to describe Royce’s ethico-religious insight as he might have done himself if he had self-consciously written in the philosophic language of American personalism” (xii); it is “an extended dialectical poem, using words, concepts, and arguments to articulate, criticize, and defend Royce’s central insight” (2); and it is a series of discussions united by the thesis that Royce “bequeathed . . . a novel idealism based on an awe-inspiring ethico-religious insight” (6). Still, in the book’s “Closing Remarks,” Tunstall denies that he has told the reader what precisely unifies his inquiries into a single work, and states: “What unifies the diverse investigations conducted in this book is that every one of them is a chronicle of my encounter with Royce’s ethico-religious insight” (131). After all this, I still think the book to be a hodgepodge, though an intriguing one nonetheless.

The term “ethico-religious insight” originates with Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., whose readings of Royce Tunstall draws upon frequently. Tunstall describes the ethico-religious insight as having it that “we are seen as participants in the divine life, but insofar as we live out the divine’s eternal purpose in our own unique way” (x). Another way that Tunstall puts it is “we are most alive and living up to our fullest potential when we commune with the Logos-Spirit and interact with one another in accordance with it” (2). While these articulations are not identical, Tunstall’s uses of the term are consistent enough that the reader recognizes that a description fitting these two together is apt.

Part 1, Tunstall’s revised and expanded master’s thesis, is itself coherent and generally persuasive. Tunstall traces Royce’s ethico-religious insight through a wide chronological range of Royce’s texts and, in light of a comparison of Royce with Howison, interprets Royce as a personalist, albeit one more akin to Boston personalism than the personalism of Howison. All of this is executed carefully and convincingly. One interpretive point of interest is Tunstall’s view that Royce indirectly replies to Howison’s criticisms for the two decades of his life following their 1895 “Conception of God” debate. Tunstall views The Problem of Christianity (1913) in this way,¹ his interpretation hinging on “Royce’s conception of the will to interpret and how it functions in human life and constitutes the divine life” (52). Tunstall does not consider Royce’s own interpretation of that text as stated in its preface. There, Royce claims that he will “apply the principles” put forth in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) “to the special case of Christianity,” and that The Problem of Christianity, “if it is nothing else, is at least one more effort to tell what loyalty is.”² Perhaps Tunstall might retort that The Philosophy of Loyalty is an indirect reply to the criticisms of...