Peirce and Religion by Roger Ward (review)

In his Peirce and Religion, Roger Ward offers an insightful interpretative angle into Peirce’s philosophy. Ward interprets Peirce as a fundamentally religious Christian and Trinitarian thinker who holds that science and religion are complementary approaches to inquiry. He tracks the development of Peirce’s pragmatism against the background of Peirce’s life, and searches for points of contact between Peirce’s pragmatism on the one hand and Trinitarian theology and Christian ecclesiology on the other. Such an interpretation would place Peirce along great Christian philosophers of language like Augustine, Duns Scotus, and J. G. Hamann.

Ward first gives us an overview of Peirce’s intellectual background in mid-19th century Massachusetts. American science and movements like Transcendentalism were on the rise, but the background of Puritanism and modern philosophy were also strong. Ward identifies three key influences on Peirce: his father Benjamin, his first wife Melusina Fay and Frederic Dan Huntington, a professor of theology at Harvard. Benjamin Peirce developed an idea of the evolution of universe as unfolding of God’s purposes, which Charles then took up. Melusina Fay helped to bring about Charles’ conversion from Unitarianism into Episcopal Trinitarianism, and thus brought Charles into contact with the triadic Trinitarian world view. Huntington used a Pauline theological method to fix the practical consequences of religious beliefs and to use them to improve religious practices. Theological interpretation first takes up a question, next offers an interpretation of a Biblical text, then uses the text in a conversation with contemporary authors and finally draws consequences of the discussion for practical moral action.

Ward next examines how Trinitarianism, and Christian views of moral action and community influenced Peirce’s main article series and lectures throughout his life. Ward follows a method that combines biography along with textual interpretation. His interpretation includes two interesting historical claims. First, Peirce developed many of his key ideas, like the role of community and scholastic realism, early in the 1850s and 60s, and there thus is a lot of continuity between Peirce’s works. Second, Ward connects the differences between the pragmatism of the 1870s and the pragmaticism of the early 20th century with Peirce’s religious crisis in 1876–1892.

Ward discusses the themes of conversion to logic and conversion to community (Chs. 2 and 3) in Peirce’s early 1868–69 cognition series. Ward argues that Peirce’s views of logic and inquiry are analogous to Christian views of the faith community. Inquiry presupposes trust that the truth can be found, and also a faithfulness or obedience to the truth. Peirce’s theory of inquiry can then be understood through a Biblical theology of faith as trust and recognition of reality, and obedience to that reality. Peirce explicitly argues for an analogy between that science and Scholastic inquiry when he criticizes modern philosophy and the “incapabilities” of human reason. Logical and scientific inquiries presuppose a potentially infinite long run, and individuals have their biases. Therefore the subject of research is a potentially unlimited logical community. Then a researcher reasons well only, if he and his actions are a sign of this ideal subject and its reasonings. Ward claims that Peirce’s view that good reasoning imitates the practices of the ideal reasoner is analogous to Christological ideas, such as the idea of Jesus being an exemplification of the Servant of the Lord and an ideal of religious faith.

Ward next discusses (Ch. 4) Peirce’s changing opinions about scientism and faith during his 1876–1892 religious crisis. Peirce’s polemics against organized religion and his positivist critique of doctrine in the Logic of Science lectures of the late 1870s are a problem for any reading of Peirce as a Christian thinker. Although Peirce has a scientistic orientation, he clearly supports modified forms of Trinitarian theism in his Metaphysics Series in the 1890s and also theism in the Humble Argument. Ward interprets the scientistic atheism of the Logic of Science series by arguing that Peirce’s separation from Melusina led him into a religious crisis and to a...