Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism in Light of the Scientific Study of Religion

I. Introduction

Robert S. Corrington has misgivings about the use of the word "naturalism" to describe his view of reality; in fact, more recently he has been using "deep pantheism" and variants.¹ Nevertheless, "naturalism" remains an apt word, conjuring the creative depths of the world around us, and we should continue to use it to describe Corrington's philosophical-theological system—without unduly apologizing for its inevitably circular semantic content, and despite the risk that his view might be known by its name instead of its content. The variant of naturalism for which Corrington is so well known is called (by him) ecstatic naturalism, and he has shown it to be an important version of religiously and axiologically nonreductive naturalism.²

Corrington's view deserves careful analysis and evaluation in light of many fields, including the scientific study of religion, with which it has not been in extensive dialogue to this point. While the scientific study of religion does not have the final say on religion or psychology or metaphysics, it has proved to be a fertile conversation partner for all manner of interpretations of religiously relevant themes, and it is an intriguing exercise to assess Corrington's ecstatic naturalism through its lens.

In conversation with the scientific study of religion, ecstatic naturalism looks impressively robust in many respects, particularly regarding

• • its view of ultimacy (the evidence appears to demand nothing more than what ecstatic naturalism supplies);

• • its insistence on the axiological relevance of the depths of nature for human experience (the evidence suggests that ecstatic naturalism correctly emphasizes this aspect of the human-world relation);

• • its recognition of the projective fields that human beings bring to any encounter with the potentially sacred (projection does indeed seem to lie at the root of persistent anthropomorphism in religion).

In a few respects, however, Corrington's form of ecstatic naturalism appears somewhat conceptually fragile, especially regarding its interpretation of the objective locus in nature of sacred folds and other venues of axiological intensity. Specifically, the scientific study of religion, and particularly the social construction of reality, suggests that Corrington's form of ecstatic naturalism makes insufficient allowance for the reality-constituting power of human social understandings of reality and thus treats human interaction with sacred folds too much like unanalyzable encounters that are self-explanatory, self-justifying, and self-confirming. The social construction of reality as well as the analysis of religious and spiritual experiences urge recognition that our experiences of the axiological potentials of nature are mediated not only by the projective fields springing from the human underconscious (which Corrington analyzes beautifully) but also by the social embedding of each human person in habits of living and seeing that constitute the axiological potentials of nature in culturally distinctive ways.

An important question for those who appreciate ecstatic naturalism in Corrington's or any other form is whether the analysis of sacred folds, intervals, and their unruly ground can be framed so as to comport better with findings from the scientific study of religion without sacrificing axiological realism and without losing the existential vibrancy and psychological potency that has made ecstatic naturalism so beloved as a way of interpreting reality. That is the subject of this essay.

N. Scott Momaday is one of the great contemporary American writers, a Kiowa-Cherokee who won the Pulitzer Prize for his breakthrough 1968 novel House Made of Dawn.³ In Ken Burn's majestic documentary The West, Momaday describes the American West in the following intriguing terms: "To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities, powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And I say on occasion it may have to be believed in order to be seen."⁴ The second half of this provocative maxim, I believe, receives insufficient attention in Corrington's ecstatic naturalism. Corrington describes the encounter with nature and its impact on our beliefs about reality in compelling and moving terms: we see it and then we believe it. But nature's sacred folds must also be believed to...