Sick Souls and Healthy Minds

Conversations outside the blog have led me to back up a little. 

You may have been reading previous posts, and finding it difficult to follow my pessimistic assessment of human nature. This may not be the fault of my argument or of your ability to follow it, but a result of our respective religious temperaments. So, before I go further in describing Sin, it might not be amiss to reflect on the work of philosopher and psychologist William James (sitting at left above). If you are interested, his book The Varieties of Religious Experience is well worth reading, but I will give here brief descriptions of the religous temperaments he termed "healthy-minded" and "sick-souled"

William James well understood that people express religion in various ways, and that this had to do with experience and temperament. He noted that some speakers seem certain of the goodness of life, exuding confidence in human abilities to do the right and abstain from wrongdoing, who saw every setback in moral character as temporary and, in principle, correctible by piecemeal adjustments to our behavior and relationship with the world. He would use the term "healthy-minded" to describe their outlook. They were generally to be found in the liberal denominations of his day (and I would hazard in our own), and James thought that the Roman Catholic Church was generally amenable to the healthy-minded. For a healthy-minded preacher, think Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those sharing this temperament, we would call optimistic, and they certainly appear to live happier lives than the other grouping that James observed.

These he termed "sick-souled". Their assessment of nature and human character was much bleaker, not something to be remedied by piecemeal adjustments, but requiring wholesale conversion, understood to arrive "supernaturally", certainly from beyond the usual plane of human effort. These were often found in Protestantism (although, note the optimism of 19th century Unitarianism and Universalism). For a sick-souled preacher, think Jonathan Edwards. While the sick-souled live less happy lives, James considered they have something serious to offer us with respect to understanding the human condition.

James also understood that people lay on a continuum between extremes of healthy-minded and sick-souled. He held to a pragmatic philosophy, regarding as philosophically true that which was useful for our behavior. He was certainly not averse to searching for the true among alternative or opposing ideas, for which I consider him wise, since the sick-souled and the healthy-minded have much to offer to each other, if only we are willing to listen.

Our religious temperament also impacts on understandings of wrongdoing and evil. To the healthy-minded the problem of evil is the problem of "ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail". To the sick-souled the problem is "Sin in the singular, with a capital S, as of something ineradically ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial, piecemeal operations."

Traditionally, Sin has been understood as alienation to God. In an earlier post (Between Gods and Idols), I suggested a definition of God as Ordering Principle, along the lines of "that to which our thoughts and actions ought to be loyal". This seems to me a useful way of encouraging conversation among the widest range of belief. Whether gods are imagined walking on Olympus or in Eden, whether understood as disembodied intelligence or set of ideals, whether the "believer" calls themselves Christian, theist, agnostic or atheist, as long as they value some attitudes and actions over others, they will find a place in the conversation.

The problem of Sin becomes the question of what prevents our thoughts and actions being in the service of or directed toward this Ordering Principle, which I call God, and the question of how this alienation from this Ordering Principle might be removed. We are also interested in describing the consequences of Sin, and the consequences of its removal. Those of us who are Christian will want an account of this in traditional and biblical language, while those coming from other traditions or none may want to reflect on how they describe these terms.

Which brings me back to comments. Be assured, I'd be interested in your impressions to this developing theology, and so might other readers. Theology is a conversation. Please submit comments.