Peirce, Pragmatism, and Religious Education: Participating More Deeply in God’s Imagination
an essay published in Religious Education Volume 111, 2016 - Issue 4, Pages 381-397.
Abstract
Approaching Christian education in light of Charles Sanders Peirce’s Classical Pragmatism can help catechists make Christian tradition more intelligible to present-day North Americans; it can provide them with a rich framework for pedagogical practices; and it can help them offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in the Trinitarian life of God. A Peircean pedagogy of religious education emphasizes attentiveness, discernment, creativity, artistry, and the key role of the Holy Spirit.
Creativity and imagination – personal, political, religious – are the dynamos that power human transformation; they are the wellspring of thinking, learning, and teaching; they are integral to God’s work in the world. The Classical American Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) offers a powerful framework to help religious educators – especially teachers in Trinitarian Christian contexts – to engage the imagination more cogently and coherently. At its heart is a vision of artistry. For Maria Harris both religious educators refining their practice, and believers seeking to deepen their faith, are best seen as religious artists in training (Harris 1987; 1988). The touchstones of their artistry include disciplined perception, receptivity, interaction with media, creative expression, and critical discernment. The influence of the Pragmatist philosopher and educationalist John Dewey is particularly evident in this educational model (cf. Dewey 1934; 1938):
In the conversation between religion, the aesthetic, and education, … John Dewey's conception of education as the reconstruction and reorganization of experience [is particularly] … fruitful” (Harris 1988, 464).
If Dewey is correct in seeing [the] combination of the aesthetic and the intellectual as a characteristic of all human activity, then aesthetic teaching, as I have described it …, provides an educational model valid for all teachers. (Harris 1987, 141)
I propose setting Harris and Dewey within an even broader Pragmatist framework.[1] If Harris sees religious education as artistry, and Dewey sees art as “consummated” experience, Peirce, the founder of Classical Pragmatism, uses “experience” as a root metaphor for reality in general.[2] His architectonic (big picture) style of thinking articulates links between the phenomenology of experience; the process of semiosis (sign-making-and-interpretation); and the rhythms of inquiry in science, education, and art.
The shorthand for this broad framework thinking is “metaphysics.” Metaphysics is a science of metaphors. But a critical metaphysics entails more than making metaphors; like any science, it tests the power of different metaphors to interpret and clarify, to expand our understanding and to sharpen our practice. Contemporary religious educators have generally shied away from grand metaphysical systems. It is true that a “totalizing” system can leave little daylight between thinking and practice, little wiggle-room for new data or points of view to emerge. But we all have a metaphysics; we all possess guiding metaphors that shape our behavior and thought. For some, the world is suffused with spiritual forces. For others, reality is most like a clockwork of atoms, neurons, and carbon-based molecules. The academically educated may see reality as a dialectical struggle, or as a polymorphous play of discourse and power, or a text, sacred narrative, or (theo)drama. Bringing our broadest metaphors – our metaphysics – into teaching and learning can help us to sharpen our thinking. We can begin to use those metaphors as intellectual tools. And we can challenge each other to reformulate them where they fall short in prompting good thinking, good teaching, and good Christian life.
For many years, Process theologians (often liberal Protestants) were the principle inheritors of Classical Pragmatism in theological circles. More recently, Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, and Evangelical theologians have begun turning to Classical Pragmatism to understand Christian experience more clearly (Murray 2004; Robinson and Southgate 2010; Yong 2002; Downing 2012). Among the most prominent theological educators using Pragmatist concepts in recent years are Rebecca Chopp (1995), Siebren Miedema (2010), Peter Ochs (1998), and the late Donald Gelpi, SJ (2007).
After briefly sketching a Peircean angle on imagination, metaphysics, and trinitarian theology, I explore three key “hunches”: (1) that Peirce can help us to make Christian tradition and human experience more intelligible to North American students; (2) that Peirce’s categories and semiotics can help us to sharpen our own practice as religious educators; and (3) that a theology rooted in Peircean thinking can offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in Trinitarian life. I conclude with a warm invitation to religious educators and to practical theologians, to join a growing conversation about Peirce, Pragmatism, and the dynamics of growth in faith.
1. A Pragmatist Account of the Imagination
Imagination is the power to put things together in new and useful ways; it is the mental leap that connects one image or thought with another. Semiotics – the theory of sign-making-and-interpretation pioneered by C.S. Peirce – can clarify how imagination relates to reasoning, inquiry, and to mind in general.
Peirce argues that semiosis, or sign-making-and-interpretation, has a three-fold nature. A sign is not merely a signifier + a signified (e.g., Jerusalem à that Judahite city); it is always a three-fold relationship (e.g., the word Jerusalem means something to me). Acknowledging this three-fold-ness makes context, history, and ethical purpose integral to signs and their analysis. It also gives semiosis an emergent dimension: a sign is always “something by knowing which we [come to] know something more” (Peirce Collected Papers, 8.332). We might think: “That city is called ‘Jerusalem.’ I remember a passage about ‘the heavenly Jerusalem.’ Wasn’t there a news report about Israelis and Palestinians fighting in that poor city? What kinds of practices could build such a city anew?” Signs engender more signs; imagination makes new connections; semiosis terminates only temporarily, when we need to choose one meaning and put it to use.
In Peirce’s thought, signs arise as parts of nature, and they form the basis of human thinking. “We have no power of thinking without signs” (Collected Papers, 5.262). Even to have self-consciousness is to imagine ourselves and our own stories, to interpret and re-present ourselves to our own minds. To reason is to generate and use symbols in ever more complex and rigorous ways.
1.a. Reasoning
Peirce identifies three kinds of human reasoning: the ability to induce, to deduce, and to “abduce.” Induction is the most basic: it is the hunch that the x+1th iteration of a certain behavior will follow the pattern that has held all these x-many times. In deduction, the imagination turns signs and symbols this way and that to work out the concepts they already imply. In “abduction,” the imagination takes flight by proposing plausible scenarios. Abduction scans the context and links disparate pieces of evidence to suggest some emerging pattern that might make actual sense. It is the “hunch” in the three-fold sign-process – the hunch that in this instance, I should take “Jerusalem” to mean that heavenly city, in which joy and sacrifice will raise a new song (Heb 12). Abduction is also the key element in artistic production – the hunch that this one daub of color, or this word, or this movement, might transform the gestalt of the whole artwork and finally get it just right. Abduction is the creative leap that allows me to move from what exists before me (or what seems to exist, or what I see through social conditioning), towards what might be, or could be, or should be the case.
Human abductions are always fallible; that’s why rigorous inquiries should follow a scientific approach. A pressing question, or an anomalous perception, or a lively curiosity produces some sense of mental dissonance. After a period of reflection (which often includes subconscious incubation) an abductive insight may arise. The diligent truth-seeker then works out the implications of her abduction; she shares the insight with her community and verifies it against gathered data. Only then does she take it as a new version of truth. In Pragmatist thinking, this anatomy of inquiry applies to the sciences, to ethical reasoning, and to the arts. As many religious educators have acknowledged, this is the pattern that lies at the heart of everyday sense-making, of disciplined inquiry, and of lasting conversion (e.g. Loder 1998, 87-89).
1.b. A Metaphysical Category
Peirce connects abduction with a fundamental metaphysical category: the dimension of reality that he calls Thirdness. Peirce developed his metaphysics to clarify thinking and experience at the broadest and most comprehensive level. His analysis of formal logic and his study of phenomenology led him to a grand philosophical abduction: there seem to be three dimensions inherent in all of experience, which he called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness means the quality of an experience (e.g., its smoothness, its attractiveness, the impression it makes as a whole). This “particular suchness” of an experience can be relatively simple (e.g., “red”) or simultaneously holistic-yet-complex (e.g., “the experience of Mahler’s 5th Symphony,” “the experience of my encounter with Jesus”). As a category, Firstness suggests quality unbounded by form or by pattern, unstructured potentiality with the freedom to show up in any which way. As a dimension of reality envisaged most broadly, Firstness is the pool from which all experiences well forth.
Secondness is the facticity of the experience (there it is, hitting you in the face). Secondness marks some suchness as a concrete reality with an impact. It is the dimension of reality that pushes back at us, that will not be denied. It can be a force or image that impinges upon us; it can be a system that constrains our behavior. As a category, Secondness suggests limit and specificity: not anything, but this particular.
Thirdness is the tendency of the experience. It suggests emergence and direction, mediation and communication. Examples of Thirdness include quantum probability and “laws” of nature; ingrained habits and personal character; life-giving or death-dealing social dynamics; acquired skills; patterns of healthy development. Thirdness becomes evident when we relate two concepts or images in terms of some common characteristic; that is, it becomes evident as we come up with abductions and generate signs to interpret the world. Thirdness is particularly evident in the habit of semiosis that we speak of as “mind.”
Peirce emphasizes that Firstness and Thirdness are no less real than the hard facts we experience. Health, elegance, reasonableness, patterns of human flourishing (and their opposites) are just as “real” as quantifiable data. This leads him to ground ethics and logic in aesthetics: the science of rigorous inquiry into what and how humans should value and seek. As Christopher Tirres argues, “a pragmatic theory of inquiry is first and foremost rooted in a model of art” (Tirres 2014, 127).
This in outline is Peirce’s metaphysics: we cannot get any more “real” than when speaking of experience, and experience means First, Second, and Third. No one can have an experience that lacks Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; and they are not reducible to each other in any logical way. At the same time, they never exist “by themselves” – they coinhere with each other as the necessary dimensions of every experience.
1.c. Thirdness and God’s Imagination
Donald Gelpi’s grand theological abduction is that Peirce’s metaphysics can interpret the Trinity: both the economic Trinity (the way we experience God’s salvation) and the “immanent Trinity” (the way we understand God’s life in itself). Gelpi proposes that Christians use Firstness to think about God the Father – the loving wellspring of all possible qualities and experiences, the source to which the revelation of Christ and interpretive gist of the Spirit refer (Gelpi 2009, 474-477). He uses Secondness to think about God the Son – the Word (Hebrew: Dabar; Greek: Logos) who dwells among us as God’s action, decision, and fact. The Son is the particular, concrete self-communication of God’s saving purpose; the pointer to who God really is. Rather than identifying Logos with God’s perfect mind, Gelpi picks up a scriptural tradition that can be traced through Theophilus, Irenaeus, Basil of Caesarea, and Victorinus (Gelpi 1984, 60-66; 1991, 1.170-171; cf. Briggman 2012, 126-147). For them, the Word is God’s power, efficacious (Gn 1) and active (Heb 4:12), accomplishing that which God sets out to do (Is 55:10-11).
Finally, Gelpi uses Thirdness to think about God the Spirit. Spirit is evident when creation blossoms in diverse complexity; when individual gifts and capacities are awakened; when beings communicate, hypothesize and practice discernment. It is evidence when prophetic insight touches humanity, and when disparate people are brought together in like-minded community.
Just as Thirdness is spirit and mind among humans, Gelpi suggests that God’s Spirit can be seen as the “mind” of the Godhead who “searches everything, even the deep things of God” (1 Cor 2:10). The Spirit is wisdom and “mind” of the Father: “When [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then [Wisdom] was beside him, like a master worker” (Prv 8:29-30). The Spirit is “mind” of the Son: “‘For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). If human abductions are always fallible, God’s Spirit is always on target. The Spirit discerns the true value in every emerging dynamic. She identifies the life-giving tendencies in every creature and personal habit. Her tendency is to nudge every thing towards its best future. Like an artist, She brings forth thoughts and feelings that permeate spaces and can shift their gestalts. Just as artists put words, colors, or musical timbres together, the Spirit brings different trends and creatures together into wholesome, richer, unexpected new harmonies.
2. Putting Peirce to Work
This brief sketch of some key Peircean concepts suggests their value for religious education.
Peirce’s architectonic perspective allows teachers to link conversations that might otherwise seem unconnected: science and the humanities, emotion and logic, metaphysics and sign-making, imagination and God. The process of semiosis links imagination, sign making, and interpretation in an indissoluble cycle. The sciences and the humanities, ethics and theology may investigate different realms and use different methodologies, but the sorting of qualities, facts, and patterns remains at the heart of all rigorous inquiry. We can always ask: Do our signs about God fit the evidence? Do they help us understand something true, something more? In the next sections, I touch on three ways that Peircean concepts might help us engage students in reflection and inquiry about life and faith.
3. Making Sense in Present-day Life
My first “hunch” about Peirce’s pragmatism is that it offers a framework in which topics of particular interest to religious educators – spirit, truth, and critical thinking – can make more sense to modern day, Western minds. This is because concepts like evolution and scientific inquiry are part of its intellectual DNA.
In my high school class in Catholic theology, I learned a metaphysics whose basic metaphors were “form and matter”: while bread and wine remain physically unchanged during Eucharist, their “nature/essence” is transformed into Christ’s body and blood. But a metaphysics of “form and matter” or “soul and body” turns out to cloud more than it clarifies. Is “form” a good metaphor for “justice” and “beauty” when their definitions shift and vary across time and place? Do modern humans and Australopithecines somehow share the same “nature”? What is more, the distinction between “form and matter” can lead to a host of invidious dualisms – “spirit and flesh,” “mind and body,” “reason and sensuality,” even “masculine and feminine.” When understood as distinct essences, these realities become hard to negotiate, their relationships impossible to comprehend (Gelpi 1984, 585).
Instead, Classical Pragmatists like Peirce and Dewey articulate the continuities between matter, habit, and thinking; between spiritual and material life. Dewey focuses on the biological basis of experience and creativity. But Peirce “extends the power of relation beyond biological organisms” (Esposito 1980, 202). For Peirce signs, patterns, and spirit have their own power: to spread out, interact, and develop, for good or ill, in individuals and communities. While Dewey confines his thinking to naturalistic phenomena, Peirce ventures broader abductions (cf. Dewey 1935, 708). While Dewey sees mind and pattern as emerging from matter, Peirce conjectures that mind and spirit inhere in experience, that matter is (God’s) concretized mind. If Christian theology is indeed a set of spiritual experiences (Jesus, Spirit, Church, salvation) in search of a good metaphysics (Whitehead, 1926, 39), then Peirce’s willingness to venture root metaphors suits Christian reflection quite well.
At the same time, Peirce’s pragmatism encourages teachers and students to keep their conjectures rooted in reality; it links ethics and critical inquiry by inviting students to interrogate what signs and arguments are for. In this way, it helps bring modern “truth-talk” back into line with both with common-sense thinking, and with Jewish / Christian scriptural sensibilities. In everyday usage “truth” connotes both conformity to reality, and personal virtues like honesty, faithfulness, and the courage to stand for what’s right. “Truth” has similarly practical and holistic meanings in Scripture. Hebrew words for truth – ʾāman, emeth , emunah, and the exclamation Amen! – connote lasting firmness, faithfulness, reliability, and responsibility; they connote persons or statements that have been investigated, that reflect the facts accurately, that inspire trust and belief. The Greek words alētheia, alēthēs, alēthinos, alēthōs in the Greek Jewish and New Testament scriptures connote conformity to reality, faithfulness, divine truths / revelations, and Gospel life.
In short, a good Peircean teacher sees truth as “a finding through fashioning,” as “the articulation of something of reality within the resources of a particular language,” medium, or type of art (Murray 2004, 166, 194). She challenges herself and her students to articulate faith, to test it meticulously, and to do so without losing nerve. She holds out the possibility that some faith articulations – once tested – may turn out to be problematic, or less than elegant, or just plain wrong. She calls on believers to be “true” and “authentic” in the best, richest, and most searching sense of the words. She exemplifies modern day virtues: creativity, courage, and keeping it real (cf. Taylor 1992).
4. A Peircean Toolbox for Teaching Religion
My second “hunch” about Peirce’s pragmatism is that it can help teachers to sharpen their practice, and help students to plumb their experience in deeper and richer ways. If Dewey “focused his efforts on describing experiences in their fullness or lack thereof,” Peirce unpacked “the constituent parts of which any and all experiences, or phenomena, consist” (Wojcikiewicz 2010, 66). Phyllis Chiasson has used Peirce to identify a “fundamental set of skills for effective reasoning” that teachers can foster and hone. Extending her work, I propose that a Peircean pedagogy cultivates: (1) the ability to name and qualify; (2) the ability to analyze and unpack; and (3) the ability to create and interpret (cf. Chiasson 2005). Of these, (2) analysis is perhaps the skillset most familiar to academically trained teachers. A Peircean approach to analysis identifies necessary relations and logical connections: of qualities to each other, of parts to their wholes, and of movements within unfolding dynamics. However, Peirce underlines how analysis is oriented toward the future, towards project-based learning and practice. We think through connections and implications to unpack the testable parts of hypotheses, to rehearse in advance what might happen, to unfold plans about what to do. Equally important in a Peircean pedagogy are two others skillsets: (1) noticing and articulating what one sees and feels in experience; and (3) developing the techniques and cultivating the spaces where sign-making-and-interpretation can flourish.
4. a. Noticing Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds
A Peircean pedagogy trains students to notice the First, Second, and Third dimensions of what they investigate. In terms of Firstness, religious educators who adopt a Peircean pedagogy train students to notice qualities: the feel and flavor of the material; the textures and the wholeness of what and whom they encounter. Sensations, emotions, ideas, and persons all have their feels and their flavors. A key goal in students’ education is to “train the eye” (Harris 1987, 129) – and not only the eye, but every other perceptive capacity. Good teachers get students to “look” and to look again: to see forms and colors that, at first glance, were hardly discernible; to notice sound, rhythm, movement, and volume; to inhabit proprioception and social situation. Good teachers get students to name their emotions with rich characterization: joy, anguish, indignity, curiosity, attention, commitment, anger, awe. They help students to characterize mental experience: to distinguish thoughts that seem elegant, vague, shocking, cogent, or incoherent. They help students to name and own their impressions. First impressions convey a great deal of information – sometimes about the person or object, more often about our own history and state of mind. A Peircean pedagogy acknowledges first impressions. The goal is not to settle for superficial perceptions, but always to begin where students are at: acknowledging the power of first impression; refining them through close attention to appearances, anomalies, and convergences; looking for possible truths. Engagement, activity, discovery, inner quiet, and contemplation are all part of one’s training in noticing qualities.
In terms of Secondness, religious educators who adopt a Peircean pedagogy train students to notice the facts of experience. They welcome curiosity. They challenge students with hard data, with real life testimonies, with the stubborn details of texts, stories, objects, and lives. As Ben Quash suggests, Christian discernment means deciding in retrospect whether something is possible or impossible, whether some new insight, or expression, or lifestyle is in line or askew of God’s will. This can only be known after the evidence, testimony, and implications have been weighed with an open mind and heart (Quash 2013). Cultivating attention to Secondness requires training students to “tell it like it is.” Critical educators have pointed the way to classroom practices that can cultivate this virtue of frank conversation. Perhaps most important among these are the decision to love our students and to stand in solidarity with them; the willingness to demonstrate healthy vulnerability as teachers; and the commitment to speak openly about race, gender, class, and power.
Cultivating attention to Secondness also means constructing evidence-based norms for discernment. Just as teachers and learners can develop classroom “ground rules” together, they can build a shared understanding of the theological basis for Christian norms. For example, students and teachers together can investigate the Biblical witness concerning the genuine marks of God’s Spirit at work. Which key biblical texts about Spirit are worth looking into? What do these passages say about Spirit in their “plain sense,” and what do they say as we look even deeper (cf. Tanner 1987)? The practice of searching the Scriptures together can model an ecumenical process of shared critical inquiry. Drawn from ecumenical sources, here is my reading of the scriptural witness. Scripture suggests that God’s Spirit is creative (Gn 1), life giving (Ez 37:1-14; 1 Cor 15:45), and renewing (Ps 104:30). It suggests that She is prophetic (Is 42:1-4; Jl 2:28); that She liberates and restores broken communities (Jgs 3:7-11, 6:33-35, 11:27-29; 1 Sm 11:6-7); that She stands in judgement against oppressive regimes (1 Kgs 22). Especially from a Christian perspective, it suggests that She fosters diversity and orchestrates harmony (Acts 2:1-18). Her presence supports wisdom, craft, power, and godly maturity (Gn 41:38; Ex 35:30-34; Dn 4-6 passim; Lk 1:80). She helps us to interpret sacred traditions (Jn 14:26), and to testify to the truth (Mt 10:19-20). In Pragmatist language, She is attuned and attentive to each emerging dynamic, to each growing self and process in the world: prospering those in line with God’s vision (Eph 3:16-19), compassionate to creatures in travail (Rom 8:26-27), directing and corrective to the wayward (Jn 16:8), drawing forth patterns and creativity that our own human planning could neither anticipate nor ever contrive. She is no ghost in the machine: She sets things in motion, “driving” (Mk 1:12), “conceiving” (Lk 1:31, 35), “bringing to birth” (Jn 3:5). (Congar 1986; Levison 2013; Welker 1994; Polkinghorne and Welker 2001.)
In terms of Thirdness, religious educators who adopt a Peircean pedagogy train students to notice emerging patterns. For example, Willis Jenkins has argued that our moral traditions are “in over their heads” in light of the challenges of climate change, pollution, and global economics. These crises are more complex, more intergenerational, and more interactive than any tradition has heretofore faced (Jenkins 2013). Similarly, on the level of psychosocial development, our growth into full maturity entails multiple shifts towards greater responsibility, shifts that we can only fully grasp we after we have actually experienced them (Kegan 1994). Both these cases require us as learners to wait for an unforeseen gestalt-shift, for a new abduction or vision to emerge. Christian educators with a Peircean pedagogy teach students how to wait on God’s Spirit to reveal new patterns of living and thinking. Through indirect methods of teaching and learning (Harris 1987; 1988), through prayer and ritual, through exposure to rich symbols and stories, and through engagement with people and situations that reflect moral excellence, they will cultivate the kinds of abductions that lead in healthy, wholesome directions.
4.b. Cultivating Sign Making, Interpretation, and Inquiry
Finally, a Peircean pedagogy trains students to create and interpret, to express and to understand their reality. Religious educators who adopt such a pedagogy shape spaces where sign-making-and-interpretation can flourish; they create spaces for making good art. Stated in more pedagogical language, a Peircean pedagogy trains students to codify, de-codify, and re-codify their own reality (Boal 2006; cf. Freire 2007, 110-124). It trains them to name and describe, to analyze and unpack, to re-present and express their own thoughts and experience in a variety of different media: essays, poems, stories, prayers, rituals, drawings, dramas, service projects, etc.
Many of us – both teachers and students – have been conditioned to curtail our own self-expression (Dykstra 2012). Harris writes eloquently about how to free up and cultivate artistry in religious educational settings (Harris 1987, 119-141). The more students learn to solve aesthetic problems, the more adept they become at solving problems aesthetically – at thinking and learning and working like artists. Visual problems require visual solutions; uncertain movements call for kinesthetic “commitments”; questions of motivation require answers that are rhetorical and emotive. Words are useful (especially when students get stuck), but they are best directed to clarifying and answering artistic questions: Why did you use that particular Bible story to make your point? What are you trying to convey in this essay? Is there a theme that holds this service project together, and how would you express it to your fellow volunteers? Students learn that there are times for action and rest, for holding close and letting go. They learn to take on and integrate the four roles of the artist – creator, performer, audience member, and critic – in a fluid and organic way. Ultimately, they learn to perform Christianity (or whatever faith-way they end up embracing) with their own, in their own idiom and personal “style.”
One key role of the teacher in this pedagogy is to make available and make truly accessible the texts, stories, symbols and objects as rich “raw materials,” as precious resources that students can use in expressing their faith. Good teachers “scaffold” the art-making as a simultaneously free yet rigorously studied process. They help students learn how to notice the meanings and the creative affordances that each text, story, or symbol may provide. They help students to create compelling new interpretations and interventions to reflect their religious commitments. They encourage learners to step back and evaluate their works-in-progress (whether privately, in groups, or with teacher input). And they invite students to discern whether the “flights” of their imagination have landed “upon a sanctifying effect” (Quash 2013, 232).
This kind of pedagogy produces resistance – not just in our students, but also in ourselves – especially when writing, creating artworks, or pursuing projects at the edge of our comfort and practical competence. For this reason, Peircean teachers create healthy spaces and processes to contain and to channel anxiety. They create robust “holding environments” (Hess 1991). In childhood psychology, a holding environment is a space where young people feel able to imagine and play because challenge, freedom, and security are in the right balance. Grownups establish good holding environments simply by being present to youngsters in free and thoughtful ways. Teachers, too, can “hold” the learning environment: by being present, by articulating shared expectations, and by establishing habits of respectful interaction until students learn to hold the work-space for themselves.
Patterned practices – like prayer, ritual, and formal genres of performance – can also act as holding environments. Teachers can invite leaners to call on God’s Spirit: to ask for Her guidance during periods of incubation; to ask for the new vistas we need to survive. Imagine a unit on sexism and religion framed and punctuated by three prayer services in which women’s Bible stories play a central role. In each service, students might proclaim, reflect, and pray over a different story; with the help of the teacher (if necessary) they could even develop and enact a simple ritual. The final ritual might include copies of each student’s final written reflection, especially if those reflections contained written commitments to take some concrete form of action (mental, personal, or public) in response to what students had learned. Teaching the class genres of performance – Bibliodrama, Theatre of the Oppressed, or other types of embodied reflection – can give students the opportunity to learn new forms of artistry while containing emotion for critical, artful ends (see Rue 2005).
Religious educators who adopt this kind of Peircean pedagogy will need to cultivate an artist’s heart in ourselves. As educators, do we make time to follow up teaching hunches and on other creative ideas? Do we journal or take reflective notes on our practice? Do we make time in department meetings to talk about our teaching as art and vocation? Can we reflect on the ways that our own coaches have helped us to hone and integrate our different skills? Do we dare undergo some basic training in an unfamiliar art form, so that we can experience again how to learn to create?
5. Participating in God’s Imagination
My third and final “hunch” about Peirce’s pragmatism is that it can enhance the Christian experience of participating in God’s Trinitarian life. Aquinas argues that all creatures “participate” in God’s pure existence in receiving God’s ongoing act of creation. “To be created is to be fundamentally ecstatic, to feel the very root of existence as rapturously given from an infinite source not of one’s own making” (Sherman 2008, 88). A trinitarian vision based on Peirce’s metaphysics goes two steps further: it suggests that we participate by being part of God’s being; and that we participate in God’s ongoing creativity.
In the theological framework that Gelpi draws from Peirce, all there is, is experience; and God is the “supreme” experience. That is, God experiences everything: the experiences of human and non-human creatures, plus the experience of God’s unique trinitarian life. This is a form of panentheism, in which the whole of creation exists “within” God’s experience, while God’s experience remains infinitely greater. In this framework, each creature is its own unique process, possessing its own qualities, holism, impacts, and tendencies; at the same time, from a different perspective, each creature consists of God’s own experience. So God tastes my life’s flavor and feels my life’s punch. My awareness is God’s mind coming to flower. My failures and tragedies “grieve” God’s Holy Spirit in the most immediate and intimate way (Eph 4:30).
While panentheism has a long history in Christianity (Keller 2014), Gelpi’s model provides a fresh metaphor by which Christians can understand and explore their religious experience. Suppose we take this panentheism to heart. Can I find God infinitely close to me (“closer to me than I am to myself;” Augustine Confessions, 3.6.11) as I ponder the qualities, facts, and tendencies of experience? What difference does it make to see God as immediately present –in myself and in other people, in a glorious sunset, in a moment of anguish when God is being nailed to the world? If we take seriously that God’s Spirit works with “real tendencies,” nudging and guiding from inside and out, will we notice new power or new possibilities in our lives as Christians, citizens, and human beings? The answers cannot come a priori, but the questions seem worth exploring.
Peirce’s metaphysics highlights in particular the prospect that Christians can share in God’s Thirdness. Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa all link divine creativity with human experiences like spiritual growth, transformation, art, and discernment (Sherman 2008); so do more recent artists like J.R.R. Tolkien. They see humans as both created and creating: weaving words, images, stories, and plans of action that can reflect and further God’s own plans for the world. This tradition – that we all share God’s Spirit – is as old as Scripture, as Jack Levison has cogently argued:
It is not the fault of Hebrew or Greek, but the limits of the English language, that forces the unfortunate choice between spirit and Spirit. … All people – every last one of us – has the spirit-breath of God within us from birth. This … is a tradition, a belief, a conviction in the Bible. … [Still], the spirit of God within … must be tended by the right practices if it is to remain a holy spirit (Levison 2013, 17, 19, 67).[3]
Identifying with God’s creativity means stepping up to our own creative vocation. Again, a Peircean pedagogy leads us back to the data, to ask what God’s creativity is really like. The first chapter of Genesis by itself seems to call up a challenging mandate. It seems we are called to transform sterility and chaos into growth; to foster fruitfulness; to let healthy patterns emerge and when they do to let life run free; to discern what is good (and by implication what is evil); to declare and defend goodness where it may be found.
6. Conclusion
If the hunches I have proposed prove coherent and cogent, the pedagogical and intellectual payoffs could be significant. A Peircean framework could strengthen lines of pedagogical inquiry that linking philosophy, theology, religious education, and the hard and social sciences. It could help teachers to frame accounts of spirit and faithfulness in ways that make sense to believers of other faiths, or none at all. And it could strengthen ecumenical dialogue on the basis of shared teaching strategies and practical pneumatologies.
Peirce’s one great rule of philosophy was simple but challenging: “Do not block the road of inquiry” (Collected Papers 1.135). A particular grace of this rule, from a Peircean perspective, is that inquiry is always communal – a great conviviality to which interlocutors far and wide, whether living or departed, are invited. This conversation is also deeply creative – a constant shaping and sharing of symbols, gambits, and arguments as we sort out the facts and look for the truth. As a religious educator, a teacher, and a plain old person, I can hardly imagine a better way to spend my time. May the conversation go on!
John P. Falcone received his Ph.D. in Theology and Education from Boston College. john.paul.falcone@gmail.com
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[1] In this essay I set aside the neo-Pragmatism of Richard Rorty and focus on Classical Pragmatism, both the “Cambridge School” (C.S. Peirce and Josiah Royce), and the “Instrumentalist School” (John Dewey and William James). See Gelpi 2007, 137-206; Murray 2004.
[2] For introductions to Peirce’s thought, see Atkin 2016; Gelpi 2007.
[3] Levison (2013, 49) acknowledges that in the New Testament, “the holy spirit” is generally not “understood as a gift from birth.” Nevertheless, “the qualities of the spirit … coalesce” around habits that can be cultivated like other natural endowments.