[F]aced with dwindling membership and blows to their church’s reputation caused by its intransigence concerning medical treatment, even for children with grave illnesses, Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

The church generally believes that “sickness is the manifestation of a conflict between “correct” and “incorrect” thinking.” And the national spokesperson “does not believe in germs or the existence of illness”. Christian Science generally “forbids mixing medical care with Christian Science healing, which is a form of transcendental prayer intended to realign a patient’s soul with God.”

William James always comes to mind when I hear about the Church of Christian Science. He was a strong proponent of “healthy mindedness” and used its techniques himself.

Here’s an excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on James:

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James’s main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91). James also cites the “mind-cure movement” of Mary Baker Eddy, for whom “evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it is a liar” (V, 107). For “The Sick Soul,” in contrast, “radical evil gets its innings” (V, 163). No matter how secure one may feel, the sick soul finds that “[u]nsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy….” These states are not simply unpleasant sensations, for they bring “a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness” (V, 136).  James’s main examples are Leo Tolstoy’s “My Confession,” John Bunyan’s autobiography, and a report of terrifying “dread” — allegedly from a French correspondent but actually from James himself. Some sick souls never get well, while others recover or even triumph: these are the “twice-born.” In chapters on “The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification” and on “Conversion,” James discusses St. Augustine, Henry Alline, Bunyan, Tolstoy, and a range of popular evangelists, focusing on what he calls “the state of assurance” (V, 247) they achieve. Central to this state is “the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same” (V, 248).

There is a collective dimension to this: all the early Christians experienced the same thing. Like alien abductees, the first Christians had a shattering experience in common. This brought them together. But this experience was not an institution.” – Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.

Watch Zahl speak about this book:

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

The first two chapters are precious, in the best sense of the word. It recalls a kind of religious devotion and sensibility that is not at all a part of my religious vocabulary. Yet I can appreciate the palpable reality of her childhood faith. What’s interesting to me is that this period of her life was what she called “preliterate”. While I don’t remember not being able to read, Rice has memories of a rich inner and outer life unadulterated by the text.

She admits being a lousy reader in school and through college. (That was a surprising factoid!) But perhaps for the novelist or creative writer the development of one’s own vocabulary used to interface with the world outside and within is a part of what makes great writers. I’m just guessing.

Rice beautifully juxtaposes the menagerie of nature with the riotous panoply of sights, sounds, and smells from the pre-Vatican II liturgies. I’ve yet to attend one but now that Benedict has more or less given a full-voiced imprimatur, more and more parishes are going back to this earlier form of worship. Certainly Rice has made me temper my Protestant rejecting anything as “worship” which the participant can neither pronounce nor understand. Temper, not abandon.

I think part of the difference here is the reliance on “the Book”, the texts, the lyrics of the hymns. That was the main focus of my childhood religious experience. Rice reached the Divine through the phenomena of mostly non-literate sign and symbols of the Divine. Reading Schleiermacher again while picking up this Rice memoir has made me take a step back to realize the spiritual efficacy of this non-literate path. I say “efficacy” only because of the impact these experiences apparently had on Rice. In this Jamesean sense, it certainly “worked” for her. It had an indelible impact on her even though she spent more decades away from the faith that within it. Or perhaps, as Schleiermacher might conjecture, she simply was unaware of the Infinite even as it, or some sense of it, never left her.

A.A. Long wrote, “Margaret Graver’s book [‘Stoicism and Emotion’] expertly demolishes the widespread belief that ancient Stoicism was a philosophy that advocated repression of every feeling we call an emotion. With admirable clarity she gives an in-depth analysis of how the Stoics assessed emotional health and pathology, and of why, while taking such emotions as anger and fear to be always irrational and culpable, they held that human perfection requires joy and love.” How would you introduce the actual Stoic view of emotions, versus the “widespread belief” about them, to undergraduate students?

Most “everybody” knows that Jefferson (you can’t get more “founder-y” than Jefferson!) was a deist.

Well, it looks like deism is making a come back in American society. (Andrew Sullivan offers his views on this here.) It’s a fascinating development, really. Personally, I think it is evidence of two things. First, there’s a genuine lack of religious education among people who would consider themselves “religious” in the institutional sense that James avoids. Second, I think it speaks to an acceptance of the reasonableness of religious belief  among people who would not call themselves “institutional” believers. In other words, just a generic, non-religionist, “ordinary” (whatever that is!) American. [Sorry: a-MUR-can.] What this means is that a lot of folks who are not affiliated with any organized religion are not atheists. They’re actually deists.

At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?

I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he’s very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that’s what I mean by being a materialist.

A key question he examines is whether or not we can talk about God or remain silent. Shades of James on mystical experiences, right? There’s even a little Prof. Pam there. And you thought I was the only one “talking” about the aphophatic tradition. Actually, Blackburn gets the tradition wrong, doesn’t he?  Blackburn writes:

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the “apophatic” tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as “God” have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.

Do you think Willie Mays is an official Gator now that he an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from SFSU? I thought you would have been all over that when you were talking Dwight Clark’s, “the catch,” in class today. Willie Mays has his own version of “the catch,” check it out.

Yes, I knew Mays was an official Gator. But what I hadn’t thought about was the prospect of ineffability from an athlete’s perspective.

I gave as an example of ineffability with respect to the sense of a loss of words the loss of words we experience when we witness something fantastic. I mentioned Dwight Clark’s “The Catch“. It was so amazing that we cannot adequately express it. I wrote the student back that I’d hate to be a sportscaster. They are paid to express the inexpressible and indescribable.

Here’s Willie’s catch:

But I wonder how apt the sports connection is. James says that ineffability is one of four marks of a mystical experience. The person who experiences it, James says,

immediately says that it defies expression and that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experience; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others…. [M]ystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect…. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony.

James is talking both about the person’s experience of something and the person’s inability to describe it as well as the non-experiencer’s inability to appreciate someone else’s experience.

But perhaps there is something of the ineffable about the experience from the athlete’s perspective. They do get into the zone. Maybe from their perspective there may be something rather mystical about what is happening to them. And it probably is the case that while the folks in the stands may be wowed by “the catch”, we can never fully appreciate the feeling the athlete had.

From the website: