THEY MADE INTELLECT A SPIRITUAL FORCE
• • • • • • •
Intellect has been called the cognitive power of the soul, the means by which humans conduct inquiry into the nature of ultimate truth, Socrates’ “divine voice.” A Buddhist might call it right thinking: enlightenment meets the Enlightenment. As with all centuries, the twentieth had its share of extraordinary thinkers.
Evelyn Underhill was one of them. Poet, novelist, scholar of religious mysticism, Underhill moved from British naval intelligence during World War I to Anglican pacifism by World War II. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, her classic work, was written while she was still in her early thirties. She believed modern science and ageless contemplative practice to be complementary and, in the grand tradition of the fully engaged, divided her days between her prolific literary career and working with the poor and giving spiritual guidance.
For liberal Protestants, New York’s Union Theological Seminary is a bastion of progressive Christian thought, and it was there, during the century’s violent midpoint, that Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich wrestled with the moral and intellectual question of evil, exemplified for them by Nazi ideology. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, experienced the Hitler regime firsthand in his native Germany until his outspoken opposition to the Third Reich forced him to leave for the United States. Niebuhr, born in Missouri, came to his social ethic through liberalism and socialism, which he abandoned because of American socialist pacifism over entering World War II. “Christian Realism,” he concluded, forced the recognition of great evil, even as it embraced the great good expressed by individuals.
Orthodox religiosity often rejects intellectual inquiry as a threat to tradition, hierarchy, and belief—all the more reason for including Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Soloveitchik among the century’s spiritual giants. Their orthodoxies were very different, of course. Schmemann was a Russian Orthodox Christian priest, Soloveitchik an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Yet both men helped their coreligionists steer a course between unquestioned acceptance of Old World dogmas, unworkable for many in twentieth-century America, and wholesale abandonment of the wisdom embedded in the tenets that had sustained so many of the faithful over centuries. Changing times, they insisted, required changed religious patterns, arrived at through intellectual engagement with modernity.
Hans Küng sought a similar reformist path within the Roman Catholic world. The tightly structured Roman Church, however, proved more resistant to Küng’s unorthodoxy. Despite his having been an official theological consultant to the Second Vatican Council, Küng’s intellectual forthrightness in opposition to papal infallibility and other key dogma eventually prompted Rome to revoke his credentials to teach Catholic theology at Catholic universities. Despite that, he remained a Catholic educator while pursuing interfaith dialogue and peacemaking.
The twentieth century inherited scores of religious and philosophical schools for deconstructing reality. One of the century’s unique contributions in this realm was the extraordinary faith (at least in the West) placed in psychology as a balm for the human condition. Carl Gustav Jung and Abraham Maslow helped restore spirit to Sigmund Freud’s spiritless creation. Jung, who had worked with Freud, plumbed the dream world and religious imagery to link human archetypes and illuminate our “collective unconscious.” Maslow injected into modern psychology the idea of spiritual development as a key component of mental health.
The end of the twentieth century saw great emphasis on the development of artificial intelligence. However, it will be some time before computers make superfluous the likes of Ken Wilber. Wilber, born as the century reached the halfway mark, is a modern rarity, an independent scholar whose goal is nothing less than a “theory of everything.” For Wilber, everything means science as well as spirituality, East and West, the perennial philosophy and the latest thinking on human psychology, sociology, the arts, and even alternative medicine. He is at once premodern, modern, and postmodern, denying none their partial truth. “Everybody is right, to a certain degree,” says Wilber. Only in his fifties, he may well be the late twentieth century’s intellectual gift to the twenty-first.
(1875–1961)
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Responsible for the juxtaposition of spiritual and psychological growth, Carl Gustav Jung spent his life exploring “inner space” through dreams, symbols, mythology, and art. Born in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a clergyman, Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel and later worked with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Their relationship was intense and ended, after just a few years, with the publication in 1912 of Jung’s groundbreaking Symbols of Transformation.
Among Jung’s greatest contributions, both to analytical psychology and to spiritual growth, is his work on dream interpretation and his understanding of archetypes. Archetypes are part of the “collective unconscious,” a concept he developed by studying world religions and myths. He determined that some symbols cross religious and cultural boundaries throughout history, and that all humans connect to this set of symbols primarily through dreams. Examples of archetypes are the “mother,” the “father,” the “hero,” and the “trickster.”
Personality theorists generally believed that the psychological process was either mechanistic—one thing leads to another—or teleologic—future ideas lead us on. Jung believed in a synthesis of the two and added a third component, synchronicity, two events happening at the same time, which is not logical but from which an individual gains understanding about the self. For Jung, these synchronistic events were not coincidence but evidence of the collective unconscious and the connectedness of all humans, animals, and nature.
Jung’s development of the concepts of archetypes and collective unconscious have transformed how we discuss both psychological and spiritual growth.
Jung’s primary goal for humans was to become whole, both psychologically and spiritually. In his personality typology—consisting of four functions: sensing, acquiring information through the senses; feeling, evaluating information through one’s emotional response; intuiting, integrating information from sources outside conscious ones; and thinking, evaluating information rationally and logically—he stated that for each person one function is most developed (superior) and one is least developed (inferior). Humans process their world primarily through their superior function, but consciously developing one’s inferior function leads to wholeness and brings about balance in one’s psyche and life. Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers used Jung’s typology as the basis for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator of personality type.
Because he combined evidence about the human psyche from his clinical work; his own dreams, fantasies, and visions; as well as an in-depth study of alchemy, Eastern religions, astrology, mythology, and fairy tales, Jung’s work has greatly influenced the spiritual growth movement in mainline as well as New Age religious communities.
HIS WORDS
The fact that religious statements frequently conflict with the observed physical phenomena proves that in contrast to physical perception the spirit is autonomous, and that psychic experience is to a certain extent independent of physical data. The psyche is an autonomous factor, and religious statements are psychic confessions, which in the last resort are based on unconscious, i.e., on transcendental processes. These processes are not accessible to physical perception but demonstrate their existence through the confessions of the psyche.… That is why whenever we speak of religious contents we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable.
—Answer to Job, p.7
The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.… A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious.
—Four Archetypes, p. 3
The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.
—Man and His Symbols, p. 34
Books by Carl G. Jung
Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Answer to Job. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon Books, 1959.
The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung. Bollingen Series 20. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953–1979.
Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Man and His Symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston; edited by Aniela Jaffe. 1963. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Books about Carl G. Jung
Dunne, Claire. Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul. New York: Parabola Books, 2000.
Hayman, Ronald. A Life of Jung. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Stevens, Anthony. On Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999.
Storr, Anthony. C. G. Jung. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
Organization
C. G. Jung Institute–Boston, chartered by the New England Society of Jungian Analysts (NESJA) and dedicated to the healing discipline of analytical psychology; web site: www.cgjungboston.com, lists other Jung affiliates.
“The statements of the conscious mind may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of the statements of the soul.”
(1928–)
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A leading Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Küng is known for his work on behalf of interfaith dialogue and his call to religious leaders to help bring about world peace by unifying around a common ethic: “Treat others as you would have them treat you.” Although appointed by Pope John XXIII as the official theological consultant to the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Küng subsequently challenged the Holy See on papal infallibility and other key Catholic teachings. Despite church censure, he has remained a loyal Christian and continued his life’s mission as a Catholic educator.
The 1995 founding of the Global Ethic Foundation, of which Küng is president, was inspired by his draft of the “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic,” adopted by the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. This document proposed a set of universal ethical values for both believers and nonbelievers and declared a commitment to a culture of nonviolence and respect for life, a just economic order, tolerance and truthfulness, and equal rights and partnership between men and women.
Hans Küng was born in the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland, and studied at the Papal Gregorian University in Rome and at the Sorbonne and the Institut Catholique in Paris, receiving his ordination in 1954 and his doctorate in theology in 1957. A dedicated ecumenist for the past forty-five years, Küng focused his first book on the doctrine of justification by faith, showing the often overlooked similarities between the Protestant and Roman Catholic positions. He has held many teaching posts, but because of his dissident stance the Vatican revoked his right to teach as a Catholic theologian at the University of Tübingen in 1979. He thereafter became a popular lecturer at the university’s Institute for Ecumenical Research until his retirement in 1996. A prolific author, Küng has tackled a wide range of subject matter, including Judaism, Freud, art, and euthanasia. Many of his later books have been collaborative efforts with key figures from other religious traditions. Küng’s seven-part German-language television special about religions around the world, titled Spurensuche: Die Weltreligionen auf dem Weg (Exploring the Tracks of the World Religions), was issued on videotape in 1999.
Küng urged a “global ethic”—a commitment to a culture of nonviolence and respect for life, a just economic order, tolerance and truthfulness, and equal rights and partnership between men and women.
HIS WORDS
Men and women with a religious commitment all over the world have not lost hope: wherever they can be activated—whether in Poland or in South Africa, in the Philippines or in South America—the religions are still a spiritual force which could change the face of the earth for the better
—Yes to a Global Ethic, p. 2
Books by Hans Küng
The Catholic Church: A Short History. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Christianity and World Religions: Paths of Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993.
Does God Exist? Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.
Freud and the Problem of God. Translated by Edward Quinn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Infallible? An Unresolved Enquiry. New York: Continuum, 1994.
Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1995.
On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1984.
Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Why I Am Still a Christian. Translated by David Smith, et al. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987.
Yes to a Global Ethic. Edited by Hans Küng. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1996.
Books about Hans Küng
Häring, Hermann. Hans Küng: Breaking Through. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Kuschel, Karl-Josef, and Hermann Häring, ed. Hans Küng: New Horizons for Faith and Thought. New York: Continuum, 1993.
Pitchers, Alrah. The Christology of Hans Küng: A Critical Examination. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Organizations
Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, P.O. Box 1630, Chicago, IL 60690; phone: 312-629-2990; e-mail: info@cpwr.org.
Global Ethic Foundation for Inter-cultural and Inter-religious Research, Education, and Encounter; web site: www.uni-tuebingen.de/stiftung-weltethos/dat_eng/index_e.htm.
Institute for Ecumenical Research (Institut für Ökumenische Forschung), at the University of Tübingen, Wilhelmstr. 7, 72074 Tübingen, Germany; web site (in German): www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/uoi/Institut/index.html.
“The religions are still a spiritual force which could change the face of the earth for the better.”
(1908–1970)
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A pioneer of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow taught that human beings are motivated by a range of needs that are organized like a ladder, from the most basic to the highest. This “hierarchy of needs” starts with physiological, survival, and security needs; proceeds through emotional needs for love, belonging, and self-esteem; and culminates in “self-actualization,” the need to fulfill one’s human potential. He said that only when basic needs are fulfilled do people pursue the higher needs.
Abraham Harold Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. By 1934 he had earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in psychology from the University of Wisconsin. After a period of teaching at Brooklyn College, in 1951 he joined Brandeis University and remained there until his retirement in 1969. At Brandeis he met Dr. Kurt Goldstein (a specialist in psychiatric and neurological disorders), who introduced him to the idea of self-actualization, and began to produce his own theoretical work. In 1965 Maslow published a study of human behavior in the workplace, Eupsychian Management,
Maslow’s theory of self-actualization influenced the subsequent establishment of transpersonal psychology, which recognizes spiritual development as a component of mental health.
Maslow was especially interested in studying the traits of self-actualized people (such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt), which include benevolence, justice, self-sufficiency, and humor. He also studied life-transforming moments of profound understanding, love, or ecstasy, which he called peak experiences. In these experiences, he said, one perceives reality with clarity, effortlessness, and a profound sense of meaning. Self-actualizing development and peak experiences, he believed, are within the reach of all and enable people to live fully rounded, engaged, happy lives.
The field of humanistic psychotherapy that grew out of Maslow’s work in the 1960s is aimed at helping individuals to become self-actualized. His focus on study of the positive, healthy potential of individuals was a radical departure from the emphasis on pathology that characterized the Freudian and behavioral schools of psychology dominant at the time. Maslow’s theory of self-actualization influenced the subsequent establishment of transpersonal psychology, which recognizes spiritual development as a component of mental health.
HIS WORDS
I have used the words therapy, psychotherapy, and patient. Actually, I hate all these words, and I hate the medical model that they imply because the medical model suggests that the person who comes to the counselor is a sick person, beset by disease and illness, seeking a cure. Actually, of course, we hope that the counselor will be the one who helps to foster the self-actualization of people, rather than the one who helps to cure a disease.
—The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, p. 51
If the variant religions may be taken as expressions of human aspiration, i.e., what people would like to become if only they could, then we can see here too a validation of the affirmation that all people yearn toward self-actualization or tend toward it.
—Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 173
The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or a religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love.
—Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 226
Books by Abraham Maslow
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Arkana, 1993.
Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow. Edited by Edward Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996.
Motivation and Personality. 3d ed. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987.
The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Toward a Psychology of Being. 3d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Books about Abraham Maslow
Decarvalho, Roy José. The Growth Hypothesis in Psychology: The Humanistic Psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
Hoffman, Edward. The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1988. Reprint, Four Worlds Press, 1998.
Organization
Association for Humanistic Psychology, 1516 Oak St., No. 320A, Alameda, CA 94501; phone: 510-769-6495; web site: ahpweb.org.
Other Resources
Films: Being Abraham Maslow, interview with Warren Bennis; New York: Filmmaker’s Library, 1972. Maslow and Self-Actualization, Santa Ana, Calif.: Psychological Films, 1968.
Audiotapes: Self-Actualization, Psychology of Religious Awareness, and others; available from Big Sur Tapes, Tiburon, Calif.; web site: www.bigsurtapes.com.
“If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy the rest of your life.”
(1892–1971)
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The son of a minister, the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr became one of the most popular and influential pastor-theologians in America, affecting political thought, ecumenical dialogue, and the Christian social ethic.
Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, and the pastoral influence of his father led to his early interest in theology. In 1910, at the age of eighteen, he graduated from Elmhurst College, the seminary of the Evangelical Synod of North America, a denomination now part of the United Church of Christ. After this early education, Niebuhr went to Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, from which he graduated in 1913, and then received bachelor of divinity and master of arts degrees from Yale University. He was ordained in 1915.
Niebuhr went to Detroit to serve as pastor at Bethel Evangelical Church, where he remained until 1928. During his tenure at Bethel, he observed the hardships of autoworkers before they were protected by labor unions or social legislation. Accordingly, his philosophy shifted from the prevailing liberalism of the day to a socialist critique of capitalism. Later he abandoned socialism because of socialist support of pacifism on the eve of World War II. He left Detroit to assume a professorship at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he would remain a formidable intellectual force until his retirement in 1960.
Despite his belief in the pervasiveness of sin and evil, Niebuhr considered himself a hopeful man, and his political activism reflected his belief that there are “indeterminate possibilities” for human beings to do good.
At Union, Niebuhr developed the theological concept for which he is best known, Christian Realism. This idea and Moral Man and Immoral Society, the book in which it is developed, stress the persistence of evil in society and in the human experience, even as individual human beings are capable of great moral good.
Despite his belief in the pervasiveness of sin and evil, Niebuhr considered himself a hopeful man, and his political activism reflected his belief that there are “indeterminate possibilities” for human beings to do good so long as they accept that not everything is within their control. He sought to convince Christian pacifists to rethink their position as Hitler rose to power.
Niebuhr also accomplished much in the area of ecumenical dialogue. He was perhaps the first influential Christian theologian to advocate against Christians’ seeking to convert Jews. After he suffered a stroke in 1952, Niebuhr’s public activities were severely curtailed, but he continued teaching and writing until his death at age seventy-nine in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
HIS WORDS
THE SERENITY PRAYER
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
—1934 monthly bulletin of the Federal Council of Churches
American Christianity tends to be irrelevant to the problems of justice because it persists in presenting the law of love as a simple solution for every communal problem.
—“The Spirit of Justice,” in Love and Justice, p. 25
The world’s most urgent problem is the establishment of a tolerable system of mutual security for the avoidance of international anarchy. Such a system will not meet all the requirements of perfect justice for decades to come. There is a sense in which it will probably never meet them. Yet it is possible to avoid both a tyrannical unification of the world, and the alternative anarchy, if each nation is ready to make commitments commensurate with its power.
—“American Power and World Responsibility,” in Love and Justice, p. 205
Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991.
Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Edited by D. B. Robertson. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. 1932. Reprint, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.
The Nature and Destiny of Man. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.
The Self and the Dramas of History. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.
Books about Reinhold Niebuhr
Bingham, June. Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992.
Fox, Richard Wrightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Gilkey, Langdon. On Niebuhr: A Theological Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
“American Christianity tends to be irrelevant to the problems of justice because it persists in presenting the law of love as a simple solution for every communal problem.”
(1921–1983)
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A priest and brilliant theologian of the postrevolutionary Russian emigration, Father Alexander Schmemann was instrumental in opening up the spiritual riches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the Western world and in establishing a vibrant Orthodox Christianity in America.
Schmemann was born in Estonia and brought up in France among the community of intellectual Russian émigrés. He studied at Saint Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which, because of the suppression of religion in the Soviet Union, had become a center for the study of Russian Orthodox theology. His specialty became liturgical theology. He was ordained a priest in 1947 and taught at Saint Sergius until 1951, when he emigrated to the United States to teach at the recently formed Saint Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York, where he became dean in 1961 and remained for the rest of his life.
Schmemann’s charismatic personality, his deep love of the church, and his particular emphasis on liturgical renewal made him perhaps the most influential figure in the Orthodox Church in the United States in the twentieth century. Before the 1950s the Orthodox churches in America with roots in Russia and Eastern Europe were on the decline and in danger of dying out. In the 1950s and 1960s, a revival of sorts that reversed this trend began: attendance at services increased as did education in the Orthodox faith, founding of new parishes, and openness to sharing the faith. Schmemann’s influence on this phenomenon was foundational.
Schmemann’s charismatic personality, his deep love of the church, and his particular emphasis on liturgical renewal made him perhaps the most influential figure in the Orthodox Church in the United States in the twentieth century.
He was active in the ecumenical movement and believed that churches have a responsibility to express their faith through social action. “Christ came to save the whole man and not part of him,” Schmemann said. The contemporary world in all its complexities requires answers as well as good theories, he said, adding that true ecumenism depends not only on the unity of the church but also on the unity of all people. The churches, he continued, must constantly review and revalue their relations with a changing world order; only in so doing can they function as creative organisms.
HIS WORDS
Many people often find religion’s most important aspect to be the rituals and customs, the beauty of services, the possibility of encountering the sacred, heavenly, and divine. But Christ’s parable of the last judgment (Matt. 25:31–46) reveals that all of this, if it is not based on love and directed toward love, makes religion fruitless, needless, empty, and dead.
—Celebration of Faith, p. 121
Again and again we come to recognize that the most essential, joyful mystery of Christianity is the mystery of the person, of what makes each human being valuable to God, of what we can and must love in him or her. It is precisely this mystery which the world and its ruling ideologies have repudiated.
—Celebration of Faith, p. 97
Books by Alexander Schmemann
The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.
“The most essential, joyful mystery of Christianity is the mystery of the person, of what makes each human being valuable to God, of what we can and must love in him or her.”
Other Resources
Web sites:
www.concentric.net/~Kyinsman/Schmemann.html. Father Alexander Schmemann home page.
www.schmemann.org. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann web site.
(1903–1993)
• • • • • • •
As the foremost expositor of modern—or centrist—Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik offered observant American Jews a path between liberal denominations and secularism on the one hand and insular ultra-Orthodoxy and Hasidism on the other. He exemplified unwavering fidelity to Jewish tradition alongside an almost unprecedented comfort with secular, Western intellectual traditions, carving a niche for observant Jews to remain true to their religious ideals and lifestyle while participating in the secular culture. So influential is his contribution that few major opinions or decisions are issued in the modern Orthodox world today without claiming the mantle of “the Rav”—the rabbi—as he is widely known.
Born into a dynasty of distinguished Lithuanian Talmudic scholars, Soloveitchik focused on Maimonides’ philosophical presentation of Jewish law. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin. In 1932 he moved to Boston and soon after established the Maimonides School, the first Jewish “day school” that emphasized secular and Judaic studies equally. (Previously Jewish educational options included after-school programs or yeshivot limited to Judaic studies only.)
Soloveitchik exemplified unwavering fidelity to Jewish tradition alongside an almost unprecedented comfort with secular, Western intellectual traditions.
Soloveitchik began teaching Jewish philosophy in 1941 at New York’s Yeshiva University and became head of the school’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Seminary, in effect the only rabbinical seminary in America for centrist Orthodox Jews. The position gave him profound influence on the Orthodox rabbinate, and he was responsible for ordaining more than two thousand rabbis. He was active in the religious Zionist movement before and during the establishment of modern Israel.
Although he published little in his lifetime, hundreds of hours of Soloveitchik’s lectures and classes were taped, and scholars have only begun mining this vast collection. In his two most important published works, Halakhic Man and The Lonely Man of Faith, he applied academic philosophical methods to Jewish thought. The first explores the system of Jewish law as a method of applying divinely inspired order on the world. The second explores the tension between faith and reason.
Soloveitchik often took progressive stances on issues, and much debate about his legacy centers on how far in that direction he would have gone were he still alive. In a then-novel move the Maimonides School taught Talmud to girls. Soloveitchik also gave the first lecture on Talmud at Yeshiva’s Stern College for Women.
HIS WORDS
The contemporary man of faith looks upon himself as a stranger in modern society, which is technically minded, self-centered, and self-loving, almost in a sickly narcissistic fashion, scoring honor upon honor, piling up victory upon victory, reaching for the distant galaxies, and seeing in the here-and-now sensible world the only manifestation of being. What can a man of faith like myself, living by a doctrine which has no technical potential, by a law which cannot be tested in the laboratory, steadfast in his loyalty to an eschatological vision whose fulfillment cannot be predicted with any degree of probability, let alone certainty, even by the most complex, advanced mathematical calculations—what can such a man say to a functional, utilitarian society which is saeculum-oriented and whose practical reasons of the mind have long ago supplanted the sensitive reasons of the heart?
—The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 6
Books by Joseph Soloveitchik
Fate and Destiny: From Holocaust to the State of Israel. Hoboken: KTAV, 2000.
Halakhic Man. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983.
The Lonely Man of Faith. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought. Adapted by Abraham R. Besdin. Hoboken: KTAV, 1993.
Books about Joseph Soloveitchik
Confrontation: The Existential Thought of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik. Hoboken: KTAV, 1993.
Genack, Menachem. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Man of Halacha, Man of Faith. Hoboken: KTAV, 1998.
Hartman, David. Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joesph B. Soloveitchik. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 2001.
Rakeffet-Rothkoff, Aaron. The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Hoboken: KTAV, 1999.
For a more complete list of books by and about Joseph Soloveitchik, see Confrontation, pp. 175–176.
Organization
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Institute, 2 Clark Rd., Brookline, MA 02445. Dedicated to disseminating Soloveitchik’s teachings.
“The contemporary man of faith looks upon himself as a stranger in modern society, which is technically minded, self-centered, and self-loving.”
(1886–1965)
• • • • • • •
Best known for his public criticisms of Nazism and his unorthodox liberal theology, Professor Paul Tillich had a gift for harmonizing secular philosophy with relevant theology.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Tillich was born in Starzeddel, Germany, and spent his childhood there. In 1904 he completed his high school education at the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium, a Berlin school for advanced students. Tillich went on to study the theology of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel at universities in Tübingen, Berlin, and Halle. In 1911 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Breslau, and he received his licentiate in theology the next year from the university in Halle. In 1912 he was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Two years after his ordination, with World War I raging, Tillich was called to serve as a military chaplain. Four years of witnessing the cruelty and brutality of war deeply affected his theology. Before his war experience Tillich’s theological foundation was the Romantic movement, which saw a distinct relation between man, nature, and history. But witnessing the violence of war led him to reject his earlier thought as immature and incomplete. He expanded his theological horizons and began to develop his own systematic theology.
After the war Tillich went to the University of Berlin to become a the University of Berlin to become a lecturer on the philosophy of religion. He then went to the University of Marburg, where Karl Barth’s “neoorthodox” theology was popular. At Marburg, Tillich met and was deeply influenced by Martin Heidegger, a theologian who brought existentialist thought—the search for an intellectual way to describe the human condition—to bear on the problems of the twentieth century.
Tillich articulated a popular theology to answer the eternal philosophical and theological question on the nature of humanity, “What am I?”
In 1925 Tillich moved on to Dresden, where his view of culture was greatly shaped by his exposure to the arts, and later to Leipzig, where he continued to teach and lecture. In Frankfurt, in 1929, Tillich found himself teaching at the most liberal educational institution in Germany. His public criticisms of the growing Nazi movement cost him his professorship, though, and with an invitation from his fellow theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to teach at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Tillich and his family moved to the United States.
Tillich taught at Union until 1955. While there he developed a theology to answer the eternal philosophical and theological question on the nature of humanity, “What am I?” He concluded that life is meaningful and unified. In his classic book, The Courage to Be, he wrote: “Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of nonbeing upon itself by affirming itself either as part of an embracing whole or in its individual selfhood.” After his retirement from Union, he became a professor at Harvard; then, from 1962 until his death three years later, he taught at the University of Chicago as the Nuveen Professor of Theology.
HIS WORDS
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
—Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1958
The total movement with which we are concerned is the slowly developing defeat of the spiritual temper of the nineteenth century. The self-sufficient this-worldliness of capitalist culture and religion is being disturbed. Questions and doubts are arising on all sides; they point toward something beyond time and threaten the security of a present which has cut itself loose from the eternal.
—The Religious Situation, p. 24
The first duty of love is to listen.
The Courage to Be. 2d ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich. Edited by F. Forrester Church. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
The Protestant Era. Translated by James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.
The Religious Situation. Translated by H. Richard Niebuhr. New York: Henry Holt, 1932.
The Socialist Decision. Translated by Franklin Sherman. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963.
Books about Paul Tillich
Parrella, Frederick J., ed. Paul Tillich’s Theological Legacy: Spirit and Community. Berlin, N.Y.: Walter de Gruyter, 1995.
Pauck, Wilhelm, and Marion Pauck. Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Other Resources
Memorial Park: Paul Tillich Park, New Harmony, Ind. Tillich’s ashes were interred here in 1965. Web site: www.newharmony.evansville.net.
“Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.”
(1875–1941)
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A poet and novelist, Evelyn Underhill wrote elegantly on mysticism and devotional life and advocated the integration of personal spirituality and worldly action. The only child of a British barrister and his wife, Underhill was educated primarily at home in Wolverhampton, England, and later at London’s King’s College for Women, where she studied history and botany. At the age of sixteen, she published her first book, a volume of light verse about the legal profession titled A Bar-Lamb’s Ballad Book—hardly a harbinger of the sweeping and incisive studies of religious mysticism that would bring her eminence throughout the West as an author and lecturer.
Although she converted to Christianity in 1907, the year of her marriage to Hubert Stuart Moore, Underhill did not immediately affiliate with a denomination. She was drawn to Roman Catholicism but felt some of its tenets conflicted with her growing attraction to the burgeoning modernist intellectual movement. While researching Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, her 1911 classic, she met Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the expert on mysticism who greatly influenced her thinking and became her spiritual director. In 1921, the year she became a practicing member of the Anglican Church, Underhill delivered the Upton Lecture on the Philosophy of Religion at Manchester College, Oxford, becoming the first woman to do so. During this time, she also traveled throughout Western Europe, studying its art and culture. Mysticism, which explores the works of the great mystics, including Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, and Rumi, is still considered the consummate investigation of human spiritual awareness.
Evelyn Underhill recognized that contemplative prayer is not just for monks and nuns but for anyone willing to undertake it.
Underhill believed that contemplative prayer is not just for monks and nuns but for anyone willing to undertake it. She considered the study of modern science not a threat to contemplation but rather an enhancement of it. She was an advocate of an integrated life, balanced between active and passive spirituality. As a routine she spent mornings writing and afternoons working with the poor and giving spiritual direction. A prolific writer, she published novels, books of verse, philosophical and religious works, accounts of retreats and conferences she conducted, and critical essays and reviews in various publications, including the Spectator, where she served for a time as theological editor. She frequently lectured on matters of religion and spirituality. Her Upton Lecture was later published as The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today. Another of her books, Worship, published in 1936, led her to a profound interest and involvement in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Underhill worked in naval intelligence during World War I, but by 1939 she had joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. The following year she authored a forceful pamphlet on Christian pacifism entitled The Church and War. Although she studied the personalities of mystics and ascetics, she was widely known as a passionate individual interested in all aspects of life.
HER WORDS
It is the “inclusive” mystic, whose freedom and originality are fed but not hampered by the spiritual tradition within which he appears, who accepts the incarnational status of the human spirit, and can find the “inward in the outward as well as the outward in the inward,” who shows us in their fullness and beauty the life-giving possibilities of the soul transfigured in God.
—Mysticism, p. xvi
Visions and voices, then, may stand in the same relation to the mystic as pictures, poems, and musical compositions stand to the great painter, poet, musician. They are the artist’s expressions and creative results (a) of thought, (b) of intuition, (c) of direct perception. All would be ready to acknowledge how conventional and imperfect of necessity are those transcripts of perceived Goodness, Truth, and Beauty which we owe to artistic genius: how unequal is their relation to reality. But this is not to say that they are valueless or absurd. So too with the mystic, whose proceedings in this respect are closer to those of the artist than is generally acknowledged. In both types there is a constant and involuntary work of translation going on, by which Reality is interpreted in the terms of appearance. In both, a peculiar mental make-up conduces to this result.
—Mysticism, p. 272
Books by Evelyn Underhill
Fragments from an Inner Life: The Notebooks of Evelyn Underhill. Edited and with an introduction by Dana Greene. Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse, 1993.
The Letters of Evelyn Underhill. Edited and with an introduction by Charles Williams. Westminister, Md.: Christian Classics, 1989.
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922.
Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. 1911. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002.
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915.
Worship. 1936. Reprint, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.
Books about Evelyn Underhill
Cropper, Margaret. The Life of Evelyn Underhill. 1958. With a new foreword by Dana Greene. Woodstock, Vt.: SkyLight Paths, 2002.
Greene, Dana. Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
Organization
Evelyn Underhill Association, 7315 Brookville Rd., Chevy Chase, MD 20815; web site: www.evelynunderhill.org.
Other Resources
Virginia Theological Seminary Archives, Bishop Payne Library, 3737 Seminary Road, Alexandria, VA, 22304-5201; phone: 703-461-1850; email: jrandle@vts.edu.
“It is the ‘inclusive mystic’ … who shows us in their fullness and beauty the life-giving possibilities of the soul transfigured in God.”
(1949–)
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Ken Wilber is one of the few intellectual visionaries to offer a unifying view that seeks to reconcile all the discordant elements of our postmodern world—to embrace equally science and spirituality, and to include all the disciplines in one grand “theory of everything.” With his model of human growth and development, synthesizing Eastern contemplative traditions and Western science into a comprehensive “spectrum of consciousness,” Wilber laid the philosophical foundations for the transpersonal psychology movement. His writings have renewed appreciation of the perennial philosophy, the worldview common to the great wisdom traditions, in which reality is seen as a multilayered phenomenon, ranging from matter to body to mind to soul to the Divine Spirit. Wilber criticizes contemporary materialist culture as a “flatland” that denies the existence of higher levels of consciousness. To counter this perspective, he argues for an integration of science and religion through the development of a science that embraces all the various stages, structures, and states of human consciousness.
Wilber argues for an integration of science and religion through the development of a science that embraces all the stages, structures, and states of human consciousness.
Born in 1949 in Oklahoma City, Wilber was educated at Duke University and the University of Nebraska, acquiring two bachelor of science degrees and a master’s degree in biochemistry. However, his explorations of psychology and philosophy led him to abandon his pursuit of a Ph.D. to concentrate on his own studies and writing. His reputation was established with his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, written when he was twenty-three years old. As an independent scholar he has found a respectful audience all over the world, in addition to attracting controversy for his critique of New Age thought.
From 1983 on Wilber has distanced himself from the transpersonal movement in favor of an approach that both “transcends and includes” the essentials of all the major schools of psychology. Applying this integral vision to the social sciences, he has brought new insights to developmental psychology; anthropology; psychotherapy; the sociology of religion; the philosophy of science, health, and alternative medicine; and art and literary theory. Seeing these diverse fields from an integral perspective, he brings together the best of the premodern, modern, and postmodern periods, denying no school of thought its partial truth but asserting that “everybody is right, to a certain degree.” To give integral philosophy a firmer grounding in the academic world, he founded the Integral Institute, which aims to document the scientific evidence for spiritual development and transformation. The first eight volumes of his Collected Works were published in 2000.
HIS WORDS
At this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego.
—Up from Eden, p. 328
So the call of the nondual traditions is: Abide as Emptiness, embrace all Form. The liberation is in the Emptiness, never in the Form, but Emptiness embraces all forms as a mirror all its objects. So the Forms continue to arise, and, as the sound of one hand clapping, you are all those Forms. You are the display. You and the universe are One Taste. Your original Face is the purest Emptiness, and therefore every time you look in the mirror, you see only the entire Kosmos.
—A Brief History of Everything, p. 240
Books by Ken Wilber
The Atman Project. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1980.
Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2002.
A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996.
The Collected Works of Ken Wilber. Vols. 1–8. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. New York: Random House, 1998.
One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. 2d ed. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1977.
A Theory of Everything. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. New York: Anchor Books, 1981.
Organization
Integral Institute, 4450 Arapahoe, Ste. 100, Boulder, CO 80303. A nonprofit organization dedicated to the integration of body, mind, soul, and spirit in self, culture, and nature.
Other Resources
Web site: wilber.shambhala.com. Original writing by and about Wilbur, frequently updated, with archive and link to newsletter.
“At this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego.”