Philosophical Theology Vol. 2, Existence by Robert Cummings Neville
Existence, the middle volume of Neville’s Philosophical Theology, offers a theological anthropology, and so deals with “religious dimensions of human nature, its conditions, and processes” (xvi). As such it contrasts with (while of course also integrating with) the mainly metaphysical concerns of the volume that precedes it, Ultimates, and the social scientific interests (very broadly [End Page 89] construed) of the volume that follows, Religion. After a preface and introduction, the volume is arranged in four parts, each of four chapters. The parts deal respectively with (1) “ultimate boundary conditions” of human existence set by the metaphysics of determinateness developed in volume 1; (2) “predicaments and deliverances” of this human existence; (3) its “ecstatic fulfilments”; and (4) existential “engagement and participation” of those conditions, predicaments, deliverances, and fulfilments. An extensive index of subjects and names, cross-referenced to Ultimates, rounds out the volume.
The first thing to note about Existence and its place in Philosophical Theology is that it is here that Neville makes the normative force of religion most explicit. In volume 1, Neville defined religion as “human engagement of ultimacy expressed in cognitive articulations [such as Ultimates itself], existential responses to ultimacy that give ultimate definition to the individual and the community, and patterns of life and ritual in the face of ultimacy” (Ultimates, 4). If religion matters at all, though, it is thanks to individuals “actually engag[ing] ultimate realities in and through” the symbols and practices available to them (3). Religious symbol systems and practices matter—when they do—because individuals stake their inwardness, their ultimate identity, on them. Thus Neville approves and (he argues) improves upon William James’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s shared stress on interiority as essential to understanding religion.
The normativity of interiority flows, not from the descriptive observation that some individuals stake their inwardness on religious symbols and practices, but from the fact that “only the individual perspective allows us to make sense of the ultimate seriousness of life’s brokenness and ecstatic fulfilments” (4). “Religion” in any normative sense depends on existential engagement with ultimacy—on there being individuals who have as essential components of their identity engagements with ultimate boundary conditions of their existence. Whether individuals engage ultimates well or badly, and whether those engagements work well or badly for them: these questions are senseless in the absence of religious existence. Indeed, essentially, religion is religious existence (5). And if one did not exist religiously (if that is possible), one would be unable, or at least drastically less able, to grasp the particularity of one’s predicament, let alone means of coping and grace.
Of course, “religion” is a term used in nonnormative, or at least not so explicitly normative, ways, too (in attempting “substantive” and/or “functional” differentiations of religious from nonreligious phenomena, and in advancing critical explanations or deconstructions of the differences, for example). But the normative force of religion that vests in existence is, Neville argues, irreducible. One may also register this by noting that to exist is, inevitably, to experience “brokenness” of various kinds, relative to ideals that are metaphysically [End Page 90] ultimate. A condition of being human is having to inhabit these predicaments. Insofar as religions offer to “fix” what is broken and/or to open possibilities of ecstatic fulfilment transcending one’s predicament(s), they are normative undertakings, and the normativity involved belongs to religion in the proper sense.
The specific hypothesis is that “to be human is to be normatively bound to face the question of the affirmation of existence, to be under obligation, to need wholeness, to engage rightly with other things, and to achieve a meaningful identity with value” (26). These five ultimate boundary conditions of human existence are discussed in part 1, especially in terms of their derivation from the ontological and cosmological ultimates identified in volume 1. The condition of obligation stems from having to choose among different possibilities of form. Need of wholeness stems from having to integrate, more or less well, components ingredient in our becoming. Norms of engagement have to do with being amid and among others in the existential field. Concern for meaning is the human version of value-identity. Each of these conditions broaches the fifth ontological ultimate, existence as such, which bears for us the normative question of whether to affirm our existence.
Since we cannot avoid these conditions of existence but only satisfy them more or less well, they are universal predicaments. Neville resists the temptation to collapse the predicaments into one, while demonstrating their interwovenness. How one responds to predicament is not a given. Yet it is typical that human beings experience their existence as broken in some ways or others because they diminish or deny outright their need and ability to deal with its ultimate dimensions. Religions offer many and various interventions at and past these breaking points. Neville has much sensitive and subtle to say on these matters throughout part 2: on guilt for failure of obligation and religious interventions for justification, on disintegration in failing wholeness and interventions for centeredness, on estrangement from others and interventions to (re)connect, on meaninglessness and interventions to achieve happiness even despite disvalues in one’s identity, and on saying yes to being.
It is part 3, “Ecstatic Fulfillments,” that really presses the discussion beyond predicaments and the so often broken promises of their resolution, to consideration of engagements of existence just such as it is. In one of his loveliest phrases, Neville writes that ecstatic fulfillments “fly in the face of ultimate predicaments unresolved” (190). In ecstases, fulfillment is rather to integrate the ontological ultimate, in its own right or through the cosmological ultimates as they are aspects of the ontological creative act, directly into one’s value identity to give a “transcendent meaning to life” that does not depend on perfected, persistent righteousness, wholeness, engagements, and ordinarily achieved value-identity [End Page 91] (189). “Integrate” is a potentially misleading active verb here: as Neville indicates, ecstatic fulfillment is characterized by a sense of the initiative of the ontological ultimate, the creative act as dynamic source of eternal meaning, identity, love and freedom, which he keys, albeit more loosely, to the ultimate boundary conditions previously elaborated.
Whether working through the ultimate predicaments of one’s human existence or receiving fulfillment ecstatically, individuals must somehow “inwardly” engage and participate those processes by way of the socially constructed symbols and practices of religion. How does religion(s) enable existentially defining experience? In the four chapters of part 4, Neville discusses ritual, cognitive and emotional commitment to communities and practices, shared lives of faith, and finally the inhabitation of a sacred worldview.
Of course, the flip side of ontological ultimacy is nothing at all. Some interpreters have lately questioned the need of Neville’s ontology, for instance, as a “bridge too far” beyond experience, in which metaphysical hypotheses should root and from which they gain plausibility (see the articles in AJTP 36.1 on Neville’s Ultimates). For my part, I am a realist about nothing at all. I think Neville, too, holds that nothing to be experienceable, at least in the mode of finite/infinite contrast. Thus his ontological hypothesis is integral to an adequate account of religion, existence, and ultimacy.
Existence is an elegant book. In many if not most respects, I take it to be true. Whether it is a good book, we shall discover by what its readers make of it. I hope it achieves something of the cultural impact to which its author aspires.
