EDITOR’S SELECTION: Walking the "Path of Piety": Charles Peirce, Religious Naturalism, and the American Literature of Transformation

Abstract

the appreciation of Charles Peirce’s religious dimension has been slow to mature, due in part to the disparate nature of his prodigious output, but also due to a certain blindness of his interpreters. Michael Raposa, in his essay “Peirce and Modern Religious Thought” (1991), argues: “Some early interpreters of Peirce, like Hartshorne and Goudge, argued that his religious perspective was inconsistent with the basic thrust of his philosophy. Many later commentators have implicitly endorsed this argument by systematically ignoring the religious dimension of his thought.” In contrast, Raposa suggests “that what Peirce had to say about religion is remarkably continuous with what he wrote about a variety of philosophical, mathematical and scientific topics. . . . Peirce fashioned his conception of God out of the very materials that his semiotic and his synechism supplied” (Peirce’s Philosophy 349). Raposa offers a fuller account in Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (1989), while other systematic accounts of Peirce’s religious perspective include Robert S. Corrington’s An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (1993) and the more recent Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (2011) by Leon J. Niemoczynski. Identifying Peirce as a theologian with a spiritual cosmology of the sacred may require a leap of faith, though less of a leap if one considers Peirce’s religious musings within his architectonic of evolutionary realism, evolutionary love, and his interweaving of spontaneity and creativity (Hausman 18–19). Corrington defines his own overview of Peirce as an “emancipatory reenactment” (Introduction to C. S. Peirce xii), and Niemoczynski terms his own study a “constructive interpretation” and creative extrapolation of Peirce (ix), while Raposa’s systematic account elaborates “a conception of theological method, a task that Peirce clearly never himself assumed,” requiring “a sketch of how this might look as it takes shape” (Pierce’s Philosophy 357).