Michael Raposa says an obligation lies at the root of his writing Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning (2020). The chapter introducing and coining the term ‘theosemiotic’ in his earlier work Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (1989), was like a “promissory note” for a future development of that idea.1Theosemiotic wonderfully pays the bill. Although this essay is first and foremost an attempt to illuminate the meaning and internal logic of Raposa's book, it also takes up meaning in terms of “what follows from” the text. Raposa incites a community of inquiry centered on Peirce and religion, and in this essay, I follow and extend that work by exploring agreements, challenges, and possible developments from the platform of theosemiotic.Though he focuses primarily on the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, this is much, much more than a Peirce book. It was Peirce, the systematic and enigmatic powerhouse of American pragmatism, that first connected me to Raposa's work.2 Although our scholarly efforts circulate around Peirce, our methodologies trace different orbits. Raposa develops the foundational history of Peirce in the work of Duns Scotus, John Poinsot, Ignatius of Loyola, even stretching back to deeper Augustinian roots. The strength of this book resides in the thorough and careful development of Peirce's ideas in their historical depth and systematic potential. Raposa brings Theosemiotic into shape as a system, a stream of thought, that Peirce does not originate but lifts to peculiar view and explores like a hungry prospector. This faithful work by Peirce enables those following in his task to set some beams in place and explore galleries and shafts that expand his peculiar additions in anticipation of larger constructive work to follow. A central pillar of both the excavation and construction in this book is Raposa's perception of the charged interrelation of “philosophical theology and a theology of the spiritual life,” a dynamism within our obligations of understanding and acting that connects philosophical construction to an organic and religious core of life.3Raposa enters the work of Theosemiotic as a work of community; Peirce is his Beatrice. He takes the measure of this stream or vein of inquiry by telling its history and sketching out its key features and drops confessional clues about his attraction to the system along the way. There is space here for considering individual lives in relation to robust community, for examining the connection between reason and theology, self-control, and liberation. Raposa emulates Peirce's philosophical orientation to nurture ideas as he describes in “Evolutionary Love,” warming ideas and selves into life. Raposa turns aside from both Cartesian razing and forced construction of ideas, as well as Hegelian abstraction and de-personalizing of reason. Inquiry is a product of selves following connections into the remoter realms of inference, a movement that depends upon an orientation toward a telos that itself is developing with and through the actions of inquiry. Inquiry is the guided discovery of a knowable but infinitely extending realm of truth, like a great cathedral that adds rooms, wings, and chapels as we continue to explore it.Chapter one presents the historical argument for Theosemiotic, followed by six chapters of systematic development. I did not find an explanation for the development or arrangement of the content of these chapters, so as a good synechistic Peircean I have developed one. Abbreviating slightly, the content of chapters 2–4 is Selves/Love/Inquiry. Readers familiar with Peirce will notice the reach of this triad, drawing together the Cognition Series with the later Evolutionary Love in service of pragmatic inquiry best described in the 1903 Harvard lectures. Chapters 5–7 develop Community/Discernment/Prayer, expanding from a base of Peircean ideas into speculative development. This second triad, and particularly Community, is my focus for the balance of this essay. Before I turn to this analysis, though, let me say a brief word about prayer in a philosophical text. Raposa is elegant and courageous in the way he brings this idea from Peirce into connection with our 21st century philosophical abilities and disabilities.My outline places Inquiry and Prayer as thirdness-place holders in Raposa's system of Theosemiotic. Inquiry has a robust sense of inferential effort and testing, motivated by the traditional warrant of pursuing truth—the “object” of inquiry. But Prayer—what is its object? It is more than petition or lament, although these can be forms of Prayer. How does philosophy lead a person or a community to Prayer? Perhaps Prayer is the honest and truthful (as far as truth is known) acknowledgment of our place in the universe, a “place-ness” that is active acceptance of the character of individual and communal life within a set of discoverable values and proper actions. Could that be the telos of a philosophical/religious pursuit? Raposa wants to bring our imaginations and critical thought to this idea. So, following an explication of community (section II) and its development in prayer (section III), I take a step in the direction of what Jonathan Edwards would call “improvement” by following the impulse in Raposa to the roots of religion, conversion, and extending the scope of theosemiotic identity (section IV).Communities of Interpretation link Peirce and Royce. Raposa takes up the conditions that make such communities possible and the ideals that connect their living sense to evolutionary development. The triad of shared similarity/orientation to ideal(s)/evolutionary development echoes in the three sections of the chapter; I Conditions of community, II Peirce and Royce on communities of interpretation, and III Extending the concept of communities of interpretation. This last step of development leads to a theosemiotic account of world religion that exhibits resistance to reductionism, affirms a naturalism that attends features of being human, communities are complex living symbols as far as they share attention and commitment to certain ideals, and presents the developmental test of neighborliness in Jesus’ parable to the afflictions attending humans.4Since individuals are text-like interpreters of other texts, a theory of intertextuality is essential for understanding communities as nexi of interpretation. “This kind of intertextuality,” Raposa says, “does not involve making one text the key for understanding the other. It does involve creating a semiotic space in which a lively conversation between different reading experiences might be able to occur, not by abandoning any set of beliefs as though one did not have them.”5 Raposa's approach reflects Peirce's claim that we begin any inquiry recognizing the “prejudices” with which we come to the question, beliefs that we do not conceive can be questioned.6 The semiotic space Raposa calls for, therefore, moves between the nodes of individuals interpreting themselves within their own traditions and in relation to other traditions and individuals constituting them.The will to community, which is central for Royce, provides the impulse for individuals to engage in this intertextual work of interpretation. Raposa develops the will to community as a work of attention; “human agency is primarily embodied in our capacity to direct our attention to this rather than that . . . Love is impossible without paying attention.”7 Raposa ties this voluntarism to Peirce's appropriation of Scotus’ haecceity, the particularity of the other to whom we can direct our attention: “Here we are exposing once again the kind of philosophical voluntarism that seems most congenial for inquiry in theosemiotic. Love must begin with volition.”8 From the platform of volition Raposa draws in the ultimate question of community; who is my neighbor? Reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, he points out that the battered victim and his Samaritan rescuer were strangers before the encounter . . . this separateness was not sufficient to preclude their becoming neighbors. Here it is just such a love that seems crucial for establishing real relation as neighbors, and on this issue Peirce and Royce seem very close to Jesus (whose parable, after all, they would have had in mind even as they were raising the question.)9The connection point of voluntarism between Peirce and Royce, who Raposa says provided the first theological development of Peirce, lays the ground for his development of community, discernment, and prayer that concludes the book.And it is just this point of voluntarism that I want to explore a bit more thoroughly. I agree with Royce and Raposa that “will to community” and the “will to interpret” are deeply integrated, and as such are essential to understanding the universe.10But I think Peirce does not balance the community of interpretation completely on the will of individuals. It is more complicated than just a will to it, but takes the will as subject to a call, a demand. The question, “who is my neighbor?” was framed, after all, in the context of figuring out the most important commandment. The story of the parable answers the question “what does Torah bind me to most ultimately?” It is not a question of will so much as obedience.In “The Doctrine of Chances” in the Illustrations of the Logic of Science series, Peirce develops the argument that community is based on the very essence of logicality, “It seems to me that we are driven to this,” Peirce says, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle. . . Now it is not necessary for logicality that a man should himself be capable of the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he should recognize the possibility of it, should perceive that only that man's inferences who has it are really logical, and should consequently regard his own being only so far valid as they would be accepted by the hero. So far as he thus refers his inferences to that standard, he becomes identified with such a mind.11This emphasis on logic as rooted in the social principle reduces the force of community as a choice of willing or attention. Certainly, we do will to become part of a community or to extend our communal identity by understanding the ideals that hold us together with others. For Peirce, though, all these actions are expressions of the principles of logic, laws of thought, that we do not choose. The Christological sacrifice Peirce evokes in the image of the “hero” who “saves the whole world” as the appropriate recognition of the universal demand of logic. This aligns more clearly with the Torah basis of the “who is my neighbor?” question. Not who we choose to extend humanity to, but “all races of beings . . . beyond all bounds.” This is the obligation at the root of logic, the social meaning of the very possibility of inference.Peirce salts his philosophical writing with biblical and Christian allusions, as I have made a habit of pointing out. Chapter One of my book, Peirce and Religion, follows Peirce's early adult conviction about Christianity and its importance in framing his philosophical perspective.12 The question these references raise is the centrality of Christianity to Peirce's philosophical system. Is religion and Christianity just a word/myth pool he draws from for emphasis? Or do the references and images comprise a context of “prejudice” or “beliefs” Peirce takes as his own platform for inquiry? Scholars taking the first branch read Peirce as invoking a vague God, who must at all costs remain vague, in order to undercut any creedal divisions that would necessarily appear with a less vague God. Raposa follows the anti-creedal approach to Peirce and religious community. God is poet, the world is perfused with signs making an argument, religious traditions are related to the interpretation of these signs but end “dangerously” in cul-de-sacs of specific creeds and statements of belief.13Peirce seems more sanguine about religion, though. For example, he writes in 1893 about the marriage of Religion and Science, not the subsumption of religion into science, but as partners bound in a complex and fruitful relation. After discussing Science, he turns to Religion.Peirce did find that many church creeds were designed to exclude people from community rather than to embody the grand inclusiveness he has in view. But even those creeds are errors from which inquiry and evolution can proceed in the direction of a “return to a great Church” that is needed. Another place he says, “Doubtless, a lot of superstition clings to the historical churches; but superstition is the grime on the proverbial pavement of the sacred edifice, and he who would wash that pavement clean should be willing to get down on his knees to his work inside the church.”15One last bit of evidence for the positive role Peirce finds in the church is his effort to re-join the Episcopal church. Henry Johnson notes that Peirce's name is entered on the church role in an unusual way, and against church rule against including divorced people. He argued or pleaded his way back on to the church roster in Milford.16 The concrete community Peirce aligns himself with is not a vague community against which no exception can be raised, but an inclusive community that overcomes separations by love. Theological traditions are incomplete but necessary steps in the continuing shaping of community, life, and inquiry. For science as well, an encompassing realm of logicality within which the pursuit of reality in the grand community of interpretation exhibits a model of teleological orientation proper for inquiry into the meaning of God. Both are joined in the inquiry into the same object, the animating life of the universe. Theology is practical science, as he picks up from Duns Scotus, having to do primarily with individual choices of actions and meanings. What we do is bound up with what we think. What we do in our actions is interpret the meaning of the universe. When we get on our knees, inside or outside the church, we are participating in the work of the community.The interpretation of individual and community direction and meaning is a demand grounded in logicality. New possibilities of meaning emerge as communal action is manifested in inquiry, no longer dependent on the mind or life of single individuals. Shared purposes expand in terms of possibilities and moral demands. There is the moral demand on an individual for obedience in relation to a community's actions and direction. There is also a moral demand on the community to grasp its own power (exceeding that of individuals) and therefore to locate its responsibility in another form of inquiry and action, to discern obedience on a communal scale. Royce elides both moral demands, I think, into loyalty to loyalty. My suspicion is that Peirce would challenge this elision. Royce takes the road of the ideal community. Peirce trod the road of calling, obedience to a tradition and an instantiated community of people. Though the Samaritan story is initiated by the question about the greatest commandment, it turns out that the non-Jewish Samaritan conformed his action in obedience to the Torah without special knowledge of that code. Jesus was shaming his auditors—people outside your community discern God's law better than you, despite your claims to holiness. Peirce seeks to understand this kind of obedience in a more universal way that generates both individuals and communities willing to sacrifice themselves for logicality.As I mentioned in the introduction to this essay, seeing prayer as a chapter title in a philosophy book is surprising. Less surprising is the transition Raposa makes from his inquiry into community to discernment and then to prayer. The organic flow of ideas is remarkable simply because it works so well. Discernment is what normative science looks like in a community, the processes by which we resolve ideas into action. Jonathan Edwards provides good ground for the role of affection in developing self-control. Peirce's development of self-control, especially in the 1903 Harvard lectures, has its roots in Plato. The response of the philosopher to the Sophists in the Gorgias blazes this point, that self-control is the basic element of inquiry, morality, and action; “The self-controlled man will do what is right in regard both to gods and men; for surely he would have no control otherwise.”17 The communal testing of discernment in the trajectory to self-control bring us to the process of gradually refining meaning into a “living embodiment of meanings by the selves who read and discern.” When such a life displays a “distinctive kind of purpose or purposes,” Raposa says, the person is “transforming life into prayer.”18And what is this distinctive purpose?To answer this question Raposa focuses on musement in Peirce's “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.”19 Raposa interprets this essay as an a posteriori ontological argument for the reality of God, and also remarks that its outline sets the “agenda for any future theology of theosemiotic.”20 Musement, playful openness, exercise and experiment are central to Raposa's vision of Theosemiotic. All experience, taken in this way, is testing of the God-hypothesis both in its intuitive suggestive power, and then as a content that results in an ideal sufficient for developing an “all-embracing conduct of life.” It begins in musement in which “purposes grow quiet in obedience to the one general principle that advocates purposelessness—what Peirce described as the ‘law of liberty.’”21 From a platform of liberty, the individual can cast itself in this affective way into the intuitive reception of the irresistible idea of God. Self-control is enticed into an active and holistic form of practice.Community is implied in the development of self-control that redounds in “transforming life into prayer.” The community is the inductive ground for determining the purpose of the God-hypothesis. An all-embracing conduct of life can only be instantiated in relation with a community. I think the community is vital as both the condition and telos of prayer. Raposa locates community in the context of “extended inductive testing through observation and experiment will generate new habits of thought and perception.”22 It is a living process in which testing and habit forming depends on the conversation within the community. The verb of community is obedience, like the recognition of law, not only in thought but also in the practical choice of will. When the prodigal son comes to himself and returns home, he says “Father I have sinned against heaven and you,” instantiating the living ideal of God and family. In this parable a conversation of self with self, extends to selves and others recognizing their intertextual co-dependency. Bringing myself to self-control is a sign of the community's meaning. The community tests the flourishing effects of the God-hypothesis in the trans-individual life of its membership.The relation of community and prayer is evident in the examples and sources Raposa invokes in this chapter: Ignatius, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Simone Weil. Weil is particularly significant for the presenting the role of musement in relation to a community, especially as she remained outside the Church but in a way that recognized the positive meaning of the Church. Her testimony to absence as central to a kind of reflective flourishing is clarified in Raposa's note that Weil found the metaphysics of emptiness at the center of attention.23 The apophatic withdrawing of God makes room for human response and creation. The absence of God opens the space for meaningful action, but the abyss of non-meaning lurks behind or within the common features of attention. Really seeing lifts things into humanhood, like the Samaritan seeing the naked and discarded body on the side of the road as a fellow human and nurturing him back to life. Or, as Isaiah finds, the abyss appears when the social order breaks down and he retreats to the Temple, only to find a similar chaos of images and demands; “Woe to me for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). None of his words or the words of his people connect with what he is experiencing. The crack of non-meaning runs through him back out the door, and only a gift of grounding in purified speech, when the Cherubim touches his lips with a coal, can stem the flood. This seems at odds with the image of a gradual refining of obedience of the Church/community to the (liberatory) needs of the world, and the evolutionary work of obedience of individuals to and for the Church/community. But all cases of successful interpretation depend on some determinate place, a location in a tradition or event, even if that location is accessed as a point of resistance as in the case of Weil.The risk of interpretation models of spiritual life is that the interpreters can lose contact with their ground of meaning even as conversation continues—just disconnected from reality. I am talking to you Q-anon! Or we may fly off into the solipsism of only private meaning. Weil's worry is even deeper. That when we finally fix our attention rightly, the metaphysical absence is more keenly experienced. William James famously rejected “second hand” religion as too stable and remedial for the world. It turns God into a divine clean-up crew, as John McDermott used to say in conversation. James thought such religion was a failure of courage. He preferred a universe in which real loss was possible. But if there is real loss in a non-divine controlled world it is only a finite loss. Real absence is a divinely ordered world in which real absence is experienced. Weil gets that better than James. Weil's is the truer metaphysical abyss—the one where God is and is not the abyss. She stands next to Isaiah in the utterance, “Woe to me! I am undone.”Prayer comes back in this relation to the abyss of non-meaning. Raposa takes Weil as a member of the Theosemiotic family along with Jonathan Edwards because they are both familiar with listening for God while staring into the pit of non-meaning. I would like to sit at table with those two, but I wouldn't want to live their lives. Prayer is communication about the pit, and communication when the pit is overwhelmed by a circumambient (to use Peirce's phrase) beauty. The aesthetic includes the beauty and the lurking pit, like the Stephen King novels on my shelf. Words that do not aim to define, deflect, demote, or deny that bicameral reality are drawn from us in the search for self-control, to say what is right before God and others, and to say it with intention and honesty. The meaning of agapism is when our words, our lives, become instruments in the poetic argument of God. There is more in our prayers than we think. Raposa's courage is evidenced by the suggestion that philosophical theology can be measured or tested by prayer.Reading Raposa's book reminded me of how John Smith saved my graduate school life. At least that is how it seems looking back twenty-plus years. My early encounter with American philosophy and especially Charles Sanders Peirce dinged my religious radar. Something was there, something stealthy and significant but obscure. As I pursued the background of American philosophy for some point of perspective on this mysterious content, Smith's Jonathan Edwards: Puritan Preacher Philosopher appeared. Carl Vaught, one of Smith's students and my advisor, may have recommended it, or it may have just turned up in a search of the stacks at Penn State. What I read about Edwards began to give a shape to what I was sensing in Peirce—a focus on the impact or sign of God's presence in what we think and do, with an impulse to bring all of humanity into a form of beauty of action and spirit. I just remember all the question marks I made in the margins of Buchler's edited version of Peirce's “Law of Mind.” Doug Anderson patiently replied to my impatient queries about nominalism, realism, and Peirce's take on God.Raposa's Peirce's Philosophy of Religion was similarly evocative and supportive in equal measure. Raposa gravitated to the same paragraphs in the Collected Papers I had begun to toil over and linked them together in the system he would later denominate Theosmiotic.When I followed my own questions into Peirce, I came to conclusions about the essential role of Peirce's commitment to the Episcopal church and Christianity that we are still debating. With this present consideration of Theosemiotic I see more clearly where the differences originate, at least from my perspective, and where our appreciation of Peirce can yet carry us along in harmonious inquiry.Raposa worries, justifiably, that an explicit identification with Christianity within the process of articulating the process and extension of semiotic inquiry sets ancillary and possibly dangerous borders around the products of musement, inquiry and meaning that yearns to stretch out inclusively to the full breadth of religious and philosophical thinkers. I share that concern but from another side. My worry is that Christianity, taken as such a limit, is really an abdication of the motivating principle of religion appearing in the establishment of the Christian community. But the scandal of the gospel, as my seminary New Testament professor called it, cannot be reduced out of the story. For instance, I find that Christianity in the thought of Jonathan Edwards, for example, is more capacious on the inside than it looks from the outside. Theosemiotic inquiry expands through the borders of Christianity rather than being limited by them. There is a vitality in the original idea that works like an engine in prompting further inquiry and pursuit of the truth, a truth that can only be lived as a pursuit of obedience to determinate ideas and a communal tradition. It may contain errors, but they are ours to work through, the grime we are called to get on our knees and remove.If I can add a candidate to the theosemiotic team, I propose C.S. Lewis. Lewis's conversion story from atheism to Christianity is mostly grounded in literature and mythology. His account of the Psalter is that these poems settled into the community, good dreams codified in words and made into a tradition. He has no difficulty accepting that “Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical.”24As these are told and retold, they evolve from something “originally merely natural,” and are raised by God above itself, “compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served.”25 Myths in the ancient world also collect experience into forms that evoke a reality beyond the temporal that Lewis calls “good dreams.” Such are the basis of scripture and ideas that pervade human consciousness and community. We live through them together. The realization of Christ, for Lewis, is the practical and living correspondent to the dreams in which God materializes our deepest hopes. Lewis seldom talks about Jesus as the superhuman icon of religious focus and fervor. He is more of a symbol, a fact but not an infatuation. Do any looking into Lewis on Christology and everything points to the fictional character Aslan, the Great Lion. There is no theory here, just a story, a character, that got itself thought. And that sounds so much like Peirce in “The Place of Our Age” when he says, “the first condition, therefore, the enunciation of the predicate, was fulfilled at the birth of Christ.”26Locating our embodiment of inquiry within an interpretive movement, as objects and interpreters, we engage in the interpretative work a matter of obedience, obligation, self-control. Raposa's book greatly expands the work of inquiry into theology and meaning, making an explicit claim on readers of Peirce and the tradition. Reading signs together as sign-selves we are not just able to, but responsible for, casting our self-signs into the hands of communal interpretation. Raposa encourages his readers to embrace the universe and its developing meaning in our own self-signs. Not because a failure to do so would be a sin or an error, but to avoid false reliance on univocity or the oblivion of abstraction. Raposa's persuasive account brings us face to face with a fulsome challenge of engaging in joining the evolving meaning of the universe.