Josiah Royce - The Problem of Christianity.

The Problem of Christianity.

The final phase of Royce’s thought involved the application and further illustration of the concepts he had defended since 1881. Some have seen here a fundamental shift in Royce’s thinking but the evidence is far from conclusive. Royce’s hypothetical ontology, temporalism, personalism, his social metaphysics based on the fourth conception of being remain, along with the operation of agapic loyalty, and the unity of finite purposes in the ideal of the beloved community. There is no obvious shift in method and no overt move to abandon idealism. Royce himself declared the “successive expressions” of the philosophy of loyalty “form a consistent body of ethical as well as religious opinion and teaching, verifiable, in its main outlines, in terms of human experience, and capable of furnishing a foundation for a defensible form of metaphysical idealism.” (The Problem of Christianity, Vol. 1, p. ix) Royce never was an old style absolutist in either method or ontology but there were those among his peers who only came to recognize this in his later thought. Some of these believed he had changed his view in some fundamental way. Royce’s ethics and religious philosophy certainly matured, but the basic philosophical framework did not shift. Having provided throughout his career an idealistic way of grasping the Will, in contrast to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic treatment, it remained for Royce to rescue Pauline Christianity, in its universalized and modernized form, from the critique of Nietzsche and others who tended to understand will in terms of power and who had rightly observed that the historic doctrine was no longer believable to the modern mind. Striking in this work is the temporal account the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church and the communion of saints as a universal community. This community is a process of mutually interpretive activity which requires shared memory and hope. In seeking to show the reality of the invisible community, perhaps Royce was seeking communion with his departed son Christopher and his close friend William James, both of whom had died in 1910. Royce kept these and other personal tragedies far from the text of his published work, but the grieving certainly affected and deepened his insight and perhaps exaggerated the quality of his hope.

Two key influences on the thought of Royce were Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. In fact, it can be argued that a major way Peirce's ideas entered the American academy is through Royce's teaching and writing, and eventually that of his students. Peirce also reviewed Royce's The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885). Some have claimed that Peirce also supervised Royce's Ph.D., but that is impossible as Peirce arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1879.