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Aligning with lives of faith

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Abstract

The philosophical and theological discussion regarding religious faith has primarily concerned itself with the abstract issues of what faith is, whether it can be rationally held, and how an agent can acquire, sustain, or deepen faith. The issue of how we should orient ourselves to the faith of others and the role such orientation might play in the religious life hasn’t been much discussed. It is this topic that I propose to address in this essay. I do so by considering a little-known nineteenth-century saint of the Eastern Orthodox church, St. Jacob of Alaska, exploring the ways in which the liturgy calls for its participants to engage with St. Jacob’s life of faith. I develop and defend the claim that it calls for the religiously committed to align their lives with the lives of exemplars such as St. Jacob.

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Notes

  1. For biographical details regarding St. Jacob, see Oleska (2010), part III, which contains some of his journal entries.

  2. The view of faith with which I'll operate is McKaughan (2016)'s "action-centered" account, which understands faith to be a blend of trust in a person and a commitment to following that person or a way of life.

  3. MacFarquhar (2015) offers fascinating descriptions of such people. In drawing attention to these so-called secular saints, I don't wish to suggest that nothing seems "off" in the case of some religious saints.

  4. To be clear, I don't deny that there are ways to emulate St. Jacob's life that are both achievable and desirable. It's just that those ways are typically not ones that involve closely approximating the depth and scope of the man's life of faith. When I use the term "emulate" in what follows, I'll have emulation of this rich and specific sort in mind.

  5. Schmemann (1974). I'll insert page references to this book parenthetically in the text.

  6. I address this transformation in more detail in Cuneo (2014), reprinted in Cuneo (2016).

  7. Here I draw upon comments in Wolterstorff (2008, pp. 141, 366–367). While the Christian tradition commits itself to there being post-mortem life, I limit my attention here to pre-mortem lives.

  8. Strictly speaking, this implies that we should speak of investing in a life, or history of a life, of faith. In what follows, I'll understand the locution "life of faith" to incorporate this qualification (and will sometimes simply speak of investing in the history of a life of faith).

  9. The terminology is from Tuomela (1995, pp. 232–234).

  10. In what follows, I'll speak of standing in the full representation relationship to St. Jacob. I'll assume, however, that, if we do so, it is in virtue of his life of faith. Recall, moreover, that the full representation relation concerns ideals that are central to a movement or life of faith.

  11. There are other characterizations of faith in which alignment might imply having faith, such as that presented in Kvanvig (unpublished).

  12. I gesture at why in Cuneo (2015), reprinted in Cuneo (2016). My thanks to the members of the Summer Seminar on the Virtue of Faith in Bellingham, WA, Luke Reinsma, Nick Wolterstorff, and two anonymous referees for their feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. Work on this essay was made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, although the views presented in this essay don't necessarily represent those of the foundation.

References

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  1. University of Vermont, 70 S. Williams, Burlington, VT, 05401, USA

    Terence Cuneo

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  1. Terence Cuneo
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Correspondence to Terence Cuneo.

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Cuneo, T. Aligning with lives of faith. Int J Philos Relig 81, 83–97 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9602-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9602-1

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