THIS is one of a number of collected essays originally organised as lectures by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which Cambridge University Press has now reissued a quarter of a century or more later. It comes with an invitation to consider their overall significance both in their first setting and today.

In 1995, philosophy of religion was dominated by issues such as arguments for and against the existence of God, the problem of evil, and the nature of religious language. So, the proposal from Michael McGhee to consider some potential relationships with spirituality was adventurous, to say the least.

Equally impressive was the quality of the 14 commentators who agreed to participate. Admittedly, some of their proposals could easily have been foreseen, such as a role for Kierkegaard and Heidegger (Michael Weston) and William James and F. H. Bradley (Timothy Sprigge), or in reflections from other religions, as with Tibetan Buddhism and Islamic Sufism (Paul Williams and Oliver Leaman).

Fergus Kerr provides an early example of support for René Girard’s theory of how the mechanism of the scapegoat helps to make sense of the purpose behind Christ’s death. While Augustine’s account of self-knowledge is brought to bear in its own right in Rowan Williams’s essay, Stephen Clark demonstrates how badly skewed are so many modern presentations of Descartes’s philosophy, precisely because of their failure to take account of how his apparently narrow rationalism is in fact founded on a richer base, in an all-encompassing Augustinian psychology.

Two essayists (John Haldane and Anthony O’Hear) seek to identify a potential contribution from the visual arts, while Iris Murdoch, the best-known (then) contemporary advocate of such a position, is successfully modified by Janet Soskice to take more account of the everyday, of how even the lactation of a mother can be seen as a rational response as much as a natural one to her child. In other words, it is suggested that a wider notion of the psychology of belief is needed, beyond the narrowly intellectual, something that is also emphasised by Sarah Coakley.

In her review at the time, Ann Loades had remarked that “such a collection would have been inconceivable twenty years earlier.” But what of 30 years later? No doubt, in part stimulated by such discussions, change in the practice of the philosophy of religion can be detected in at least four directions.

First, there is now much greater willingness to acknowledge spiritual issues at the heart of much pre-modern philosophical writing. Influential here has been a book by the French academic, Pierre Hadot (d. 2010), Philosophy as a Way of Life, in which even Stoic physics is shown to have had a spiritual concern at its heart. Second, topics once considered exclusively theological are now commonly discussed by philosophers. The difference is most easily seen in recent introductions to the subject, such as Charles Taliaferro’s and Chad Meister’s Contemporary Philosophical Theology (2016). New issues are raised in a way that effectively undermines any supposition that the rather tired arguments for and against divine existence are all that matters.

Third, any narrowly intellectual approach to knowledge has been replaced by recognition of the need to give equal consideration to how emotion, desire, and context help to give shape to perceptions of the divine. The difference is nicely illustrated by the contrast between two Nolloth Professors of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford: the impressive rationalist constructions of Richard Swinburne, who held the chair between 1985 and 2002, and the present incumbent, Mark Wynn, for whom more material considerations (such as particular placement and spirituality) have become equally important.

Finally, as with the essays of Haldane and O’Hear, increasing importance has been attached to how the closely allied discipline of aesthetics might provide openings on to the divine — not that this is the only explanation of the burgeoning interest in relations between theology and the arts. But one indicator of the importance of the cognitive aspect comes from the empirical research financed over the past few years by the Templeton Religion Trust in relation to its project on “Art Seeking Understanding”.

But, if so much progress has been made, is there still any need to read the original essays? The short answer is “Yes,” because a recurring temptation remains to focus on only a few of these options.

The Revd Dr David Brown is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews.


Spiritual Life (Talking Philosophy)
Michael McGhee, editor
Cambridge University Press £19.99
(978-1-009-23021-6)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99