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ABSTRACT
This paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of ‘living religion’ and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski’s recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters with exemplars of moral qualities, of a sort that invite admiration and emulation. A plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity is distinguished, each reflecting a distinct form of spiritual aspiration, which will show in the lives of the members of different traditions. I develop this claim by focusing on the ways that spiritual aspirants can encounter exemplars through their depictions in spiritual narrative. It emerges that narrative encounters can activate certain forms of admiration and enable certain forms of emulation if they depict the suffering of exemplars.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors and to two anonymous referees for very generous comments on earlier drafts of this paper and to an audience at Oxford for helpful discussion of this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Examples of a strong form of the belief model include Mawson, Belief in God, while a noted champion of a strong form of the practice model is Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension.
2. Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs; Kasulis, Shinto.
3. Bennett-Hunter, Ineffability and Spiritual Experience.
4. Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion.
5. Cooper, “Sense, Mystery, Practice.”
6. Harrison, “Embodied Values in Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” 33.
7. Burley, Rebirth and the Stream of Life; Wynn, Renewing the Senses.
8. Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension; Stump, Wandering in Darkness.
9. Wynn, Renewing the Senses, 127.
10. Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory.
11. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Virtue Theory.
12. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Virtue Theory, chs. 2 and 3.
13. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Virtue Theory, ch. 2, sections 5 and 6.
14. Daodejing, ch. 19. Classic examples of zhen ren from The Book of Zhuangzi are Butcher Ting (ch. 3), the Bellstand Maker (ch. 17), and the Old Fisherman (ch.19).
15. Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects, 4.
16. On the ‘moral beauty’ of exemplars, see Kidd, “Beauty, Virtue, and Religious Exemplars.” A study of the aesthetics of exemplars in Buddhist traditions are Cooper, “Buddhism, Beauty, and Virtue” and Kidd, “Beautiful Bodhisattvas: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Exemplarity.”
17. See note 13 above.
18. Kidd, “Epistemic Injustice and Religion.”
19. Wolf, “Moral Saints.”
20. Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, ch.2.
21. Zagzebski, in public debate, University of Genoa, 6 October 2017.
22. Christensen and Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature.
23. Cooper, “Living with Mystery.”
24. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
25. Kidd, “Exemplars, Ethics, and Illness Narratives.”
26. Harrison, “Embodied Values and Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” 22.
27. O’Neill, “The Power of Example.”
28. Annas, The Morality of Happiness; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge; Crary, Beyond Moral Judgement.
29. The Buddha, Sayings of the Buddha, 75.
30. Harrison, “Embodied Values and Muslim-Christian Dialogue,” 33.
31. Stump, Wandering in the Darkness, 218. Perkins, The Suffering Self.
32. Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension, 23.
33. Cooper, Convergence with Nature, chs. 7–9. Møllgaard, An Introduction to Daoist Thought, ch.2, challenges such cheerful takes on Zhuangzi and on Daoism.
34. Kidd, “Adversity, Wisdom, and Exemplars,” gives a fuller discussion of the relationship between experiences of adversity and the attainment of exemplarity.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ian James Kidd
Ian James Kidd is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include comparative philosophy of religion, exemplarist virtue theory, and themes in Indian and Chinese philosophy. His website is https://sites.google.com/site/dfl2ijk/