A principal concern in the philosophy of religion has long been the extent of rational support for belief in God, and much of the debate has centred around the familiar list of standard arguments for God’s existence – the various versions of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments, the argument from religious experience, arguments from the nature of morality, and so on. Robert MacSwain’s impressive new study proposes an important addition to the list, the ‘argument from holiness’ or the hagiological argument.
The author does not claim to have devised or invented this argument, but rather to have identified and labelled what amounts to a distinctive strand of reasoning in a considerable number of religious writers, philosophers, and theologians: ‘despite its notable absence from standard discussions of theistic arguments and religious epistemology, a sufficient number of substantial figures have taken the basic idea of human holiness as divine evidence seriously enough that we should at least take it seriously as well’ (148). In a meticulous trawl through the relevant literature, MacSwain uncovers the way in which many key thinkers, including amongst others Basil Mitchell, Patrick Sherry, Sarah Coakley, Peter van Inwagen, Rowan Williams, and Stanley Hauerwas, have in various ways instanced the lives of saints as providing some kind of support for the truth of belief in God. Such a line of thought, as MacSwain points out, goes back at least as far as John Henry Newman, who, in his Lives of the English Saints (1844–5), observed that ‘As “the heavens declare the glory of God” as Creator, so are the saints the proper and true evidence of the God of Christianity, and tell out into all lands the power and grace of Him who made them’ (41).
But how exactly do the lives of the saints function as evidence? The notions of ‘sainthood’ and of ‘evidence’ are themselves far from straightforward, and MacSwain explores four definitions of the saint: ‘people in whom the holy or divine can been seen’ (Robert Adams); ‘those who have achieved an extraordinary degree of goodness’ (Patrick Sherry); ‘those in whom the transformation of human existence to Reality-centeredness is so much more advanced from the generality of us that it is readily noticed and acknowledged’ (John Hick); and finally the apophatic approach of Jean-Luc Marion, for whom ‘the phenomenality proper to holiness can only be manifested for those who have experienced it’ (90). As for the notion of evidence, MacSwain presents us with a detailed conspectus of the epistemic options that have been deployed in support of the rationality of religious belief, namely (i) deductive proof (Aquinas); (ii) formal probability (Swinburne); (iii) ‘“soft” or “moderate” rationalism’ (a broad category to which are assigned several writers including the present reviewer); (iv) reformed epistemology (Alvin Plantinga); (v) ‘interpretative ambiguity’ (John Hick); (vi) ‘atheist denial’ (including J. L. Mackie and Kai Nielsen); and (vii) ‘fideist acceptance’, which covers a range of positions including those of Kierkegaard, Barth, and more recently Lara Buchak. This bald list does scant justice to the careful analysis and copious citations offered for each of these respective options, and those working in the epistemology of religion, whether interested in sainthood or not, are likely to find in this part of the book what amounts to a serviceable and stimulating taxonomy in its own right.
We then turn to the central concern of the book, which is to examine ‘how three distinct understandings of sainthood are construed as different types of evidence for God or the divine’ (154). The first, which MacSwain dubs a ‘propositional’ approach, is typified by Sarah Coakley’s appeal to instances of supreme altruism which, she argues, ‘far exceed what could be accounted for in terms of … genetic and cultural fitness’ (166). Such a phenomenon invites the question of what makes such extraordinary goodness possible, and the best explanation, we are invited to conclude, is that sainthood is to be understood not as a purely human achievement, but (quoting Coakley’s ‘Evolution, Cooperation, and Divine Providence’) as being ‘only ultimately comprehensible as a response to divine grace’ (185). The second approach, dubbed ‘perceptual’, involves the idea that God’s activity is not so much inferred from premises about saintly lives, but rather that such lives are directly perceived as lives in which the holy or divine can be seen. And the third approach, labelled ‘performative’, suggests that saints can, by what they do, by how they have lived and how they died, become what Paul Moser has called ‘personifying evidence’ of God (219). In other words (drawing on the way this idea is framed by Rowan Williams), God does not so much give us arguments as give us ‘lives which respond to the call to take responsibility for making belief in God possible’ (231).
As the above summary may suggest, this is a book which is built around careful exegesis of the arguments and texts which the author has identified as exemplifying versions of the hagiological argument. The task is performed with exemplary clarity, and the result is a finely constructed volume that specialists in the philosophy of religion, and religious epistemology in particular, will welcome as an invaluable resource – one that uncovers and lays out for scrutiny what does indeed amount to a distinctive way, or set of ways, in which support might be offered for the rationality of belief in God, or the divine.
If once had to voice a reservation, it would be a wish that the author had allowed his admirably careful and detailed exegesis to make room for more of his own reactions and evaluations. As it is, MacSwain’s evaluative conclusions are guarded: he regards it as ‘eminently plausible’ that saints in the various senses discussed could be construed as natural signs pointing to God, but ‘leaves for others’ the question of whether such saints might be considered supernatural signs (230). It is not hard to see how the instances of sanctity referred to throughout the book might be subjected to alternative, deflationary explanations by the majority of contemporary analytic philosophers for whom anything other than naturalistic explanations is anathema. But given what he describes as his own ‘hermeneutical convictions’ (256), MacSwain would no doubt readily concede that all the arguments he discusses hinge on matters of interpretation. The impressive cumulative case from sanctity to the divine which he builds up depends at many of its stages on our being able to see things in a certain light – an approach that seems to allow (in Pascal’s phrase) ‘enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition’. And that will be seen as unavoidable if we agree, as I think we should, with the dictum to which MacSwain explicitly subscribes at one point: ‘our whole life is inescapably hermeneutical’ (199).
