This is my second essay on Berkeley’s philosophy of religion, in which I want to outline the idiosyncratic nature of both signs and grace in Berkeley’s philosophy, to suggest that they both operate on a phenomenological level in the subject. I will furthermore be contrasting Berkeley’s views with those of later phenomenologists, notable Eliade, Husserl and Hegel. You can read my first essay on the Role of Berkeley’s God here: https://dionysius.substack.com/p/the-role-of-berkeleys-god
Firstly, Berkeley completely dismisses the possibility of a universal, or the abstraction of a particular into a universal. He points out that “upon looking into my own mind I do not find that I have or can have these general abstract ideas of a man or a triangle above mentioned, or of colour prescinded from all particular colours.”(Berkeley, The Seventh Dialogue) Universals are thus empty without particulars, and therefore a universal cannot exist as an abstraction of a particular. Berkeley then goes on to conclude, “I do not perceive that I can by any faculty, whether of intellect or imagination, conceive or frame an idea of that which is impossible and includes a contradiction.”(The Seventh Dialogue) Thus Berkeley puts forth the argument that there is no way to abstract from particulars in such a way so as to include them all and not have a contradiction within the universal. However, there is still abstract thought. How does Berkeley then account for this? By positing particulars as an embodiment of some general term or abstract idea, saying “May we not admit general ideas, though we should not admit them to be made by abstraction, or though we should not allow of general abstract ideas? To me it seems a particular idea may become general by being used to stand for or represent other ideas; and that general knowledge is conversant about signs or general ideas made such by their signification...”(The Seventh Dialogue) What Berkeley is effectively positing here is that a singular individual may come to be lifted into a general idea, as being the embodiment of many other ideas. Berkeley then furthermore goes on to argue that grace can be abstracted in this way as well, “there may be diverse true and useful propositions concerning the one as well as the other? And that grace may, for aught you know, be an object of our faith, and influence our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones, although we cannot attain a distinct idea of it, separate or abstracted from God the author, from man the subject, and from virtue and piety its effects?” Grace, much like a general idea can also be abstracted.
The most obvious theological consequence of such an idea, which Berkeley does not cite here, but which is quite radical, is that Christ can be read as a purely profane being who is only a representation, or a sign, of the sacred as a general idea. That is to say, the infinite is encapsulated in the finite. We can further draw this out to the concept of space, certain physical spaces can become symbols of the sacred, “We illustrate spiritual things by corporeal”(Berkeley The Seventh Dialogue). As Mircea Eliade pointed out, a church, for instance, may be a physical place, but it phenomenologically embodies the sacred in our experience. That is to say, the matter of faith and grace, are entirely within our experience of being. These phenomena, furthermore, do not exist on a rational, but in a whole experiential domain, “having granted those signs may be significantly, though they should not suggest ideas represented by them, provided they serve to regulate and influence our wills, passions, or conduct, you have consequently granted that the mind of man may assent to propositions containing such terms, when it should not perceive distinct ideas marked by those terms.”(The Seventh Dialogue). The sacred is not something to be thought, it is something to be felt, “It seems to follow that a man may believe the doctrine of the trinity… although he doth not frame in his mind any abstract or distinct ideas of trinity, substance, or personality; provided that this doctrine of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier makes proper impressions on his mind, producing therein love, hope, gratitude, and obedience, and thereby becomes a lively operative principle, influencing his life and actions…”(The Seventh Dialogue)
Furthermore, Berkeley clearly views these experiential phenomena as being key to understanding, to gaining real substantive knowledge, “Nothing, I say, is more natural than to make the things we know a step towards those we do not know; and to explain and represent things less familiar by others which are more so.”(Berkeley, The Seventh Dialogue) Our experience of these signs, although they do not impart ideas, nonetheless are a critical point in developing substantive knowledge. In other words, Berkeley’s idealism sets up a clear subjectivity to our thought, “Science and faith agree in this, that they both imply assent of the mind”(Berkeley, The Seventh Dialogue). What is important to note here is that Berkeley remains tied to a sensuous understanding of psychology and cognition, that is to say that Berkeley does not understand anything along the lines of a transcendental subject, and indeed seems to explicitly reject such a possibility. Whereas the later father of phenomenology, Husserl, necessarily believed that we need to be able to transcend both the subject and sense perception in order to be able to gain an understanding of other subjects in a world out there, Berkeley explicitly denied such a possibility, being a strong immaterialist. However, what this means is that Berkeley rejects the possibility for any distinction between non-substantive and substantive knowledge, as Locke and Hume did, all ideas are substantive, and so are the affections caused in us by experience, “Faith, I say, is not an indolent perception, but an operative persuasion of mind, whichever worketh some suitable action, disposition, or emotion in those who have it; as it were human affairs.”(Berkeley, The Seventh Dialogue) Berkeley thus makes it clear that faith and other emotions such as it produce in us substantive truths.
These substantive truths which are produced in us by grace are the knowledge of a kind of goodness. Berkeley seems to be in accord with the Neoplatonists, such as Pseudo-Dionysius as well as the German idealists, such as Hegel: certain things act as a bridge through which the profane subject reaches the sacred, the absolute, or the One, and is thus imparted certain emotion, it is through beauty that man finds the good, or God. Likewise, for Berkeley, through our emotional response to certain signs, such as scripture, we have certain moral lessons impressed upon us, that is, we reach God, it creates in us a “union between the divine and human nature…”(Berkeley, The Seventh Dialogue) This is not unlike Hegel’s conception of aesthetics, where he made the point that beauty acts as a metaphysical unifier, unifying our own existence, with a universal God. Indeed, for Berkeley, this concept of faith, is more precisely one of the crossroads where man is capable of meeting God, or intersecting with God. Our ideas come from our collision with God, and Berkeley, as we saw, makes faith an intermediary for that, as it is a “disposition or emotion” which develops into substantive being. Likewise, for Hegel, the intersection of God, or the absolute, and history is key to his philosophical system. Indeed, this notion of the sacred, being encapsulated into signs, or into material reality, is ever present in Hegel’s own Philosophy of Religion. God for Hegel, is encapsulated into the material historical moments in human history. Berkeley does not hold as totalistic a view on that front, divinity is simply something which is encapsulated in a particular subject’s experience. This is the same point as the one I brought up with regards to Husserl, though Berkeley does in many ways anticipate these later philosophies, he occupies an extremely unique and idiosyncratic place in the history of philosophy. Indeed, Berkeley represents a complete withdrawal into the subject. Whereas God for someone like Hegel, or ideas for Husserl, were certainly real and objective in themselves, these concepts are exclusively in the mind of the subject for Berkeley.
What this reflects is a deeply individualist or protestant ethos with regards to the individual’s faith. One’s faith entirely depends on his own experience of the phenomenal signs associated with that faith, or from which he draws that faith. This seems, at first glance, to imply a radical relativism to Berkeley’s system. No, rather, what it is, is a removal of the need for an objective link to God, a subject’s relationship with and relation to takes place entirely within his own mind. This has some hugely important theological implications, firstly, it completely goes against the Catholic theology of interpretation being reserved to the clergy(and thus why Berkeley reflects a fundamentally protestant position). Indeed, interpretation cannot possibly be reserved to the clergy, because the experience of any person regardless of their standing or title is based on one’s emotional experience of faith, without rationally cognizing it as what it is, precisely because we “frame no abstract idea of the union between the divine and human nature.”(Berkeley, The Seventh dialogue) A subject does not need someone else to think of divinity for him, he experiences it for himself through the material signs of divinity.
As such, Berkeley provides an incredibly idiosyncratic phenomenology of religious experience based upon an entirely subjective experiential understanding of faith. Historically, this view is entirely unique to Berkeley in terms of his contemporaries as well as later philosophers and thinkers concerned with the way in which religious faith is experienced by human beings.