John Rawls, Lapsed Episcopalian

An article in the Times of London Literary Supplement discusses the progressive Christian ideals that served as the foundation for John Rawls’ influential political philosophy.

The writer of A Theory of Justice, and the father of modern American political liberalism, Rawls (who died in 2002) apparently considered entering seminary as a young man and pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church, but ultimately walked away from the church, earned a Ph.D in philosophy and became one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

Recently, his senior philosophy thesis from his time as a Princeton undergrad, written in 1942, and entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community,” has been found.

From the Times article:

The moral importance of the separateness of persons, a fundamental theme of Rawls’s work, is strikingly anticipated in the moral and religious conception of community that lies at the heart of the thesis. Rawls proposes that the essential feature of human beings is our capacity for community, that sin deforms our essential nature and destroys community, and that faith is the realization of our nature through integration into community: our “openness” to God and other persons overcomes the terrible aloneness that issues from sin. Although the term “community” may suggest otherwise, the human fellowship in which we realize our nature does not destroy the separateness of individual persons, but is founded on an affirmation of their distinctness. Here is a revealing passage:

“We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted…

“The Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body shows considerable profundity on this point. The doctrine means that we shall be resurrected in our full personality and particularity, and that salvation is the full restoration of the whole person, not the wiping away of particularity. Salvation integrates personality into community, it does not destroy personality to dissolve it into some mysterious and meaningless ‘One’.”

The importance of the separateness of persons is further expressed in the idea that we need bodies, and faces, in order to be able to communicate with and recognize one another. It is also essential for understanding the significance of the Incarnation, whose importance is that it establishes a direct personal relation between us and God.