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Utility, Understanding and Creativity in the Study of Religions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Chris Arthur
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Extract

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

If thought were the mere discovery of interesting facts, its indulgence, in a world full of desperate evils and among men crushed beneath the burden of daily tasks too hard for their solitary strength, would be the act of a traitor.

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 867 , January 1993 , pp. 14 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Collingwood, R.G., Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge, Oxford 1924, p.15Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim, London 1954, p.14Google Scholar.

4 Hampshire, Stuart, ‘Commitment and Imagination’, in Black, Max (ed), The Morality of Scholarship, New York 1967, p.55Google Scholar.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature, (Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902), London 1928, p.41Google Scholar [From Lecture 2].

8 Berger, Peter, The Heretical Imperative, Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation, London 1980, p. 25Google Scholar.

9 Hick, John, God and the Universe of Faiths, London 1973, p. 120fGoogle Scholar.

10 Cox, Harvey, Turning East, the Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism, London 1979, p. 175Google Scholar.

11 Clarke, Bryan, “The Causes of Biological Diversity”, Scientific American, Vol 233 no 2 (August 1975), p. 60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

12 Ibid.

13 Raine, Kathleen, The Inner Journey of the Poet and Other Papers, (ed Keeble, Brian), London 1982, p. 13Google Scholar.

14 Eliade, Mircea, No Souvenirs, Journal 1957‐969, (tr Johnson, Fred H), London 1978, p. 119Google Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Weltmusik’In Texte zur Musik: 1970–1977, Koln 1978, pp. 468–476. An English translation by Bernhard Radloff appears in the Dalhousie Review, Vol 69 no 3 (1989), pp. 318–326.