Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II.
Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized, in his phrase. My counter is that salvation naturalized is rather thin beer, so thin in fact that I don't think it deserves the name 'salvation.' Salvation naturalized is salvation denatured. But I don't want to denigrate in the least what is positive in Ryan's suggestions. My point is rather that he does not go far enough. Ryan does not deliver salvation; what he delivers is a substitute for salvation.
According to Ryan,
. . . salvation is an achievement of deep and genuine patience accomplished through a calming of the mind and a contemplation of the fact that the frustration, resentment, and anger with which it frequently reacts to the course of mundane events are: (a) inappropriate, given the fact that on the whole life and the world are very good and (b) unnecessary, given the fact that the mind can replace resentment and the others with patience.
The pursuit of mental quiet is a proximate goal of meditation practice. It is a remarkable state, difficult to attain, but possible to attain by those willing to work hard enough. Preserving the state of mental calm outside the period of formal meditation is even more difficult. It is easy to be a monk in a monastery; the trick is to be one in a marketplace. Although those who have pursued, attained, and written about mental quiet have often been rooted in traditions replete with heavy metaphysical and religious 'baggage,' mental quiet can be approached under epoché of these metaphysical and religious commitments. In plain English, one needn't believe in God or accept any theology or any metaphysics including naturalistic metaphysics, to reap the benefits of meditation and its mental calming. And from this a deep patience can be expected to arise, as Ryan points out.
But does this deserve to be called salvation? It seems to me that if we are to think carefully and precisely about these difficult matters we should be very careful with our terminology. What Ryan is describing is very close to the ataraxia or tranquillitas animi promoted by the ancient Stoics and Skeptics. Well then, why not give it some such name as unperturbedness or mental tranquillity?
I am suggesting that it serves no good purpose to use the religious term 'salvation' to refer to that highly desirable state of mind that Ryan describes. We must not so rig our terminology as to foreclose on the possibility of genuine salvation, salvation as it has been understood in the major religions. I'm not saying that there is salvation in this further, genuine sense. I am saying that we ought not, by a hasty terminological decision, to foreclose on its possibility.
One characteristic of genuine salvation is that it is a saving of one's existence rather than a mere transformation of one's mental state. Even if one were to attain and maintain the state of equanimity Ryan describes, that would do nothing to rescue one from the evil of death. That death is a great evil is of course a controversial point. The epistemology of naturalism is a third-person epistemology, and from a third-person point of view, the death of the individual appears to be something quite natural, something which, if not exactly to be welcomed, is at least not be called evil. (Is it evil that autumn's leaves pass out of existence to be replaced come spring by numerically distinct ones? We too fall from the tree of life, but others will take our places. Where is the tragedy in that?) So I might expect some argument from Ryan the naturalist on the question whether death of the individual is an evil.
But given that death is an evil, as it seems to be from the first=person point of view, then any notion of salvation that did not include an overcoming of death in some form, individual or transindividual, whether through the resurrection of the body, or the continuance of a Platonic soul, or by absorption in Brahman, an absorption that did not completely erase that which is absorbed, or entry into Nirvana, or in some other way, would not be a full-blooded notion of salvation. To be saved in the most fundamental sense of the term is to be saved from destruction. One who can meet his destruction with equanimity is better than one who cannot, but he is destroyed just the same, and to say that his salvation consists in his equanimity in the face of physical and mental destruction is to engage in an illicit semantic stretch.
A second characteristic of genuine salvation is that it is salvation from an unsatisfactory predicament that is not a mere result of our lack of mind control. It is certainly true that much of our suffering is self-induced by inept mental moves and by a remediable failure to exercise mental discipline. But there are also the factors that are not in our power. I can improve my thinking and enlighten myself to some extent, but my mind remains fundamentally dark. My understanding has drastic limits and I fall into confusion easily. I can purify and ennoble my desires and affections to some extent, but my heart remains foul at bottom. People who examine themselves honestly will see the corruption in their own hearts. And I can exercise and strenghten my will, but it remains weak and easily suborned.
It is as if our condition is a fallen one: we are not what we ought to be, and there is nothing we can do, individually or collectively, to make good our defects. For this reason we need salvation, a salvation that cannot be identified with the paltry self-improvement that we can achieve on our own, and even then only intermittently and after strenuous work tha only a tiny minority have the time and energy for.
A third characteristic of genuine salvation is that is a salvation to a state of genuine happiness and well-being, a higher life that in rare moments we glimpse as a possibility. To be saved is to be delivered from misery, evil, ignorance, finitude, to this genuine happiness. The ability to cope patiently and tranquilly with the mundane is a sorry substitute for this true happiness.
It is important to realize that even if there is no higher life and there is no salvation such as I have described it, my point remains unaffected, the point being that we ought not foreclose on its possibility by an inept terminological move.
I want to admit, though, that Ryan could reasonably oppose me by saying that, since naturalism is true,what I am calling a possibility is not a possibility. It may well be that here, as in so many other areas of philosophy, a stand-off is unavoidable.