Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 20, 2023: In the late American Jesuit philosopher and theologian and Royce specialist Frank M. Oppenheim's masterful book Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987 - the year in which Oppenheim turned sixty-five) achieved an impressive synthesis of the work of the prolific American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916; Ph.D. in philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, 1878).
In Oppenheim's 1987 book Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion, he includes a "Chronology" of Royce's life (pp. xvii-xviii). In it, he notes that in 1902 "Royce starts his fourteen years of in-depth study of logic" (p. xvii) - which Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914) had urged him to undertake. Moreover, Oppenheim emphasizes that Royce wrote his 1913 The Problem of Christianity after he had his 1912 Peircean insight (pp. xiii, 9-10, 18, 22, 23, 31, 190, 161n.12, and 363n.19).
Oppenheim discussed Peirce most extensively in his 2005 ambitious book Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce's Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey (University of Notre Dame Press; for specific page references to Peirce, see the "Index of Names" [p. 493]).
Now, in Oppenheim's Chapter 12: "[Royce's] Empirico-Historical Method: First Stage" in his 1987 book Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion (pp. 183-204), he says the following about Royce's 1913 masterpiece in the philosophy of religion, The Problem of Christianity: "his [Royce's] selected ideas, designated 'Christian' simply by historical origin in [Christian] communal consciousness,, but eternally sown in the Universal Community by its Interpreter Logos-Spirit, stand in the truth and are true, whatever changes come" (Oppenheim, p. 192; italics in Oppenheim's text).
So what are Royce's "selected ideas, designated 'Christian'" in his 1913 masterpiece The Problem of Christianity (Macmillan, two volumes; but reprinted as one volume by the University of Chicago Press in 1968; and then the 1968 edition was reprinted by the Catholic University of America Press in 2001, with a "Foreword" by Frank m. Oppenheim, S.J. [pp. vii-xxxi])?
In Oppenheim's "Foreword" in the 2001 edition of Royce's 1913 masterpiece The Problem of Christianity, he informs us that for Royce's purposes in his 1913 masterpiece the "three essential ideas of Christianity which had found him without his devising them [p. 366 in Royce]" were "the three ideas of [1] community, [2] humankind's fallen state, and [3] its liberation (or atonement) by his generalized idea of Grace (or Loyalty)" (p. x).
In Oppenheim's "Foreword" in the 2001 edition of Royce's 1913 masterpiece, he writes of Royce's "prophetic voice" in his 1913 masterpiece (p. vii), and Oppenheim subsequently informs us that Amos was "one of Royce's favorite prophets" (p. xxiii).
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