Boredom and Curiosity - My Talk To The Class of 2016

This year I had the rare privilege of giving the Convocation Address to our new students.  Here's a bit of what I said, with a link to the full text:

"I think boredom often begins when we start to care too much about those serious stories we tell about our lives, the ones we hope others will care about. If we become too fixated on accomplishing, in some distant future, the practical and respectable things that will make others respect us, we can easily come to view the events of the current day as an obstacle to be overcome on the way. As a result, rather than enjoying our today, we endure it."

Future Hopes, Present Experience, and the Wisdom of the Past

A reflection on Henry Bugbee's Inward Morning, his entry dated Friday, September 5.

Bugbee writes: "Of experience...we may hope for understanding in our own time, and in this we do not seem to have the edge on preceding generations of men."

Science grows from one generation to another.  What we know is more advanced than what previous generations knew.  But precisely because of this, we are alienated from what science will know, what it aims to know when it reaches its goal.  Science uses experience, it swims in the medium of experience on a long-distance swim.  We are like generations of migratory butterflies, none of us making the whole journey, but each of us making part of it so that the next generation may fly further.  Standing on one another's shoulders we become the giants upon whose shoulders our intellectual descendants may stand.

At first blush, experience seems less worth knowing, since it is subjective, unquantifiable, subject to the winds of time and the diurnal tides of the chemistry of our blood.  But experience is immediate.  No generation is privileged; every generation receives the same share.  Here our knowledge is not a deposit that we hope will gain interest for our children; it is something in our hands and for us now.  The wisdom of the past does not advance the next generation so much as clarify our own.

Bugbee again: "It is not a question of our beginning from where they leave off and going on to supersede them. We are fortunate if we can become communicant in our own way with what they have to say." 

Tradition has roots that mean handed-down.  Bugbee reminds me, gives me words to articulate, why it is worth continuing to try to read ancient wisdom.  He reminds me why, when I could have chosen to work in science, it is not a bad choice to work as a teacher, priest, curator, historian, poet, librarian - a custodian of the narratives of experience.  Science aims forward beyond our lives; but experience is here now, where we live.  Is it such a bad thing to live here and now?

Sorcery and Pollution

In the Apocalypse of St John on Patmos, he writes that some will be excluded from heaven by their wickednesses. [1]  He describes them with florid metaphor, calling them "the dogs," for example.  He goes on to name some of them: sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, idolaters, and so on.  A nasty lot, to be sure, all of them worshiping things not worthy of worship.

Of course, sorcery isn't much of a problem for us these days.  At least, that's how most of us see it. But some folks are concerned that magic in modern fiction poses a threat to sanctity.  Several years ago I wrote a book called From Homer To Harry Potter, in which one of my aims was to help Christians (many of whom were concerned about the sorcery of young Mr. Potter and its influence on their children) think about myth, fantasy, and magic.  Not all magic is equal, I argued, and not all of it should alarm us.  

So this word "sorcery" in St. John's Apocalypse caught my eye recently.  Perhaps sorcery is a bad thing, after all?  The word St. John uses is pharmakos, related to the Greek pharmakeia and to our word "pharmacy."  It means one who makes potions, and especially potions used to poison others. 

What's wrong with this version of sorcery should be obvious to everyone: it amounts to the idolatry of power and the abuse of nature to worship that idol.  To put it in simpler terms: it is an idolatry of power because it regards human lives as things to be sacrificed on the altar of power.  We kill because we desire to dominate.  Selah.

And it is an abuse of nature because it regards chemistry as a tool of domination of others.  It concocts in order to destroy, and, again, it destroys in order to dominate.

Christians who are concerned about magic should ponder this.  Is God concerned with hand-waving, spells, and incantations?  I doubt it.  But it would appear that God is not pleased with using chemistry to do violence, and with regarding natural science as a tool for domination of other people.  I know it alarms me, at any rate.

I haven't got a quick conclusion here.  My point is not that we need to do away with chemistry or hold witch-hunts for chemists.  But I frequently return to Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, [2] where he offers a way to speed up science by dividing up the four causes that Aristotle said all scientists need to seek.  Bacon suggests that if we can find the material and efficient causes of things - the matter and energy that cause particular contingent states and arrangements of things in the world - that should be enough for science.  Seeking the other two causes - formal and final causation - amounts to something like seeking the meaning of things and their purposes in the world.  To require scientists to seek these things is probably an undue burden on the natural sciences, and it certainly bogs down their progress by engaging them in endless debates about metaphysics and ethics.  Bacon leaves these latter questions to theologians and metaphysicians, freeing natural scientists to much more rapid progress in their research.  Bacon's division of causes was a brilliant stroke, and modern science owes it very much.

In the same book, Bacon finds he must make a defense of chemistry.  He does so by means of an analogy between chemistry and sorcery. [3]  It is prohibited to converse or do business with evil spirits, he says, but it is not prohibited to inquire into their nature and power.  Those who do the former are sorcerers, but those who do the latter are theologians.  Bacon adds, as an aside, that he's not sure either one is doing anything real, because those alleged spirits are "fabulous and fantastical."  Still, the analogy is helpful: it may be unethical to use poisons on other people, but it is certainly not wrong to seek to understand the nature and power of poisons.  So natural science, when it seeks to understand the nature and power of chemical compounds, for instance, is doing something like theology.

Here is where I find myself at a loss: theology has a story it can tell about why we should not converse with demons, and for those who live in the community that is shaped by that story, it is compelling.  But what story can we tell that will teach us how to avoid modern sorcery?  We have traded albs and chasubles for lab coats, and for the most part, this has been a positive development.  But we have not been intentional about telling a good story about science, and we have liberated it from questions of meaning and purpose - a liberation that we have recently begun to question, as we "have become death, the destroyer of worlds."  We have become unwitting sorcerers all, crafting potions that do wider and greater violence than the ancient theologians could have imagined.

*******

[1]  Rev 22.14

[2]  See Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, 2.VII.3, e.g.

[3]  Bacon, op. cit., 2.VI.2.

Philosophy Begins in Wonder

Aristotle famously remarked that the love of wisdom - philosophy - begins in wonder.  This is correct.

It has since been noted that philosophy aims at the conclusion of wonder.  This, unlike the first statement, might not be correct.

So much depends on what we understand the aim of philosophy to be.  If we model it on the applied sciences, then its aim is to solve particular problems, in which case it aims to be done with its work.  The conclusion of a chain of reasoning becomes its consummation, and the consummation becomes the end.

But if philosophy should also aim to make us scientists as Peirce understood science - he says it is "the pursuit of those who desire to find things out" and something that is carried out in a community, not by an isolated individual - then it aims not just at solving problems but at introducing us to the world.

Bugbee points out (Inward Morning, August 31 entry) that in wonder, "reality has begun to sink into us."  Think about it: when you really wonder at something, isn't it because of a disclosure?  Wonder may seem to concern what is hidden, but the beginning of wonder is also the beginning of an opening, when the world opens to us.  If it were not so, we would not even know to wonder.

Philosophy teaches us - or ought to teach us - to open ourselves in return.  This opening of ourselves is not the conclusion of wonder but the development of the habit of wonder.  I don't mean the slack-jawed laziness that poses as wonder and pretends that all things are wonderful while being open to none of them, but, as Bugbee puts it, a commitment to being in the wilderness and the patience to let ourselves be "overtaken...by that which can make us at home in this condition."

Faith, Hope, and Certainty

“Certainty may be quite compatible with being at a loss to say what one is certain of.  Indeed I seriously doubt if the notion of ‘certainty of,’ or ‘certainty that’ will take us accurately to the heart of the matter.  It seems to me that certainty is at least very much akin to hope and faith.  And I agree with Gabriel Marcel that it would be a mistake to undertake the interpretation of hope and of faith under what I will call the aspect of specificity, as if hope were essentially ‘hope that,’ and faith ‘belief that.’  Likewise, then, of certainty: Perhaps it too is not a matter of knowledge we can be said to possess.” 

Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp.36-37.

The Comfort of Certainty

"Only once, as far as I remember, in all my lifetime have I experienced the pleasure of praise--not for what it might bring but in itself.  That pleasure was beatific; and the praise that conferred it was meant for blame.  It was that a critic said of me that I did not seem to be absolutely sure of my conclusions."

--Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 1.10. (1897)

I often turn to Peirce not just for technical philosophical matters but also for insights like this one.  What sort of people am I interested in surrounding myself with?  It is most comfortable to surround myself with people who share my views and who espouse them with the air of certainty.  But as Peirce reminds us in "The Fixation of Belief," the great danger there is that in so doing I cut myself off from seeing my own errors and from improving my thinking. 

As with so many things worth remembering, it is hard to keep this in mind.  We need not just people who think differently from the way we think but also communities that will help us return to those words and ideas that sharpen us and provoke us to thought.  This is the challenge of theology and of philosophy, and of liturgies, both sacred and secular - to remind us of what we ought to remember while at the same time challenging us to resist the comfort of resting in what seems sure.  As Augustine writes, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord."  Until then, until our hearts find rest in the absolute, we should be wary of certainty, which is so often the enemy of learning.

Bugbee and the Tillage of the Soul

In the opening entry of The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee writes

“I have yet to discover how to say what moves me to the endless search and research, the reflective turning over in my mind of experience.  The turning over is all so much tilling….All this tilling can be but a burying deeper of what ought to be coming out.  The moments in which something reliable has seemed to come of it all have impressed me as sudden.  Insight is earned, to be sure, but it is not steered, and it must find its own articulate form.  If it is to become more than sporadic and utterly ephemeral, one must pay attention to it, it must be worked out.”  

(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp.33-34.

This is as much about philosophy as about mysticism; but it is a philosophic attention to mysticism.  The difficulty is not discovering what moves me to search; that is already known, albeit in a way that is not easily said.  The difficulty is in learning how to say it.  “God” and “the soul” and “eternity” all present themselves as shorthand for this motive.  It is enough to say them, sometimes, but they are placeholders.  They must not be said in vain.  We do not possess God; we seek God.  God is, as Eriugena intimated (in his description of what it means to create), both that which we seek and that which impels our seeking.  God’s creativity and origin-ality are complex, even if God is simple.

"Come, Let Us Reason Together": Thinking About God

A student in my philosophy of religion class recently asked me, "Do we really need to put this much thought into God?  Is it not okay for me to believe without all the philosophical questions?"

On the one hand, yes, it is okay for you to believe without being a philosopher.  As William James points out, we often decide to believe religious, ethical, and aesthetic propositions on insufficient evidence, and we often do so justly.  Sometimes you've just got to choose, even if you can't prove you've made the right choice.

And I'm sympathetic with this student's position.  Faith can be, as James puts it, passional.  When people question our passions, or put restrictions on them, that can feel like a violation of something very personal and intimate.  In those times we feel that the person telling us we may not believe is a dogmatist and a tyrant.

On the other hand, I think there are some good reasons to spend time thinking philosophically about God. Here are five reasons why I think religious people - and specifically but not exclusively Christians - ought to do so.  

First, if your belief is based in Jewish and Christian scriptures, you might find the commandment to "love the Lord your God with all your...mind" to be sufficient reason.  If you love God, why would you withhold your mind from your worship?  And if you claim to be giving your whole self in worship but withhold your reason, aren't you in danger of committing the error of Ananias and Sapphira?

Second, thinking about God brings us into community with others.  It's a way of putting our beliefs into words, and when we do that, we invite others to consider them with us.  

Third, lots of people have opinions about God, and some opinions about God lead people to do violent things to others.  If we disagree with that violence, and want to stop it, we have two choices: we can oppose it with equal and opposite violence, or we can try to reason with others.  Perhaps more importantly, we can reason with those who might one day become violent and help them form reasonable and peaceable beliefs. It's hard to reason about others' opinions if we aren't able to reason about our own opinions.

Fourth, even if our reasoning about God is inconclusive (as it often is!) it is a kind of exercise for the mind, one that might prepare us for the conversations I just mentioned and also for solving lots of other kinds of problems.

Finally, thinking about God can help us discover idols in our own thinking.  It's a kind of self-examination.  If you take God seriously, then you probably want to make sure you don't worship the wrong thing.  My experience tells me that when I think about very difficult problems, part of me gets tired and wants to settle on any old solution so that I can be done thinking.  But that settling on a workable solution might well get in the way of finding the best solution.  Similarly, settling for an easy theology might get in the way of finding the best theology.  Will I ever find the best theology?  I admit I'm not sanguine about this.  But why should that keep me from longing and trying to make the theology I have better?  At any rate, surely I should try to avoid believing in the wrong thing.  I find Merold Westphal's position to be a helpful one: skeptics of religion are often better idol-detectors than I am.

What do you think?