CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 13
ENDINGS:
SOME BRIEF MUSINGS
My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.
JOHN BANVILLE
This work is bookended by two quotes from The Sea, a masterly work by the Irish writer John Banville (born 1945). In the above passage, rich with symbolic associations, Banville holds before us the chilling vision of stepping into Charon’s boat to be ferried across the Stygian darkness to the place of the dead without having managed to figure out what life was all about in the first place. We leave behind a mysterious and puzzling world, through which we passed uncomprehendingly, and prepare to enter another realm about which we know even less. It is a thought that many prefer to ignore.
Life is a mystery—something with so many impenetrable and uncomprehended dimensions that our minds simply cannot take it in. We can only cope with such a mystery by filtering out what little we can grasp, thus reducing it to what our minds can accommodate so that reality is displaced by what is rationally manageable. Some withdraw from any intellectual engagement of this kind, believing that it is pointless. The wise persist, however, knowing that any worthwhile insights come only by an uncomfortable but necessary stretching of our minds.
For Richard Dawkins, our universe is genuinely mysterious. How can the human mind, seemingly designed to cope with the quotidian threats and opportunities upon which survival depends, conceivably take in the vastness of our universe? “Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved as it was to cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through medium distances in Africa.”[1] I agree with him entirely. I fear that some of his more dogmatic rationalist friends might demur at his reference to an “all too limited human mind,” yet Dawkins has science on his side at this point, and they will just have to get used to this. Recognition of the limitations of the human mind is not, however, an insight that is restricted to modern physics but is a signature characteristic of the human predicament.
Some suggest that mystery is just a superstitious person’s way of referring to an irrationality. As a slogan, this suggestion is both slick and simple; as a guide to reality, however, it is superficial and deeply misleading. Those of us who have studied quantum theory know it has developed its own rationality of our fuzzy world, which calls into question inadequate common-sense conceptions of what is reasonable, shaped by our limiting experience of reality. Lesser rationalities—such as those of the bygone “Age of Reason”—tend to evade the challenge of more expansive visions of rationality by dubbing them “irrational.” In fact, their views are corrected and relativized by scientific advance, in both the natural and the social sciences. Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein have all played critical roles in challenging such naive visions of rationality.
More recently, postmodernism has claimed that science, religion, and philosophy are tainted with cultural influences, causing us to conflate truth with power. There is a legitimate debate here about the extent to which this is indeed so, yet the evidence suggests there is a genuine case to answer and a legitimate cause for concern. There can be little doubt that further chastening of our inflated ideas of rationality awaits us. The question that remains on the table is this: What can be learned from recognizing that the human mind is “all too limited”?
As I bring this work to a close, I see three points that have clearly emerged from the chastening of human rationality that we have considered in this work. None are religious in themselves, yet all are religiously significant. They all call out for further thought.
1. Humility: Reality Is a Lot Bigger than We Are
The proper attitude to the universe is humility—a respectful appreciation of its spatial and temporal vastness, in the face of which we seem insignificant. We can only have a partial and incomplete grasp of our universe. This does not lead to a relativist anarchy, in which all views are held to be equally good. Our beliefs about the universe need to be warranted or rationally motivated—that is to say, there must be reasons for believing that they might be right. Yet as the progress of science itself over the last few centuries makes clear, what one generation regarded as correct is discarded by another generation as false or inadequate.
In a powerful visual image, Paul of Tarsus speaks of the limits of our vision of reality. We now only “see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). To be human is to see only part of a “big picture” of reality and to learn to live with a deep sense of frustration that we cannot see more, mingled with some slight satisfaction that we can see anything at all. The enemy here is not faith but arrogance—the conceited belief that our limited view is right, and for that reason others are wrong.
2. Generosity: We Will Have to Learn to Live with Unresolved Questions
Humans long for certainty and clarity. While the Enlightenment’s quest for clear and certain ideas proved impossible to attain, save in very limited contexts, it was nevertheless a very human aspiration. That’s the sort of knowledge that we yearn for. But save in the limited realms of logic and mathematics, it’s not what we can realistically expect to achieve. Aspirations to Cartesian clarity have faded, to be replaced with postmodern hesitation. It has simply not proved possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rational ideals from the sustained criticisms of Martin Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Even in the natural sciences, we have to accept the provisionality of scientific theories. Our beliefs may be warranted; they might not, however, be right. “Neither science nor religion can entertain the hope of establishing logically coercive proof of the kind that only a fool could deny.”[2]
This means that we need to learn to live with unresolved questions, hoping to find answers that may be trusted yet so often cannot be proved to be true. I come back to Bertrand Russell’s insight that our condition is such that we need to cope with living without the hope of certainty.[3] It is not difficult to point to ultimate questions of life that remain frustratingly resistant to definitive answers. What, for example, lies beyond death? Maybe death ends everything. Maybe we must step into Charon’s boat for our final journey to a dark underworld. Maybe we might enter a New Jerusalem, a place of safety and rejoicing. Nobody knows for certain, although I know what I believe and hope—and why. But that doesn’t mean that I regard others who disagree with me as deluded fools. I gladly leave that sort of rhetoric to cultural fundamentalists.
For perhaps the most important point to appreciate from such a line of thought is this. Given that life’s great questions remain tantalizingly open, we need to be generous towards those whose answers do not coincide with our own. Sir Isaiah Berlin famously argued that ultimate human values—such as questions of justice or the God question—necessarily lead to conflict. They cannot be reconciled or resolved by rational calculation since they cannot be measured. Nor, in Berlin’s view, could they be sorted out by philosophy, which Berlin was inclined to think incapable of solving anything that is of ultimate importance to us as human beings. The divergence of opinions and values in human thought is not ultimately a mark of mental fragility or malfunction but of the intractable nature of the world within which we live and think.[4] If Berlin is right, human beings end up with “a diversity of narratives about themselves, none of which has the authority of a metanarrative.”[5] And since reality is too complex to compel us to agree on its right interpretation, we might at least be civil to each other as we try to make sense of things as best we can.
3. Wonder: A Willingness to Expand our Vision
Our sense of wonder at the solemn stillness of a starlit night or the crystal purity of a northern landscape elicits more than an experience of beauty; it discloses the limited capacity of our minds and invites us to expand our mental vision to embrace the universe as it actually is, rather than to try and reduce it to what we find convenient or manageable. We face a constant struggle within and against ourselves as we stare down the temptation to desiccate and dissect the mystery of ourselves and our universe. Wordsworth’s words still ring true:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.[6]
A “mystery,” in the theological sense of that term, is something that ultimately triumphs over the human instinct to reduce and simplify, exposing the limits of the systems and frameworks within which we try to trap reality.
Recent psychological studies of the human experience of awe have highlighted the tension that arises from wanting to understand what we experience yet simultaneously wanting to sustain the experience itself.[7] At their best, both science and religion try to preserve this mystery, affirming the intelligibility of our universe without reducing this to what the “all too limited human mind” can accommodate. In Christianity, this is evident in the creative tension between theology and worship, which paradoxically celebrates both the fact that so much of God can be grasped, however inadequately, by the human mind (and hence leads to theology), while at the same time so much remains beyond the human capacity to understand (and hence leads to worship, in the sense of acknowledging that the greatness and majesty of God eludes verbal analysis and is best expressed in praise and adoration).
Conclusion
This book has reflected on the great mystery of human identity, and especially our attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world as we journey on the Road. The proper human response to that mystery is a sense of humility in the presence of something greater than us; an intellectual generosity, not a narrow dogmatism, in trying to make sense of it; and perhaps above all, a feeling of awed wonder that we are temporarily placed within such a vast and beautiful universe and are capable of reflecting on its deeper significance—as well as our own. It seems that we are born to wonder, created to seek out meaning and purpose in life, and thus follow paths of exploration that will ultimately lead to God as their source and goal. We are called to make sense of the clues implanted within us and around us, and realize their true significance.
It is easy to be drawn to ideologues who try to short-circuit or bypass the problem of our “all too limited human mind,” offering us the cozy and smug certainties of in-groups or the strident slogans of fundamentalists. These imagined certainties demand a God’s-eye view of reality, to which neither they nor we have access. Our place is on the Road, not on the Balcony—not a settled habitation of detached privilege but a process of journeying in hope through an opaque and puzzling world.
The approach to the mystery of human identity and meaning set out in this book is both informed by science and nourished and enriched by the Christian tradition. We indeed are “meaning-seeking animals.” Just as we seek food in order that we may survive, so we seek meaning in order that we may flourish. Perhaps we are, as John Banville suggests, a “little vessel of strangeness” sailing through the “muffled silence” of an “autumn dark.” Perhaps we have been forced to pause in the middle of our lives, to use Dante’s famous image, as we realize that we are lost in a dark wood, unsure either of where we are or where we are meant to be.[8]
Dante’s Divine Comedy is not the only theologically informed account of our quest for meaning, nor the only substantial work of literature to be organized around the image of a journey through life. Yet many regard it as the most acutely observed and finely expressed account of our search for significance. Perhaps in closing, we might reflect on what one of Dante’s leading interpreters saw as its core vision:
We find affirmed with the utmost clarity and consistency the fundamental Christian proposition that the journey to God is the journey into reality. To know all things in God is to know them as they really are, for God is the only absolute and unconditioned Reality, of whose being all contingent realities are at best the types and mirror, at worst the shadows and distortions.[9]
We need a vision such as this to sustain us as we pass through this world of dark shadows and pale reflections, thinking and wondering as we journey. We are unable to stand above the Road and see the “big picture” for ourselves—but we can trust that there is one, giving us meaning and purpose as we travel on that Road.
[1] Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), 19.
[2] John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 126.
[3] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), xiv.
[4] On Berlin’s “value pluralism,” see John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 74–110; Mark Thompson, “Versions of Pluralism: William Empson, Isaiah Berlin, and the Cold War,” Literary Imagination 8, no. 1 (2006): 65–87.
[5] Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 109.
[6] “The Tables Turned,” in The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 574.
[7] Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297–314; Patty van Cappellen and Vassilis Saroglou, “Awe Activates Religious and Spiritual Feelings and Behavioral Intentions,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 4, no. 3 (2012): 223–36.
[8] Dante, Inferno, canto 1, lines 1–3.
[9] Barbara Reynolds, in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 3, Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 16. Reynolds’s best study of Dante is Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).