2. The map, the lens and the light: making sense of things
Discovering new things always adds interest to life. A colleague of mine who had read Moby Dick was inspired by Herman Melville’s remark about having an ‘everlasting itch for things remote’. He began travelling to distant parts of the world: one year he visited the highlands of Vietnam; the next, he rode the railways of Patagonia. He was driven by an unquenchable desire to see new things, to ‘sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts’, as Melville had before him.
But there’s another voyage of discovery we can make, and this, as the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) once remarked, ‘does not consist in searching for new landscapes, but in seeing them with new eyes’. When we do this, the familiar takes on new meaning; the ordinary becomes special. Our eyes need to be opened and our sight healed, so that we can perceive things as they really are.
Seeing things through new eyes
To help explain this important point, let me tell the tale of a mysterious block of stone discovered in Canford School in Dorset. The school was founded in 1923 when an old country manor house was purchased and renovated for educational use. The house had previously been owned by Sir Henry Layard (1818–94), a prominent Victorian archaeologist who had spent much of his time excavating ancient sites in Mesopotamia, and was credited with the discovery of the ‘lost’ city of Nineveh in 1845. The builders who converted the house into a school found some large blocks of stone in one of the rooms. The school management had no idea what to do with them. For a while, one of them was used to prop up the school’s dartboard. Eventually, it was moved to the school’s ‘tuck shop’, which sold drinks and confectionery to students.
In 1994 John Russell, a professor of art history at Columbia University, who was researching a book about Layard, visited Canford School.
When Russell first saw the stone, he assumed that he was looking at a cheap plaster copy of an ancient Assyrian carving. Then his eyes were opened and he realized what the stone really was. He discerned its true significance. As a result, the way the object was understood and valued changed radically. What was once seen as a useless lump of rock was now recognized as an important historical relic, worth nearly $12 million.
The key point is that the stone was seen with new eyes. Russell displayed what the philosopher Iris Murdoch called ‘attentiveness’ – a careful, principled, committed attempt to perceive things as they really are, rather than as they merely appear to be. We may approach an object with a set of assumptions, then discover as we look at it that these do not tie in very well with what we are actually observing. So we begin to look for another way of seeing that fits better.
It’s an idea that is familiar to scientists. The philosopher of science N. R. Hanson (1924–67) pointed out that we all look at the world through ‘theoretical spectacles’, whether we realize this or not. What kind of spectacles might bring things into sharpest focus? The Harvard psychologist William James (1842–1910) declared that religious faith is basically ‘faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained’.
It’s a point that is familiar to us from the New Testament. When Paul urges his readers to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your minds’ (Romans 12.2), he is asking us to put on Christian spectacles and see the world afresh. The New Testament uses many images to make it clear that the Christian faith brings about a new way of envisaging the world. My three favourites are these: our sight is healed; our eyes are opened; a veil is removed.
One of the things I’ve noticed as I get older is how other people help me to see things more clearly. They point out things I’ve missed. And sometimes, they have to correct me when I get things wrong. That’s why it’s so important that Christianity is a corporate rather than an individual faith. Others help us explore its landscape. C. S. Lewis found that his Christian faith was significantly deepened by the insights of friends such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. What others saw helped Lewis to see further.
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others … In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.
My favourite description of exploring the landscape of faith comes from the pen of Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited we discussed earlier. After his sudden conversion to Christianity in 1930, Waugh wrote to a friend describing how his new faith allowed him to see things clearly for the first time:
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.
Before coming to faith, Waugh saw only a distorted world of smoke and mirrors; after his conversion, he saw things as they really were. He began to explore this new landscape with excitement, enthusiasm and wonder, as his later writings make clear.
But where do we start? How do we find our way to this world’s main features? One answer is especially helpful in making sense of Christian belief. If you want to explore a landscape, you need a map.
The map: the landscape of faith
As every explorer will tell you, a good map is essential to help you get your bearings. Whether you’re traversing a mountain range or simply trying to get home, a map will reveal the way to go (if you know how to read it). It will show you the big picture of the landscape, so you can work out where you are, or what you’re looking for. Then you will begin to notice some of the features. Let’s linger on this thought for a moment.
Recently, when I was leading a small group at a conference at Oxford, dealing with the ‘imaginative appeal of faith’, I asked the dozen or so people in my group to tell me what they found so valuable about their faith. For some, it was the stability it brought to their lives; for others, it was knowing God’s presence, even in life’s darker moments. A few spoke warmly of the sense of being loved; others of the way faith helped them make sense of things. They all believed in the same ‘big picture’; yet each found one aspect of that picture especially powerful.
What was really interesting, however, was the way that people reacted to what others were saying. Those who valued the Christian emphasis on being loved by God realized that there was more for them to discover – such as how faith might help them make sense of things. Even though everyone found their faith helpful and meaningful, they realized that there was more to it than they had appreciated.
What drew me to Christianity as a young man was its ability to make sense of things. In one respect, my conversion was very intellectual. Yet as I grew older, I began to appreciate other aspects of my faith – such as its ethical vision, its strong sense of purpose in life, its ability to secure personal identity, and its powerful appeal to the imagination. All these features (to continue our map illustration) were already there; I simply discovered them.
Now maps are not the same as a landscape. Think of somewhere special you’ve visited – perhaps a Caribbean island, an Umbrian landscape, or the mountains and forests of California. Can you remember what it was like to experience its natural beauty? Now imagine this special place on a map. How does that two-dimensional representation compare with the three-dimensional reality? Poorly, I expect! A map cannot convey the vibrant colours, the rich textures and the subtle fragrances of a glorious landscape. A diagram on a piece of paper is never going to do justice to the beauty and majesty of the natural world. But it’s not meant to. It’s there to help you explore and discover, and find your way to where you want to be.
The map we find in the creeds is there to help us explore the landscape of faith and to find our way back home. It’s a map that distils the core themes of the Bible, disclosing a glorious, loving and righteous God, who creates a world that goes wrong, and then acts graciously and wondrously in order to renew and redirect it, before finally bringing it to its fulfilment. And we ourselves are an integral part of this story that reveals our true purpose, meaning and value – who we are, what is wrong, what God proposes to do about this, and what we must do in response.
Christian beliefs are not like a set of individual, unrelated ideas. They are held together by the compelling and persuasive vision of reality that is made possible by the gospel. We see a breathtaking landscape, and marvel at its beauty; then we move on to take in its features. To understand the beliefs, we must first catch the vision. To make sense of the snapshots, we need to take in the panorama. We can think of creeds as maps that help us understand how Christian beliefs interconnect – just as maps show us how towns and cities are interconnected by roads.
We’ll be looking at these creeds in more detail later in this volume, and finding out how this ‘map of faith’ came into being. Yet the analogy of a map is only one way of helping us understand what Christian beliefs are all about. Let’s move on and look at another.
The lens: bringing reality into focus
Imagine that you are walking along a sandy beach on a beautiful day. Ahead of you is a deep blue ocean, stretching as far as you can see into the distance. As you look, you catch a glimpse of something moving. You have a small telescope with you. You reach for it, and point it out to sea. To begin with everything is blurred, but as you adjust the lens, things suddenly become sharp and clear. You can see a yacht shimmering in the distance; you can even make out individual crew members moving around on its deck.
Christianity is about bringing things into focus. For many people, life seems to have no meaning. It appears to be random, meaningless and chaotic, without any underlying order or significance. We are born. We die. And what lies in between is nothing but ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.
When I was young, it was a great treat to go to the fairground that passed through my home town about once a year. I retain a vivid memory of its hall of mirrors. As I walked past these mirrors, I would see a figure that I recognized as myself – yet distorted. Sometimes I would be fat, sometimes thin; sometimes tall, sometimes squat. I was misshapen. But was this really the way I was, or just the way I seemed to be? What was the caricature, and what the reality?
Christianity gives us a lens through which we can see ourselves and our world for what they really are. One of the finest statements of this principle is found in the poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633), especially in these lines:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
Herbert was writing in the early seventeenth century, when two inventions that made use of lenses – often referred to as ‘glasses’ at this time – were transforming human appreciation of the natural world. He draws a clear distinction between the different modes of viewing these allow: looking at, and looking through. You can look at a window or a telescope. Or you can look through them, and find yourself in a new world.
In Herbert’s day, the microscope allowed a new wealth of detail to be seen in the petals of flowers and the wings of butterflies, while the telescope revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter and the mass of stars that made up the Milky Way. Both instruments allowed people to view things that had always been there but had not previously been evident, because they lay beyond the frontiers of human sight. We could not see them, because our eyes were not good enough. An expansion of vision was needed to open up these new worlds.
Herbert’s comments, however, are primarily about theology and concern the purpose and place of Christian beliefs. He helps us understand that we can approach beliefs in two ways. First, we can look at them, an approach found in many traditional textbooks of theology, which set out each individual belief and allow its distinct themes to be appreciated. But second, we can look through them, as if they were a telescope enabling us to ‘espy heaven’ – and enjoy an enriched view of reality, resulting from a heightened ability to discern what is really there.
Embracing Christianity’s ‘bigger picture’ helps us realize that each of us, being created in God’s image, matters profoundly; and that status and wealth mean nothing compared to the riches of knowing God. As Thomas à Kempis (c.1380–1471) pointed out in his spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ, when it was seen in perspective, ‘the glory of the world fades away’.
Yet some people choose to keep seeing the world through a distorting mirror. Iris Murdoch was aware of the unsettling fact that human beings often find reality somewhat uncomfortable, and prefer to invent ways of looking at the world that are less inconvenient. As a result, ‘by opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us’. Why not? Because we shield ourselves from reality by ‘fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’.
Looking at things through a Christian lens, on the other hand, brings our true situation into focus, enabling us to realize that we cannot go on as we are. It brings home to us that we are sinful. We’re like people who have fallen into a pit and can’t get out. We need someone to rescue us. To use a medical analogy: the Christian framework of meaning acts as a diagnostic tool, showing us that something is wrong with us, and telling us the treatment that is needed if we are to be cured. We are liberated from the delusion that all is well, and shown what needs to be done if things are to be put right.
The light: illuminating the shadowlands
The Christian way of thinking illuminates the world, enabling us to see things more clearly, even in the shadowlands of this life. Imagine you are standing on a hilltop, overlooking a vast landscape. It is dark, and you are facing west. Behind you, the sun begins to rise. Gradually, the shadows disappear, and the countryside lights up. Everything that is illuminated below you was already there a few hours ago. But only now can you see the detail. The coming of the light brings discernment and vision.
This idea has a rich history within the Christian tradition. ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation’ (Psalm 27.1). ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’ (Psalm 119.105). One of the central points made by Christian theologians is that light shows up things as they really are, dispelling illusions. Illumination allows a reality check, forcing us to confront what are at times some awkward truths.
In my second year at Oxford University, I was given a room in one of the oldest parts of Wadham College. At night, the room looked very elegant. But in the morning, as the sunlight streamed in through the windows, it showed up the cracks in the walls, the decaying wallpaper and the tatty old carpet. I often thought it would be more pleasant to live in the half-light and not have to face up to the faded grandeur around me.
Being forced to confront reality has a much darker side. Many of us who have read about the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War are shocked by the brutality, bloodshed and barbarism of extermination camps like Auschwitz. Yet one of the most distressing things about these death camps is what they tell us about ourselves. Although some atheists improbably suggest that God caused the Holocaust, the harsh reality is that this event was planned and perpetrated by human beings. It is a difficult problem for secular rationalists, who make human beings the ‘measure of all things’ (Alexander Pope), to confront the reality that these same human beings can be utterly barbaric. That realization, as we saw earlier, caused W. H. Auden to abandon his naive belief in human goodness, and realign himself towards God.
What Auden and countless others discovered is that the Christian way of looking at human nature is far more realistic. This approach holds that we are, first, created in the ‘image of God’ and, second, sinful. We find ourselves excited and inspired by the vision of God, which draws us upwards; yet we also find ourselves pulled down by the frailty and fallenness of human nature. It is a familiar dilemma, famously articulated by Paul: ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Romans 7.19).
So from a Christian perspective, we must recognize that while human beings are capable of greater things than most political systems or philosophies allow, we are equally capable of failing to live up to our potential. Christian theology gives us a critical lens through which to view our complex motivations and mixed agendas: we bear God’s image yet we are sinful; we are capable of good yet capable of evil; our culture and history are characterized by aspirations to greatness and goodness on the one hand, and the practice of oppression and violence on the other.
This way of seeing ourselves is unsettling for those who want to enthrone humanity. The easiest way of dealing with an uncomfortable truth is to deny it or try to sweep it under the carpet. But it just won’t go away. Any ‘big picture’ of reality has to be able to explain the profound moral ambiguity of human nature. Indeed, many are drawn to the understanding Christianity offers because it faces up to the fact that human beings are capable of intentionally doing evil. We shall have more to say about this in a later volume. The important point is that we need a big picture that can be trusted – one that can cope with the moral complexity of reality.
For one of the best explorations of how Christianity offers a trustworthy account of reality, we turn again to C. S. Lewis. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.’
G. K. Chesterton had no doubt that Christianity made sense of things, and this played a key role in his return to faith. Chesterton’s spiritual journey took a decisive turn in 1903, when he published a newspaper article explaining why he and many others now regarded Christianity with intense intellectual solemnity.
Chesterton realized that testing a theory meant checking it out against observation. ‘The best way to see if a coat fits a man is not to measure both of them, but to try it on.’ Let Chesterton himself explain what he has in mind.
Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease … We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass.
Chesterton’s argument here reinforces a point we keep returning to: that Christianity offers a big picture, and it is this vision of reality as a whole – rather than any of its individual components – that proves so compelling. Individual observations of nature do not ‘prove’ Christianity to be true; rather, Christianity validates itself by its ability to make sense of those observations. ‘The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.’
For Chesterton, a good theory is to be judged by the amount of illumination it offers, and its capacity to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us. ‘With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’ Much the same point was made by the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil (1909–43), who discovered the Christian faith relatively late in her short life. She was drawn to its winsome way of illuminating life’s enigmas:
If I light an electric torch at night out of doors I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up… . The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world.
Yet though the Christian faith illuminates the world around us, some shadowlands remain. What was dark may become clearer, but everything is not yet made plain. As Paul points out: ‘For now, we see in a mirror, dimly’ (1 Corinthians 13.12). His imagery speaks of a blurred, fuzzy or even distorted view of things that does not show how they really are. The landscape of faith includes distant and dim borderlands, not fully illuminated by the light of the sun.
So while the Christian faith allows us to see further than we otherwise could, it reminds us that there are still limits to our sight. Faith trusts that God journeys with us, even when we are bewildered and perplexed. We may not perceive God in everything, but God sees us, wherever we are. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast’ (Psalm 139.9–10). God’s presence and care do not depend on our discernment or comprehension: God is with us, even when sight or reason fails.