Chapter 13 Surprised by Meaning
Chapter 13
Surprised by Meaning
The French philosopher Blaise Pascal is one of many to ponder the meaning of life. Is it all a short, meaningless accident?
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even which I can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing, and which do not know me, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why I am here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and this time been allotted to me?1
Pascal spoke of his fear that his brief occupation of a “little space” in the vast history of the universe would be random, accidental, and devoid of meaning. How could he make sense of things?
Reality is open to multiple interpretations. There are different ways of looking at things, with significantly different existential outcomes. Some leave us deeply disturbed, others excite us, some console us. To explore this point, we may consider the night sky. Imagine that you are out on a dark, cold night. Above you, pinpoints of light twinkle in the dark velvet sky. Many have felt overwhelmed by the solemn stillness of the sky at night. But what does it say to us?
It is a question that I have often reflected on myself. When I was nine or ten years old, I managed to build myself a small telescope so I could observe the moons of Jupiter and explore the Milky Way. I spent many a cold winter night staring at the vast expanses of space, wondering where I fitted into all of this. I remember looking at one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky—M31 in Andromeda, now known to be one of the nearest galaxies. Even with my small telescope, I could see something of its beauty. Yet its beauty was tinged with melancholy. I knew that it was more than two million light years away. The light now leaving that distant galaxy would not reach earth for two million years, by which time I would be long since dead. The night sky seemed to me to point to the vastness of the cosmos and the insignificance of humanity.
Much the same thoughts were expressed more recently, though in a much more articulate and reflective manner, by Ursula Good-enough, a cell biologist interested in exploring the deeper meaning of the natural order. She tells of how she became so disturbed by the meaninglessness of the cosmos that she decided to stop thinking about it. “Our sun too will die, frying the Earth to a crisp during its heat-death, spewing its bits and pieces out into the frigid nothingness of curved spacetime.”2 She found herself being overwhelmed by a “bleak emptiness” every time she thought about the deeper meaning of the cosmos. “The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again.” In the end, she decided not to think about such things. She decided to cope with the “the apparent pointlessness of it all” by telling herself that there was no point to seek or to find. As Steven Weinberg once commented, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” The information is there—but it doesn’t create a pattern. Nothing seems to fit together. There is no big picture.
The classic way of dealing with this troubling realization is Stoic indifference. We should rise above the meaninglessness of the cosmos and concentrate upon building our own character. We create our own problems through our responses to the world. The wise person cultivates a supreme indifference and disengagement from reality, concentrating on the formation of personal character and rationality.3 Instead of trying to make sense of a senseless universe, the wise person constructs a private rational universe of meaning and value. The development of character is thus an assertion of the individual’s capacity to create meaning in the face of a meaningless world. Similar ideas are widely encountered today. Many argue that we must construct our own worlds of meaning, assembling ideas and values into a patchwork quilt of meaning, tailored to our own needs and concerns.
There is, however, an alternative way of looking at things which goes back to the dawn of civilization. Where the New Atheism skims the surface of reality, the wise choose to go deeper. We cannot rest content with a superficial reading of nature. We need to go further and deeper. Meaning, here understood to be embedded deep in the order of things, can be discerned by the wise. It does not need to be constructed or invented; it is already present. The British philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch (1919–99) spoke of “the calming, whole-making tendencies of human thought,” by which she means the ability of a “big picture” or “grand narrative” to integrate our vision of reality.
Murdoch is right: we seek meaning in life, rather than endless additional facts about life. It is easy to accumulate information, pasting new items into our mental notebooks in much the same way as a keen stamp collector adds new items to an album. But what purpose does this serve? Earlier we noted how the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) spoke of “a meteoric shower of facts” raining from the sky, yet lying on the ground, “unquestioned, uncombined.” We are overwhelmed with information, as a casual search of the Internet reveals. Yet what bigger picture does this information disclose? What happens when we join together the dots? When we put all the pieces of the jigsaw together? Is there a picture at all? Or is it simply a mass of disconnected bits of information?
“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.” —C. S. Lewis
Just as the merits of a telescope are judged partly by the clarity with which it allows us to see distant objects, so a worldview is assessed by how well it illuminates the landscape of reality and brings everything into sharp focus. The Christian faith enables us to make sense of things, so that we hear tunes where others only hear noise, and see patterns where others see disorder and chaos. What was once a blurred and fuzzy image is suddenly seen clearly and distinctly.
This is the view that has been explored throughout this work. The Christian faith offers a framework of meaning which is deeply embedded in the order of things and ultimately originates from and expresses the character of God. The world may indeed seem meaningless and pointless. What is needed, however, is a lens or a conceptual framework which brings things into focus. The world may seem meaningless; yet this is because we do not see it in the right way. If it seems hopelessly out of focus and disorganized, it is because we have yet to find the key to bringing it into focus and weaving its seemingly disconnected and unrelated threads together into a tapestry of meaning. Christianity provides a framework of meaning which illuminates the shadowlands of reality, brings our observations of the world into focus, and weaves the threads of our experience into a pattern. C. S. Lewis summed it up well in a well-turned statement we noted earlier: “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.”4
Yet this framework of meaning is not something that we manage to figure out by ourselves, after an exhaustive analysis of all the options. The meaning that we quest is disclosed to us. We are, so to speak, “surprised by meaning.” The traditional Christian language of “revelation” affirms that the meaning that all human beings seek, yet find so elusive and mysterious, has been shown to us. Once someone has shown us how to make sense of things, it seems obvious. But we couldn’t get there by ourselves. When Thomas H. Huxley first read Darwin’s Origin of Species, he is reported to have exclaimed: “How stupid of me not to have thought of that!” Once it had been pointed out to him, it made sense of what Huxley had himself observed. But Huxley had not been able to find the answer for himself. Someone had to show him how everything was woven together and interconnected. The Christian faith speaks of a God who holds the key to our history and who has entrusted that key to us so that we might unlock the door to the true meaning of things.
So what kind of meaning are we talking about? The social psychologist Roy Baumeister recently set out a significant analysis of theories of the meaning of life, in which he identified what themes had to be engaged and explored before the human quest for meaning could be satisfied.5 There were, he argued, four fundamental questions that had to be answered convincingly if a way of thinking was to count as a “meaning of life”:
These are not empirical questions, which can be answered by the natural sciences. As we have seen, they lie beyond its intellectual horizons and methodological frontiers. Yet we cannot live without formulating answers to such questions.
For example, consider the question of justice—a passionate concern for many in today’s complex and broken world. Yet justice is not something that we can “read off” from the world. Indeed, some recent attempts to ground justice in nature sometimes end up defending the Darwinian idea of the “survival of the fittest.”6 What of widows and orphans? Of the powerless and weak? In his penetrating and highly acclaimed writings on the nature of justice, Michael J. Sandel argues that any notion of justice depends upon competing conceptions of the good life—that is, networks of beliefs about human nature, values, and purpose. Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, argues that where rationalism held that reason could answer such questions, the harsh reality has turned out to be that they cannot be meaningfully answered without depending upon beliefs that ultimately cannot be proved.7
The Enlightenment dream of basing justice on pure reason has foundered. Perhaps more disturbingly for rationalist accounts of reality, such as those favored by the New Atheism, there is a growing consensus among intellectual historians that the Enlightenment was so diverse that it cannot really be spoken of as a single movement. Instead of speaking of human “rationality,” we must speak of “rationalities.”8 The Enlightenment turns out to be a rational multiverse, with competing and diverging accounts of the nature and scope of human reason. That’s one of the reasons why so many have concluded that the Enlightenment offered theories of rationality and morality which proved impossible to defend in theory, and impossible to implement in practice.9 When the New Atheism appeals to reason and morality in defending its own ideas and critiquing those of theists, we are perfectly entitled to ask for clarification. Which rationality do you mean? And which morality?10
As Sandel rightly points out, public reason is not neutral: it is shaped by a theory of the good. Secular rationalism therefore does not, and cannot, provide an adequate foundation for justice. Sandel argues that secular liberalism represents a hollow and shallow view of the world, which ends up merely defending the right of citizens to do whatever they please, as long as they hurt no one else.11 But real justice is about values and ideals. Secularism often presents itself as offering a “neutral” approach to ethics and social questions, allowing all to share in public debate irrespective of their faith commitments. Sandel argues that this is untenable: secularism denies, excludes, and suppresses the moral ideals and values of others, while maintaining the myth of its own neutrality.
Sandel’s analysis highlights the importance of theories of the meaning of life which bestow value and dignity upon actors and actions. We cannot pretend that there is a “neutral” public sphere: all spheres of life are shaped by these theories—including the Christian faith. Christianity does more than make sense of things; it also confers meaning and value. So how does the “big picture” offered by Christianity engage with these fundamental questions? In what follows, we shall explore each of the four issues we noted earlier in this chapter.
1. Identity: Who Am I?
It is very easy to give definitions of human identity. We are defined by our genetic make-up, by our social location, and by countless other scientific parameters. We can be defined by our race, our nationality, our weight, and our gender. Yet all too often, identity is simply reduced to the categories we happen to occupy. The curse of the scientific age is that human beings are reduced to genetic and social stereotypes. Individual identity has become a matter of an impersonal genetic code.
Powerful protests have been raised against this depersonalization of identity. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) argued that purely scientific accounts of humanity reduced people to objects: to an “it” rather than a “you.” The essence of personal identity, for Buber, is an ability to exist in relationships. We are defined, not by our chemical or genetic make-up, but by our social and personal relationships.12 Identity is something given, not something achieved. I am given my identity as a father by my children; I am given my identity as a person of significance by the God who has graciously chosen to relate to me and to regard me in this way.
This is a central element of the Christian vision of personal identity and meaning. While the term “soul” is often misunderstood as an immortal component of human identity, its more biblical meaning is “human nature in so far as it relates to God.” We find our true identity in our relationship with God, who knows us and gives us our identity and significance. The really important point is this: we do not define ourselves, but we are defined by another, who gives us our identity and significance and safeguards the same. Our identity is not contained in, or safeguarded by, some part of our bodies; it is given and guaranteed by God, who beholds us and remembers us.
Augustine of Hippo made this point in his Confessions, written between 397 and 398. Questions of personal identity and significance loom large in this remarkable piece of writing. For Augustine, human destiny and identity are both linked to God, as our creator and redeemer—an idea expressed in Augustine’s famous prayer: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”13 Human identity is here linked with our intentional origination from God and our subsequent relationship with God, culminating in “finding rest” in God. It is a powerful statement, which suggests a narrative of restoration and homecoming. We are not fully human until we exist in relationship with God. This is a core component of the Christian understanding of human identity.
It’s an important point. Many agree that political and social systems ought to enable us to achieve our true humanity. Yet secular humanism argues that religion suppresses human identity, and it concludes that human liberation is dependent upon the suppression of religion. Yet secular humanism seems to ignore the awkward fact that there are multiple narratives of human identity. Its own theory is simply one among many, and it has no claim to special privilege or priority. Many hold that we only achieve our true identity and fulfilment through relating to God. And that vision of human identity has every right to be heard, represented, and enacted in the public sphere.
One of the most profound pieces of writing in the Old Testament is Psalm 8, which takes the form of reflection on the place of humanity in the natural world. The psalmist considers the immensity of the night sky before turning to consider the place of human beings in this vast universe (8:3–5):
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
The passage locates humanity between God and the beasts of the field, endowed with dignity on account of their divine creation. The fact that God cares for human beings is seen as being a matter for praise rather than logical analysis. The recognition of God’s care for individual human beings precedes our reflections on its theological basis.
God’s care for humanity is emphasized throughout the Old Testament. God is our shepherd, who accompanies, supports, and upholds us, even in “the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23 NIV). Yet the New Testament adds a new dimension to this by reaffirming God’s love for humanity by linking to the death of Jesus Christ as a tangible demonstration of this commitment and compassion. Paul speaks of this divine commitment at several points: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). The death of Christ is not seen primarily as a biological, or even a judiciary, event; it is interpreted as a token of commitment, a demonstration of God’s solidarity with humanity.
Our value thus does not depend upon or reflect our achievements; instead, our value comes in the esteem in which we are held by God. God is our “secure base” (John Bowlby), just as a parent provides the unconditional love and acceptance needed for a child to grow up and learn from mistakes. Such a “secure base” provides a platform for personal growth and maturation and enables us to cope with personal challenges and difficulties. The biblical image of God or the Christian faith as a “rock” (as in the image of the person who builds their house on a rock rather than on shifting sand: Matt. 7:24–27) expresses these ideas of security and stability in an accessible way. We possess value because we are valued, accepted, and enabled to cope with the challenges of life.
We could speak of the “transvaluation” of human life through being “touched” by God—a theme that is found throughout the poetic writings of George Herbert. In one of his poems, Herbert (1593–1633) likens the graceful “touch” of God to the fabled “philosopher’s stone” of medieval alchemy. Just as the philosopher’s stone was believed to transmute base metal into gold, so God could transform the value of individuals through grace:
This is that famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.14
We are, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich famously put it, enfolded in the love of Christ, which brings us a new security, identity, and value. Once we see ourselves as enfolded by Christ, we come to think of ourselves in a new way—as those who are valued, welcomed, and loved.
3. Purpose: Why Am I Here?
Purpose is central to serious and meaningful living.15 On the theory of evolution, one of the more disturbing implications of atheistic interpretations is that we are here by accident, the product of an indifferent cosmic happenstance. This conclusion is not, it must be stressed, demanded by evolutionary biology itself; it is the outcome of fusing the basic themes of evolutionary biology with an aggressive and dogmatic atheism. Yet it is an unsettling thought, even for many atheists who profess to believe it. Some, of course, argue that its metaphysical austerity is an indicator of its truth. When I was an atheist myself, I took a certain pride in believing in such grim and bleak ideas, seeing it as a badge of intellectual courage and integrity.
Bleakness, however, is not an indicator of truth. We might believe that everyone is out to get us, so that life is both pointless and downright dangerous. Yet that conclusion might rest upon our somewhat warped interpretation of the world, rather than the reality of the situation. The Christian answer to this question is grounded in the passionate belief that God chose to enter into human history in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—thus enabling us to relate to God, and ultimately to be with God in the new Jerusalem. According to Scripture and the Christian tradition, God is the heart’s true desire, the goal of our longings, and the fulfiller of our deepest aspirations. The Christian tradition has developed many ways of expressing this belief. The “chief end” of human existence, according to the Shorter Westminster Catechism (1648), is “to enjoy God, and glorify him for ever.” God thus provides a rich and deeply satisfying answer to the profound questions that we ask ourselves about the meaning of life.
The image of a journey helps frame the great questions of purpose in life. Some see life as a random and meaningless process of meandering, in which we search endlessly for a purpose that eludes us, if it exists at all. The Christian tradition sees this journey as having a goal. We walk with a purpose, as we make our way to the new Jerusalem, which is where our true destiny lies. We are, according to the New Testament, “citizens of heaven,” who have the right of abode there. Though in exile on earth, our true homeland lies in heaven. God is our shepherd, the one who leads us, guides us, and accompanies us on our way home.
The journey helps us explore the purpose of life from two different perspectives. First, it emphasizes that life has more than just a direction: moving from life to death. It has a goal, a purpose. To be with God is affirmed to be the culmination of all human desires and longings. Everything that is good, beautiful, and true points to God and finds its fulfilment in God. Second, the image of the journey reminds us that we may help others in need along life’s road as we travel. Coming home to God and finding rest is the climax of that journey; the process of travelling itself, however, allows us to grow in wisdom and insight and to serve other wayfarers as we travel.
4. Agency: Can I Make a Difference?
Finally, we need to consider an important and often neglected question: Can I make a difference? Or am I so insignificant and powerless that I might as well not be here? The capacity to make a difference with things is seen by many people as integral to their quest for meaning and purpose. If I cannot make a difference, I might as well not be here, they think. The issue is that of empowerment. Do we have what it takes to make a difference? Or is this something we need to be enabled to do?
From a Christian perspective, human nature is damaged and wounded by sin, thus not able to achieve its full potential unaided. It is a point made throughout the New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul. As we noted earlier, Paul was convinced that he was trapped, unable to break free from the prison of his own limitations and weaknesses.16 What could be done? In the end, Paul found his answer: “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24–25).
This theme was particularly developed by Augustine of Hippo, who was exquisitely sensitive to the problem of human weakness, fragility, and brokenness.17 In Augustine’s view, human beings were damaged by sin, which was like a hereditary disease, passed down from one generation to another. Sin weakens humanity and cannot be cured by human agency. Yet Christ is the divine physician, by whose “wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5 NIV). We are thus healed by the grace of God, so that our minds may recognize God and our wills may respond to the divine offer of grace.
Or again, Augustine argues that sin is like a power which holds us captive, from whose grip we are unable to break free by ourselves. The human free will is captivated by the power of sin and may only be liberated by grace. Christ is thus seen as the liberator, the source of the grace which breaks the power of sin. Or again, sin is a type of guilt or moral impurity which is passed down from one generation to another. Christ thus comes to bring forgiveness and pardon. Using such images, Augustine builds up a powerful depiction of human nature being weakened, impoverished, and trapped by sin—but healed and liberated by grace.
There is much more that could be said on these themes. The life of faith is to be seen as the divinely enabled pursuit of human aspiration within the recognition of human frailty. It represents an examined life, in which each human existence is seen in the mirror of a greater truth and a higher standard. The idea of God’s grace gives theological expression to the fundamental Christian experience, hard-wired into the New Testament, that God is one who loves, cares, assists, and maintains a faithful watching presence, even in the darkest and loneliest existential moments. The heart of this life of faith lies not primarily in a set of propositions about reality (although these play an important role), but rather in a trusting orientation and attitude towards God, who is recognized as the sole source of perfection for a being that is clearly intrinsically imperfect. The arrival of God thus brings transformation of our situation, not simply illumination of it.
The all-important point here is that Christianity does not merely enable us to “make sense of things.” There is a vast chasm between knowledge and meaning, between information and significance. The Christian faith does not leave us where we are, while possessing a better understanding of things; it offers to transform our situation. It may help us to make sense of our situation if we learn that we are ill, or imprisoned. Yet this knowledge of the true state of things is not in itself transformative. Knowing that we are ill does not automatically lead to healing; it is merely the condition for seeking help. But that help lies to hand. As the traditional African American spiritual puts it:
There is balm in Gilead,
to make the wounded whole;
There’s power enough in heaven,
To cure a sin-sick soul.