The Givenness of Things

THEOLOGY

I was slow in arriving at a Christology, at least in articulating one, because any account of Christ always seemed to me too narrow — however true in part, still false for all it excluded. This problem resolved itself for me in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, this reconception of the Creation narrative that places Christ at the center of the phenomenon of Creation even while it declares his earthly presence in Jesus of Nazareth. To me this implies that a quality which can be called human inheres in Creation, a quality in which we participate, which is manifested in us, which we epitomize. It implies that Jesus is the defining instance of this essential humanity. Christ is central ontologically, and what I have called humanity is ontological as well, profoundly intrinsic to Being because he was in the beginning with God and without him nothing was made that was made.

There is a very great imponderable at the center of Christian thought, the Trinity, which seems to me to forbid the attribution of any act or quality to any of its persons with even the passing implication that it is less the act or quality of the Others, or any less to be attributed to the Godhead altogether than to any of its persons. So, if I seem here to supplant God the Creator with Christ the Creator, this is the consequence of a distinction between God and Christ that is common but that I do not at all wish to make here. I should say at the outset that I am much impressed by the fact that the universe, so far as scientists and mathematicians have opened this mighty text, is not mindful of our mechanistic suppositions, which have made us so awkward in our conceptualizing of our profoundest intuitions. Is there any great Christian theology that does not have the Trinity at its center? Does the highest sense of the sacred abide where the Trinity as a concept is disallowed? Well, I think not, for what that is worth. The loftiest utterance of the holiness of Christ tells us that he was in the beginning, that he was with God, that he was God. And, of course, that he dwelt among us. Modern religious thought, with notable and distinguished exceptions, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, has shied away from the unfathomable, as if grace could have other origins and truth another character. There has been a marked tendency to treat the commonplace as the standard by which the plausible, the credible, is to be gauged.

If anything we know about creation suggested that such metrics were appropriate to making judgments about the deeper levels of what we experience as physical reality, then there would be a stronger case for applying them to the deepest, most absolute reality John’s language invokes. But anyone who has spent an hour with a book on the new physics knows that our old mechanistic thinking, useful as it is for so many purposes, bears about the same relation to deeper reality that frost on a windowpane bears to everything beyond it, including the night sky and everything beyond that. How very strange it all is. I have just read an article that begins this way: “Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.”

It is never my point to make a theological argument based on science — I wait for the day someone will lift a corner of quantum physics and find that it is underlain by a physics yet more bizarre. The point here is that religious thought is, persistently and inappropriately, influenced by a kind of scientific thought — which happens to be two or three hundred years out of date. This old science was very inclined to expose and denounce the impossible. It did much good service, and a good deal of harm as well. It set rationalistic limits to what could be believed which are still widely honored, though little we know now and little we do now would satisfy eighteenth-century notions of the possible. Of course it is still reasonable and necessary to say that there are effective impossibilities, vast categories of them. In their nature their numbers are hardly to be conceived of. But grander reality and deeper reality are volatile and fantastical. Our comfortable certainties — that if a thing is in one place it cannot be in other places at the same time, that the dimensions that are the architecture of our existence are all the dimensions there are, and so on — these certainties are the things to be marveled at. It is as if we were a quiet city in the heart of a raging sea, no foundation touching the seafloor, no spire rising out of the waves. Some gentle spell prevents us from grasping our situation, and this is all right because the same gentle spell shelters us from it. We know what we need to know to live in this city. Cows give milk, hammers drive nails, books should be returned to the library. But we know now that the overwhelmingly preponderant forms and theaters of existence are utterly alien to such business. Any reasonable standard of possibility would declare us to be impossible.

I saw a video of a physicist talking about the wonders that await us in the quantum computer. He said this computer would draw us closer to nature, to reality, because its processes would be the processes of reality. Fine. Then it seems to me that the great question is, What is this nonreality in which we live, this order of Being, endlessly confirmed to us by our senses, which seems to us to operate very differently from quantum reality though it must participate in that reality as deeply as everything else does? What is this nonreality that left us persuaded it was reality itself, the model, standard, test of all existence, until the start of the twentieth century? What is this nonreality that is orderly enough, thick enough, to be formed and manipulated by us, that in the ordinary course of things is to be trusted by us so absolutely that to ignore its rules and limits is insanity? This, by my lights, is a far deeper question than most. It is as if our senses and perceptions have fed us with milk rather than with meat. Why should our minds be at a remove, providential as it may be, from the processes of reality, until finally we are helped by a cunning device of our own creation? Is this not strange?

Well, let it be. I wish only to say one more time that the rationalistic arguments that claim to winnow out the implausible and the meaningless by applying the flail of common sense are the products of bad education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual. So the religions are quite right to conceptualize it in terms that exceed the language of common sense. The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think they can make themselves understood by shouting. Sadly, too many religious have abandoned their own language, its beauty and subtlety and power, accommodating to the utilitarian expectations of these demanding outsiders who have no understanding of the language or culture and refuse on principle to acquire any. But the unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an ultimate reality. Paradoxically, I suppose, it is only our limited understanding that keeps the unfathomable from being more unfathomable still. For these reasons I am grateful to science for freeing me to consider essential elements of Christianity without bringing the prejudices of what is still called modern thought to bear on them.

Christ as Creator implies to me that his role as Christ is intrinsic to Creation — that in that first moment creatures were foreseen whose nature and course of life he could take on altogether without in any way diminishing his high holiness. It was foreseen that these creatures would need him to restore them by an epochal act — of love, forgiveness, loyalty, grace, friendship, brotherliness — all of them human things, whose names we have learned from our own capacities, and in every good human bond, perhaps for as long as we have walked upright. They are things we know from our own experience, our own hearts, souls, and minds. Then in this profounder sense we are not aliens in the universe, taking the word in the largest sense, but are singularly rooted in it. If Providence is reflected in this arbitrary construction, this beautiful and orderly, knowable and manipulable delusion we share, then our privileged place is very evident.

The objection will be made that if Creation from its beginnings anticipated, that is to say made inevitable, our need for such intercession and rescue, then what the theologians and philosophers call evil was also made a constituent part of Creation, whence all the familiar arguments about human culpability on one hand and the nature of God on the other. This is a grave objection. I know of no better response than to consider the history of our species, and the future it appears to be preparing for itself. It is a truism that humanity is deficient in humanity, but who would dispute it? In the privacy of our thoughts does not any one of us feel the difference between our best impulses and our actual behavior? Does not any one of us feel the difference between the thought and work we are capable of and the thinking and working we let ourselves get by with? Freedom comes to mind — we are not termites who have been honed over the eons to be state-of-the-art, infallible termites. Maybe something that feels like courage and loyalty floods the bodies of bees that swarm to defend hive and queen, but these stimuli fall something short of virtue since bees cannot do otherwise. We wander the terrain of a very remarkable freedom — to default, to betray, to habituate ourselves to mediocrity, to turn away from the emergencies that strike our nearest neighbors, or to profit from their misfortune. We are unique in nature for our ability to be consistently, even catastrophically, wrong. I received a letter a while ago from an economist, a very polite rebuke for my having impugned the wisdom of the market, or, more precisely, its inerrancy. His defense, which flabbergasted me a little, was that the market is merely a reflection of human choices — which of course I am ready to concede, stipulating only that it may be a small and particular clutch of humans whose choices are reflected in it. In any case, his account of the market by my lights lands the whole phenomenon solidly on the terrain of our peculiar fallibility. No economist myself, I have for proof only recent and ongoing global catastrophe, which, for whatever reason, he did not mention.

Then the capacity for evil is the price of our freedom? No, this is a conclusion I choose not to draw. It has the look of gross oversimplification, of having the same clear legitimacy of derivation as any reductio ad absurdum. But thinking ought not to be balked by the fear of undesired implications. A thousand things can go wrong in any slightly ambitious thinking, and correctives must be ready when the mind recoils, even without an articulate objection. This statement regarding evil does not acknowledge its terrible cost, the fact that freedom on one side is so often the worst kind of grief and affliction and bondage on another. If the only possible response to the gravity of the question is to let it stand, so be it. I have not intended to offer an answer to it, only to draw attention once again to the great strangeness of the human situation. The features and dimensions of the moral universe we inhabit are as particular to us as is the simulacrum of physical reality given to us by our senses and perceptions.

Jonathan Edwards was a metaphysician and abreast of the best science of his period. He pondered problems that are still current, having to do with time and causality. These anomalies, selfhood among them, he took as proofs of the active, present, unfolding will of God. To my theistic mind, this seems an elegant response to the givenness of things. I find myself too often reaching for analogies — and here is another one. If time and gravity answered to the expectations of scientific theory, if time were symmetrical and ran backward as well as forward, if gravity were as strong as its kindred forces imply it should be, then the whole human narrative could not have happened. Say a different universe might have entertained a different kind of narrative. Yes, and this is what defines the word “arbitrary.” Finally, no necessity we can describe requires that the universe should be thus and not otherwise. This is one implication of the theory of multiple universes. If we take the question from the other side and say accident made the conditions that eventuated in our existence, with all its strangenesses, then we are left with the problem of explaining the accidental or the random in a system that seems, in rationalist theory, to be driven by necessity. If necessity needs to be reconsidered so fundamentally that it is at the point of becoming another thing, then the rationalist argument seems to me to be in need of very radical criticism indeed. Let us grant the reality of chance or accident, or of quantum phenomena that are the same in effect. If there are constraints on possibility, which our experience tells us is the case, and which the rationalists certainly assume to be the case, then those constraints are arbitrary. Analogies are available: language of every kind, culture at every scale.

I do not wish to seem to be reasoning, nor even theologizing, my way to an apologia for the Christian mythos. It is simply time to put down the burden of bad and assertive thought that has induced us to compromise or abandon it. This kind of thinking is so profoundly engrained in us in the West that it is no easy thing to see past it. Then again, I am certainly not proposing that we make way for those consumer-friendly mysticisms that have contributed so largely to the banality of our time. I wish to explore the questions of Being within the terms of Christian orthodoxy. I know “Christian orthodoxy” is a problematic phrase in itself. For me it is expressed succinctly in the Apostles’ Creed. I am aware that my interpretation of the Creed may not square with others’.

Be that as it may. I have concluded that only a radical Christocentricity can address the problem of Christian exclusivism, which has gone against the grain of Jesus’ teaching these two thousand years. If his presence in the Creation asserts the human as a uniquely sacred and intrinsic aspect of Being, and his presence on earth underscores this, then how are we to believe that he, call him Christ, call him God, would sweep almost the whole of our species out of existence, or into some sort of abyss, because of historical accident, or because of the terrible and persistent failures of our churches and of those who have been smug or cruel or criminal in his name. Granting all complexities, is it conceivable that the God of the Bible would shackle himself to the worst consequences of our worst behavior? Reverence forbids. Is it conceivable that the reach of Christ’s mercy would honor the narrow limits of human differences? It might be that the Christ I place at the origin and source of Being would be called by another name and would show another face to all those hundreds of billions who are or were not Scots Presbyterians or American Congregationalists or anything remotely like them. This is my devoutest hope, not least because it promises our salvation, too. Maybe his constant blessing falls on those great multitudes who lived and died without any name for him, for those multitudes who know his name and believe they have only contempt for him. The philosopher C. S. Peirce says somewhere that it would be most Godlike of God to love those least like himself. Most Godlike, most Christlike. I know the refutation. If salvation is universal, what about Hitler, Stalin? Well, hard cases make bad law. I am not willing to open an abyss, conceptually speaking, just to accommodate Hitler and Stalin. It is surely perverse to construct a whole cosmology around them. Thus begins the casuistry, as it used to be called, that provides hell with so many other tenants. My thoughts on the ultimate disposition of the great villains and monsters of history might incline me to curtail my conception of grace. The cost would be too high.

* * *

Here my argument takes a turn that might be unexpected, though all the foregoing was meant as preparation for it. The human self has been clapped into the durance vile of rationalist thought these many years, as it is now. If it is true, as I propose, that human nature enjoys likeness in kind with deep reality, if it has the means to see beyond the limits of the quasireality in which it also of necessity participates, then anyone is, indeed, a microcosm, just as the old philosophers said. Every one of us has privileged access to the unique source of insight on this question, a living mind. I will report briefly on my own consciousness, which is no doubt somewhat singular, but then so are they all.

In a month I will be seventy. I recognize the privilege of living in an age and a culture where this is not a significant attainment. I have the whole cohort of my friends around me. I could almost choose not to give a thought to my age. But something surprising has happened, some ticking upward of pleasure and intensity that is really not what I had been led to expect. My pleasures are the same — books and plays, church and teaching — and my feelings about them are changed only in degree. It must be obvious that my life has circled these fascinations and taken their rewards for decades. Now they are all refreshed. This has nothing to do with any intention of mine. It is not that I have changed my mind. Rather, my mind, quite abruptly, seems to have changed me.

I thought these fevers ended with adolescence, and here they are, back again and raging. This time I know how to give them welcome. This time I know my life is drawing to an end. The strangeness of life on earth first of all, and then of everything that takes my attention, is very moving to me now. It feels freshly seen, like a morning that is exceptional only for the atmosphere it has of utter, unimpeachable newness, no matter how many times old Earth has tottered around the sun. Sometimes I am so struck by an image or an idea that I cannot sleep nights. Now my mind has begun to appraise its own state at inconvenient moments, to bring me back from the brink of sleep by noticing when its own activity has become — hypnagogic.

I’m frankly surprised it knows the word. Where did that come from? Why was it stored up all these years to tease me now? In writing I have always felt as though I am my mind’s amanuensis, in reading its researcher, in repose its slightly dull companion. I feel a novel begin to cohere in my mind before I know much more about it than that it has the heft of a long narrative. This heft is a physical sensation. A forming novel is a dense atmosphere more than it is a concept or an idea. I find my way into it by finding a voice that can tell it, and then it unfolds within the constraints of its own nature, which seem arbitrary to me but are inviolable by me. When I lose the sense of them everything goes wrong. I suppose it is inevitable that I should think of a fiction as a small model of the simulacrum of reality that is given to us by sense and perception, and as a way to probe anomalies that emerge in the assumed world when it is under scrutiny. But this is only a hypothesis, an attempt to account for a phenomenon I cannot will and, in an important degree, do not control.

Then what am I? Or, to put the matter more generally, what is I? It is a seemingly complete and knowable self always vulnerable to startling intrusions and disruptions that can only have their origins in that same self — impulse, inspiration, sudden access of memory. The sense of self is as necessary to us as our physical bodies. But it is incommensurate with the nature and potentialities of the mind with which it would seem to be synonymous. By what is it constrained? Why do we have so little experience of our mind’s actual working? Why do we never really know what we know? A great deal has been written about the mind/brain, though little about its brilliance, which has everything to do with these intrusions, this mental overplus that asserts itself as it will, when it will. At seventy years of age, I know myself as I eventuate, as I happen. Rationalistic accounts of mind and self do not suit their subject any better than a mechanistic physics suits a quantum universe. What I do or feel, however it may surprise me, will of course be retrojected to become a part of my definition, a part of who I, so to speak, am. This does not mean that I can repeat what I have done or that any emotional state I experience will persist, even in accessible memory. It is entirely reasonable to assume that there are limits to what I am capable of, what generosity, what perfidy, though my experience has not been of a kind to test these boundaries. It is also reasonable to assume that these boundaries could be remarkably broad, or porous. In this sense I will never know myself, nor will anyone else know me.

Let us say, then, that the world of ordinary experience that is the world of rationalism is inexplicably unlike other systems of being in which it is immersed, including our own subjectivity. I emphasize the word “experience,” because its claims to objectivity are by no means so straightforward as they have been made to seem. While we as subjects can hardly venture a tentative conclusion about who we are, our species has reached a remarkably solid consensus about the nature of time, space, and causality. This model of the world, which seems to be the product of our peculiar limitations — and powers — stands up to endless tests of its reality. Then what is improbable, or impossible? Again, the most scientific answer would seem to be: We are.

This is not an anthropic argument in the usual sense. I am not interested in making the case that the universe as we know it seems to be extraordinarily well suited to our emergence in it. While this is apparently true, the argument can be reversed easily — only in such a universe could we have emerged. My point is very different — that we are somehow a little enclave of qualitative unlikeness, an enclave not to be thought of as spatial, but as experiential. When we fling some ingenious mock sensorium out into the cosmos so that it can report back what it finds there, inevitably it provides human answers, data addressed to notions of relevance that, however sophisticated, are human notions. We will never know what we don’t know how to ask, which is probably almost everything.

Then the reality we experience is a matter of mind, but not to be called illusory, because it is profoundly shared, and because, within very broad limits, it works. It works so well that, over the millennia, though philosophy, poetry, and religion have expressed restlessness with its strictures, these strictures have been taken increasingly to define and limit reality itself. To oversimplify greatly, the argument in Western civilization has been about whether the sense of an Other, an order of Being that exists in meaningful relationship with humankind, or that at least can be described in human terms, is or is not a meaningful intuition. The rejection of this intuition has always been, and is to this day, based on a scaling upward to infinity of the properties of what I have called our simulacrum, this quasireality that holds us at a remove from the world’s true workings. In other words, the criticism of religion that derides its central intuition as a projection of human fears and desires onto a universe that is alien to such things is itself a projection of human inferences, deductions, and expectations onto a universe that is wholly incommensurate with them.

* * *

Let us say that we live in a small model of reality, providentially scaled and ordered to serve us and content us for most purposes, beautiful enough to sustain our spirits endlessly, transparent enough to help us learn to see beyond it, and wrapped in a quiet of its own that lets us leave the roar of its origins to mathematics and its wild eons of unfolding to physics and cosmology. If this is not Providence, or miracle, it altogether awaits explanation in any other terms. It is wholly unsuited to the extrapolations rationalism has made from it, which leave it mechanistic or algorithmic and in any case oddly or tendentiously inhuman, though it is a product of a reciprocal relationship between limited human consciousness on one hand, and, on the other, whatever it is that sustains this model and makes it, as I have said, stable, usable, testable, and thick. When I introduce the word “providential” I am changing the character of the discussion, of course.

Providential is fairly exactly what Jonathan Edwards meant by arbitrary. He argued that the aspects of experience that seemed then and seem so far to be inexplicable, for example, the persistence of identity over time, express no intrinsic necessity but, instead, the active intention of God. A discipline of modern thinking is the assumption that if a thing is not explained, then in good time science will explain it. Therefore the thing, the self, for example is, for all purposes, explained, insofar as its complexity or elusiveness might otherwise reflect on the nature of existence. The phenomenon of consciousness is no different in this regard from the attractive power of amber. The triumphalist tone of people who speak as if from the posture of science comes from the notion that if the imperium of science has not yet spread to every aspect of existence it might as well have, taming and enlightening every corner where superstition might lurk. I do not, by the way, find this attitude among actual scientists. The word “explain” is typically used in scientistic contexts as a synonym for the much more tentative word “describe.” It is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest it has been explained.

I have spent all this time clearing the ground so that I can say, and be understood to mean, without reservation, that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come. I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such. The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

I have mentioned my recent bout of obsessions and intensities. Shakespeare has been very much on my mind, to my surprise. I studied him in graduate school, then put him aside entirely for decades until something stirred in my brain a few months ago. This happened as I was finishing a novel, writing the end of it, which ought to have been obsession enough. But it is very tiring to write, and naps and walks are an important part of my working life. Now that I have acquired every respectable video I can find of productions of Shakespeare, I watch them when I am tired, and they refresh me more satisfyingly than sleep. I am predisposed to attend to the plays as theology, among other things. I have found this kind of attention to them spectacularly fruitful. The Tempest takes us as far into the thinnest upper atmosphere as anything I know, whether art, metaphysics, or theology. Since Shakespeare was active during a period of sectarian turmoil and controversy, attention to the religious element in his plays tends to focus on the question of his loyalty to one side or the other, Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant. But his history plays are proof of his awareness that England was entirely capable of violent turmoil without there being anything so interesting as religious controversy involved in it. The great central concepts of Christianity were in dispute while he lived, and this would have been interesting in itself, putting aside the question of his alignment with positions articulated by others. Out of it all, I propose, he drew a powerful vision and aesthetic, of a grace that transcends even the most embittered differences. The great scenes of reconciliation that conclude so many of his plays are moments of Shakespearean grace.

For my purposes here I wish to draw attention to the scenes of recognition that are the prelude to reconciliation. When Lear is reunited with Cordelia, Leontes with Hermione, Posthumus with Imogen, the qualities of the despised and lost, which are constant from the beginning, are only truly perceived and valued after the terrible alienation has ended. The contrivances of plot that bring these reunions about are treated as providential and the scenes themselves have a religious radiance and intensity, though the worlds of all these plays are non-Christian. Again and again they tell us really to see the people we thought we knew, and really to feel the sanctity of the bonds we think we cherish. They open onto the inarticulable richness concealed in the garments of the ordinary — in the manner of Christianity, properly understood. Death has a very similar effect in Shakespeare. His characters question the reality of the whole world of experience, but not of their own souls. Beyond the accidents of hate and harm that distract and corrupt us, there is grace, reality indeed, in whose light all such things simply fall away. The plays make a distinction between mercy, which is given in despite of faults, and grace, for whom no fault exists. When Lear tells Cordelia she has reasons not to love him, she says, “No cause, no cause.” When the villain Iachimo kneels to Posthumus for forgiveness, Posthumus says, “Kneel not to me; The power that I have on you is, to spare you; The malice towards you to forgive you: live, and deal with others better.” In the great age of the revenge play, this visionary aloofness to the very thought of revenge is striking, certainly. So it would be now. If the world is indeed arbitrary, temporal in this sense, then an absolute reality would have no traffic with its accidents, our errors and confusions. Heaven make us free of them.

I find Shakespeare confirming that late, vivid sense of mine that everything is much more than itself, as commonly reckoned, and that this imaginary island is the haunt of real souls, sacred as they will ever be, though now we hardly know what this means. Paul says we may take the created order as a revelation of God’s nature. We know now that there is another reality, beyond the grasp of our comprehension yet wholly immanent in all of Being, powerful in every sense of the word, invisible to our sight, silent to our hearing, foolish to our wisdom, yet somehow steadfast, allowing us our days and years. This is more than metaphor. It is a clear-eyed look at our circumstance. Let us say that this quasireality is accommodated to our limitations in ways that allow us an extraordinary efficacy. To me this would imply a vast solicitude, and a divine delight in us as well.

The Prologue to the strange play Pericles, Prince of Tyre says the tale it tells is an old song, sung, among its other benign effects, “to make men glorious.” Again, this tale ends in recognition and restoration. Pericles is stirred from his trance of grief by the voice of a daughter he has not known, whose voice he has never heard. Thinking her dead, he has given way to utter sorrow. So her being restored to him is like resurrection. He sees her as he might never have seen her — miraculously herself. The tale “makes men glorious” by allowing plausibility to drop away in profound deference to human particularity, human love and loyalty and worth. I take these pious pagans to be living out a meditation on the meeting in the Garden, the supper at Emmaus. Our love and hope are sacred, and existence honors and will honor them though the heavens finally roll up like a scroll.