The Givenness of Things

EXPERIENCE

All the great Christians have said we must be humble. This should be easier for us moderns, knowing what we know. Of course we have been anticipated, by the psalmist, by the Job writer. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Here we stand staring beyond the great mysteries we have opened, having stepped to the threshold of still profounder mysteries. We can look far back in time. This is remarkable. Indeed, where the cosmos is concerned we can only look back in time. This is also remarkable. We don’t know what time is, of course, but we do know that it is not symmetrical. It goes in one direction. We look into the deep past, a maelstrom of sorts, in which time changes its nature, then perhaps disappears altogether. We can only conclude that we have our origins in this unfathomable storm, mundane creatures that we are, rumpled, trivial, tedious, our minds full of flotsam and small grudges, yet creatures somehow profound enough to have made our way nearly to the verge of creation, even as we fly farther from it into a future governed by forces that are dark to us. I have read that there was a moment well into cosmic history when the expansion of the universe abruptly accelerated. I have read that its rate of acceleration continues to accelerate. This is at odds with expectation. Now we have antigravity to account for it, an explanation that would be more satisfying if we had any understanding of the nature of gravity. If over time the universe can change radically, then it can change again. The conditions now friendly to life on earth, since they seem to be rather finely calibrated, could shift a little and then the universe would be done with us, our vanishing no event at all as things are reckoned at these scales. There would be no one to attempt a reckoning, no one to speak the word “event.” Light would be darkness without eyes to see it, I suppose, but, in the nature of the case, this would be a matter of no consequence. Our brilliance has shown us grounds for utter humility. We could vanish into the ether like a breath, leaving nothing behind to say who we were, even that we were. No doubt we will vanish in fact, mere transients in a cosmos that will realize itself over eons.

How astonishing that we know this.

My particular saint, John Calvin, says that our brilliance, our inventiveness, our imagination, our need to understand the movements of the stars and the planets, are unmistakable proofs of the existence of the soul. He says that in descending into ourselves we find God, we being the products of such exquisite workmanship. In his praise of humankind, of God therefore, he makes no distinction between the body’s intricacy and adeptness and the mind’s or soul’s agility and fluency. He treats them as one thing. Then there is the other side, of course, our thoroughgoing sinfulness. Some people are shocked by this. I am ready to grant an overwhelming bias toward error in human affairs, though most of what I know about human fecklessness and brutality I have learned from the newspaper and from history books. Calvin’s sense of human depravity, however honestly come by, is by far the most conventional aspect of his thought. He is unique, so far as I can tell, in rescuing out of the general ruin the whole human being, body, mind, and spirit. He is unique in evoking a sense of the soul that is more than a better self, more than a diaphanous second presence that will enjoy or endure the eternal consequences of our temporal life. He describes an embodied soul realizing itself in human thoughts, even in dreams. He sanctifies the best pleasures of existence, from the work of our hands to our dazzling senses to the heroic aspirations of our sciences, our learning and inquiring. For him the spiritual is intrinsic to the temporal, a present pleasure, most felt when we do anything that amazes us as an exercise of the God-given brilliance that we take for granted or that we might have left untried. And the concept “soul” allows us to acknowledge the richness and variety of the experience of the self. Robust old Martin Luther wrote, “My conscience is a lady and a queen.”

This is the soul as experience. It is also for Calvin the place or mode of encounter of the soul with God, sanctification of another order. All this is relevant to current debates about the soul, which are based on that notion of the diaphanous second self which really cannot be discovered in any special region of the brain, just as all the skeptics tell us. I remember reading an article once about starfish. They were thought to have no eyes. Then it was discovered that they were all eyes, that their bodies were entirely covered with visual receptors, and that the simple-looking creature somehow integrates a mass of sensation. A more considered understanding of the soul, as an experience that I think we do share, would put an end to these mystifications about its physical locus.

I’m often surprised by the literalism of rationalist and even scientific belief in the physical as a unique category, and as one whose norms and predictabilities, however localized, have an authority out of all proportion to their place even in the cosmos we know. And this is apparently about 4 percent of the cosmos we may reasonably infer. I will not pause here over unexpressed dimensions and multiple and successive universes, though the possibility of their existence only reinforces my point. What we experience as physical reality is profoundly untypical of physical reality. Human experience is the central factor here. We can know that we are part and parcel of the universe at large, that great storm of energy. From the soles of our feet to our worst idea, from a Beethoven sonata to Yankee Stadium, nothing can be accounted for in any other terms. Yet we can never really believe it. We could all go to school to Heraclitus.

I have called it a storm, but there is a profound order or predictability in the whole fabric of it. Whatever atoms are, certain of their properties and combinations can be described. There are other constancies, which we call laws and forces. I take the Jamesian view, that what we know about anything is determined by the way we encounter it, and therefore we should never assume that our knowledge of anything is more than partial. If this principle applies to reality at the smallest scales that are so far accessible to us, it most emphatically applies to the stratum of reality that we consider familiar. A number of times I have read or heard from the scientists and the rationalists that the brain is a piece of meat. This being true of the brain, then the brain/mind, the mind/soul, are degraded or dismissed by their being revealed in their actual, brutish nature. But why limit this insight to the brain? The entire human person is meat, except where it is bone, no enhancement. If it is reasonable to say the brain is meat, it is reasonable on the same grounds, the next time you look into a baby carriage, to compliment the mother on her lovely little piece of meat. I could as reasonably say that pieces of meat come to my classes, sit in the chairs, and gaze at me with something that looks for all the world like interest or indifference. Whatever else might be said of these living hams and chops and ribs, they seem to bore easily. Speak this way a few times, and your dearest friends might start whispering words like “sociopathic” and “psychopathic.” There might be murmurs about intervention. My point is simply that there is nothing reasonable about speaking of the brain as meat when it is equally and in the same way true of the whole person. Abraham Lincoln was meat, and so was John Wilkes Booth. If it is meaningless to say this, if nothing that distinguishes them is conveyed when it is said, and the brain/mind is already disqualified from making the difference between them, then by my lights the whole notion is reduced to absurdity.

More to the point, what is meat? Complex life. And what is that? The universe’s greatest mystery. It is meat that sings and flies and fledges, meat that makes civilizations and pulls them down. It is probably an error to localize intelligence in the brain too exclusively, but it is no more reasonable to doubt what it does on the grounds that it is an organ than to doubt that the lungs oxygenate the blood or that the eyes see. And what does the brain do? It orchestrates the functioning of the body, and it learns, weighs, imagines, designs, devises theories and rationalizes them, among other things. But the mother of the baby to whom you paid your rationalistic compliment would not be offended because you seemed to undervalue meat. My students would not defend themselves from my scientific view of them by insisting on the complexity of the nervous system. What is weirdly absent from all this is a sense of the human, and even, for that matter, of the animal. It is a pointed exclusion of what we simply know, of what is manifestly true. Reductionist definitions of humankind are radically inadequate. They are not made scientific by the putting out of account of the very qualities that make our inquiries into ourselves interesting, or even possible.

Calvin’s approach is more scientific. He says we should be amazed by our very toenails, should find them a synecdoche for a brilliance in which we participate, which in the mere functioning of our bodies and minds we express and enact. Einstein said that time is man’s most persistent illusion. With all respect, I would suggest that our great illusion is in fact stasis, solidity. Time flows one way, gravity is much weaker than it ought to be — existence as we know it depends entirely on these anomalies. And why does the reality that contains us cohere as it does, given that it is and can only be of one substance with that primal storm I mentioned earlier? What strange nexus is this that has let us feel becalmed? We look out at the collisions of galaxies and are amazed. We should be more amazed that our cities stand, our bodies pass through maturity and aging, our selves are rooted in and derive from a past that cannot be evaded and is nowhere to be found.

Look at Mars, a planet that is at present dead. Once water flowed there, apparently. But now it seems fair enough to call it a lump of stasis. It falls decisively within the range of things our perceptions tell us are solid. Then look at Earth, teeming and swarming, full of embodied life that, yes, we can see and touch, nourish, injure. Everything that exists or happens within our cocoon of atmosphere is altogether physical, if we give the word “physical” its proper meaning. As the word is used casually, ordinarily, inexactly, it means only what is accessible to our senses. But our senses select arbitrarily. Is space a void or a substance? This is debated. If antimatter should cross the little margin of relative scarcity that allows matter to exist, Being would be gone in the blink of an eye, solid Mars extinct as the dream I might have had the next night. But who has any conception of antimatter? These are conditions for the existence of everything we call physical, and we don’t know what they are. Like the word “human,” the word “physical” carries an implicit modifier that conditions its meaning—“merely” human, “merely” physical. It is absolutely medieval, downright pre-Copernican, to isolate the world we know from the heavens as we know them to be. Creation can only be altogether one phenomenon, ourselves included. Taken down to its essence, it is energy, whatever that is.

The brain as an object is less readily conceived of in these essential terms than is perception or thought, which are swift and transactional. Patient matter accommodates them, so to speak, and that is the marvel here. Renaissance writers argued that we human beings participate in the universe profoundly, precisely in our thinking, knowing, imagining. Certainly there can be no grounds for isolating these phenomena, which are almost the whole of our experience, from any model of reality. This is especially true if the isolating is done on the basis of a strikingly primitive conception of reality, one which is itself in service to a conclusion that precludes the kind of data that would call it into question. This refusal to be alive to the character of manifest life produces all sorts of absurdities. Where did an idea come from? Someone else had it first. Where did he get it? From someone else. And he? Maybe from Persia, which is another way of saying, from someone else. It seems that the genealogy of ideas must go back to Adam. Or might it be that ideas arise in living brains, meaty things that they are? Thought, memory, language, art, mores are all subtle, fluid within imperceptible and mutable constraints. We can no more generate ideas that are strictly our own than we can acquire ideas without making them our own. These complexities more nearly resemble the volatile and orderly substance of Being than they do the fortuitous accretions of matter that present themselves to the capacities of our senses.

My point is simply that the distinction, which is still very sharply drawn, between the physical and the nonphysical, is an important error, understandable in 1400 but inexcusable now. It has spiritualized the soul out of meaningful existence and de-spiritualized the world into an object of contempt at worst, or, more typically, a thing defined by its difference from anything called spiritual, which includes, as I have said, almost everything that is distinctively human. It is usual to blame Descartes for mind-body dualism, which is odd, since he identifies thought, the experience of consciousness, as the one thing that can be proved to be real. Beginning there, the reality of any other thing can be proved or disproved. His object is to find a sound starting place for scientific inquiry at large. And where else do we begin in fact? Disliking subjectivity will never make it go away.

Here is an idea that would make Descartes blanch. Apparently, there are scientists who believe that at some point fairly soon we will be able to upload our minds to computers, freeing ourselves from our bodies, being, therefore, immortal. I suppose they will program in the virtual experience of taking the uploaded dog on a walk to the virtual park, through the rain on randomly assorted virtual days adjusted to reflect prevailing weather patterns in some selected place and season. These immortals would at last be free of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and with them no doubt of all urgent reflection on what we are and what we mean. I can’t help imagining that, given the sterility of it all, the sullens would set in and these uploaded minds would do what many of their creators do — devise ingenious viruses, spy on one another, refine resentments, contrive schemes to dupe the mortals. Then physical reality, let us say a great solar storm, the impact of a meteor, even a major war, would sweep them all away, making the always necessary point that, for our purposes, the physical is not to be transcended. In any case, an uploaded mind would be as void of soul as a cryogenically frozen body. We know this intuitively.

If we think of the human person with all her senses and faculties participating in reality equally — and isn’t the reality of a thing an absolute, yes or no judgment about it, which sets everything to which it is granted on an equal ontological footing? — then we cannot put anything out of account in our attempt to define or explain her. Is error real? We all feel its effects every day. What about malice, ignorance, falsehood? They are mighty powers in this world. And, as it happens, we, humankind, have a monopoly where such things are concerned. Our brilliance can go very wrong. The old intuition that every life is or ought to be a moral contest is sound, given that the so-called real-world consequences of our thoughts and actions can be very grave. And, in a wholly real way, they accumulate, and they compound themselves. We can be trapped for generations in a frightful misapprehension, or we can be swept up in a terrible lie. Prisons and pogroms are secondary consequences of these potent untruths. So a great reality must be conceded to these anomalies of human thought and behavior, if we are to understand ourselves at all. There may be other intelligent life in the universe. If there is, I wish it well. If there was, we may have had a great deal in common with it. But for now we must assume that we are unique, the quintessence of cosmic dust. Our self-love and our humility are two sides, or many sides, of one fact: We are in a very great degree the creators of the reality we inhabit.

Calvin has little to say about eternity. For him it is continuous with mortal time because the glory of God is shown to us here, and because God confronts us in our thoughts and circumstances and in every image of God that we encounter, fallen as we are, and they are. This perspective is useful to me, a good discipline. There is much talk of judgment in Western tradition, and little acknowledgment of the primary character of judgment, that is, revelation. It is no departure from tradition or orthodoxy, only a shift of emphasis, to say that, granting a Day of the Lord, we will learn what we have been and what we are, against the standard of grace and true righteousness, of which we have had no more than inklings, and in the light of a fullness of Being from which it has been our nature to withhold ourselves. Surely no skeptic could doubt that a sound intuition lies behind the recognition of a profounder moral reality than any we have attained to. Grant it reality in an ontological sense — is there another one? — and there are important interpretive consequences, cosmologically speaking.

In any case, a great deal depends, perhaps our humanity depends, on our sensing and acknowledging that quality in our kind we call the soul. The soul is a universal and unalienable sacredness. It confers the dignity of a great competence that reaches far beyond the self and its necessities. There is a poem by Vachel Lindsay I memorized as a schoolgirl—“Let not young souls be smothered out before / They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. / It is the world’s one crime.” No, it isn’t. But it is one of our gravest crimes, massing now to impoverish the future in ways we will never know to name. But the souls we let our theories and our penuries frustrate are souls still, and, if Jesus is to be trusted, they will be our judges, they are now our judges. Clearly I am very much influenced by the parable of the great judgment in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew.

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Lately I have been watching ghosts — the ghost of the young Olivier playing a wistful and inward and elegant Hamlet, the ghost of the old Olivier playing a Lear mightily bemused by mortality. And, most movingly, I have seen the ghost of the lithe young prince in the eyes of the age-ruined king. How remarkable it is that we can summon these spirits, head to foot as they lived, perfect in every gesture and inflection. All our best art is the art of conjurers, calling up likenesses, inviting recognition, their praise and vindication being that they may have made something true to life. The actor playing an actor weeps for Hecuba. And we will weep for Hamlet, for everything we recognize in Hamlet. So slight a thing as a thought can assume weight and dimension through so slight a thing as a word. Great meaning can be contoured by a glance. This in the earthy atmosphere we all breathe, the here and now. It is elusive to us, like other great realities, like time and space and gravity. And it is the haunt of souls. We know who might look up at us from any injury we do or allow to be done. A soul, in its untouchable authority. It is an authority made good, Jesus tells us, when the Son of Man appears in his glory — that same son of man who has appeared to each of us a thousand times in the raiment of sorrow and need. The same son of man who has done us ten thousand kindnesses we have not noticed to acknowledge. The same son of man who moves our hearts to kindness, when we are moved.

Some of us have believed that a treasury of merit, in the gift of a church, can compensate for our failures and our deficiencies, our sins. Some of us have believed that only divine grace, in the gift of God, can make good our shortcomings. But what does any of this mean? Does it mean that the grand cosmos is so ordered that in the best case some of us might ’scape whipping? This does not seem to me to reflect well on the Creator. And granting the magnificence of Creation, which we have hardly begun to comprehend, and our extraordinary place in it, surely it is all about more than these traditional preoccupations encourage us to think. I do believe we blaspheme when we wrong or offend another human being. And I understand that, over the millennia, this continuous, often outrageous blaspheming has put a vast, unspent stress on the order of things. But the other side of this same reality is the great fact that human beings are sacred things whom it is indeed blasphemy to wrong. Only think what we are, then why God might have a fondness for us. Think that God is loyal to us, and then what, in ultimate terms, we must be. I have no problem with the word “sin.” I think it is one of our most brilliant evasions to have associated sin so strongly with sexuality that we can be coy about it, or narrowly obsessed with it, or we can dismiss it as a synonym for prudery, as we go on hating and reviling, as we go on grinding the faces of the poor. We alone among the animals can sin — one of our truly notable distinctions. Or, to put it another way — we are the only creatures who are, in principle if seldom in fact, morally competent. Responsible, or at least answerable.

* * *

There is a sense in which the life of Jesus reiterates the implication of God in Creation. So when I read about apocalypse I cannot think of it otherwise than as an epochal moment in the life of the living God. I know this statement is full of problems. In the nature of things there is an awkwardness in applying time-bound language to the eternal, and yet that is the problem God gives us in making himself known to us, if we assume that there is a God and that he is indeed mindful of us. The word “time” is a problem in itself. Creation did not exist and then it did, emerging out of and into what greater reality God knows. At a particular moment Jesus came into the world. And at some particular hour when we least expect it, a veil will be lifted and there will be an ending and a beginning, creation purged, healed, and renewed, afterward forever in a new and right relationship to God, who so loves the world. The clocks will stop, and we will find ourselves on the threshold of the everlasting. There is an ambiguous relationship between judgment and revelation, which has caused us to put the emphasis in the wrong place, that is, on judgment. Divine judgment implies a true and absolute understanding of the nature of transgression, which would be a great revelation, certainly. Grace itself, if it is nontrivial, must also have its meaning with a final recognition of what has been at stake here. For this reason Jesus is, from birth to death, a figure of judgment, an apocalyptic figure. And, therefore, so, by the grace of God, are we all.

Here is a question: If the soul is embodied, how does it survive the death of the body? Well, if the human self is information, as the talk of computer-mediated immortality seems to assume, and if information cannot pass out of the universe, as I read elsewhere, then presto! we have a theory — which I do not credit for a moment. My point is simply that finding the true boundaries of credibility is not nearly so easy for us moderns as it has been thought to be by previous generations. For myself, I have no more to say on the subject than that the resurrected Jesus let Thomas touch his wounds. If substance is only energy in a particular state, then the opposition of soul and body is a false opposition, and our passing through nature to eternity a different thing than we imagine. Suppose that the body is more wonderful than it is frail or flawed or full of appetites. The hairs on our heads are numbered, after all. We might be tempted to think of Paradise as a place where language would be unneeded since everything would be known. Doubt would be extinct, goodness would lack the shading of darker possibilities. We know ourselves in struggles and temptations, and what would remain of our selves if these were no longer the terms of our existence? Something more interesting, no doubt, some purer discovery of what a self might be. Perhaps we could trust God that far — to give us a heaven better than earth — if we really did value human beings enough to believe he values them.

I share Calvin’s view, that this world is what God gives us to know, that our thoughts about eternity can never rise above speculation. So we are certain to distract and mislead ourselves. The rest really is silence. If we think of the other potentialities for Being we are aware of now, and the degree to which our present reality is arbitrarily constituted, first in itself and then because of the limits of our knowledge and our means of knowing, it is not hard to imagine that another reality might be, for our purposes, inarticulable. I am speaking metaphorically here. I do not want to saddle science with theology. My meaning is simply that while science has shown us our powers, it has also shown us our limitations. Try to find a book on quantum theory that does not begin with a confession of bewilderment. And quantum theory is an account of the ways of the reality we inhabit and feel we know. My point is not that our thinking should be formed by contemporary science, but that it should not be formed, as it has been, by primitive and discredited ideas, whether scientific or commonsensical. Cynics mock the notions that hover around immortality, and as usual they have a point.

Speculation about the afterlife has had a very long history. It has in some cases become dogma, or else commonplace, which is more fixed than dogma. Pagan sky gods would feel at home in some precincts of it. Understandably, it has been a projection of this world minus time, earthly grandeur much aggrandized. Rest and plenty and companionship with Jesus and with those one has loved — however these might be changed in new circumstances, in essence we might recognize them because God loves and God provides and God has put his particular blessing on rest. These graces are elements of present life, or they can be. If we construct beyond this point, we have impossibilities to deal with. How can the dead live again? We will see. Why should they live again, motley and cantankerous as they have been for the most part? Because God values them. And he is the God not of the dead but of the living.

Still loyal, even to our dust? What is there to conclude, then, but that in ways we cannot conceive, we are very wonderful? Imagine that we find ourselves restored, and our friends, and our enemies, and those so blighted and neglected that all their beauty had been only God’s to enjoy. Souls. A heaven of souls. We know something of what this might mean if we have ever loved anyone, and we would know more if we loved more. The kingdom of God is among us.