The Givenness of Things

PROOFS

For a century and more we in the West have been told that our experience of life is deficient, lacking something truly essential, to our happiness and also to our humanity. Oddly, it is the privilege of advanced education that generally induces us to accept this impoverished condition as inescapably our own. Again, oddly, the interpretation of our condition, which quite invariably includes loss of religious belief, puts its apparent antidotes, notably religious belief, beyond the pale on grounds of naïveté, nostalgia, and so on. Those who might not otherwise suffer from this affliction are coaxed into acknowledging that God, however essential he has been proved to be, to our happiness and our humanity, was nevertheless a creature of historical circumstance.

None of this has ever seemed true to me, or even logical. Nor have I been persuaded that human life was or could be less a marvel than it was when it was felt to address and celebrate the sacred, being itself sacred. So I have studied Scripture and theology, and I have gone to church. My tradition places great importance on the sermon, and I go in hopes of hearing something that acknowledges this deep old human intuition, this sense of the sacred. Often I don’t hear any such thing, but sometimes, more remarkably, I do. A good sermon is a pure, rare, strangely unworldly gift. How is the possibility of such a gift to be understood?

In his translation into Latin of the opening phrase of the Gospel of John, John Calvin followed Erasmus, and the earlier examples of Tertullian and Cyprian, in choosing the word Sermo rather than the word Verbum. It is clear from his Commentary that he found the more conventional translation lacking in substance and resonance, inadequate to the theological burden of John’s Logos. The English, “In the beginning was the Word,” is so familiar, so pleasingly straightforward, so sanctified by use, that it is hard now to think of it as insufficient, even though it is clearly a translation from the Latin, not from the Greek. Of course the whole world has changed, and Latin has receded so far in Western culture that associations that colored or burdened particular words in the sixteenth century are lost to us now. And over time the same words have acquired new resonances that elevate them.

Still, there is interest for me in the distinction Calvin insists on between Sermo, which he calls the Sapientia Dei, and Verbum, which is for him the temporal or transient utterance that is the human voice of Divine Wisdom, a thing to be sharply distinguished from its essence and its eternal source. He says, “When the Scripture speaks of the Word of God, it certainly were very absurd to imagine it to be only a transient and momentary sound, emitted into the air, and coming forth from God himself; of which nature were the oracles, given to the fathers, and all the prophecies. [The Word of God] is rather to be understood of the eternal wisdom residing in God, whence the oracles and all the prophecies proceeded.” Christ for Calvin is the creative Wisdom expressed in the Being of all things. In his translation and Commentary his concern is to insist on the ontological meaning of 1 John. Christ, the Wisdom of God, is present in the order of Being itself, as he “upholds all things by the word of his power” and present as well in the testimony of the ancient prophets who “spake by the Spirit of Christ no less than the Apostles and all the succeeding ministers of the heavenly doctrine.” For him the very sinews of reality are made of the wisdom proceeding from this source, whether implanted in materiality with all its aspects and conditions, or spoken by those “ministers of the heavenly doctrine” who have been its teachers through the whole of Christian time. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are an aspect of this wisdom that is sacramental in its reciprocity.

This is consistent with a metaphysics, an ontology, that runs through the whole of Calvin’s thought. It places humankind, and the most striking of human attributes, at the center of cosmic reality. The kind of thought that is often called modern forbids at least tacitly the acknowledgment of human exceptionalism, as if it were reasonable to exclude reality’s most exotic expressions from an account of the nature of reality. Science itself tells us not to overlook the effect of the observer on any observation, an effect including but not limited to bias. Yet a very primary datum, ourselves in our undeniable distinctiveness, is folded into statements about primates in general, or about the wiles and aspirations of genes, human and other. Thought, that gorgeous blossoming of consciousness so deeply interesting to earlier civilization, dropped away as an object of thought as a consequence of the strange idea that we are not appropriately described by the qualities that are unique to us. This idea has eluded scrutiny, having created an environment friendly to its own flourishing.

Ontology creates a vast and liberating space. To propose that the order of the universe at every scale is, so to speak, of one substance with words preached — assuming that these words bear some relation to truth — may seem arbitrary. Contained in it is the assumption that human beings bear a privileged relation to truth, one that allows them to find it, however gradual and partial the discovery might be, and also to speak it, however imperfectly it is discerned and expressed by them. Contained in it also is the assertion that the life proposed to us by faith, which is often said to run counter to the behests of our animal nature, actually finds its origins in a more absolute and essential reality, that is, in the Divine Wisdom that is the eternal source of all Being.

It would seem, objectively speaking, that human beings do indeed enjoy a privileged relation to truth. Science bears this out, to offer what is surely the least controversial instance. Calvin makes the relationship between Divine Wisdom and human knowledge explicit:

Of [God’s] wonderful wisdom, both heaven and earth contain innumerable proofs; not only those more abstruse things, which are the subjects of astronomy, medicine, and the whole science of physics, but those things which force themselves on the most illiterate of mankind, so that they cannot open their eyes without being constrained to witness them. Adepts, indeed, in those liberal arts, or persons just initiated into them, are thereby enabled to proceed much further in investigating the secrets of Divine Wisdom. Yet ignorance of those sciences prevents no man from such a survey of the workmanship of God, as is more than sufficient to excite his admiration of the Divine Architect.

For Calvin, Divine Wisdom has the character of revelation. As it emanates from God it also reveals him. And as we are able, within radical limits, to perceive and understand it as Wisdom, even to investigate it, we are participants in it. This ontology precludes all conflict among the varieties of knowledge. There is no devaluing of learnedness and inquiry on one hand and on the other no essential disability imputed to ignorance. The attributes of Wisdom are utter plenitude and perfect grace. It is justified in all its children.

My affinity for Calvin seems as remarkable to me as it has seemed to certain of my readers and critics. And when I propose his metaphysics as a model for thought, I do so in full awareness that there are other excellent models. Calvin produced an extraordinary body of theology and scholarship, which is so broadly neglected as to seem new, and at the same time so deep an influence on my religious heritage and my civilization as to seem as I read it like the awakening of submerged memory. So its satisfactions for me are no doubt particularly deep. Lately I have been turning my thinking toward the ontological Christ, the Christ-presence in Creation. Calvin says, “Were it not that [Christ’s] continued inspiration gives vigour to the world, every thing that lives would immediately decay, or be reduced to nothing.” Emily Dickinson wrote,

All circumstances are the frame

In which His Face is set,

All Latitudes exist for His

Sufficient continent.

The light His Action and the dark

The Leisure of His Will,

In Him Existence serve, or set

A force illegible.

As is very often the case, I recognize that I have been more than anticipated in a thought that to me, for me, had seemed new. I was taught that the de-mythologizing of Christianity was a step forward, or at least such a deft strategic retreat that it came to the same thing. But since myth — never to be confused with fable — is ontology, since its terms attempt to describe the origins and nature of reality, Christianity was induced to excuse itself from explorations of this kind, to tend to its own truncated magisterium, or, to put the matter another way, to stumble forever at its own threshold, fretting over the issue of belief versus disbelief, having accepted garden variety credibility or plausibility as the appropriate standard to bring to bear on these reported intrusions of higher truth upon human experience. Calvin says, “All who are not regenerated [italics mine] by the Spirit of God possess some reason, and this is an undeniable proof that man was made not only to breathe, but to have understanding.” Our strange, voracious brilliance is no less an anomaly on this planet than our propensity toward religious belief. Objectively speaking, there are no grounds for the tendency even in modern Christianity to make clean distinctions between these impulses, let alone to oppose them.

The great importance in Calvinist tradition of preaching makes the theology that gave rise to the practice of it a subject of interest. As a layperson who has spent a great many hours listening to sermons, I have an other than academic interest in preaching, an interest in the hope I, and so many others, bring into the extraordinary moment when someone attempts to speak in good faith, about something that matters, to people who attempt to listen in good faith. The circumstance is moving in itself, since we poor mortals are so far enmeshed in our frauds and shenanigans, not to mention our self-deceptions, that a serious attempt at meaning, spoken and heard, is quite exceptional. It has a very special character. My church is across the street from a university, where good souls teach with all sincerity — the factually true, insofar as this can really be known; the history of nations, insofar as this can be faithfully reported; the qualities of an art, insofar as they can be put into words. But to speak in one’s own person and voice to others who listen from the thick of their endlessly various situations, about what truly are or ought to be matters of life and death, this is a singular thing. For this we come to church.

On my side of the ocean, at least, we have more or less let the word and the concept “wisdom” fall into disuse. Humanly speaking, this is an odd thing to have done. Wisdom literature seems to be as old a form as any there is. No doubt it is the record of an oral tradition much older than literacy. The Egyptians said, “Let not thy heart be puffed-up because of thy knowledge; be not confident because thou art a wise man. Take counsel with the ignorant as well as the wise … Good speech is more hidden than the emerald, but it may be found with maidservants at the grindstones…,” and “If thou findest a large debt against a poor man, / Make it into three parts, / Forgive two and let one stand. Thou wilt find it like the ways of life; / Thou wilt lie down and sleep (soundly).” Akkadian proverbs say, “You go and take the field of the enemy; the enemy comes and takes your field,” and “Unto your opponent do no evil; / Your evildoer recompense with good; Unto your enemy let justice [be done],” and “A quarrel is a neglect of what is right.” In Aramaic, “Many are [the st]ars of heaven [wh]ose names no man knows. By the same token, no man knows mankind.”

Wisdom seems very often to correct against presumption and self-interest, to go against the grain of human nature as this is often represented to us. Its plain usefulness to us, if we could act on it with any consistency, argues for a higher order of understanding than immediate worldly interests, say survival and propagation, require, or, for that matter, endorse. Calvin interprets John’s saying “The life was the light of men” this way: “[The Evangelist] speaks here, in my opinion, of that part of life in which men excel other animals; and informs us that the life which was bestowed on men was not of an ordinary description, but was united to the light of understanding. He separates man from the rank of other creatures; because we perceive [still] more readily the power of God by feeling it in us than by beholding it at a distance,” that is, in the brilliance of the created order, which for Calvin is a revelation of the Divine Architect.

There is wisdom everywhere in Scripture. The grass withers and the flower fades, surely the people is grass. Our mortality radically undercuts the claims of power and prosperity, the claims of this world. And our very transience means that we partake of a reality infinitely greater than ourselves in the fact of our understanding. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

The word of our God is surely that Sapientia Dei which speaks through time and order and instruction and prophecy, wisdom in which we participate first of all in the fact of understanding the brevity of our life and the beauty of it, and in the sense of recognition we share in hearing these words that were perhaps already ancient when Isaiah said them. All flesh is grass, and the beauty of it is like the flower of the field. In feeling the truth of such words we are seeing the world from a perspective like God’s. In feeling our unlikeness to the eternal we are experiencing the very height of our humanity — experiencing, that is, our ability to know far beyond our needs, our immediate circumstance, and to ponder existence itself. As we humble ourselves we are exalted, a paradox familiar to Christians.

In saying this I am setting humankind within Calvin’s ontology of Divine Wisdom. And I am proposing as well that our nature has an element in it that contravenes self-interest, and does so consistently and powerfully enough to be a demonstration of human exceptionalism. If the fierce old Akkadians could feel in their introspective moments that evil should be answered with good, this is certainly evidence that wisdom is indeed implanted in our nature, together with the thousand passions that make us sometimes harsh and meager, sometimes catastrophically unwise. Modern thought has tended to dismiss the pensive inclination in us, together with the conclusions our kind have come to in that mood, including the idea that ontology is meaningful, or at least that it is much more than a branch of physics.

In the absence of conceptual language that would allow us to elevate wisdom above foresight or discretion or practicality, what becomes of the sermon? If our humanity waits to be acknowledged in terms that make even the soundest instructions for leading the most respectable life seem trivial, and if it is deprived of this acknowledgment so long and so consistently that we forget what to hope for, what value can the sermon have for us? Yet wisdom can only mean insight, and so long as the dead level reality that is all contemporary thought admits to is the whole field upon which insight can be brought to bear, nothing nontrivial can result from it.

There is a word that fell like a curse on American religious culture—“relevance.” Any number of assumptions are packed into this word, for example, that the substance and the boundaries of a life can be known, and that they should not be enriched or expanded beyond the circle of the familiar, the colloquial. We encouraged ourselves to believe that our own small, brief lives were the measure of all things. Wisdom would have told us that our lives are indeed small and brief, like the billions that preceded them and the billions that will follow, but this information was precisely not welcome. Wisdom would have told us, too, that, by grace of our extraordinary gifts, and theirs, we are heirs to the testimonies of unnumbered generations. But these gifts, of course, failed the test of relevance, which was a narrow and ungenerous standard, systematically unforgiving of anything that bore the marks of another age, or era, or decade.

It is always hard to know where these fads originate, but they do sweep through American culture, and they do conform it to whatever notion is having its moment. At first it seemed like an extravagant compliment to say that nothing mattered much if it did not address people where they were. But then it became clear that where people were, thus understood, was a very narrow place. The solution that was offered was to narrow it still further. I saw this as a writer having to defend against journalistic editing bent on purging from the pages of important publications any language not abjectly simple, even hackneyed. This ran its course. I saw it as a layperson, too. The same assumptions ravaged hymnals and made pabulum of Scripture in translation.

Day-old journalism is used for wrapping fish. But hymnals and Bibles are costly and durable. They can persist in the environment for a generation or more. Traditional language was expunged, making Christians less conversant in it and less aware of the philosophic and literary traditions that have made it so profound a presence in world culture. Theology was stripped out and replaced with fine sentiment — though never so fine as to startle the parishioner with any unreasonable demands. And scholarship, in its publicly accessible forms, the forms churches use for their classes and discussion groups, is a parody of itself. Karl Barth rightly said that Christianity that excludes the Old Testament has a cancer at its heart. So we have that to deal with.

But these are all only symptoms of a more profound problem. It is a canard among those who reject religion that it is essentially an attempt to dispel mystery, that it tells us how the leopard got his spots. These same despisers often speak of science as the proper and approved method for dispelling mystery. It tells us how the leopard really got his spots. In fact religion, like science, addresses and celebrates mystery — it explores and enacts wonder and wondering. It posits a vision of reality that incorporates into the nature of things the intuition that Being has a greater life than we see with our eyes and touch with our hands. The clutch of atheists who have been active lately, who claim to be defenders of science, discount physics as it has developed in the last one hundred years and more on the grounds of its strangeness, its exuberant indifference to common sense notions of how the world works. Whether rigorous thinkers would feel they had this option is a question for another time. But the fact that they feel free to exclude what they don’t understand, even when its reality and importance are incontestable by their own standards, surely goes some way toward explaining the confidence with which they dismiss a profoundly human intuition they cannot share, that there is more to reality than their reductionist notions of science can comprehend. This is not to say that the existence of God is proved or disproved by the tractability of the next query science poses to itself. It is to say that no model of the universe of things can be descriptive that does not take into account the reality of human existence and nature, first of all in the fact that they are the sole lens or portal through which we know anything.

Our capacities and incapacities as creatures who know must be placed at the center of the universe, that is to say, the universe accessible to us — the only one we have, though not the only one there is. It may be that masses and forces forever “dark” to us support the reality we inhabit. Someday they may surge or fade, and the heavens will roll up like a scroll. Gravity, on which everything depends, may be a shadow phenomenon with its origins in a neighboring universe that happens to be approaching the end of its life. It is no criticism of human knowledge that it cannot know its own limits, or, for that matter, fully understand its own strategies, its own capacities. Moses Maimonides accepted Creation ex nihilo and Albert Einstein rejected it, until the implications of Edwin Hubble’s observations became clear. Twelfth-century Maimonides took the idea from Genesis, from remote antiquity. The Genesis account is a most remarkable expression of an intuition found widely in ancient religion, that the universe did indeed have a beginning. We can never know what it is we only think we know, or what we know truly, intuitively, and cannot prove. Our circumstance is itself a very profound mystery.

There is a tendency, in the churches and in society as a whole, to push mystery aside as if it were a delusion of ignorance or fear that can have no relevance to people living in the real world. This is strange. Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Richard Feynman said, “Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggles for good and evil seems inadequate.” Awe and mystery do not become simple, solvable puzzlement because they are encountered in a church, or because they are addressed in religious art or in the terms of religious thought. Feynman said something one hears often, “God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for other mysteries.” And so on. The mystery that compels science and the mystery that elevates religion seem very like one another. In neither case is there a reason to suppose that mystery will be exhausted or dispelled. In both cases the beauty of Being is acknowledged in its grand elusiveness. An ontology like Calvin’s assumes that the boundaries between them are by no means clear, and that to set them in opposition is to misrepresent both science and religion. Presumably the results achieved by science are more quantifiable, though religion has inspired a very great share of that true art Einstein speaks of. There is an effort to supplant the kind of mystery celebrated by faith with a supposed “realism” that cuts us off from humankind, from the literature of thought, from the vast and weighty record we have of the brief history of our species. Simultaneous with this, perhaps identical with it, is the assumption that people will only be annoyed by references beyond the ever-contracting boundaries of the familiar.

Historically, Christianity has been a very great force behind the spread of learning. I have an old book I found in an antique store, a big volume that declares itself to be “the devotional and explanatory pictorial family Bible.” It has a leather cover with scriptural scenes pressed into it. It was published in 1892 by the American Wringer Co. I looked this company up on the Web, and found it, of course. It was and is a manufacturer of minor household devices, notably wringers. The Bible it published is interesting in a number of ways. It presents the text in two columns, one the King James Version and the other the Revised Standard Version. It has a learned and judicious “Introductory,” which explains that the verse divisions of the Old Testament were “adopted by Stephens in his edition of the Vulgate, 1555, and by Frellon in that of 1556 … It appeared for the first time in an English translation, in the Geneva Bible of 1560.” The book is full of those soaring, hyperbolic engravings for which the nineteenth century was notable. It provides a history of every book; cityscapes of places where Paul preached; maps; very brightly colored and somehow gilded renderings of the furnishings of the tabernacle and the temple with a “comprehensive and critical description” of them in sixteen large and closely printed pages. It has pictures of every animal and plant mentioned in the Bible, most of them in color; pages of drawings of ancient coins; an essay on translators, reformers, and martyrs; all sorts of tables and chronologies of ancient history; an evenhanded and informative “history of the religious denominations of the world.” (Mormons might take exception.) Then comes the “Complete and Practical Household Dictionary of the Bible,” 112 pages long, also illustrated, showing an Assyrian plow, the Erechtheum, foreign captives making bricks at Thebes, the Ephesian Diana. This is just a part of the front matter. Someone pressed a four-leaf clover at the first page of Genesis.

I imagine a traveling salesman pulling up to a farmhouse in a wagon loaded with hand wringers to take the drudgery out of wash day, and Bibles to fill a whole family’s educational and devotional needs. This is all very American, the unembarrassed mingling of religion and commerce. Something no longer American is that there is no condescension in it. A household in need of a hand wringer might also acquire a history of the Scriptures as text. (“The Apocryphal books, to which, of course, no Masoretic division was applicable, did not receive a versicular division till the Latin edition of Pagininus, in 1528.” That “of course” tells us worlds.) They would acquire not only a history of English translation but a thorough demonstration of its effects. And any child could dream forever over the fabulous cities of Egypt and Babylonia, the agonies of the prophets, the elegant vigor of angels. No doubt some of the scholarship is outdated. It appears rather free of tendentiousness, certainly by modern standards. It is a cliché of American cultural history that for generations many homes had no book except a Bible. If the Bible happened to be like this one, people in those homes might have been in many important ways more sophisticated than my graduate students. The book cost me only $50, because Bibles of its type are so common. I have a similar Bible in German, Luther’s translation, also published in America. It tends to be forgotten that for a long time German was America’s second language.

God is the God of history. Christianity is a creature and creator of history. On these grounds alone it is absurd to think history could possibly lack relevance. Then, too, if human beings are images of God, aware of it or not, and since they have been an extraordinary presence on earth for as long as they have been human, what they have thought and done cannot be irrelevant to very central questions about Being itself. We are grass, no doubt of it. But with a sense of history we can have a perspective that lifts us out of our very brief moment here. Certainly this is one purpose of biblical narrative and poetry. Then the fact is that we are made to know. It is in our nature. Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. This can be looked at from another side — the most incomprehensible thing about humankind is that we want to understand the universe, and that we are, so to speak, sufficiently of one mind with it to find it in some degree accessible to our understanding. How to describe this fact, this experience? At the end of his Sixth Meditation, Descartes, always granting human fallibility, concludes that the reports his senses make of conscious experience can be taken by him as true. “For from the fact that God is not a deceiver it follows that in cases like this I am completely free from error.” For him knowledge is a transaction with God, whose nature assures its integrity. It is not only his spending most of his life in the Low Countries and serving in a Calvinist army that makes me feel Descartes was open to Calvinist influences. To return to the distinction made by Calvin in his Commentary on 1 John, Christ, that is, God, is the essence of wisdom and its eternal source. “Astronomy, medicine, and the whole science of physics” are forms in which the knowledge of the grandeur of God, that is, human understanding of the universe, can be sought out and known by human beings. This kind of knowledge is at a long, qualitative remove from Sermo, Wisdom itself, and at the same time, as Verbum it is inexhaustibly revealing of that same Divine Wisdom.

We have made very separate categories of science and learning on one hand and reverence for the Creator on the other. Some people attempt theological proofs on the basis of what might be called the brilliance of the natural world, the intricacies of its interrelationships, their elegance. Arguments of this kind are generally persuasive to those who need no persuasion. This matter of proof, or of justifying faith in terms that might seem respectable to skeptics, has consumed a great deal of time and energy lately, and left those of us for whom God is a given without much help in contemplating a reality whose origins and subsistence are in God. It is surely appropriate to consider the implications for our understanding of reality of the character we ascribe to him. Let us say, first of all, that humankind is a true and appropriate object of his love. On its face this is an idea that runs counter to many things we know from experience and observation. But Christianity, like quantum physics, does not exist to affirm or rephrase common sense. Like quantum physics, it could not exist within the strictures imposed by common sense, supposing they were of a kind to be imposed on anything more substantive than our own thoughts. Let us say that atomic particles can be entangled at any remove in space and time. This is contrary to everything we thought we knew about space, time, and causality, but that’s just how it is. The wisdom of common sense is the foolishness of subatomic reality. Let us say that human beings stand in a unique relationship with the Divine. Edwards’s phrase, the “arbitrary constitution of the Creator,” does seem increasingly useful in describing its physics. Then there is no justification for applying the test of common sense to what the religious must assume are reality’s deeper structures, the orders and affinities that make human wisdom in its larger sense efficacious, beautiful, vital, and full of satisfactions.