The Wise Man and the King: A Postmodern Parable

When I was collecting research for an essay I was to turn in to Dr. Kaufman on Franz Kaufka’s The Trial, I first took advantage of the power of the Internet. It has long since been a college trade secret that one can collect invaluable references by looking through the footnotes of other scholars’research. I thus discovered a paper entitled An Imaginative Encounter between Franz Kafka (1884–1924) and Reb Nahman (1776–1810) by Rabbi Moshe Reiss, Ph.D. The conception of a dialog between these two historical Jewish figures was really quite ingenious and thematically well-conceived, though I found fault with Rabbi Reiss in that it was not particularly well-formatted for the Net, riddled with small typographical errors that could easily have been corrected with a little bit more time and care. Beyond my desire to steer away from entirely Web-based research, this apparent carelessness further discouraged me from using Reiss’paper as a primary source, for while the ideas were strong, the final result seemed less professional and thus could easily be deemed less credible as well (though I personally do not believe that to be the case). Nevertheless, among several other Web authors I discovered, his paper was truly thought-provoking and his citations alerted me to a number of excellent resources. Through the interlibrary loan system I soon secured a choice selection of primary sources, Rabbi Reiss indirectly helping me write a tight, A paper.

I had never previously heard of Reb Nahman, who is described by Rabbi Reiss as “Ukrainian,” “raised in a late eighteenth century ultra-orthodox Hassidic home,” and “messianically obsessed.” The description at Amazon reveals that he was “one of the most renowned of the early Hasidic masters of prayer and probably the greatest of the Hasidic storytellers.” I remember being particularly struck by “The Wise Man and the Simpleton,” a parable recounted by Reiss from Reb Nahman’s book The Tales of Nahman of Bratslav (and slightly reformatted here):

Reb Nahman’s parable is subtle and has poignancy on at least several levels. Apparently, the philosophic man overestimated the worth of his own importance by first underestimating his worth in the King’s eyes, for in the end, he became the system of measure by which he measured the King and by extension all other men. In other words, the wise man initially recognized the importance of the King and his own utter lack of significance by comparison, but, failing to understand the simplicity of the invitation, soon suppressed the knowledge of his King and called other men fools who subjected themselves to him. So interested was he in the reasons why the King would send for him, that it did not take the King long to become an afterthought, effectively rationalized away into insignificance, overshadowed by the wise man’s own self-importance. Thus, in an ironic juxtaposition, the lesser man becomes the greater man in his own eyes; “wise” enough to realize no King would ever send for someone like him. When mapped out, his argument looks a bit like the following:

Following this line of reasoning, who then, has ultimately become more important in the eyes of the “reasoner”: the real King or the “wise” man? The wise man did recognize that compared to the King, his life was rather small and unimportant. But it is what he did with that knowledge that created the complete inversion of his judgment: he trusted his own wisdom far too much. His skepticism dismissed the possibility that the King would send for him on any grounds. Implicitly trusting this conclusion generated by his skepticism—leaning on his own understanding a bit too readily—he eventually concluded that the King was illusionary. It never occurred to him that the problem might not be a problem at all, but simply an error in his own judgment. Being truly wise in the recognition of the greatness of the King and even his own unworthiness, he nonetheless became a fool in his underestimation of the King’s motives and overestimation of his own ability to reason correctly. Part of the error in his judgment was because he had learned the lessons of the surrounding culture that teach that one must always earn one’s way on merit, talent, or other distinguishing feature. Heaven forbid that a King might simply want to see him out of benevolence: might just want to see him because he wanted to see him and not because of some talent or ability that he had that the King might want.

I find the wise man’s actions particularly relevant to my life in college, where values are often inverted and it is not always so obvious how such has occurred; consider: at any given stage, did the philosophic man do anything that was expressly unreasonable, anything that was not understandable? His thought followed a rational progression of initial belief in the King’s invitation, and yet, considering his own insignificance in a world where worth is based on material value, he soon disbelieved until his disbelief eventually won out over his belief, his own self-importance and pride growing in the process to a point where he began to scorn other men. And do you notice that I spoke of my life in college, where “values” are often inverted? Recently in The Woman Born Beautiful (Ichi, Ni, San, Shi, Go), we consulted Vigen Guroian’s article Awakening the Moral Imagination (which, incidentally, took much of its inspiration from another Hasidic master, this time Martin Buber). In it, Guroian speaks of “values” and how this term has come to replace the older concept of “virtues”:

It is precisely this emphasis on values and the subsequent systems of thought deriving from it that so often cause the “wise men” to declare that the King does not exist at all. It strikes me that this is often a unique folly of “educated persons” and is not nearly so pervasive with “everyday, ordinary folks” who tend to respond deeply and from the heart without as much reflection. As Paul Vitz remarks in the first chapter of his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism:

Such a factor often leaves me stuck somewhere in the middle, for my aspirations are to teach at the university level but my heart is set on finding truth; I, for one, do believe that the King is alive and well and seeks an audience with all who will accept His invitation. As we have so often noted about strengths and weaknesses, my strength of seeking after truth and trying to weigh all things carefully is also my weakness, for I, like the philosophic man, can became so engaged in thinking something through that I effectively began to lose my objectivity, seeing only the problem before me and not how it stands in relief to the larger world around: my perspective is limited and finite. In fact, I would say that is one of the biggest challenges of any Christian in college, particularly when studying more theoretical subjects: the elements that are isolated become effectively larger than life, for if our attention is now “here” it cannot also be “there” as well, and the balance in which truth is found becomes compromised accordingly.

One further gets the impression that truth isn’t always so important to some of the theorists one encounters in the classroom; sometimes one gets the impression that consideration of the question “But is this true?” can soon become so conflated that it is effectively emptied of all meaning. Pride may be the real culprit: the desire to “get ahead” that we unwittingly absorb if we are not careful. Thus, in our quest to become wise, we run into the danger of becoming fools. Why is this often true? I believe it has much to do with our “values” and where we place them; the wise man evaluated the world based on a system of worth: he could not comprehend why the King would send for him when his wisdom (the only virtue he saw as having any lasting merit) could easily be matched by any of the King’s courtiers—to say nothing of the King himself whom he also knew to be very wise. His was a worldly sort of wisdom that adopted the value system of the surrounding culture, never thinking to question the very milieu in which it was itself birthed. The wise man recognized that in this dog-eat-dog world, anything of value is merely a commodity to be bartered and sold, and thus his wisdom was a commodity as well: and, he sanely recognized, a limited one at that. Yet his wisdom was the only true commodity he felt he had and thus he leaned on it heavily, calling on it to help him understand the situation. Sadly, he never transcended the value system in which his wisdom had taken root and could not imagine any reason the King would send for him that was not predicated on value as a commodity: goods to be bartered and sold.

A similar logic or value system is found in college: knowledge is a commodity, commodities hold value in the marketplace—thus, knowledge equals value in the marketplace, an often-coveted means of getting ahead. Even more subtle, however, is not just value in the marketplace, but a derived sense of self-worth from one’s ability to command the market-place: I have such-and-such amount of commodity, therefore I have such-and-such amount of worth as a human being. In and of itself, knowledge is a good thing, but when it gets transformed into a mere commodity, it tends to create pride in the haves and self-disparagement in the have-nots. No longer is it seen as a virtue in itself but as a commodity to be bought and sold and a means of obtaining self-worth. The student begins to learn how to market himself: how to speak better, write better, think better, and argue more persuasively. He thinks to himself: “I now have X number of years of education, hence I have greater marketability and thus greater worth. Not only will I make more money, but I will have more prestige and will be able to get further ahead in every way: my car will be faster, my tastes more refined, my contacts more sophisticated.” A combination of pride and self-doubt begin to well up within him, and he feels ambivalence toward the world: he has come far, but far enough? He knows that others have come farther and he cannot possibly measure up. He is therefore frequently tempted to compare himself to others who have not come as far as him, so as to make his own distance traveled seem greater. Likewise, the college professor is often both heir and advocate of this system of values; a premium is placed on being the first to generate new knowledge, if not inwardly motivated by himself then outwardly by his institution of employ who have federal dollars and tax write-offs and collegiate rankings gleaming in their eyes. In such an approach to education, ever so subtly the self begins to take center stage, the pure pursuit of truth for its own sake slowly receding into the background.

When Christians who have the value system of the King enter this environment, they might easily be swept off their feet because they fail to recognize that all that they are being taught is not motivated from a pure pursuit of truth, but rather by a system that seeks its own self-advancement according to a completely different value system. They may begin to grow disillusioned with the whole system in general, rather than clearly seeing it for what it is and recognizing both its strengths and its weaknesses. Even if the system in which education is birthed is badly flawed, it does not mean that nothing good comes of it, for “unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled” (Titus 1:14). When disillusion begins to creep in, the secret for any Christian, whether in college or otherwise, is to pull aside and pray, renewing one’s mind with the sweet, refreshing waters of the Holy Spirit. With God’s help, we can see things as they actually are without becoming disillusioned and morose. Our Lord said to His disciples: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). In other words, they were to see the reality around them clearly, but not to despair of it; rather they were to see clearly so that they might transform it: not by might and not by power but by the indwelling Spirit of their Lord.

We all long for something of substance. The wise man did feel a thrill at the prospect of being summoned by the King, but his view of the world was so jaded that he soon put all such thoughts behind him and hardened his heart. He clearly recognized that the world is corrupt, that it is to large degree based on commodity. In truth, it does not take a particularly wise person to recognize this factor, at least if he has had any experience with the world at all and has kept his eyes open during the process. But the wise man in the parable could not see beyond this aspect and inadvertently became a part of the problem and not the solution, for it is likely there were those who thought him very wise, taking copious notes as they listened to him call other men fools. In the end, he was little different than the ragged urchin in W.H. Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles, who could not conceive of “any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept”:

Skeptical that the King could have any interest in him, the wise man became hardened, jaded, cynical and helped contribute to a world in which girls are raped and two boys knife a third. There is, of course, a legitimate time and a place for skepticism—the “be shrewd as serpents” part of Jesus’s statement—but skepticism can also be our worst enemy when it comes to the wisdom of faith. We should pray, then, that God would reveal to us the difference, for like all things in life, there is a proper balance. Consider two other parables for a moment pertaining to misguided skepticism, this time on the prospect of resurrection:

In both instances, we can sympathize with the “wise ones”: the twin who has never seen the outer world and cannot conceive that such a place exists: likewise, the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads at the thought of ever having beautiful wings and flying through the heavens. The problem with their wisdom, however, is that it is limited and has not seen all the variables. Based on the existence that they know, such things seem like fantasy and their words sound wise. But they cannot conceive of an existence outside or beyond any more than the wise man in our original parable can conceive of a King who would summon him simply because he wished to see him.

I said earlier that “my strength of seeking after truth and trying to weigh all things carefully is also my weakness, for I, like the philosophic man, can became so engaged in thinking something through that I effectively began to lose my objectivity, seeing only the problem before me and not how it stands in relief to the larger world around: my perspective is limited and finite.” In the final episode of Dr. Jerram Barr’s 10-part video series Building Up Bridges, Tearing Down Walls, he speaks about engaging our culture and recognizing that the strengths in which it most prides itself are also it points of weakness. He begins by citing Romans 3 and 1 Corinthians 1: “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:1–2); “For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1: 22–24). His point is that the Jews really were the guardians of the Law and the Greeks were truly wise, the strengths of both cultures still shaping our world to this very day. However, while these characteristics are genuine strengths, they also become a great source of pride, like the wise man and his wisdom: “to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness.” Taking this analogy and applying it to our contemporary culture, Barrs asks what virtues we see in the Western world that are simultaneously genuine strengths and sources of pride that stand in the way of the Gospel. He suggests that, for America, at least, freedom might be one of these areas. We certainly do see that many of the political issues in the United States center around rights and freedom, and, to cite just one discipline, nearly all the debates in bioethics revolve around the degree to which personal autonomy should prevail.

Beyond individual cultures, it strikes me that there is an entire cultural climate today that is even larger than the individual nations, and that cultural climate is postmodernism. The description “postmodernism” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but as we are using it here, it is simply a nametag we are attaching to a specific period in history to better understand it: namely the contemporary era in which we live. Because there is such an influx of information, technology, and ideas, it can quickly change how we view the world around us. Sometimes, we, as Christians, become very disillusioned with postmodernism and see it as a great evil or else we so overuse the term that we empty it of any real meaning. (For all of these reasons, I very often denote it as “post-Modernism” in academic papers, though it is a bit unwieldy to do so here.) The real strength of postmodernism is a recognition of our limitations, just as the wise man initially recognized the limits of his own wisdom. However, the problem can come in when our devaluing of our ability to know much of anything with certainty morphs into its own dogmatic statement that nothing is knowable, like the wise man who erased the King.

One of the best examples I have heard of the perspective of life that emerges in our postmodern culture came from my folklore professor who likened the contemporary mindset to the modern skyscraper. When you are standing outside on the sidewalk and look at one of these buildings, what do you see? Story after story of one-way glass reflects the city behind you. Each pane of one-way glass forms a slightly different perspective: the pane directly in front of you shows the skyline centered from your perspective, the one to the right of it shows an almost identical view slightly to the right of your perspective, the one to the right of that shows an almost identical view slightly more to the right. Up and down and side to side, like so many television monitors, each pane of glass reflects a slightly different view of the city. Stepping inside the building produces a different effect. You know, of course, that you are looking out from one-way glass, but it has become largely invisible to you now. Likewise, postmodernity has made us very conscious that our individual perspectives are like panes of one-way glass. Our perspective is invisible to us, though having seen so many other panes of one-way glass from the outside, we know it is there. And while my perspective is invisible to me, you, standing on the outside looking through your one-way pane of glass, see it as being a different mirrored image of your world, just as I see your one-way glass as a different perspective of my world. Each perspective is varied and there are at least as many perspectives as there are people, each one necessarily limited, finite.

In his 1994 essay “Children and Colors: Folk and Popular Cultures in America’s Future,” Jay Mechling writes that “most Americans of the 1990s live comfortably in a postmodern world of pastiche, ironic juxtapositions, and self-reflexive parody” (Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition 266). Because the postmodern environment has made people so aware of “one-way glass,” our culture defines itself in often humorous ways; movies, for example, ironically reflect back on themselves and comment on other movies, a pastiche of intertextual and intratextual irony interacting against an externality that provides its context. Mechling admits, after addressing a series of questions regarding contemporary society, that: “My answer to these pressing questions is perfectly postmodern in its mood. That is, my answer is emergent, incomplete, and dialogical” (279). Mechling recognizes that his essay is one perspective of many and that history is never complete, the course of time moving ever onward. Thus, any answer is not the final answer—it “is emergent, incomplete”—and with so many panes of one-way glass running around, its emphasis is not on the universal but rather on the dialogical—the (often ironic) juxtaposition of our engagement with one another, iron sharpening iron, stone beating scissors, scissors beating paper, and paper beating stone. But let us look at one more example.

When I first put the Mr. Renaissance Website together a little over four years ago, CSS (cascading style sheets) was not nearly the de facto it has become today for changing the appearance of Web pages. In simple terms, to use CSS, one sets up a very basic Web page with HTML (hypertext markup language) and then uses (an often separate page of) code to change the way everything on the page looks. Thus, in the case of a separate file, by changing this one file, one changes every page on the Website to which it is linked. The result leaves the same content, but makes the form look much different. Let us be “self-reflexive” then, and look at this same paragraph as it might be changed by CSS—even the capital letters have been transformed to lowercase (though not if you copy and paste the inner contents elsewhere). :)

You see, like a different CSS file to the same Website, you see differently than anyone else on this mailing list. We all read the same words, but our previous experiences “color” them differently, subtly affecting their perceived meaning. And, those who print out this newsletter to read may experience a different kind of “coloring,” some of the vividness of our example above lost because they print in black and white and/or do not see the colored borders and backgrounds which failed to print due to the default settings on their browsers. These persons might be metaphorically likened to an individual with dulled sensitivity: he hears the same words everyone else does, but in his mind they do not register the same effect and accordingly become blunted, lackluster. (Incidentally, there is a Website devoted exclusively to CSS entitled Zen Garden: just click any of the links under “select a design” to see the a wide variety of layouts of the same content; in fact, those who are truly seeking enlightenment can purchase the book that resulted from the project entitled The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web.) ;)

It is possible, in becoming acutely aware of how we all process information differently—aware of how we “color” a text in our mind—to begin to think that everything is thus colored and hence entirely relative. Everything is not relative, however: the text itself has not changed, though our perception of it has. But that is part of the problem, going back to our original parable: if the wise man were a typical postmodern, as he becomes more self-reflective, recognizing how we all color things, he may begin to question: “Did the King really summon me, or did I merely perceive that he did?” And, eventually, he might ask, “Is the King even real?” Finally, with enough studies into what we perceive and his estimation of how reliably we see things, he might conclude: “the King is not real and other men who believe that they see the King, see a mirage of their own making.” The more “sophisticated” the man—the “wiser” he is—the more this conclusion might seem “apparent.” Our friends who are reading this newsletter as a printed, black and white copy, are not nearly as struck by the visual contrast in our example above. To those of us reading on our computers however, we see much more vividly the CSS metaphor of how we all “color” a text (even as its content remains the same). Further, as readers reading on our computers, our “more sophisticated perception”—more vivid, fuller, richer—affects us more deeply, making us appreciate more fully the power of perception. If we linger for long on these thoughts in this “world of pastiche, ironic juxtapositions, and self-reflexive parody,” we begin to become increasingly divorced from “common sense,” everyday reality. Becoming thus “wise,” we can in time become fools, calling black white and white black: declaring perception is the only reality; the only world that exists is the one I create: men who are subject to “the King” are fools, for there is no King “out there.”

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:18–31)

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