Ideas Clothed in the Mind of God

In the collection of essays entitled Brecht on Theatre, German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) shares his thoughts on various subjects, such as an excerpt in which he talks about Verfremdungseffekt, or the “V-effect” for short. The word Verfremdungseffekt suggests the notion of “estrangement” or “alienation” and is sometimes translated as the “A-effect” (alienation-effect), as John Willett does in the excerpt we are describing. The idea of the V-effect is that Brecht would rework something very familiar to his audience—perhaps a well-known historical narrative or a spin-off of someone else’s play—and weave it into an opera in a way that estranged the once-familiar subject matter, forcing the audience to consider this frequently encountered thing in a totally different way. He was not against natural emotions emerging from the interaction of the actors in his various scenes, but he wanted more than sentiment for sentiment’s sake: he wanted to provoke his audience to thought, in part by partially revoking their suspension of disbelief so that their intellect would remain consistently engaged. By intentionally taking his material from the familiar and commonplace and reworking it, he made those things to which his audience had grown complacent seem strange and unusual. This idea of taking the mundane and representing it in unique ways is not itself new or novel: plenty of playwrights before Brecht had waxed eloquent about making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. But Brecht and his collaborators were particularly adept at the V-effect as a social instrument, for example confronting the audience with the hypocrisy of society to which they had grown rather flippant. Given that those who frequented opera houses were generally from the affluent and well-educated sectors of the social world, they were less likely to give such matters a second thought.

In the short excerpt on the V-effect, Brecht describes asking the question, “Have you ever really looked at your watch?” By doing this, he is inviting people to evaluate their watches anew; he invites them to look with new eyes at these marvelous instruments, largely taken for granted, that they wear around their wrists. So I would ask you, “Have you ever really looked at your watch?” Digital watches may seem less spectacular than analog ones, but nevertheless, there is something quite amazing about a tiny piece of circuitry that counts the minutes one by one until it reaches sixty and the hours one by one until it reaches twelve and the days one by one until it reaches from twenty-eight to thirty-one and the years one by one without end and all this in an object that averages perhaps a square inch in size. The effects are even more striking with an analog watch in which very fine-toothed gears work in concert to keep the hour, minute, and second hands in motion, often the days of the week, and sometimes a way of distinguishing the day from the night (and in others still further sophistication). We take watches for granted but the vast majority of us would be hard pressed to manufacture such devices for ourselves. Even if we did have all the parts, we would not know how to put them together and make them work. These tiny inventions we wear around our wrists are really quite a marvel of human ingenuity though most of us never stop long enough to notice or care.

To me, the V-effect is what philosophy accomplishes in its better moments. Philosophical treatises can be tedious in their logic and are at times as rigid and inflexible as Victorian women laced in cast-iron corsets. But at its best, philosophy takes the most ordinary things in the world and makes them strange again, filling us with wonder. We once again approach each blade of grass with awe and find butterflies breathtaking; nothing is quite as it seems.

In the readings for my various classes, I have again discovered something of the sense of wonder in the world. Yet the process of drawing it out is at times laborious and often more than a little taxing on the mind—and that, in turn, can spill over into the emotions. In any case, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding has furnished some thoughtful reflections. As many of you know, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) is usually considered to be the father of empiricism. We use this word “empiricism” rather freely in these newsletters and what we mean by the term, of course, are those things discoverable by the senses. The term “empiricism” is often used to contrast scientific knowledge, which proceeds on the basis of observation and experimentation, with other types of knowing, such as things discoverable by reason and reflection. (These two ways of knowing are often described by their Latin counterparts: a priori refers to that which can be discovered by reflection alone and a posteriori describes knowledge derived from sensory perception.) We also tend to describe sense perception in terms of “experience.” There is good reason for this choice of words as it relates to empirical knowledge, for both the word “experience” and the word “experiment” come from the Old French word experiri (itself from Latin experimentum) which translates to “trial” or “test.”

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke attempts to form a distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. Primary qualities are those properties that comprise the essential essence of a given object. These elements include an object’s extension and solidity and approximate our conception of a given thing’s mass. The idea of extension is the idea that matter takes up space by extending in different directions; my palm has extension approximately three-and-a-half inches across. Solidity deals with the resistance that one object encounters when it meets another. No two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time; Locke spoke about the properties of water, for example. When two pieces of metal are being pressed together, placing a diamond between them forces them apart until the diamond is in one way or another removed. Water pressed between two pieces of metal, by contrast, tends naturally to flow to either side allowing the easier joining of the metal parts. However, if the water is not allowed to flow completely away but is trapped between the two metal pieces in such a way that it cannot escape, no matter how much force one uses, one will never bring the metallic surfaces into full contact. Only when the water is removed can the two surfaces be brought fully together. So too, other things we term “soft” we consider as such because they yield to our touch, but even these objects have solidity: a pillow does not at any given moment occupy the same space as the face being pressed into it but gives way. Also included in Locke’s primary qualities are figure (we might say “shape”), motion, and cohesion (even the most fluid things cohere together and thus have a unity that enables us to call them what they are: therefore we have meaningful concepts such as “water” or “mercury” to say nothing of “rock” or “wood” or “sledge hammer”).

Secondary qualities, according to Locke, are effected by primary qualities. However, just because primary qualities have the power to effect secondary qualities does not mean that these secondary properties are necessarily in the object; they rather are our sense perception’s response to that object. That is, according to Locke, secondary qualities involve the joint participation of the external object’s primary qualities and our sensory organs; the primary qualities trigger responses in our sensory organs and this combined cause and effect becomes the basis of secondary properties. He uses the example of wax: if you have ever seen bee’s wax in nature, you know that it is naturally tan colored. However, when wax is left out in the sun, it will either (a) melt or (b) be bleached to an off-white color. We do not imagine that (a) melting is itself a property found in the sun nor do we suppose that (b) the off-white color found in the wax is a primary property of the sun. Yet we do believe that it was the power of the sun that caused these changes to take place. Something in the wax has the ability to respond to the sun by melting or being bleached and it is the interaction of sun and wax together that effect the change. So too, things such as color, taste, and smell Locke believed to be the interaction of our organism with external objects. These qualities he called secondary qualities, because just as melting is not in the sun but is a property caused by the sun, so too Locke believed these properties are not “in” objects per se, but are rather caused by the interaction of various objects and our sense perception. Secondary properties do not comprise the essence of a given thing; rather secondary properties characterize the response we have to those things. That is to say, the essence of a given thing has to be there first in order to effect the response, but the response half of the equation is not itself found in the thing. The combined cause of primary qualities and the response of our sense organs taken together are essentially what comprise Locke’s secondary properties. Before we carry this idea further, let us briefly look at the perception of color.

If you were to tell many people that a stop sign was not actually red but rather had the power to produce the perception of redness in a human being, they would find what you said totally nonsensical. Yet scientists tell us that we have receptor cells in our eyes (dubbed cones as a rough indication of their microscopic shape), and it is these that “create” color, if you like. Something in the stop sign has the power to effect within our optical nerves the sensation of redness, yet other animals such as dogs apparently do not see color, for while they have rod receptors, they do not have the cones in their retinas that make them responsive to color. (By contrast, a dog’s sense of smell and hearing tend to exceed that of human beings; we may only imagine what such extended senses are like.) Whether this means that redness is actually “in” the object—in this case, the stop sign—or whether it is simply the interaction of human eye and external thing is debated. As a side note, did you know that the traditional red capes bullfighters use to taunt bulls are apparently only colored for the gratification of human retinas? The bulls, seeing only black and white, are infuriated mainly because they have been abused before the event: they have been starved and shocked and poked and prodded and that is what enrages them, not the color red. If I were a bull, I would no doubt be seeing scarlet too!

Dr. Helm, our modern philosophy professor, suggests that when we look out into our world, we are in effect “perceiving ourselves perceiving.” He does not mean that we are watching ourselves watching ourselves in the sense that I might, for example, glance up and see myself standing at the window looking out. What he means is that when light waves enter my retina, they are perceived with colorization, a bit like a black-and-white classic that has been touched up with Technicolor. This now colorized “signal” becomes my final perception: I do not see the signal before it is processed, only afterward. So then, when I see something, according to this conception, my act of perception colorizes whatever it is I am seeing. I do not see the thing itself in all its (apparently?) black-and-white glory, but rather I perceive my perception of it. That is why he says that we are “perceiving ourselves perceiving.” It is not likely that his description would evoke any kind of disagreement from Locke.

A central reason why Locke wrote the Essay was to put an end to skepticism. He wanted to demonstrate the limits of human knowledge so that we would content ourselves with what was obtainable. Among the doctrines he attempted to quash was the idea that we have innate ideas. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates tries to rationally demonstrate the idea of reincarnation and then in Meno, Socrates, assuming the same doctrine, attempts to demonstrate that we do not learn in the sense that anything new is imparted to us. Rather we learn by being made to remember, and if we are thus remembering, there must be some innate idea to remember, and idea, as it were, from a previous existence. (See also the October 6, 2004, issue Wisdom: Socrates, the Psalmist, and the Serpent.) This tantalizing idea of innate ideas found its way into the philosophical stream and influenced thinkers up until Locke’s day. Locke’s counter, however, is radically different.

Every idea that we have or will ever possess, claims Locke, derives ultimately from sense experience and among the demonstrations he offers is the inability of a blind man to have an idea of color or of a deaf man to understand the nature of sound. The blind man, for example, does not know what perceptions correspond to color because his eyes have never beheld the world. There is no innate idea of color in him any more than there are innate ideas in any of us. Locke invites us to take inventory of our own thoughts and see if there be any there that are not ultimately accounted for by experience. He suggests that all of our ideas are either derived from (a) perception or from (b) reflection on what has been perceived by the senses. Therefore, a sailor may conceive of the torso of a woman on the body of a fish, but he will never conceive of something outside of the concepts which his experience has supplied him. He cannot imagine what he has never experienced any more than a blind man can imagine what the perception of color would be like.

We may object and say that we also have ideas that are derived neither from perception nor reflection but from learning. Locke would likely answer this objection by suggesting that it does not defeat his premise in the least: the ideas taught us by another are ultimately deriving from the sense experience common to humanity. It is only because we share common sense perceptions and the words to describe them that one may evoke an idea in another, and this evocation is itself an aspect of sense perception as we see the letters the other has imprinted upon the page or hear the other’s voice forming words (and likewise with any other sensual cues involved in communication). Incidentally, while we will not take the time here to examine his thoughts on symbols, Book III of his treatise is entitled “Of Words” and deals extensively with the curiosity of language, an extension or embodiment, we might say, of our ideas ultimately derived from either (a) perception or (b) reflection. He also has some fascinating thoughts about the revelation of God and the role of faith and reason in the last chapter of his treatise (specifically, Book IV, Chapter 18, entitled “Of Faith and Reason and Their Distinct Province”). His thoughts on language, reason, and revelation are all greatly interesting, but there is only so much ground we may cover in a single issue and those topics will have to be deemed the potential fodder of another day. We will console ourselves by noting simply that he made the allowance for what we may term, if we like (though Locke does not) a third way of knowing in which God directly impresses upon us some kind of experiential knowledge that not only bypasses the organs of sense but may afford us an understanding that transcends the perception of the ordinary senses, as Locke notes apparently happened to the Apostle when he perceived such ineffable things “as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of a man to conceive.” Locke calls the latter original revelation as opposed to traditional revelation in which we must assess for ourselves those words purportedly inspired by God.

Locke was no atheist; in fact, he was a strong believer and advocate of Christianity and sought the harmonious blending of faith and reason. He knew that many in the Church taught that we possess an innate idea of God but Locke offered a different conception. He divided our knowledge into three basic categories: we have (a) intuitive knowledge, (b) demonstrative knowledge, and (c) sensitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is knowledge that comes in a flash and consists of apparently self-evident insights. These are the sorts of truths we simply know and do not often stop to explain or examine. Demonstrative knowledge follows a pattern more like a geometric proof. Each stage of the process consists of intuitive or sensitive knowledge and the series of steps taken together demonstrate a given proposition. We may not immediately know, for example, that the interior angles of triangles always add up to a total of 180 degrees no matter what kind of triangle we are dealing with. However, by a series of demonstrations in which we not only measure the interior angles of a number of different kinds of triangles but also explain the logical necessity behind this conception, we become convinced of its truth. In time, we may forget the steps that led us to this certain conclusion (and others of its kind), but we clearly remember being led there and thus do not later doubt. It is of this second type of knowing that Locke believes our knowledge of God consists, being very clear from a consideration of ourselves and what it would take to produce beings who think and feel and possess intelligence. In fact, Locke thought that, upon reflection, there was nothing more obvious and certain than the knowledge of God, though he denied that such knowledge is in any way innate. And finally, sensitive knowledge is the knowledge acquired through the senses and it is the least immediately reliable of the three, as it is often subject to distortion, such as optical illusions or other factors that interfere with our perception of external objects, not to mention the problematics of secondary properties as reliable guides to matter as it is in itself.

Now then, we said that Locke denies the idea of innate knowledge. However, it is not entirely correct to say that he believes we were born tabula rasa—a blank slate. Certainly he describes our minds as white sheets of paper upon which experience writes its letters. However, he also recognizes that there is something that propels us forward in life. That something is the sense of pleasure and pain with which our Creator has instilled us. Ultimately, Locke believes that both of these perceptions are given us by God in order to guide us to that which is best both for our bodies as well as our spirits. Holding our hands near the flame warms them but stretching them too close burns, warning us to pull our hands away. If we had no such warning system, we could easily destroy our bodies. Likewise, Locke believes that we have basic desires and drives from which we derive pleasure. These too can be abused but they are ultimately there to lead us forward into that which is beneficial to both body and soul. The utilitarians to follow Locke made this tenet one of their guiding principles and therefore we hear of utilitarian calculus in which the greatest happiness for the greatest number is controversially “computed,” or at least an attempt is made at the same. Whatever we are to make of utilitarianism, let us pause here for a moment and reflect on the idea of pleasure and pain in general.

We have spoken of the nature of fire to warm us when our hands are held a moderate distance away from the flame but to burn us when they come too close. One of the specific example that Locke uses is that of the sun’s blinding light which hurts our eyes and thus protects the delicate instruments of perception by which we see. In like manner, we are told in terms of virtue that using other people leaves us feeling hollow and empty whereas benefiting others brings us a sense of joy. The article The Virtue of Temperance is a fine example of this rationale, suggesting that the virtue of temperance deals mainly with touch and thus most involves the pleasures of food, drink, and human sexuality. When these desires are kept in moderation—when we cultivate temperance—we achieve maximal pleasure from them. However, when we overindulge, they become something like passing our hand too close to the flame and feeling the burn. Perhaps human sexuality is the most obvious example of pleasure incurring emotional pain if approached intemperately. We can derive few pleasures higher than that of seeking to fulfill our spouse sexually in a self-giving expression of kindness and love. However, when we approach our sexual urges by demanding that they be fulfilled, what initially promises great satisfaction often leaves us feeling hollow and a bit bewildered or even cynical. In these instances, we may assure ourselves that we genuinely care about our partner’s pleasure, but a closer examination reveals our concern has more to do with not wishing to appear a poor lover than in actually caring for our partner’s emotional needs. The implication, of course, is that being worried about being seen as a “loser” in bed is really a form of pride, the focus being far more on ourselves and the image we are projecting than on the other and his or her physical and emotional needs.

Just as in the case of the fire that either warms us or burns us depending on the relationship to it we share, built into the pleasure principle is the mechanism of pain that reveals the reasonable boundaries we must observe if we desire soundness in physical, emotional, and spiritual health. In the case of sexuality, when we demand our own pleasure be gratified, our encounter may lead to genital pleasure, but the emotional aspect leaves us unfulfilled and we therefore seek to satisfy that longing elsewhere or in some new way. If all we are doing is using our partner’s body to masturbate, then we can expect little more pleasure than that of solo sex. Further, the most fulfilling aspects of masturbation generally mimic in fantasy what is only fully achieved in the reality of the self-giving of one’s body to the other. (Incidentally, Bodies of Evidence by Frederica Mathewes-Green is one of the most balanced and intelligently written articles I have read in some time on the subject of human sexuality; if this topic interests you, you might find her comments insightful.) These points regarding sexuality alone suggest that Locke’s pleasure-pain principle is a lot more sound than many of us may be willing to grant. What is more, particularly for persons seeking to be fully pleasing to God, the idea of pleasure in general is often regarded with suspicion, the advice of others often further complicating the problem and adding to a false sense of guilt. Yet pleasure in and of itself is not a sin; in fact, it could be argued that the entire quest of the spiritual life is to put aside lesser pleasures in search of those which are highest, to set aside the constant pursuit of instant gratification and replace it with the art of delayed gratification, both in small things as well as in the most pure and transcendental sense. Pleasure is still there, but it is tempered with self-restraint, our self-discipline enabling us to become masters over our passions rather than our passions becoming masters over us.

Recall that in our previous issue, St. Aquinas did not deny that we have an innate idea of God, but qualified this belief by suggesting that it is true mainly insofar as we all seek happiness. He further asserts that only God can fully fulfill us in this way. Part of his rationale is purely philosophical, for (in accord with St. Anselm), God is by definition that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought. This definition suggests that God is not only the originator of all things, but utterly perfect—not lacking in any way. In fact, when Scripture speaks of the holiness of God, built into this idea of the holy is the idea of the wholly, or utterly complete. The very reason why God is said to be holy is because He alone is without lack and as such He alone deserves our adoration and praise. By contrast, when we attempt to prop up our imperfections with other fallible creatures and things, we run the risk of them folding beneath us, for what is itself limited can never totally complete or fill the imperfect. Perhaps Jorge Luis Borges offers such an insight when he writes that “[t]o fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” That is not the only way to look at human romance, of course, but his comment is illuminating in the sense that it highlights our limitations and the inability of even the most pure bonds to satisfy us completely. We are creatures of need: not only do we hunger and thirst and require rest (and die without these things), but we are also subject to restlessness, loneliness, feelings of alienation, and a host of other very real emotional needs and perceptions that bespeak of our dependence upon external realities. We need food and drink to nourish our bodies, rest to replenish us emotionally, spiritually, and physically, and one another to fulfill our needs for companionship and human touch. Yet all of these things can be filled and the sense that there is still something missing remains. St. Aquinas’ idea, then, is that only the infinite can ever fully satisfy the inner thirsting of the finite soul; this conception is the philosophical basis behind the idea that the ultimate happiness of humanity is found in God and God alone and the strange restlessness will remain until one finds one’s joy in Him.

Locke seems to agree with St. Aquinas in his own way, for while I never remember him using the term innate, he nevertheless does believe that it is God who wires us with our sense of pleasure and pain and that He has done so for our own good to keep us from stagnating on the one hand and from overindulging on the other. Physically, we desire food and drink, warmth when cold, shade when hot, and any number of related perceptions. Our desires and our pains therefore serve to keep us healthy physically. Locke did not specifically address human sexuality that I recall, but he would likely have said that these desires are a mixture of the physical and spiritual. And ultimately, the thing we most yearn for as we desire the deepest fulfillment of the human heart is God Himself. You may recall that St. Aquinas referred to God as “man’s beatitude”—that this quest for happiness is the primary sense in which it could be said that we have an innate idea of God. In fact, this concept even furnished the basis for our title: Innate Knowledge: God as Man’s Beatitude.

In conversation with a friend last Wednesday regarding these matters, he put the question to me as to what compels us to affirm God and His goodness in those altogether too rare moments in which each blade of grass or bird’s song or cloudless sky seem to speak of God’s glory and in which the veil between heaven and earth appears to have been pulled partially back. I said something of what we have been discussing here, but he extended the idea by suggesting that we have been designed in such a way that we respond to God and to the things He has ultimately created. What is innate, in other words, is our ability to respond: perhaps even the response itself is to some degree innate.

Locke divided our world up into primary and secondary qualities, but not without incurring protest. George Berkeley (1685–1753), an Anglican bishop who was widely read in the philosophers of his day, wrote A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge which is in part a direct response and rebuttal to Locke’s work. Incidentally, this is the same Berkeley who supplied the name to the famous university in California and is the same Berkeley whose Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous kicks off the popular interdisciplinary PPE program (philosophy, psychology, and economics) at Oxford. The name Hylas is a derivation of hyle—“matter”—and Philonous the compound philo-nous—“lover of mind”—hence, the dialogues frame the debate of matter versus mind. Taking the side of Philonous, Berkeley purports to write a “common sense” rebuttal of Locke’s essay, but the ideas in his Treatise are certainly not the stuff of the common person: as he puts it, we should “think with the learned but speak with the vulgar.” Berkeley follows Locke’s lead by suggesting that all we have within our heads are ideas and thus all we have to compare one against another are ideas. We cannot very well compare things “out there” with things “in here” inside our heads, for there is no “out there” available to our examination. All that we know and perceive and think and feel is entirely confined within our own heads. That much does not seem so radical. However, the part to follow suddenly becomes much more so.

Locke goes to great lengths in his attempt to demonstrate the high probability that the things we perceive with our senses really exist as matter external to us. As part of his appeal, he notices how his senses corroborate one with another. For when we pass our fingers through fire, we experience the searing sensation and physical symptoms of a burn, such as redness and swelling. Later, we can manufacture the idea of fire from the stuff of our imagination and envision passing our fingers through it without the least bit of pain. The fact that the sensation of actually seeing fire is much more vivid and acute than our merely imagining it combines in turn with the pain we simultaneously feel when we get too close to produce a strong corroborative evidence. The obviousness that these various senses work in concert for Locke attests to a high level of probability that an external world of matter actually does exist outside ourselves. By contrast, Berkeley flatly denies the existence of matter, though we should probably hear him out on the subject first before formulating any overly hasty opinions. It is not that the things which we perceive do not exist, for what we see, what we hear, taste, touch, and smell are all very real. They are much more vivid than the ideas furnished by our own imaginations for very good reason. What Berkeley claims, then, is that God directly and constantly supplies us with these perceptions. They exist in His mind and it is His mind that gives them their stability and logical consistency. He has willed them into being and thus they exist, not as physical matter but as spiritual substance: for Berkeley, all things exist as “ideas” in the mind of God.

Berkeley believed that Locke’s views, along with the mind-body dualism of Descartes, was a breeding ground for skepticism and atheism, though the latter term had more of the sense of agnosticism to it than the way in which we often employ the term today. His solution was to radically remove the material world and to place these things in the mind of God. We will not explore his ideas further here (though they are truly fascinating and worthy of such consideration) except to note that the much more recent British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) affirmed that the discoveries made by Einstein and the world of physics resoundingly support Berkeley’s view of the world, if we but substitute the idea of “energy” for “spiritual substance.” For physics has shown beyond a reasonable doubt to many learned minds that matter is little more than slowed-down energy and that things that appear solid are in fact force fields of atomic energy ceaselessly in motion. For centuries, oriental philosophy has embraced such notions, suggesting the possibility, for example, of passing one’s hand through a table or even one’s own body. Modern physics appears to confirm this concept: resistance (and thus the perception of solidity) is apparently the product of the spin of the molecules in our hand counteracted by the rotation of the molecules in the table. Moreover, it is believed that it is at least theoretically possible that the frequency of our hand could be harmonized with that of the molecules in the table and accordingly be made to pass through it without so much as a second thought. It also reawakens strange thoughts about the tales of spirits and ghosts that were once more widely circulated—and believed—than they are by much of the Western world today, to say nothing (as my editorial assistant has reminded me) of Jesus’ apparent passage into the upper room even though the doors were locked.

Philosophy, for me, is not really a quest for definitive answers, for it engages far too much in speculation. It is rather, at least in its better moments, a way in which Brecht’s V-effect is set into motion for me. It was Francis Bacon who famously said “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” That strikes me as being very true. For when we dabble in philosophy here and there—we could just as easily say physics or any other abstract discipline—we begin to feel like we have the universe all carved out and served on a platter. When we really begin to probe and dig around beneath the surface, however, many strange things begin to surface. What is more, what can we really be said to know at the end of the day?

When I was a boy, I tried with limited success to avoid eating those things on my plate I did not like by pushing them around and around in an attempt to make the amount of food appear less and thus appease my parents. Yet in the end, I had as much food on my plate as I ever had. That is what we do with all of our knowledge. We push food around on our plates and become very familiar with the various formations into which we are capable of congregating it. Yet in the end, it is still the same plate and the same food and we are little wiser than when we began. If our purpose in pushing around our food is to awaken that sense of wonder, we thereby gain immeasurably. But if our purpose is to try to push beyond the realms of human knowledge, we tend to become just a little mad and in any case deceive ourselves into thinking we know more than we do. Whether there is an external world composed of matter—or one composed solely of spiritual substance—I believe that Locke was on to something with his suggestion that all that exists in our minds is the storehouse of sense perceptions and our reflections on them. We may have an innate tendency to pleasure and pain; furthermore, there may be something innate that gives us the power of reflection, the ability to reason from one idea to the next, and the capability of responding to God. Yet for all of this, the only world we know is the world in which one sense perception follows another: a world in which one thought follows the next. We have never seen outside of our own shells; if we have gotten a glimpse of anything outside ourselves it is only because we have somehow managed to get something of the outside world inside our heads. Perhaps, then, our sense of God involves reception on our part: an act by which He enters into our heads and our hearts. Or perhaps we are always clothed in Him, being the “ideas” He has willed into being.

We have been rather hard on the skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) in several recent issues: quite undeservedly so in fact. For while he was a skeptic, he was not without sense and has probably considered the question of God far more deeply than many of us have. In fact, he may be seen as something of the gadfly that was once ascribed to Socrates: never coming out and expressing his own views, he nevertheless served as an irritant that provoked atheist and believer alike to ponder the question of God. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is an engaging work addressing ideas not so uncommon to our own discussions here. Much like the Platonic dialogues—or Berkeley’s dialogues read at Oxford—Hume features a small number of characters involved in conversation. One is a skeptic named Philo, one is a mystic named Demea who rejects much of institutional Christianity, and one is a rational theologian named Cleanthes in whose library the discussion takes place. Ironically, Philo and Demea—the mystic and the skeptic—initially appear to have the most in common until it is shown that Philo is actually Demea’s most cunning adversary. None of the characters are seen as coming out indisputably on top of the dialogue and many strong arguments are argued back and forth with a level of eloquence and insight that makes me regret ever saying a single cross word about Hume.

In Part IV, Philo is speaking to Cleanthes about the Peripatetics, a term used to describe the followers of Aristotle, for it is derived from Greek peripatētikos—“walking about”—the way in which Aristotle apparently taught. The Peripatetics would say that the reason why bread nourishes our bodies is because of its “nourishing properties” and the reason senna (a flower used as a laxative) purges our bodies is because of its “purgative” ones. Yet in the end, what more had they done but pushed the food around on their plates? For they no more understood the cause of nourishment or purgation by the labels they affixed to the same than did the skeptic who denies our ability to know such matters or the common person who freely admits he has no idea what the cause of such things might be. In recent centuries, we have apparently made more progress in some ways, at least if we count our modern amenities and the ways in which we harness them to be a sign of progress. Certainly medicine and technology have experienced amazing breakthroughs. Yet in the end, how much of our knowledge is really anything more than pushing food around on our plates and taking note of the arrangements we are capable of producing?

There is very little we can truly know in the world but a great deal we can experience. There is probably no healthier, happier, saner, or more spiritual way to look at life than with wide eyes of wonder. To the extent that our learning can facilitate Brecht’s V-effect, it will have served a useful purpose. But if we try to push past the boundaries of human knowledge and claim we know more than is capable of ever being known, we threaten to snap or short a circuit. G.K. Chesterton claims that it is mysticism that keeps men sane; by contrast, it is often the most rationally minded who suffer from insanity (recent European history furnishes some fine examples). The implication is sweeping but in many ways true: the poet speaks the language of the human heart whereas the philosopher (and perhaps theologian) often speaks a language of abstraction that likely does not approximate the true nature of God even remotely.

Archive note: See also looking vs seeing on the discussion forum regarding this newsletter.

The author of First John reminds us that we cannot fairly say that we love God if we do not love our brother; in the same breath, I would wonder if we do not at times spin our abstractions so precariously thin that we starve both our own hearts and those of our brothers and sisters as well. It may be that learning the language of humanity is one in the same as learning the language of our Lord and perhaps the timeless truths we seek are as close as the home and hearth next door. It may be that until we learn to speak the language of the everyday, we will never discover God anywhere, for it may be that He is only found (at least in any discernible way) in those things in which He has so lovingly fashioned.

“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.”

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