[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 4:1 (September 2004).]

Merold Westphal

Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for devotional reading! The idea is strange, even weird. But our trio has at least one conspicuous advantage over the authors we more easily turn to for spiritual edification: Because they write in the language of psychology and sociology, it is easier to see that they are talking about real people in the real world.

But our trio has an even more conspicuous disadvantage. They are atheists. Worse, they are militant atheists. Worse yet, they are among the most influential and widely read atheists of our time. Few writers can claim to have contributed as deeply and decisively to the secular humanism that permeates the world we live in. It is “out there” shaping the way “they” think and act, and it is “in here” shaping the way we think and act, even in our battles with secular humanism. And they have contributed to the spread of this virus more than almost anyone else. How can we possibly come to think of them as God-given instruments of our own cleansing and renewal as individual Christians and as the church? How can we be enabled to recognize in the diatribes of these enemies of the faith the painful truth about ourselves?

I believe the final answer to this question is found in recognizing the profound parallel between the critique of religion in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and the critique of religion found in the Bible. Faith as fraud? Devotion as deception? These are strong charges, but modem atheism is not the first to make them. What about Amos, whose God cannot stand the music offered in his praise (Amos 5:23)? What about Isaiah (Second or Third), for whom “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa. 64:6)? And what about Jesus, who considers the most pious people of his day “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27) and the temple run by the chief priests a “den of robbers” (Mark 11:17)?

We need only recal1 Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees, Paul’s critique of works righteousness, James’s critique of cheap grace, and the Old Testament prophetic critiques on which these are based to be reminded that biblical faith has built into it a powerful polemic against certain kinds of religion, even if they are practiced in the name of the one true God. These biblical diatribes against false religion are addressed to the covenant people of God in their worship (as they think) of the God of the covenant; indeed, in the case of James and Paul, these sharp critiques are addressed to the Christian church. They cannot be neutralized by appeals either to metaphysical orthodoxy or to ritual rectitude and zeal or to the combination of sound doctrine and proper worship.

But perhaps the most frightening critique of instrumental religion in the Bible is the portrayal of Jesus’ own disciples in the Gospel narratives. I am not referring here to the prayerlessness that made the power over evil spirits that Jesus gave them useless (Mark 9:14-29), the insensitivity with which they scolded parents who brought their children to Jesus (10:13-16), the overconfidence with which Peter denied that he would deny Jesus (14:27-31), the lethargy that made it possible for Peter, James, and John to sleep through Jesus’ agony in Gethsemene (14:32-42), the cowardice they showed when “they all forsook him and fled” (14:50), or even the disloyalty with which Peter eventually denied even knowing the one he had confessed as Messiah (14:66-72).

These are all signs of weakness, evidence that the faith of the disciples had the awkward habit of running out of gas at crucial moments. But there is also evidence that their faith had a venal quality to it, that even when it was present it was corrupted by instrumental interests. We see this on the three occasions when Jesus tried to tell them of the suffering and death awaiting him in Jerusalem:

Mark 8:27-9:1 Immediately after Peter’s dramatic confession, “You are the Christ,” Jesus speaks of his suffering and death. Peter rebukes him, but Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” The subsequent episodes suggest that it is not cowardice but ambition that speaks here. If Jesus is the Messiah, Peter is in line for a top job in the new administration.

Mark 9:30-41 Again Jesus tries to tell the disciples what lies ahead, but they are unable to understand and afraid to ask about it. What do they find to talk about in the episode that Mark and Luke record next? They have a debate about which of them is the greatest. Who will have the most prestigious positions in the kingdom? And to keep the inner circle conveniently small, they try to silence a man who is casting out demons in Jesus’ name, “because he was not following us.”

Mark 10:32-45 Jesus tries again. James and John respond by coming forward with a painfully honest confession of what motivates their discipleship: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” The text does not say which of the two brothers wanted to be Secretary of State and which one Secretary of Defense, but it does tell us that the other ten disciples were very upset at this attempt to get an inside track on the spoils of victory.

It is in these texts that Jesus’ profoundest teachings about the meaning of discipleship occur. He speaks of self-denial, cross-bearing, servanthood, losing one’s life for the sake of the gospel, and giving one’s life for others. The contrast between his understanding of what it means to be a bearer of the kingdom and the disciples’ self-centered discipleship is as powerful a critique of instrumental religion as anything to be found in Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.

But because their critique of religion is so deeply biblical, in spite of their own unbelief, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche can help us to recover the meaning of the biblical critique of religion if we will let them. The Spirit that speaks to the church also blows where it will. Is it possible that the Spirit would speak to the church through its worst enemies?

We can more clearly see the powerful parallel between Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, on the one hand, and Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus, James, and Paul, on the other, if we become more precise about the nature of the atheism being recommended for our devotional meditation. For it is not every form of modern atheism that I have in mind. To focus on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud requires a simultaneous broadening and narrowing of the meaning of “atheism.”

“Atheism” can be used of religious unbelief in a broad and inclusive sense. It thus includes both the atheist proper, who claims to know that God does not exist, and the agnostic, who, with a kind of Socratic ignorance, claims only that we do not or cannot know whether God exists. Further, atheism is no longer limited to the issue of God’s mere existence, but also includes major claims about the nature and activity of God. Nor are its negations limited to the propositional content of the religious life. They extend from religious theory to religious practice with the claim that the liturgical, devotional, and ethical practices of the religious life are rationally impermissible or at best unwarranted, in either case irrational.

There is a narrowness, however, that corresponds to this broadness of usage. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud represent a type of atheism different from the atheism that has dominated European philosophy of religion from at least the time of Gaunilo through Hume and Kant and that continues to this day to hold center stage in Anglo-American discussion. This atheism we can call “evidential atheism.” It is nowhere better summarized than in Bertrand Russell’s account of what he would say to God if the two were ever to meet and if God were to ask him why he had not been a believer: “I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence God! Not enough evidence!’”(1)

By contrast, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have been called the masters of the school of suspicion.(2) What unites them in spite of important and possibly irreconcilable differences is their joint practice of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motives from ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not to notice how and how much our behavior and our beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown. While our trio develops and applies the hermeneutics of suspicion with primary emphasis, respectively, in the spheres of political economy, bourgeois morality, and psycho-sexual development, they also each subject the religion of Christendom to the critique of suspicion.

This suspicion is to be distinguished from skepticism, which gives rise to evidential atheism. Skepticism is directed toward the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is directed toward the evasiveness of consciousness. Skepticism seeks to overcome the opacity of facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons. Skepticism addresses itself directly to the propositions believed and asks whether there is sufficient evidence to make belief rational. Suspicion addresses itself to the persons who believe and only indirectly to the propositions believed. It seeks to discredit the believing soul by asking what motives lead people to belief and what functions their beliefs play, looking for precisely those motives and functions that love darkness rather than light and therefore hide themselves. Where Hume and Kant challenge the soundness of the arguments for the existence of God, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud seek to show how theistic belief functions both to mask and to fulfill forms of self-interest that cannot be acknowledged.

While skepticism (along with evidential atheism) has its origins in Platonic-Cartesian doubt, suspicion arises from Francis Bacon’s critique of the Idols of the Tribe and Cave. “The human understanding is no dry light,” writes Bacon, “but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called ‘sciences as one would.’ For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.” With reference to impatience, hope, superstition, arrogance, and pride, Bacon comments, “Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.” This leads to the advice that every seeker of truth adopt the rule “that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion…” (3)

The style is different, to be sure, but Schopenhauer clearly makes the same point when he says that by will he does not mean a power guided by knowledge and under the direction of reason. Instead, he says, we should think of the will by analogy with blind instinct, which uses reason as its instrument. Reason gives fictitious accounts of our behavior for the sake of moral appearances, or, even better, under the guidance of the will becomes entirely unable to notice unwelcome facts about the self. In short, the will is substance and master, the intellect only accident and servant. (4)

In his masterful book on Freud, Paul Ricoeur makes the point with similar generality. Suspicion is necessary to keep before us “the nonautonomy of knowledge, its rootedness in existence, the latter being understood as desire and effort,” that is, as the will and affections of which Bacon and Schopenhauer speak. “Thereby is discovered not only the unsurpassable nature of life, but the interference of desire with intentionality, upon which desire inflicts an invincible obscurity, an ineluctable partiality.” (5)

As we shall see in more detail, Freud sees dreams and neurotic symptoms as the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes. He then suggests that religious beliefs are like dreams and reIigious practices like neurotic symptoms. In both cases the claim is that we can neither understand nor properly evaluate the belief or behavior in question until we discover the hidden drives and motives that shape them. In other words, suspicion easily transfers its critique from beliefs to practices.

The resulting evaluation of the religious life is as a whole devastating for at least two reasons. First, to an even somewhat impartial observer the critique seems all too true all too much of the time. The prominence of various self-serving motives in our piety, or at least in that of others, is all too easy to notice. Who can fail, for example, to see the self-deception in the Afrikaner attempt to portray apartheid as a divine mandate or in the “white man’s burden,” “manifest destiny,” and “anti-Communist” theologies that have shaped the colonial domination and even extermination of indigenous populations in North, Central, and South America? Or who can fail to notice the instrumental character of the piety of the politicians, especially at election time? Do they serve God for nought (Job 1:9)?

Second, by its nature suspicion discredits the believer and the believing community even if their beliefs should turn out to be true and their practices in themselves good. Even orthodoxy becomes idolatrous when belief in the triune God serves to sanctify the flaunting of his purposes in the world. The God of the Bible repudiates metaphysical compliments, however orthodox, ritual tributes, however splendid, and moral rectitude, however rigorous, when they are set in the context of instrumental religion, offered to a god we hope to domesticate.

So it is not surprising that almost invariably our first reaction to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is to seek to refute or discredit them. It is comforting to think (though at this reference to comfortable thoughts suspicion begins to get suspicious) that Marx can be blamed for the Soviets, that Nietzsche can be blamed for the Nazis, and that American (scientific) psychology treats Freud as beyond the pale.

While this temptation is largely a defensive reaction to the expose suspicion is likely to generate, it gains the appearance of legitimacy from a failure to distinguish the two kinds of atheism. No doubt the proper response of Christian thinkers to evidential atheism is to seek to refute it. This can be done by trying to show that there is, in fact, sufficient evidence to warrant religious beliefs and practices rationally. Or it can be done by challenging the way in which the evidentialist demands evidence.

I shall not discuss the relative merits of these strategies here. My thesis here is that an entirely different response is called for by the atheism of suspicion. The first task of Christian thinkers as they face the likes of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is not to refute or discredit them. It is to acknowledge that their critique is all too true all too much of the time and to seek to discover just where the shoe fits, not “them” but ourselves.

In short, I am calling on the philosophers, theologians, and above all the pastors and lay teachers of the Christian community (1) to be the prophetic voices that challenge the church to take seriously the critique of religion generated by suspicion and (2) to lead the way in using it as an aid to personal and corporate self-examination. The emphasis of Christian spirituality on personal self-examination and the emphasis of Hebrew prophecy on corporate self-examination make it possible to speak of the religious uses of modern atheism when we speak of the atheism of suspicion.

_______

Merold Westphal is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Originally published in Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism by Merold Westphal, © 1998 Fordham University Press. Reprinted with permission.

(1)Quoted by Alvin Plantinga in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 17-18.
(2)Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.
(3)Frands Bacon, Novum Organum, XLIX, LVIII, emphasis added.
(4)Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), I, 111, 114, 292, 368-69; II, 126-28.
(5)Ricoeur, pp. 457-58.

[The following was a a presentation for the Department of Religion at the University of Florida in the fall of 2006.]

C. John Sommerville

Editor’s Note: On October 19-20, 2006, the Department of Religion at the University of Florida celebrated it’s 60th anniversary, the second oldest such program at a state university in the US. Two public lectures were offered for this event. The first was a talk re-telling the history and development of the department, given by Chair David Hackett. The second was given by John Sommerville, Emeritus Professor of History at UF, and a friend of the Department. Dr. Sommerville was asked to address the issues of his recent book, The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford UP, 2006), with a view toward what a religious studies program could offer within a state university like UF. As a Center, we are pleased to have Dr. Sommerville on our board, and we think his talk gets to the heart of his book extremely well. While we encourage you to read the whole book, we offer the print version of his lecture as a primer.

You are all acquainted with the phenomenon of the scapegoat, from your studies. The lot has fallen on me to fill that role today, as we discuss the place of religion in the university currently. Or perhaps our hopes for the future of religion in universities. If there is a future for universities. So if I, as a bit of an ignorant outsider, abuse your hospitality by challenging something you hold dear, you can lay your comments on my head.

But I do want to set your minds at ease, somewhat, as we get started. You may know that a book has appeared recently under my name, called The Decline of the Secular University. Of course it is about the university and religion. It is partly a lament about how religion is being ignored in this secularist environment. More importantly, it is a lament about what the university has done to itself by the agenda of the last several generations. David’s talk has reminded us of just how rapidly religion has been contained within the Department of Religion here at the University of Florida. Of course, he has also shown how the department has taken advantage of the new opportunities offered to it.

And yet religions are thriving in America today, at least by some measures. Universities are not thriving, it seems to me. They are not giving leadership, in politics, culture, science, or social responsibility. They do not even succeed on our ultimate measure, of being entertaining, unless you happen to have a championship team in something or other. When they do, they are rewarded.

In the book I raise the question of whether religions might be thriving intellectually more than they are, if religious perspectives were welcomed across the university curriculum. I assume that we in this room do think that religions, or most religions, do have intellectual depth. Also, universities might be closer to the center of American life, if they related to the ultimate concerns of Americans, rather than handling those concerns with special objectivist gloves. Objectivity insists on separating knowledge from action, in line with the fact/value dichotomy which is now under philosophical attack.

So my question for us is where religion departments come into this picture. How are they, or how could they, be improving the religious institutions of our society? And how could they enhance the university’s importance? I suggest three questions for the time we have: (1) Do Religion Departments offer leadership within those religions, or could they? (2) What are their opportunities for leadership of their universities? And (3), wouldn’t they need to become theological in order to be of such help to the university and society? That is, how could they aid either religious bodies or the university except by pressing particular views on them? You may think of other things to discuss, and are free to do that.

By doing theology in the university I mean actually developing the potentialities of a religion. Let me repeat that: by doing theology in the university I mean actually developing the potentialities of a religion. It would be like making religion a professional program, like most of the university has become. Not professional as in certifying specialists for certain careers, but professional in terms of being an applied field. And couldn’t all of our professional education programs be seen to have religious dimensions?

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that I do not lament the fact that professional education is now the choice of most of our students, and the recipient of most of our resources. This seems to me a natural development. For a long time, the job of the university was to discover the facts, and so science was the queen of the sciences. Now, it seems that we have come to a point when we want to apply the knowledge we have. Which means applying it for human benefit. All professional education implies some human good that it offers to serve, although this may be a secret to those teaching it and their deans. I only lament that this professional education is not being informed by conscious consideration of the human. And I suspect that the reason for that is that real consideration of the human gets us into traditional religious discourse. It is commonly held that religions are off limits in tax-supported education, and that we have a safe place to keep them, which is religious studies departments.

We need a new paradigm in thinking about universities. When they were for discovering reality, the burden was on religions to show that they had anything to offer. To the extent that universities are now for applying our knowledge for human benefit, the burden is on science to show that it can make our choices for us. We have been slow to recognize this shift, and of course paradigm shifts are always strenuously resisted. It is what my book is about.

***

Students in secular universities and colleges are not being told the whole truth about their majors. They aren’t told that the central question in medicine is a religious one. Health relates to human wholeness, which is a religious, not a natural, concept. Standards of sanity and disease have to do with optimal human states, which are ideas left over from religion. After all, the AIDS virus is just as much a part of nature as you are, and if naturalism is what you go by then science can make no urgent distinction between diseased and healthy. People in those fields are responding to a religious call whether they are aware of it or not.

Students may not think of the central problems in law and public administration as religious ones — how we should relate to each other. Arts students could be told how much of the world’s great music, art, architecture, poetry, drama and fiction is even now being produced under the inspiration of the transcendent. The field of education is fundamentally a religious enterprise, built on foundations of belief, since there are no self-validating rational principles. Business students probably aren’t told that wealth means well-being, which involves religious perspectives. Money is only a means toward this end, and if we have no idea what well-being is, money will not help us get there. And science students aren’t told that the overriding question about science itself is a religious one, namely what use to make of our knowledge. That’s a question you check at the classroom door.

The upshot of all this is that universities cannot even offer intellectual leadership unless they at least insinuate “ultimate concerns.” You remember that Paul Tillich offered ultimate concern as a noncontroversial, analytic, culture-free definition of the religious. The reason we thought it was so brilliant is that he seemed to have found religion to be a characteristic of “the human” itself. He cunningly showed all of us to be religious, if we only recognized it. Actually, as you probably know, he thought some people worshiped idols like nationalism and “success” and needed to be educated into something truly ultimate. In the final analysis he thought that only the Ultimate could be considered to be ultimate, and that we needed theologians to unpack that for us.

In my book and in this talk, I do not acknowledge the idea of religion-in-general, but only consider specific religions. That is, the noun “religion” is only an analytic term and not a substantive one; it has a formal usefulness but no required content. Religion departments are especially aware of this fact. I only point out that it frees us from some of the demands of objectivity. It gives us license to approach religions subjectively, hermeneutically, and to insist that this is the more profound approach.

But back to the university’s need to take on our biggest concerns. A half century after Tillich we may have reason to doubt the universality of anything like ultimacy. Does everyone have a concern that is ultimate or even close? Are generations of Americans growing up unable to locate anything that can serve as a core of their being? Is their attention so scattered that they cannot make commitments even to family or job? Is it only their tattoo that reminds them they are the same person they were yesterday?

The human, as Tillich and his generation thought of it, actually seems under attack in today’s universities. Science and postmodernism vie in showing how cleverly they can dissolve all certainties, not least our superstition of personal identity. They promise us a future in which we are resolved by a physicalist understanding of consciousness or a shifting of signifiers (or however that goes.)

In my book I urge that religious studies departments should not be the only place in universities where religious viewpoints, ultimate perspectives, can be brought to bear. Our culture has concerns about the human. The ordinary language we use in our discussions of the subject was forged in religious debate. How can we discuss responsibility, justice, sanity, concern, wealth, truth, humane, without involving connotations from a religious past and indeed a religious present?

If such discussions must go on outside the university, doesn’t that make universities marginal? But where do they take place? In politics, where the actual decisions are made with regard to human good? You are shaking your heads. Who in politics has been trained for any such debate? We are wary of electing people with visible religious commitments. In churches? They seem to have been convinced that religion has no intellectual dimension. And who convinced them of this, so much as universities? Are the discussions of the human going on in the media? How could they, when the media must move on to a new concern each day for fear of forfeiting our interest and their profits? In entertainment, which the Greeks understood as a part of public education? Who is in charge of serious discussion these days?

So if the university is to become important in this way it will need a wake-up call. Could religious studies departments be helpful to this end? Or would they violate their mandate in the attempt? This seems to involve the university’s commitment to objectivity. We all recognize the value of objectivity as a tool, applied to appropriate ends. But would that prohibit serious advocacy of the views of religions, in addition to distant and objective consideration? Let me offer a few examples of the possibilities.

First, I claim in my book that the problem of judging religions is becoming more obviously important in the world than it used to seem. Pretending to refuse such judgments seems increasingly insincere these days, and proclaims the university’s marginality. I also argue that religions can only be judged on the basis of other religions, since religions are defined as our terms of ultimate reference. In essence, one’s basis for judgment is one’s religion, if it rises above merely partial objections. Basic scientific, philosophical or utilitarian assumptions don’t bear the weight that religious ones do. They don’t fuse knowledge and motive, wisdom and action the way religions do.

Or second, perhaps we see our job as modeling worthy roles – character-formation, as it were. If we understand character-formation according to the current theory, as learning to inhabit certain narratives more than analyzing certain situations, what narratives are we pressing on our students? Does the whole idea make us nervous? Is that something we need to conquer?

On a third track, are we glad to show students where their own religious traditions offer them a basis for judgment on the politics and culture that surrounds them? Or do we engage in that easier game of scoring off the more rustic elements in society, all in a good cause?

Fourthly, how can a religious studies department get across to students that religions are not just things to think about, but also ways of thinking? For instance, could students imagine, as historians of science have pointed out, that Western science itself is a part of Western religion, beginning in a monotheistic metaphysic and long sustained by a desire to understand the Creator’s other reality? Has the grand narrative of science ever found another basis than that deuteronomic development?

***

A sixtieth anniversary might be a good place to consider how the department sees its opportunities. Actually, I should be pressing this on the university administration or the regents or legislators. We are not our own masters. Academic freedom is for those who own an academy. There are certain things public figures aren’t free to talk about at all, and in America religion is at the top of our list. But religion departments probably have some license to take up subjects that others would shy from.

I really have no idea how to get universities to consider all practical concerns as involving an ultimate reference. So I wrote a book about it. Silly me; who reads books? What sense could Oprah or Larry King make of it? There might have been a day when books with the imprimatur of Oxford University Press might have gotten the attention of important people, but who are the important people today? In 1912 the US elected a college president to be the country’s President. That seems like a very long time ago.

So those are my questions. If there are others that seem more pertinent or interesting, feel free to ignore mine. But to remind you of the three I mentioned earlier:

(1) Could a religion department be of help to religious communities?

(2) If the alternative to the university’s marginalization is a clear sense of purpose, what department within the university should be more clearly identified with questions of purpose than a religion department?

(3) Would it be possible to shake off the negative connotations of “theology” to reassert the practical character of religious education? Or are we most comfortable presenting religion as essentially private? Could a reengagement with theology exist alongside objectivist and hermeneutical approaches, or could it only clash? And could the apparent constitutional difficulties be finessed? In short, could universities still be secular in the sense that religion must not rule, but not secularist, in the sense that religious conclusions must be ruled out.

***

So I’ve said my piece. But if you’ll permit me, I want to share two of my memories of your department which might be relevant here.

When I arrived at UF in 1971 the very first PhD committee I served on in the History Department was on the subject of Billy Graham and the Fundamentalist/Evangelical split, which he played a part in. The outside member on the committee was your own Delton Scudder, who had an enormous problem with the idea that anyone would get a PhD from UF by studying Billy Graham.

Before the candidate came into the examination room Scudder was making an issue of this. Mike Gannon, especially, was trying to calm him down, explaining that in the brave new world of the 70s, anything goes. Well, Scudder knew better, but he let it go. The History Department could go to the Devil for all he cared.

I went along with the department here, but I’ve come to feel that maybe Scudder was right. Maybe not about Graham, but about the idea that academics should offer judgments and defend them. And right in his implication that theology belongs in the university, or theological arguments do.

The other memory I have is of reading some of Dick Hiers’ books on New Testament thought, and being greatly enlightened by them. But I thought it was very curious that the Library of Congress classification system had them all shelved in the BS section. Makes you wonder about Congress’s sympathies. And made me realize what the Religion Department is up against.

_______

C. John Sommerville is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Florida, and he serves on the board of the Christian Study Center. Throughout his career, Dr. Sommerville’s work has traversed the secularization of various cultural touchpoints in England and the United States.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:2 (December 2007).]

Todd A. P. Best

This fall our reading group focused on selected writings of Dorothy Sayers. As we read through a collection of her essays and one full book, it occurred to us that it couldn’t hurt to get even more people to read Dorothy Sayers. Our discussions were quite engaging, but for those who didn’t sit in on our reading group, we wanted to let you know that there’s still time to read this provocative author. But who was she, and why did we read her?

 

Dorothy Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, the only daughter of a school headmaster. She received her first degree from Somerville College, Oxford in modern languages and later went on to be one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University, this one in medieval studies. Sayers decided that academic life did not suit her interests, so she worked in the publishing industry for several years. It was during this time, specifically in 1923, that she wrote her first novel, Whose Body?, in which she introduced a character named Lord Peter Whimsey, who would be the central character in her well-known series of detective novels and short stories.

 

Transitioning to full time writing, Sayers made a name for herself in the British literary scene. Her friends included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, and though she is often associated with the famous Inkings, she never was actually a member. Later, she broadened her writing to include plays, essays, and translations of medieval classics like Dante’s Divine Comedy. In addition to print, stage and broadcasting would become staple forums for the presentation of Dorothy Sayers’ work.

 

Her historical context for thinking and writing was, of course, the war and an increasingly secular culture in Europe. In this sense, she wrote as an apologist for Christian theism in a culture and time that was having a hard time of being convinced of religion’s worth. With the onset of the war, she began writing prolifically, creating demand for her as a lecturer, and eventually leading her to become churchwarden for her parish in London.

 

It was after the war that Dorothy Sayers turned to translating medieval works. She translated The Song of Roland from the French and was working on the third volume of Dante when she suddenly died of heart failure at age 64 in December of 1957.

 

If one were to reduce Sayers’ work to one category, it could be called cultural theology. Topically, she wrote broadly – addressing issues ranging from work to worship, from creativity to creation, from human folly to human pleasure, and from the nature of economics to the nature of God. But through all this, there is always one anchor point for Sayers – a deep Christian understanding of whatever her topic happens to be, and she offers this understanding to whoever is interested, not just to the faithful. She writes with the voice of a cultural critic, a trained literary expert, someone who understands present historical significance in a way that transcends eras, and most importantly, she writes as an adept theologian.

 

For Sayers, theology is what shapes or ought to shape everything that Christians think about and everything that we do, and it also ought to speak meaningfully to the culture in addressing broadly human questions. She does this by setting forth, topic by topic, to show that Christian doctrine, the teaching of historically orthodox Christianity (also known as that demonized word “dogma”), is not, as many have said, restrictive or narrowing. Rather, it is expansive and opens us up to imaginatively exploring the vast implications that a particular doctrine might do for our toughest problems. Her line of thought often goes like this: here is a quandary, here is what the church has said in general through its basic creedal statements, and here are the implications of a theological response (often in contrast to an inadequate view that Christians themselves hold or to what the cultural perception might be).

 

One of the best examples of Sayers’ cultural application of theology is her book on aesthetics, The Mind of the Maker. In the book, Sayers’ offers her philosophy of the arts, specifically of the creative act that takes place in making art. Hers is a complex but very compelling understanding of how the trinity (three-in-one Godhead) provides a way for us to think about art and our own creativity. For a doctrine that causes so many to throw their hands up to the mysteriousness of it, Sayers thoughtfully puts it to work in ways that make it clear that even mystery can offer insight when probed and taken seriously.

 

As for her own theological place, Sayers’ was thoroughly Anglican, and though her thinking reaches across denominational differences in the same vein as Lewis’ concept of “mere Christianity,” it is frequently obvious that she takes as her reference point the Church of England. Ironically, this institutional context, whereby one actually knows the history and depth of one’s tradition, is what makes much of her writing so fresh and so rich. Being Anglican – and better yet, being historically Christian – for Sayers is to consider everything in reference to a theological understanding of the way things are, not as an endpoint but as a launching point. To put it another way, her method is to consider the historic doctrines of the church, to understand them, and to creatively put them to use in daily life and thought, though they have become stale to many. Thus Sayers’ legacy could be said to be that she shows us how to breathe life into doctrines; and she demonstrates that they are not, in fact, boring, but rather they are of the most dramatic of ideas when coupled with our creative imagination rooted in genuine human experience.

 

Forty years after her death, Dorothy Sayers’ body of work is both broad and deep. Her essays and non-fiction, in particular, give us ways to explore the historic Christian tradition as a framework for understanding culture and human experience. And though a creed may be centuries old, age alone does not allow us to dismiss a doctrinal statement’s possibility for providing a way of seeing as well as a place to stand – so long as the idea has the possibility of being true, and so long as the human imagination is allowed its creative energy to work out the implications.

_______

Todd A. P. Best is Editor of Reconsiderations and Director of Programs at the Christian Study Center.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:2 (December 2007).]

Daniel Julich

Historical study is, from my perspective, about the search for wisdom. It is about listening to the voices and events of the past and allowing them to bring new light and understanding to the way in which we think and behave. But looking into the past must not be oversimplified as merely piecing together big ideas independent of important bits of context that shape the perceived outcome. As one looks at Blaise Pascal, his philosophical and religious ideas cannot be separated from the life with which they are interwoven. This is precisely the holistic, incarnational view of life upon which the Christian tradition is based.

 

In this essay, I want to lay out some biographical background on Pascal, and then I will describe how his thinking was shaped in no small way by his training in mathematics. Indeed, it is my view that Pascal’s early apprenticeship in mathematics shows up in his later religious and philosophical reflections. While I will only touch on his religious and philosophical ideas here, it will be clear that mathematics provides a prominent backdrop for Pascal’s life in general, and an obvious context for his thinking in particular.

 

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France, a town 260 miles south of Paris and he died in 1662 in Paris at the age of 39. He spent the greatest portion of his adult life in the French capital, but also spent some years in Rouen, a city just a little bit north of Paris. His years include part of the reign of Louis XIII and the commencement of Louis XIV, although the so-called Sun King’s personal reign did not begin until a year before Pascal’s death. Pascal was born and died Catholic, like most of his countrymen, but he embraced a particularly Augustinian version of Catholicism during the latter part of his life. During his lifetime, Pascal became known especially for three endeavors. First was a mechanical calculating machine that he invented in his twenties and continued to develop into his thirties (incidentally, this was the key reason for naming a computer language for him). Second, he was known in his life for the publication of his thoughts and experiments concerning the creation of a void and the demonstration of the weight of the air. And third, he was recognized as the pseudonymous author of the witty and ironic Provincial Letters.

 

Although well-known by some through these three accomplishments during his lifetime, the publication of some scientific, mathematical, and religious/philosophical works posthumously, made him even more famous. Some of the most well-known aspects of his work, especially for those of faith, are contained in his Pensées, literally Thoughts. These are simply a collection of scribbled fragments ostensibly intended to be a part of a larger religious work but never completed. The order of these fragments is a matter of interpretation, and their place within the grand scheme of the proposed apologetic work is unclear. For anyone who spends much time with Pascal, this disjointedness can be extremely frustrating. Pascal does not give us a coherent articulation of his philosophical and religious views. Despite being unfinished, the Pensées have attracted the attention of thinkers since their first publication. The very famous Wager argument is contained in these [ital]Pensées[end ital], as well as Pascal’s reflections on the greatness and misery of human beings. Many have also heard of Pascal as having spoken of a “God-shaped void” in the heart of human beings, a paraphrasing of one of the Pensées.[1] Additionally, Pascal’s statement “the heart has reasons which reason does not know” shows up frequently in common parlance.

 

Pascal’s earliest biographies, written by his family not long after his death, extolled both his precocious genius in mathematics and his exemplary piety. Others followed suit in this evaluation. Mathematically, Leibniz praised Pascal’s first work on conic sections, completed while he was still in his late teens. He has also been hailed as the “founder of modern probability theory” together with Pierre de Fermat. His name has become associated with the arithmetic triangle, sometimes called Pascal’s triangle. Although he did not originate the triangle, he developed many applications of it. The work in physics that came out of the experiments on the void led to what some have seen as significant advances in the field of hydrostatics. And finally, his last mathematical venture dealt with a particular mathematical curve.

 

One of the especially puzzling and yet fascinating aspects of Pascal’s biography is his supposed renunciation of mathematics and science in order to devote himself fully to religious reflection. His sister, his first biographer, set the stage when she stated that from the time he was twenty-four years old, Pascal “renounced all other knowledge in order to apply himself uniquely to the one thing that Jesus Christ calls necessary.”[2] And Pascal’s writings do indeed suggest a deep unease about the ultimate usefulness and value of geometrical studies. Yet, in his religious writings I found Pascal making use of mathematical metaphors and mathematical ways of thinking that seemed to suggest that his mathematical reflections actually helped him to understand the problems of being human and being a man of faith.

 

These seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge, mathematics and theology, are in fact part of the philosophical makeup of an informal society of mathematicians by which the young Pascal was shaped. But before describing that group’s ideas and personalities, it would be helpful to understand Pascal’s own family influences that led him to that group. When Blaise was born, his father Étienne was a significant political official in Clermont. Étienne was 35 years old when he became the father of Blaise, his only son. There was an older sister (three years older) and a younger sister (two years his junior), and his mother died when Blaise was just three years old. Étienne, for his part, never remarried during the 25 years of life that remained to him. Instead, he invested his energy in his children, and in 1631 he left his post in Clermont in order to move to Paris and to devote himself to the education of his children and especially his son. This was a move that was not all that unusual at the time. Existing educational institutions were being challenged in their methods and in their outcomes. The Renaissance rediscovery of those ancient Greek and Latin writings hitherto unknown either completely or only imperfectly, had already created an atmosphere that would particularly value the questioning of authority received from the Middle Ages and the application to ancient languages in early life. Furthermore, there was, in the 17th century, a growing recognition of the difference between childhood and adulthood. This, in turn, fostered an emphasis on ensuring that children were not pushed beyond what was prudent for their age. Following these trends, Étienne Pascal first taught Blaise languages and sought to keep him from distractions of other subjects.

 

Besides Blaise’s education, Pascal’s father also pursued his interest in mathematics. When Étienne arrived in Paris, he began to meet regularly with a group of individuals who were skilled at and interested in mathematics. It is a group that gained notoriety for its specifically mathematical focus. The group is often called the Mersenne Group or the Mersenne Academy, being named for its organizer Marin Mersenne. Mersenne was a monk who is known for his wide correspondence network that included mathematicians, natural philosophers, theologians, historians, and musicians. Mersenne would often bring problems to the group that had been revealed to him by his correspondents and the group would seek solutions for them. These sorts of informal groups were common in the Paris of the time, but this one is specifically noteworthy because of its specific focus on the mathematical disciplines and the mathematical approach to physics and other sciences. These meetings were not simply professional gatherings. In fact, there was probably only one of its members that could be called a professional mathematician.[3] The group was made up of friends with a common interest, and the meeting place would often rotate between the homes of its members. Pascal the son was undoubtedly privy to many of the meetings of the Mersenne group during his late childhood.

 

His family recounts a story that marks his unofficial entry into mathematical endeavors, and has been one of the major factors for Pascal’s consideration as a precocious “genius.” According to this story, although Pascal wanted to know more about geometry, his father restricted it because according to his understanding, mathematics had the potential to be so alluring that it would monopolize the child’s time and draw him away from his other studies. But when Blaise was twelve or thirteen, as his older sister recounts in a biography, his father walked in on him as he was making figures on the floor with chalk. These figures amounted to the working out of a proof that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles; furthermore, when asked, Blaise explained what he was doing, using the appropriate geometrical reasoning from first principles. Too proud to be angry, Étienne shared his discovery and Blaise was allowed to be a junior attendee of the mathematical conferences in which his father took part.

 

Pascal was nurtured intellectually then, not only by his father, but also by this group of mathematicians. It was within this context that Pascal did his first work on conic sections, completed when he was only 17. This work dealt with a number of results that he had discovered that were universally true of conic sections – that is, circles, parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas. The Mersenne group and especially Mersenne himself, promoted this early work of Pascal’s. By this means, Blaise Pascal’s skill became known to numerous mathematicians in France and the rest of Europe. Importantly, one of the reasons that he was touted was that his mathematical skill was evident at such a young age.

 

This “mathematical academy” of Marin Mersenne constituted a philosophical and religious approach to the world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an increasing attempt to restore orderliness and rationality to the universe. The mathematical approach to the world was a part of this drive. This mathematical group of which Pascal became a part, moved in the same direction as had Galileo, seeking to quantify phenomena in the world and to discover the proportionality that underlay its processes.

 

The justification of this deep investigation of the mathematical properties of music and of the universe in general had, for these mathematicians, both a religious and a philosophical motivation. One of the most popular quotations for 17th-century mathematicians, given as a religious motivation of their study comes from the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom. This quotation reads: “thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”[4] Mathematicians justified their pursuit of these patterns and proportions, then, in the name of uncovering the thoughts of God the geometer. In the case of music, the harmonious structure represented not just a mathematical, but an aesthetic exploration of God’s creation. The book of nature, Galileo had stated, was written in the language of mathematics.[5] But in Mersenne’s writings we catch an even more in-depth understanding of the type of atmosphere in which Pascal was raised. Mersenne writes of the godlike task of discovering the multitude of consequences that can be produced from a single mathematical principle. At the most basic arithmetic level, he considers the way in which unity (what we call the number 1) can produce an infinity of numbers through addition and multiplication. He compares this to the basic unity of the Godhead which produced the full spectrum of creation in all of its variety. On a more geometrical level, Mersenne says of the figure of the circle: “if one knew all its properties, and its uses, and all that one could draw and conclude from it, one would know more than all that has ever been written in matters of the sciences.”[6] As one seeks out these connections within geometry or the possible permutations of musical compositions, the state of divine knowledge is approximated. So that, when speaking of the remaining mysteries of geometry, Mersenne writes that such discoveries approximate the state of heavenly beatitude. He writes this: “The Angels know all these difficulties perfectly, and we will likewise know them when it pleases God to take us into the ranks of the blessed.” Mathematical knowledge, for Mersenne, is a part of heavenly knowledge.

 

The interaction between Mersenne’s expressed hopes for mathematics and his description of Pascal place the young man in a category that may perhaps be thought of as a “prophet” of mathematics. In a work written in 1625 (two years after Pascal’s birth and long before Mersenne knew the family), Mersenne expresses the hope for a timely nativity:

 

May it please God to cause to be reborn in this century some new Archimedeses, who will lead Mathematics to their last perfection…[7]

 

During the 17th century, the figure of the third-century BC mathematician-engineer named Archimedes came to stand for greatness in mathematics and inventiveness both practical and theoretical. Mersenne’s invocation of the rebirth of Archimedes has indeed the flavor of a prophetic hope. In the 1640s, Mersenne would label each of [ital]two[end ital] outstanding young mathematicians as “Archimedes.” One was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens (six years Pascal’s junior), later one of the most important of the founding members of the French Academy of Sciences. The other was Blaise Pascal. There is obviously a bit of literary flair to comparing these young men to a great Greek mathematician. But it is also an extension of the attitude that emerged from the Renaissance that knowledge was growing and increasing to such a degree that the progress of ancient thinkers would be taken up and finally come to completion or perfection. A number of utopias appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the research of the sciences and mathematics by those specifically trained for them were central to the ushering in of the perfect society. This golden age of knowledge was very much akin to Christian hopes of God’s reign on earth. For Mersenne and for others in his circle, mathematics was emerging as the central key to this perfection of knowledge. Hence, the label of Archimedes carried with it this prophetic vision.

 

This kind of optimism about knowledge was, however, not universally shared. Instead of a coming consummation, many saw the undoing of the possibility of any knowledge. The discovery of new worlds and the questioning of traditional interpretations of the world encouraged many to claim that no knowledge whatsoever was possible. For Mersenne and others like him, mathematics was one of the key weapons against such pessimism about knowledge and truth. Not only was the performing of mathematics an imitation of the mind of God, its methods and structure provided it as the paradigmatic discipline of certainty. In 1625, Mersenne wrote a book entitled The Truth of the Sciences Against the Skeptics. In it he calls mathematics “the sciences very certain and very true in which suspension [of judgment] does not find a place.” The geometrical method of proof based on distinct definitions and clearly accepted axioms was considered by them to show that mathematics, at least, could attain to some certainty. This is not to say, however, that all knowledge could be discovered through mathematics. Besides the proof structure, what gave appeal to those looking for certainty was also that mathematics allowed one to isolate quantitative and numerical aspects of nature. To quantify the world was to make possible exact comparisons. It made for measurability of the world, a true sense of comprehension of it.

 

The capacities of mathematics to approximate to God’s infinite productivity and attain certainty were extremely attractive. For the group in which Pascal grew up, full of men who were mostly amateurs rather than professionals, proficiency in the mathematical disciplines was a mark of pride. And Pascal was shaped by these values. Growing up among mathematicians who were his father’s friends and some years his senior, he was mentored and promoted by those who were consciously or unconsciously seeking to perpetuate and further their study of geometry. In a later summary of some of his mathematical works Pascal himself would write of “the benevolence which has sustained me since my first years in this learned School.” [8]

 

Not merely technically but in a profoundly personal way, Mersenne’s mathematical group served as Pascal’s place of initial apprenticeship, and there was a profound sense of responsibility that went along with this. It would be of little surprise if he wrote about religious matters in the Pensées using the metaphors of mathematics. But what I want to suggest is that the connections between Pascal’s mathematical-scientific works and his theological reflections are perhaps even more than metaphor. When he writes his religious thoughts in terms that are similar to those used in mathematics, he is drawing on a kind of structural similarity that reflects theological truth. I believe that the similarity has to do with the relationship between what may be known with certainty and that which transcends the abilities of human knowledge. This relationship is undoubtedly bridged by Pascal’s rich training in mathematics by way of the Mersenne group. It would be the thing that certain people would argue Pascal abandoned for theology, and it would also be the thing which others, including myself, believe enabled him to offer important theological insight. In other words, for Pascal mathematics becomes not a competitor of theology but, rather, a lens through which he would be able to see and articulate an understanding of life that becomes an important thread of the Christian tradition.

_______

Daniel Julich is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida where he is currently writing his dissertation on Blaise Pascal.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 6:4 (June 2007).]

Margy Weinert

Editor’s note: In the spring of 2007, the Christian Study Center hosted a class on “The Poet as Priest” in which we asked representatives from the Department of English at the University of Florida to address the question of whether or how poetry might point beyond itself to something transcendent. One of our speakers was Margy Weinert, who reflected on childhood in Wordsworth’s poetry. We offer an abridged version of her talk here.

There’s a little paragraph I found in the middle of Moby Dick a few years ago, and though it’s not necessarily a significant paragraph in the book as a whole, it has nevertheless resurfaced in my ponderizations many times since I first read it. This little passage was in fact the starting point for the contemplations that led to my interest in Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In the passage, the narrator, Ishmael, is on a hunting exhibition away from the main ship, the Pequod. As he looks over the side of the small whaling boat, he gazes into what he realizes is an underwater nursery. In the calm center of an otherwise agitated herd of whales drift the female whales who are pregnant or nursing, as well as their babies. As the other whales fight off the human spermaceti hunters, the mothers and babies are in an otherworldly world of their own.

 

As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight…Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond (Chapter 87).

In a previous talk in this series on “The Poet as Priest” Professor Richard Brantley, speaking on Emily Dickinson, summarized the relationship between Romanticism and Christianity. Wordsworth and other British Romantics were, he said, able to “conceive of the physical senses as portals to epiphany, and not just as analogies to spiritual insight.” This is just what is going on in Wordsworth’s “Ode.” The speaker in the poem describes how his perception of the world has changed based on input from his physical senses, so that through his physical senses he is led to contemplations of the supernatural. During his talk Dr. Brantley read a poem by Dickinson in which the speaker seems to be expressing a feeling similar to one that Wordsworth expresses in this poem. Dickinson writes, “I know that He exists. / Somewhere – in Silence / He has hid his rare life / From our gross eyes.” The speaker in Wordsworth’s poem is similarly concerned with an elusive Higher Being who seems both impossibly distant and infinitely immediate.

When I recently stumbled upon Wordsworth’s poem in an anthology, I found in it an expansion of the idea I hinted at before with the passage from Moby Dick.

In the second stanza we see a description of some of the beauties of the earth – Rainbow, Rose, Moon, and sunrise – and then we read, “But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath past away a glory from the earth” (II). The speaker has a sense not only that the earth has lost some ineffable glory, but also that he himself, through his gradual realization of this loss, has lost some of his own glory. As a child he was “appareled in celestial light,” now he wears something far weightier, “earthly freight…Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!” (VIII)

In the fourth stanza, he mentions two sights that in the midst of earth’s beauty recall to his mind the loss he has suffered. “But there’s a Tree, of many, one,/ A single field which I have looked upon,/ Both of them speak of something that is gone” (IV). Could the Tree in fact be the Tree of Knowledge, and the field the Garden of Eden? The speaker does use lots of Edenic language to describe early childhood; it’s as if he is drawing a parallel between the fall of humanity and expulsion from the Garden on one hand and the aging of the individual human and loss of the Childlike Vision on the other hand. In its infancy the human race lived in a Garden that was separated from Heaven by only the thinnest of veils, so that God Himself would come down to walk in the Garden in the cool of the evening. And just as that thin veil between Heaven and Earth became an opaque wall with hardly a peephole in it – so too does the human child, born still in a seeming state of mystical communion with or awareness of its Creator, seem to lose that communion the longer he lives on this side of the opaque wall. For Wordsworth, the redemption of the human race is represented by the newborn human baby; babies are the freshest and purest among us, and they also promise the future survival of the human race. For the Christian, however, redemption is found in only one Baby – the Christ child, who gives new life to all who believe in Him.

In Stanza Five, the speaker introduces a paradox. Birth is a “sleep and a forgetting,” an entrance into mortality that is in fact not unlike death. The speaker describes four stages of human life.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

 

So the growing boy is gradually imprisoned and limited by his own improving knowledge and intellect. Our own experiences, knowledge, doubts are like vines gradually growing and twisting around us, ensnaring and imprisoning us.

Stanza Six describes Earth’s attempts to distract us with her own inferior pleasures and beauties, just as a nurse might offer a hungry baby a bottle of formula when what the baby really wants is its mother’s breast milk.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a mother’s mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can

To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,

Forget the glories he hath known

And that imperial palace whence he came.

Skipping to Stanza Nine, the tone shifts to one of hope, almost, if one can be said to have hope in a memory of the past rather than in the future.

 

O joy! That in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

For Wordsworth, or whoever’s voice he is speaking in, there is a two-fold memory that lends comfort in the listless sorrow of adulthood: the memory of childhood, and the memory of having had during childhood a more immediate memory of Eden. He says, “The thought of past years in me doth breed / Perpetual benediction.”

In Stanza Ten, the speaker continues on the theme of finding comfort in the past:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

Finally, in the eleventh stanza, the speaker seems to decide that humanity has made a worthwhile trade, that in fact it is enough to have just the memory of the past delights and the actuality of the present delights offered up by Nature and the earth. And so the speaker finds that, in later life, long after the childlike vision has faded, the adult vision that has replaced it may be richer still.

In talking about this poem I used the phrase “Childlike Vision” to describe a particular childlike way of thinking and seeing and being, a special sort of vision that fades away as we age. I’ve been wondering about this Childlike Vision ever since I first read that passage in Moby Dick about four years ago. Trying to remember what it was like to have it, wondering what it was, and why we lost it.

Before we have words for the objects around us, before we understand their uses and where they came from, everything we see is a great abstract wonderland. If we look around and imagine that we don’t know what anything is – the carpet on the floor, with its countless little threads, except we don’t know words like carpet or floor, how it got there, and why it’s there – all we see are images, and all we can do is marvel. Until we know what a thing is, it could be anything. Around age two, the identities of objects are not yet fixed in our minds so that we can easily pretend they are something else. A blanket becomes a giant ocean wave, then you crumple it up and it’s a storm cloud, then you bury yourself in it and it’s quicksand. Samuel Johnson described this childish quality – as well as the loss of it – as eloquently as usual in one of his Idler essays.

 

We are naturally delighted with novelty, and there is a time when all that we see is new. When first we enter into the world, whithersoever we turn our eyes, they meet Knowledge with Pleasure at her side; every diversity of Nature pours ideas in upon the soul; neither search nor labour are necessary; we have nothing more to do than open our eyes, and curiosity is gratified.

Much of the pleasure which the first survey of the world affords, is exhausted before we are conscious of our own felicity, or able to compare our condition with some other possible state. We have therefore few traces of the joy of our earliest discoveries; yet we all remember a time when Nature had so many untasted gratifications, that every excursion gave delight which can now be found no longer, when the noise of a torrent, the rustle of a wood, the song of birds, or the play of lambs, had power to fill the attention, and suspend all perception of the course of time… (No. 44 in the Idler, 17 February 1759)

As childhood wears on and we learn more and more of the world and all its labels and explanations, this Childlike Vision fades. And when it is gone, we can only dimly remember that we once had it; we can’t remember the Vision itself. No matter how we may try to remember and recapture this Childlike way of seeing and being, we never can because that kind of knowledge cannot be forgotten. There is a reason why, as we grow and live, and we see more of the ugliness and the decay in the world, we are surprised by it. It is because whether or not we are born with a “sin nature,” we are not automatically at the point of deepest evil. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge not only introduced evil into our lives, but also gave us knowledge of good and evil – we recognize what is evil and good, and we know that “good” is how things “should” be.

Remember that feeling you used to get when your mom read you your favorite book? A feeling like you’re flying…a feeling in your stomach or your heart. A tensing of your toes. Whatever physiological form the feeling takes, it is something like Lewis’s description of joy. A longing for something, somewhere. As adults – and Christians – we often identify this as a longing for what is to come, our eternity in Paradise. But perhaps it is also a longing for – nostalgia for – memory of – what came before. Perhaps the Fall is played out individually in the life of each of us. In the same way that we fell all at once through the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, and so were severed from God, so too throughout our lives do we experience a sort of fall from a state of blissful infancy to a rueful adulthood.

The Childlike Vision goes beyond wonder and curiosity and imagination. It allows a total surrender to play and make-believe. A certain lack of concern for or understanding of the ways of the world. This way of seeing and being is one that, curiously, in an adult would be considered eccentricity or even mental illness. Imagine an adult playing like a child, and you get something like Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, busying himself all day with his mock-battles, which he likes to arrange on the lawn outside and then act a heroic role in himself. Year after year he fritters away his fortune on gunpowder and other materials. At first Uncle Toby just seems lovably comical; then we come to see how sad and strange it is for a grown man to be trapped in the carefree world of his own imagination. Maturing is a necessity. And, as Wordsworth seems to say, the knowledge and wisdom brought by maturity lend an even deeper beauty to the sights we so delight in as children, a mixture of beauty and sorrows that is “Too deep for tears…” (XI).

We mature in part by gaining knowledge, and it is as we gain knowledge that the Childlike Vision fades away. It may not even be that we forget how to be and think like a child, but that we are no longer allowed to be and think like a child. Because adults are supposed to know things that children don’t, and this knowledge binds and inhibits us.

Another feature of the Childlike Vision is, I think, that it allows children to exist in a sort of eternity. For all the talk of children’s short attention spans, I’ve found that children often get “stuck in a moment” repeating the same action over and over. Whether it’s having you read the same book to them five times straight in a single sitting, or – as a two-year-old I know recently did – leaping repeatedly into a pile of pillows, serving as an imaginary anthill, and having me, with great show of effort, rescue him from the ants while his four-year-old brother pretended to hose him down with an ant-killing concoction. The time it took to do all this was not enough to satisfy his desire to do it; he seemed to want to be in a state of doing it. So we did it continuously for a half-hour or so, and to him it was as if no time at all were passing.

In a poem called “My Kingdom” that R.L. Stevenson wrote for children, he speaks in the voice of a child playing in a little dell he has found, imagining that all the land around him is his own kingdom. He is completely immersed in his pretend world when the voice of his mother calls him home. The child is called back from one reality to another – to a playing child the pretend world does seem all but real. I’d guess most of us have memories of similar experiences. One summer Sunday afternoon when I was maybe seven, my brothers and sister and I were playing in the backyard, pretending our swing-set was a space ship hurtling through distant galaxies. I can still feel the warm, moist air of that afternoon, and I can still feel my bare feet caked with dirt. I was in that purple realm which to a child is earthly heaven. Until we were interrupted. Long before we would have stopped our game, my dad called to us that it was time to come inside and clean up for evening church. I begged him to let us stay and play. Something in it felt wrong to me, to leave this glorious outdoor world behind in exchange for a stiff dress and a hard church pew. That summer evening, I felt I was not simply being told playtime was over; I was being yanked from a state of bliss that was beyond time.

So where do all of these contemplations leave us with Wordsworth’s poem? I wish I could give a confident and expert conclusion summarizing the meaning and significance of this poem, but I’m afraid that that would somehow minimize not just what Wordsworth has written, but also what poetry is…If one purpose of poetry is to sing of the ineffable, to try to take an idea as ethereal and intangible as angels’ music and put it into the small, hard, tangible words we call poetry – then surely the words of a poem cannot be reduced any further into explanations without losing even more of whatever it is that makes it true and beautiful. In short, all I really know to say is that we should all read Wordsworth’s poem for ourselves and contemplate the Childlike Vision, if such contemplations seem valuable.

Is Wordsworth an example of the Poet acting as a Priest? Not in the sense that he acts as a mediator between Humanity and God, standing with his back to his congregation, performing rites and ceremonies in a foreign language. But he does take on a priestly function in the sense that he can inspire us to worship. He gazes up at the clouds in awe, singing of what he sees, and as we hear his song we feel compelled to do the same.

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Margy Weinert recently completed a Bachelor of Arts in the English department at the University of Florida where her emphasis was on pre-20th century British literature. This fall she will begin a doctoral program in English at Baylor University where she plans to narrow her focus to supernatural and religious themes in British literature.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:1 (September 2007).]

C. John Sommerville

You may know that the annual Templeton Prize, which carries more money than a Nobel Prize, is awarded for contributions in religion. Over the years it has become a notable cultural event. It has been awarded to Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, but is normally given to those working the border between science and religion, like Stanley Jaki and John Polkinghorne.

This year the prize went to Charles Taylor, which is a name that should mean more than it does. Taylor is a philosopher, who taught at Oxford and McGill (in Montreal), and he is notable for putting “personalism” on the philosophical agenda.

Why is that remarkable? Personalism is significant in that it brings religious questions back to the table in the discourse of meaning. The academic world is caught in a struggle between philosophical Naturalism and this other thing I’m calling Personalism. Philosophy departments aren’t necessarily debating this issue, being distracted by smaller-scale concerns. But the parts of the university that impinge on the “real world,” the sciences and all the professional schools, keep stumbling over issues of Naturalism and the human.

Naturalism is basically materialism. It seeks to “reduce” human values like justice, truth, responsibility, wealth, love, the human, to “physicalist” terms. You’ve been hearing about the neuroscientists’ efforts to explain religion and everything else (except their own science!) by tracking and measuring brain impulses. Before that, it was sociobiology that tried to explain the human away, in terms of evolutionary psychology. That didn’t get very far before getting stuck. But the naturalists will never give up, nor should they. Science has a duty to see how far naturalistic explanations and proofs will work. Unfortunately, scientists sometimes explain things before discovering them, promising answers before they’re available. This is often convincing to journalists, and is becoming imbedded in our culture.

Personalism takes the opposite approach. Basically, it takes those value terms (justice, responsibility, love, etc.) to be as real as anything in the universe. Philosophers define real as irreducible, and personal values have never been “explained” or reduced conceptually. There is no reason to think they ever will be, making them as real as gravity or space. Indeed, personalists argue that the most real things in our universe are the things that can act. Actors (persons) are more real than the things that are acted upon, such as our physical elements. So it is not only our bodies that are “real” but out intentions and character as well.

Since religion is more obviously part of the personal rather than the material, Taylor’s arguments bring religion back to the forefront of philosophy. In many academic departments, Naturalism is assumed to be self-evident. So while people may casually use human and even religious terms, we imagine them to be philosophically or scientifically second rate.

This is where Taylor made a breakthrough. He has forced academics to recognize the reality of the personal. The important thing for us is that is the conceptual language that religion is comfortable with. Partly, Taylor has done this by avoiding the term Personalism. It’s an old term that never captured the attention of philosophers. Taylor did capture their attention, especially with his Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989). “Self” is the fashionable term for human concerns. It is a long and complex book, but it became an instant classic.

 

For whatever reason, Taylor doesn’t build his case by drawing on his personalist predecessors, like Martin Buber, John Macmurray, Michael Polanyi, Borden Parker Bowne, John Zizioulas, John Habgood. Fashion has passed them by. Rather, his big book engages the usual suspects: Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, Hume, the Romantics, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault. In other words, he is forcing his way into the philosophical canon rather than pleading for a niche within the academy.

Though retired, Taylor is still very active. Being asked to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland is as high an honor as philosophers or theologians get. Taylor gave his series in 1999 and is developing them into three books on the large subject of secularization. He is broadening that theme far beyond the discredited “secularization hypothesis” of Max Weber and others. The third volume, A Secular Age, is due out this year.

Note: A review of Sources of the Self appeared in Reconsiderations 2:3 (June, 2003).

A board member of the Christian Study Center, C. John Sommerville is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is currently finishing a book on religious ideas for secular universities.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:1 (September 2007).]

Richard V. Horner

Since the Christian Study Center does not fit established categories in the university, we frequently need to explain what we do. We are something of an enigma, so this past summer we produced our second view book. It articulates our project and includes our newly crafted purpose statement: Rooted in the thoughtful consideration of a Christian understanding of life and culture, and working in cooperation with the University of Florida, the Christian Study Center of Gainesville draws on the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition and on the scholarly resources of higher education to understand cultural change and to address human questions that are widely shared in the university community.

In that purpose statement we specifically identify with two things. First, we identify with the Christian tradition, and second, we identify with the University of Florida. In identifying with the Christian tradition we talk sometimes about the “thoughtful consideration of a Christian understanding of life and culture” and at other times about “the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition.” Both phrases express our conviction that the Christian tradition offers an understanding of human experience and culture that everyone needs to consider, both those who profess Christian faith and those who do not. Throughout the modern era Western culture has largely resisted Christian thought, but it is now time to reconsider.

In identifying with the University of Florida we want to identify with the university itself and with the university community at large. We are glad to be in this neighborhood, and it is important to us to be good neighbors not only to the university but to all who are a part of this community – to book stores and restaurants, to churches and campus ministries, to professors and students, to the University of Florida and to Santa Fe Community College. Most centrally, though, when we identify with the university we identify with the work that it does: the work of research and inquiry, of teaching and learning, and of producing knowledge and generating ideas that shape lives and cultures. We are very serious about joining the university in its work and about bringing the resources of scholarship together with the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition.

The reason we want to bring scholarly resources and the Christian tradition together is to understand cultural change and “to address enduring human questions that are widely shared in the university community.” Study centers and institutes associated with university communities can have various legitimate focuses. We have placed our focus on understanding contemporary cultural change and on addressing enduring questions about what it means to be human. In short, we want to keep the important challenges of what we call human flourishing in view, and we want to bring the best scholarship and the deepest Christian reflection to bear in thinking about important enduring questions in a constantly changing context.

Working from the basic purpose statement, in addition to drawing on the resources of higher learning and the Christian tradition, we also want to contribute to them. Quoting the viewbook: “The Study Center affirms scholarly inquiry, artistic creativity, and Christian reflection and we seek to contribute to each of these critical endeavors out of love of God and neighbor.” We do not mean to be presumptuous, but we do intend to be serious about our work. We have been blessed with precocious, articulate undergraduate students and with thoughtful, hardworking graduate students, with first-rate local faculty/scholars who are doing important work in their fields, and with numerous, excellent guest scholars who come from around the country. From student scholars and artists who are just developing through to Study Center board members who are senior scholars, the Study Center has been making important contributions to the university and to higher learning, and we know we are still just at the beginning of what is to come in both scholarship and the arts as we continue in the tradition of Christian reflection.

Across the page from our statement of purpose our view book lays out four fundamental commitments, and when taken together they help to give a sense for the unique role that the Study Center plays here in Gainesville. Our first commitment is to Christ, and because of that commitment we are also committed to critique or scholarship, to a conversational approach to inquiry, and to questions that focus on culture. Our program flows out of our vision for exploring the intersection of Christian thought and academic discourse and also out of our four commitments, and we are very pleased with the way our classes, lectures, and reading groups have come together this year.

Our purpose and commitments generate and shape our program. Our Monday night classes represent the breadth of what we are trying to do. Therefore, they are a central part of what we offer at the Study Center. Over the past several years we have seen these classes develop into engaging, thoughtful explorations of a wide variety of issues that bring current scholarship and Christian thought together. This class is one of the places where our commitment to bring the university and Christian thought together gets worked out in specific ways. Put simply, we approach these Monday evening classes by starting where the university is and then moving toward Christian reflection and understanding. Let me explain a little of what this means.

First, because we think scholarship is important and because the university is our starting point, we accept the university’s standards for scholarship and its expectations for those who teach. There are other completely legitimate ways to operate in this community, but this is the path we have chosen for ourselves. We have made the deliberate choice to offer classes that could just as easily be offered on the campus. While members of the university community may not agree with our conclusions, they should have no reason to complain about the quality of the scholarship, the qualifications of our teachers, the legitimacy and importance of the issues addressed, or the genuine academic freedom that our guests have as they stand at our lectern. With regard for the university’s standards of scholarship, we believe we could take our classes to the campus and no one would have any reason to complain.

Second, because the university is our starting point, we ask questions that are, or ought to be, shared in the university community. While members of the university community often do not share our answers or conclusions, we do want to be addressing questions that matter widely in the university, so we seek to begin with shared questions that arise in the context of human experience and specifically in the course of inquiry and learning. Having said that, we also want to formulate questions that ought to be asked, even if they are not already being asked. In fact, we view the framing of questions as a central part of our work. We want to ask questions that keep the focus on what it means to be human, and we want to ask questions that provoke thought, deepen reflection, and lead to engagement with Christian wisdom and understanding.

While we start with the university and draw on its scholarship, we aim at Christian thought in a way that asks both those who profess Christian faith and those who do not to consider more deeply a Christian understanding of whatever the issue happens to be. Our conversational approach seeks to bring together different voices for the sake of finding understanding about our genuine questions. There are voices from scholarship, voices from the Christian tradition, voices from those who attend our events, and each adds something to the conversation so as to allow us to take seriously the ways that Christian insight might respond to particular questions.

A couple examples come to mind of how these two objectives, staring with the university and aiming at Christian reflection, have shaped our classes.

Last fall we offered a class on “How We Got Four (and only four) Gospels.” This may not sound like it starts where the university is, but stop and consider. In the year previous to this class Dan Brown’s best-selling book The Da Vinci Code had been turned into a movie, the Gospel of Thomas and the Nag Hammadi documents had become the stuff of 24-hour news programming, and National Geographic had published the Gospel of Judas. Questions about the biblical text, and especially the gospels, had become questions for everyone, including scholars. We were starting right where we needed to, and we moved by way of first-rate scholarship to a consideration of the biblical texts that gave us good reasons to see why the canonical gospels would have been received as they were by the early church.

Last spring’s class on poetry provides another good example of how we shape the questions that we think ought to be asked on the campus. We entitled the class, “The Poet as Priest” and we asked our five speakers to address the question, “How do you account for the power of poetry?” We unpacked this question as follows. Does poetry put us in touch with something that transcends the poem and the poet? If not, how do you make sense of the power of poetry? Is a poem just the sum of its parts or is it something more? These are the sort of questions that we think are well worth asking on university campuses. It is the sort of question that we want students and faculty to struggle with, and we are very grateful to the three students and two faculty who did struggle with it for our benefit and hopefully theirs as well.

By starting where the university is and moving toward Christian understanding and reflection, these classes served both Christians and those who do not hold to a Christian understanding of human experience. In the first case, Christians, who do not always take scholarship as seriously as they ought where the biblical text is in view, had to do some demanding thinking about ancient history, and in the second case, Christians, who do not always think as deeply as they ought to about such things as the power of poetry, had to think more deeply and carefully about what a Christian understanding of human experience entails. Meanwhile, people who have dismissed the biblical text too easily had to deal with the fact that solid biblical scholarship suggests a far more coherent and reliable canon than 24-hour news anchors indicate, and people who have dismissed a Christian understanding of human experience too easily had to grapple with the fact that this understanding offers a compelling way of thinking about poetry and about other deeply moving works of art.

Our Monday night class has been the context for an emerging, new initiative that is taking shape called the Forum on Religion and Scholarship. The Forum on Religion and Scholarship seeks to promo