Uncle Screwtape on beauty

What follows is my own creative adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ classic work, “The Screwtape Letters”.  The idea of writing these diabolical letters was Lewis’ but the thoughts contained here are my own.

***

My dear Wormwood,

It seems that after your last debacle that the powers that be decided to give you an easier assignment.  Rather than feeding you to me, that is.  Don’t mistake this for mercy!  That phenomenon or the weak has no place in our lord’s kingdom.  You can rest assured that the only reason why you are not deep down in my (regrettably empty) belly is because someone thinks you may yet have some usefulness left in you.  We shall see.

Anyway, you have been reassigned.  The ease of this assignment should shame you, for you have been assigned to an academic.  An academic theologian to be more precise. You are being handed a soul on a silver platter!   This place is already ripe with them.

What makes the academic theologian such an easy assignment is how blissfully unaware they are.  For all their talk of the soul (isn’t it adorable how they keep calling it the nous?) they become delightfully unaware that they even have one that needs tending.  This is why our people worked so hard at developing the concept called “abstraction”!  The more they talk, for example, of the nous as an abstract concept, the easier it is for us to keep them from making the connection between their concept and the concrete reality of the soul that they themselves possess.  The more we keep them in abstractions, the easier our task shall be.

There is one pesky thing, though, that academics are especially prone to think about.  This one thing has the potential to undo all of our hard work.  And that is beauty.  Academics love to talk about beauty.  And as long as it remains mere talk (“idle chatter” as the Enemy’s book calls it), we have nothing to fear.  But the dangerous thing about beauty is that it refuses to remain an abstraction.  Talk of abstract concept of beauty quickly – too quickly – turns to the consideration of particular things that are beautiful.  Even academics (dense and dull though they are) recognize that beauty is meant to be embodied.  (Even the mere writing of that word turns my [pitifully empty] stomach!  What an insipid and vomitous notion!).

There is a lot more at stake here than may first appear.  For, though their human culture doesn’t realize it, the academic world still bears remarkable influence on the world outside of its ivory towers.  We know this well.  You recall those fools who taught our Father’s great idea: deconstructionalism?  That “merely academic” topic filtered its way quite nicely into what the sociologists  called “the popular imagination.” So the academics are remarkably influential, which is why our people worked so hard to corrupt their realm.  (We should be grateful for the 19th century for assisting our efforts on this so well).

Back then to my warning to you about beauty.  You see, my precious Wormwood, if the academic (I shall refrain from referring to him as a “human” for obvious reasons) ponders beauty for too long, he will come to see the absolute necessity of its embodiment.  And this just plays into the Enemy’s hands – he, after all, was the one who came up with that most filthy and disgusting of ideas – becoming one of them.  Can you think of anything more revolting?  Dear Wormwood, I know that I cannot.  But do you not see how beauty may play immediately into the Enemy’s hands?  The last thing we want is a human lot who see through the antagonistic dichotomy between flesh and spirit that we posit to their minds.  We have always had great success with those who call themselves, rather ironically, Gnostics.  The very last thing we want is academics, or anyone really, taking the Enemy’s embodiment seriously.  As long as we can keep them Gnostics, thinking the Enemy hates the body (one of the greatest of all the lies our Father Below has devised!) we shall have them won.

This is why beauty poses such a threat to our task, my dear Wormwood.  But rest assured that there are plenty of ways around this danger.  The best course of action is to keep beauty an abstraction.  The best way to do this is to create controversy over definition.  We both know how academics swarm to that kind of controversy.  They love to spend so much time debating what a term means that they never move past it.  This was one of my most successful strategies in my younger days.  Slobglob, on the other hand, succeeded with the opposite tactic in non-academic circles: using words without ever considering their meaning.  How deliciously simple it is to lead these humans to error through the excess of the so-called good.  (We hate them because they are the harmony of spirit and animal, so it is only right that we push them to elevate one side over the other.  Our people hate beauty and so we hate harmony all the more!)

If we cannot boggle their contemplation of beauty by debate over definition, then we must labor to make beauty more a matter of taste than of truth.  This has become relatively easy for us lately, again thanks to the 19th century.  Our work there amongst the philosophers (you must watch out for some of them) had this delicious result: we destroyed the harmony between subject and object.  A great success!  Now the humans give priority to their own subjectivity over the object.  We brought them to the point where they define something as beautiful when they experience it as beautiful. (To be certain, the advent of what is called “pop music” went a long way to helping us here).  What is important to them is not the “truth” of the object but “my own personal experience” of the object.  Beauty becomes a matter of individual taste (and this can lead us right back into the purely conceptual squabbles over definition).  And of course, as the saying goes, there is no accounting for taste.  If we can succeed in making beauty an issue of taste, then it makes no demand upon them; beauty just becomes an experience or, even better, a form of entertainment.

As long as we can successfully keep beauty in the realm of taste, we needn’t worry about the embodiment to which beauty leads.   Because the threat of beauty is that it points to the embodiment of the Enemy.  But there is nothing, ah, “aesthetically pleasing” about that embodiment.  No one, least of all an academic, would have the taste for that ugly, bloody, dead man.  The “incarnation”, as the Enemy’s thinkers have called it, is in poor taste indeed.

So, my dear Wormwood, I wish you luck in your new assignment (by which, I hope you understand, I mean that I wish you no luck whatsoever – you see, my love, I am dreadfully hungry).  Nevertheless, I do offer you sound advice in the hopes that, when you fail (as I am certain you will) the authorities will reward me with you upon news of your perpetual incompetence.  No offense, of course, dear nephew.  I simply know how you are.  I trust you’ll pardon me for being so incisive about your character.  Not to mention that consuming you would be, ah, truly beautiful.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

What is Theology, Anyhow? (Or: How do you introduce theology to college freshmen?)

The word “theology” comes from two Greek words: theos, meaning God and logos, meaning “word”.  Theology thus literally means “words about God” or, more formally, “the study of God.”  In its most general sense, then, theology occurs whenever we speak about God.  We are theologians then when we pray or worship, when we discuss our beliefs, when we read our Bibles, even when we say “Oh my God!” in exasperation (we are just bad theologians when that happens!).  Of course, if we confess that God is the source of all things (Genesis 1, John 1), then everything we talk about is implicitly words about God – theology. Theology, therefore, is not something that can be separated out from the rest of our lives – it is not primarily a discrete academic field.  Theology is not just a topic; it is also a way of seeing, a practice, a way of life, a way of existing in the world.  In short, theology is holistic – it is about the entire person (mind, body, spirit) engaged with the reality of God.

But if this is what theology is, how can it be taught in a university setting?  To put it bluntly, it can’t be.  Theology’s proper setting is the Church; in the worship of the Church theology is heard, spoken, and practiced.  But of course, theology has a narrower sense, too.  There is a distinctively intellectual or propositional aspect to theology (this will be our main focus in this class).  Theology so understood is the careful, critical, reasonable exposition of Christian beliefs.  Theology in this vein is faith seeking understanding.

We seek to understand what we believe and work out why we believe it.  For example, Christians believe that “Jesus is Lord.”  Theology (again, in this narrower sense) complements this belief by asking, “What does it mean that Jesus is Lord?” and “Why do Christians believe this about Jesus?”  Theology’s role is to expound and exposit those beliefs that Christians confess and practice in the Church.

The university, however, is not the Church.  This creates problems for the academic study of theology because the university (at least as it is presently conceived) doesn’t really have room for this holistic (and ecclesial) way of doing theology.  Even in a purportedly Christian university we have fallen into the rather artificial dichotomy where we educate our minds in the classroom and educate our spirits elsewhere – chapel, perhaps.

This is how we’ve ended up with the “academic study of religion.”  Theology has come to be divided between the “intellectual” side that is studied in the university while the “spiritual” or “practical” side of theology is left to the Church.  The consequence of this division is that both the university and the Church are impoverished.  Theology is holistic or it is nothing.

The academic study of theology is especially impoverished when it is cut loose from its proper ecclesial mooring.   Academic theology, when separated from the confession and worship of the Church, ceases to be concerned with belief and instead treats its subject as a sociological/cultural phenomenon.  Theology ceases to be about the person’s living engagement with God in and through the Church.  It becomes instead a dead object studied and dissected like a cadaver on the examination table. Academic theologians study theology from a detached, “objective” point of view.  Or so they think.  Unfortunately for those who cling to the ideal of objectivity, postmodernism has shown us that pure objectivity (a neutral, detached, unbiased perspective) is impossible.  We all come to everything we study with certain presuppositions, certain expectations, certain beliefs that color the way we read, receive, and interpret the things we study.  Strict neutrality, pure objectivity is, quite simply, impossible.

This is especially the case with theology.  Theology cannot be studied from some detached perspective.  We cannot study theology the same way we might study business or science.  The subject matter of theology is nothing other than God himself – marvelously alive and active in the world yet mysterious in his nature and glory.  We cannot study God the same way we might study the specimen in front of us in Biology.  We study God theologically in an analogous way to how we come to know a person – a friend or a lover.  We don’t come to know a friend in a detached way, observing them from afar without engaging them in conversation.  Rather, we participate in them by talking to them, sharing stories, making jokes, and doing activities together.  We engage with them holistically – with our minds, our emotions, our bodies.  We comes to know a person by being in relationship with them – a relationship in which there is both give and take, receptivity and exchange.

Theology too is inherently participative and dialogical – it is an ongoing conversation between God and the Church, stretched throughout history.  What we are studying this semester is this dialogue between God and the Church, listening to these “words about God” spoken for generations.  But, in addition to that careful listening, we are also entering into that great conversation.  Our course will be devoted to listening to the conversation between God and the Church and participating in it, engaging it with our minds, emotions, imaginations, and bodies.  Neutrality here is impossible.  You can agree with the Church, you can disagree with the Church – but you cannot remain indifferent to it.  We are all caught up in the unfolding story of the Church’s history and its theology.  We don’t get to sit in the audience as mere observers.  We are now actors on the stage of the Church’s history.

The glory of theology

As usual, David Bentley Hart brilliantly and articulately captures the glory of theology as an intellectual discipline.  Of course, theology is even more than what Hart lays out here (there is a necessary ecclesial reality that Hart doesn’t here address), but this is a good start:

“Moreover, theology requires far greater scholarly range [than other academic disciplines]. The properly trained Christian theologian should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the liturgies, texts, and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should have a thorough philosophical training, should possess considerable knowledge of the fine arts, should have an intelligent interest in such areas as law or economics, and so on.”

Piece of cake, right? Hardly.  But Hart captures the unique glory of theology: it draws all knowledge into the beautiful tapestry of God’s revelation.  That is something worth getting excited about.  Theology transforms all knowledge into a great hymn to the truth, beauty and goodness of the Creator.

Some thoughts on eschatology with Florensky

Pavel Florensky’s Iconstasis is a quiet masterpiece of theology, art and metaphysics, surprisingly and gloriously eccentric. Florensky’s account of Orthodox iconography roots the practice in ecclesial tradition, yes, but also in a cosmological and metaphysical vision so rich that all of created being becomes iconographic by being drawn into the true Icon of Christ, the image of the Father.

It is hardly possible to do justice to the richness of this little book. Florensky begins his treatment with an unusual discussion of dreams as a phenomenological depiction of the peculiar boundary between heaven and earth that God establishes in Genesis chapter one. Here, even in the first line of the page, Florensky reveals the icon as a type of sacrament of this cosmological vision. The icon is where earth and heaven meet. This is certainly true precisely because the icon participates in Christ as the true meeting of heaven and earth.

Such understanding is fundamentally eschatological. This is seen in Florensky’s account of the dream. Dream time works in the opposite direction as waking time. We are all familiar with the sensation where an event or a sound in waking time features in our dream: our alarm clock features in our dream as a siren, for example. That external stimulus features in our dream. But the entire content of that dream has been determined by that external stimulus that comes only at the end of the dream. The entire dream progresses linearly but not from its beginning but from its end. But this is not to say that this is merely backwards linear movement. The dream is not lived backwards. It still moves forward in a reasonably sensical way. But the key point is that the content, the movement of the dream, is determined by its end– that external stimulus that brings the dream to its (sometimes abrupt) end. The life of the dream is the movement of its own end toward its own end.

Let me give an example: When I go to bed, I set my iPad alarm clock to wake me up with the sound of church bell chimes. Often my mind will incorporate those bell chimes into the narrative content of my dream where I will, in my dream, be walking down the street by a church and suddenly hear the bells that are the faintest echo of those external bells sounding from the tablet by my sleeping head. But the point is, the entire narrative flow of my dream has lead me to that point where I am on the street listening to the church bells ringing above me. Perhaps earlier in the dream I am having a discussion with my beloved and I tell her that I think I am going to go for a walk to the store on the corner. And so I, in the dream, go for that walk, perhaps buy a newspaper and then am struck by the desire to walk to the church to hear the church bells. And so I set out walking again until I find myself in that precise moment where I hear the bells and wake from sleep. The entire dream has been narratively and logically ordered by and toward its end.

The theological implications of such a phenomenology are, I hope, obvious. We are eschatological creatures; the narrative of our existence is ordered toward its own ending. By “ending” I don’t necessarily mean our biological end in death (though that of course does have some determinative power in our lives, but only secondarily). What I mean instead is the resurrection of the dead that Paul so beautifully expresses in 1 Corinthians 15. The narrative of our lives are determined by their end in the resurrection of the human body. Our bodies are given, our lives are lived by and for the resurrection. The resurrection is that “external stimulus” that shapes the flow and logic of the narrative of our world.

Of course, to speak of the resurrection is ultimately to find oneself speaking of God in Christ. For the resurrection is Christ: “I am the resurrection” as Jesus says in John’s gospel. Our ultimate end is Christ. As Augustine says, “After this life, may God be our dwelling place.” When we wake after death, we wake within the reality of Christ– restored, unbroken relationship of the most intimate sort: the nuptial bliss of the marriage feast of the Lamb. And we shall see that all of our longings in life, all of our desires and passions and hopes were ultimately for this marital reality. It is this nuptial bliss to which our entire lives have been moving.

And in that marital delight, our eyes will be healed and then we shall see truly what we had only wondered at before: the iconography of the world– that it holds the truth of our eschatological destiny as a cosmic secret, revealing it only to those who have had their eyes healed by faith and can now see truly what has always been present: that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (Hopkins), directing our eyes through the symbols of the world to that fulfillment that shall come as we wake from death to life.

Temptation

“Under a starry sky I was taking a walk,

On a ridge overlooking neon citites,

With my companion, the spirit of desolation,

Who was running around and sermoniing,

Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else

Would be waking here, trying to understand his age.

Had I died long ago nothing would have changed.

The same stars, cities and countries

Would have been seen with other eyes.

The world and its labors would go on as they do.

 

For Christ’s sake, get away from me.

You’ve tormented me enough, I said.

It’s not up to me to judge the calling of men.

And my merits, if any, I won’t know anyway.”

–Czeslaw Milosz

On Suffering

A poem from Scott Cairns:

September 11

And the pillar of fire, and the pillar of cloud

Did not depart from before the people.

According to the promise, we had known

we would be led, and that the ancient God

would deign to make His hidden presence shown

by column of fire, and pillar of cloud.

We had come to suspect what fierce demand

our translation to another land might bode,

but had not guessed He would allow our own

brief flesh to bear the flame, become the cloud.

Peter M. Candler, Jr on Death & Resurrection

An interesting interview featuring my dissertation director, Pete Candler, speaking about a paper he wrote for a panel he and I did together last October at Baylor University’s Institute for Faith & Learning.

 

Book review: Mark L. Taylor: “The Theological and the Political”

Mark Lewis Taylor’s latest book is an engaging, impassioned argument for a re-imagining of “the theological” as an instrument for political liberation. Taylor draws a line between “Theology” and “the theological”.  The former is the study of doctrinal systems that reference a transcendent Other whereas the latter is “liminal state of dread, fear, ecstasy and hope” that expresses itself in creative and artistic expression.  Taylor believes that Theology, with its emphasis on a higher, transcendent power is no longer a useful instrument for political liberation (indeed Theology more often capitulates and endorses political atrocity than critiques it).  Rather than Theology’s “higher power”, Taylor invokes “the greater power” of “the theological” ⎯ the reflective, existential knowledge (what he labels the ‘transimmanental’) of one’s particular life situation.  The theological is the motivating power of an art that is truly existential (or, as Taylor says, “ek-sistant”) and may therefore be subversive of oppressive political regimes.  The art of the Guantanamo poets, he claims, is nourished by the theological (that is, the existential import of one’s “ultimate concern”) and therefore becomes a subversive critique of the politics of imprisonment and torture.  Thus the heart of Taylor’s project is to develop a theoretical account of the way the theological arises from and critiques through artistic expression the agonistic politics of our world.

Taylor’s book is rigorous and impassioned.  His argument is clear and well-organized.  His task and his critique are important.  But the problem of Taylor’s book is that the political functions as an ontological totality.  Everything, including the theological, is an aspect of the political.  If there can be no disruption of the agonistic political from outside of its realm; indeed, there can be no eschaton.  By lacking an eschaton, Taylor assumes the eternality of agonistic politics and the perpetuity of oppression.  This leaves theological discourse in the unhappy situation of an endless cycle of subversive critique.  Yet for all of Taylor’s talk of subversion, there is nothing that the cycle of political violence is being subverted for.  There is nothing beyond agonistic politics: one regime is subverted and replaced by another oppressive regime.  In the end, Taylor simply leaves his readers with an unending cycle of subversion with no hope of a true and lasting eschatological peace.

Educating for Truth, Part Two: Knowledge as Eros

The real failure of wissenschaft as a method is that it fails to recognize that knowledge is principally erotic.  Knowledge is driven by desire, a desire for increasing intimacy and union with its object.

Ever since Descartes (who is himself drawing substantially from Stoic epistemologies), we have principally understood knowledge as a type of “possession”.  Amassing more and more knowledge will eventually allow us to gain power over all things and become “masters and possessors of nature”.  This Cartesian agenda colors wissenschaftlich methodology: knowledge consists in the possession of information that gives us mastery over the object of our knowledge.  What we possess, we own.  What we own, we rule.

But the truth of the matter is that no object, even the simplest and most basic, can be fully possessed in its totality.  Every object of study has an irreducible mysteriousness at its core.  “Behind every answer there is a new question, and behind every reassuring certainty there is an expansive new horizon.”

Even something as seemingly simple as a basic flower is ripe with mystery: the investigation into its nature, its chemistry, its beauty, its meaning yields an endless sea of questions.  Even as we come to understand more and more of the truth of the flower, its fullness continues to allude us.  It’s truth is unveiled to us, so we can know it.  But at precisely the same time, it remains veiled to us.  The object is always something more than what we can discursively know about it.

To be sure, truth as a whole is in principle unveiled (because all truth is truth), yet it remains infinitely transcendent and veiled in its totality.  For this reason, it awakens in the knower a yearning for more.  True knowledge thus manages to conjoin two seemingly contrary experiences: the experience of possessing, and surveying from above, the object of knowledge in the clarity of the intellect and the experience of being flooded by something that overflows knowledge in the heart of knowledge itself, or to put it another way, the awareness of participating in something that is infinitely greater in itself than what comes to light in its disclosure (Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, 24).

This yearning for more that Balthasar speaks of is the erotic drive of knowledge.  Knowledge is driven by a longing for fuller knowledge and understanding of its object; the increase in knowledge is an increase of intimacy with that object– a union with the object in its mysterious interiority.  This is true for all knowledge but it is especially true of that knowledge in which the object is actually a subject.

Let us take, for example, romantic love.  What lover has ever said of his beloved, “I have arrived at comprehensive knowledge of her.  I know her fully now.  I am satisfied.  I do not need to learn anything more about her.”  Indeed, perish the thought of ever hearing this from a lover’s lips!  Such sentiments would indicate the death of knowledge and indeed the death of love.  For knowledge and love are mutually indwelling; love motivates knowledge and knowledge nourishes love.  The lover’s love drives him to “live every day anew at the very origin of love and therein continue to probe and question it.”  In the mystery of the beloved, the lover’s desire to know her more fully is perpetual; a marriage is a lifetime of coming-to-know one’s spouse.

We have seen how quickly we moved from knowledge as desire, or eros, to knowledge as love.  This is a necessary movement, especially when the object of knowledge is a subject as in romantic love.  Knowledge as desire implies a distance, a remove, between the knower and that which it knows.  Desire must become love in order for there to be genuine understanding.  In a marriage, it is the intimacy of love that yields the truest understanding of the other person. Lovers’ knowledge of each other develops from factoids (“where did you grow up?”) to conceptual understanding (“she understands the world in such and such a way”).  But it is only in the binding of the two into one flesh in marriage and sexual intimacy (surely a foretaste of the heavenly unity between God and humanity at the marriage feast of the Lamb!) that lovers are said to truly “know” each other.  The lower forms of knowledge of the other (factual, discursive, conceptual) serve as the necessary foundation for the higher knowledge of the other, beyond all discursive understanding, in which knowledge is participation in the life, the mind, the soul, and the body of the other in intimate union.  Suggest to any lovers who have tasted the heights of intimacy that they limit their knowledge of each other to the purely discursive and factual and they will rightly revolt.  This revulsion occurs because knowledge, when mixed with love, is not satisfied with knowing from afar.  Love draws the lover out of himself and toward the beloved in a desire for intimacy with her.  And this intimacy, this love, issues forth a new understanding of the beloved, an understanding of her in her uniqueness and her mystery.  That love creates an understanding between the lovers of each other that is entirely secret to them.  No other man knows the beloved in the same way as her lover does because “love itself is understanding.”  I know my wife in a way that no one else does because of the love we share.  Anyone can learn the discursive facts about her given the right situation.  But to love her is to know her most truly.  Romantic love is the highest form of human knowledge in which the object of knowledge is truly a living subject.  In this knowledge, detached observation and enquiry is entirely inadequate to the “object”.  True knowledge of the object-that-is-living-subject is a mutuality, an exchange, a dynamic relation characterized by receptivity and donation.  When the object of knowledge is actually a subject, true knowledge can only be found in a relation of mutual indwelling and participation, which is to say, in a relation of love.

What, then, is knowledge?  A wissenschaftlich methodology would tell us that knowledge is the amassing of factual, discursive information about an object.  But a phenomenological study of love shows that knowledge is an erotic coming-to-know of the object.  This erotic drive carries the knower through the lower forms of factual and discursive knowledge but also perpetually strives for intimate union with the object, a union that is called love.  True knowledge is indeed discursive but it is ever open to an understanding of its object that is possible only beyond discursive knowing.

Educating for Truth: Part 1- The Problem

Over the next few posts, I will be developing an argument  for the university to educate for poetic and mystical knowledge in addition to conceptual knowledge.  What follows is intentionally polemical and strongly worded in the hopes of generating lively conversation.  Please, don’t hold back! =]

To get us started, a quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar:

The whole world of images that surrounds us is a single field of significations.  Every flower we see is an expression, every landscape has its significance, every human or animal face speaks its wordless language.  It would be utterly futile to attempt a transposition of this language into concepts.  Though we might try to circumscribe, even to describe, the content these things express, we would never succeed in rendering it adequately.  This expressive language is addressed primarily, not to conceptual thought, but to the kind of intelligence that perceptively reads the gestalt of things. (Theo-Logic vol. 1, 140.)

Balthasar’s point here is that the depth and beauty and richness of the world cannot be adequately captured by conceptual knowledge.  The reality of the world, that fundamental mystery of Being, defies all (Cartesian) attempts at total conceptual knowledge as the striving to dominate and control the mystery.

Yet mastery is precisely the driving motivation of the modern university.  The desire for mastery is at the root of the disciplinary specialization that drives the fragmentation of the academic curriculum.  The quest for mastery motivates the research agenda that powers the tenure process.  Cartesian epistemology– that knowledge of a thing can be so complete that one gains dominance of it– lies at the heart of the modern university.  And so the modern university limits itself to conceptual knowledge because it is precisely by concepts that we can know the object in toto and, hence, control it.  The university teaches all things conceptually, even the arts.  In the classroom, we can talk about the concepts of art and harmony, we can discuss the techne of music and painting and science.  But our academic discourse, with a few extraordinarily rare exceptions, is limited to that kind of conceptual and technical talk.

But Balthasar tells us that such an approach to knowledge is inadequate to the world.  Concepts cannot make sense of the poem.  Concepts may help the knower identify the technique of the poem’s rhyme, its use of parallelism and metaphor, but conceptual knowledge does not know the poem truly.  Concepts may identify its techne but cannot comprehend its logos.

This reminds me of a beautiful passage from C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In that story, a group of adventurers (including an Enlightenment educated young man named Eustace Clarence Scrubb) come to the island home of an ancient man named Ramandu.  As the adventurers speak with Ramandu, it is revealed that he is a star, one at rest from his heavenly journey.  Scientifically minded Eustace, however, is skeptical.  How could this old man be a star?  He objects, saying, “In our world, a star is just a flaming ball of gas.”  Ramandu smiles in response and says, “Dear child, even in your world, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

Just as Eustace’s conceptual knowledge of stars was inadequate to the truth of what a star actually is, so too is our conceptual knowledge inadequate to getting to the truth of Being.  Balthasar gives the example of erotic love: the techne of erotic love could be explained by the biochemical reactions of attraction.  But this would not even begin to capture the truth of what erotic love means to those who experience it; the concepts of biochemistry may tell us how erotic love works but it is powerless to understand what erotic love is.

The problem is of course that our universities no longer believe in truth.  ”Truth” has become an antiquated notion of a pre-Enlightenment medievalism.  Instead of being a place where truth can be freely studied and contemplated, our universities are held sway under the tyranny of facts. But “facts” are inadequate to the wholeness, the richness, and the mystery of the world.  The fullness of a thing is never captured in its factuality.  One does not have real knowledge of a thing if one has only a conceptual mastery of its facts.

By limiting the university education to the passing on of conceptual knowledge– of fact– the university is ultimately creating a false knowledge of the world.  It is creating a cult of conceptual knowledge that, because of its lack of acknowledgement of its own limitation and inadequacy, becomes deceitful and, eventually, idolatrous.

The university, if it is to be a place where genuine knowledge is cultivated, cannot ignore questions of truth and with it other forms of knowledge that allow the knower to know truly.  Anything less than that signals the end of knowledge and the denial of humanity.

In the next post, I will argue that an education that avoids the discourse of truth is an education that denies the human.  This is so because human nature is constituted by a desire to know the truth.