THE first part of this book was about God. The second part was about the story of God's action upon the human race. Note the word story. Christianity is a historic religion: time has always been its fourth dimension. In studying man's relation with God time is vital. His relation to God has a history, a shape, an unfolding, in fact a plot. It matters enormously when a man was born. It is not a case of a static higher world with which man has had, and could only have, a fixed relation. That world and we have had a good many changes of relation. Things that have happened are part of our religion as well as things that are. Not to know the story is not to know the religion; and not to know the religion is not to know reality. For the facts of religion are not simply facts of religion, but facts, and the most important facts. What we have been studying is that context of reality in which we are, and from which we can in no way escape. Given that the context is what it is, it remains for us to study our own being and our own life in it; and this will be the theme of the third and last section of this book.
In summary, we see the context as stateable in terms of three actors and four events. The actors are God, Adam, Christ: all of them are in us in various ways, and we have no hope of understanding ourselves without understanding them. The events are the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption and the Judgment. Knowing this context we know where we are, what we are, and what we exist for; knowing the totality we can know our place in it and establish our relation to everything else in it. We can do nothing to alter the context, for it is reality. As I have said we cannot escape from it, there is nowhere to escape TO, for apart from it is only nothingness. The only thing left to our choice is the mental attitude we shall adapt to it. No subordinate choice that we make can ever be as important as this fundamental choice. What choices are open to us? Roughly, three. We can do our best to understand reality, the context in which we are, and harmonize ourselves with it. Or we can understand the context and rebel against it, that is rebel against reality, and what could be bleaker? Or we can ignore the context and either invent one of our own by selecting such elements in the context as we happen, mentally or temperamentally, to find appealing, or else act in no context at all.
Maturity lies with the first choice. Maturity is preparedness to accept reality, co-operate with reality, not kick against reality: remembering that the reality we accept does not mean any situation that merely happens to be, and is in fact within our power to change, but only the vast framework of reality which by God's will is what it is.
We are existent in a universe:
we and it alike are created by God,
held in existence from moment to moment by God;
we enter life born in Adam and enfolded in the results of his fall:
we are meant for a supernatural destiny
and can reach it only by entering a supernatural life through rebirth in Christ
our Redeemer:
we are only fully ourselves,
that is in a condition to be all that we are meant to be and do all that we
are meant to do,
as members of the Mystical Body of Christ.
These are the inescapable facts about ourselves.
To be unaware of any element in them is to falsify everything.
Whatever one proposes to DO about the facts,
there is only ignorance and error, darkness and double darkness, in not seeing
them.
top
In that darkness we cannot get our relation to anything right. The sociologist, for instance, is not DIRECTLY concerned with men's relation to God, but with their relation to one another, and this is true of the novelist, too, for the most part. But men are IN FACT related to God, fallen in Adam, redeemed by Christ, on their way to Heaven or Hell; and if the novelist or sociologist does not know this, he does not know men. That is he does not know his business. Even what he does see, he does not see right. Our own age is very fastidious about novels, and particularly about their reality. We say a novel is artificial, and so saying damn it out of hand, when the characters are unreal. Yet no one seems to mind that the world they inhabit is unreal. The novelist is continually in the absurd position of making laws for his characters in a universe that he did not make, and he is forced to this absurdity simply because he does not know the laws of the real universe. Lacking this knowledge, no matter how profound his insight into human character and passion and motive and motivelessness, he is doomed to unreality. A work of art is not composed in order to illustrate the moral law, any more than a cathedral is built to illustrate mechanical laws. But if the builder ignores the laws of mechanics, his cathedral will show its unreality by falling down; and if the artist ignores the moral law, his work will in the long run show its unreality just as certainly.
This, fundamentally, is why the theologian finds the modern novel chaotic. To one who has grasped the shape of reality, the most solemn, sombre, closely observed modern novel seems as grotesque and fantastic as Alice in Wonderland. What makes that masterpiece obviously fantastic is that the law of cause and effect does not operate; but this lack of connection between cause and effect is at the level of the most superficial of secondary causes. Consider what derangement must follow if the first cause is utterly unknown. The grotesqueness is not less because the cause ignored is more fundamental; it is only less obvious because the mind has lost contact with its own depths.
But if the theologian dismisses the novelist's world as lacking shape, the novelist dismisses the theologian's world as lacking flesh and blood. This counter-charge is worth examination, because it draws attention to a real danger that lies in wait for the student of ultimate reality. There is a danger that in handling elements so far beyond the reach of daily experience one might come to treat them as abstractions; and in that event our philosophizing would come to be an exercise in getting these abstractions rightly related to one another, in getting the shape of reality right. But the universe is not simply something that has a shape. It is something. The trouble is that the student, in his student days at least, must to a large extent be conditioned by his examinations; and examinations are almost invariably about shape; it is difficult to devise examinations that can test how real reality is to a man. It is possible to have a less detailed knowledge of all the relations that exist between all the various elements of reality, yet know reality better; a man who has never heard of some of the subtler truths may have a far better hold upon reality, because of the intensity of his realization of it. To know all the ins and outs of the diagram of reality is very valuable, but not if reality is in the mind simply as a diagram. We must never mistake intricacy for depth.
Therefore it is necessary to balance our study of the relations of things
by a growing intimacy with the very being of things.
Thus we must study creation, not simply the process,
the transition from nothingness to something by the exercise of God's omnipotence,
but the result of the process, the created universe.
Studying it, we will come not only to a better knowledge of it, but to a better
knowledge of God who created it;
and this again not only in the sense already discussed that we learn something
of any maker from the thing he has made,
but in the less obvious sense that from the study of created being we come
to an awareness of BEING,
which we can bring to our study of the Uncreated Being.
The theologian studying only God might come to a pretty thin notion of God.
The primary truth about God is that He is.
The more IS means to us, the richer our knowledge
of God.
For a beginning of our study of IS, finite
being lies ready to our hand, accessible, apt to our habits.
It is only a shadow of infinite Being, but even a shadow is still something
immense if infinite Being has cast it.
Just as finite language is inadequate to express our knowledge,
yet is the best we have and not to be spurned without loss,
so finite being is an inadequate expression of infinite Being,
yet is the best we have as a starting point and can yield immense fruit of
knowledge.
top
We must study being, not simply as a philosophical concept, but as a reality expressed in everything that exists. We shall do better if we arrive at our own mental relation with being from our own experience of the things that are, and not simply from books in which other men abstract for us the fruit of theirs. Certainly it would be folly to think that we are likely to get a better notion of infinite Being by ignoring finite being. For in the first place, as we have seen, it bears at its lowest the imprint, and at its highest the likeness, of its Maker. It would be a singular aberration to think one could learn nothing about God from the things He has made - from the heavens, for example, which show forth God's glory.
The mind really aware of the splendour of creation cannot but feel how superb must be the infinite Being, if He can make this admirable stuff out of nothing. It is no compliment to God's omnipotence to treat what He has made of nothing as if it were little better than nothing. It is no compliment to a poet to be always seeking him and resolutely refusing to read his poetry. God is communicating with us, telling us something, by way of his universe. There is something verging on the monstrous about knowing God and not being interested in the things He has made, the things in which His infinite power is energizing. The logical development of so strange an attitude would be to love God so exclusively that we could not love men? an exclusiveness which He has forbidden. We have to love our neighbour because God loves him, and love demands knowledge. We cannot at once love our neighbour and ignore him; and we have to love the world, because God loves the world; and coming to know the world, we find that we are knowing God better. Provided that we keep the proportion right, our relation to God is better and richer because of our use, with mind and will and body, of what He has made.
But note again: in its way the created universe IS, and from it we can get a real if quite unsayable notion of what IS means. But as our knowledge grows, we are conscious of a kind of two-way effect - a growing sense of the wonder of it, and a growing awareness of the element of nothingness in it. As against not-being, nothing, it is so measurelessly great. As against Infinity, it barely is at all.
Given that the created universe has to be studied, how shall we study it?
There is no one set way.
Once one has the shape of reality,
there is almost no way of NOT studying it, if one's
mind is not abnormally lethargic.
Once one has the main elements of reality clear in the mind, everything can
add to the richness.
Indeed a great deal of the enriching process will be spontaneous and unmeditated.
We have not to be forever setting our teeth and working conscientiously at
the enrichment of our mind.
Direct study of the universe there must be,
but it will not be the whole of the mind's action or the best part of it.
Any living activity will serve.
There is, for example, an immense amount to be learned about being,
and therefore about God if one knows how to apply it,
merely by having a cold plunge on a winter morning.
top
On the same principle of learning from our own experience in living, there is much to be learned by sharing the fruit of the experience of others by reading? not simply reading philosophy, but the works of men especially gifted to react to reality. The theo?logian may well have something to gain from the novelist. For if the novelist has only a vague notion or no notion at all of the total meaning of life, he has usually a highly developed awareness of the flesh and blood of it. But far more than novels, the theologian might gain by reading the poets - and not only because they might improve his style, though this is more important than he always realizes. In that awareness of reality that is so vital, the poet really has something to give the theologian.
|
| Apollo 11 mission. Lunar module EAGLE returns to dock on command module COLUMBIA, 21st July 1969. Earth rises over the lunar horizon. |
| Story - NASA |
Wordsworth's The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare and Virgil's Sunt lachrymae rerum witness over eighteen hundred years to the same truth: the poets cannot be happy with the idea that nature is dead. They feel the life in it, though they do not always know what the life is that they feel. The Christian is exactly the reverse: he knows what the mystery is, but for the most part does not feel it. He knows as a fact of Christian doctrine that God is at the very centre of all things whatsoever, sustaining them by His own continuing life above the surface of that nothingness from which He drew them: but he does not experience things that way. What the Christian knows as a truth, the poet responds to as a living fact: he sees things so. That is the one half of his gift. By the other half, he can communicate his experience, so that we see them so, too. Thus the poet can help many men who know a great deal more about creation than he does. He can help them by making creation come alive to them.
But as we have said there is need of direct study of the created universe. Consider matter first. The natural sciences serve the lesser purpose of helping to make the world more habitable and the greater purpose of increasing our knowledge of it. This order of values is not simply a fad of my own. The scientist himself holds it. Science is from the Latin verb SCIRE, to know. Science does not mean doing, it means knowing. We have the electric light, not because scientists wanted to give us a handier illuminant than gas, but because they wanted to know more about the nature of light and the nature of electricity. The handymen may hang around the scientist, seeing how they can put to use what he discovers; but it is he that discovers, not they. And he is driven on to his discoveries by a passionate desire to know. But for him, and that quality in him, the handymen would be helpless.
It would be startling, we have shown, for a theologian to think he could learn nothing about God from the things God made - any of them, therefore the material things too. The scientist has information to give the theologian, which the theologian can turn to gold. The scientist is not as such a theologian. He is dealing with causes and arrangements and relations less fundamental than the FIRST CAUSE and the FIRST PRINCIPLE OF ORDER.
 |
| Photo Microscopy: Microscopic image of the Pupa of the holly leaf miner, showing fully developed adult (20x) (Darkfield Illumination). Nikon Small world Gallery prizewinner - 1978 competition. |
| Story - Microscopyu.com |
Further, he keeps within the field of material things. Therefore as a scientist he does not and cannot know what it is all about. He can know an incredible amount about the things upon which he specializes, but from his science he cannot learn the totality of being and therefore he cannot know the full meaning, or any large part of the meaning, even of what he does know. He knows it out of its context. To repeat an illustration used very early in this book: the scientist who is only a scientist is in the position of a man who should have made a most detailed study of a human eye, never having seen a human face. The scientist is dealing with the relations of material things to one another and this is valid and valuable knowledge, requiring its own sort of asceticism and devotion. But it is very bad for him if he confines himself exclusively to it, for a scientist is also a man with a man's need to know and a man's capacity to know the meaning of his own life. Nothing is valueless that God has made, but the things the scientist studies are the lowest in value; and apart from their relation to God and to the higher things of that creation which in their lowliness they complete, they would be of no value at all: this is how he tends to study them. To be engaged so closely in their study that larger realities remain unseen is to neglect the better part of his own humanity. No amount of excellence as a scientist can compensate for stuntedness and crippledness as a man. Yet these brilliant workers upon the lowest things may well be compensated by the good God for the blindness so many of them have inflicted upon themselves.
The scientist loses more by not learning from the theologian than the theologian loses by not learning from the scientist: in any event the theologian has never ignored the stuff of the universe as the scientist has ignored the mind behind the universe. The theologian can hardly help knowing that bread nourishes, that poison kills, that sex perturbs. But if one loses less than the other, both lose. The scientist's loss is not here our concern, but the theologian's is, since we are taking our first steps along his road. He and we can learn from all the things that bear God's imprint, but still more from those higher things that He made in His likeness - angels and the souls of men. There is more to be learned from studying angels, but not by us. Man lies more immediately to our hand. We can study him more conveniently than we can study the angels. We can study him not only in psychology classrooms or history classrooms, but in the workshop, the bus, the shaving mirror. The stupidest couplet that Alexander Pope ever wrote is: Presume not the illimitable to scan, The proper study of mankind is man.
In divorcing the study of the illimitable from the study of man he was wrong
both ways;
for man is a most excellent starting point for our study of the illimitable,
while man cannot be understood apart from his relation to the illimitable,
that is out of his context.
The remainder of this book will be concerned with the study of man,
for we have already paid the beginning of attention to the illimitable.
top