A Primer on Philosophy and Education

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading a pre-release review copy of Sam Rocha’s new book, A Primer on Philosophy and Education. The book is not (nor does it pretend to be) a general introduction to Western philosophy; rather, it’s an introduction to philosophical thinking, especially as it applies to education—and here Rocha has a bit of fun.

Rocha is a philosopher of education, and from that and the title of the book one might think that this is a book about schools, teachers, and chalkboards. On the contrary: Rocha refers to all of that as “schooling”; by education he means “learning”, or more precisely, the ability to learn for one’s self, and to go on doing so all one’s life. But that precise meaning only emerges in the course of book. (Whoops! Spoilers. Sorry, Sam.)

The day I read this I was at home sick with a cold, and so it’s a fairly strong statement to say that I enjoyed it and that it held my attention. That said, I find I can’t judge the book fairly, as I’m really not a member of Rocha’s intended audience: his students, and others at a similar level. I don’t claim to be a philosopher of any stripe, but I’ve been delving into it long enough that at least I’m no longer a beginner (perhaps I’m a philosophomore). Whether I’d have found this book helpful when I was beginning that journey, I don’t know. But it all made sense to me, and as I say I enjoyed it.

Anathem

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, is that most odd of things: philosophical science fiction. By which I mean that in order to enjoy it fully, you really need to have at least a passing acquaintance with the history of Western philosophy from Thales on down; and the more you know, the more you’ll enjoy watching it play out. Not that this is a book of philosophy, or that you have to be a philosopher to read it. There’s plenty of action, interesting characters, and the like.

It is also a difficult book to describe without giving the game away. Heck, it’s a difficult book to describe even if you dogive the game away. But Stephenson has too much fun doling out the information for me to want to spoil it.

The book takes place in a world that is, we are assured, not our own, though there are many points of similarity. Our protagonist is one Fraa Erasmus (“Raz” to his friends) who lives an ascetic sort of life in something that seems very like a monastery, but isn’t, the Concent of Saunt Edhar.

No, I didn’t mispell that. “Saunt”, in Erasmus’ world, is a corruption of “savant”. Edhar was a great and noted thinker in his day, and the Concent, a stronghold of the “mathic world”, was founded to be a place where thinkers could do their work in seclusion, safe from the turmoils and upheavals of the Saecular World outside. Erasmus is a young fraa when we first meet him, winding (with three partners) the great clock that occupies the central tower of the Concent; he is still learning, and has yet to choose his mathic order, the path that he will follow for the rest of his life. He, like all other fraas and suurs, is free to think, to create, and to learn, but he is limited to the most basic technology (called praxic in his world): his bolt, a length of cloth that can become longer and shorter, thicker and thinner at need, that he wears as a garment; his chord, a rope-like object that can also change size, used to keep his bolt from coming off (among other things); and his ball, a soft round object that can be as small as a tennis ball or as large as a truck, but which is mostly used for sitting on. The ball can also glow to provide light.

The fraas and suurs live in almost complete isolation from the Saecular World, coming into contact with the extramurals, or “extras”, those from outside the walls, only during the time of Apert, a week-long festival that occurs once a year…or once every ten years…or once every hundred years…or once every thousand years…depending on who you are. Fraa Erasmus lives in the Decenarian Math, meaning that for him Apert will come every ten years. And as the book begins, Apert is coming; and what will it bring? Therein lies the tale.

I don’t want to say too much more, but I will say this. First, Stephenson’s world-building is phenomenal. I am literally in awe. Second, though there were one or two slow parts I enjoyed the book considerably; it’s the kind of book I’d like to read again for the first time. Third, the intellectual climax of the book is so audacious I can hardly prevent myself from giving it away. Fourth, although Erasmus and his friends have definite, strongly held points of view, with which I sometimes disagree, it never feels like Stephenson has an axe to grind. That impresses me as much as anything.

The only other book by Stephenson that I’ve read is Snow Crash, which had its moments but which I’ve never felt any need to re-read. Anathem is much, much better.

If anyone is interested, I’d gladly discuss my further thoughts about the book down in the comments.

It’s the Poetry, Stupid!

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis notes something that made me hit my head and go “D’oh!” All scripture (even the prose bits) is akin to poetry. Even the bits that are simply reporting something that really happened are akin to poetry, because God is the author of creation. As a poet uses images to convey something deeper, so God uses events to convey something deeper. You can’t get away from it.

And as an analytically minded math-major turned software developer, I have not much taste for poetry, nor much patience for it. If they want to say something why can’t they just say it clearly?

Wait! Please don’t try to answer that. I’m not going to argue that poetry is a waste of time; I know better, intellectually at least, and I regard my lack of taste for poetry to be a personal flaw. I’m confident that there’s a there there, so to speak, at least in the non-feculent 10% of poetry predicted by Sturgeon’s Law.* I just don’t enjoy it.

But I want to hunger and thirst for God’s word. And if there’s a sense that God’s word is akin to poetry, then it would appear that there are some important and relevant skills that I’m lacking.

Sigh.
__________________
* And how do you figure out which 10% is non-feculent? Alas, you have to wade through a lot of—but I digress.

Matthew and Mind Maps

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Matthew 1:22 tells us that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit that prophecy might be fulfilled; and Erasmo speaks of what prophecy is and what it says.

But first, I need to talk about mind maps. I’ve been using mind mapping software for some years as a fancy kind of graphical outliner; it’s especially useful for capturing notes from group discussions. However, I’ve recently discovered that there’s another side to mind maps, especially if you draw them by hand: it’s a way of getting your creative, pattern-matching, relation-making backbrain to come out and play with your analytical, verbal fore-brain. As a working programmer I’ve long since learned to rely on my back-brain to solve problems, but I’ve usually had to rely on walking, driving, or taking a shower to get the solutions to come to mind. Making mind maps by hand can do the same trick, apparently, and in a more focussed way, and so I’m making an effort to learn how to do it.

Most mornings, consequently, after reading and pondering what Erasmo has to say, I’ve tried putting it together in a mind map. Here’s the one I came up with this morning.

This isn’t really intended to speak to anyone but me, of course; and in this case I’m using the mind map as more of an input device, to help me remember what I’ve learned, than as an output device. But it captures the following points:

• In the Gospel, God’s Wisdom is always the chief actor and mover of events.
• However, God’s Wisdom generally works through the prophets, those who “speak before”, that is those who prepare.
• The purpose of the Old Testament prophecies was always to prepare for the coming of God, and hence was intended to lead to the creation of a Tabernacle, an appropriate dwelling for God.
• But sometimes you build the altar one place so that the lightning can strike somewhere else. The Tabernacle of the Temple was the best that man could build; but all of history leads up to the Annunciation, and the conception of Christ in Mary’s womb.
• And so Christ’s conception is the fulfillment of all of the prophecies; God now truly dwells among us.

The point that struck me most, reading Erasmo’s lectio, is the first one: in the Gospel, God’s Wisdom is always the chief actor. I’ve tended to focus on the people in the story; but in the Gospel, of course, the Author is also an Actor; the Father and Holy Spirit, though not usually manifesting explicitly, are always present.

He Will Save Us From Sins

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

For Matthew 1:21, Erasmo looks at Christ’s mission: he will save us from our sins. He didn’t come to throw out the Romans or make Israel politically powerful; he came to make us holy, to claim us, us as individuals, for himself.

Idolatry is always strong in human society; and in our society the two dominant forms it takes are individualism and collectivism. As individuals, we worship ourselves: we exercise, we eat right, or we feel guilty because we don’t do these things as the culture says we should. And, of course, the cult of the almighty orgasm is, in the end, simply the cult of our own pleasure. We Have To Have Our Own Way.

Jesus says no; we must love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s the first great commandment; and it’s all about sanctification, being holy. Erasmo says,

Until our lives are reoriented toward God and doing what is good, our endeavors in any field of human activity can only be a function of our sinfulness and egotism.

The second idol is collectivism: the notion that all social problems—poverty, addiction, violence, racism, what have you—are systemic, and the key to fixing them is to fix society. The Good of All thus becomes the thing to worship; but “All” is an abstraction. There is no “All”, concretely speaking, but only all of us individuals, and worship of the “All” leads in turn to worship of the State, which is the only entity big enough to conceivably “fix” society as a whole.

Jesus says no; the problem isn’t Society, but rather Our Sins; that’s the systemic problem. He came to fix it at the root, by his death and resurrection. Now it has to play out in our lives as individuals. And this leads to the second great commandment, that we must love our neighbors—our real neighbors, those people we see every day—as ourselves. I wish to be well-fed, clothed, and housed; I wish to have a fulfilling, interesting life; I wish to become holy, to love God as He deserves, that I might spend eternity with Him. I work to achieve things things; and so I must work to achieve for my neighbors. It is my individual responsibility, and it relates not to some vaguely defined collective but to individuals: not to society, but to people. These people may live thousands of miles away from me, or they may live in my house, but they are individuals, created by God in His image.

Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Having spent the last week with Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, I’m now ready to give some preliminary impressions: preliminary because I’ve not read the whole thing, or even a tenth of it. But I spent an hour with it on Monday evening, and half-an-hour each morning since, and I think I’ve got the flavor of it.

Bottom line: I love it. It’s a keeper.

To recap, I got this book after praying for help from God to jumpstart in me a deep love of scripture. I want that precisely because the scriptures are a chief way God chose to use to make himself known to us. They are, in a sense, incarnational; and as St. Jerome said, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Conversely, to know Christ one must know the scriptures, and to love Christ one must love the scriptures.

And Erasmo clearly loves the scriptures. It’s clear in every line. He has read them, tasting the words, chewing on the meaning, and coming to know the Lord he loves through them, and he has made his meditations available to us.

The book begins with a lengthy introduction (around fifty pages) entitled, “A Cordial Reading of God’s Word,” which gives Erasmo’s approach to the project. These fifty pages (or, at least, the thirty or so that I’ve studied) might be worth the price of the book all by themselves. Here’s a sample:

The principal care of one who would make his house within Christ’s Word must be to allow the sacred text all its importance, all its resonance, all its radiance and centrality. He will ceaselessly allow it to occupy the central “block” of both his page and his loving attention, as in those manuscript commentaries on The Book in the Middle Ages—of Jewish, Christian, or Moslem origin—which display a minimal portion of the inspired text within a solid square in the middle of the page and whose thick margins, on four sides, became more and more crowded with the glosses of scribes who prayed, studied, memorized, and recopied—in a word, celebrated—the text inexhaustibly.

Not only is the Word of Scripture central to the study of Christ, it is to be central to our lives. The page with the Word at its center and glosses around the outside is to be the model for my life: my life is to be a gloss on the Scripture.

Every page is like this: every page has some fact, some link, some relation, some metaphor, rooted in the Word, rooted in the Faith, rooted in the Liturgy, that opens my eyes and begins to lift me up to heaven. I could multiply examples endlessly, but if I gave as many as I’d like then I’d certainly be hearing from the the Copyright Cops. But here’s one more example, in paraphrase.

At one point, while talking about the importance of the Greek text, Erasmo notes that the word St. Paul uses in Letter to the Ephesians for the “offering” of the temple sacrifices is the same word Matthew uses when people “bring” the sick and lame to Jesus to be healed. The sacrificial victim must be spotless, without flaw; and when folks bring their loved ones and “offer” them to Christ, he heals them, makes them clean and spotless, so that he can in turn offer them to God. And this adds a crucial element to the scene:

The situation in Matthew is then enhanced from a merely thaumaturgic one (even if this is establishing Christ’s crucial identity as Messiah) to a cultic, mystagogical, and even eucharistic one.

Jesus is not just a magician, not just a wonder-worker: in healing those brought to him, he is foreshadowing what he came to Earth to do for all of us on the cross.

In addition to reading and studying the opening essay, I’ve been spending some time each morning with the actual scripture of Matthew and Erasmo’s meditations on it. I’ve gotten partway through verse 19 of Chapter 1, which is slow going consider that the first 16 or 17 verses are all begats. (There are important lessons in the begats!) And my experience with these shorter meditations is similar to my experience with the opening essay: on every page there’s a connection I had not made, an image that will stick with me and enrich all future readings. I hope to have more to say about some of them in coming days and weeks.

In the meantime…if anything I’ve said appeals to you, go ahead and get a copy. I think you’ll find it to be worthwhile.

Scripture Incarnate: Matthew 1:1

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Erasmo’s view of scripture is deeply incarnational. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God; and the purpose of scripture is too bring us face to face with Him. Though the Bible, God’s word written, is not in itself divine, still:

The written word of the evangelist: Is it not an incarnation of the spirit of his spoken word, breathed from his mouth of flesh on the roads of Palestine?

And this is why Erasmo bases his commentary on the original Greek text of Matthew’s gospel. Nothing about the Incarnation of Christ is an accident: not the time, not the place, and not the people. If we accept God’s omnipotence, then we have to say that the Gospel was ultimately recorded in Koine Greek because that’s the way the Lord wanted it. It’s worth looking at it that way, to see what we might see. (And then, Erasmo quotes a Hassidic proverb: “To read the Scriptures in translation is like kissing your wife through a handkerchief.”) Not, I hasten to add, that you need to know Greek to read this book, which is fortunate because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read it.

Erasmo begins his commentary with the title of the work, “good tidings according to Matthew”. And here again we see the Incarnation at work. Christ is God Incarnate, the fullest Revelation of God to His people. To know the Father, we must know the Son. And the principle way we know the Son is through his witnesses, and especially through the four evangelists.

We might put it like this: Christ, God Incarnate, is the embodied revelation of God, and the content of that revelation. The Church—the Apostles and their heirs, the multitude of saints, and all the rest of us—as the Mystical Body of Christ is also in a way the embodied revelation of God, and specifically the means of transmitting that revelation. The Church says that general revelation ended with the Apostles, and this is certainly true, but in another sense revelation is continually on-going as we encounter Christ in the scriptures and pass Him along to others. The content of revelation is unchanged and unchanging, but Christ will continually reveal it to each of us, if only we let Him. Erasmo says,

We come to see who God is and experience the depth of his love only by being taken up into the faith of the saints (in this case, St. Matthew), those who proclaim to us by the witness of their life and words the reality of the God who inhabits them.

When God descends to earth and enters human history, He doesn’t do so by halves.

A Cordial Reading of Scripture

I have a dirty little secret.

I don’t really like reading the Bible all that much. I mean, I’ve read it; all of the New Testament and much of the Old, much of it multiple times. I look at a passage of the New Testament and it tends to go in one eye and out the—well, you know what I mean. And this is not a Good Thing, especially for a Lay Dominican, given that Study is one of the four pillars of Dominican life.

Mind you, I studied obsessively during my first few years as a Catholic revert. The Faith was my current interest, and I burrowed into it with vigor. But interests wax and wane, and other things have my attention at the moment.

Which is why God made promises. I vowed to love my wife when I married her, in preparation for those times when loving unselfishly is difficult. And as a Dominican I promised to continue to study the Word, in preparation for those times when other things look shinier, and when I’m tired in the morning and just don’t want to do it. And during Lent I came face to face with the fact that this is one of those times, and that I need to get moving.

At times like these, prayer is indicated: the kind of prayer where you say, “Lord, I don’t want to read your word, but I want to want to read your word. Please help!” And I’d been praying this kind of prayer during Holy Week.

So on Holy Saturday I was at Barnes & Noble with Jane, and saw a book: Volume III of Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, published by Ignatius Press. I noticed it because it had the usual Ignatius spine, and because it was HUGE, 870 pages, dwarfing all of the books around out. So I pulled it out and took a look. It was subtitled, “Meditations on the Gospel according to St. Matthew”. Not the whole gospel, mind you; chapters 19 to 25 only. Turns out he covers chapters 1 to 11 in the first volume (746 pages), and chapter 12 to 18 in the second volume (800 pages), and he still has three chapters left to go; I’m expecting that the fourth volume, if he manages to publish it, will be 1200 pages at least.

I nearly recoiled in horror, but instead I took a closer look.

It’s a verse by verse commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, beginning from the Greek text. It is intended to be a cordial reading of the Gospel, a reading from the heart. It is intended to be read in the context of the Church and its teachings. It is intended to be part of an encounter with the Living God through His Word written.

Did I mention that Matthew was St. Dominic’s favorite gospel? He carried it with him everywhere.

Interesting, I thought. If only I had the time to plow through something so big. And I walked away.

I think I got about eight feet away before I turned around and went back. When you ask God for something, it’s unwise to walk away from the answer.

Naturally, B&N only had the third volume. So I ordered a copy of the first volume (from Amazon, on my cell phone; sorry, B&N!), and it arrived today. I spent an hour during my daughter’s dance class reading the (first part of) the introduction. And I’m more convinced than ever that my running across it on Saturday was an answer to prayer.

This post is long enough; I’ll have to say more about the book in the coming days. (If I don’t, nag me!)

Belief in the Future

Some while back, author Sarah Hoyt offered to do a blog tour in support of her upcoming book Darkship Renegades. I should say, in support of her then upcoming book Darkship Renegages, because said book came out some while back while our Sarah was afflicted with the ‘flu. She asked me for a topic, and I proposed “science fiction and religion”. Here’s the post she was kind enough to send me. Meantime, I liked Darkship Renegades, the sequel to Darkship Thieves; see my review of Darkship Thieves, and if it sounds appealing go get ‘em both.

And with that, here are Sarah’s comments on science fiction and religion, with special reference to Darkship Renegades and also to A Few Good Men, a related book.

Belief In The Future
by Sarah A. Hoyt

Science fiction and religion don’t work well together. Our fore-writers seemed to hold on to the quaint notion that in a sufficiently advanced future there would be no religion. That notion was, I grant you, pleasing at least at the time, but religion and humans don’t seem to interact that way. There is no such thing as a knowledge of science vast enough that it banishes the ache of being human which religion addresses. Those who think they are free of religion are merely transferring their fervor to something else – religious, ethical – sometimes ironically the very denial of religious feeling.

And although this is by no means always true, most of the time religion is brought into science fiction it is in opposition to science, or as the foe to be conquered.

This is also not always true or a given. To some extent, early science progressed hand in hand with religion. All religions might go through an anti-science phase, or be anti-science in certain regions or times, but the same curiosity about something bigger than ourselves, in the end, extends to both religion and science.

Only, of course, religion is not logical. It is not logical because it’s not meant to be, because the questions it answers (and gets out of the way) are those that typically have no answer, like “What is the purpose of life” and “what is the sound of one hand clapping.” (Okay, the last one is not, that I know, part of any religion, but it IS the type of imponderable religion addresses.)
The problem, then, with most religion – even the most respectful – brought into a science fiction world and created by a science fiction writer is that the writer usually tries to make it logical.
Look, we can’t help it. We try to make our magic logical, we try to make our history logical, and perforce, if it’s going into a book, the religion we just created gets kicked, shoved, and made – by gum! – logical. Which means unless it’s not a real religion, but something, say, dictated by a computer, or aliens, it won’t impress any religious reader as a true religion.
I had a strong advantage in this, because frankly I don’t write in a logical fashion. No, please, don’t assume this means my world building makes no sense, or that thought doesn’t go into it. I mean that after I do all that planning work in advance, I’ve found it’s more productive to let my subconscious drop its bombs in. I’ve found that often, when I don’t know what I’m doing my subconscious does.

I have, in other circumstances, referred to this as plotting by fits of brilliance. Oftentimes those fits of brilliance end up having to be written out in the final draft. Sometimes they get left in to pad the world. And sometimes, years later, while I’m Standing On the Corner, Minding My Own Business, a forgotten bit of brilliance will explode into a full story.

To an extent that was the case with the Usaian religion in the Darkship world. I hadn’t planned on having religions. Or rather, they’re mentioned, but my main character, Athena Hera Sinistra was not, for logical reasons when you read the book, brought up religious. In fact, she makes a fine muddle of all religions in her mind.

So, there it was, in the outline of the first book, Darkship Thieves, a little scene where Athena sells a gold ring to a pawn shop. My intention was to have this be the moment when she realizes there are practical as well as ethical advantages to not conning and lying your way through life.

I wanted the shop keeper to radiate integrity, even though he deals in “shady” and his entire community is probably illegal. So it occurred to me to make him a member of a proscribed religion. Because I didn’t want to offend any existing religions, and because (though Communism is a religion in that world) I didn’t want him to be a Communist because, well… he’s a merchant and clearly a good one, so I blithely made him a Usaian. (The name coming from the fact someone had just used it, derogatorily at me.) I had great fun having Athena think the eagle is a war god, and such. Fine. A piece of whimsy. Right.

Er…

My subconscious had other plans.

I had for some time planned to write a revolution in that world. Or rather, I wanted to write several revolutions, one of them being modeled after the US. Only… Well, I believe in the constitution because while I think our system of government is horrible, it’s the best the world has come up with, as far as I can tell.

However, in a far future, when history has been distorted and vast portions of it erased, why should anyone fight for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?

And there, in my mind in both Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men were the Usaians, who carried those principles through the ages as received wisdom and with them the certainty that G-d intends them to rebuild the republic.

We get the religion through the eyes of someone who is being converted to it. (There will be more in twenty five years, the last book – not twenty five of my years, I hope – through the eyes of someone raised in it.) So what we hear is what his mentors believe, which might not be an accurate depiction of the faith, as such.

What we do get is gloriously contradictory. While the character is assured he doesn’t even have to believe in the afterlife, later in the story there is a family ceremony to consign someone who’s died to being born again in a free land (not clear if it’s reincarnation or another world.)

Of course, every religion has the official theology, and a “low church” of superstitions and ways of doing things that have accrued as folk religion, sometimes borrowed from other, older faiths.
It is the little contradictions that makes the religion feel real.

But there is something else – through their imperfections and struggles, it is the religion that gives the characters the sense of duty and the sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

This made up religion, born of a moment’s whimsy, gives my characters’ dignity and strength that even I can’t mock. It makes them decent, even when they don’t want to be. It lifts them above themselves.

I’m not about to convert – I already have a religion – but their religiously-formed family life and their ordered existence even in the middle of chaos, revolution and war, made me feel a kindred with them.

And in that too, their religion feels real.

Whether it feels real for others, I don’t know. But to the author, it felt authentic.

Georgette Heyer and the Via Negativa

Recently I was reading Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer, and—

OK. Half of you are saying, “Who’s Georgette Heyer?” and the other half are saying, “Hey, you’re male.” Time for a recap.

Georgette Heyer was an author—or, so I gather, the author—of regency romances in the middle of the 20th century. Regency romances are romance novels set in Regency England, in the time after George III went made but before his death. I do not usually read romance novels, but there’s something about Heyer, as authors as diverse as Lois McMaster Bujold and Julie Davis have noted. She’s funny, she has great characters, she writes well; and when you’re in the mood for something light and frothy, they are great fun. I suspect that she is more akin to P.G. Wodehouse (though less farcical) than to the average romance novelist. And it would be hard to overstate her influence. Some years back there was a flood of novels intended as sequels or companions to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with the noted exception of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the ones I glanced at all seemed to owe as much or more to Heyer as they did to Austen. She created her own fictional world, every bit as carefully constructed as a good science fiction or fantasy milieu, and millions have accepted it as the Real Thing. (Give her a try. Try Frederika. Or possibly Talisman Ring. Or maybe The Grand Sophy. I’ll wait.)

So anyway, I was reading Cotillion, in which a thirty-something man of property is travelling from London to the country to make an offer of marriage to a long-time acquaintance. He is not in love with her, or with anyone, but he’s the heir and it has been successfully impressed upon him that he must marry. He well likes his long-time friend, and so off he goes. On the way, he encounters a young woman of good family, great spirit, equal beauty, and little experience who is running away from home because her grandfather, the patriarch, won’t let her marry the man she wants to marry, because she is too young. What’s a gentleman to do? She has a grand strategy, but he can see it won’t answer. He can’t take her back to her family, because she won’t tell him who they are. He can’t leave her on her own; there are unscrupulous people about, don’t you know. Got to take her with him. And from there, of course, the tangles increase.

Now, here’s what led me to reflection. All of his acquaintance are wondering what has happened to him. They hear about the girl, and they all begin to jump to conclusions. Long, drawn out, extremely logical, plausible, believable conclusions, all of which happen to be quite wrong; and they go wrong for two reasons: first, they don’t have all of the information; and some of the information they do have they disbelieve. But as I say, their conclusions are, given the information they have and choose to believe, completely logical.

It occurred to me that we are in much the same position relative to God. It is possible (see Thomas Aquinas) to deduce the existence of God from first principles; and given that He exists, there are certain things that can proven about Him: that He is omnipotent and omniscient, for example. But is less obvious is that these statements are essentially negative. God is infinite, you see, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense of being unbounded. We can put no bounds on His knowledge or His power. That doesn’t mean that we truly understand what it means to be omnipotent; we don’t. It is simply not conceivable to us.

And yet, on a daily basis we try to make sense of God, and thus to put bounds on Him. And perhaps we even reason logically, and come to valid conclusions, based on what we know for sure. But the one thing we can know for certain sure is that God eludes our intellectual grasp. This why Pope Benedict in his writings frequently refers to God as the “Wholly Other”.

And yet, all is not lost. We are doomed to intellectual failure, but we are not doomed altogether.

We cannot grasp God, not intellectually, and certainly not by reasoning from first principles. But He knows this, and He doesn’t leave us orphaned. Instead, He has revealed Himself to us, first through His history with the Israelites, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. He’s in fact told us quite a lot about Himself, and all we really need. It’s partial information, but it’s enough.

Of course, we still go astray intellectually, just as the various on-lookers in Cotillion do. But the confusion does not go on forever. In time the gentleman comes home, and the on-lookers are able to find out from him what’s really been going on. And so we can go to God; and so in time He’ll bring us to live with Him, we are allowed to hope, and we will see Him clearly, and all our questions will be answered.