A Childish Wonder

Having watched four of my children encounter reality for the first time, I know that to the uninitiated, existence is a strange and magical thing. Even in the operations of one’s own body, there is mystery, for it is not clear at first how consciousness and one’s appendages are meant to cooperate. At some point in the first few months, the wonder of human personality grows to momentous import and the child is awestruck at the hilarious and unpredictable antics of faces, which, through an inscrutable and almost indescribable autocatalytic process, grow in animation in response to the child’s own degree of expression.

The world of nature, too, is full of wonders. Some things are fuzzy, some scratchy, and some smooth, hard and cold and the child spends hours feeling with her hand and mouth and ears and head. Some things fly around the room and some slink along the ground and there is at first no rule which says that the things which slink may not, in a metamorphosis, spring into the air and soar – they sometimes do . To a young child, the exquisite marvel of existence itself is perfect and unmitigated. The sharp edges of reality have not been rubbed smooth. Her sense of wonder is utter and complete and cannot be increased or enhanced. The dog which lies at her feet may sprout wings and fly or the faces smiling down at her may begin to glow and speak with the heavenly and musical language of the archangel and still the child will see these things as the seamless and unexceptional progression of an endlessly magical fabric.

Of course, we grow out of this wide-eyed and infantile wonderment. Over time, we begin to understand, through endless repetition, which types of phenomena are remarkable and which are ordinary. We cannot be surprised by everything forever. The first time we notice the sunrise, it may be unspeakable and mystical, but what of the thousandth?

And a good thing, too, else how would we know real wonders when we saw them? If we were still awestruck by our mother’s voice, we might not appreciate Pavarotti’s.

It is, furthermore, the rolling back of these mysteries which has been the hallmark of natural science. Just as an adult has come to understand which occurrences are commonplace and which extraordinary, the mature culture of the modern west has illuminated whole realms of previously mysterious events and cycles, showing them to operate predictably in compliance with fixed physical laws. We have made such progress in this domination of the extraordinary by the prosaic that it looks as though our last childish vestiges of credulity may soon be dismantled – replaced at last by a hard, mature, and sober realism which understands everything, and is, therefore, shocked by nothing.

Critically, this realistic perspective must do away with the idea of God entirely or at the very least relegate him to the amusing but subjective realm of unicorns, goblins, and heavenward-growing beanstalks. It is understandable that primitive peoples (our ancestors, amazonian tribesmen, and perhaps even children) might transpose the existence of God over matter as if to create a focal point for their wonder and ignorance, but beliefs that are harmless and amusing among children and natives threaten to inhibit a modern adult’s cognitive development.

A Mature Amazement

However, a reexamination of our basis for incredulity reveals that even the most solid of our knowledge about the predictability of the natural world is constructed not from a sterile empiricism, but through a childlike and fertile imagination working in concert with the cultural awareness and rational conventions of a given historical period.

As physicist, philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolution:

Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers) to questions like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice.

Put another way, the elemental mysteries of existence must be accounted for one way or another before the process of scientific inquiry even begins. Usually, these mysteries are accounted for through culturally-embedded assumptions (however valid or invalid) these assumptions thereby limiting the scientist’s evaluation to a mere modicum of available data and limiting his conclusions within a culturally-acceptable range.

And this is merely how inquiry begins. Once it is well underway, the process is even less inerrant and inexorable. Former Harvard professor of geology, biology, and history of science Stephen Jay Gould explains:

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

It is in this way, Gould explains later, that rational and objective scientists were incapable of “discovering” that africans were the equals of europeans in intellect until it was culturally permissible to do so.

If, as Gould and Kuhn suggest, the projection of culture on the outcome of scientific inquiry is equally as strong as the projection of scientific findings on culture (if the two are interlaced and often indistinguishable) then science, far from offering a final elucidation of the mystery of humankind’s existence, only adds to the mystery.

Why, one might ask, are we the only creature in the entire known universe who seeks to know the universe or even has a conception of the universe as a universe? The universe is not an empirical fact; your dog cannot smell the universe and you cannot see it. To get to the conception of a universe, one must follow an almost tortuous path of discursive reasoning, and then what has one really gained? Out of thirteen billion light years of space, one would assume that only a microscopic sliver would or even could be interesting to a terrestrial mammal. And yet we find the whole thing fascinating – from edge to theoretical edge and from star to cell to quark – and many of us spend our whole lives dedicated to finding one more method of displaying the shape of the universe through our instruments.

Wonderful indeed.

The Dangers of Frameworks

The investor William Buffett warns us to “beware of geeks bearing formulas” and it is good advice for a keeper of companies, seeing as even the most mechanical of businesses runs by the complex, organic mechanisms of human minds and human relationships. Business is more biological than mathematical and more psychological than either.

Similarly, certain dangers lurk in the very notion of a rational framework which I hope to mitigate though they cannot be destroyed. To begin with, it is important to realize that a framework is a technology, although a metaphysical one and cleverly disguised. Just as language itself is a technological means of communication, knowledge retention, and expression, so a framework is a rational technology to assist us in the apprehension of certain truths.

The danger inherent in a rational framework is the same inherent in any technology: that in reducing actual complex, interpenetrated phenomena to a discreet set of articulations for the sake of comprehensibility, we risk oversimplifying our understanding of the phenomenon itself. It is in this way that we have come to the astounding and comical conviction that intelligence is not only definable, but can even be objectively tested and assigned a discreet number.

However, it is not the technology’s fault, and technology can do a lot of good. As long as we are conscious that it we are looking through a technology’s distortions, it can help us to apprehend the actual truth of the matter. Forget for a moment that what we are seeing is not the entity itself, though, and we are in for trouble. As long as we are aware we are looking through binoculars, they can help us see farther. But if we mistake our extended and yet distorted frame for the real thing, we are likely to stumble over what is right in front of us.

And so, with these caveats and disclaimers publicly posted, here is a framework for thinking about human culture:

An Image-Bearing World

The cosmos began somewhere. Some say it began with God, others that it began with the Big Bang, some postulate that the two may not be incompatible. I am not going to argue here for one, the other or both, but merely point out a particularity with origins.

If something comes from something else, then it stands to reason that the resultant something is merely a subset or reconstitution of the original something. In other words, if the cosmos began with the Big Bang, then everything we experience (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of that singular event. If this is not so – if certain elements of reality cannot be traced back – then our theory of origin is too narrow.

Given this, if one assumes the Christian hypothesis that reality began with an act of creation, then it follows that all of reality (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of God’s singular personality. In other words, creation bears God’s image.

Of course, we could have just read the first few chapters of Genesis to gather the same thing, but I believe, firstly, that it is useful to see the logic of origins running in lockstep with the scriptural account and, secondly, that we have (often and unaccountably) limited our Christian understanding of image bearing to humans rather than extending it to the natural realm. The reason for this, on the surface, is probably that the scriptures speak specially of the man and the woman being made “in the image of God”, whereas the creation is never spoken of in these terms.

However, I do not believe the special designation of image bearer given to the man and woman excludes the possibility of a general designation for the rest of creation. In the first place, how could it? If creation did not get its substance from God’s image (his likeness and character) then where did it get it? nature, in other words, reflects something, so if not God, then what? One might argue that this is not the same as image bearing, and if by that, one means that the way humans reflect God is unique, then such a position has merit. However, if one means by such a statement that human’s display God’s character while nature does not, then one must explain what or who’s character nature displays. One would also have to explain the many places later in scripture which speak of the natural world reflecting attributes of God’s character.

Rather, the natural world bears the likeness of God in the same vein (although not to the extent) which humanity does. Both humanity and nature bear the imprint of their origins. Both are a recapitulation of God’s character. But man and woman are also special. They not only bear an image, they create an image as well. They are to reshape, rename, and redesign nature after their likeness. They are to coordinate mind and body and combine reason and matter until the whole creation is filled with their creations.

Additionally, just as nature is blessed to multiply and expand, so too is the human race. Adam and Eve were not to be alone for long. The race of their children constituted not only a multiplication of image-bearing faces, but also a multiplication of image-bearing imaginations resulting in new and novel combinations.

The whole arrangement is rather like a kaleidoscope, the input of light and color resulting in a million recombinant designs. And like a kaleidoscope in constant motion, or like the ripples on a calm pond, the image is intended to expand and recapitulate through all eternity. It is as if the creation at the beginning is a portrait to which the growing intricacy of nature and the iterative progress of human culture is forever adding detail and refinements. The physicists tell us that the universe is expanding. If this is true, then it is a fitting picture, for neither a static cosmos nor a static human culture would form a just likeness to God. It is, perhaps, by this expansive motion that a finite world best reflects an infinite being.

Cultural Reflection

This being the case, the first element in our framework is an understanding that human culture (with all its miscellaneous strangeness and magic) is a reflection of God’s image just as a tree is, just as a human baby is.

One might say that human culture is the extrapolation of humanness. Put another way, human culture is the image of God animated. The acting out of image bearing is part of the burden which the bearing entails. Human culture expands the image of God and in the process makes us more human than before.

We can see this more clearly in a couple of examples. In the beginning, God created sound and wood. He also created man and woman and instructed them to cultivate the sound and wood so that it would bear fruit. The result, after much experimentation and false starts, is Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. One senses as one listens that the composition makes sound more itself. One might also say that the creation and appreciation of such a work makes us more ourselves – more completely human.

Similarly, the mathematics which enable us to postulate an expanding universe are the extrapolation of Adam’s original project of naming the animals. After the animals, we named other things as well, not only naming instances, but naming generalities, such that the name for one animal next to another animal was “two” and both of those animals next to a brook were “three” (adding the abstraction “things” to the lexicon in the process). Extending this cultivation of rationality has led to relativity, black holes, quantum theory, and a new understanding of time. It is easy to see downsides to all of this, but it is even easier to see that were we to roll back all of this fractal expansion from the act of naming, we would be erasing humanness along with its abuses.

The Abuses of Image-Bearing

It is plain to all but the most dim-witted of observers that the progress of human culture has not been without its setbacks. The only real debate, it would seem, revolves around what causes the setbacks and what to do about them.

The modern secular position (if I can attempt an amalgamation of many separate voices) is that our essential problem is one of insufficient knowledge. As far back as Socrates, we’ve had the idea that knowledge and virtue are inseparable if not one and the same thing. The picture the modern world paints is one of science, technology, and the arts progressing in lockstep with morality, happiness, and human fulfillment. The problems of culture, then, are simply because we are new to the task. As we get more practice at the dance, we will step on each other’s toes less frequently. The grave danger, by such logic, is that we may regress to a more primitive level of knowledge through a failure of education or a capitulation to religious sentiment.

I have dealt with the question of human progress in detail elsewhere, so I will not fully restate the case here. Let it suffice to point out two essential difficulties with this perspective:

Firstly, as long as humans compose the jury by which human progress is adjudicated, then we will tend to acquit our contemporary selves while convicting our forbearers. In this way, we are bound to measure progress linearly (from past to future) because we are the ones closest to the future. We may, of course, be right, but all those who could dispute the claim (the citizens of past ages representing our co-defendants) have long since been executed. “Proves our point” we say.

Secondly and more importantly, the school of thought which says cultural problems stem from insufficient knowledge ignores the troubling relationship between increasing external knowledge and decreasing internal knowledge – knowledge of the self. As Nietzsche put it, “as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers”. One could add that we are in fact less knowledgeable of ourselves after thousands of years of human inquiry than we have ever been. The reason, as I have noted elsewhere, is that the transcendent stance of rational and artistic objectivity leads us outside ourselves, causing our advancement in human culture to atrophy our own self-knowledge. The basic posture of the modern man and woman standing astride the monuments of human cultural growth is one of self-consciousness and insecurity.

This insecurity is, I believe, better explained by the Christian hypothesis, which says that, far from insufficient knowledge being the problem, it was actually an inappropriate kind of knowledge which caused the original mishap. When humanity reached for the tree, they were reaching for a knowledge which would enable them to be like God, knowing (and judging) good and evil for themselves rather than acknowledging God as the source of their knowledge and being. The fall was in fact an attempt to become gods and recreate the world after our own image. By asserting our independence, humanity was attempting to redirect the mirror of the world so as to bypass God and reflect the self.

In this way, every aspect of human culture (even our so-called progress) can be seen as a form of rebellion – or to use the language of the scriptures: idolatry. Instead of work reflecting the creativity of God in creation, we redirect our labors to reflect our own self-interest. Instead of sexuality reflecting the unity and diversity of the Godhead, we talk of sexual preference and sexual fulfillment – a bipartite act centered on the singularity of the self. Instead of theology reflecting our creator, our theology after the fall reflects the biases and preferences of its human authors. Instead of art recapitulating the creator’s beauty and truth, we work diligently to divest it of both – to display it nakedly to the world and thereby assert our ownership and mastery.

The result of all this is a rotation of idols, and at the swirling center of this pagan orgy is the idol of the self. Each artifact of culture serves fallen humanity as both a little god to whom we bow as well as a little worshipper, bowing to the desires of the self. We bow to the calf and use the calf as a servant to our mirthful self-interest.

It is in this way that the growth in human culture has been paralleled by a growing alienation of the self from its place within that culture. The more we exalt ourselves to a place of godlike transcendence over matter, thought, and human relationships, the more we separate ourselves from the ordinary human enjoyment of such things. Thus the peculiar predicament of the self in the twenty-first century – increasing daily in knowledge, power, and psychological estrangement.

Another way of talking about all of this is simply to speak of a breakdown in morality. Even outside Christian circles it is generally acknowledged that morality centers on the golden rule: on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or (in short) being unselfish. Christianity adds as a prefix to all this a selfless love of God, but the attitude is the same: morality maintains an open, outward-facing posture while immorality is inward-facing.

The fall, in short, involved an attempt by our forbearers to turn the world upside down from its original purpose so as to serve the selfish ends of a new, very human, deity. The results surround us.

Unsuccessful Rebellion

We have, of course, made a mess of things, but what is perhaps even more amazing than our errors is that we have not made more of them and that the ones we have made have not caused more extensive damage. It’s astounding, in a way, that we can see current and past cultures – rife with cyclical wars, genocide, racism, bigotry, and cruelty – culminating in the construction of a stable of weapons capable of making such cruelty ubiquitous and yet still see truth in the strokes of the artist, beauty in the formulations of the mathematician, and goodness in both as they care for their children. Human culture is both unaccountably wonderful and unaccountably monstrous in equal measures. If culture is progress, then it is a bizarre and heartless sort of progress but if it is mere degeneracy, then it is it is beautiful as it burns.

I believe the root of this paradox can be unearthed by comparing the nature of an image-bearing world with the nature of humanity’s rebellion. If, indeed, it was God who created the world then it was he who stamped it with his character and this stamp would not be so easily erased or redirected. Humanity, by its rebellion, might have turned every stone so that they now revolved around the newly-inaugurated deity of self, but this would merely constitute a sort of vandalism, not a complete reformation. For the man and the woman to have been entirely successful in their coup, they would have had to remake the world from scratch, reflecting only the imprint of a new race of gods. As it was, they had to make do with the materials they had on hand. It must have been irksome until they grew accustomed to such debasement – rather like starving and ill-clad Confederate troops raiding Union supply depots or anti-western militants finding nothing but American flags to serve as blankets.

The rebellion was unsuccessful, cursed from day one with a lack of proper munitions and materiel – what we could scrape together consisting entirely of what we could pilfer from the enemy’s own extensive stores. We have persisted in our self-absorbed cause, but by building with the enemy’s elements and in the enemy’s mediums, we have succeeded only in furthering his original design – scattering, spreading, and expanding the image of God where we intended only our own. It has been infuriating and unavoidable, seeing what we had to work with.

This, then, explains how it is that we often reach the state of external exaltation simultaneous with one of internal despondency, why the smartest and richest and strongest among us are often psychologically the most precarious and vulnerable. The greatness we have built for ourselves refuses to serve us because it is stamped with another’s likeness. The greater we grow and the more voraciously we consume praise from our environment, the more our environment revolts and refuses our pleading demands. We are, as it were, asking cats to act like dogs; they may have been created to serve, but not us.

A Twisted World

All of this leads us to the conclusion that we are living in a twisted world, as if the preceding paragraphs were necessary for such a commonplace. However, understanding that human culture is both good and evil simultaneously is important to our understanding of how to address the part which is evil. Culture is twisted and grotesquely so, but it is not irreparably broken; it can be pried and prodded back into alignment although it will require more than our strength to do so.

This understanding is particularly important to the Christian community, who have often been the first to snuff out the smoldering wicks and bruised reeds of human cultural activities in the name of moral integrity. However, this rigid stance often belies a certain blindness to our own twistedness, as if the effects of the fall had stopped like a spent flood at the doorstep of the church rather than sweeping through every orifice and vestibule.

In addition to glossing over the stains on even the most sanctified of vessels, a stark separation between those elements of culture which the church deems good and those deemed evil belittles the image of God displayed in the whole construct as well as in its parts.

Part of the evil of the fall, in fact, consists in our tendency to separate what God has joined. Just as we attempt (unsuccessfully) to sever elements of creation from their image-bearing function, so also, we are constantly making petty distinction between two conjoined truths and creating a warm, moist, and fertile ecosystem for growing evil in the interstitial spaces. Christians, through the years, have been responsible for many such cavities even as they brandished the bone saw and warned of gangrene. One thinks of the pious southern landowner drawing a fine racial distinction even as he decries with moral outrage the Northern violations of his God-given liberty and threatens secession. Perhaps a careful reevaluation of the prior distinction could have prevented the subsequent rupture.

The task of the Christian within culture, therefore, is one of integration and orientation rather than dissection, repairing torn ligaments between connected truths and aligning contorted joints into their rightful position with the whole being. There may be times when amputation is indeed the appropriate metaphor. It is, after all, better to enter heaven lame. However, while a flicker remains of life and health and the image of the creator, we are to tend and nurse it lest we contribute to the distorting and dismembering effects of rebellion through our own attempts at fealty.

What this looks like in practice is that the Christian is an advocate and sponsor to each part of human culture, but her advocacy and interest elicits her insistence on cultural wholeness. At first, such a description reeks of bias, and certainly any Christian’s particular application of cultural advocacy will itself contain its share of distortions. However, due to the influence of God’s original image stubbornly persisting through many attempts at displacement, the Christian’s particular demands of culture need not feel like a violation or debasement of the activity the Christian is seeking to redeem.

For instance, the Christian position affirms sexuality and likens the human pleasures of sex to the divine pleasure of Jesus himself as he embraces the church whom he has won. Sex, according to the Christian way of thinking, is a transcendent experience, clothing physical sensation and biological function with spiritual significance. However, because of the significance of sexuality, because of its great worth and reflective meaning, one is not to separate sexuality from love. To go further, once the Christian has linked sex with love (a joint our culture certainly sees as preferable if not indispensable) love is then joined with its indispensable corollary: sacrifice. If love, says the Christian, does not involve giving oneself, then it is not love but only lust. It is but a small step from the necessity of selflessness to the necessity of marriage as the lifelong commitment to selfless love. Thus, the Christian would perform a sort of surgery on the bleeding wound human culture has opened between our sexual cravings and the selflessness of true love – pointing out that the former will never be satisfied until the later is cultivated in something very like marriage.

Similarly, the Christian position affirms artistry and craftsmanship of all kinds, but evaluates the worthiness of art by means of the reflections of truth, beauty, and goodness manifest in the created order and accessible even to the uneducated layman. It may well be that certain abstract works are fully understood only be an intellectual elite, but their exclusivity is not, by itself, a mark of quality. Also, the artist who seeks to dissect art to its lowest level, severing art from intentionality, skill and technique (the artist who demonstrates a sadistic mastery of art by stripping it of form and substance) will not by the mere novelty of this reductionism gain the Christian’s approval. Of course, by this standard, much of what is labeled “Christian Art” must be discarded, but such a label is merely a symptom of a more wholesale reductionism of Christianity itself.

The marketplace also has the Christian’s approbation. It is nothing less than the biological image of man writ large, each portion of the market, like an organ, supplying what is lacking in the operations of the whole and receiving its sustenance as a byproduct of such kindness. However, by this same token, a Christian understanding of the marketplace refuses that a person should hide her gifts and wholesome aspiration behind the flimsy screen of self-interest, but be willing to pursue with abandon the particular calling for which she has been equipped – the calling which, if neglected, would leave some crucial facet of God’s image unfinished. Christianity’s view of the workplace is of a garden – where the giving of oneself comes prior to receiving one’s sustenance and neither the purity of the gift nor the sequence of the harvest is to be tampered with.

Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Christianity (by examining God’s character) merely asserts that the one logically precedes the other and the bounty of the harvest is proportionate to the generosity of the labor. It is rare, for instance, that an entrepreneur interested only in his own gain manages to realize such gain. One must first do some good if one would receive good in return and it is almost impossible to benefit others while thinking only of oneself.

Again, it is bewildering that many churches, forgetting Jesus’ own participation as a carpenter, view the marketplace as a guilty pleasure, enticing believers away from more legitimate occupations.

I could give many other examples – spanning technology, family relations, entertainment, and economics – but these, I hope, are enough for now. I desire only to make the point that Christianity, far from being stubbornly entrenched as human culture’s opponent, should instead, by its very nature, be its greatest apologist. We have grown used the term “apologetics” as it refers to defending the idea of God or of Christianity itself, but it is, I believe, equally applicable in this context. The Christian ought to be the first to defend culture against every attacker (even if these attacks come from other Christians) for the simple reason that God’s image resides in what he has made and part of what he has made is human culture through the (often unwilling) agency of men and women. In defending culture, we defend the creative prerogative of its maker. This is not to say that God himself needs defending; defending culture is more like defending others from the inevitable consequences of getting crossways with the universe.

It just as certainly does not entail a mindless acceptance of every cultural whim or fancy. One may have to come near to blows with both the patient as well as his overly-aggressive physicians (both Christian and secular) if the infected member is to be salvaged. But what it most certainly means is a rugged commitment to seek beauty amid ugliness and and virtue amid brothels. This is not because we believe that either beauty or virtue will save us – there is not enough true virtue in the best of us to fill a thimble – but because all true and good things, however marred and misdirected, lead us to the one who is true and good himself, and part of his goodness, we are promised, is to hear those who ask him for help.

Summary of the Framework

Thus, we have constructed a framework for interpreting culture, and I hope it’s a good one. We have started with the image of God invested into human activity, acknowledged the twisting of this image in idolatrous self-worship, and celebrated our outrageous good luck (some would call it providence) that we have not been entirely successful in our selfishness for the simple reason that we, our materials, and our activities were all made to reflect another. While it is badly scuffed up and graffitied, the image can never be entirely effaced.

The resultant mindset, I have suggested, is one of advocacy, seeking the image of God in every aspect of culture and patiently, even obstinately, working out the kinks and connecting severed concepts until the original beauty is restored. Of course, we are not going to be entirely successful, and the biggest obstacle to our success is the rebellion of our own heart, insisting on making our own selfish divisions in what God has joined and inclining to the saw rather than the scalpel in repairing the divisions made by others.

The End of Knowing

Saying that we understand culture by means of God’s image is as much to say that we do not understand culture fully though we can encounter it as we can a person. For each person is a mystery – inscrutable, unique, unfathomable – and just as the depth of a soul cannot be fully plumbed, neither can the soul’s artistry. And what line could measure the creator of both the soul and its handiwork? Knowing culture, knowing another person, and knowing God, all involve a similar type of knowing. We may know many things about – facts, principles, frameworks – and these things may help us to know, but they do not by themselves constitute knowing. For there is believing-in and trusting-in which must occur to know the smallest particle or the smallest person. We reach out our hand to take hold of another’s, trusting its warmth and believing what is unspoken in her eyes. The hand and eyes of creation’s author offer a similar kind of knowing.

Thus, the end of this rational exertion is not rational but relational. We can know a person by proposition only up until the moment of introduction, past which point knowledge must expand beyond proposition or it serves as impediment rather than interpreter. Exposing the reflection of God’s character in culture is merely an introduction. For relationship to begin, God must extend his hand and we must trust its warmth.

A Gluttony of Things

Just as we anticipate and bemoan our gluttony around the holiday banquet table, but appear incapable of preventing it, we appear also resigned to a low-level nausea stemming from a quite different source between Black Friday and the day after Christmas. It is hard not to feel a slight disgust at the desperate and belittling sales flyers, the endless lines of disheveled shoppers stooped like homeless peasants outside mall doors, and the milling, pushing, tired, flustered throngs filling sack after sack with merchandise – their faces growing more empty as the sacks fill. Over it all, a strain of festive music plays, interrupted periodically by the announcement of yet another sale in yet another store. Of course, some seem to enjoy it, and seem more energized each time their credit balance increases, but in even these glowing faces, one can see the effects of overindulgence – as if one were watching a sorority girl’s elation increase with each shot up until the moment of collapse.

Shopping online is, by and large, the same experience, although instead of feeling overwhelmed by the sensory overload of a hundred choices, we are overwhelmed by the mental overload of ten thousand choices, each with its own pictures, description, and list of reviews. We cannot buy a pair of fuzzy socks in such a context until we have compared it to a dozen other pairs and read about the fuzzy experiences of two or three of their current owners.

We have, of course, grown used to this feeling of mild disgust. We are quick to affirm that “the season” means something else. Different things for different people, but something about family, giving, and perhaps God. But what is one to do? The shopping will not be accomplished without us, and so we hold our noses and plunge in, sometimes even making a joke of it. Of course we are going to wreck our diet, but the cream cheese icing and one-day sales are just too tempting. There is always the new year, strategically placed in the final ruins of our previous resolutions, promising a reparation of our defenses and perhaps a few late-season deals.

Toward a Sharper Image

But gluttony is nothing new. We may be quite sure that the roots of our excess grow deep, and it is not difficult to imagine some medieval adolescent princess (attended by bodyguards and leading an entourage of slaves as porters) meandering through the marketplace picking out spices, trinkets, tapestries, and clothing – her face aglow with the elation verging on collapse.

One could even trace the glow backwards to when the first prince and the first princess went shopping for the first clothing among the trees of the garden. Their newfound understanding had led to a revelation of sorts. They had looked in the mirror, felt naked and knew they needed a change. Their first attempts left something to be desired and little to the imagination, but through gradual improvement in tailoring and materials, they were able through time to cover (or at least obscure) that first embarrassing problem. The image they created for themselves was never quite right, but they would have lots of time to improve it.

In a sense, one could look at the modern shopping mall, catalogue, or online store as merely an extrapolation from this point – ever more elaborate and inventive means of covering the anxiety of the human condition with new clothing and new things which are designed to match the image of ourselves in our minds and hearts with the one we encounter in the mirror each morning and see reflected in the reactions of the people around us.

However, the progression, to say the least, has been nonlinear. It is hard to imagine the medieval princess without also picturing the hundreds of peasant girls stretching out thin, dirty arms to her, dressed in tatters and trying to sell hand-spun linens. But visit today’s marketplace and it is full of princesses with not a peasant in sight. What sort of strange fairy tale are we in?

Consumerism Circa 1800

Consumerism, at one time, lived in rarified air. In the town of Natchez, Mississippi, on the great river, one can find preserved a remnant of the lavish antebellum lifestyle of the south’s planters. In one such residence, built by a wealthy cotton broker in the 1850s, stand two fifteen-foot-tall mirrors, gilded with gold and placed at each end of the home’s expansive parlor, giving the impression of a never-ending grand hall. The mirrors were imported from Europe along with many of the home’s other moldings, ironwork and building materials. The home’s owner had chartered a ship for this effort, seeing as free next day air was unavailable.

But you needn’t have been wealthy to enjoy early-1800’s consumerism. If you lived in a major city, you could find non-perishables for purchase from all over the world, some of them at prices that even the middle class could afford. Of course, at the time the middle class was just emerging, and the U.S. average per capita annual income (even adjusting for inflation) was just $2,000. Furthermore, only 9% of the U.S. population was urban, compared to 80% today.

Taken together, the portion of the US population in 1800 who were either wealthy enough or urban enough to be the princess was probably under 5%.

For the remaining 95% of early American citizens, if something was to be enjoyed, it would have to first be produced. The extent of one’s shopping might be for a few staples (tea, sugar, tobacco), or on occasion one might visit the confectioner and buy a bit of candy. Anything more was too expensive, too distant, and too infrequent to be worth thinking about.

But all of that was about to change.

Railroads and Richard Sears

In 1825, the first locomotive was tested in Hoboken, New Jersey, lighting a slow fuze which would trigger a series of explosions in the length and reach of the nation’s rail network. By 1890, 164,000 miles of track had been laid, enough to cross from New York to L.A. fifty times.

With the railroad, everything changed. Areas which were once inaccessible except by horse and cart could now receive their goods by the carload. In 1888, at the perfect point in history for such an enterprise, a man named Richard Sears sent out his first catalogue peddling jewelry and watches. Within ten years, this modest enterprise was selling paint, photographic goods, and “talking machines” – whatever those were. Suddenly, the humble Midwestern farmer could mail an order for paint from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, and pay for it by shipping his crops off on the train to distant markets. He too could now be the princess.

The intersection of the railroads and Richard Sears was but one development during the industrial revolution. There were a thousand others, and 998 out of the thousand served to either increase the selection of goods for purchase and speed their time to market or increase the purchasing power of the average American consumer. I do not know, but I wonder if it was in this period that the word “consumer” came into wide usage, having long before jettisoned it’s historical meaning of “squanderer”.

The Invisible Hand

Contemporaneous with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith published a monumental book (both in length and impact) titled The Wealth of Nations. If Smith had not written it, it would surely have been written soon by another, for it was an idea whose time had come. In it, Smith examines the first budding seeds of the industrial revolution to find an “invisible hand” of economic growth prodding the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to benefit their fellow man. The hand was not, as Smith pointed out, one of altruism, but one of self-interest, each person serving the greater good as a byproduct of his own desire for gain. Multiplied by a million, Smith said, this was how great economies were formed.

Even Darwin’s theory of natural selection based on the survival of the fittest in a self-interested struggle can be traced back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand of economic struggle. Like the making of sausage, the result of economic growth may be delicious, but the process is rather distasteful – merely selfishness in motion.

Whether Smith’s theory was merely the reflection of ideological trends or their catalyst, the industrial revolution operationalized the self-interested tendencies of consumerism, creating a buzzing global industry designed to do nothing more and nothing less than create new images for consumers. The modern marketplace is what happens when self-interest and the assembly line collide.

What is strange at first glance is that our self-image has grown less secure even as its manufacturing methods have improved. It is not immediately clear why both the medieval princess as well as the medieval peasant appear to be more comfortable in their own skins than we are, who have had far more skins to choose from. One would think over time that we should have found the one which was, like baby bear’s porridge, “just right”. The modern shopper sits at the top of a tremendous supply chain consisting of hundreds of industries manned by millions of people concerned with nothing more than creating an image of the shopper which she will like and therefore purchase – thus giving individual producers the resources to become shoppers themselves and improve their own images. But the shopper still feels naked. In fact, more naked than before the whole modern industrial consumerism project began. Why might this be?

The Ghost of Shopping Future

Part of the problem, quite certainly, is the very proliferation of options designed to solve the problem of self image. The modern shopper is daily presented with thousands of alternate possibilities for what kind of person he can be. These possibilities come in the form of clothing (hip, traditional, rugged, retro, athletic), music (punk, country, classical, hip hop, indie) decor (modern, ornate, minimalist, period, rustic) toiletries (basic, indulgent, fastidious, pure, trendy) food (eclectic, organic, fast, comfort, or one of innumerable special diets). This is not even to mention the socio-economic stratification overlaid onto many of these categories to ensure that the wealthy and the poor each have their own brand of eclectic cuisine, indulgent toiletries, etc. What is more, while many shoppers pick associated labels across several merchandize categories for the sake of consistency (rugged clothing, country music, rustic decor, etc.) there are no rules governing such behavior and the modern consumer is often caught in a kind of limbo between competing options trying to figure out which one matches his true self. It is not hard to see how insecurity develops. After a few shifts from one image of the self supported by sundry purchases to another, the shopper realizes that he doesn’t really know who the person really is behind all the purchases. Its at this point, when the shopper sees himself as a ghost picking out clothing to give himself the semblance of corporeality, that acute anxiety sets in. It appears this anxiety can only be relieved by more shopping, and (thanks to Adam Smith and his co-conspirators) he does not have to look far.

Thus, the cycle of identity-building accelerates, along with the pace of purchase. We are not, however, doing much building. Each image of the self is promptly discarded after we realize that it doesn’t fit us as precisely as we hoped. Some people reach a state of equilibrium at some point, conceding the hopelessness of the process. Many never do. The net result of the enterprise is that our shopping is often focused on a very near-term future. We want to cloth ourselves for a few moments, knowing that when the moment passes, we will have to continue our foraging or feel ghostly.

The Ghost of Shopping Past

As I have alluded to, the image-shifting malady of the modern shopper is not an individual and singular one. It is supported by an active industry of smart and creative people who are constantly inventing new ways to appeal to old desires. The reason the producer of goods is largely invisible to the shopper is that the consumer focus of modern industry has abstracted them. If (as is generally conceded) the only role of a producer is to create an object of desire (one which promises the shopper a new and better image of herself), then it is the desire, not the thing itself, which is most important. In fact, if the desire could be created in a vacuum, without the need for the article to have any real substance, then one would have struck upon the perfect business model – the output being profitable trinkets and the input being inconsequential.

In reality, this fabled business model is hard to come by, but many businesses come close to it by assembling from several layers of least-cost suppliers a shabby finished product supported by a generous marketing budget. The ironic thing is that this shoddy workmanship rarely hurts the consumer since he or she moves on to the next item after only one or two uses. It is telling that, with a consumer goods industry many hundred times as large as in days past, it is generally conceded and demonstrably true that the quality of most of the articles we employ in daily use has degraded rather than improved. Modern goods are quite often lacking in both craftsmanship and longevity for the simple reason that neither are demanded. Of course, we still appreciate the appearance of craftsmanship, but such can be more economically supplied in plastic, plaster, and polyester rather than wood, stone, and wool.

In this way, through a torturously attenuated supply chain, the shopper is hopelessly abstracted from any sense of a product’s past or producer. For all we know, the items of our daily use erupted fully-formed onto the shelves of our retailers having no past and no creator. If the shopper is by this incapable of seeing anything in the item except her own flickering image, then the ghostly producer will have accomplished his end.

Both the past and the future of consumer goods look (when seen in this light) pernicious, a series of selfish deceptions, perpetrated on others by industry and on himself by the shape-shifting shopper. However, the original ideological premise behind the rise of the consumer economy provides not only a methodology by which we have come to our current state, but a justification as to why it is really for the best. For when each of us (at every level of the supply chain) follows his own self interest, we are told, the result is greater prosperity and therefore greater happiness. Far from pernicious, our selfish image-making and image-seeking is rather instrumental in the greater good and to be encouraged. The only check we ought to give to our consumption, therefore, is based on our means of payment.

Loving Too Little

It is little wonder, then that many Christians and secularists alike have rejected the rat race (as we have aptly termed it) and sought to disassociate themselves from the consumption economy and its abuses. We must admit that this response, as extreme as it appears, is eminently sane. In a culture of gluttons and alcoholics, those who eat only bread and drink only water are probably healthier.

The Christian, furthermore, has an added rational for asceticism. Are we not told in the scriptures, “Do not love the world or the things in the world”. If John could write those words two thousand years ago, then what would he say today amid a world of cheap and petty nonsense attempting to pass itself off as our true self? Did not Jesus himself say that we ought not to be concerned with what we should eat or drink or wear. Is he who clothes the lilies of the field incapable of providing us with clothing?

However, one finds also in the scriptures the earthy scent of a beautiful and God-breathed creation peopled by God’s image-bearers, employing themselves in shaping wood, weaving cloth, tanning hides, and making music. The scriptures, conspicuously, do not condemn but celebrate these activities. Was not Jesus himself a carpenter? And where, pray tell, could he have sold his wares if not in the world?

What is unambiguous in the scriptures is that, while the creation and what humans fashion out of it is good, it is not God. There was nothing wrong with earrings, but (while they might be shaped into an instrument of greater worship to the true God) they were not to be molded into an idol.

In this we finally begin to see clearly. Our goods (the creations of human hands) have both a past and a future and we are to trace them both out. If one follows the path backwards, one arrives in time to the creator himself, forming man who forms the article in turn. If one follows the path forward to what ought to be the article’s destiny, this too culminates in the image of the creator as each new artifact of man’s culture fills up the cosmos’ remaining voids with the reflection of God’s character.

The central problem with the modern consumer economy (with the shopping mall) is that we have done everything possible to destroy all traces of this historical continuum, leaving the item purposeless and clean – a mirror reflecting our own image and nothing else.

It is doubtless true in the idolatrous sense which John indicates, that we love the things in the world too much. But by the same reasoning, we have been guilty of loving the things in the world too little, separating them from their rightful heritage as sacramental images and diverting them from their rightful future as lamp stands illuminating the character of God. Instead of admiring our goods as constituting part of the broader mystery of creation, we have used them mercilessly – used them up and thrown them out. It is as if we had been offered marriage and settled for a pinup.

Recovering The Past

Tracing backwards through the layers of obfuscation in the industrial supply chain to perceive the image of God in our consumer goods is rather like archeology. One senses that beneath the mountains of worthless dust, there must be some fossil worth digging out, but where to start?

I believe that among the first steps is to explode the myth of affordability which undergirds our perceived right to selfish consumption. As long as we believe that a purchase is our due, we have no need to dig deep enough to find something worth admiring.

We have been trained by two hundred years of economic growth to translate the most exquisitely-crafted of articles into monetary units. The temptation is to believe that because the effort and craftsmanship required to fashion something of quality and beauty (much less something without either) can be measured, that it can, somehow, be purchased. We have grown so used to the idea that it no longer seems strange to us to speak of buying someone’s time and abilities. This commonplace is made yet more ordinary by the producer himself, if we can find him, speaking of his own talents in the same way – as merely monetary units in an economic exchange.

However, simply because something can be measured does not mean the measure defines it. We may reduce the heat of the sun to a measurement in degrees, but that measurement merely adds a decoration to a phenomenon which we fundamentally do not understand and can certainly not produce on our own. To the question “what is heat really?” we have no answer and so we substitute something less for an answer: a temperature reading or a chemical definition. Our measurements and descriptions can peel back a thousand layers of phenomena but still leave unexplained the central inexplicable presence of the phenomenon itself. When a person (or a company of people) offers to create a good for a certain amount of payment, it is easy to gloss over the presence of the person for the price tag. But this ignores the fact that, while a person may not perform her services without payment, her skill, diligence, and materials are fundamentally incalculable. Our measurements cannot place skill in her hands nor diligence in her heart; their acquisition is a mystery which educational science only flutters around. And while we can measure the cost in dollars to extract resources from the earth, how is one to measure the value of their existence in the first place? In the end, we are like the farmer who plants his seeds in the ground, measures the amount of water and fertilizer, and waits. We know what we must do to make it grow, but we do not know where the growth comes from.

Even the things which we buy are a gift, springing out of the earth and from the minds and hands of others without sufficient explanation. We can purchase them only because they exist in the first place, though they are perhaps latent. It is existence itself which is the greatest and most immeasurable of gifts. The best things in life are free, but we have forgotten that life itself is free, and were it not so, we could not hope to pay for it.

And if existence, with all of its accoutrements, is a gift, then we may seek a giver, and this changes fundamentally how we view our shopping. To begin with, if we are purchasing what we cannot (in an ultimate sense) afford, then gratitude and appreciation is the proper response.

In a strange irony, the modern economy, with its consistency of fresh produce and packaged goods, its boring and repetitive exchange of money for pleasure, has robbed us of the very pleasure we presumed our due. For pleasure paid for and taken drives away all thoughts of love – both our own love as well as the possibility of love from another – and the only true pleasure is bound up with love.

It is fortunate, then, that the things we buy are priceless, no matter how much we may have paid for them. We could not have created one molecule of one trivial article, not with a million years and a million dollars.

To come face to face with this fact is to encounter our own dependence, but it is more than that. For one cannot perceive our dependence without then being shocked by the profusion of resources provided for our well being. It is as if for our whole life we thought ourselves to be purchasing the favors of a needy mistress only to find that she owns the whole realm and by her love and constancy has legitimized what we thought to be an illicit relationship, having casually tossed each of our payments aside. We could not have bought her though we tried repeatedly (comically and thanklessly we now realize), but she has made a marriage with us nonetheless and with her love elevated us infinitely beyond our means.

Recovering the Craftsman

In addition to a recognition of our essential poverty and blessedness, an archeology of consumerism ought also to unearth true craftsmanship, practiced by true craftsmen (of both genders I should add, although “craftspeople” is a rather awkward construction). Such people still exist although they have been pressed down and marginalized by an industrial economy content with surface stylishness rather than substantive beauty seeing that the former can be produced much more inexpensively than the later.

Even this purely economical comparison is often misleading. We are all familiar with the notion that a well-made piece of furniture retains its value indefinitely. One may spend as much for an antique of high quality as for a new table or dresser. Thus, over the life of the piece, the price per year of true craftsmanship may be far less less than that of shabby mass production even though initially the cost of the former is a multiple of the latter. It’s not inconceivable, for instance (what with an arid climate and assuming a thoughtful series of owners) although highly improbable, that some few pieces of Jesus’ own handiwork remain in circulation. If it is not so, then it is not due to his cutting corners. The reason we don’t often value this sort of longevity is that is may outlast us and it is almost certain to outlast our current self-image.

Another, and perhaps the more important, reason to seek out the craftsman behind the article is that we are not good at appreciating abstractions. When we see with what skill an item is made and the care taken by its creator, it helps us connect the dots of human creativity with those of divine. In many cases, as with modern electronics, an abstraction may be all we have. We must do the best we can. But we ought not to make the mistake of ignoring the craftsman altogether, ignoring the human act of creation required to bring us our lamp stand. And having mentioned this, we must change the direction of our inquiry, for having bought the lamp stand, one must choose what to do with it.

Recovering the Future

I have mentioned already that the shelf life of our self images (we wear through so many. there is rarely just one even at a single point in time) has grown exceedingly short, supported as it is by an active industry of image manufacture. Asking about an item’s future, in that context, seems ridiculous, almost senseless. Often we have practically used up the thin utility which our psyche derives from a purchase by the time we remove its packaging.

However, since we have taken the time to dig backward to the image of a generous God equipping men and women to create beauty for our use and enjoyment, we must dig forward to find what use and enjoyment we are to make of it. At the outset, we must disallow the use that most quickly springs to mind – that it will make us someone different, someone better. Allow that thought in and the whole pile of self-interested shape-shifting futility washes back with it.

Rather, the use we make of things ought to be the same use that the craftsman should make of his labor – that of sacrament and incarnation. If we are indeed made in the image of the invisible God, then our purpose must be to make him seen, to display his character in our own. Our character, despite the teaching of hundreds of years of western philosophy to the contrary, is not dualistic. We are not merely an independent mind floating disconnected in the medium of a body. We are both, just as Jesus was both, and the actions of the one manifest in the other. By the same token, our existence (both spiritual and physical) is bound up in our environment and culture which itself has both physical and spiritual significance. Thus, the culture and environment we create around us (our occupations and surroundings) themselves constitute part of the image of God which we are to display.

What, we might ask, is the difference? Is it possible to see a distinction between the use of things for our own image vs employing them in reflecting our creator? It is, admittedly, a precarious enterprise to measure a human being’s motives by their actions, but let me venture an example.

It has been my experience that many of the people least capable of showing hospitality owing to the constraints of their home and resources are nevertheless the most hospitable. I am thinking in particular of an absentminded man named Wynn Kenyon whom I studied under in college. I’m not sure if I recall a time in the fifteen years since I met him that a friend, stranger, or foreigner (all three soon morphed into the first) was not occupying one or more of the bedrooms in the Kenyon’s modest home. Dr. Kenyon passed away a couple of years ago, but his wife Ginny still keeps his home open. By contrast, it has also been my experience that many of those most physically capable of hospitality are least likely to practice it, or if they do, practice it in comic disproportionality with their means. It might be mean-spirited to name names, but we can each think of a wealthy acquaintance whose well-furnished home we would be afraid to stay in for fear of disturbing some carefully-crafted element in his fragile self-image. Give the same home and the same furnishings to Dr. Kenyon and it would soon resemble the catastrophic collision between an orphanage, a library, a soup kitchen, and the school of Athens. No one was ever quite sure what Dr. Kenyon’s self image was (he often wore two collared shirts at the same time by mistake), but they saw clearly who he and the environment he built reflected.

Slow, Thoughtful, and Free of Anxiety

If you have read thus far, you may be concerned that this process of tracing backwards and tracing forwards to unearth the image of God in our purchases is rather time-consuming. It may be useful, at times, to stop and smell the roses, but hadn’t we better be getting about our business? We would never get to the end of our shopping list if we took such time to understand and fully utilize our purchases.

That is the point.

While it is certainly true that many of our purchases are for common use and one cannot always spend time in contemplation over every item on one’s grocery list, it is nevertheless this very contemplation, appreciation, and intentionality which distinguishes faithful, healthy shopping from that which is degrading of both our own health and of God’s image. We ought not pass so quickly by even the humble incarnation which a grain of wheat or a cup of wine affords.

It is a necessarily time-consuming enterprise, and the length of our deliberations may preclude many of our intended purchases. But if we appreciate more of the less we have bought, we will not be the poorer. We avoid binging on things not because they are not worth tasting, but because they are. Neither the teetotaler nor the drunk are conscious of the wine’s flavor; it is only the person who tastes carefully and in moderation who is able to taste at all. Far more importantly, we may by this slow and arduous pathway come closer to the image of our creator and become a little less mindful of our own shifting and rebellious self-image. In this, we will shine the brighter, though it will not be our own light we see.

The slowness need not cause anxiety. In reality much of our anxiousness about things is based on our doubts that we will have time and money to buy what we really need. If we recognize them as gifts, then we can assume that we will have time to admire the ones intended for us and assume that what we didn’t have time for we did not really need.

The Words of Grace

In a fascinating book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the natural history of four meals. It is an archeology of dinner. He starts with a meal at McDonalds, follows the industrial food chain all the way to its grimy, mass-produced, and petroleum-fueled source and then works his way through more organic fare to a meal which he serves his guests out of the produce of his own hunting and gathering. The meal is exquisite, not merely because of its contents, but because of its origin – because of the way in which each aspect of the meal grew unmolested from the very earth. The morel mushrooms (impossible to cultivate) grew up nonetheless in shadows and crevasses, the grit and bitterness of soil transmogrified into a savory and rich delicacy. The wine came from local grapes, their sugars distilling through vine and branch into choice fruits. The fruit, in turn, fermenting in a process carefully managed but not entirely understood. Finally, the wild pig roasted for the table represented many elaborate stages of reconstitution. The earth produced the budding oak which would conserve and channel its resources so as to litter the ground with acorns. The pig would eat the acorns and, through an almost miraculous metabolic process, convert the acorn’s nutrients into blood and bone and hair and muscle. The muscle, in turn, Pollan cooked for his guests, turning raw and inedible biological tissues into caramelized and tender mouthfuls – dust to pork roast.

The meal is likewise remarkable for its healthfulness. Rather than loading their palates with synthetic additives which would be expelled from the body as an enemy, Pollan’s guests would be nourished by the wholeness of true food – not isolated nutrients made through scientific ingenuity to taste like food, but food itself with all its richness and complexity.

As Pollan raises his glass to toast the meal and thank the meal’s contributors (his guests had assisted with many parts of it), he is struck with a strange and guttural desire:

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace.

For Pollan and his guests, the moment passed and the words were never spoken. It is, after all, not easy to elicit thanksgiving from a modern man. Perhaps the words of grace were, as Pollan says later, unnecessary, the meal constituting grace in itself. At the very least, however, this encounter between a modern intellectual and the immeasurable bounty of the earth is a curious one. His response is surprising because he neither bows down to worship nor dismisses the feeling of thanksgiving as primitive sentiment. It is as if, for a few days, he has stood in the presence of a beauty he cannot describe, a beauty which feeds and nourishes him, which he cannot purchase but only receive.

The feeling is almost one of embarrassment, of knowing the appropriate response in the face of such generosity but knowing too (in the way we moderns know everything) that if he allows the notion of a generous earth, he admits the impossible: that someone has given the earth the gifts it gives to us.

This is where we often leave it: at a vague feeling of undirected thankfulness, in the brief and furtive moments in which we see the gift at all. The words of grace are hard to speak but leaving them unspoken is even harder. It is harder because it hardens us and inures us to further thanksgiving – and by this stroke distances us from the enjoyment of the gift, which is now demoted to a mere purchase (only our due).

We may (like Pollan and many another modern man or woman) be embarrassed by the exchange – the presence of pure and priceless love makes a mockery of all our diligence and effort. But if we are humble, we may by grace be able to say what we are searching for: the words of grace. The words are both thanksgiving and benediction – both an acknowledgement of need and gratitude as well as a blessing on the gift and on the giver. The words of grace bless us as well, for they add to the pleasure of the love the far greater pleasure of the lover.

It is thanksgiving, in the last analysis, which our digging has discovered, or rather evoked. I would like to believe that adding an additional day of thanksgiving to our calendar on December 27th might help to remind us, but I’m afraid the sickness is much too acute for such a remedy. The words of grace, after all, have been spoken to us before. They grew up before us like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground, but we did not esteem them. Perhaps it is because we did not look or having looked, hid our faces. But the word of grace comes not only to those who seek it out through the thanklessness of our culture, but also to those whom the word of grace seeks. We might remember as we strip off our pretenses in order to dive down deep and see the image of God in created things that it was to renew the image of God in us that the Son of Man stripped himself of position and dove down into our history. It was only in this way that he might create for us a future.

One who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less then he

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.

John Milton – Paradise Lost

A Narrative of Human Ascendency

God, it would seem, is a sore loser. After cursing humanity for their disobedience in the fall, he goes further and casts them out of the garden of Eden. His stated reason for doing so was that their rebellion had accomplished what they intended: they were now like God, knowing good and evil. Were they now to take from the tree of life, they would perpetuate their newfound powers. This (apparently) God feared, and so he drove them out – east of Eden. Not content with a command this time, he posted an armed guard as if in defense – as though the neighborhood had grown rough and he preferred the community of the almighty be gated.

The man and the woman, meanwhile, had achieved their freedom. It had been a painful beginning and they had been forced to leave their father and leave home. They would, perhaps, have been willing to stay if only he had been willing to listen, but he was obstinate and imperious. “My way or the highway”, he seemed to say, so here they were – two souls on a lonely road – but at least they were together. They did not have much, but they had each other and they had their pride – still intact even after the dressing down they had received in the inglorious moment of discovery. At the time, they had been ashamed – felt naked – but as they thought about it afterwards, he had no real reason to be cross. He wanted them to remain children forever, but all they wanted was what he already had: a world for themselves.

The first stages of the rebellion, admittedly, were rough going. There had been setback after setback and moments of temporary insanity when the man and the woman and their children were lured back into submission. But the seal on human potential (once broken) could never be replaced. Humanity grew and prospered, knowing more and more of good and evil with each succeeding generation. The old man, if he had known at the time, might have made good on his promise to kill them when they ate the fruit. “You shall surely die”, he had said, but his hand had slipped, or perhaps his mind. Or perhaps the desire was there but not the ability – his powerlessness disguised as mercy.

Looking back now, one might suppose that we have come so far as to dispense with the very narrative itself. We are our own gods; we do not need another. One of the many discoveries which knowledge made possible was that, rather than God creating us, we created God. The reason our rebellion was necessary is that we are actually the father of God, and so it would be senseless to submit to him. We have come so far and learned so much that we are able now to go back and rewrite our own history, beginning with the beginning.

We must admit, it was a little unnerving when we made the discovery that our origins were purely natural. But we grew accustomed to it over time. One doesn’t choose one’s family, and, while we found some of our brothers and sisters to be a bit hairy and uncouth, we have grown to love them just the same. And once the hypothesis of God was dispensed with, its absence made room for other hypotheses much more interesting. Now that we are unable to fill the awkward gaps with an awkward deity, the intellect must fill the gaps itself.

The only problem, we have come to find, is that meaning cannot be derived from matter, but our mind has a solution for this dilemma as well. As the late Harvard professor of Paleontology Stephen Jay Gould put it:

Darwinism compels us to seek meaning elsewhere – and isn’t this was art, music, literature, ethical theory, personal struggle, and Koestlerian humanism are all about? Why make demands of nature and try to restrict her ways when the answers (even if they are personal and not absolute) lie within ourselves?

Within ourselves. Yes, our pursuit of knowledge has rooted out the myth of God as well as the myth of absolute meaning, but by extracting the diseased plant, we are free to start afresh, this time growing a new world and a new ethic solely and exclusively out of the rich and fertile soil of our own being. The combined force of our fruitful imagination, our creative energy, and our towering intellect will enable us to shape reality to our pleasure, and the best part about it is that we will be creating a world for ourselves, from ourselves, not squeezing our variegated aspirations into the restrictive mould of a God-shaped existence. We will make our own garments.

The evidence for this progressive self-actualization is all around us. In addition to the physical reshaping of matter which we have achieved in the rise of our cities, the assembly of our machines, and the precise tuning of our many technologies, we have reshaped thought so that we laugh, cry, sing, dance, and wonder at the products of our own intellect. He who doubts the ascendency of the human race, let him meditate on all our works – on our harnessing of light and language, our mastery of mathematics and music, our artistry in shape and reason.

We have been cast down – driven out of the garden – but our dismissal has meant our freedom. God meant evil against us, but we intended it for good – for our liberation and growth. Perhaps he intended to send us to hell, but the mind, as the devil said, is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The Measure of Man

It seems plain to us that humanity has made great progress. What is not so plain is how to measure it. For the most part, we have accepted unquestioningly the narrative of human ascendency without bothering to ask where humanity is ascending to or where we have ascended from.

At the outset, one could make the assertion on pretty stable grounds that physically and intellectually, humans have not really grown at all for thousands of years, whether starting from the assumption of biological evolution or creation ex nihilo. To cite Gould once again in the same essay quoted above (Shades of Lamarck),

Homo sapiens arose at least 50,000 years ago, and we have not a shred of evidence for any genetic improvement since then. I suspect that the average Cro-Magnon, properly trained, could have handled computers with the best of us (for what it’s worth, they had slightly larger brains than we do).

We are not smarter than our ancestors. Give Plato a smartphone and he may very well have become our philosopher king. Our software may have been upgraded over the years, but the hardware is still the same, and as any technologist worth his salt will tell you, the capabilities of the software and those of the hardware are tightly bound. This may be acceptable, however, if our brains are (as they appear to be) more than adequate for even modern-day programming. We may reach a limit sometime in the future and some have made such speculations, but for now at least we seem to be within recommended allowances. Even so, we can’t credit increased intellectual capacity for our increased accomplishments.

Physically, the picture is even less inspiring. After all of our supposed improvement, our days are still 70 years, or if due to strength, 80. We have, to be sure, increased life expectancy and (to a degree) stature, but both of these things are due primarily to improved sanitation and nutrition, along with less smoking, the discovery of antibiotics and better emergency care performed by physicians skilled in more than amputation and bloodletting. Our fundamental physical framework appears frozen. We run on better fuel and are more consistent in following recommended maintenance intervals, but the machinery itself is rather antiquated.

One cannot find progress in the physical or intellectual characteristics of humanity. We appear, as a race, to be static in these areas, forced to look elsewhere for a means of measurement.

Moral Progress

In comparison to the physical constraints imposed by our biology, our moral and ethical growth appears limitless. After all, have we not universally condemned primitive ethical flaws such as slavery and racial genocide in developed countries. Are we not growing into an inclusive and sensitive global community – understanding of those with different viewpoints and ideologically opposed to the initiation of force? The prudish among us may opine the degradation of modesty and sexual moors, but even that easing can be seen as an improvement. Isn’t our openness to sexual experimentation merely an openness to love in its many and diverse forms?

Our evolving views of race and gender appear to be the most unambiguous sign of ethical progress. Surely it is better that we no longer amass bogus scientific evidence of white supremacy or withhold the vote from half our adult population just because they have longer hair. For that matter, isn’t it an improvement that it’s now socially acceptable for a woman to have short hair and for a man to have long hair. Down with the silly distinctions. We have grown beyond all that and who would want to go back?

I’m afraid I have probably offended some readers by the tongue-in-cheek manner in which I catalogue these improvements rather than affirming them with the clear strong voice of moral certitude. I’m afraid I’ll offend the remainder by not debunking at least half of the alleged improvements as actually signs of ethical decline. However, I wish to make neither modification. I believe that many of these developments are in fact positive developments and I also believe that many of them (and sometimes the same items) are too strong a corrective – placing the limb out of joint in the opposite direction in their attempts at a remedy.

To add injury to my offense, I will refrain as well from trying to precisely counterbalance the notion of moral progress with a litany of evidence for progressive moral degeneracy. One could mention human trafficking, the stubborn constancy of sexual crime, and the explosion of loathsome and degrading pornographic material even amid the rising “equality” of women. In certain circles, the millions of pregnancies terminated through abortion would count as a sort of genocide. In the opposite circles (on the average), the failure of the rich western world to provide aid to the developing world would indicate a different sort of genocide. To almost everyone, the distant but all-encompassing threat of nuclear warfare and the immediate, localized threat of terrorism loom large enough to provide a counterpoint to a vision of unalloyed progress. At best, however, this sort of utopia – hell-hole contrast merely muddies the water. We have a sense that one or the other has got to be more right at any given instant, but how to balance the equation?

There is, in fact, a yet more fundamental difficulty than mere arithmetic with measuring moral progress and it is the same difficulty which plagues our whole enterprise, but I am getting ahead of myself. For now, we will have to leave the whole discussion of moral progress in a muddle.

Technological Progress

Here at last, it appears we are on to something, for nothing in the modern world appears quite so certain and irrefutable as technological progress. One may question hazy moral tradeoffs, but who in their right mind would question the superiority of clean water over dirty or life sustained by modern medicine over certain death without it? Technology has transformed the life of humanity from one which is, as Hobbes famously observed, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” to one which is now quite tolerable, involving as it does good food, ample selections of entertainment, decent medical care, and innumerable conveniences to take the burden from humanity’s shoulders. It is well said that technology is our servant, for now almost the poorest of women can microwave her prepackaged sustenance and almost the poorest of men can drive himself to work, where (instead of backbreaking labor) he finds that the push of a button does the work of a dozen souls and whole teams of their smelly and disease-ridden animals. In each case, technology does what we do not wish to do ourselves, what the rich for ages have had done by their slaves and hired hands. When we flush our porcelain thrones, we might well remember that at one time the flushing of bedpans was a human task performed by the servants of the wealthy and by the poor for themselves.

Sometime soon, I will go into this topic in more depth, since it is one I find interesting, having lived and worked in the technology industry for over ten years. It deserves better treatment than I can now give it. For now, let a brief description of how technology emerges suffice as a case against its status as the paragon of progress.

The only way that a man or a woman may build a technology is by an oversimplification of the problem the technology is intended to solve. Let us take the simplest of examples: suppose a harried and overworked woman desires to speed the process by which she prepares tea for her guests. We, having the benefit of hindsight, can see at a glance the progression which her inventiveness ought to take. Let us suppose that she already uses a stove and that the only improvement in that regard is the substitution of gas or electric heat to warm the element. This would cut down on all the cutting down and cutting up which is currently necessary to build a wood fire. From there, we might propose an electric kettle and then progress to a microwave oven, bringing sufficient water to a boil in mere minutes from the moment her guests walk in.

But that is just the water, what of the tea? The painstaking process of choosing from among wild plants or cultivating one’s own (let us suppose she lives in the proper geography for such things) can give way, through technological innovation, to teas produced in bulk by distant farmers, then dried and individually packaged for the woman’s convenience. Of course all of this assumes the woman has money to pay for such store-bought goods, but in a modern economy (another technological innovation of sorts) in which the woman can specialize and trade the product of her labor for money, such an assumption is not far-fetched.

Through a few small technological improvements, albeit ones made possible by extended chains of other scientific and technological innovations, we have reduced the tea-time requirements for our hypothetical housewife from perhaps upwards of two hours labor to mere minutes, the result being exactly equal: a nice hot cup of tea. Would you like cream and sugar?

The best part of all this is that there were no downsides, no tradeoffs. We have accomplished the entire mission without the slightest hint of collateral damage. No people were killed or injured in the making of this (very fast, very hot) cup of tea.

As is often the case, it is in the premises that the conclusion must be called into question. If hot tea was our only requirement, we might well be able to produce it technologically without downside, but no human requirement is ever that simple.

Consider for a moment the many reasons why women and men have prepared and drunk hot tea for millennia. What comes to mind is not simple and one-dimensional, but cultural and complex. We do not drink tea merely to warm up but as an element in a sort of communion – with each other, with ourselves, and with our world. This may seem at first to be a weighty burden for a little cup to bear, but it is the same kind of burden which humanity lays on all its activities. We never do anything merely to do it, but to achieve some higher purpose through it. We desire to live at peace, in harmony, and in community with our neighbor and so we engender thoughts of love and well-being in our hearts. These thoughts result in language and the language takes the form of an invitation. We invite our neighbor into our home not because he needs our shelter but because by the offer of a place at our table, we are offering him a place in our heart, in our life. He may not be thirsty or cold and he may even prefer coffee, but our offer of tea shows him that we desire not only his presence, but his friendship – his love in return for our own. That is why for centuries, across many diverse cultures, the preparation and drinking of tea has taken on an almost ritualistic pattern. It is not merely hot, flavored water we are after.

When one sees tea time in this light it is immediately apparent that one can prepare tea too fast as well as too slow, for the care and personal attention to the setting, the cup, and its contents, is an expression of affection not to be inordinately curtailed. One does not try to set speed records in picking out a wedding ring, or (if one does) it is best to keep the process a secret from one’s intended bride. Even if the cup is for oneself, it is easy to see how shortchanging the process of preparation shortens also the time of contemplation to which the cup is accessory and threatens to dilute the pleasure which we take in the cup’s contents. Why else would millions of people go to the added trouble of grinding their own coffee for the barest of incremental improvements in flavor? The taste of the drink is only one element in the pleasure it affords us.

Additionally, recasting the goal of tea time as a desire for communion enables us to view the technological progression required for faster preparation in a new light: as elements contributing to but also taking away from our true desire. By parsing out the chopping of wood and the tending of gardens (collective activities in many cultures), we may also be parsing out the very communion which tea is intended to cultivate. By specialization in a single skill in order to trade and monetize our expertise and thus buy from the store, we may be forced to remove ourselves from the very fabric of diverse human experiences and emotions which the moment of quiet contemplation over a warm cup is designed to thread our way back into.

There is more to be said. For the moment let us simply acknowledge that the rise of technology is a mixed blessing. I would be loathe to give up flush toilets and do not wish (out of embarrassment) to formulate a list of possible downsides to such an invention. Technology has many apparent benefits and I do, in fact, see it as a kind of progress, but one must reduce the scope of ones goals as well as the definition of human flourishing in order to view the progress of technology as unambiguous.

Cultural Progress

Thus far, we have dealt in parts, but what of the whole? It might very well be that we cannot discern progression in component, but what of the resulting machine? The individual gears and sprockets of human activity may simply go round and round, but does not this drive the whole engine of human culture forward. You may have your nits to pick with any aspect, but what of the whole edifice? Surely, even amid regional oscillations affecting morality, technology, the arts, etc. we can perceive the global import of humanity’s rise from cave to castle to city to space station.

Here is where our real difficulties begin, for by now (if we have been paying attention) we may have perceived that our most fundamental problem in discerning human cultural progress is not the ambiguity of the evidence, as amorphous as it may be, but defining the rules by which one measures the evidence. In other words, the fundamental problem in measuring any kind of human progress is the human himself, because it is he who must do the measuring if it is to be measured at all. To restate once more, if a human consciousness is the source of the measurement, the real subject in the study of human progress is the measurer not the measured.

This is, of course, assuming the independence of humanity from any outside law or measuring stick, but in a modern intellectual society which accepts the narrative of human ascendency implicitly, this is a safe assumption. We must, as Gould puts it, look within ourselves for answers, including the answer to the question of human progress.

This being the case, with the human measurer now the subject of our inquiry into cultural progress, it is plain that the measurer can only conduct her measurements from one of two locations: either she must measure human progress from within human culture or from outside it.

The View From Within Culture

If we allow that the human measurer of cultural progress is taking her measurements from within culture, then we have a problem, for how does one measure absolutely what one is a vital part of? Isn’t it rather like measuring the weight of a boat while one is standing inside it? For that matter, how (even if one can get a measurement) can a participant in human culture perform measurements of value without imposing her own particular values on everyone else?

We might be able to see this more clearly if we consider the results of a cultural exchange between a denizen of a past culture and one of our own. The physicists have taught us that time is not such a fixed commodity as we once supposed, so let us arrange a discussion between a modern citizen of western culture and a priest from the middle ages. If such an exchange could be pulled off, then its results would doubtless end up as a TV special, perhaps in the form of a fireside chat in front of a studio audience:

<usual introductions and welcome to the program>

Modern Man: So father Ulrich, we’re discussing today how far humanity has progressed from your day and age. I mean, I’m not judging, but I think that deodorant has some huge advantages.

<polite laughter from the audience>

Priest (dressed in traditional Germanic garb, speaking through a special translating device): I don’t know what you mean by progress. It seems to me that you’ve made a mess of things. Why, for instance, are we having this insane discussion when the holy catholic church has made perfectly clear how one is to view not only this age, but all past ages and all future ones as well? You risk blasphemy!

Modern: Well father, I’m sorry to be the one to break bad news, but other than the knights and castles, your generation didn’t produce much of value. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault, but we sure had a hellava time cleaning up after a thousand years of feudalism and religiously-motivated oppression.

Priest (standing up threateningly and raising his hands): Infidel!!

Modern: Now hold on there father! We were just having a peaceful conversation and I was just expressing my point of view. Why don’t you sit down and you can express your point of view as well. Don’t pull out the thumb screws just yet. I was just saying that the Dark Ages (thats’ what pretty much everyone calls your age now), while they may have been necessary and may have had a lot of nice people in them, really put a lid on human potential. And the worst offender was the catholic church. The pope just wanted to stay in power and get rich, and so he kept the common man down…killed him just for disagreeing! I think it’s a huge improvement that we’re now able, a thousand years later, to discuss both sides of an issue (just like this) without fear of getting burned at the stake. Don’t you father Ulrich? Father?!

<medical personnel come in to assist father Ulrich, who has apparently suffered a minor stroke. Cue commercial break>

What is most surprising about this hypothetical encounter is that we cannot imagine the priest having any valid argument defending his own age and institution or (conversely and assuming he could see the future) rationally legitimate attacks depicting the modern age as a tissue of caricatured and odious mutations. As the debate now stands, we (the modern) always win seeing as we are here and the priest is long dead and unable to defend himself on his own terms. If the fireside chat was staged before an audience in the middle ages, the modern man would be the object of ridicule – and yes, likely burned at the stake.

For the debate to be staged on more like equal footing, a moderator would have to be selected from a third age (from perhaps roman times) who held no particular bias against either moderns or medievals. The roman would doubtless see his own age as history’s greatest achievement and move to have both debaters banished post haste before their bickering became a threat to the Pax Romana. Thus, adding the roman provides no moderation, but only a multiplication of bias.

It is plain to see that the same difficulty would arise if we were to conduct the debate across current cultures (between, perhaps, an islamic extremist in rural Pakistan and a professor of ethics at UC Berkley). Each, from the standpoint of his or her own culture, sees the other as degenerate rather than progressive. One may pick a cultural point in the middle (say, a baptist preacher in Iowa) to moderate, but baptists are very seldom called in for such purposes.

The only way to truly moderate between opposing cultural viewpoints is to choose a viewpoint which is outside of all other viewpoints – outside history and culture altogether. Its only from such a vantage point that one could judge objectively. Obviously, this sort of perspective is impossible, but it is the viewpoint we are most accustomed to.

An Outsider’s View

Thus far in our analysis of human progress, we have been arguing from a very peculiar posture – at least for a creature of our kind. If we have not recognized it as peculiar, it is probably because it is the posture which modern men and women almost always take when analyzing anything and perhaps the posture which philosophers and scientists have taken in every age. The posture I am referring to is one of objectivity – mentally, rationally, and often unwittingly placing oneself outside the scope of one’s analysis. In this way, the thinker can see everything in the world as if she herself were not in the world but rather a passive and disinterested observer.

The benefits of this posture are easily seen. By stepping mentally outside of the context we are studying, we can observe the context more clearly, without all the troublesome interpersonal relationships and unique individual instances. It enables us to class and categorize our knowledge in a way that intersubjectivity does not permit. The whole edifice of modern scientific inquiry, for instance, is built from this viewpoint, seeking to discover facts of existence not merely true for you in certain contexts, but true for everyone in every context. Similarly, western philosophy has for millennia sought to order the world of our thoughts based on objective truths applicable in every circumstance. It would not be going to far to say that modern human culture is in one way, the physical manifestation of this viewpoint – dependent as it is on scientific knowledge, rational inquiry, and extended chains of logical inference. A violin, for instance, is only formed when sound and substance are seen as commodities of sorts, arranged along a vast string of commodities, able to be tuned to suit human desire.

By itself, this posture is merely rationality at work. But problems emerge as the posture of objectivity moves further and further up the chain of being – from matter to idea to person to the self.

The Downside of Objectivity

If one succeeds in achieving complete objectivity, this invariably results in alienation. As Martin Buber put it, the I-You relationship (in which another person’s unique individual consciousness fills our view) is replaced by the I-It relationship of objective science in which the other person is merely a thing. Similarly, to the extent that we study human culture as an object we must fail to enter into it ourselves. We cannot both take part in the daily and intimate rituals of human society and study them as mere instances in the same moment.

The objective viewpoint cannot know an individual, only an instance. Instead of seeing a sunset or a rock formation as a particular entity never before seen and never to be duplicated, we can through objectivity see only an instance of a set of phenomena. Objectivity is platonic; it does not allow intimacy with its subject matter. All of modern science, in fact, is not in the least interested in the individual except insofar as the individual conforms to a class or category meant to contain her (or it). Imagine the consternation which a modern scientist would suffer if she were to encounter a being which was completely unique and individual – the only instance of such an entity in the cosmos. If nothing about the being was exactly like anything else the scientist had ever seen or studied, then she would be at a loss. If, on the other hand, the scientist could find a single attribute of the being which was not unique, she would breath easier. Before, it could only be related to, but now it could be examined.

Unique and Alone

The process of alienation is complete when the objective posture is taken even toward the self. We move from I-You to I-It and then finally to It-It – seeing ourselves as an object also, interacting with other objects, taking part in a category of behavior. It is rather like the jr. high boy who watches himself in the third person ask a young lady to dance and then observes with terror and delight that he (a boy) is now holding hands with her (a girl) and both are moving about the room (in an activity called dancing). In a few months, the boy will have forgotten entirely the girl’s name and face, and what he was doing with the instance of “girl” can hardly be called dancing. Thus, the objectification of the relationship and the experience destroys them both.

The human self (specifically, one’s own self) is just the sort of unique and individual entity which defies objective study. The reason is that, while everything else in the universe conforms (more or less) to our mental categories, our self does not. The self knows of no other exactly like it. It is unique and individual and therefore cannot be classified or scientifically studied. We may put all of our friends, family members, and acquaintances into neat boxes, but the boxes we make for ourself never quite fit. Like the scientist, we are indeed relieved when we find aspects of our selves which conform to stereotype, but such moments are fleeting. We are both the nicest (in some respects) and the meanest (deep down, if we are honest) person we know. Our interests, personality, and potential has no sharp and clear limits. Our emotions are a deep mystery. We are like other selves and yet so unlike them. Our closest friends know us in some ways better than we know ourselves, but we know that they do not know us fully. If only we could know ourselves fully. We cannot escape from our self and therefore cannot be entirely objective. We are forced back into relationship, if only with ourselves and only at intervals. The mysterious knower inside our mind keeps surfacing as indisputable evidence that an outsider’s perspective is impossible.

The Progress of Objectivity

If there is any sign of progress in human culture, then surely it is the progressive frequency of a sustained objective posture. Whereas only the elites within ancient cultures even attempted to speak objectively of the human condition, one can find our most benighted modern layman pontificating on the evolutionary origins of infidelity, interpersonal dynamics within committed relationships and the rational proofs for the existence of God as if these subjects lay dissected before them on the laboratory table. The layman may very well mangle the logic behind these subjects, but he has mastered the objective voice. For that matter, the modern speaks of even everyday subjects, such as the health benefits of fresh fruit, in the objective voice – as if the all-knowing all-seeing speaker had weighed all possible evidence and now spoke with godlike authority. This, in spite of the fact that his authority comes from the wellness column in a tabloid.

It has been by this progression that we in the modern world have come, seemingly, to know the entire universe in minute detail but have grown progressively more estranged from ourselves, from each other, and from our culture. As Walker Percy’s question in Lost in the Cosmos is well-put:

Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other – while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31

Like a ghost in a great machine, our exalted posture makes it progressively more difficult to live authentically amid the ordinary associations of everyday life. For instance, one cannot be a Brooklyn hipster in today’s all-seeing, all-knowing world without self-consciously taking the role upon oneself and carefully acting out the parts – choosing clothing, interests, attitude and friends as if one was a hipster – the act of roleplaying thereby undermining one’s authentic hipster status. In contrast, a Spartan warrior in ancient Greece would find our struggle for authenticity strange – so immersed was he in his own culture as to be unaware of any alternative persona. If the sign of one’s authentic engagement in human culture is being unaware of the possibility of being other than oneself and unaware of the possibility of living other than one does, then almost no one in the modern western world is culturally authentic. The objective viewpoint has driven us out – a stranger amid the spectacular success of a place we used to call home.

And in a final ironic twist, objectivity casts us out of the very edifice of knowledge which it has built. We live in an age of of infinite knowledge, and what we know most surely is that practically all of what we know will soon be debunked. As Robert Persig observes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the very scientific enterprise by which we aim to arrive at truth has (by its continual and infinite production of new hypotheses and new discoveries to take the place of old ones) actually distanced us from any firm conviction that we know the truth. We have more knowledge and less truth than ever before. The more we seem to discover, the less we seem to know. We know today that fresh fruit prevents tooth decay, but tomorrow we will know differently.

This has been our progress.

An Abandoned City

The whole of history, then, can be seen as two contra posed processes. On the one hand, an increasingly sustained objectivity has enabled explosive growth in our understanding, resulting in an increase in technology, art, and moral sensibility. On the other hand, the preposterous expansion of this viewpoint, purporting to be outside the realm of our own experience, has driven us away from the community of what we have created with the result that, having built the glorious dwelling of human culture, we are unable to live in it.

If you wishes to conduct an empirical test of this hypothesis, then you may do so by taking a poll of the most talented and successful human beings you are aware of (those who seem to us most transcendent in art, science, reason, wealth, etc.) and asking whether they are the equals of everyday people in the basic relationships and ordinary enjoyments of human culture. We would like to go to a baseball game with Harrison Ford, but one doubts whether he would be able to be himself with us – he would have to be Harrison Ford. We would love to have a physics lesson from Stephen Hawking, but he probably doesn’t have much to teach us about how to overcome discouragement at the office. To the extent that he does, it is probably due to the subjective experience he has gained through disability rather than the prodigious objective capacity of his intellect.

It is, we find with a sinking sense of irony, entirely true that the mind is its own place, but the more heavenly our human accomplishments the more hellish our alienation from them.

A Regress

It is a strange sort of paradox, this cultural growth accomplished by the method of alienation – of objective transcendence. It may well be asked why the one cannot be had without the other. At first glance, it does not seem a necessity of objectivity that the process of such inquiry should lead to an inability to function in normal human contexts.

Indeed, the posture of rational inquiry is destructive to our placement and participation in culture only to the degree that we rely on such a posture to define the essential essence of things rather than merely postulate on secondary causes. If, for instance, we acknowledge the complete and mysterious individuality of the people with whom we share life and breath, then we do not make objects of them to notice their similarities. But it matters a great deal whether the individual or the similarity is primary. If we see similarities as primary, we have effaced the individual and can no longer enter into relationship; if we see the individual as primary, then the similarities can help us relate to them better.

The whole thing is an absurd predicament, and, it would seem, an absurdly simple one to remedy. However, like a cat up a tree, we have gotten ourselves into a jam and cannot find a way down. Once adopted, it is not so easy to relinquish our godlike perch and take the humble stance of a creature among other creatures once again. If the problem were in our environment, we could solve it in a moment. But it is in ourselves, in our minds, or (to use the language of a previous age) in our souls. If it is indeed the soul that is lost in the process of finding everything else, then the soul cannot hope to find itself. It must be found, and the finder must be someone from outside the soul. Someone, furthermore, who is outside of creation altogether for creation, to the lost soul, is merely a projection. As a result, the finder of the soul must be its creator and originator – to root the soul in something more substantial than itself – or else the soul will continue to drift. The mind is its own place, but it needs a father.

We must, therefore, be born again.

We have been talking around it, but it must be said, as offensive and inscrutable as such a phrase invariably is. The notion is as shocking as it is absurd, for it suggests that the way up is the way down, that the only way to progress is to regress – back to the childhood of our existence, back before we could think and speak and act for ourselves. Not only that, but it is impossible, for while the will of the strong may venture great feats to secure their own salvation, no one is born by his own power. To accept such a remedy would be to acknowledge not only helplessness, but to relinquish one’s own will – one’s own prerogative. It would, in fact, require giving back the fruit – giving back our freedom.

But it would be just as well. We would only be exchanging one sort of burden for another: the impossible burden of godlike transcendence for the gentle burden of a father’s instructions. By contrast, the later yoke feels light. Our freedoms, likewise, would be exchanged in rebirth. We would be denied the freedom to judge good and evil for ourselves, but we would be given the freedom, after years of forced mimicry and roleplaying, to simply be ourselves among other selves and among the rest of creation – children of the father, free to explore the realm he has created for our tending.

We did not adequately weigh the implications of lifting Godhood to our shoulders. We have reigned as kings, but the kingdom we have built has no roots and no substance – rooted as it is in our own transient being. It is a wonder, then, that when we lay down the crown we have fashioned for ourself, the kingdom does not disappear, but grows stronger and more concrete. It is suddenly revealed that our reign has been a sham, that its real purpose was to serve the ends of a true king who has ever reigned over a true kingdom. A kingdom, furthermore, which has grown and progressed even under its unlawful stewards. This discovery of the impotence of our own power and the hopelessness of our designs has, now that we have accepted our proper role as subjects, a rather cheering aspect. If all that we have done in a dreaming and delusional autonomy has been preserved, then what shall we accomplish as servants now that we are awake. It is, perhaps, better to serve in heaven than to reign in hell.

A Clear Deception

One may appreciate an excellent fabric from different perspectives and at different levels of detail. The fineness of the thread, the richness of the color, and the intricacy of the pattern disclose their qualities to the hand and to the eye in layers and at intervals rather than all at once. Likewise, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, like the finest of textiles, is threaded with meaning both obvious and profound.

“Many years ago” Andersen begins “there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed.” And thus the first thread is sown for a deception so thorough that it would weave a spell over the whole kingdom. For embedded in the emperor’s preoccupation with dress was the rest of the deception in embryo, waiting only for the proper habitat and gestation. The king is, so to speak, already pregnant with the trickery nurtured by the professed weavers and their subsequent chicanery.

The emperor wanted new clothing, and the finer the better, for all his other clothing had worn old and grey so that, when wearing them, he felt exposed and embarrassed. The weavers promised the finest of bespoke suits, which would clothe the wearer with not only beauty but power. The particular quality of the cloth was that it could be seen only by the worthy – by the wise and competent. In the earlier Spanish tale from which Andersen’s was adapted, the weavers claimed the cloth could only be seen by those born within wedlock – those of illegitimate parentage found the cloth invisible. The clothing, then, was a useful tool for rooting out pretenders – whether bastards or fools. The application of such a tool would, no doubt, become clear later on. For the moment, the emperor was content to have secured an empirical test for his administration and advisors. One could imagine in the not-too-distant future this greatest of kings served by the wisest of lieutenants, the detritus of fools and misfits having been systematically sloughed off. Doubtless the emperor had a few suspects already in mind – those attendants from good families whom he nevertheless found insufferable and idiotic. He would finally be able to strip them of pretense on logical and irrefutable grounds. Delusion tastes sweeter when mixed with desire.

The weavers busied about their work, spinning non-existent cloth on their empty looms, all the while pilfering the costly silks supplied to them for their craft. The fraudulent fabric was almost complete. It lacked but one embellishment – one which the weavers could draft, but could not weave themselves. The emperor’s attendants, when sent to inspect the weaver’s progress, do not see the non-existent cloth, but, knowing beforehand the fabric’s power to expose fools and not wanting to be exposed themselves, they pretend to see. Whether they did this because they were fooled or merely because the emperor was fooled is irrelevant; the salient point is that they recognized their own position in society to be an illusion – a vapor built upon a breeze, supported by a scaffolding of haze, swirling in an amalgam of alleged parentage, past favors, and the promise of future services. They realized themselves to be socially naked, and it was only in pretending to see the invisible cloth that they retained the illusion of clothing.

This last deception was by far the greatest. The emperor, too, is ensnared in it, and his terror is palpable as he comes to grips with the possibility that even his own status is an illusion. If he cannot see the cloth, then perhaps he, too, is an illegitimate fool – merely a halfwit in a fancy suit. His rule is shown to rest not on an unshakable heritage and inbred capability but on the thinnest of perceptions, held by the lowliest of peasants. The emperor ruled because his subjects thought him worthy, but take away the thought and the rule would follow. When Hans Christian Andersen was a boy of eight, he stood with his mother in a crowd waiting to see King Frederick VI. When the king appeared, little Hans cried out “Oh, he’s nothing more than a human being!” If the Emperor’s subjects arrived at the same conclusion, his realm might well be lost.

It is, in the end, the emperor himself who chooses to be fooled in his attempt at fooling others. And the only reason the others are fooled by such foolishness is their fear of playing the fool themselves. In the final parade, the king rides naked through the streets as the representative of an entire people fearing exposure.

Andersen and the weavers are, in a conspiratorial collusion, using deception to point out the truth of our societal nakedness, for we, along with the emperor, are the brunt of the story’s moral.

Two Strange Things

In the Genesis account of creation, there are two special trees in the midst of the garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Apparently, Adam and Eve were welcome to eat of the Tree of Life, but they were to stay clear of the Tree of Knowledge.

This second tree is one of two strange things about the creation account. The name of the tree is strange to us. We don’t see anything wrong with that kind of tree. We eat of that kind of tree all the time without tasting evil. Was not the Lord so pleased with Solomon’s request for wisdom that he gave him riches also? What could be bad about knowledge? For the most part, we accommodate this strangeness by assuming that it was a test. In other words, we assume that there was nothing wrong with the tree other than the fact that God forbad it. The tree was good, we say, and the knowledge it gave was good, but God asked them not to eat it out of principle (one must set boundaries somewhere) and it was therefore the disobedience rather than the fruit itself which caused the trouble.

The second strange thing is the embarrassing emphasis in Genesis 2 and 3 on nakedness. The first instance is in 2:25 after the creation of Eve:

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Another mention occurs in chapter three after they have eaten the forbidden fruit:

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Then, when God comes into the garden in the cool of the day, the fact becomes central:

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

One explanation is simply that, like the writer of cheap romance, the scriptural author is attempting to make the account a little juicier, but this will not do. Those who believe in scriptural inspiration may reject such an idea out of hand, but even to one who takes Genesis to be mythology it is obvious that this repeated nakedness is no mere embellishment. The inquiring mind wants to know why Achilles was “swift-footed” and why Adam was nude; we should not pass by naked people without taking notice. If the writer thinks the fact that Adam and Eve were naked is important to the account (he keeps pointing it out in different ways) then we need to understand why.

I believe that these two strange things are not independently strange, but collectively strange. In other words, the nature of the tree makes sense of all the nakedness on parade. Perhaps God’s forbidding of the tree (that particular tree) was not coincidental. Something about knowing Good and Evil exposed an embarrassing fact.

Nakedness and Ignorance

In our mature adult understanding we see nakedness as the companion of ignorance. The ignorant child and the ignorant tribesman both stand exposed due to their lack of knowledge. One expects to find the delirious, the unconscious, and the insane in a state of nature, but once the fit has passed and cognizance returns, they had better get dressed.

Even the nakedness of erotic dancers and actors involves an implicit ignorance. Both would be embarrassed to walk through the grocery store naked, but the artificial environment of the striptease or the movie studio forces them to ignore the fact that it is the same audience in either case. If the actress retorts that she can indeed walk naked through the grocery store without embarrassment it may be asked why, on very hot days, she does not. The reason is that her nakedness in the studio is only excused by willfully taking on the aspect of ignorance and pretending she is alone. She may be able to stroll through the store in the same way, ignoring the awkward stares, but it too is only an act. As soon as she is fully conscious of herself as a human being among other humans, she puts on her cloths. No one attends the Oscars naked.

One may see a version of this principle in action when, in the artificial environment of the beach or the swimming pool, people frolic about nearly naked, willfully ignoring the stares of others. If one was to stumble in on the same people dressed in their pajamas, they would be more likely to be embarrassed although twice as clothed. As soon as knowledge is grasped, so too must clothing.

Another Look

Following this thread, our correlation of ignorance and nakedness seems to fit the Genesis account. After all, the man and his wife were both childish and ignorant, and it was only after taking to themselves the knowledge of good and evil (becoming, as it were, like God) that they realized with humiliation that they had been walking around naked their whole lives. Is not the whole account rather like a bad dream in which, at a cocktail party, you discover you have forgotten an important part of your wardrobe?

But something about this explanation falls flat, for it seems, if anything, to run contrary to the flow of Genesis 2 and 3. When Jesus casts the demons out of the man from the Gerasenes, the restoration of the man’s reason leads to the restoration of his clothing. But Adam and Eve do not cast the demon out of the garden but accept his leading. And when they grasp the fruit with its wisdom, the result is a loss of coherence even as they gain clothing. It is as if Adam and Eve wake out of a good dream, in which they were happy, secure, and clothed, into the nakedness of real life.

Nakedness Hides

It may seem at first blush as though nakedness and dress are empirically binary. One may ascertain through various tests whether or not another person is wearing clothing. The person is or is not although he may be bordering on one end of the spectrum or the other. However, this sort of scientific scaling ignores the fact that nakedness is not a fact at all but a concept which does not exist in material reality.

Animals, for instance, can be neither naked nor clothed, or (more precisely) they are not less naked when wearing clothing or more naked when going without. Animals are merely themselves, and to them clothing or the lack thereof is the cause of neither pride nor shame. Even the most prudish of victorian societies, for whom an exposed female ankle would be scandalizing, did not consider it necessary to cover any part of their dogs, horses, or chickens. One at first may contend that this is because the animals are a lower order of being – they are not conscious, at least not in the way we are. However, this fails to explain why we humans feel it necessary to cover up even those of our own kind who are not conscious of their own nakedness whether because of illness, insanity, or youth. Somehow, we feel as though the state we call nakedness can exist for a sleeping man but not for an alert house cat. In this sense, we infer nakedness even to those humans who cannot be aware of it themselves.

This is particularly so in the case of our children. It is plain to those of us who have spent considerable time among young children that for them nakedness does not exist. A boy of two years old may be aware whether or not he is wearing clothing on a hot day, but he is no more embarrassed to bare all than to cover up. Neither what you put on him nor what you take off matters at all. If the boy is considered to be naked, it must be inferred from his elders. For his part, he is merely himself, and cooler for being so. Knowing this, even our inferences of nakedness pardon the condition in those unconscious of it themselves even while condemning it in those who should know better. It is funny when a toddler streaks across the living room when company is over; it is not funny when a man does so.

There are, likewise, times and places in adult life in which nakedness does not exist as such. A woman of sixty who would be mortified to be found naked on main street among strangers may give no thought to nakedness in the bedroom with her husband of forty summers. And it is almost non-sensical to speak of a mother becoming naked in order to nurse her newborn child. It would seem, rather, with naked baby at naked breast, that mother and child are less naked to each other than at any other time. They are merely themselves, to themselves, unjudging and unjudged – naked and yet somehow clothed.

Compared to the mother and child, the man stumbling into the formal dinner wearing sneakers or the bridesmaid who wears orange when the rest are wearing pastels is far more naked. And here, at last, we get a sense for what this idea called nakedness actually is. Rather than the presence or absence of clothing, it is the presence or absence of judgement – of our bodies first, and then ourselves.

Maturity and Judgment

There comes a time in a child’s life when she realizes that she, too, is a self and must therefore judge matters for herself. At first, these matters may be small – whether she likes her greens or wants to go to sleep – and then later she must decide in large matters – whether she thinks she is beautiful and whom she chooses to love. Before the point arrives at which the girl is judging for herself, her judgement is shaped by her parents. The reason children are aware of their own nakedness at the age of four rather than the age of eight is because their parents have supplied their own judgements in place of the child’s. The parent’s judgement may grow overbearing as the child ages, but at first they are essential. With each small gesture of parental kindness, each gentle word and thoughtful caress, the child is judged and found worthy, and beautiful, and loved. Without knowing it, the child’s world (her conception of herself) is shaped through the affirmation of her parents. She does not and cannot judge herself because her father and mother have already told her that she is herself and it is that self whom they deeply love – down to her skin, down to her heart.

Reaching maturity – the point at which the parent’s conception of the child is called into question and the child seeks to judge for herself – is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we might well mourn the loss of childhood innocence and confidence. On the other hand, the radical self-awareness and self-judgement of maturity is necessary for the child to become an adult and take her place alongside her parents. The scaffolding of a parent’s assurances which undergird a child would never suffice to hold up an adult.

A Brave New World

It is here that the strange and gargoyled shapes of Genesis three begin to take a form that we can understand, for Adam and Eve were God’s children, and as such were formed by God and judged by his being and affirmation. Their lives, their selves, were a reflection of his life and self and with each small gesture of parental kindness they were found worthy, and beautiful, and loved. They did not and could not judge themselves because their father had already told them that they were themselves and that it was those selves whom he deeply loved. Amid such love, what need had they for clothing?

But they were not content as children, and this is where the analogy with our own lives and our own families must end. If one is the child of human parents, then one grows to be their equal. But if one is the child of God, then one remains a child forever – or is cast out.

As in Andersen’s story, the initial deception came from the outside – from the serpent – but the final deception was of the self. The fruit symbolized for Adam and Eve a maturity of sorts, one they had never dreamed of and could not comprehend. The fruit enabled one to judge for oneself what was good and evil, and in the process cast off the judgement of God. If their world had, heretofore, been anchored by the gravity of their creator, it would be so no longer, for now they would be their own Gods, cut loose and able now to chart their own course as the self-proclaimed creators of a new world. It was, we would say now, brave, even audacious, and it was also flawed.

The flaw, so inconspicuous as to be unnoticed in the excitement of that one bold step, was that if God was the only creator, then he could be the only father also, and to be set loose from his orbit and seek to grow into fathers ourselves was not to be free but to float aimlessly and pointlessly – to be lost. In a universe with but one center, Adam and Eve’s attempt to establish a new center failed and its failure was both catastrophic and banal.

Knowledge and Nakedness

The fall was so widespread and destructive that all of creation groaned, and yet its implications were first felt in the most common of places. The man and his wife – who had lived together among the rest of creation in full view of the creator without a hint of shame –  make it their first official function upon achieving deity to inspect their own bodies – and what they see they find mortifying. Forced to judge for themselves – looking at themselves for the first time not as the selves born of the creator but as selves by themselves, standing on their own merits – they are ashamed and want nothing so much as something to hide behind.

It is, ironically, the man’s and the woman’s newfound knowledge which created their nakedness and insecurity, for before the fall, while there were no clothes, there could be no shame and therefore no nakedness. It was only afterwards, with a self-judgement separated from the father, that they formed the conception of nakedness – that somehow their selves were not sufficient in themselves, and must be covered, must be clothed. Their nakedness revealed an insecurity caused by separation from a knowing father to pursue knowledge for themselves.

It is possible, from this inauspicious starting point, to chronicle our battle with nakedness from the fall until now. It has been, from start to finish, a fabric formed of knowledge, although woven in various materials. One runs out of things in the world before one runs out of ways we seek to cover our insecurity – masking discomfort with ourselves in various and ingenious ways. One might even say that the rise of human culture, with all of its glory, is really just an accumulation of loincloths, cleverly disguised so as to be invisible to bastards, fools, and (as we shall see) to children.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

In Andersen’s version of the old story, it is a little child who finally points out that the emperor has no clothes. His father hushes him in order to cover his own nakedness, but the child has nothing to hide. What is ironical about the choice of this little hero is that to the child, the emperor was not naked but merely without clothing. It did not matter to the child what the man on the horse wore or did not wear. He spoke because the spectacle was unusual and interesting, not because it was embarrassing or scandalous. He might have gladly ridden the horse naked himself if his father had let him and it was only because of this that he could see through so clear a deception.

We have grown older and more mature, and the quaint story of Genesis is no longer sophisticated enough to impress us. Are we not indeed our own gods, directing our time on this spinning world as we see fit? We are secure in our knowledge, for our knowledge has given us power – power over the world and power over ourselves.

And yet we wear clothing – clothing to hide our bodies and clothing to hide our souls – a series of masks which we are constantly putting on and taking off as the moment and the audience dictates. We are afraid, and what we are most afraid of is that we might be found out – revealed at last as a fraud and a no-account, as a pretender and a phony, as naked and ashamed. Dressed like an emperor, and seeming confident, we are horrified when anyone or anything threatens to lift the edge of our garments. Our self-assurance is but a wisp and a shadow; any bright light and it is gone.

When the light shines we find ourselves standing naked like a child and yet so unlike a child in our consciousness and shame. It is only then that we can perceive the wisdom of strange and ancient texts. We may then follow the words upstream, as it were, from our present catastrophe back to the life of humanity’s childhood. We find upon doing so that it is impossible to go back; the way is barred. But the way forward, although through our wrecked attempts at shelter, is open. For in barring the way to the Tree of Life (which, if we had eaten from it might have made an eternity of our lostness), our ancient Father prepared the way for a new childhood by way of a new child. The child would be borne into the world naked as a baby and leave the world naked and bleeding as a man, and by his nakedness and by his bleeding, he would take on all our shame like a garment and clothe us with his love. If we would follow this child, we must stoop low and become as children ourselves. Only then – despairing of every fine covering our wisdom has fashioned – can we stand exposed –  unclothed, and yet fully clothed – in the love and imparted gravity of our father.

The Image Revealed

In the vast quietness of a formless void, the Spirit of God hovered, still and unhurried in the unending, brooding darkness of shapeless matter. He had waited, patient in his power, for what would be called an age – its passing between eternity and a moment, for to him potential was as unshakably certain as the past. His thoughts in the dark and cold and shapelessness were bent toward what he was about to do and so sure was he of his intentions and his ability to carry them out that it was as if they had already been done – so completely was all future existence comprehended in the vast and powerful consciousness of the creator.

And then he spoke, and it was as if the lifeless blackness of existence heard his voice and opened its eyes. And there was light. And the fastness of space rippled with surprise, but it was no surprise to the creator for the light was part of him, emanated from him, burst from him as if a door of the sun had been opened. For age upon age, he had dwelt in the light, and now the darkness laughed to finally see itself and the formlessness gasped to behold its own shape. The creator smiled and his spirit smiled back because they had extended their word and created what had existed forever. What was themselves was now other, such that the creator could see himself, as it were, in a mirror. And seeing himself thus reflected, showing to himself and to the world what had been himself forever, was good. And it would grow better.

God spoke again, and the word he spoke was a thought formed before time and now stretched out into time and stretching out the land and the waters and the expanse, making many of what had been one. The words flowed freely now, in a stream of words containing thoughts, but not thoughts such as one thinks about what exists, but thoughts such as exist themselves and give existence as a gift without themselves ceasing from existence. These were hard thoughts, real thoughts formed into words by the word which, when spoken, planted these words like seeds, each one containing within itself the fully-formed reality of reality itself. Nothing was made that has been made without these word seeds, and nothing was made which has been made from any other seeds save these – emanating from the creator through words made soil, sand, seas, stars, and flesh – all dwelling among us as indeed the creator did at first. The creator blessed them and by his blessing existence flourished and expanded like the branches of a tree, multiplying over and again in complexity and beauty until the world was filled. Again his words and blessing formed an image, and the creator could see Himself in the image as in a mirror, and seeing himself thus reflected repeated that it was good. But it would grow better.

What was hidden in God had been brought out, into the light to reflect the light and give life, and its life was blessed and multiplied. But God spoke again to make known what was hidden, and this last disclosure was to shine brighter than the sun, clearer in its image and likeness than the light which first emanated from the creator. This new word was to contain and rule over all other words for this word was to create in its likeness as God had created in his. For this word would contain in itself words – thoughts – about all the rest of creation and by these word-thoughts would recreate the world after its own image which was the very image of God – the child by its artfulness reflecting the father. In the man and woman, the creation would be comprehended and cared for. They would name and rename and create and recreate and all of the naming and all of the creating would fill up and form what remained of the voids and shapelessness of the cosmos. And God blessed them and by his blessing the man and woman flourished and expanded like the branches of a tree, spreading out like the fractal geometry of a snowflake. And they were to multiply over and again the intricacy and beauty of their own race and of the earth they were given to cultivate. It was to continue forever – until every formlessness was shaped and every void was filled. The man, the woman and generations of their children would look with ever-increasing elation at the ever-increasing beauty  of their creation – as in a mirror – while the creator would see with ever-increasing pleasure as – like two mirrors facing each other – his image expanded until what was good became very good — and continued to grow better.

The Image in Earth

The first words of scripture open like a flower, in breathless delight revealing a secret long hidden and long contemplated. It is the secret of existence, of the form from which matter takes its shape and the being from which all other beings borrow. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the physical world is but the illusory earthly Maya through which the self must pierce in order to experience the liberation of Nirvana – of oneness. But in Genesis, the musky scent of freshly turned soil mingles with that of incense and the songs of birds and angels mix and make melody. The creation is real, and it is truth. It borrows being from God but is distinct from him nonetheless – of the one, and yet many. We are told by the scriptures to trust our senses but to follow where they lead – to taste and see that the Lord is good.

The expansion and variegation of existence, we are told, is an imprint, pressed into the fibre of unadorned matter by the creator as he pulls and stretches the void into its contrasting elements. Different types and levels of life dilate into different species within that life – minerals and rock, grasses and trees, sparrows and eagles. This diversity is not tangled together in a random swirl but arranged in rhythmical and ordered patterns and relationships. Flowers turn towards the sun as it rises and the seas swell with the moon as it waxes. The seasons ebb and flow with the movement of the heavens gently and yet inexorably.

And the creation is beautiful. This is not said explicitly, but it takes no extrapolation.

It is indeed very good. And it is not merely good in an aesthetic sense, but reflectively good as an expression – an emanation – of the one who made it. God’s creation is not merely given meaning as a veneer of spirit on top of matter, but contains meaning within itself. Creation is not an analogy of truth, but truth itself given physical form – incarnated. The smallness of a mustard seed contains within its smallness truths inseparable from its form. The number of the sands and of the stars is not a mathematical accident but the generosity of God cast in matter. If water cleanses, restores, and enlivens, it is because the very nature of water is salvific. The reason eagles soar, wine intoxicates, wind blows, and flowers bud is because these things are themselves the true image of the true God. If the edges of this image are not discreet, it is simply because the image is continuous throughout, folding and interlacing – the very texture of reality.

The Nature of the Image

We have been speaking of God’s image as if we knew what it meant. We do not. It is an imprint, surely, a reflection, a turning and folding and stretching of inert matter into the shapes and tastes and scents of God. But if that is all then God remains aloof, separate from His creation as the craftsman is separate from the work he has fashioned. The creation is of God, from him, borrows its existence from his, but the relationship is still amorphous, for who is to say whether the craftsman loves his workmanship for what it is or simply as a means of self-glorification? Are we not told that the world was made for the glory of God and does this not betray a certain divine utilitarianism: God making the world for his own amusement.

When Moses wished to record the early lineage of the human race, he began:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

The scriptures do not speak of God’s image until they come to the man and the woman, and it is only here, in the fifth chapter – after the fall, after the garden, and after the death of Able – that it becomes clear what that image entails. For the image of God in the man and woman was not merely that of a craftsman imprinted on clay but the nature, character, wealth, and status of a father bequeathed to his children. Adam and Eve resembled God as Seth resembled Adam and Eve. The man and the woman were God’s offspring and so bore his likeness.

As children are the glory of a father, the human race was the glory of God. As with a father, God’s glory was proportionate to his love such that the flourishing his love created became the source of his honor. The desire to display and propagate one’s own qualities may, in some contexts, be megalomania, but in a father it is an act of generosity and compassion, giving of the life that cannot be gotten elsewhere and delighting to see it bear fruit in the being of another. A father’s glory derives from the child’s oneness (my own life in miniature) and yet also from the child’s otherness (a new life – two new eyes looking back at me). A father gives his life to save his child from death because the life he saves is his own life – the life he has given to bring the child to life. It is in the heart of a father exulting in his child that self-centeredness and selflessness meet. Thus are we to understand God’s glory in his children.

The tenderness with which the scriptures speak of God’s craftsmanship in the rest of creation is an extension of this fatherly love. The reason the righteous man is compassionate even to his beasts is that the beasts, too, partake of the life of the Father. The creation was not an impersonal exchange, like the assembly of an automobile, but the conception of a new world, each small flowering of life and animation the offspring of God. This is why there is sorrow even in the death of sheep and goats to atone for the sins of men and women.

The Breath of Life

The blessings of God on creation and on the man and woman were that his offspring would have offspring of their own. The breath of life once conferred, would not stagnate, but grow and expand. Even in the world of plants and animals, in the very earth itself, we see the tree of life growing outward and upward, filling the earth with ever more intricate ecosystems and patterns as life collides with life, species interacts with species, water flows over stone, and new life is given birth. The creation is not still for an instant, for the breath of life once breathed is never still.

How this life grows is a commonplace and yet also wonderful and incomprehensible. Most of advanced organic life reproduces sexually, through the joining of two genders, completely alike in species and yet opposite. This duality woven into the fabric of creation ensures that each new creature will be distinct – not merely additive to the existing order, but multiplicative. By including humankind in this pattern, God ensured that the sea of human faces and personalities would have no end. We are accustomed in western Christianity to speak of the image of God residing in the soul of an individual, but the multiplication of humanity through sexual union would lead us to understand that God’s image is also plural, requiring an eternity of human offspring to show it most fully.

The Creation of Culture

Amid the exponential progression of God’s image in the natural world, the man and the woman are given a special task. They are asked to garden and out of their garden grew the whole of human culture.

Unlike the rest of creation, the man and the woman were to be creators also and employ their creative energy in re-creating the world after their own image. They were, as Lewis and Tolkien would say, in the business of sub-creation, making new creations out of what had been made. It was at first a humble endeavor – cultivating the ground, pruning trees, and tending livestock – but this re-creation, this remaking, continued in cycles one after another until the whole world was remade and continues to this day. Out of sound came music and instrumentation. Out of wood and stone came art and science. Out of the garden and the fields came every culinary delicacy.

The remaking of the world after the image of humanity was as God intended, for it was after his image that humanity was made, and it included not only the remaking of the physical world, but remaking the world of the self. Adam’s naming of the animals was but the first instance of this remaking as Adam gave to each animal not only a place in nature but a place in the mind – a name by which it and all others of its kind would be known. This sort of knowing was foreign to the other creatures, but would become the primary occupation of the human race. It was, in fact, through this knowing that humanity’s cultural re-creation became possible – the knowing of the mind and the working of the hands intermixed and interlaced so as to become indistinguishable – such that when the musician picks up her violin to play no one is sure where mind ends and body begins.

A Child of God

As a child who opens her eyes for the first time out of dark, warmth, and being into the consciousness of light, seeing, and knowing, I believe we are to look up through the first words of the scriptures to see a father. Like the child, who has no thought to herself – indeed does not know herself as a self – but looks for knowing into the knowing and gentle face of one who brought her into being, we are to see God not as a proposition or an idea, but as the wellspring of reality from which everything we can touch, know, and feel flows – as a person who’s gravity holds the heavens, and our very selves, in constellation. It is God’s image which gives us shape.

It is, ironically, this humble posture of a child held up by our parent that has enabled us to reach so high. When, in childlike wonder, we set out immediately to explore and to create, assuming the foundations of purpose, truth, beauty, and morality as our birthright, we tend to make great progress. The same cannot be said of our efforts to explicate our own existence and create our own image for knowledge stable enough for all that we would build on top of it. After thousands of years of philosophy and science we are still no closer to knowing for ourselves why it is we know anything or even why we exist and are conscious. If we had waited for these efforts to reach a conclusion before exploring elsewhere, human culture would not exist. We have not waited, and we are the better for it. Each one of us, like a child, has waked into the world of nature and of thought in mid stride – learning and growing and making without thought to where it all came from or what it all means.

It is a peculiarity of existence that if one attempts to create a foundation for existence by one’s own efforts, then everything one has built on it topples. If, like Descartes, we arrive through strict logic at “I am” by way of “I think”, then we must either childishly assume the validity of inference (“therefore”) or abandon all knowledge. If, in the abandonment, we (like Hume) adopt strict empiricism, then we must justify our empiricism on non-empirical grounds. If, like the materialist, we trace the origin of consciousness to naturalistic causes, we must explain how matter can be conscious of itself without being other than matter – a constellation of atoms able to see itself, not merely its reflection – and how a consciousness comprised solely of matter can be trusted to create valid inferences such as those required for a materialistic theory. As far as we climb, we must fall back. Back to the trusting, wide-eyed credulity of childhood – to the basic, unexamined underpinnings of reality – if we are to accomplish anything at all.

If one cannot create a new image for existence, then one must be content with what one is given even if it is not of our own making. This foundation does not prove that we are children of God, but our inescapable trust in it implies that we are children of something. The image we bear may not be of God, but is of something very like him.

Perhaps our reticence to acknowledge our parentage may be traced back to Genesis as well. There, we are told, the first man and the first woman cast off their childlikeness and became like God, knowing good and evil. If this was the case, then they might very well have used their newfound knowledge to recast their own existence instead of being content to cultivate the existence already given. In this case, God’s image in humankind would have been badly marred, although one suspects that an image as indelible as that of God’s would not be easily erased.

A Special Diet

It is rather rare that Christians speak of culture and when they do, one often wishes they would not. Many – if not most – Christians seem to know of only two forms of culture: the worldly culture of sex, drugs, violence, video games, and depressing movies and the Christian Culture which they have carefully culled of its worldly elements. Thus, Christian Culture is like culture proper, but much less, having removed miscreant elements such as expletives, narcotics, pornography, and abortion entirely while slashing the remaining artifacts down to their purely Christian components. Thus, Christians enjoy music, literature, dancing, movies, and talk shows, but only that which have been expurgated of their sinful extra-Christian facets. Christians may engage in sex and violence, but less of it and some Christians are allowed by their denomination to drink alcohol, but not to the point where one begins to enjoy it. Of course, very few Christians consistently adhere to these restrictions, but most would, I think, agree with the principle behind them. Much like the FDA, the Christian community inspects and certifies our cultural fare, and places the sinful parts under the ban. In order to be a good Christian (I suppose there are some), one must be willing to live within limits, enjoying only those elements of culture pre-approved for Christian consumption.

One may find this sort of restoration by negation practiced in the modern (and many a historical) Christian community to be aesthetically unpleasant, but what if the result is true virtue? After all, many a person has made a diet of far less palatable cuisine through gradual acclimation. Perhaps Christian Culture is like a strict vegan diet – a healthful lifestyle made possible by eliminating the tasty parts.

We must admit, as well, that the tasty parts of modern culture make up a rather evil stew, one it would seem sensible to give up entirely. If the vegan wishes to be no part of putrid feed lots and heartless mass slaughter houses, we can understand his objection even if in the bargain, he must give up the occasional Delmonico. Who could fault the Christian, then, for conscientiously abstaining from sampling the more innocuous end of the extra-Christian smorgasbord for fear that in the process she will become complicit in the whole mess. Better to be a teetotaler than a drunk, particularly given the clear scriptural injunctions to purity and holiness.

The rabbis of Jesus’ day followed this line of thinking. They had taken great pains over many years to build what they considered an impenetrable hedge around the Torah (the law). This hedge consisted of additional rules built around the edges of the law which held its adherents to a stricter standard than the law itself. Thus, the hedge functioned like the shoulder of a highway, or a security fence around a swimming pool, providing a safety margin between the individual and the danger of lawbreaking. They reasoned that if their hedge laws were placed far enough back from the sharp edge of the Torah, their offenses would be only misdemeanor.

Islam does something similar. It takes the hazy moral sentiments of Jesus and puts them into concrete action through the five Islamic pillars. Following Jesus seems a hopelessly ambiguous affair, but reciting the Shahadah, praying at five daily intervals, giving one fortieth of one’s possessions, observing Ramadan, and pilgrimaging to Mecca are duties in which one is clearly faithful or delinquent.

Broken Christian Culture

Many Christians seem perpetually engaged in this domestic dispute, skirmishing over bits of territory and points of order. Can Christians drink? What sex can or can’t a Christian have? Should Christians use birth control? Should Christian women wear pants? In short, what is inside the line of Christian propriety and what is outside? The frame of the entire argument is that of legalism and libertarianism – how much liberty is allowed the Christian before she begins to fall over the edge into lawbreaking? It is an intramural debate. The non-Christian world does not care, and why should it? Why waste time listening to a people whose spiritual and emotional energy is spent squabbling about limits only to have the majority of professing believers walk over those limits at the first opportunity? It is as though Christians gain an inner satisfaction from recording their position on an issue knowing all the while that it will be roundly ignored in practice.

Furthermore, even those cultural artifacts which have been certified as solidly within the lines of Christian permissibility bear a faint odor – the glue and formica smell of artificiality. Very few even within the Christian community would claim that Christian music is better as music or that Christian books are better as literature. They are not better or more beautiful, but rather safer. One might argue that a safer and cleaner environment offers the opportunity for even greater enjoyments since the fear of contamination is absent, but this line of reasoning only works to a point. The park is preferable to the dump for a Sunday afternoon, but if even the park (with it’s duck droppings, litter, and fungi) is found unsuitable, then one must move indoors and begin a progression of cleanliness and artificiality culminating in the sanitarium. As with the surfaces in a hospital, one must be willing to give up the aged patina of the genuine article to avoid its susceptibility to staining and bacterial infection.

Perhaps this explains the tendency of even those Christians who have remained faithfully quarantined from the broader culture to fall ill with it’s maladies. It is as if a lack of fresh air and sunshine have weakened the immune system to the point where common ailments such as marital squabbles and teenage rebellion metastasize into life-threatening conditions.

And so Christian Culture, prior to explicating the evils of the world, must first explain its own failures: how it is that a people who are supposedly set apart and holy can be so petty, shallow, quarrelsome, and obnoxious? This is not even to mention Christian Culture’s failure to live by its own higher standards in the areas that the rest of culture finds permissible.

Cultural Standards

All of this presents a perplexing dilemma. Today’s Christian Culture is formulated out of a belief in moral and spiritual absolutes – that it is possible to form judgements as to the goodness or badness of our actions and our creations. but somehow the pursuit of this absolute standard has caused a sort of evil to emerge – that of hypocrisy and artificiality. Why might this be? I believe that the answer lies in the fact that the Christian community has, like the rest of culture, failed to trace its standards all the way to their source.

Many would object, at this point, that it is meaningless to speak of cultural standards at all. Each culture has its own standards and one standard is no better than another. The problem with Christian Culture, as they see it, is this very dogmatism, causing Christians to adopt a “holier than thou” attitude toward others. If we could only accept people and cultures as they are without feeling like we have to pass judgement, we could build a diverse global community consisting of many cultures who appreciate and respect each other’s differences. When we see that ours is not the only way, they reason, we open our mind to knowledge and our hearts to others.

It is a beautiful sentiment. So beautiful that one feels impolite in pointing out that inclusiveness and cultural tolerance is a modern western ideal which we would have to impose upon most other world cultures. But assuming one could and assuming doing so would not undermine the very idea of a diverse global community, the self-proclaimed relativist may contend that each new cultural context requires a different moral response and therefore cultural morality is not a fixed point. In the jungles of Bolivia, marital fidelity may mean something different than it does in Brooklyn. What this person means is that the same underlying principles of conduct must be applied differently in different contexts, but this serves only to reinforce the notion that the principles themselves are fixed and inviolable. It would be relativistic to say that in some cultures hate rather than love forms the basis of familial relationships; to say that love demands different things in different contexts merely affirms love as an absolute moral imperative. The larger and more universal the moral truth, the more universally and therefore contextually it must be applied. Thus, “Thou shalt not kill” may be applied in fewer contexts than “Love your neighbor as yourself” inasmuch as the former is a subset of the latter. The fact that a principle can be referenced from a broad range of diverse circumstances proves its independence of these circumstances just as the referencability of a mathematical constant displays its superiority over the point from which it is referenced.

For the relativist to say that we simply cannot know (and therefore cannot judge) the rightness or wrongness of another culture falls into the same conundrum. She is simply placing the moral imperative to understand a situation thoroughly before passing judgement over and above other moral imperatives. She may be right or wrong in doing so, but she is not relativistic.

We have not made much progress. It is easy to show that each culture (even the tolerant one) holds its standards to be truth but much more difficult to decide between the truth claims. To do this, we must swim upstream, past the shallow cultural platitudes to the foundational elements which undergird all cultures. For the purposes of this discussion, we don’t have to decide on exactly what those elements are, but merely acknowledge the possibility (indeed the necessity) of their existence.

Nested Truth

In order to deduce the possibility of foundational truths, one need merely affirm two simple ideas, which are each as natural to us as breathing: In the first place, it takes no great flight of deductive reason to observe that something cannot be contradictory to itself even if logic is frequently employed (this is perhaps logic’s primary occupation) to show how something that appears contradictory is not. The second idea is perhaps even more primal although less self-explanatory. It is the idea that truth is nested, like Russian dolls, such that some truths are only a small part of other truths while these partial truths may themselves contain other truths within themselves. It is on this little idea, unpretentious, unassuming, and largely unexamined, that the whole of human knowledge depends. Even the radical reductionism of the Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think therefore I am”) assumes not only that thinking may be nested within being, but that the nesting tells us something – that it branches in both directions opening up both smaller and larger dolls as we unfold the mystery of existence. In other words, knowledge depends not only on organization (giving truths a category), but on hierarchy (relating the categories of truth to one another in ascending and descending progressions).

One sees this little idea at work constantly in the natural sciences. By the standards of science, one has not found a new plant or a new idea until one has defined it’s placement within the hierarchy. At this time, physicists are attempting to reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Theory in order to form a layer of knowledge further up the hierarchy than we have yet been able to reach. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the naturalist studies the flight pattern of a dragonfly or the muscular structure of an elephant, gathering sense data in order to inform our conceptual models. The nesting of knowledge does not necessarily progress from smaller to larger, but from less fundamental (and more phenomenological) to more. Thus, the study of natural phenomena help us formulate scientific laws which we then use to explicate other phenomena. Sometimes, as in theoretical physics, the phenomena demonstrating a law are quite sparse. Much of our knowledge of the universe is a projection of the human intellect using the apparatus of mathematics from the barest modicum of empirical phenomena.

Philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, psychologists – they too reach for the nesting doll “therefore” in constructing their theories, formulating their axioms, and explaining their findings. It is important to note that knowledge is always constructed either up or down, never sideways – at least not for long. Inference requires hierarchy. If we find two truths in parallel, our means of relating them to each other is either to place one truth beneath the other or to place both truths beneath another, larger truth. Truths cannot be side by side unless they have the same parent.

One may object that we are very far from reconciling all of our various schools of thought. After all, aren’t theology and physics studying vastly different subject matter – so different, in fact, as to be incompatible? This may be, but incompatibility proves only that one is true and the other is not or that we do not yet have sufficient knowledge to bridge the gap. The behavior of subatomic particles and the behavior of galaxies moving at the speed of light may appear to operate according to different physical laws, but that merely proves that our understanding of the laws is flawed and partial, not the impossibility of one day constructing a theoretical bridge. If a bridge really is impossible between two truths, then we are left with an irrational world, for reality cannot contradict itself.

All of our knowing, then, depends on the ordering of our discoveries along a hierarchy, and unless truth at its core is self-contradictory, following this hierarchy upwards must lead us to fundamental truths. As I said, it is not important at this stage to say what this truth might be. Perhaps it is love. Perhaps it is string theory. It does not matter to us now. It does not matter now, either, whether the fundamental truths are actually god, gods, or even The almighty, personal God of Judeo-Christianity. What is important to see is that each culture must trace it’s truths upward, opening up one Matryoshka doll after another, if it is to have truth at all.

Christian Relativists

If one grants that truths are nested and must culminate in something absolute, then it is only a small step to see that truths lower in the hierarchy are relative to truths higher up just as a child cannot come into existence without a parent. One could say that affirming a truth as absolute (or more absolute) necessarily relativizes truths below it. If Einstein is absolutely right, then Newton must be only relatively right. Our difficulty is that it is not always clear whether the chicken is absolute rather than the egg.

This difficulty causes us to place the locus of absolutism too far down the hierarchy of truths. We may promote the moral axiom of self-control to a place of absolute supremacy but this requires the demoting of other truths. Thus for a man to deem his own utter self-mastery an absolute virtue, he must give short shrift to such quaint truisms as “love that is not shown is worse than hate” and look with scorn on the weakness displayed when Jesus wept. If the biologist believes that the atom is fundamental, then the organ is relative. For a time, scientists believed that time was absolute, forming a substrate onto which the relativity of matter broke like waves. Now we are not so sure.

Christianity is based on the belief that a personal, creating God is the one absolute at the center of existence where all the chains of Russian dolls culminate. However, Christians in practice are just as prone as others to place the locus of absolutism further down the hierarchy, placing even God in the relative position. Thus, Christians in the south a hundred and fifty years ago mistook an economic system – their way of life – for an absolute and ran roughshod over the very image of God dressed in different skin – fomenting evil in their attempts to do good.

A Musical Culture

Our cultural standards are not arbitrary or relative, and they lead us by a progression of inferences toward some form of absolute. Our understanding of this absolute may require tightly-prescribed cultural parameters or it may indicate that the whole of human culture is irrelevant. The Christian position, which affirms this absolute as the personal God who is the creator of all things, is shockingly expansive in its approval of all elements of human culture even as is it is tightly prescriptive in the manner culture is practiced. Much of the damage caused by well-meaning Christians is done by being tightly prescriptive in the elements of culture while being expansive in the manner the remaining elements are implemented. Thus, a song is acceptable because of it’s explicitly Christian message even if it is implemented poorly.

If God is indeed the originator of all of existence and all we see is a dependent extrapolation of his independent being, then all of existence (all elements of culture) must be good – they must be worth preserving. This seems an outlandish claim, for one’s mind immediately jumps to all of the elements of culture which seem impossible to fit into a Christian framework. How are we to reconcile what we know about God with child molestation and racial genocide, with obscenities claiming to be art? Perhaps the Eastern religions can explain away these things as an optical illusion, but Christianity teaches that evil is real and must be dealt with. So real, in fact, that the only way it could be expunged from the lives and hearts of His followers was for God to die in the person of His Son. In the pages of Genesis, evil is even shown to take physical form in the person of the devil. In what sense, then, can we say that all of culture is affirmed by God?

The answer has to do with the character of good and evil – their substance, consistency, and relationship to one another. For one will find as often as one looks at the matter that you cannot find evil in isolation – it is always something good twisted. One cannot even imagine the evil of child molestation apart from the good of human sexuality and even racial genocide would be impossible without the goods of diversity, passion, and human industry. It requires creativity, imagination, and sometimes great technical skill to create an obscenity. In order to practice evil, a man must employ the instruments of good improperly; there are no instruments of pure evil. Even the devil is but a fallen angel. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is goodness spoiled. And there must be something first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted.

If this is so, then we cannot get to a perfect, un-fallen world by mere subtraction. We cannot simply remove all the bad things because bad is not a thing at all but something good which been taken out of context. Thus, things we think of as intrinsically good (like sexuality) can be taken out of proper context to form evil and even things we think of as intrinsically evil (like death) are shown to be the soil in which good grows. Good is stronger than evil. It is more substantial, more real, closer to God, who is reality itself.

Lewis writes earlier in the same book:

Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

Our culture may now be making a tremendous racket by playing the notes at the wrong times, in the wrong combinations, and in the wrong way. However, to make music again, we cannot simply memorize a set of notes or remove the notes that sound bad. We must learn to play. We must become musicians. Certainly, for a time, for the young or immature, we may prescribe the notes and guard young hands from venturing onto the black keys too soon, but that is with the intent that the whole instrument should be one day be played, in full and in harmony. For a time, we may tell our little children to stay away from fire, but there is a day also in which we must teach them to cook.

Put another way, the Christian’s stance toward culture is that of a farmer. There may be no animal, plant or substance which is altogether inappropriate, but its placement is crucial. Weeds in the meadow are healthy, but they shall not be allowed in the garden. Deer in the forest are beautiful, but they cannot eat from the stables. The trouble we are now in and the reason so-called Christian Culture suffers many of the same disfunction’s as it’s secular counterparts is that we have lost this farmers sensibility for appropriateness and place.

We have been conditioned to think this whole conversation is about legalism and libertarianism, and I’m afraid that by bringing up the Pharisees earlier on, I am implicit in the error. However, the frame is misleading. The danger of excluding a part of our culture that is good (although perverted) is not merely that it creates a law that leads us away from grace (although that is a grave danger). The real danger is that we will have removed a part of God’s image and with it truths that he would have us learn and share. In a fallen world, amputation is sometimes necessary to prevent gangrene from spreading – “It is better to enter life crippled or maimed…” – but even better to set the twisted limb in proper orientation to the body, the body in proper orientation to the spirit and the spirit in proper orientation to the one who made every last Matryoshka doll. In short, the Christian’s orientation towards culture must be that of restoration – of redemption rather than separation, of listening. Listening amid the wreckage and confusion of a culture gone mad for the haunting and sacred music that the madness still makes.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

If one takes for a starting point that man is a creature living in a natural environment, then our world, our selves, our culture, even our god, are just the product of a long progression of environmental accommodations and ever more advanced physiological constructs. According to this interpretation, we are adapted organisms amidst a milieu of other interconnected adaptations. Everything that we consider good and bad (even good and bad themselves) are merely causally-connected chemical responses to our environment. The desire to write such that others might understand has its source in the gene mutations intended to adapt me as an organism better to you as an organism and better to the world as my environment. If I dislike popcorn or if I think my children are beautiful, then it must be for biologically-relevant reasons. If men find blondes more attractive, then it must be because of reproductive efficiency. If blondes find aggressive men more attractive, it must be because of higher infant survivability. You see, in the modern view, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. There can be no disaster within this understanding. No lostness. No fall. No pitching forward into the abyss of our own self-consciousness. In the modern naturalistic view, we have the self and its culture (its environment) perfectly understood. We have pinned man down like a bug in an insect collection. We have named him, classified him, studied him, and dissected him. He is no longer a mystery. We know where he came from and where he is going.

Evidence that Something is Wrong

If humankind is just another creature among many other creatures, then we are certainly the most maladapted. On a typical day, we don’t feel like the mockingbird on the wing or the squirrel digging for nuts, or the deer chewing clover. We don’t feel like an organism in an accommodating environment; we feel like something is wrong. Sometimes only partially and cosmetically wrong and sometimes deeply wrong, but always wrong. And furthermore, the more we seem to know about humans, the less we seem to know about ourselves. It comes as no surprise to us to hear of economists declaring personal bankruptcy, or marriage councilors seeking divorce, or nutritionists struggling with drug addiction, or psychologists going crazy. We perform surgeries on the heart but use the heart to love the wrong person, we retire at sixty but hate retirement even more than we hated work. We are idiot savants, calculating the expansion rate of the universe but stumped by the intractable problem of our own expanding waistlines.

In other words, we are living in the most therapeutic century in the history of the human race, in the most therapeutic country in all the world, and yet are not happy. How could this be? How can an organism live in an environment that is ideally suited to it and yet fail to find it suitable. In the natural world (and we are supposed to be part of the natural world), there is no concept of being engaged, well-fed, well-mated, and safe while also being depressed, frustrated, and bored, and yet we find ourselves in this predicament all the time. And some of the people with the most accommodating environments (movie stars, trust fund kids, rock icons, Russian oligarchs, etc.) seem to make themselves and others the most miserable.

Something must be terribly wrong. Maybe wrong with us (we could be broken animals) or with our environment, but something is wrong. It is profoundly ironic that the same people who argue most adamantly that our consciousness is the result of chance mutations are the first to suggest some intentional, creative treatment for our maladaptation to our world. Nature isn’t supposed to produce maladaptation, or if it does, it’s supposed to fix it by chance, not through our intervention.

Killing Ourselves

Perhaps the most telling symptom of this strangeness is the troubling tendency of human beings, even human beings in accommodating environments, to take their own lives. Many other animals engage in risky behavior. My dog growing up thought it an adrenaline rush to chase automobiles. This I would equate to other strange human activities such as base jumping, free climbing, and the like, but however closely associated with death these activities might be, they are not suicide. About 80 of the 380 odd (I choose this word deliberately) people who have attempted to summit K2 died trying, but all 380 intended to reach the summit and come down alive. Jumping off a cliff with a parachute is crazy, but it is jumping without the chute which is suicide and suicide is often not crazy. The thrill seeker jumps off a cliff with a chute confident he will live but the suicide jumps off a cliff without a chute confident he will die. The latter has a better grasp on reality.

In some cases, animals engage purposely in activities that can only end in death. Salmon, for instance, die soon after struggling upstream to spawn. This kind of death, however, is a byproduct of some other purpose (such as mating, giving birth, protecting the hive, etc). the analogue in the human realm might be the soldier leaping onto the hand grenade to save his comrades or the mother choosing an anguishing and terminal labor to save her unborn child. This too, is far removed from suicide. The purpose of death in these instances is the preservation of life, albeit in others.

In the few cases that come closest to suicide in the animal world, what really appears to be going on is some normal animal instinct going haywire. This may be paralleled in the human world by addictions, eating disorders, and the like. Here the lines become dim, for many of these patterns lead one to desire death. However, The desire to be thin or be high, or to scratch an itch that is not there is not the desire for death even though the failure to attain these things may lead to that desire or cause death inadvertently.

In the animal world, death is never, as far as I know, selected as a bald choice, devoid of other physical benefits to oneself, one’s associates or progeny. We may excuse the suicide when the choice is made in the midst of real adversity or to avoid an equally certain death by some other means. The troubling thing about many human suicides, however, is that the desire for death appears to be the only sign that something is wrong; death is chosen for reasons which the naturalists tell us do not exist.

While not a perfect indicator, a few statistics (from gapminder.org) will, I believe, make this picture a little clearer. When we analyze global statistics comparing average income per person with average life expectancy, a clear trend emerges. Those countries with the highest incomes generally have the highest life expectancy. Furthermore, there is a smooth downward gradient in average life expectancy as one moves down the global income brackets. This is to be expected. Richer countries generally have better healthcare, more advanced sanitation systems, more nutritious food and superior emergency response. One must factor in a few outlying factors such as increased obesity among some rich countries, but for the most part, the correlation is solid: Increased income equates to longer life through the improved services that wealth affords.

However, when one compares the same X axis (Income per person) with the average suicide rate per country, all correlation disappears. Suddenly Ethiopia with an average per person income of less than $1,000 per year is equal with the United States with an average income of over $40,000. Russia, with an average income of over $10,000 has a suicide rate that is ten times that of the Philippines with an average yearly income of only about $3,000. The implications are staggering. What this data seem to indicate is that income plays little or no part in our level of contentment. Even with longer life, better food, improved education, expanded opportunity, and access to the finest psychologists (in short, all the things money can buy) we kill ourselves at approximately the same rate.

One may justly argue that suicide, while an indicator of contentment and happiness, is not an absolute indicator. It is a good point. One could imagine another chart correlating income per person to reported levels of “happiness”, “life contentment”, “personal satisfaction” or the like that followed the same smooth upward progression with income that life expectancy does. However, these measures, however valid for the sake of study, do not measure what people do but what they say. Since we have not yet invented a machine that can test levels of happiness in the human soul, we can only ask the individual to self-report how he or she feels. It may be only natural to report being happy if one is in the upper income brackets simply because one feels as though he or she has no obvious reason to be sad. It is hard to imagine a movie star sitting down to an interview by his half-acre pool, sipping twenty-year-old scotch and answering that he feels miserable and frustrated. Suicide, on the other hand, is what people do regardless of what they say. If the movie star answers the reporter that he has never been happier, but the next week is found dead from pain killers, we know which data to believe.

A Self in a World

Why might this be? how has it come to pass that in all we have come to understand about humankind, we have somehow failed to understand what makes us content. In an hour of careful study, any one of us could pick up a book and learn enough on the subject of equestrian husbandry to raise reasonably healthy and happy horses, horses which would not frustrate themselves or others and which would certainly not take their own lives. But our own happiness, which we presumably have had a lifetime of experience cultivating, remains an enigma. And how is it that the hardest person to content, among the billions of people in the world, is myself, whom I presumably understand better than anyone or anything else.

The answer has to do, as Walker Percy describes in Lost in the Cosmos (a book I am greatly indebted to), with the way the human self responds to its world in comparison with the way an organism responds to its environment:

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did  Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor?

The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

The organism is needy or not needy accordingly as needs are satisfied or not satisfied by its environment.

The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self.

What Percy means by “world” is the sum total of ones consciousness. George Washington is not part of my environment, but he is an important part of my conscious world, helping to inform what kind of person I am. It is these mental associations that form my sense of self. “Liberty”, “revolution”, and “independence” are not part of my environment (I have not touched, tasted, smelled, or seen or heard them), but they are very much a part of my world. Through the ages, these particular elements of consciousness have given millions of people a reason to live, have been the cause for which millions more have willingly died, and doubtless the perceived absence of such elements has caused many more to take their own lives. All of this commotion for a set of attributes that do not exist in our environment but only in the world of our conscious awareness.

When Percy says that the self is rich if it can succeed in identifying itself and poor if it cannot, what he is getting at is that what makes a person’s world (their conscious self) healthy is not his or her environment, but the extent to which the elements of the person’s consciousness form a cohesive and comprehensible whole. This is not to say that the physical world does not matter. Every aspect of the physical world and especially the relationships with other people invade the conscious world of the self. It is simply to say that there is not a one-to-one correlation between what we encounter temporally and how we process that information consciously or spiritually. An animal dies when it’s environment no longer adequately supports it. A person takes her own life when her world no longer makes sense to her.

The Self and the Soul

C.S. Lewis suggested in Miracles that almost the whole of Christian doctrine could be inferred from our embarrassment at bawdy jokes (finding ourselves embarrassing and funny), and our dismay at a dead body (Finding body without consciousness frightening and uncanny). To Chimpanzees nothing is bawdy, shameful, or uncanny. Other animals (at least as far as we can tell) only look out into their environment. We humans, however, are constantly looking in on ourselves, finding ourselves funny, confused, embarrassed, conflicted, and artificial. This last attribute is crucial, for it strikes at the heart of our predicament. As humans, we are constantly observing ourselves from an outside objective viewpoint and concluding that we are somehow not being ourselves. Your dog is always herself, but you are often only playing a part for the audience of your family, friends, or even yourself. Sometimes we sense the roles we play for others are artificially negative: “When I snapped at you, I wasn’t myself. I was so tired…”. Sometimes the roles we play are artificially positive: “I’m so happy you could come. No, you’re not interrupting anything…”. We can probably name someone who thinks we are a better or a different person than we are or thinks that we like their company more than we do. When we consider it closely, it is likely that each person we know has a different idea of who we are and in most of these ideas we can see shades of truth and bits of error. What is most troubling is that we seem unable to successfully arbitrate the dispute. We don’t know any better than others who we are and we sometimes know a lot less.

The reason Lewis says that this absurd state of affairs makes Christianity intelligible is that the central claim of Christianity as to our plight is that the self has been severed from its source of selfhood by the fall, establishing a boundary condition between the self (the soul) and itself (body) that results in endless self-inflicted frustration. To use the language of the scriptures:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

In the beginning, our selves were wrapped up in God. We were, in fact, his children. It was the vine of God’s being that allowed the branches to flourish. Cut off from this source, the self has no other source of grounding.

The Vacuous Soul

All of this is rather esoteric. All we seem to have established is that human’s are complicated and sometimes irrational – hardly a new idea. It seems far-fetched to surmise that grasping the rift between soul and body at the fall of humanity can inform our understanding of modern cultural activities, such as attending a movie or choosing a coffee table, but even our coffee tables betray a certain psychosis, as Percy points out in the same book mentioned previously:

In a recent issue of a home-and-garden magazine, and article listed fifty ways to make a coffee table.

One table was made of an old transom of stained glass supported by an antique brass chandelier cut ingeniously to make the legs.

Another was a cypress stump, waxed and highly polished.

Another was a big spool used for telephone cable set on end.

Another was a lobster trap

Another was a Coca-Cola sign propped on Coke crates.

Another was a stone slab from an old morgue, the brood runnel used as an ash tray.

Another was a hayloft door set on cut-down sawhorses.

Another was the hatch of a sailboat mounted on halves of ships’ wheels.

Another was a cobbler’s bench.

Not a single one was a table designed as such, that is, a horizontal member with four legs.

Question: Why was not a single table designed as such rather than being a non-table doing duty as a table?

(a) Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.

(b) Because the fifty non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.

(c) Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.

(d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like the vacuole, only succeeding in emptying them out.

Perhaps, as the scientists tell us, we are merely another animal, albeit a strange one. But if this is so, then we must explain why perhaps the strongest and most desperate of our appetites, the desire to know and name our inner selves using everything from coffee tables to symphonies, has apparently no physical source and no physical outlet. How, in a world devoid of the human soul, can one account for so much human energy being wasted simply to inform the metaphysical world of the self? What use have we for the apparitions of truth, beauty, and goodness, liberty and love which lurk inside our minds outside our environment. What use have we for the idea of a metaphysical God who made the soul and offers to knit it back together and back to himself? For that matter, what use have we for science – the method of rational inquiry – or naturalism – the long line of discursive reasoning claiming everything seen and unseen is natural in origin – since these too are apparitions, ideas shared among billions of souls and yet conspicuously absent from the realm of sensation and empirical study? One cannot find a single “therefore” in the natural world but only in the mind of a human.

One would like to go and visit the naturalist in her home and sit down to discuss this strangest of all animals. Perhaps over a cup of coffee she could explain why it is that she has chosen to dress as she does, furnish her home as she has, volunteer at the shelter, spend her time in extended rational inquiry on the most paltry of physical artifacts, and what each of these facets of life mean to her, how they inform her sense of self. One would listen and sip, petting the naturalist’s dog which she has named and which comes when one calls, can sit and roll over, and knows fully and clearly what it is and that coffee tables are for chewing.

A Cultural Disaster

As we approached the gate departing Amsterdam for Kiev, we could feel around us that something had changed. The faces around us were hard and darkened, unsmiling and immovable, untrusting and suspicious, the collars of dark coats upturned not against the cold but against each other. It was as if each person were a fortress, closely guarding love, sorrow, pain, and any sort of weakness lest another come and steal away what little source of satisfaction remained to her. We did not understand the words spoken among the passengers. Words offer a window into one’s emotions, even when spoken in a foreign tongue, but the passengers spoke few words. What they did speak seemed intended to end conversation rather than invite it. Perhaps it was an eccentricity of the language. Some languages sound harsher than others. Or perhaps the language had, over many years, begun to sound harsh because of how it was spoken. We sat silently, apprehensively, guardedly feeling as though we were about to enter the site of some great cataclysm.

Days later, we found ourselves driving north through the icy windswept countryside little knowing where we came from or where we were going. The snow blew in delirious flurries past our frost-encrusted windows and drifted into little crests along the plowed edges of vast black and white fields. They lay fallow and ominous, blasted by the cold and scraped by the driving snow. The sky above was a silver grey, adding neither light nor color to this monochromatic world. In the summer the fields would sprout and the sky would shimmer. By autumn, these fields would shine like gold beneath pale blue skies, just as the gold and blue of the Ukrainian flag. But the harvest was many months away and the cold and white and black were here now, enfolding us like death.

As we drove through this mortuary of summertimes, we saw every now and then long low barns break the contact between land and sky at the crests of the hills. Their peeling, grey, whitewashed walls were set off in skeletal angles from the ground punctuated by empty black sockets of broken glass windows. Built to house enough golden grain to feed ten nations, they are now only the weathered gravestones of one nation’s youthful hope. They are the emptied husks of mans’ industry after that industry has gone mad and begun to rabidly feed upon its master – after the millstone slips from it’s axis and crushes the miller.

All of that was eighty years ago, but the stench of death still lingers. It was then that the Thousanders arrived. Before they came, life was poor, but it was also happy. The thatched roofs of Ukrainian villagers might only cover a couple of rooms and a clay floor, but the floors were warn smooth with dancing and the rooms were open to family, neighbors, and strangers alike. A few acres, a few vegetables, a few chickens, and perhaps a cow or horse. It was all one needed. That, and a town square full of fellow villagers with which to make music and drink moonshine and make merry. In the summer came the plowing and seeding and harvesting and in the winter came warm fires and stories. The cries in the street were from young children sledding gleefully down snow-covered hillsides.

But in 1929, the Thousanders came, and with them a mandate from Stalin himself. Small farms were to join together into large collective farms and small villages were to join together into one collective state. Twenty-five thousand officials sent out into every corner of Ukraine performed this work with loyalty and precision. Of course, most farmers resisted, but they were as grains of wheat struggling upstream against a flood. They made explanation and the explanations were good. They had worked their own land for a generation, for two, for three, for four, and wished to remain as they were, to pass the soil they had tended down to their sons and their grandsons. But what were such narrow longings when the dawn of a new age of men was at hand? When the good of all mankind was taking root and was growing south, south from Russia toward the Black Sea. The farmer was ordered to answer for his foolishness and what answer could be made. The farmer must come before the official at night and answer, but he had no answer and so the official would berate him for his selfishness, for his insubordination to the great cause:

Stand and do not sit and answer, and if you have no answer, then walk. Walk to the next official as the cold deepens and the snow begins to fall. Perhaps the next official will listen to your petty reasons or perhaps he will send you out again through the cold, knee-deep in snow to the next official. Perhaps you will come back to me tomorrow and make the same answers and walk the same cold paths.

The loose parochial structure of village government did not fit into the larger mechanism of the soviet state, and so it was replaced, with the Thousanders at the regional apex of a strict hierarchy. The Thousanders were responsible for the collective farms. They must fill the quotas imposed on them from above. But the Thousanders hands were not creased from labor and they could not sooth a horse with the sound of their voice. The farmers worked as the Thousanders directed, but it was not as before and the land suffered. It did not yield as it once had, but the quotas must be met. Not only met, but increased every year.

The golden grain which was the lifeblood of rural Ukraine grew weakly and much of what did grow was loaded into freight cars and sent north to the throbbing hub of empire. Starvation crept in but still more grain was required. Soviet officials in the Bread Procurement Commission prowled from house to house looking for signs of hoarded grain. Smoke from a chimney was one such sign. Perhaps the fire was used to bake bread or cook porridge out of wheat intended to fill the state’s quota. Often the commission would find only the dead, emaciated bodies of peasant farmers huddled around their last source of warmth, watched from the dark corners of the little house by the lifeless, hungry, longing eyes of the children they had watched starve. Still the Commission searched on.

The villagers were often recruited as officials and asked to spy on their fellow villagers. The neighbor whom you grew up with might report you to the Thousanders for keeping a cow or a garden. Doors that once opened to strangers closed to friends and family. There was food aplenty to the north, but travel there was forbidden. Soon, even the nightingale (the symbol of Ukrainian nationalism) was being hunted by villagers for food or killed by Soviet officials for sport. Every emotion was looked at suspiciously.

By this means, in only four years, the Soviet Union achieved the decimation of Ukrainian village life. Interdependence was turned into subservience to the party line. Hospitality was turned into suspicion and paranoia, the kind farmer who once offered his hill for sledding stayed alive through the famine by feeding on the flesh of the children who trusted him. The Ukrainian identity as individual, village, and nation was almost completely destroyed. The Ukrainian villagers no longer knew who they were.

A Lost Culture

In Ukraine the scars of Soviet brutality have not healed. Still present is the fear and paranoia bred from systematized terror and still absent are open smiles and open doors. How is one to recover from the legacy of state-sponsored starvation? How does one regain one’s cultural footing when it has been so thoroughly destroyed?

The Soviet regime introduced not only new forms of action into these rural villages, but new forms of knowledge as well, and it is the legacy of this knowledge, rather than the legacy of Soviet actions that still forms scar tissue over the Ukrainian soul. The cultural footing that has been destroyed in Ukraine is ideological, and for it to be replaced, some of what has been learned must be unlearned.

When a culture is lost, it may seem at first as though something has merely been forgotten, but that is not exactly it. If something is forgotten, then it can be remembered, but a loss of culture cannot be so easily remedied. One might hit closer to the mark by saying that the loss of culture is a loss of knowledge; that once it is lost, the bereaved no longer knows as he once knew. In this predicament remembrance is insufficient, for one might remember who one was without regaining current self-knowledge. I can remember that I was a child, but I can no longer know myself as a child, feel the same emotions, have the same internal assurances. I can no longer believe that a kiss will heal my wounds. One might urge the Ukrainians to dress in the old garb and speak with the old language and live in the old way, but what they once knew of themselves they no longer know. The outward form of a lost culture may be easily reconstructed, but its inward substance cannot. This is because the inward substance involves a way of knowing, or sometimes of not knowing, that has been lost. And so the exiled soul searches and searches for home, but on finding it is unable to walk the old pathways with the same settled lack of self-consciousness.

At the center of the Soviet ideology was a reductionism born from assumed objectivity. In other words, the Soviet Union was born of a system of thought masquerading as the system of thought and forcing the subcategories of reality into the subcategories of a systematic ideology. A country is a broad idea having to do with land and customs, heritage and beliefs, loyalty and allegiance, but a state is a narrow idea including only selective components convenient to the sovereign of the state. It is not the terms that are important: state or country; what is important is the reductionism of a broad concept into a narrow concept in order to fit inside the confines of a narrow ideology. Similarly, the structural hierarchy that the Soviet Union imposed upon Ukrainian village government had little to do with the organic structure of people living in community. Instead of leadership emerging out of hard-won respectability, it was imposed from above with no regard to the particular and unique governmental needs of the village. The village, in fact, had only a conceptual definition, but such a loose definition did not fit the model of an organized state. The rigid stratification imposed on village government was not a servant to the village but to the larger state, which without such structure at the local and regional level could not have functioned at its center. Furthermore, the nuanced relationships of friends, spouse, and child were also redefined in a much more selective fashion in the Soviet Union. Since each individual’s primary loyalty was to the state and its large-scale aims, the particular provincial relationships had, of necessity, to be placed in tight strictures. Even the spiritual bond which the peasant farmer felt with the land he had long tended was replaced with a rigid and unyielding reductionism of land to the productive unit.

Looking again at contemporary Ukrainian culture, one can see the influence of these ideological forms continuing to bind the Ukrainian mindset. One might even posit that the dearth of Ukrainian adoptive parents is due to the Soviet-style recategorization of fatherless children into the more convenient packaging of orphan. It may be hard to learn, but it is even harder to unlearn what has been so thoroughly inculcated.

A Definition of Culture

I do not think that the sensibilities of most people would be offended if I proposed a limited definition of culture as an environment in which people flourish. In other words, human culture is intended to enable people to be themselves, but moreso: More loving, more musical, more creative, more productive, more virtuous. One could easily describe as the opposite of this an environment in which people are less than themselves: Less loving, less musical, less creative, less productive, less virtuous. The aspects of culture may vary, but what sets a good culture apart from a bad one, or at least gives us a basis for comparison, is the degree to which a culture brings out what is truly human or good in us and suppresses what is inhuman or evil.

Problems With Culture

It would seem that we have cracked the nut and all that is left is picking at the bits of shell. We must simply construct a model for human culture that allows ourselves to flourish. We can establish programs for the arts, systems for production, planning institutes for creativity, and universities devoted to the pursuit of virtue.

It is at this juncture that we encounter a problem, and it is the same problem that the Communists encountered in reformulating the Soviet culture. The problem is that as soon as we attempt to look at culture objectively and put in place practical, tangible means for its improvement, we begin down the same reductionism as that practiced by the Soviets. If we place ourselves over and above culture as its architects and planners, then the culture we create takes on the limitations of our own imagination and understanding. We begin to say things like “all we need is…” and “creativity is merely…” and from there begin to turn whole, organic systems of human experience and endeavor into neatly defined holding pens which contain only a fraction of the materials necessary to meet our goal of human flourishing.

Furthermore, from this objective vantage point, standing over and above culture as it’s examiner we are unable to enter into culture ourselves. We find ourselves aliens and strangers to the very object we intended to improve. It is the peculiar aspect of culture that it can only be experienced from the inside. If one is aware of culture as culture, then for him, it ceases to be culture. As soon as one adopts a vantage point exterior to culture by which to analyze its operation, one can no longer be nourished by it. The reason this is the case brings us back to the elements of human flourishing. In order for us to excel in love, we must not be mindful of ourselves as lovers or of love as a medium between ourselves and the beloved. If two people are in love, they are by definition, extended toward each other in their thoughts, actions, and emotions. They are not thinking of themselves at all, but of the other person. To the extent that their focus shifts away from the beloved to the emotions aroused by the beloved or to the way the beloved makes them act, it is to that extent that they have fallen out of love. This is the same for two lovers as it is for any relationship. If the content of the relationship is centered in the self, then it is mere solipsism. Love is centered in others. Similarly, in order to excel in art, in creativity, in production, or in virtue, then the center of operation must be located outside the self. One must think of melody while making music and one must be concerned with wood while making furniture. Thinking of oneself destroys by degrees our ability to flourish as does thinking of the subject of our activity as merely a thing rather than encountering it as something unique and irreplaceable. Even taking part in custom must be done unconsciously. If we are self-conscious of our role-playing in cultural customs and festivals, then we have not fully entered into these enjoyments. We are on the outside of culture, inside our own heads, analyzing our part in the drama like an anthropologist taking part in a primitive tribal ritual all the while taking mental notes for her dissertation. It is the culture that the anthropologist is not aware of that she is really a part of.

This dynamic is strange and paradoxical. It is strange because we have come to believe that it is from the objective vantage point of rational, disinterested observation that we can come to know things truly and it is the plain fact that such a vantage point destroys our ability to know anything or anyone. Either we will reduce the thing to a shell of its former splendor for the purposes of examination and classification or else, like love when it is studied in isolation, it will disappear under our scrutiny. It is from within the context of culture that we can learn and grow but we are somehow barred from full entry by our own psyche just as surely as the Ukrainian of today cannot reenter the village life of the 1920’s. We are all anthropologists, taking from one culture to augment another, entering into festivals self-conscious of our image and role. We are analysts  and scientists more than participants. Watching a modern person’s involvement with culture is like watching a fugitive, running from activity to activity, seeking enrichment and relationship as if sampling hors d’oeuvres, staring at love until it disappears. It is as if we are a child in a funhouse, going from mirror to mirror to see what we look like with no one to tell us definitively which mirror is true.

I have described this as a modern problem. It is so, but it is more than that. When we look at the history of humankind and our unending wars, domestic strife, the meanness and frustration, the upheavals and rebellions, the sexual exploitation and racial hatred, we can see the fugitive running long before we were born, always seeking to enter into relationship, purpose, and festival and always expelled by his own objective self-consciousness and reduction of whole truths to partial systems.

A Lost Father

It is only in this light that the words of scripture become explicable. While we assume that we are full participants in human culture, at home in the human world as a deer is at home in the forest, then all the talk of fallenness and sin seems overblown. When we see, however, the extent of our disconnectedness from our own kind, not to mention our own selves, from a stable sense of purpose and a fulfillment in our occupations, then the scriptures may be heard for the first time. For the message of scripture is that not merely one particular culture has crumbled beneath our feet, but the substrata of all culture. We have fallen fundamentally and irrevocably. We can never reenter the primordial cultural soil from which we grew for that soil was the familial relationship with the Father who formed us and breathed us into existence, and whom we have offended and spurned. In the beginning, we knew ourselves, we knew others, and we knew our Father. We flourished because our self-knowledge was so sure and so thorough that the self could be forgotten and our attentions focused elsewhere. Then a catastrophe of our own making swept all of that away and all we knew was that we were naked and afraid.

The particular nature of the catastrophe was one of overreach. We knew so much, but we lusted after the kind of overarching, objective knowledge of all things that only our Father possessed. Not content to know in part and let our relationship with the Father supply the substrate into which our knowledge must lodge, we broke free and found ourselves floating, unable to comprehend the whole, but always believing that we have glimpsed it and must pass judgement on the parts based on our flawed vision. Our knowledge was Godlike in kind but not in scope and we have been swinging it wildly ever since, its misapplication serving alternately to destroy our cultures or to exclude us from them.

And yet. And yet despite our cultural rootlessness, we still have a sense of place, as if our feet know the steps to a dance long after our minds have forgotten the tune. As we look around us we see others dancing too, and their feet follow the same patterns, in step with music everyone has forgotten. “How can this be?” we think, and yet it is. The pagan world sways and twirls to the silent tune of sacred music. This gives us hope. Hope that in remembrance of the dance the tune also might one day be recovered, and with the tune the old way of knowing and the the former relationship with our Father.

Cultural Orphans

The severance from our Father was violent and traumatic and we are still shaken. We cannot reenter Eden any more than we can reenter childhood. We are an orphaned culture, always seeking and never finding, hunting about for something, anything to inform our sense of self and make us whole, to connect us with the means of human flourishing. It is a fruitless pursuit, made the more fruitless by our attempts to enter into culture through objective analysis. But if the scriptures are to be believed, then our Father offers us a new childhood via a new life lived by means of another son’s unbroken relationship. He offers us a new way of knowing, or rather a way of giving up the knowledge we had no business grasping and stepping down from our isolated, objective perch. We cannot come back to the Father in our life, but another life is offered.