Here is an old account of creation and our place in it.
The palaces of princes are not beautified and adorned, to the intent men should pay their respects and honors to the walls, but to shew the grandeur and magnificence of the king, to whose person their honor is due … The world is a glorious and magnificent pile, raised designedly to exhibit the wisdom and power of its Creator to the reasonable creature man, that from him God might receive the glory of all his other works … This creature man, the masterpiece of all the visible world, [was] therefore crowned king over it the first moment he was made.
Humankind was formed of “vile and despicable dust,” and “the consideration is humbling, and serves to tame the pride of man, who is apt to dote upon his own beauty.” Yet it redounds to the skill and wisdom of the Creator, “who out of such mean, despicable materials, has fashioned so exact and elegant a piece.”
But “the soul is the most wonderful and astonishing piece of divine workmanship; it is no hyperbole to call it the breath of God, the beauty of men, the wonder of angels, and the envy of devils. One soul is of more value than all the bodies in the world.”
This is from A Treatise of the Soul of Man, written in the mid-seventeenth century by the English Puritan John Flavel. I found Reverend Flavel in a footnote to Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. I have both felt and sought out the influence of this tradition of Christianity, partly for its wisdom and loveliness and learning, partly because it illustrates endlessly that very much of what we think we know is in fact only the husk of old polemic. Puritans are said to have hated life, the flesh, the world—as heretics were always said to. Their writings, far from supporting this notion of them, are rich with humanist thought and with celebrations of human perception and experience. Crucially, for them beauty is a mode of divine address, a signifier of divine intention. The world is filled with sunlight, the heavens are filled with stars, our bodies are exact and elegant, and in all this the sacredness of creation is manifest, there for us to see because our senses and minds are formed to apprehend it and glory in it. For purposes of comparison, modern anthropologies are silent on the subject of beauty except in those cases where, by their lights, it rationalizes the selection of mates. What they do not acknowledge they always exclude. In Edwards, the sense of beauty is the profoundest experience of consciousness, capable of a vision of the divine that is pure of any sense of self. He says, “God’s nature, or the divinity, is infinitely excellent; yea ’tis infinite beauty, brightness, and glory itself. But how can that be true love of this excellent and lovely nature, which is not built on the foundation of its true loveliness? How can that be true love of beauty and brightness, which is not for beauty and brightness sake?” And, “A true saint, when in the enjoyment of true discoveries of the sweet glory of God and Christ, has his mind too much captivated and engaged by what he views without himself, to stand at that time to view himself, and his own attainments: It would be a diversion and loss which he could not bear, to take his eye off from the ravishing object of his contemplation, to survey his own experience…”
So, my Puritan tells me, humankind is the masterpiece of the visible world. This is an aesthetic judgment, though it refers to all our gifts and competences. And the soul is the beauty of men. We see sacredness in one another in a particular beauty that, in the manner of sacred things, is identical with a great truth. This thought is beautiful and true to our best experience. I do not propose to argue for the truth of religion by storming the heavens, by arguing from design or offering ontological proofs. These things are meaningful only to those who are predisposed to finding them meaningful. There is a much stronger argument to be made, beginning from Calvin’s descent into the self, where, he says, one will find unmistakable marks of divinity. The soul, being both radically individual and universal among human beings, is an inexhaustible revelation of one’s own nature and of the nature of every other soul who has lived, lives, and will live. The concept of the soul is the profoundest possible bond among us, an unshakable basis for compassion, recognition, and love, which, acknowledged, would enable us to love enemies, welcome strangers, and all the rest.
And then there is the dignity and joy, the heightening of consciousness, that comes with the thought that each of us participates so deeply in ultimate reality. Flavel says this about language:
Other creatures have apt and elegant organs; birds can modulate the air, and form it into sweet, delicious notes and charming sounds; but no creature, except man, whose soul is of an heavenly nature and extraction, can articulate the sound, and form it into words, by which the notions and sentiments of one soul are in a noble, apt and expeditious manner conveyed to the understanding of another soul.
Something true is said here. Surely all of us have, at some moment, been moved by a bad poem, or the memory of an old song, or by a confession of guilt or love, even when we might not entirely trust the speaker. Theories that see language as basically functional do not account for its complex power, its ability to touch the soul, so to speak.
These theories tend to be based on speculations about the motives and behavior of our remotest ancestors, of whom we know very little indeed and are liable to misinterpreting the very little we do know. The approach may or may not make sense, but it certainly means these speculations are unconstrained except by the preferences of their formulators. In any case, a supposed original simplicity tends to be interpreted in such contexts as meaning that simplicity persists as the essential character of whatever is in question. Language is “really” a system of signals used to maximize self-interest. High achievement of whatever kind is “really” a ploy for attracting mates. Human beings are “really” primates with hypertrophic brains. Presumably the manifest complexity of all these things is an accretion of simplicities, which never yields qualitative change.
This makes complexity epiphenomenal, a distraction from primary reality. But in fact complexity is totally pervasive. Consider the nucleus of an atom, or rather, consider as we can whatever it is we have tagged with names like nucleus and atom. A void is scintillant with matter and antimatter. Simplicity exists only as an idea, the abstract of a cursory reading of the given world. So by what miracle could it be essential to anything? Early evolutionary theory was bolstered by European encounters with simple people speaking simple languages, so they thought—a catastrophic error of interpretation that lives on in these theories about the primal origins of human traits and behaviors.
How to find a way to reconceive virtually everything. How to rid our worldview of a systematic fault in our thinking, which leads us to disallow the universe of things its terms will not accommodate. This is a difficult problem. I propose that we consult earlier writers, that we consider a cultural moment more inclined to hyperbole than to reductionism. For those who can do so in good faith, I propose a return to theist realism, by which I mean attention to the world as it is, without reductionist translation and transvaluation. To do so would be to reanimate the aesthetic vocabulary my Puritans made such free use of. If we adopt their view, that through our minds and senses we participate in absolute reality, then beauty, elegance, or charm, which we perceive as attentively as any other information, and which we replicate with remarkable nuance and fluency, is acknowledged as an active element in creation. Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality, and we are an essential part of it, bringing to it our singular gifts of reflection and creation.
Which terms, in these few sentences, would the prevailing model of reality disallow? Minds, first of all. Singular gifts, certainly. Reflection by this or any other name is not a thing I have seen mentioned in the literature. Surely experience is the test for the meaningfulness of such language. Do we reflect? My Puritan considers a lovely image of the fusion of body and soul and rejects it in order to intensify it. Until death, he says, body and soul are even more indissoluble than light from space. Does the brain process this image? Or does the mind reflect on it? I have lived from birth wit
h space and light, as we all do, and had never considered how they exist together. My mind is gratified by this new perception, just arrived from that distant star, the seventeenth century. Of course my particular mind has had a long training in attentiveness to figurative language and to Renaissance and Reformation thought as well. It has done the autonomic business of retaining, shelving, and discarding, which predisposes any mind to distinctive interpretation of any body of knowledge. The mind has proclivities, and a history. In fact, the mind is a history. In excluding it from acknowledged reality, the prevailing anthropology excludes our most defining experience of ourselves. This is consistent with the growing consensus that we have no selves. It is amazing how we disappear.
My theistic realism is vastly more capacious, and notoriously anthropocentric. I will quote at some length from Flavel, to demonstrate Christian humanism in full flight.
The soul has in itself an intrinsic worth and excellency, worthy of that divine Original whence it sprang: view it in its noble faculties, and durable powers, and it will appear to be a creature upon which God has laid out the riches of his wisdom and power.
There you shall find a mind susceptive of all light, both natural and spiritual, shining as the candle of God in the inner man, closing with truth, as the iron does with the attractive loadstone; a shop in which all arts and sciences are laboured and formed; what are all the famous libraries and monuments of learning, but so many systems of thoughts, laboured and perfected in the active inquisitive minds of men? Truth is its natural and delectable object; it pursues eagerly after it, and even spends itself and the body too in the chase and prosecution of truth, when it lies deep, as a subterranean treasure, the mind sends out innumerable thoughts, reinforcing each other in thick successions, to dig for, and compass that invaluable treasure, if it be disguised by misrepresentation and vulgar prejudice, and trampled in the dirt under that disguise, there is an ability in the mind to discern it by some lines and features, which are well known to it, and both own, honour, and vindicate it under all that dirt and obloquy, with more respect than a man will take up a piece of gold, or a sparkling diamond out of the mire: it searches after it by many painful deductions of reason and triumphs more in the discovery of it, than in all earthly treasures; no gratification of sense like that of the mind, when it grasps its prey for which it hunted.
He goes on with his praise for the mind, then of will and conscience, the passions and the affections. He identifies the mind with the soul and celebrates its intellectual capacities and integrity as proof of its “divine Original.” In this he follows Calvin, elaborating on a famous passage in Institutes of the Christian Religion. Putting theology to one side, insofar as the passage permits, is he saying something true here? Is he saying something we can confirm from experience, as individuals and as sharers in the life of civilization? Is the vast conceptual space he claims for the mind necessary if a true account is to be made of it? I personally am impressed by the fact that we have sent a little spacecraft beyond the solar system. Whatever unnamed truth lies behind his words—in the next paragraph he describes the study of the heavens, as Calvin did also—his account of the mind is highly consistent with human history and culture. By comparison with this or with virtually anything that lives, the human being of the modern theoretical imagination is static as a mummy, encased in its tiny, simple repertoire of motives, oddly incapable of meaningful evolution. Again, can accretions of minor calculations of self-interest, reduced as far as theorists can manage, add up to the assertions of intellect and intention Flavel describes, assertions we see continuously throughout recorded history? Is he evoking an excitement we recognize, which is different in kind from even the most cunningly concealed motive of practical self-interest?
If our own experience of consciousness is meaningful as a basis for evaluating statements about consciousness—and why wouldn’t it be?—then recognition is an important test of any model that is presented to us. Among the remarkable human traits Flavel does not mention, and which would not set well with his rapturous humanism, is a vulnerability to accepting low valuations of ourselves as individuals and groups that then become predictive. As a girl, I expected to be terrible at math and I was. This might have been true in any case. But many studies confirm this effect in many settings. We can actually stupefy ourselves and one another. Recently an undergraduate at a major university wrote about the many voices telling his generation that they would only “live, work, and die.” I have encountered this sort of thing among students any number of times. I’m sure it has many sources, but I see no reason to ignore the effects of the kind of teaching they receive that undertakes to describe their own nature to them. Some instructors like to shock students out of a complacency that has effectively been gone from the world since they were students themselves. Without wishing to seem judgmental, I must say I find this sort of thing brutal and destructive, a little stupid, calculated to produce a cheap effect, an iconoclasm that amounts to no more than stomping the dust of icons long shattered. No doubt this annoys me more because the pretext for it is indefensible as science. In any case, there are studies showing that positive attitudes and circumstances can be enabling, and where legitimate it is surely the role and obligation of educators to provide them. Flavel and Calvin were both expressing the vision of the Renaissance, a period notable for intellectual fruitfulness.
Be that as it may.
Is there an intermediate position between the exaltation of Flavel and the extreme reductionism of contemporary theory? Flavel’s faith assumes a brilliant Creator God whose attributes dignify and sanctify the creature made to share them. Neither language nor imagination could exceed the grandeur of human nature or the worth of the individual soul. Of course they bear the marks of the Fall, “lovely and excellent” as they are all the same, “but what shall we say, how shall we conceive of it, when all spots of sin are perfectly washed off its beautiful face in heaven, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon it!” and holiness and righteousness are “super-induced upon this excellent creature!”
Do we deserve this? Can we know? The most unambiguous proof of our significance is too disheartening to be dismissed as self-aggrandizement. We should probably stop denying that we are exceptional among the creatures, now that most of us can make a list of ways we might well put an end to it all. I am not competent to speak about religions in general, but it is certainly true that Christianity has a very potent sense of the human capacity for evil. Its humanism is anchored in the doctrines of Creation and Fall, not at all paradoxically, since as an image of God the essential dignity of humankind is uncompromised by acknowledged sinfulness. This is very much more complex, therefore truer to experience, than is allowed for in the entity offered by the theorists, the unmind and unself incapable of either good or evil. And here again the participation of humankind and of the human self in ultimate reality, assumed in religious tradition, is tacitly rejected. We know that very straight lines can be drawn between human choices and the fate of the living world. Yet nothing in this anthropology suggests that there are issues of better and worse to be engaged, choices to be made that are quite starkly moral, if anything at all is of value. I note in passing that the individualism, even solipsism, sometimes associated with experiencing oneself as a soul is a conception that entails an ethic of love and service in a world of souls, an ideal as fully excluded from modern anthropologies as is the metaphysics that supports it.
We distract ourselves from powerful, ancient intuitions of the grandeur and richness of being, and of human being, with a reductionist theoretical contraption endlessly refitted in minor ways to survive the collapse of old scientific notions that have sustained it and to present itself once more as the coming thing, with the whole history and prestige of science behind it. Those intuitions, which figure in the highest thought and art civilization has produced, are faith.
HOPE
Once a minister at my church asked the congregation to reflect on their understanding of Christia
n hope. A lady so tiny with age that when she stood up her hat was just visible above the pew said, “The first thing I’ll do when I get to heaven, I’ll run and find my grandma. She loved me so much!” Her small voice crackled with anticipation. This hope of hers was almost too confident to be called hope. But our modern understanding may have impoverished its meaning somewhat. In New Testament Greek, the word translated as hope seems to have meant something closer to expectation. In any case, some homely, profoundly beautiful thing had befallen her many decades before, and so the great drama of immortality in which she trusted was for her chiefly the occasion for one highly particular hug, scented, no doubt, with laundry starch. She imagined herself running like a child through the New Jerusalem, taking no note of its splendors, avid as a child would be for one voice, one face, one touch.
Her vision is fraught with theological difficulties. What about judgment? We do give this word a darker meaning than is appropriate to it. It can mean “vindication,” “praise,” “reward,” as when the master in a parable finds a servant to be good and faithful. Nevertheless, Christians more or less assume that it is not a thing to be evaded.
The grandmother’s day of judgment might have taken into account the fact that she had figured so graciously in a child’s life that the memory had been cherished through long years, keeping her, child and woman, loyal to the hope of heaven. When the grandmother was younger and capable, by whatever tender human arts, of giving the child such utter confidence in her love, she probably had no idea that she was creating in the child a memory that could take its place among our conceptions of celestial things, even outshine them. Her reward might be—allowing as one can for the mysteries of time and timelessness—the extraordinary, endless moment of love given and returned.