Can we love and undervalue at the same time? Among those of us for whom the commandment has authority, are we fulfilling it when we are forgetful of the incomprehensible complexity—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional—of anyone we encounter? Are we indifferent to the gifts that tradition calls their likeness to God? Has our conception of God himself changed to a point where we do not see in him the brilliance that made our brilliance imply sacredness?
During Dickinson’s lifetime the antislavery movement in America made much use of this language of humanism to argue for the sanctity of every person. American historians have inflicted grievous harm on American history. The Dickinson family moved in abolitionist circles and were friends of friends of the very radical John Brown. You heard it here first. Of course, shorn of her cultural heritage and shorn of the cataclysmic history taking place around her, it might be a reasonable exercise of the imagination to see her poetry as dealing with scorned love or something of the kind, I suppose. In historical perspective, one of the great projects of our time appears to be diminution.
The sanctification of the individual—not the love of humankind in the abstract, which would be much easier, much less irksome, but of the singular neighbor, as encountered—implies to writers who embrace it radical human equality and dignity. There are traditions that would give the self priority here, since self-love is the basis and measure of love of neighbor. I prefer Calvin’s view, that the encounter is, ideally, a moment of profound recognition, in which all considerations of self would be forgotten. I see certain Christians now ready to forgive themselves and their allies for transgressiveness that amounts to nothing else than injury and insult to that sacred other. This behavior is encapsulated and denatured or sentimentalized in the little word sin. By these lights, the suffering of Christ bought his followers the right to cause suffering in their neighbor, then to repent at leisure. The universality of the divine image would encourage another reading of the verse: “Against thee and thee only have I sinned.”
It is true in any case that, lacking a humanist amazement and joy at the astonishing creature one is by virtue of being human, all those miracles of thinking and dreaming and perceiving and creating, of offering generosity and love and also accepting them—lacking all this, there can be no appropriate honor given to the other, of whom these very things are also true.
There seems to be little attention given these days to God as creator, in terms of his having put the mark of his character on his creatures. Insofar as religion is considered naïve, this is often by its association with notions of the world’s origins that are in conflict with modern science. But science can be one of those parallel narratives I spoke of earlier, true in a way, but a distraction from the main point. No doubt there are reasons, actually or potentially articulable in scientific terms, for things to be as they are. These theories, so influential now, can sound convincing—so long as human experience and the mind’s response to experience are left out of account. But there really are no intellectually respectable grounds for leaving them out of account, and no grounds for accepting as exclusively valid a parsing of us that has no language to describe or engage them.
For what should we honor and love ourselves and one another? For heart, soul, mind, and strength, for the astonishing richness of human being that enables us to enjoy our gifts and to shape them and explore them and to make more of them than we would ever have thought possible. God wants this from us and from our neighbors, whom we love when we give them courage, grant them sacredness, sustain them in thinking, inquiring, and imagining, and assure that they have the needs of the body, which frees these powers in them beloved by God.
Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition
The Annual Charles Gore Lecture at Westminster Abbey: March 7, 2017
I place the origins of modern intellectual tradition in the seventeenth century for the purposes of this discussion, granting that assertions of this kind are most useful when they are understood as provisional. The modern, however the word is understood, has been going on for a very long time, has in fact grown old in the course of its pilgrimage from the late Renaissance to the day before yesterday. Here, in brief, is my theory of how the modern period arose and how it has become another era, and in need of another name. The term postmodern doesn’t serve—it only connotes namelessness. The fact that it has not been improved upon is interesting in its own right, of course.
The modern, the era of science, arose when the Renaissance and the Reformation brought acute and positive attention to human subjectivity. The mind became a sacred space where God communed with the individual in ways that enabled thought and perception in the discovery of empirical fact. While it is difficult to imagine a purer statement of subjectivity than Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” his subjectivity is not entrapment because God permits him his perceptions, and God would not lie. Scientific inquiry in its beginnings was one mode of interaction between the human and the divine that arouses those gifts of the mind which were thought of then as proof of a human and divine bond and likeness.
Scientific method proved powerful, empiricism allayed philosophical worries about subjectivity until they were in effect forgotten, and the assumption became general that science could and sometime would explain everything, including the mind itself. So over time the mind was desacralized and the world as well, metaphysics was put aside, and science, brilliant as it was, took on the character of dispeller of myth and agent of disillusionment. There was nothing inevitable about this. In the first place, the remarkable capacities of the mind, in the Renaissance often celebrated in terms of its ability to understand the movements of the stars and planets and their relative size and distance, were spectacularly demonstrated in the emergence of vast new areas of knowledge. Yet somehow that central mystery, the ability of the mind to deeply know the physical world, ceased to be acknowledged, even as its impact on thought and culture grew continuously. The most remarkable thing about the universe, as Einstein and others have said, is that it is accessible to our understanding. Then the converse must also be true—the most remarkable thing about us is that our understanding is of a kind to find the universe accessible. A good Renaissance humanist, a Pico della Mirandola, would seize on this as proof of our central place in creation. But as science developed it put such thoughts aside. It dropped the great Renaissance fascination with our singular character as creatures who learn, devise, imagine, create. Brilliant science celebrated itself, rightly enough, but it ceased to marvel over the gifts of the singular species that invented science and has persisted in it. Humankind has fallen in its own estimation, while the notion emerged and still vigorously persists that this utterly human project is somehow inhuman. Among other things, it is usually taken to be aloof from the errors we are prone to.
Religion came to be reckoned among these errors. It began to be regarded as a crude explanatory system, an attempt to do what science actually could do, that is, account for the origins and the workings of things. And on these grounds religion came to be treated as though it had been discredited by science. Scripture, the Church Fathers, and classical theology have far other interests, yet Christianity has been earnestly and ineptly defended by some as if it really were battling science for the same terrain, as if it really were a collection of just-so stories all along, rather than the body of history, poetry, ethical instruction, and reflection—and metaphysics as well—that had deeply informed, dignified, and beautified Western civilization for so many centuries. Science has not produced social ethics or poetry. It has very little to say about history, has induced little in the way of philosophical reflection. This is nothing against it, of course. It is about other business.
But to put science in place of religion as if it were an equivalent framing of reality must necessarily entail the loss of many things that have indeed been lost. There are some transformations that are worth pausing over, simply to appreciate their strangeness. Christianity, which had shaped literatures and citi
es and regimes, had structured time and consecrated the passages of life, began to be tendentiously misrepresented, and very few seemed even to notice what was happening. This is as true now as it has ever been. And there are still the would-be loyalists who will forever insist that the Bible is in fact a collection of utterly veracious just-so stories, reinforcing the arguments of their supposed adversaries.
It is a pity that Europeans took to tramping around in the non-European world when they did, corrupting every kind of evidence while imposing their assumptions on the lives and languages of the people they found there. Notably, in their response to indigenous religions, they interpreted what passed through the dense filter of their incomprehension as primitivity, which primitivity was then widely asserted and assumed to be the basis and essence of all religion. This kind of thinking lives on among scholarly syncretists, who propose that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a composite of local gods, a little El, a little Baal, a little Marduk. These mythic eminences left literatures that are a more than sufficient refutation of the notion that they contributed attributes to the God of Israel. But where a core primitivity is assumed, their very unlikeness authenticates them.
In any case, in the course of all this there has been a radical transformation of the West’s conception of humankind. No one now would say of us “in apprehension, how like a god!” A Shakespeare returned from the grave would be astounded to learn what that apprehension has been up to, how far it has penetrated into inconceivably distant reaches of the universe, for example. Writers of his period generalized instances of brilliance to characterize man in the abstract, the human species itself. We detach human achievements from humankind, whom we are then free to consider in whatever reductionist terms might suit our purposes, recently as economic units who can only act rationally in terms of self-interest, in every interaction minimizing cost to themselves while maximizing benefit, whether consciously or unconsciously.
How like an angel.
Wars, plague, punishments designed to terrorize and appall, lethal poverty—every kind of horror was commonplace in Renaissance England. If we think we have grounds for doubting the sacredness and splendor of our species, they had better grounds. At the same time, the best that we have done, the sheer mass of it, would surely confirm them in their high estimate of human capacities. This is to say that there is no necessity behind the extreme declension our species has suffered in its own eyes.
In defense of this lower valuation, our moral failures will be enumerated. There are a great many of them, as there are in any age or generation. We may be more aware of them than earlier periods were of their own crimes and vices. If this is true, and if the case we wish to bring against ourselves might be called moral, it is interesting that we can at the same time be receptive to a model of human nature that is morally blank at best. Self-interestedness is not a trait well thought of in traditional moral systems, however demotic. That it is presented to us as uniquely and inevitably our governing motive puts an end to all the old struggles of the soul, and moots old considerations like honor or loyalty or compassion. I do not wish to imply that people are no longer moved by such considerations. But I am impressed by the authority of an idea of self and others that strips everyone of individuality and of seriousness, and of the possibility of actions that are original and free. What will Western liberalism finally mean if there really is no more to respect in citizen and stranger than this?
So if we say that the age of science began with a Renaissance awe at the power and agility of the human mind, endorsed by the faith that its brilliance was to be enjoyed and marveled at as engagement with God and likeness to him; if we have now arrived at a point where the mind and the self are frequently said not to exist, according to contemporary theory following God himself out of the universe of credible things—then it is clearly an understatement to say a tremendous inversion has taken place. The exalted mind of early science has given way to a flattening of experience that, on no actual grounds, is called modern and also scientific—this while science has made tiny earth a seraphic eye that turns every way, looking always farther and deeper into the strange, surging cosmos.
* * *
I have presented a list of historical errors that have affected Western life profoundly, and the rest of the world as well because of the assertiveness and prominence of Western culture. The modern period has been shadowed by gloom, nostalgia, disillusionment, anomie, deracination, loss of faith, dehumanization, atomization, secularization, and assorted other afflictions of the same general kind. It has become an iron cage. And so on. Objectively, there is very little in late modern experience to account for all this moaning. By the standards of earlier centuries we have been very fortunate. These days most people see their children live to adulthood. It would be hard-hearted to consider this a small blessing. There are related facts, also nontrivial. For example, far fewer women die in childbirth, leaving far fewer orphans. In Western countries, at least, most people can read, a major enhancement of life. All this is definitely something to work with, in terms of our having lives we can enjoy and make meaningful. And a great many people do precisely this. Nevertheless, as a matter of curriculum, which is our substitute for catechism, we learn that something has gone very wrong, that our human modifications of the world make it impossible to live a truly human life. The horizon open to us is that “patient anesthetized upon a table.” An implication behind it all is that the disillusioned know something the uninitiated don’t know. The importance of that unnamed thing is granted, and the gloom it brings with it is given place, in books, on canvases, in plays and installations. And everything that reflects its scale and coloration, which to my eye looks like resentment, desolation, and self-pity, is ipso facto modern. So it has been for more than one hundred fifty years. Enormities have befallen the West during those years, which were wholly enormities committed by the West, induced in part by the sense of threat and failure, and nostalgia as well, that has cursed late modernity, both culture and period. I generalize. But in my experience there is an alienation between science and the humanities that discourages humanists from acquiring more than a minimal awareness of science, poorly digested, while at the same time they assume that their own work is marginalized, even a little humiliated, by the triumph of science. Unaccountably, in this brilliant period the workings of the mind, which uniquely express and describe the mind, whether as poetry or as microbiology, have ceased to be of interest in themselves.
The thought has been prevalent for a long time that the human project, whatever that is, has failed and left us stranded and bewildered. The myth is that this is the effect of modernity with its disillusionments, the sad burden of all we now know. But in fact our errors have brought us here, the inversions and misconstructions that arbitrarily, though as if by necessity, enforce certain conclusions about what life means and how it can be experienced by us. Intellectual integrity can be and often is understood to mean that one enters boldly into diminished reality, even kicks the rubble around a little. But it should mean examination of received notions, for example, that reality is indeed diminished. Intellectual integrity is not possible so long as we give ourselves over wholly to cultural consensus, however broad, however long enshrined.
At the beginning of the modern period, God was a given in the field of thought that was the seedbed of science in our sense of the word. This aspect of the thinking of figures like Descartes, Locke, and Newton is regularly treated as a tip of the hat to prevailing powers, or a carryover from a kind of thinking they were themselves finding the means to leave behind. It looks to me, from my reading in the period, as though the Reformation in England, which radically isolated the individual in the fact of asserting his or her immediate relation with God, found consciousness—that is, experience—a very rich field of theological exploration. Their exploration took the form of a parsing of the mind according to its functions and capacities, with the understanding that it is, and is made to be, the intermediary between God and the soul
, granted, of course, that anyone might choose to reject this awareness of God’s intimate awareness of him, and might turn away from the knowledge of God implicitly proffered to him. Adam figures in all this as the archetypical human being in whose creation we are all created and whose attributes we receive, fallenness famously, but also the ability to know God as Adam did.
I confess I am perfectly happy to accept this view of things. However, I can hardly recuse myself from a discussion in which, so far as I know, I am the lone participant. So having given fair warning of my biases, I will consider certain consequences of conceiving of the mind thus theistically, putting aside the question of God’s existence, simply admitting his existence with its effects into the discussion as Einstein did the cosmological constant, not as anything demonstrated, only as something somehow necessary to making the rest of the system work.
First of all, to do this re-situates the discussion of the nature of the mind in our experience of the mind, our own and others’, rather than in theoretical speculations about the brain as a product of evolution, or the brain as a lump of tissue responsive to stimuli. Wherever any kind of brain is studied, except a human brain, the questions are what can it do and what does it do. Researchers in London have demonstrated that a bee can learn to perform behaviors that are unlike anything a bee is called upon to do in the normal course of life. A very tiny brain is sufficient to produce behavior that might appear to justify the word intelligent. This is consistent with Darwin’s observations of ants in his garden. So reductionism in the case of an insect is inappropriate because, elegant as its suite of instincts clearly are, they do not preclude its having the ability to react to novel circumstances, to appraise and adapt, within limits we will never establish since we will never know how to test for them exhaustively. Appraise and adapt—I use anthropomorphic language here, lacking any other, therefore lacking any way to suggest a distinction between human and insect purposiveness. Despite Darwin, it has been usual for a long time to make reductionist accounts of human behavior and consciousness, likening them to those of ants or crickets to demonstrate, in effect, that anthropomorphic language is not really appropriate in our case either. But better science undercuts the old notion that tiny-brained creatures are automata running solely on instinct. It appears they can sometimes decide when instinctive responses would not be useful. I go further here than the science does in inferring self-awareness. In any case, as we learn that intelligence has been lavished on the living world at large, we should be less reluctant to acknowledge our share in it.