Time is a difficult subject for thought because in a sense we know too much about it. It is perhaps the only phenomenon of which we have direct apprehension; if all our senses were destroyed, we should still remain aware of duration. Moreover, all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about time is like trying to use a ruler to measure its own length.
-Dorothy Sayers, from the essay Strong Meat
Our epistemology must be found in time. For it takes time to think about something – time to “know” it. We are nothing like God, who can “know” something without time – instantly from our perspective. Or are we nothing like this? Is there an analogy? I think perhaps there is.
Freud was fascinated by the activity of the unconscious. Today, we are often enamored by the power of intuition. Witness the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink and the many TED talks in the same vein. This is a knowing that seems to happen outside of time. Now, on reflection we know it is happening IN time just like all our other processing, but the time is not perceived. It doesn’t SEEM like it’s there. We cannot put our finger on the duration, or even confirm that their was any.
It would seem that omniscient thought would have quality of intuition, rather than that of a super-computing quantum AI making 10^400 calculations per second. Those would still be logged and in order. God may create sequentially, but He does not think as such. For us to to have the knowledge of good and evil, we became tainted by evil because it had to actively pass through our thoughts. God can know evil “intuitively” without actualizing it.
Jesus, as fully man, stepped into this temporal limitation. In the gospels, we find he knows secret things, but these are revealed to him by the Holy Spirit, in time. He’s drinking from the fire-hose of God’s love even while in another sense, He is the whole ocean.
A friend of mine online recently commented that the philosophy of time is especially hard. I agree, and I think Sayer’s was right – it is a difficult subject for thought.
The following is a passage from Dorothy Sayer’s essay ‘The Other Six Deadly Sins’. I present it here, essentially unaltered, except interspersed with recent real headlines from, alternately, The Huffington Post and The Blaze. It seems my feed on Facebook is little more than a mashup of these two newspapers as of late. The following are all actual headlines from these popular sites, going back only a few days.
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We all know pretty well the man – or, perhaps still more frequently, the woman – who says that anybody who tortures a helpless animal should be flogged till he shrieks for mercy.
Fraud and Betrayal Over the 20-Week Abortion Ban: Shame on These Women
The harsh, grating tone and the squinting, vicious countenance accompanying the declaring are enough to warn us that this righteous anger is devil born and trembling on the verge of mania.
You Can Murder Your Child, But You Can’t Make Medical Decisions For Her
But we do not always recognize this ugly form of possession when it cloaks itself under a zeal for efficiency or a lofty resolution to expose scandals – particularly if it expresses itself only in print or in platform verbiage.
Even Voter Fraud Couldn’t Save Mary Landrieu
It is well known to the more unscrupulous part of the press that nothing pays so well in the newspaper world as the manufacture of schisms and the exploitation of wrath.
Yes, Billy Crystal DID Just Make A Homophobic Statement (And Here’s Why It Matters)
Turn over the pages of the more popular papers if you want to see how avarice thrives on hatred and the passion of violence.
‘American Sniper’ Made Some Fans ‘Wanna Go Shoot Some F**king Arabs’
To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.
Biased Media Demonize Police But Defend Islam
A dogfight, a brawl, or a war is always news; if news of that kind is lacking, it pays well to contrive it.
Cuomo’s War Against Teachers Is an Attack on Women
The average English [American] mind is a fertile field in which to sow the dragon’s teeth of moral indignation, and the fight that follows will be blind, brutal, and merciless.
Obama Threatens Free Speech (Again!)
Why Is Franklin Graham so Anti-Jesus?
I will end only by mentioning that Sayer’s essay is from 1942.
Up until [recently] the Church, in hunting down [the sin of lust], has had the active alliance of Caesar, who has been concerned to maintain family solidarity and the orderly devolution of property in the interest of the state. Now that contract and not status is held to be the basis of society, Caesar need no longer rely on the family to maintain social solidarity; and now that so much property is held anonymously by trusts and joint stock companies, the laws of inheritance lose a great deal of their importance. Consequently, Caesar is now much less interested than he was in the sleeping arrangements of his citizens, and has in this manner cynically denounced his alliance with the Church. This is a warning against putting one’s trust in any child of man – particularly in Caesar. If the Church is to continue her campaign against lust, she must do so on her own – that is, on sacramental – grounds; and she will have to do it, if not in defiance of Caesar, at least without his assistance.
-Dorothy Sayers, from The Other Six Deadly Sins
In any current event, there’s always more going on than meets the eye – forces at work over many years. A tall tower requires a deep foundation whose bricks were laid a long time before the most visible ones at the top. It’s been pointed out that contemporary “gay marriage” has its roots in the “no fault divorce” of two generations ago. Because Christians (though other religious traditionalists can be grouped in here) neglected to fight THAT back in the day, the road was paved for eventually making “marriage” a mushy concept defined only by the whims of the state.
In the same way, there was more going on with the sexual revolution of the 1960s than just a critical mass of influential secularists wanting to have sex with whoever/whenever. There has always been a critical mass of that! But the ground-work for it actually becoming institutionalized started with the depersonalization of property. The rise of the legal contract (versus inheritance by blood), the stock market, and public corporations, set the foundation for people to act as free agents apart from their money and land and families in a way unprecedented in civilization before. During the sexual revolution, Caesar (the government) woke up one day and realized that IT no longer cared who slept with who and so the champions of traditional morality lost a powerful (though incidental) ally. The irony is that this new foundation was often laid by conservative capitalists – sometimes very religious ones – who never dreamed of it’s far-reaching consequences.
So what can religious conservatives do today? For starters, we can stop pretending like Caesar is still a potential ally in the foreseeable future. And, if we want to change things eventually, we might address lower and larger bricks in the tower of those who do not fear God, rather than the shiny new ones on top.
The reason why men often find themselves happy and satisfied in the army is that for the first time in their lives, they find themselves doing something not for the sake of pay, which is miserable, but for the sake of getting the thing done.
-Dorothy Sayers (quoting a surgeon friend), in Creed or Chaos
Some people reminisce constantly about their days in high school – as if that time was the pinnacle of their existence before the stranglehold of adulthood seized them and has never let go. In a similar vein are those who, whatever the context, can’t go five whole minutes without bringing up some anecdote about their years in the military. I used to think this was just limited to career service men or those who fought in notable wars, but on close examination, this attitude often shows up in people who spent, say, a relatively uneventful six years in the navy. What makes this time in the army (or whatever) such a dominant experience of their lives that is serves as the (nearly always implicitly superior) measuring rod to everything that comes after it? I think Sayer’s get’s to the answer here. Man is wired to work hard, and to work toward a tangible, meaningful, and beautiful goal. Working for a paycheck taints this natural psychology like a rock in the shoe plagues a marathon runner. Recalling that one race you ran where you DIDN’T have a rock in your shoe – well, it would be hard to forget.
Can we escape paychecks today? Various economic philosophers, from Marxists to distributivists think so. Zizek says we are incapable of imagining such a world. I think I’m going to say no – they can’t be done away with. However, their effect on man’s work CAN be significantly mitigated, IF we’re careful and creative. Recovering or developing a more comprehensive theology of vocation would be a good step in the right direction on this. The “protestant work ethic”, despite it merits, needs to be scrapped in favor of something more holistic. We are not even close to articulating this well yet.
In the morality of my station and duties (i.e., of the moral code) the station presents us with the duty, and we say yes or no, “I will” or “I will not.” We choose between obeying or disobeying a given command. In the morality of challenge of grace, the situation says, “Here is a mess, a crying evil, a need! What can you do about it?” We are asked not to say “Yes” or “No” or “I will” or “I will not,” but to be inventive, to create, to discover something new. The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain duties that ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all… “Gracious” conduct is somehow like the work of an artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not a choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new.
-Dorothy Sayers, from the essay Problem Picture
What a fabulous passage. Take a moment to read that again if you can.
The saint imitates Christ. But he or she does so not in being imitative, but strikingly original. They are not using a measuring rod to compare their work to others or to derive their work from others. They are hopelessly lost in their subject and it becomes their joy to give themselves to it’s nurture. St. Patrick did not pray on the hill a thousand times in a cold and calculating manner. Mother Teresa of Calcutta did not closely study other hospice programs to hone her methods. These were discovering something new, just like a true artist.
Because we can, in this world, achieve so little, and so little perfectly, we are prepared to pay good money in order to acquire a vicarious sensation of achievement. The detective novelist knows this, and so do the setters of puzzles.
-from the essay Problem Picture by Dorothy Sayers
Who knows this especially today? The makers of video games. Achievements, collecting all 3 special coins in that Mario level, and watching the credits roll are all satisfying in a way that getting up in the morning isn’t. A “vicarious sensation of achievement” to stand in for the sense of achievement they didn’t receive today at their job at Starbucks, or in that interaction with their girlfriend, or in their class at school.
What can you do for a people of short attention spans? Give them tiny well-defined things to do. This often does violence to the nature of real things. A career can have interactions in it that last years. A marriage is a decade-spanning project. School is a somewhat structured sprint during a much larger race. But we are an impatient people and we manage our boredom and feelings of meaninglessness with gamification. Life may be a grind, but if it can be like grinding through a dungeon in Final Fantasy, then it’s just a little more tolerable. Our ever faithful smart phones help us on this quest.
We are frustrated when God and Love do not gamify well.
Pop music may be a perennial rubbish heap, but that doesn’t prevent an occasional song on top 40 radio from making your ears perk up and then, after a closer listen, slam you into the wall with its emotional power. I know I’m nearly a year late to the party on this one, but I think I’d have to put Sia’s “Chandelier” in this category.
Forget the rather jarring and buzzy music video (450+ million views) featuring child dancer Maddie Ziegler, the music is what caught my attention. Sia is not the typical young 20-year-old America pop star, but a previously lesser-known Australian women pushing 40. She has a scratchy voice with a natural break that instead of avoiding, she uses to great affect. The chorus of Chandelier finds her over-singing on the edge of her range, like an electric guitarist over-driving their amp. She’s singing the paint off the walls, but not like a shining opera star carefully in control, but rather like a Saturn V rocket with a less than certain chance of clearing orbit. I’m nearly holding my breath waiting for it to explode and fall into the ocean. In reality, I suspect she is very much in control and that the melody and key were carefully chosen by her and the producer to highlight this technique on the edge of distortion. However it came about, it’s incredibly effective.
As for the song itself, it deals with despair and alcoholism. I’m sure that in my youth I would have been warned against listening to this sort of thing because of its alleged glorification of booze. Nothing could be further from the truth though. Rather, for a brief moment, the listener vicariously enters into the singer’s grief and vortex. It’s not really a pleasant ride, but full of energy and difficult to take lightly. I think the doorway is the repeated line “’cause I’m just holding on for tonight”. People of any age or station can identify with that “just holding on for dear life” end-of-your-rope feeling and from there make the jump into singer’s mind and intensity. I’ve never found (nor likely ever will) find myself serially drunk and imprisoned in a string of wild parties without hope of escape, but that is not required to relate to the emotion in the music – one has just to overlay one’s own personal challenges or feelings of being trapped along with a simultaneous resolve to make the best of it regardless. Like nearly all music, the vicarious emotion retains it’s power as long as not too many details are articulated.
In evangelical circles, people who become enthusiastic about theology or liturgy are quickly chastised for their de-spiritualization of the Christian faith and of “taking their eyes off Jesus”. Accused of being promoters of cold/dead/lifeless religion, they are told to shut up and get back to the basics of prayer, stand-alone scripture reading, and trying harder to sin less. “How can lots of books be ANYTHING other than a distraction from good Bible reading?” the thinking goes. “Aren’t there only so many hours in the day?”
But humans are easily distracted creatures and quick to set up (often with good intentions) more tangible activities to involve themselves in than the naked contemplation Christ’s incarnation. We build buildings, create charities, run hospitals and orphanages, write music, raise children, and bake cookies for the volleyball team’s fundraiser. We do all sorts of things. But in the bulk of Christian cultures I’ve been a part of in my life, studying theology was denounced as a dangerous distraction. Why is this? The simple description that American evangelicism is often “anti-intellectual” is not helpful. It doesn’t get us any closer to why exactly this is going on.
I would like to briefly propose two dynamics at work. The first is one that has been pointed out by many others. That is, that a culture will often stoop to define itself by what it is AGAINST. As the academy became increasingly secular and anti-Christian during the 20th century, Christians responded by distancing themselves from the academy and, as a side-effect, its nurture of rigorous study. (The exception being “science-y” disciplines like archeology and low-level textual criticism – think Dead Sea Scroll translation.) Liberal or progressive Christians (the enemy) in particular seemed to make heavy use of recent scholarship, making the whole endeavor even MORE suspect. This is all pretty well documented though. The second thing is a little harder to put one’s finger on.
Everyone has their pet issues – things they care deeply about to exclusion of things that are important to their neighbor. But the pet issue’s of theology wonks happen to be things that are more abstract – less tied to the person directly. The things most important to evangelicals are things tied up, that is “tightly coupled” as we might say in the fields of software design or engineering – with the persons themselves. Because the individual person – their feelings and perspective and dreams – have been given an extremely high place in modern, contemporary discourse, things tied closely to the person tend to be beyond the reach of criticism. They are also less able to have an affect on others as well, being too tied to their context. The elevation of the individual is a two-edged sword, but one we are apparently fairly comfortable with at the moment. But doctrine, and especially dogma (official doctrine) – not just scripture interpretation, but confessional theology or historical theology – THOSE things are ripe to be called out as cold/dead/lifeless, and every other pejorative that typically gets flung at anyone a who seems a little too enamored with the intellectual side of faith.
Because doctrine (or even just ideas from old books) is something that can be sufficiently separated from the individual and handled, it is open to criticism in a way that things closely tied to the person are not. People are loath to confront another adult about their poor parenting – it’s too personal (who are we to judge?). They same goes for their psychological hangups or character flaws. These have to be approached obliquely and tactfully. We are unlikely to openly criticize their expensive motorcycle or scrapbook hobby. But their formulation of the doctrine of predestination? That can be ripped to shreds and spat upon without tying it directly to anyone in particular who might affirm it. What did Augustine think about such and such? Who the heck cares! It’s what YOU think that matters.
The strength of rational thinking is it’s ability to disentangle ideas from their carriers (though it is less successful at doing this than it’s proponents usually admit). By making the individual the sacred center in how we think about the world, the person who loves abstract things is a heretic. If deep in our hearts is the place (and likely the only place) that Jesus meets us, then to talk about Him being present elsewhere (in the sacraments, creation, beauty) is to perpetuate some kind of hindering falsehood.
Obviously, I don’t have this idea very fully developed. This is just an attempt to explain one aspect of why I have been, throughout my childhood and even to this day, cautioned against studying too much about God. Some others might be able to relate.
The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993, Jordan Mechner
Tales of King Arthur, Andrew Lang (read aloud to the kids)
Superfudge and Fudge-a-Mania, Judy Blume (read aloud to the kids)
The Anglican Way, Thomas McKenzie
Tales from the Perilous Realm, J.R.R. Tolkien (read aloud to the kids)
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (The whole thing, read aloud to the kids)
Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, an anthology by Bamford and Marsh
The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl (read aloud to the kids)
Pippi Goes On Board, Astrid Lindgren (read aloud to the kids)
The Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellius, St. Athanasius
Hope within History, Walter Brueggemann
Heidi, Johanna Spyri (read aloud to the kids)
Love Not the World, Watchman Nee
Revolution in World Missions, K.P. Yohannan
The Swiss Family Robinson, Yohann Rudolf Wyss (read aloud to the kids)
Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, Robert Webber
The End of Our Exploring, Matthew Lee Anderson
