Postprandial Thanksgiving Reflections

I was sitting in the waiting room at a clinic the other day thumbing through The Seventeenth Century Background by Basil Willey when I came upon this appraisal of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682):

Perhaps no writer is more truly representative of the double-faced age in which he lived, an age half scientific and half magical, half sceptical and half credulous, looking back in one direction to Maundeville, and forward to Newton. At one moment a Baconian experimentalist and herald of the new world, at another Browne is discoursing of cockatrices and uni­corns and mermaids in a tone which implies that though part of him is incredulous, the world is still incalculable enough to contain such marvels.

We still live in that world of marvels, I said to myself. We don't know half as much as we think we know.

Willey adds:

At one moment [Browne] pro­fesses himself a follower of Hermes Trismegistus, and feels, pantheistically, “the warm gale and gentle ventilation” of the world-soul; at another, he accounts the world “not an Inn, but an Hospital; a place not to live, but to Dye in”. He exhorts us now to “live by old Ethicks, and the classical rules of Honesty”, and now to “Look beyond Antoninus, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or Epictetus. Be a moralist of the Mount, and Christianize thy Notions.” He had, in fact, what Mr. T. S. Eliot has called the “unified sensibility” of the “metaphysicals”, which was the offspring —perhaps unreproducible in different circumstances—of a scholastic training blended with the expansive curiosity of the Renaissance. It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

For a modern reader like me, the big problem with Sir Thomas Browne is that he couldn't spell!

But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth considering how, if we care to, we can still live in an intellectual world as rich as the one Browne inhabited, and why we should make an effort to do so.

Anyone with an ounce or two of curiosity is likely to be fascinating by the picture of the universe given to us by biologists, physicists, chemists, and other researchers of that ilk. On the other hand, the philosophical community had failed us big time by neglecting to emphasize how many questions lie beyond the range of scientific research, and how much our understanding of life and of ourselves depends on other disciplines—not only philosophy itself but also poetry, history, and religion.

Our lack of clarity regarding the power and appeal of these disparate but related spheres of thought—and the differing types of experience that feed them—makes it difficult to properly emphasize the value and the limitations of any of them.

A case in point: just this morning, after a first-of-the-season ski around Theodore Wirth Park, I was reading a review by Nicholas Kristov of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Lost Art of Scripture. Though I haven't read the book, a few days ago I listened to Kerry Miller interviewing Armstrong of the radio, so I already had some idea of what it's about, and Kristov's review underscored the same points. 

In brief, Armstrong is arguing that scripture—Christian, Hindu, Confucian, or whatever—presents a vision of life in a different way than does the scientific community, and that "we" have lost the ability to receive its message. She goes on to suggest that an important part of that message lies beyond its factual or didactic content; it can be found in its sound, presentation, and embodiment.

The first of these points—the widespread loss of sensitivity to the value of scripture—is certainly true; the second strikes me as a bit silly.

Armstrong reminds us of how easy it can be to ridicule the nonsensical and contradictory aspects of  scripture, and also to make use of it to defend bigoted attitudes and and violent acts. But she also holds that looking for an accurate and all-encompassing representation of life from scripture misunderstands how those writings are designed to work. True once again, though she seems to be edging toward a "performative" interpretation of scripture rather than a cognitive or metaphysical one. Kristov paraphrases :

It’s like complaining about Shakespeare bending history, or protesting that a great song isn’t factual ... Anyone who has been to a Catholic Mass or a Pentecostal service, or experienced the recitation of the Quran or a Tibetan Buddhist chant, knows that they couldn’t fully be captured by a transcript any more than a song can be by its lyrics. I still don’t understand Don McLean’s classic song “American Pie,” but it moves me every time I hear it. Music doesn’t need to be factually accurate to be true.

To which the rejoiner might be, "Yes, a piece of music or a theatrical production often moves us when it's beautiful, but that doesn't make it true, strictly speaking. The categories of experience are getting confused here, and need to be straightened out."

The other day I requested a copy of Durufle's Requiem from the library, and yesterday Hilary and I sat by the fire and listened to it. She was knitting; I was doing nothing. We enjoyed it so much we listened to it again, though it's in Latin and we had no idea what was being said beyond a few Kyries and Agnus Deis.

We were moved. Does that make us Christians? Probably not.

It's easy enough to hive off and discard those elements of scripture that expound an antiquated view of the physical cosmos, and it's also easy to cultivate an appreciation of the beauty of a given liturgy, without pondering the ethical and eschatological pronouncements that lie at the core of the faith in any great detail. Music and liturgy can bolster and strengthen a "faith," but it seems to me that faith must still be rooted in some form of understanding. If not, then it would be difficult to distinguish a religious faith from a social club or a choir group.

Then again, would it be too far off the mark to suggest that a religion is a social club of a special kind, created to facilitate and minister to its members' most important passages: birth, christening, communion, repentance, marriage, and death?

My parents dragged me and my brother to church for many years. They both sat up front in the chancel because they sang in the choir, and they had no idea what we were doing during the service. Nor did they care. They were shrewd enough to anticipate that some aspects of this beautiful world, full of reverence and holiness, might rub off on us no matter where we sat. We often played scissors-paper-rock up in the balcony, though sometimes we ran around in the basement. Occasionally we actually attended to the service—the readings, the psalms, the intercessions, and all the rest.

And some of it did rub off.

I actually found some of the sermons interesting. The minister, an East Coast transplant named Greenley, looked like a white-haired Efrim Zimbalist, Jr., the spitting image of an Old Testament patriarch. From the pulpit he analyzed Greek words and explained what the "fear" of God actually consisted of. His black Studebaker Lark convertible was always parked in front of the side door through which we usually entered the church on our way to the choir room.

St. John in the Wilderness. 

Greenley's assistant was a tall, lanky recovering alcoholic named Andy. He typically wore a long black robe and had a disheveled Whitmanesque beard which gave him the look of a maladroit prophet who'd just returned from a few weeks in the desert. My mom found Greenley to be a little stuffy, I think, but she and Andy hit it off from the first. They were both interested in antique furniture. I think the desk sitting against the wall here in my office once belonged to him.

I don't remember much about the Sunday morning liturgy, beyond its inordinate length. But all lapsed Episcopalians probably remember these lines from the General Confession by heart.

"We have done those things which we ought not to have done,

and we have not done those thing which we ought to have done,

and there is no health in us ... "

At that age, my recurrent misdeeds were on the order of putting tin cans in the trash bag rather than the garbage bag.  I was also adept at forgetting to take the trash bag down to the basement to burn it in the incinerator, even after having been entreated to do so several times.

Yet even at an early age, the statement "there is no health in us" struck me as a bit extreme. Give me a break! No health whatsoever? Isn't that laying it on a little thick?

I also found the repeated reference during the readings to Israelites, Canaanites, Philistines and Maccabees incomprehensible and tedious.

But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that the sensations associated with a particular faith experience, repeated again and again, continue to resonate subliminally and eventually become a source of comfort (or nightmares, I suppose) long after we've rejected most of the theological particulars involved. I'm grateful to have been raised in a rich Anglican tradition in which the concept of sin tended to get slighted or ignored, and this gratitude extends beyond the aesthetics of choral harmonies and stained glass windows to the kind of ingrained and unthinking reverence that lends so much power to church events. 

Perhaps one value Armstrong finds in orally transmitted scripture—a value she fears we're in danger of losing—is precisely this ritualistic liturgical repetition, which played a much larger role in daily life during ancient and medieval times, when many people couldn't read, than it does today.

 

But I think another aspect of scripture is also due for a revival: the poetry itself. And while we're at it, why not extend that interest more widely to encompass  poetic works that do not claim for themselves the imprimatur of divine revelation. I'm not talking simply about verse here, but about all types of imaginative literature. Such creations summon experiences and types of understanding that can be had by no other means.

In his description of Sir Thomas Browne mental tool kit, cited above, Willey hits upon precisely the frame of mind needed to draw sustenance from that zone of experience and expression: 

It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.

Here, in a typical passage, filled with Browne's halting yet elegant delivery and terrible orthography, he draws upon his medical background to consider where in the body the soul resides—he can't seem to find the relevant organ.

... In our study of Anatomy there is a masse of mysterious Phi­losophy, and such as reduced the very Heathens to Divinitie; yet amongst all those rare discoveries, and curious pieces I finde in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe as in that I finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not any thing of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast: and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument of the inorganity of the soule, at least in that sense we usually so receive it. Thus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor can tell how it entered in us.

Browne goes on to consider what the human body is actually made of:

Now for the walls of flesh, wherein the soule doth seeme to be immured before the Resurrection, it is nothing but an elementall composition, and a fabricke that must fall to ashes; All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves and yet do live and remaine our selves.

Now there's some food for post-Thanksgiving thought.