Eternal Perspectives

(The narrator and his 11-year-old son, Chris, are traveling via motorcycle across the northern tier of states with John and Sylvia Sutherland, longtime friends of the family. Chris has just asked his father if he believes in ghosts and, hearing a negative reply, pursues the matter.)

“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”

John nods affirmatively and I continue.

“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

“They seem real to me,” John says.

“I don’t get it,” says Chris.

So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”

“Of course.”

“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”

John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”

“Sure.”

“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”

Now John seems not so sure.

“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

. . .

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”

I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”

They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.

I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.

After a while John says, “It’ll be good to see the mountains again.”

“Yes, it will,” I agree. “one last drink to that!”

Whenever I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I kept seeing applications of the author’s arguments to my own Christian life. And perhaps your Christian life, too. In order for anyone interested to be able to understand what I’m talking about, it’s necessary to work through the development of narrator’s thought as well as my own.

Early in the motorcycle journey from Minnesota to Montana, the speaker (for the book is written in first-person limited) takes time to explain his understanding of understanding. He says,

“But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds – classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . .

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. . . .

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. . . .

“The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior . . .”

The narration goes on but I want to interrupt for a moment. When I read “romantic” and “classic” I think “Praxis” and “Theology.” And by “Praxis” I mean the living out of the Christian life, not something divorced from reason or knowledge but instead something growing out of it and also informing it. I could call it Peripateo, the word for “walk” but Praxis, “practice,” is perhaps more familiar and thus preferable.

I am not saying that experience or Praxis should determine doctrine or Theology. I am saying that Praxis should illuminate Theology. And illuminate it by both demonstrating the truth of the doctrine and deepening or even modifying our understanding of knowledge and doctrine.

Then narrator says, “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical.” My application is this: “Although Praxis is romantic (as defined here), Theology is purely classical (as defined here).”

He adds,

“The classic style [Theology] is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control.”

And then he adds this important observation:

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one more or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

If this doesn’t describe most of the division in evangelical Christianity, I don’t know what does. It is not only in the “world” that reason is elevated and affect marginalized: it is certainly true any many segments of evangelicalism, too.

Having been spiritually raised in a Bible Church environment, I have looked disdainfully in the past at those who seemed to draw their knowledge of God almost exclusively from their experiences. And their experiences, it seemed to me, tended to dictate their doctrine and beliefs.

I no longer look at such people with disdain but I still think the generalization is largely true. Such people are the romantics of Christendom, enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of Christianity but negligent or ignorant of the structure and foundation necessary to support it.

But the knife cuts another way, too. My own experience has been largely, if not exclusively, in classical or Theological understanding. It has been cerebral and reasonable, clinical and sterile. Feelings, emotions, experience have been relegated to a lower status, as though they were creations of a lessor god.

The merging of these two ways of understanding lie down the path of Christian maturity. I have only begun trying figure out how to think about these things and how to live them out. I’ll talk later about what constitutes excellence or genuine maturity, but for now I’ll only say that it requires both of these modes in proper relationship to one another.

Important and significant as this has been for me, it is not what caused the seismic paradigm shift for me. That lies elsewhere, but much needs to be explained before I can get there.

I suppose I should start by saying a few words about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its author, Robert Pirsig. This book, as I mentioned previously, was an important catalyst in some changes that have occurred in me recently. But, whether you’ve read the book or not, I need to explain what I swallowed as meat and what I spit out as bones. Because there are some bones in the book and we should be careful not to choke on them.

First, the meat. Pirsig mentions early on that he was clocked at 170 on the Stanford-Binet measurement of intelligence, a score that puts him in the rarefied air of genius. Nowhere is his intellect more in evidence or more scathing than when he turns it on the sacred cows of our culture. His analysis of the educational system, for example, is a penetrating and refreshingly honest expose of what is wrong with undergraduate and graduate programs in America. This is not central to my own present writing, however, and I’ll let it go for now – but, since I am also in no hurry, will pick it up later: it’s just too good to be missed.

As a philosopher, Pirsig leaves much to be desired, but as a teacher of philosophy and a critic thereof, he has few peers. His treatment of Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle made me stop and reconsider some of the long-held presuppositions and assumptions I have had – and not really been aware of. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

It is often said that a fish does not see water or that a fish does not know that it is wet, either of which is meant to be an analogy for the difficulty of we have in seeing the metaphysical underpinnings or presuppositions of our own culture or subculture. Pirsig shows us both the water and that we are all wet. What he has to say about Aristotle and his effect on western culture has implications for western Christianity, too.

Pirsig is in fine form when he discusses, in addition to the educational system, such things as the nature of excellence, the limits of intelligence, insanity, conformity, and spirituality. I hope to write about each of these things in posts to come.

But there are bones to be careful of, and these are pretty much all found in his attempts to come up with his own philosophical system, something he will later call the Metaphysics of Quality. As I said before, he is at his best as a critic and teacher but at his worst as a philosopher seeking his own system. Well, no one is perfect.

I need to review ZMM to refresh my memory on some of the details of Pirsig’s writings. This means I may not post for a week or so. Or, it could mean that I’ll post a whole lot real soon. I don’t know.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for tagging along.