Yeah, I see what you mean. He started out with innocuous enough observations. But I don’t follow his conclusions about Christianity (including at around the 8 minute mark as you say). If you want more reflections about that specifically, I can share. Though I may share it in the PM where Kendel’s comments are.
[Although … now that I look back, I can’t find where I thought you had compared Rohr to Watts, Kendel; so I’ll just add here that, maybe I see Rohr with more charitable eyes than is warranted, but my impression is that Rohr would not be on board with what Watts proposes in this video either. Rohr can be and is full of all sorts of criticisms of the established churches - both Catholic and Protestant, but I don’t hear Rohr writing it all off like Watts seems to, at least in this short listen.]
What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without the solidity of matter? If, such as we are, we had nothing solid about us, where would be our thinking about God and truth and law?
But there is a region perhaps not so high as this from the scientific point of view, where yet the word truth may begin to be rightly applied. I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously. True, we cannot think of any one fact thus, except as we find the soul of it–its fact of God; but from the moment when first we come into contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things seen, by which we come to know the things unseen. How should we imagine what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God without the sky?
I’m no fan of Watts but I think there is a kernel of value in what he says about the gospel regarding Jesus being understood as the message that he and we are sons of God. The important thing is that, as such, we are already in-dwelt by God, Christ, Holy Spirit … call it what you like (as if there was any magic in words). The point is to be receptive to and trusting of that nature which does not insist on its rightful place. The choice is ours: hold tightly to the reigns and go where our logic leads or learn to listen for the softer voice of the spirit and work to reconcile our ‘logic’ to coincide with and encompass what is greater. In so doing we don’t become gods; we just become whole, understand better and see more clearly. There is no doubt more to the Jesus/Christ story than I will ever understand from outside but I endorse the choice of Jesus as one to follow understood this way.
Though I am critical of Watts I did much appreciate one of his books The Wisdom of Insecurity. At the lowest point in my life it was the sermon I needed.
I’m happy to take your word on Watts, since my only exposure to him so far was just that video snippet.
This is a big theme of MacDonald’s too. Words will always be incomplete and/or inadequate for the whole of Truth. So anytime we ever speak of God, it must be to some extent blasphemous or heretical, but it’s the closest our language-bound minds can be brought toward understanding.
That’s one of the reasons I no longer get over much bent out of shape over the charge of ‘heretical’, though I very much still think some words are closer to truth, and others much farther away, or even just opposed to it. So I should take care not to leave the impression that heresy is never a serious matter.
We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science, open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman–a region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has often to go to fetch them. For things as they are, not as science deals with them, are the revelation of God to his children. I would not be misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God–not in the laws themselves, save as his means. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God; for human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to him, and is always leaving him–his intent, that is, his perfected work–behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where his work culminates in revelation.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
[Bolded part is what Lewis actually quoted.]
This makes a great segue to the Abramowitz’s connectivity vs architectivity ideas and I may try to tie it in to this excerpt soon. Yesterday was given to prep for the arborist coming today to reduce and remove material from my storm damaged trees tomorrow. I may have to be content to read again.
Today’s excerpt is also astonishingly short (the bolded part in the text) … and I just included all the text from where yesterday’s excerpt left off. (186) The Value of Analysis
Doubtless it thus makes some small intellectual approach to him, but at best it can come only to his back; science will never find the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the spring-head of his science. Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life. It discovers a little of the way God walks to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself behind. I do not say the man of science does so, but the very process of his work is such a leaving of God’s ends behind. It is a following back of his footsteps, too often without appreciation of the result for which the feet took those steps. To rise from the perfected work is the swifter and loftier ascent. If the man could find out why God worked so, then he would be discovering God; but even then he would not be discovering the best and the deepest of God; for his means cannot be so great as his ends. I must make myself clearer.
Reading bits of MacDonald and Kierkegaard at the same time has been uncanny at times. Their lives overlapped (SK: 1813-1855, and GM: 1824-1905), but MacDonald’s published fiction came out after SK’s death. Perhaps GM knew of SK.
It seems like this has not been a big question so far, but at least one or two people are asking about this outside of the BL Forum:
There are others, it seems, but I haven’t had time to read the entries. Piety, the blog author above has a main blog on SK.
I think he’s saying that we don’t get to God by rational analysis, or to the most important things about God, that is. And that seems true for most of us.
But then I read people here like @mitchellmckain, @Vinnie, @jammycakes and others who aren’t coming to mind right now, and see “analysis” can lead different people differently. It would be interesting to hear their take on this bit from GM.
And there is more to come … this particular sermon is a treasure trove for anybody who wants MacDonald’s take(s) on science. So far, I’d say he’s not simplistic about it, though one could be forgiven for thinking so if you zero in on just a phrase or two of his.
It depends on what kind of person you are and how your mind operates.
If you are a very analytical and logical kind of person who has the kind of mind that can’t help thinking deeply about things, what is stopping God from using your intellect and reason to get through to you if He really wants to? He wouldn’t be God if He couldn’t do that.
Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally, where it can live; the effects upon it of another climate; what part the insects bear in its varieties–and doubtless many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: ‘Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it.’ The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk–the compeller of smile and tear from child and prophet. The man of science laughs at this, because he is only a man of science, and does not know what it means; but the poet and the child care as little for his laughter as the birds of God, as Dante calls the angels, for his treatise on aerostation. The children of God must always be mocked by the children of the world, whether in the church or out of it–children with sharp ears and eyes, but dull hearts. Those that hold love the only good in the world, understand and smile at the world’s children, and can do very well without anything they have got to tell them. In the higher state to which their love is leading them, they will speedily outstrip the men of science, for they have that which is at the root of science, that for the revealing of which God’s science exists. What shall it profit a man to know all things, and lose the bliss, the consciousness of well-being, which alone can give value to his knowledge?
God’s science in the flower exists for the existence of the flower in its relation to his children. If we understand, if we are at one with, if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there, that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented to us. The idea of God is the flower; his idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means–of canvas and colour and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth. (Again … actual excerpt chosen for inclusion by Lewis were just the bolded parts above.)
I can imagine and guess some about the state of science in MacDonald’s day - with the public perceptions of it shaped by figures such as Thomas Huxley. But I trust that today, MacDonald (might?) find significantly more reason to make caveats for these stark words?
At least I don’t find it such a ‘given’ today that the scientist and the poet are necessarily different persons. In fact, what I hear from so many who are science enthusiasts (especially around here, and including self-identified nonbelievers as well as believers) is that their science enjoys plenty of inspiration from, and celebration of their poetic side.
So obviously he isn’t making a broad sweeping condemnation of science and neither is he saying the practice of science will spoil your relationship to what is greater. He is just saying that applying the methodologies of science is not a helpful way of seeking to know God better. First because you have no specimen to take to the laboratory for study. But I also think he believes scripture contains no backdoor route to a certain notion of God. Those are only there to aid in establishing a relationship with the God that is not a thing to be studied but something grander and indivisible which invites but doesn’t demand our attention.
Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but were they made that he might pull them to pieces? He were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end! A school-examiner might see therein the best use of a toy, but not a father! Find for us what in the constitution of the two gases makes them fit and capable to be thus honoured in forming the lovely thing, and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst–symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus–this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace–this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table–this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. Let him who would know the love of the maker, become sorely athirst, and drink of the brook by the way–then lift up his heart–not at that moment to the maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the inventor and mediator of thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul may find in God.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth. (And this time, Lewis actually includes the whole of what’s shown above! He must have seen this passage as especially meriting the space.)
I share in your reading of MacDonald here - charitable though it may seem; and continues to seem given today’s additional entry above about water. He seems here to denigrate analysis as a second-class activity not quite worthy of the poet or philosopher or of life itself. There is many a scientist today who I think could successfully take issue with him in this.
A wish that has been catastrophically granted to many if they found themselves in the midst of hurricane or living underneath a leaky roof. But despite water’s terrifying and deadly sides, I do delight nonethess in MacDonald’s extolling its wondrous existence - to which we are indebted for life itself. His main point stands and should stand despite the shadow sides which are also all-too-real for all of us at one time or another.
The truth of a thing , then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God. And now we must advance to a yet higher plane.
I like the way he puts this. We can understand beyond the mere usefulness of things (and people) and recognize, or maybe rather grant, a different kind of value.
I’ve been working slowly through the encyclopedia article on Postmodernism that Jay shared over in his Postmodernism vs. Modernism thread, and the last few days of MacDonald’s quotes go well with this part:
Heidegger’s contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from oft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being” (Heidegger 2000 [1953], 217), and “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence ” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time , the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 95-107). The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower.
This reflects a perversity in our thinking, when the meaning or truth of everything is reduced to its monetary value or usefulness. Human beings are reduced to human resources, the beauty of nature is not something to be in and absorb, but must be packaged into an experience that can be set behind a paywall and barred by a fence.
Very pointed and well-put, that! Human “doings” rather than Human “beings”? It does seem to me (along the lines of expectations put on us in accordance with what we are given) that our ‘doing’ and our ‘being’ are somehow both included as sacred spaces to be nurtured. That always comes at a risk of the ‘doing’ sort of taking over as an overriding consideration - and hence the harsh utilitarian judgments we may level at our aging or disabled selves … “I’m no good to anybody any more” kinds of thoughts that intrude themselves in unwholesome ways on us and those we love. When love is in operation, it’s the ‘being’ that has all precedence. But for all of us who are able (and while we’re still able), the ‘doing’ also seems to be a sacred expectation. At least that’s what I often get from MacDonald. Do you think that remains fair to Heidegger’s view as well?
