Tag: Plato

My Kingdom for a Metaphor!

I love my work. It is a rare profession to be able to discuss history, literature, art and philosophy all in one setting. Synthesizing the great ideas of the West is like looking at the entire world from the height of an airplane through the lens of a microscope. 30,000 feet at 300x magnification. Everything and everywhere all at once.

But it can also be unsettling—certainly for the students, but also for me. I often feel caught between the moon and New York City. I don’t always have the answers, and I, too, am often confused. But, as we tell the students, taking our cues from Socrates, confusion is a good place to begin—for it prompts us toward discovery.

One of the areas in which students struggle is in transposing philosophy and literature. It is not that they do not grasp the differences in genres—as they almost invariably prefer the latter to the former. It is that they do not always know how the metaphors of literature are understood in the descriptive analysis of philosophy.

In fairness, these modes are frequently at one in their aims if often opposed in their means. As Kierkegaard notes, the outer, physical world feels chaotic and unjust—and it often is—while the world of the spirit conforms to immutable, divine laws. “He who shall not work shall not eat” is an immutable law of the spirit, to which we would readily assent, for all must labor and cultivate their own gardens. But reality shows that sometimes the unjust do not truly work for their bread, and yet their bellies are glutted and their tongues saturated. In the stories, the good nearly always succeed, while the wicked are put down—and the world is restored to heavenly order once again. Aladdin, in choosing integrity and aiming at personal wholeness, achieves both wholeness and riches. But to choose integrity in the outer world often comes with the price tag of significant loss and suffering.

Such is the dilemma Bobby presented in class. In our discussion of Summa Theologica, Bobby wrestled with the concept, like St. Thomas Aquinas before him, of the objective world being understood by the subjective subject. How can reality ever be understood if we see things solely through our individual experience? The existentialist throws his hands into the air and proclaims that such a feat is impossible, for, he incorrectly reasons, existence must precede essence. Or, in other words, life or self-hood must come before understanding or consciousness. Humanity has no fundamental value—no established essence or nature—so we have the freedom to create our nature. Subjectivity matters more than objective fact.

To help himself out, Bobby turned to the Ugly Duckling. For the aesthetically-unpleasing fowl was not vulgar by nature, only in comparison to his more uniformly attractive siblings. He was taught he was ugly only because he was in the wrong flock. Reason, Bobby explained, could not address every human concern because we cannot apply it to all things—as, for example, matters of faith.

I applauded dear Bobby for his efforts, but in this case, it was the metaphor applied to the wrong thing. The very purpose of the Thomistic project was the synthesis of reason and faith, so that where reason can rationally demonstrate the existence of God yet cannot prove the nature of the Trinity, it can be supported by faith; and where faith cannot explain the effect of physics on my six-year-old’s ability to get a pill stuck in his sinus cavity, reason can. But then again, perhaps there are things never to be understood. The Ugly Duckling does not show the triumph of subjectivity but the necessity of objectivity—the need to rise out of one’s own immediate experience and to see the world as it rightly is.

The existentialist will once again raise his probing finger to claim we cannot know how the world rightly is. It is a problem as old as Plato, and even older when we see the Hebrew God do battle against his Egyptian challengers. The objective, measured testing of scientific hypotheses and religious truth claims are more or less one and the same. As Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, we have only to measure Christian morality to Nazi morality to know that one is far preferable to another. One is consonant with reality and the moral good, while the other wilts beneath the blazing heat of its truth.

What happens when the metaphor becomes a fixed prism through which to view reality? After all, surely Richard would not have relinquished his entire kingdom for a mere horse—for the horse would be the means by which he would attempt to reclaim the kingdom. The nature of metaphors is the power of analogy, to see in one thing but for a moment that this is the same as that. Yet if young readers cannot see past the story, they are apt to think that the story always ends happily ever after. That the Bachelorette always finds her man becomes as insoluble a truth as the Christ always rises from the tomb. The meaning, rather than clarified through metaphor, becomes lost in its details. The declarations of reason shatter in the beautiful depictions of poetry. The particular individual becomes everything while the universal becomes nothing.

I am happy to say that I think we walked Bobby through his angst and came out on the other side like Dante washing the angelic marks from his brow. And this is what learning in community should do for us—to tackle a big shelf topic together, to build consensus, and to discover truth.

Everything

 

It is an unoriginal title, to be sure. It lacks verve, promising to overpromise and underdeliver. For how does one write about so vast and voluminous a topic as everything? Short of God, to encompass everything is to be nothing. And even He has limitations.

No, that should be a subject for another time.

But isn’t this the longing of the human heart? To have it all. To understand it all. To be it all. The warrior who seeks out glory claims victory in the upcoming battle will be all he needs to be happy, until he achieves it only to learn the famous reputation of a warrior on the opposing side. Every Saul has his David. The romantic (or the womanizer) searching for the one believes happiness is found solely in the beloved, until the gnawing ache of time lethargizes his limbs and turns his eyes toward other prizes. Every Henry has his Anne—and Catherine—and Jane—and Catherine.

So when we long for the one thing that will make us happy, what we actually want—Plato reminds us—is to be happy with that one thing forever. It is the loss of Eden and the longing for heaven beating in every chest.

For the pessimist, this becomes the end of the story, the triumph of despair. For to seek everything and find nothing is to lose it all. As Chesterton says, it is the logician most like to fall to insanity more so than the imaginative poet. The poet attempts “to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits” (Orthodoxy, 1908). For the optimist, this is a new voyage of discovery, to recognize one’s limitations and to find everything in one thing for as long as possible. And so this poem is one of hope, of revealing new possibilities in old things, of looking at things all the way to the bottom but refusing to plumb the bottom, knowing that such a thing is impossible.

Everything is all we want:

to read the map of all truth

and to know all knowing

so that every piece locks

and threads together like a Gobelin tapestry.

But no ocean may be, somebody says,

swallowed in one relentless gulp,

so you narrow and shrink

and aim, choose one anything,

something you can break open and pour out

and drink deeply until it swells

your belly and scorches your lungs,

changes the depth of your eyes

and the color of your soul,

so that nothing seems same anymore—

and that anything you chose to know

becomes some eternal sea,

one thing you can only wade in

and splash upon the shore.

And later, maybe years, you lean

into your evening chair with a thick book

and ponder how you drank the cup

and beheld the ocean, how the one thing

fits together with

everything.

A Defense of Poetry

In 1579 Sir Philip Sydney composed a response to Renaissance criticisms that English drama was a hotbed of wickedness in his apology, The Defence of Posey. Though no one during the Renaissance had ever witnessed an episode of Game of Thrones, these claims against the stage were understandable for an age that, only a few steps removed from medievalism, mistrusted any representation divorced from the control of the church.

The first of these objections Sydney addresses is that there are supposedly more important things to learn and spend our time on than poetry. Aquinas seems to agree when he asserts in the Summa that poetry is the lowest of sciences, but he redeems poetry from this irrelevance when he asserts that God has used the lowest science to communicate the highest science of theology (I.Q1.A10). Despite its triviality compared with the robust disciplines of chemistry or physics or philosophy, storytelling is an ideal medium for communicating intuitive truths. After all, not everyone can read the complex reasoning of the Summa, but everyone can read Narnia. Thus, if God has used literature to showcase the divine, literature itself cannot wholly be a waste of time.

The second objection is that fiction is simply a lie. This is Plato’s problem in The Republic (Book III) with the Homeric gods, and why he is mistakenly thought to issue a wholesale condemnation of poetry. But Plato’s objection is rooted in the Grecian misunderstanding of Homeric verse as truth; but this does not mean he is against literature—especially since he uses literature as a vehicle for his philosophy. We should not confuse the vehicle with its passenger. Any peewit who reads fiction and misunderstands it for truth is already lost in the bookstore, and no signs directing him to the correct genre will help him read a lick. As Sydney confirms, “Shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious?” Is erotic love wrong in marriage simply because others wrongly use it outside of marriage? Is social media an evil because more people use it for evil than for good? Wisdom is necessary to discern between right use and wrong.

The final objection, still toted by the fundamentalist inheritors of Puritanism today, is that poetry urges us to think on evil. Through book and screen we witness injustice and corruption, we watch people be murdered, we voyeuristically participate in lovers’ passions. There is some argument to be made here, but we must distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic. The erotic depicts beauty, which should point us toward the God who created beauty; the pornographic turns inward, twisting the erotic toward base impulses that only reflect and gratify the self. Sir Guyon of The Fairie Queene, for instance, sees the bathing beauties in the Bower of Blisse and longs to join them. Jane Eyre wants desperately to marry the already-married Rochester. Both Spenser and Brontë know their readers will be seduced by the imaginative possibilities presented in their narrative and want us rooting for our heroes to give into their bestial natures. But herein lies the point. Poetry can deceive us into accepting its premises and to promote immorality. Few authors are as skilled as Spenser and Brontë to then pull the rug out from under us and reaffirm the Christian truth that we had forgotten in our unreflective consumption of literature. Poetry, therefore, is not morally bankrupt but is itself a form of moral currency to be deposited in the mind.

Perhaps the final objection demands the most attention. Yet the problem seems not to be that we don’t trust stories, as might have been the case in Sydney’s day. After all, how many people simply refuse to go to the movies or watch television out of some purist sense of principle? Most people, believers and pagans alike, raptly follow the compelling serials, blockbusters, and trilogies. What is needed, then, in our day is not a reaction against the pagans but an apology for good poetry. Anyone with moving brainwaves can watch film, but it takes effort to watch film well. All can consume, but we must urge reflection and after we consume.

The first obstacle to properly encountering art is, unfortunately, ourselves. We myopically value only that which we already prefer. Alexander Pope warns in An Essay on Criticism: “Fondly we think we honour Merit then, / When we but praise Our selves in Other Men.” Everyone thinks they have good taste, just as everyone assumes that God must see the world the way they do. But taste must be cultivated like intelligence, the muscles, or any other faculty. The more milkshakes we inhale, the less we will be able to distinguish between a Cabernet and a Merlot, or between different years of a Pinot. The more Bachelorette or even Kendrick Brothers films we watch, the less we will be able to read, understand, and discern the Christian powers at work in Spenser or Brontë. We become what we eat, and this is no more true for our stomach than for our minds and souls.

For the reader still unconvinced of the premises in this treatise, little may be done to compel him to pick up Keats. But for the man who searches eagerly for truth, he may yet find it in the eloquence of poetry. May we then surround ourselves with beauty and contemplate the higher things.