Have the Nine survived scrutiny? Perhaps you may say I have probed them with cotton buds rather than lasers or scalpels – I know what you mean – but that’s less out of fear for their fragility, than because wielding weapons – either metaphorically or actually – is seldom really necessary. This is not a heroic quest – that’s a fanciful idea; it’s a life lived – an imaginative one. Nothing needs zapping; no blood need be drawn. No animals will be harmed in the making of this book. We should always pursue enquiries in a generous spirit, especially when we know, as here, that the ideas have been offered honestly and hopefully. We can expose inconsistencies and evident errors without combativeness or ambition.
The exemplar of this kind of irenic enquiry is Sir Thomas Browne, the Norwich doctor who, in a fiercely intolerant age, quietly tended the sick, tended his garden, read everything, studied everything, and saw his sublime Religio Medici through the press in the middle of the Civil War. Here he is (and how tender, wise, witty and tolerant he looks):
‘I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps in a few dayes I should dissent my selfe.’ We should be limber in our opinions (as Ruskin has already suggested).
Any opinion is at the mercy of fact – (‘How empty is theory in face of facts!’ notes Mark Twain) – so long as we keep ourselves open to facts. And any fact, if indeed it is a fact, is only itself – a factum, a thing done once, a unique and individual particle of truth already receding into the past. As William of Ockham puts it, ‘The knowledge of a simple thing is never the sufficient cause for knowing another simple thing.’ No fact has a significance for the future ‘for the pattern is new in every moment’, everything at every moment is infinitesimally different from anything that has ever happened before. The fact comes naked, the ‘significance’ is the suit of clothes we dress it in, a costume we ourselves stitched up. And even if we accept, as scientists do and as we have to accept in everyday life, the sufficient similarity of similar facts, so that the ‘pattern’ is more or less comprehensible to us, so that, in practical terms, we can, for instance, distinguish the doorway from the wall (and the scientists can ‘repeat’ their experiments), each theory that we thereby for our purposes consider ‘proved’ remains at the mercy of another fact which may disprove it. We cannot live paralysed by mistrust of the good world around us, and we should not be empty-headed, but we can remain alert and open-minded.
Browne thinks it our duty to investigate:
‘The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: ’tis the debt of reason wee owe unto God, and the homage wee pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was the sixt day when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a grosse rusticity admire his works; those highly magnifie him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.’
And yet he keeps an open mind about it:
‘Wee doe but learne to day, what our better advanced judgments will unteach tomorrow. There is yet another conceit that hath sometimes made me shut my books; which tels me it is a vanity to waste our dayes on the blind pursuit of knowledge, it is but attending a little longer, and wee shall enjoy that by instinct and infusion which we endeavour at here by labour and inquisition: it is better to sit downe in a modest ignorance, & rest contented with the naturall blessing of our owne reasons, then buy the uncertaine knowledge of this life, with sweat and vexation, which death gives every foole gratis, and is an accessory of our glorification.’
Ultimately, he eats his cake and has it:
‘I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!’ [Footnote: this is a reference to Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!’] This is the jewel of philosophy, the triumph of wisdom over intelligence – the search for truth in the certainty one will not find it. The exercise of all one’s capacities is more important than the results one will achieve. [Footnote: Nature is not a results-oriented business, - the ‘fittest’ die along with the rest of us – so it would be fanciful to see life as a struggle for success rather than a privilege to enjoy. But it is a powerful and popular fiction, on which most of our social, political and economic activities depend. Wars, elections, sport, negotiations, even cookery programmes perpetuate the dramatic fantasy that life is a competition with winners and losers.]
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which states that the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa) is a modern retelling of an old, old story. [Footnote: in fact, it reminds me of Pwyll and Rhiannon in the Mabinogion. Pwyll sees a lady riding slowly by. He asks his servant to overtake her but ‘the more he pricked on his horse, all the further was she from him. Yet she held to the same pace she had started with.’ Three days he and his servants await and then chase her, each time with the same result, before he calls out: “‘Maiden, for his sake whom thou lovest best, stay for me.’ ‘I will, gladly,’ said she, ‘and it had been better for the horse hadst thou asked this long since.’” And when they meet ‘he thought that the countenance of every maiden and every lady he had ever seen was unlovely compared with her countenance.’ Increasingly, I’m coming to suspect that asking the goddess to stay may be more productive than chasing after her, invocation rather than abduction, affinity rather than knowledge.] In ancient Greece, the Socratic dialogue was a rigorous interrogation of a subject until all the participants had to acknowledge the falsity of their initial assumptions and the impossibility of conclusive knowledge. ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing.’ In India a similar ritual had already been practised for centuries, the brahmodya, a competitive debate to define the brahman, which ended in silence at the impossibility of the task. Later, in the medieval Greek Orthodox church, theologians realized that any statement about God ‘must be paradoxical, to remind us that the divine cannot fit into out limited human categories, and apophatic, leading us to silence’.
All words forgotten – Thou, Lord, and I
It is important to remember our limitations, not to dissuade us from effort, but to assess more honestly the extent of our achievements. [Footnote: we can, for example, at great expense, with years of training and planning, an elaborate organization at home, a support network on the ground, all the latest kit specially designed in laboratories, with dietary and medical advice tailored to our unique physiology, with the good wishes of loved ones and available celebrities and, not least of all, with great tenacity, strength, skill and courage on our part, climb the highest mountain in the world – and what an amazing feat that is. Who would begrudge a few selfies after such a remarkable, if sterile and vainglorious, effort? But before we crow and #conqueredtheworld it might be appropriate to look up and acknowledge that we can climb no higher because of our ponderous limitations, not because there is no ‘higher’. Bar-headed geese, I am told, soar above the crown of Everest without the least publicity.
The desire to climb the highest mountain, or ‘bag’ Munros, is a quantitative addiction, whereby one pits oneself against numbers rather than experiencing reality. (And numbers, of course, are another delusive taxonomy. If everything is unique, and we are all one being, there can be, in reality, only the number ‘One’. Twos, threes, fours and the rest are just generalisations without a precise corresponding reality. Are there four apples on my fruit-dish? Only if we generalise, seeing Ashmeads Kernels and Elstars as the same, seeing every Elstar as identical.) We do not rush around a gallery like a Supermarket Sweep, clocking up as many pictures as possible, nor count the notes in a concerto. It is the blissfulness or awefulness of the mountain, not its height above mean sea level, that matters.] ‘The aspiration to truth is more important than its assured possession,’ Lessing tells us. So, in the generous spirit of enquiry, we can begin again with words, words, words in the comforting assurance that our resting-place will be silence. But that may be some way distant.
for silence is not God, nor speaking is not God;
fasting is not God, nor eating is not God;
onliness is not God, nor company is not God,
nor yet any of all the other such two contraries.
He is hid betwixt them,
and may not be found by any work of the soul,
but only by love of thine heart.
He may not be known by reason.
He may not be thought, gotten nor traced by understanding.
But he may be loved and chosen with the true, lovely will of thine heart.
Choose thee him.
QUESTION-MARKS OVER THE NINE REALISATIONS
4. ‘God bewildered’ is certainly debatable, and probably iffy. It was perhaps a projection of my own sense of stupidity, suddenly aware how I’d ignored reality, but it was the feeling I had at the time and feelings are evidence. If we are inspired by a painting or a film, it is not purely because of what we see. A camera, a dog, a fly can see the same thing without the least excitement. We are not moved by the images, but by the feelings latent in us that the images release like detonations in a quarry.
I have no sensory evidence to support my ‘God bewildered’ claim but as the Selective Attention Test showed, our sensory reactions are not always trustworthy. We are complicit in everything that stirs our brain, whether we call it hard empirical information collated by the senses, or soft, squishy ‘feelings’.
Nevertheless, without certain evidence of God let alone Her state of mind, I shall relegate ‘God bewildered’ to ‘Apocryphal’ status.
9. ‘acceptance equals imagination’ seems true, but is little more than a shuffling of definitions, and hardly warrants the majestic status of an independent ‘Realisation’. For admin purposes, this can be classified with 6. ‘acceptance’.
So, the STA realisations have largely survived examination, cleaned up a bit rather than torn to ribbons.
To reiterate (and perhaps this is an opportunity to re-number them more logically) I seem to have discovered:
1. That the physicality of things is real, universal and the basis of our lives.
2. That we are wholly involved in this reality, and not separate in any way.
3. That we habitually ignore this, preoccupied with our own acculturated interests, but
4. That a rewarding sense of affinity is available to us if we accept it, imagining the unity of creation.
5. That nature unceasingly creates new, unique individuals.
6. That nature is perfect.
7. That all things are equal, and that individuality-with-interdependence is the basis of relationships in nature.
This calls for more celebrations:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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