The Further You Travel, The More Home You Are.
"There are two ways to get home: one is to stay there. The other is to walk around the whole world till we come back to the same place."
Chesterton wrote that at the beginning of The Everlasting Man. It was an appeal to an image, and the image itself was meant to convey a lesson which Chesterton then tells in the form of a short story he wanted to write but never quite got to ("like every book I never wrote," he says humorously "it is by far the best book I have ever written.") Its the story of a boy who goes on a quest to find the grave of a giant. He leaves his home in the hills of Wessex and transverses the globe in search of the grandiloquent and vast entrance where the giant lay. But "when he was far enough from home," says Chesterton, theorizing about how his unwritten story would have played out, "he would have looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden,, shining flat on the hillside like the colors and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but were too large and too close to be seen."
He ends this recounting of the untold story with this: "That, I think, is the true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today."
What Chesterton meant, I think, is that the obviousness of our resting places, our current existence, as opposed to the mysteriousness of the "out-there" into which some of us so long to journey, is a distinction that is somewhat misplaced. For in fact our homes--as, we might conjecture, the symbol of all things we take for granted as self evident-- were in fact, beyond what we thought as quaintness and simplicity, the resting place of giants long fallen, of secrets long dormant. So we see the mysteriousness of the "out-there" of the journey reveals just as much, in fact, the mysteriousness of the "back home." Lets expand the picture a bit more.
Aristotle wrote once that "All I know is that I know nothing." Years later (to put it mildly, more like 2300 years later) Albert Einstein remarked "the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know." It is mildly reassuring to me that at least in these figures my state of perpetual perplexity about the world and things in it finds me among auspicious company. If not for them I would probably just interpret my constant state of being dazed and confused as a torpor to be cured rather than some (hopefully) profound insight into the very nature of knowledge. Like Chesterton's story it seems the only way we can know where we are is by leaving. And in leaving we not only learn new things in addition to what we knew--our home itself is transformed by the new, just as a farm, should one step into the horizon and turn back, is sitting on the outcropping of giants shoulders.
These provide something of an aesthetic justification for my continued amazement that despite the perpetual nature of my studies I still feel like I do not know anything. No matter how far I travel and turn back there lay something always so vast that its lines always slip past the extent of my gaze, so that even if I turn around as quick as I can only faint glimmers of some vast outline appear. To add another figure to the list we could conjure up Plato and his dialogues with Meno. In the dialogue Plato records between Socrates and Meno, the question is of virtue: what is it? Meno is fairly certain he knows the answer, but Socrates, on the other hand, finds every definition put forward by Meno to be unsatisfying. It turns out Meno has just gone from a position of relativism, in which what virtue is simply depends on ones position in society, to--after Socrates finds this unworkable--listing a series of virtues without defining their common core. In both instances, Plato has Socrates point out, the common essence of virtue has simply been left out and so the virtues (like prudence, courage, charity) are merely being stated and assumed, but not justified. Angry (and here we come to the point on learning) and likening Socrates to an electric eel that simply numbs its pray through bombardment, Meno asks: "And how will you inquire into a thing when you are wholly ignorant of what it is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you know it is the thing you didn't know?"
How do you know what you do not know? How could one come to recognize learning, if one does not know something, how could one ever recognize having learned it? This is the famous aporia (sometimes called "Meno's aporia"). In his own way Socrates (or Plato, though the mouth of his Socrates) tells the same story as Chesterton, only from a different moment in the journey. Whereas for Chesterton's character, he had to leave and look back upon his home to see a mystery, for Socrates this life was already a journey, but in order to know of the journey, one had to "look back," as it were, upon the eternal truths of the "Forms," through recollection: the Ideas of Forms were the eternal truths of the world with which our souls, on this theory, were in contact with before they became conjoined to the body. So, says Plato through Socrates, one must only "recollect" these truths (to look back home, to follow Chesteron's metaphor in a slightly different way).
All of this is a roundabout way, the oblique journey around the world to go home, that to me has in many ways because of its aesthetic the necessity of an analogy to my own life. Within theology (as in academia generally) there are many critiques that get bandied about, but usually the most damning and frequent one comes in this standard (and often supremely frustrating) form: "his analysis could have been better if he added [such and such a theologian] who interacts with [such and such a philosopher] which really demonstrates the legacy of [such and such a school of thought] without which, of course, his own position is not properly understood and his own exposition, therefore, remains inadequate."
Which is to say that I have damned myself to a profession of perpetual intellectual unrest and exodus from home in search of discovery (Thank God the pay is so good! Wait...). And it is ironically that such a perpetual flight, unlike birds soaring in the air, is a very heavy thing. Since as long as I can remember there was a latent curiousness about things that I had, a sense that there was some great mystery to unearth just around the corner. A great secrecy was latent in the world, I thought (and still think) hidden behind just one more corner that you have to turn--always just one more corner, it seems--and its there waiting like Chesterton's giant. And so it is an exciting journey. But it is also tiring. Qoheleth has it right in Ecclesiastes: excessive devotion to books wearies the body, and to the writing of books there is no end. And I sit here, as another semester closes, having learned much and paradoxically, in having learned much, learned exponentially more the many things I do not yet know, many more vistas have opened showing territories to go travel in, things to explore, things out of reach. Such perhaps are the ingredients of madness.
Yet Chesterton's story is apt: there are two ways to get home. I could stop, stay where I am. But then, paradoxically, I wouldnt know where it is I am, truly. The tuth is that the further you travel, the more home you are. Mystery does not cease its movement because you yourself cease to move; you simply no longer acknowledge it and so accept the mundane given. The mystery of giants lay ahead (and behind) and the deep secrets play around the corners. And unlike Plato's forms, or even, in its own way, Chesterton's farmstead, as Christian's we recollect Christ--but in so doing we are remembering the future. It is a remembering of what has happened as the pattern of things to come, as the very grain of the universe, as the writer of Hebrews puts it "the essence of things hoped for." Or as Paul writes, we are runners running a race. So the ultimate message that Chesterton writes of, and one which with I happily comply: the endless exodus of knowledge is an act of devotion to an infinitely creative and mysterious God, and the mysteries of the world are His own mysteries, the fecund play of His joy. So to speak, mystery, in this picture, is not the long journey one must overcome but is life itself so that even in its most vexing aspects mystery is the vital surplus of life, the very borders of the finite and the infinite which we perpetually transverse. Yet, because it is mystery, it is also profoundly ambiguous. One more semester down and I have found no giants whose bones fund the earth beneath me, only traces. But like Augustine said "My heart is restless until it rests in You," and even in weariness I still see another corner to go round.
Chesterton wrote that at the beginning of The Everlasting Man. It was an appeal to an image, and the image itself was meant to convey a lesson which Chesterton then tells in the form of a short story he wanted to write but never quite got to ("like every book I never wrote," he says humorously "it is by far the best book I have ever written.") Its the story of a boy who goes on a quest to find the grave of a giant. He leaves his home in the hills of Wessex and transverses the globe in search of the grandiloquent and vast entrance where the giant lay. But "when he was far enough from home," says Chesterton, theorizing about how his unwritten story would have played out, "he would have looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden,, shining flat on the hillside like the colors and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but were too large and too close to be seen."
He ends this recounting of the untold story with this: "That, I think, is the true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today."
What Chesterton meant, I think, is that the obviousness of our resting places, our current existence, as opposed to the mysteriousness of the "out-there" into which some of us so long to journey, is a distinction that is somewhat misplaced. For in fact our homes--as, we might conjecture, the symbol of all things we take for granted as self evident-- were in fact, beyond what we thought as quaintness and simplicity, the resting place of giants long fallen, of secrets long dormant. So we see the mysteriousness of the "out-there" of the journey reveals just as much, in fact, the mysteriousness of the "back home." Lets expand the picture a bit more.
Aristotle wrote once that "All I know is that I know nothing." Years later (to put it mildly, more like 2300 years later) Albert Einstein remarked "the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know." It is mildly reassuring to me that at least in these figures my state of perpetual perplexity about the world and things in it finds me among auspicious company. If not for them I would probably just interpret my constant state of being dazed and confused as a torpor to be cured rather than some (hopefully) profound insight into the very nature of knowledge. Like Chesterton's story it seems the only way we can know where we are is by leaving. And in leaving we not only learn new things in addition to what we knew--our home itself is transformed by the new, just as a farm, should one step into the horizon and turn back, is sitting on the outcropping of giants shoulders.
These provide something of an aesthetic justification for my continued amazement that despite the perpetual nature of my studies I still feel like I do not know anything. No matter how far I travel and turn back there lay something always so vast that its lines always slip past the extent of my gaze, so that even if I turn around as quick as I can only faint glimmers of some vast outline appear. To add another figure to the list we could conjure up Plato and his dialogues with Meno. In the dialogue Plato records between Socrates and Meno, the question is of virtue: what is it? Meno is fairly certain he knows the answer, but Socrates, on the other hand, finds every definition put forward by Meno to be unsatisfying. It turns out Meno has just gone from a position of relativism, in which what virtue is simply depends on ones position in society, to--after Socrates finds this unworkable--listing a series of virtues without defining their common core. In both instances, Plato has Socrates point out, the common essence of virtue has simply been left out and so the virtues (like prudence, courage, charity) are merely being stated and assumed, but not justified. Angry (and here we come to the point on learning) and likening Socrates to an electric eel that simply numbs its pray through bombardment, Meno asks: "And how will you inquire into a thing when you are wholly ignorant of what it is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you know it is the thing you didn't know?"
How do you know what you do not know? How could one come to recognize learning, if one does not know something, how could one ever recognize having learned it? This is the famous aporia (sometimes called "Meno's aporia"). In his own way Socrates (or Plato, though the mouth of his Socrates) tells the same story as Chesterton, only from a different moment in the journey. Whereas for Chesterton's character, he had to leave and look back upon his home to see a mystery, for Socrates this life was already a journey, but in order to know of the journey, one had to "look back," as it were, upon the eternal truths of the "Forms," through recollection: the Ideas of Forms were the eternal truths of the world with which our souls, on this theory, were in contact with before they became conjoined to the body. So, says Plato through Socrates, one must only "recollect" these truths (to look back home, to follow Chesteron's metaphor in a slightly different way).
All of this is a roundabout way, the oblique journey around the world to go home, that to me has in many ways because of its aesthetic the necessity of an analogy to my own life. Within theology (as in academia generally) there are many critiques that get bandied about, but usually the most damning and frequent one comes in this standard (and often supremely frustrating) form: "his analysis could have been better if he added [such and such a theologian] who interacts with [such and such a philosopher] which really demonstrates the legacy of [such and such a school of thought] without which, of course, his own position is not properly understood and his own exposition, therefore, remains inadequate."
Which is to say that I have damned myself to a profession of perpetual intellectual unrest and exodus from home in search of discovery (Thank God the pay is so good! Wait...). And it is ironically that such a perpetual flight, unlike birds soaring in the air, is a very heavy thing. Since as long as I can remember there was a latent curiousness about things that I had, a sense that there was some great mystery to unearth just around the corner. A great secrecy was latent in the world, I thought (and still think) hidden behind just one more corner that you have to turn--always just one more corner, it seems--and its there waiting like Chesterton's giant. And so it is an exciting journey. But it is also tiring. Qoheleth has it right in Ecclesiastes: excessive devotion to books wearies the body, and to the writing of books there is no end. And I sit here, as another semester closes, having learned much and paradoxically, in having learned much, learned exponentially more the many things I do not yet know, many more vistas have opened showing territories to go travel in, things to explore, things out of reach. Such perhaps are the ingredients of madness.
Yet Chesterton's story is apt: there are two ways to get home. I could stop, stay where I am. But then, paradoxically, I wouldnt know where it is I am, truly. The tuth is that the further you travel, the more home you are. Mystery does not cease its movement because you yourself cease to move; you simply no longer acknowledge it and so accept the mundane given. The mystery of giants lay ahead (and behind) and the deep secrets play around the corners. And unlike Plato's forms, or even, in its own way, Chesterton's farmstead, as Christian's we recollect Christ--but in so doing we are remembering the future. It is a remembering of what has happened as the pattern of things to come, as the very grain of the universe, as the writer of Hebrews puts it "the essence of things hoped for." Or as Paul writes, we are runners running a race. So the ultimate message that Chesterton writes of, and one which with I happily comply: the endless exodus of knowledge is an act of devotion to an infinitely creative and mysterious God, and the mysteries of the world are His own mysteries, the fecund play of His joy. So to speak, mystery, in this picture, is not the long journey one must overcome but is life itself so that even in its most vexing aspects mystery is the vital surplus of life, the very borders of the finite and the infinite which we perpetually transverse. Yet, because it is mystery, it is also profoundly ambiguous. One more semester down and I have found no giants whose bones fund the earth beneath me, only traces. But like Augustine said "My heart is restless until it rests in You," and even in weariness I still see another corner to go round.
Comments
"That would be the use of discovering so-called 'objective' truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able to review them all and show up the inconsistencies with each system? What good would it do me to be able to develop a political theory and combine all the intricate details of politics into a complete system, and so construct a world for the exhibition of others but in which I did not live; what would it profit me if I developed the correct interpretation of Christianity in which I resolved all the internal problems, it had no deeper significance for me and for my life; what would it profit me if truth stood before me cold and naked, indifferent to whether I recognized her, creating in me paroxysms of anxiety rather than trusting devotion?"
Should Truth bare herself to me "cold and naked" I would have to univocally respond that her beauty is allusive and unappealing. Yet, should this truth, as Kierkegaard elaborates, move beyond a hypothesis to passion — then, my living within the truth is no longer a hypothesis — it is actualized ambiguity—the living epistemic uncertainty that will either result in hatred, pyrrhonism, or trusting devotion. Hence, I have realized that it is in "living" moments of research and writing that is what I quintessentially cannot do without. However, the academic process (or shall I say, life) is only lived when it pursues the Hidden One—the foundation of Life (Prov. 2.1-11). Hence, the paradox is resolved in knowledge of the Holy of Israel, stated in kataphatic terms of Isa. 2.1–7.