Letter #110: I've Been to the Mountaintop

And it's kinda boring up there.

“Meh.”

Pater Familias,

In the mid-1600s there was a Frenchman, Isaac La Peyrère, who thought only the Jews were descended from Adam and Eve. Everyone else came from a different stock of “Pre-Adamite” races, which among other things explained why they all lived in different places and talked funny. Some of them even ended up French—a fate worse than death.

It’s easy to make fun of guys like La Peyrère. But it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for early modern Europeans as it dawned on them that the world was vaster and more various than they had imagined. Of course people started asking if the story of the Jews and Christians was just the story of one neighborhood in a larger world.

Even now that we’ve catalogued the whole globe, we still can’t help but suspect it’s at least possible there are other places, maybe in the reaches of space, where the spiritual terrain looks different. That’s the plot of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra: a new humanoid species on Venus avoids the fall. It’s natural to wonder how far the domain of sin and death extends.

But that’s because we’ve never yet found its borders. To date no explorer has journeyed far enough to meet with a race exempt from the basic patterns and deformities of human nature. The world is dappled all over with an ever-shifting array of customs and peoples, but it turns out man is everywhere a piece of work. Wherever you go you find him stamped in the same image, and wherever you go you find it marred.

Maybe that’s why all the wisdom traditions you allude to, magnificent as they are, tend to exude a kind of weariness at their pinnacle. Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing philosopher, compassed between them the full range of human reactions to the natural world. Both of them concluded that it’s an endless flow of change—everything always happens, so nothing ever really happens.

That’s about where Stoicism ended up, too. In his gloomier fragments Marcus Aurelius writes about “the condition of soul and body when death comes for us. Vastness of time before and after. Fragility of matter.” And as you discovered firsthand, Buddha consummates his quest in release from being, a surrender to the cosmic sea. Even the master of Jewish learning in scripture concludes that the sum total of it all is “vanity, vanity.”

Those who grope their way up the mountain of human wisdom seem to reach the summit exhausted by the climb. If Christianity has something to add, it must be something you can’t work your way up to from below—something that comes down onto the mountaintop from above, like thunder onto Sinai.

And since our own culture feels so thoroughly spent, so lost in a haze of comic book remakes and porn, this seems important: Jesus didn’t come to earth bringing yet another addition to the already groaning storehouses of philosophy. Jesus came bringing news.

Love,
Spencer