Letter #187: A Practical Faith

It's Right There in Front of Us

Spengler.

We were talking about two ways of approaching the revelation of creation. Way One, which we’ll loosely call Platonic, is to see creation as a misshapen, even deceptive, representation of heavenly truth. Way Two, which we’ll loosely call Aristotelian, is to let creation speak to us as the only language the heavenly forms have in our lives.

It’s fair to say that, by nature, I take the second path. I’m a practical man. I have no other reliable information about the creator besides his handiwork. So if I should come upon a passage in the Bible that says the sun stood still in the sky, I feel I can reasonably deduce that this is figurative language. I don’t rewrite reality to fit my beliefs, because I’ve found that to be a very reckless and self-destructive way to live. Rather, I rewrite my beliefs to fit reality as I experience it.

This is also true in my relationship with the arts. If I go to a movie in which the plot makes no sense, the dialogue is incomprehensible and the characters are unlike anyone I’ve ever met in real life, I don’t think, “Ah, this is very profound because of its inner meaning.” I just lose interest. If the work does not in some sense hold the mirror up to nature, than it can’t convey anything but some theory the director has. And really, who cares about that?

Not unrelatedly, this affects the way I experience God, too, the director of our movie. When someone tells me the earth is really 6,000 years old and only looks older because God has left a deceptive trail of clues, I just think: No. God is not messing with us. He means for us to have an experience that reliably relates to what he made, or else why make any of it?

I can't get up to heaven unless I'm down-to-earth. If St. Paul says, Anyone who thinks Christians need to be circumcised should be castrated! (Galatians 5:12, by the way), I don’t think, “Wow, I guess we have to see to that.” I think, “Wow, Paul’s ticked off good and proper.” Because that makes more sense.

Likewise, if I come upon a passage in one Gospel which seems to contradict the evidence of another, I think, “Well, witnesses disagree. Every cop knows that." If all the witnesses tell you exactly the same thing, they are almost certainly colluding in a lie.

This is what I was talking about before — about the medievals and how they saw the human experience as primary evidence of reality. I became a believer in the first place because no scientific discovery, no logical hocus-pocus, no academic theory could convince me that good was evil and evil good. When I look at creation in light of that — rather than ideologically — Christ’s fingerprints are all over it. Then his miracles no longer seem unbelievable to me. They are of a piece with the whole miraculous shebang.

Love, Dad