Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

“The prime quality of his mind was not speed—which in the different world a century and more later would be thought to be almost the defining feature of intelligence. It also was not breadth—the embrace of the best that has been thought and said in the world of learned persons, which Thomas Jefferson aspired to—or instant knowledge of the inner details of public affairs of the twentieth-century policy wonk. Lincoln’s mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly or at least with effort and concentrated attention, into a relatively few subjects. It was purposive—personally, politically, morally.” Walter Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography

Discussing the value of reading biographies, Cal Newport recently mentioned this biography of Lincoln on his podcast. I was instantly intrigued by the idea of an ethical biography. More than offering yet another sketch of Lincoln’s life, Miller seeks to account for Lincoln’s moral formation and to explore the reasons for and the consequences of his moral choices. In the podcast Newport drew a parallel between Lincoln’s purposive intellect and the three principles of his model for deep productivity—do fewer things; do this work at a slower pace; obsess over quality.

I’m struck by the idea of a purposive intellect, particularly as it stands in contrast to a quick intellect. Miller observes that different ages value different dimensions of the intellect, and he is certainly right to say that our age most praises speed. If you asked me outright to say which of these three I aspired to, I would probably say that I desired breadth. But if you probed that answer just a bit further, you would find that what I really want is breadth quickly, to master a lot of material, yes, but to master it quickly. What I really value then is speed. The ultimate version of this to my mind is the gnostic fantasy about learning in The Matrix. That one could learn kung fu, or anything for that matter with the speed and ease of a download is nothing but fantasy, but that fantasy grows out of the idolization of not just speed but of computers as ideal minds. We want to learn the way a computer “learns.” A computer may be fast, but it cannot be purposive the way described here, no matter what one thinks of AI.

One consequence of idolizing the speed of a mind? If speed is the primary attribute we praise, then to admit slowness or to intentionally attempt slowness, as if it were good to slow down, amounts to a confession—I am not smart (at least in the way the age currently defines or values it). If the videos YouTube suggests to me about reading more, more quickly are any indication, I must have more than a passing interest in speed and the attendant anxiety that I am not fast enough. But a purposive mind is slow by design, or if not slow at least deliberate. It distrusts quickness for the sake of quickness.

What are the qualities of a purposive intellect? The purposive mind works like a plow. As Miller says of Lincoln, “His was a mind inclined to plow down to first principles and to hold to them—not as a metaphysician does, abstracting from particulars and spinning great webs of speculation, linking abstraction to abstraction, but as a lawyer, a politician, a moralist does at his or her best: by tenaciously analyzing one’s way through the particulars, seeking the nub of the matter.” Though this is true as far as it goes, I would push the image further. One does not plow simply to turn over the ground. One plows the earth in order to prepare it to bring forth new life. The plowman follows slowly as the the long steady furrows cut into the earth. With each step the earth turns up rich soil that can cradle and give life to a seed. The purposive mind is therefore generative. The purposive is also tenacious. As Lincoln said of himself, “My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible thereafter to rub it out.”

Of course, these three qualities, speed, breadth, purpose, are not comprehensive, nor do they necessarily exclude each other. Think of a mind given to both speed and purpose. Mozart comes to mind as an example. He not only produced so much, so quickly but also so much of lasting value. Breadth and purpose readily also go together, while St. Thomas Aquinas seems to be a stunning example of someone who possessed all three. His was a mind that was quick and supple, a mind absolutely steeped in the breadth of the tradition, but also a mind that worked with great purpose.

(If you click the tag for intellectual life on this blog, you will find many posts dedicated to exploring various aspects of what the intellectual life is and what it entails, and more than a few posts sketching the main lines of The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges.)

Dissertation Done – Some Thoughts on Writing, pt. 1

I am finally coming out the other side of my dissertation. The submission and the defense await, but the final draft is in the hands of my advisor. One more pass through everything, maybe two, remains. Certainly some second guessing and a handful of last minute changes remain. But the bulk of the hard work is over. Even with the final, final edit and the defense remaining, I feel an enormous sense of relief. Coming out of the fog, I suddenly remembered that I used to keep a blog and had the thought that maybe I’d like to keep one again. So here we are.

When I was finishing my full-draft, I was surprised by how much left-over writing I had accumulated along the way. I compiled all of that excess writing into a document, and all told, it added up to 30,000 words or so, a full third of what turned out to be the final word count. It is probably a truism, but I was still surprised by how much writing it took to get to the writing that I finally ended up with. I even cut an entire chapter along the way. But I had to write that chapter before I could really know that I didn’t need it. That’s not quite right though. I needed the chapter, even though the project did not. I needed to write it to think through some problems I was having with the argument. But once I came to a solution, the chapter itself was no longer relevant.

That chapter still exists, because it’s hard to let go of the work. I couldn’t bring myself to fully discard it or any of the excess. There are reams of discarded prose hidden away, because when it came down to it, I couldn’t “kill my darlings”. Instead of killing them, I sent them to another room. I named that room, my file of excess, “cutting room floor”. When I named that file, I was not consciously thinking in terms of writing being like film editing, but that thought did occur to me as I was reading In the Blink of an Eye by film editor Edward Murch.

(Austin Kleon mentioned that Murch’s book taught him something about writing too. David Epstein makes a similar connection between writing and film editing in this post.)

As a film editor Murch has lots to say about film making specifically, but also a lot to say about creating in general, especially creating something cohesive and contained from an enormous amount of material, in his case from reams and reams of dailies. One of Murch’s animating questions as an editor is why do cuts work? How is it that a film can change perspectives, change distances, change locations, and still make a kind of sense? With all the jumps through space and time, how does a film when done well, along the viewer to simply slip along with the camera, accepting the cuts as a given? In exploring the question of why cuts work, Murch wonders if there is an analog to the cut in human experience. For him, it is blinking. Blinking, he argues, in addition to its physiological purpose for moistening, protecting, and cleaning the eyeball, serves a psychological purpose as well. We blink to moisten and clear our eyes, but we also blink to transition our thoughts. A blink is like a cut in our thought-scape. A blink can move our mind from one thing to another.

I came to think of cuts in writing on two levels. First, there is the necessary cutting away, the excess that ends up on the cutting room floor. Second, there are the internal cuts within the writing itself. Thinking of cuts within writing, I came to think of each sentence representing a kind of cut. Paragraphs, sections, chapters too are all kinds of cuts as well, movements within the thought-scape of the argument, jumps in space and time, in theme and tone. Thinking of “the cut” in terms of writing brings me to one of the best books I read on writing along the way—Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences on Writing . That book helped me start thinking of the space between a period and the beginning of the next sentence like a cut in a film.

Klinkenborg calls this space between sentences, when employed well, “the gap of a well-made ellipsis.” That space is a kind of cut. And such cuts are necessary for writing just as much as they are for film. No matter how closely related a sentence is to the sentence that precedes it or follows it, that sentence must have its own internal logic, its own reason for existing. To move from one sentence to another is to leap a gap. Sometimes that gap is tiny and sometimes it can be yawning, but the writer must consciously consider the reason for the gap, the rhythm of the gap, the rhetoric of the gap.

Baptism as Boundary Crossing and Naming

At the church where I serve we’ve been preaching a sermon series on Christian basics, using Rowan William’s book Being Christian as a guide. I recently preached a sermon on baptism where I discussed the sacrament of initiation in terms of boundary crossing and naming.

Sermon in a nutshell: To pass through the waters of baptism is to pass from one realm to another, from one dominion, the dominion of darkness, into another dominion, the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col. 1:13). But to be baptized is also to be immersed into a new name and identity, the triune name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a name which summons the baptized to mission. Jesus’ baptism illustrates both of these dynamics. In his baptism he crosses the boundary line of the Jordan because he is the new Joshua coming out of the wilderness to enter the land of promise. But he is also named Beloved Son, and that naming is not incidental. The naming is anointing, an anointing which is not just calling but also empowerment for the mission ahead. For Rowan Williams this means that the baptized are those who are joined to the anointed one, and are therefore anointed into the priestly, prophetic, and kingly offices of the Beloved Son as well. Those who are immersed into the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, are named and then summoned, told to go and make disciples, and empower to do so by the Spirit.

The week after I preached that sermon a re-encountered a passage from a novel that beautifully encapsulates both dynamics of baptism as boundary crossing and baptism as naming. I’ve been listening A Wizard of Earthsea on Audible, performed by the wonderful Rob Inglis whose performance of The Lord of the Rings is simply stellar. I’ve read Le Guin’s enchanting book before, but I wish I would have remembered this lovely passage where the young Sparrowhawk is initiated into a new life by his master Ogion with a water rite and with a naming ritual, called “the ceremony of Passage”:

“On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early splendour of autumn while still the bright leaves are on the trees, Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name Duny, the name his mother had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises among rocks under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the sun’s face and great shadows slid and mingled over the water of the pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy’s arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.” A Wizard of Earthsea

Le Guin is not a Christian, and I can’t say with certainty that she has Christian baptism in mind with this passage, but she is certainly thinking in terms of initiation rites, and the potent imagery is alive with Christian implications. Duny goes in the water and Ged emerges. He passes through watery chaos and comes out the other side, stepping into a new world, stepping into a new identity.

The passage also speaks to another dynamic of Christian baptism. Baptism as clothing. Many of the earliest Christians also went into the baptismal waters naked, and when they emerged, they were clothed in white. Newly named, newly clothed, citizens of a new world. Baptism then is not just boundary crossing, not just naming, but investiture, putting on Christ as clothing, being clothed with power from on high.

The Church in Hibernation?

“We are living in a time when the images of gods and idols are crashing about us. The spiritual and cultural traditions of vast regions of the West are increasingly being called into question; indeed, we can go even further and say they are being liquidated, quickly and relatively painlessly. Just as a tree in autumn drops its leaves without pain or regret in order to gather once more new strength from within, to renew its powers in hibernal peace, so too the tree of culture is now being stripped of its leaves. Of course, in this, the late autumn of our times, the leaves lie thickly under our feet—and the books thickly in the bookstores; but we aren’t deceived for a moment about that. This colorful yellow and red swarm of leaves is animated no longer by life but, if at all, only by the wind. A small regret might well be permitted us here, just as autumn is the time of the elegiac lyric, but who would want on that account to huddle up under the blankets of an eschatological pathos! We trust the power of nature, her wise economy and the laws of her renewal.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”

Though Balthasar wrote these words in the lead up to WWII, I find them eerily prescient, and the image of the tree is quite striking. But what of it? If we could say that the Church in the West is truly in a time of hibernation, would that be a comfort? Is this a consolation? Does the knowledge that the tree is regathering its strength to bear fruit once again offer enough hope for us to persist?

Balthasar acknowledges the pull toward elegy in such times and there is part of me that would much prefer the “eschatological pathos” he mentions instead of the eschatological hysteria that seems to be our lot. Even so. I’m trying to take the point. I’m trying to learn to trust in the way he commends.

Collecting Quotes – On Keeping a Commonplace Book

For the last few years, I’ve been using the Bullet Journal system with my notebooks to organize tasks, keep my calendar, take sermon notes, write down interesting things, jot down books to find and music to listen to, etc. In every notebook I always reserve ten pages or so in the back as a commonplace book where I can collect striking quotes, phrases, and ideas. Sometimes those quotes turn into a blog post. Sometimes they make their way into sermons or other writing. But sometimes they simply sit there, waiting for me find them, to be struck again by their beauty, to ponder their strangeness, to be challenged, or to wonder what possessed me to write it down in the first place!

As I’ve written before, a commonplace book is a great way to collect and capture quotations in one place. It also provides a snapshot of recurring themes and preoccupations over the lifespan of the notebook. If you look at the tags for this blog, you will not be surprised to see that the quotes are often about contemplation, beauty, the vocation of theology, and the necessity of Christian holiness.

This is what this looks like in my notebook. Good luck reading it! I like to write with nice pens, but that doesn’t mean that my handwriting is worthy of the pens I use!

Here is a picture of my commonplace book from my latest bullet journal.

(In case you are interested, I typically use the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with the dot grid. These notebooks are especially suited for strict users of the Bullet Journal system, because the pages are numbered and there is a table of contents in the front where you can “index” your entries. But I have not been very diligent about keeping an index, and I like writing with fountain pens, so I am switching to this Rhodia notebook. The Leuchtturm works well with fountain pens, but Rhodia paper offers a completely other level of quality. If you want a great starter fountain pen, I especially like the Kaweco Sport. If I’m going to take the time to write things in my commonplace book, I want a good writing experience.)

When I finish each notebook, I like to also capture some of the best quotes here on the blog. Here are a few highlights from the notebook I just finished:

First, some obligatory Balthasar quotes:

“Let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty.” HUvB, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 3

“I have to say that for me the only truly interesting theologians are the saints: from Irenaeus through Augustine to Anselm to Bonaventure or figures that allow the radiation of holiness to show forth, such as Dante or Newman; one could also mention Kierkegaard or Soloyvov. I have actually never written because I wanted to achieve results, but in order to show individuals something that I think must be seen.” HUvB, from the interview “Spirit and Fire”

“Only an eye serenely at rest sees eternal patterns and intimations in earth’s passing forms, and only such an artistic eye can show in symbol what the world is capable of revealing to the gaze of contemplation.” HUvB, “On the Christian’s Capacity to See”

Other quotes on theology:

“A theologian is most highly honored and most ably put to use when named as a doctor of the sacred page.” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“Not all is Christology!” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“If writing is a mode of exposure to truth, then even failure can be exemplary.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“God is the grammar of holy lives, their dark and dazzling intelligibility.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“Only if there is…astonishment…can there be serious, fruitful, and edifying Christian thought and utterance.” Barth, CD IV/3

On Feeling “Useless” in a Pandemic

“The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet is that both are concerned with wonder…” St. Thomas Aquinas

So goes the epigraph to the extraordinary chapter “The Philosophical Act” in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

Pieper’s book has been an absolute balm to me over the past few months. I will remember it, along with The Power and the Glory, as a book that helped me get through COVID-Tide. As I’ve written before, his discussion of the classical distinction between ratio and intellectus helped me name my own tendency, not to mention the broader cultural tendency, to not only privilege, but to live as if there is nothing but ratio, nothing but discourse, logic, practicality, nothing but total work. But Pieper’s book reminds us that not only is there something more than ratio, and the world of total work it brings in its wake, but that the contemplation and the leisure and the festivity of intellectus is what truly nourishes, what truly establishes culture.

There is indeed another “logic”, the logic of intellectus, which is the logic of wonder, the logic that fuels prayer, poetry, and philosophy, what Pieper collects together as the Philosophical Act.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Feeling Useless

Though a balm the book has also caused more than a little of what Pieper calls “existential disturbance”, mostly because I didn’t realize the extent to which I am myself under the sway of “total work”. Until any sense of normal working hours/conditions was taken away from me, until the normal metrics of success were suddenly unavailable (and, yes, this is true for a minister too. Imagine that), I had not known my own tendency to measure myself in terms of usefulness. In fact, early in the pandemic a friend asked me how I was feeling and I said, “I feel useless.” Pieper helped me understand that what on the face of it seems like a totally irrational and overly dramatic thought was in fact a sign that I had surrendered to the “logic” of total work. It is in fact rational, in the sense of ratio, for me to measure myself in terms of usefulness.

Importantly, Pieper is not arguing that we should do away with ratio . He is rather arguing for the recovery of and primacy of intellectus. By primacy I mean that for Pieper, intellectus is both the beginning place—it must come first—and the source of what really matters in life. And this is important because the things that intellectus brings are in a sense “useless” too, in that they ultimately do not produce value, rather they have value in and of themselves. (I’ve written previously in praise of useless things, but I had not yet connected that thought to my own sense of uselessness.)

Prayer, Poetry, and Philosophy

Such “useless” things come to those who attend to the world and to those who cultivate the sense of wonder, in a word to those who contemplate. Pieper numbers prayer, poetry, and philosophy among these “useless” things. They are useless yet indispensable, and when engaged in as acts of wonder are means of transcending the everyday, the working world, the world that recognizes only ratio.

But the pull of total work is so powerful, its promises so seductive, that there are also false forms of each of these. There is pseudo-prayer which is concerned with self and not with God, pseudo-poetry which merely follows trends or is nothing more than eloquent narcissism, and pseudo-philosophy which has no sense of wonder. We all must beware of these.

So if you too have felt useless, allow yourself to reimagine that feeling as an opportunity or as invitation back to wonder. In service of such wonder, might I recommend The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a book that deeply rewards attentive wonder. Here is a passage that captures that dynamic beautifully:

“Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.”

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Love Seeking Understanding, Understanding Seeking Love: The Trinity and How Doxology Drives Theology

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly working through Stephen R. Holmes’ bookThe Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity. Though the book surveys the full history of Christian theology, Holmes begins with what has been called the 20th century revival of the doctrine of the Trinity. In rehearsing the resurgence of interest in the Trinity, Holmes asks whether the so-called revival was in fact much more revisionary than is typically thought. With that question in mind, he carefully works through the Trinitarian debates of the first few centuries in order to articulate the key figures, moments, exegetical moves, and doctrinal insights which together gave the Church her creeds and her understanding of the Trinity.

I hope to have more to say about the overall argument in a later post, but for now I wanted to share a striking observation that bears on the task of theology itself.

Holmes notes that the doctrine of the Trinity, and the attending understanding of the person of Christ, emerges as a theological articulation of the already existing fact of Christian worship. That Christ was worshipped as God from the very beginning of the faith is historically undeniable, and yet the attending theology of the divinity of Christ and the relation of the Son to the Father within in the life of God took a few centuries to work out. In other words, one way to look at the emergence of the doctrinal expression of the Trinitarian life of God is that the Church’s theology had to catch up with the already existing reality of the Church’s worship. Theology gave expression to doxology. Or to put it more boldly, doxology can and often does drive theology.

As a vivid example of this, at the end of his own extensive reflections on the Trinity, Augustine prays, and as part of his elaborate and beautiful prayer, he asks God this, “May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly” (On the Trinity Book XV.28.51) He links understanding and love, and the full prayer makes clear that understanding is never meant as an end in itself but is meant to serve and increase love. Theology that serves the church is sourced from love, from a determination to know the one whom we worship, to come to know more and more the one we are commanded to love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and then to love him.

All of this put in my mind of this lovely passage from Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology , vol. 1. , where with the evocative language of the Song of Songs, she reminds us all what theology is really for: “To speak of God, to name the Divine Perfections, should be honey in the comb, the river of delight, the freshness and strong elixir of love. Love is the Truth of God, but also the Beauty. God is sublime, a zealous Good. Love alone is as strong as death, its passion fierce as the grave. To know this God, the Living Lord, is to hunger and to delight and to hunger once more. Theology should pant after its God, the Love that is better than wine, for God is beautiful, truly lovely, the One whose Eyes are like doves. Eat, friends — all theology should ring out with this invitation — drink and be drunk with Love.” (Brad East has a lovely review of this volume here.)

I have Sonderegger’s words pinned on the bulletin board above my desk to remind myself of the true end of all my study—to know God and to love him. Balthasar sums all this up quite succinctly when he exhorts, “Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them” (Love Alone is Credible) Yes, but the theologian must not listen only, but as Balthasar’s larger work demonstrates again and again, the great task of the theologian is to become a lover of God oneself.

Theology as Architecture and the Appeal of Mystical Theology

Having recently posted about theology as architecture, I was struck by this passage about mystical theology from theologian Denys Turner. In explaining the mutual interplay of positive (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology, he employs this striking architectural metaphor:

“What falls short of God is language, the whole cathedral of speech, formed at once of presenting mass and absenting space, neither of affirming mass without the space it encloses, nor of negating space without the enclosing mass—for without both at once there is no shape, no architecture; and it is only the distinctive form of their conjunction that we possess the transcending mystery of Cuthbert’s place in Durham or Abbot Suger’s at St. Denis in Paris.” Denys Turner, God, Mystery, & Mystification

Turner has done important work on mystical theology and on negative theology in general, especially in his book The Darkness of God. Given his work in negative or apophatic theology (which is generally mystical), what he has to say about the necessity of both positive and negative theology is worth paying attention to. There is a great tendency to privilege one form other the other, to use one to negate the other but because positive and negative theology do not cancel each other out, because both cataphatic and apophatic theology mutually inform each other, because the cathedral of language about God depends on both, it will not do to privilege one over the other or to exclude one for the sake of the other. To do so might bring the whole building down. Or as Turner has it, if one insists on only the positive, the cataphatic, then one will end up with nothing but “affirming mass”. And if one insists on only the negative, the apophatic, then one will end up with nothing but “negating space.”

Photo by Adrien Converse on Unsplash

Importantly, the cathedral he imagines is a cathedral of language, and it is language itself that falls short of God, including the absence of language or the negating language of negative theology. In other words, one cannot appeal to negative theology as an escape from the thorny problem of how we speak about God, and this to my mind has important implications for the on the street, or the in the pew, understanding of mystical theology which might see mystical theology (negative theology) as an escape from the language problem.

In my work as a pastor, I have seen that there is an appetite for mysticism among many disaffected Evangelicals, and for the negative theology that so often goes with mysticism. The attraction is not without merit, and I am personally not surprised that I have pastoral conversations about The Cloud of Unknowing. I acknowledge the possibility of a confirmation bias, since many who come to Anglicanism do so with an inchoate and intuitive attraction to mystery. Nevertheless, many disaffected evangelicals have felt crushed by the “affirming mass” of nothing but positive theology, and they have found some room to breathe, as it were, with negative theology. But as we make space for the negative, for the mystical, the danger becomes opening up into nothing but the void.

In accepting that language is a limitation, theologians are not admitting defeat, rather they are affirming what is and in the best cases accepting the limitations of being human. But this is no cause for despair. That we speak of God at all is astonishing, but our speaking is merely a response to an even greater astonishment—God spoke first. Yes, as Calvin has it, God’s words to us are a kind of baby talk, which is nonetheless still communication and therefore meaningful because as all baby talk, it is spoken to us in love.

Can we hear this word of love? It depends greatly on whether or not we can be quiet. For it is only in silence that we might hear the Word spoken to us.

As Fr. Stephen Freeman beautiful writes in his post “Words as Icons”, silence, and silent expectation, are themselves “reverence for words and the truth which the reveal.”

In Praise of Useless Things: Another Post on Contemplation

One recurring theme on this blog is the necessity of contemplation. In my study of Balthasar especially, and in encountering the tradition through him, I have been struck again and again by the central place of contemplation not just in Christian spirituality but also in Christian theology. If the statement that theology grows out of contemplation does not seem immediately apparent to you, you are not alone. One of Balthasar’s continual laments is the bifurcation of theology from spirituality and the resulting expulsion of contemplation from theology. But Balthasar’s own work and his re-presentation of the Christian theological tradition shows again and again that the really meaningful theology of the church has been forged in the crucible of adoration and obedience, in word it has been birthed from contemplation.

Balthasar’s contention is that there is no truly deep and meaningful theology which does not come from a place of prayer, particularly contemplative prayer. But his argument is deeper than that because contemplation isn’t meant for just the “Spiritually” and “Theologically” inclined. No, Balthasar insists, in his book on prayer, contemplation is the birthright of everyone. So while I have come to see that contemplation is vital for the theological task, I want to make this broader point too. I have come to see that quite apart from theology, contemplation is central to being human, whether one is formally engaged in studying theology or not.

Another guide who has helped me realize this is Josef Pieper. Over the past few months, during the lockdown, I have been slowly reading Josef Pieper’s book Leisure, the Basis of Culture . It is in many ways the most helpful thing I have read in a long time, and most certainly the most helpful thing I have read in quarantine. Working from the Latin for the psalm, Pieper renders the famous phrase “Be still and know that I am God,” in this way: “Be at leisure and know that I am God.” Leisure is the contemplative stance, an openness to receive what is as it is, to receive the goodness of creation as a gift. This is perhaps always counterintuitive, but it is especially so in a time when I want to control things, to make things happen. Stillness, leisure, contemplation are all of a piece and are all aspects of intellectus (which Pieper, along with the Medieval tradition, distinguishes from ratio). Both intellectus and ratio are necessary and healthy aspects of the human mind, but Pieper’s concern is that we have surrendered ourselves to “total work” because we have come to believe that it is only ratio that matters.

But we need intellectus because it is through intellectus, through contemplation, that we experience the “useless” things of the world, that is things that are valuable in and of themselves, rather than things that are instrumental for getting me something I want. The “useless” ’things are what I actually need to live with integrity and with wisdom. Without such useless things, I have no chance of loving my neighbor, because after all my neighbor is never a means to an end, but someone to love.

Contemplation is a letting be and an openness to the goodness of Being, and ultimately to the one who is Goodness in himself. I have no time, I say. I have no space. I cannot. Oh but I may, and I must, if I want to receive what matters. There is a silence that must proceed any speaking that bears any weight at all.

Austin Farrer too holds up the necessity of contemplation while lamenting its loss. (Iit is not a unique problem of the internet age!), and reminds

“The chief impediment to religion in this age, I often think, is that no one ever looks at anything all: not so as to contemplate it, to apprehend what it is to be that thing, and plumb, if he can, the deep fact of its individual existence. The mind rises from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of their creator, but this does no happen through the sort of knowledge which can analyse things into factors or manipulate them with technical skill or classify them into groups. It comes from the appreciation of things which we have when we love them and fill our minds and senses with them, and feel something of the silent force and great mystery of their existence. For it is in this that the creative power is displayed of an existence higher and richer and more intense than all.” Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology

The truth is that the contemplative stance, the space within from which to truly see and to truly receive, is already within us. Yes, that room may have fallen into disrepair, but it is still there, and by grace it can restored and inhabited again. Or so says Balthasar:

“Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself. He is built like a tabernacle around a most sacred mystery. When God’s word desires to live in him, man does not need first of all to take deliberate action to open up his innermost self. It is already there, its very nature is readiness, receptivity, the will to surrender to what is greater, to acknowledge the deeper truth, to cease hostilities in the face of the more constant love. Certainly, in the sinner, this sanctuary is neglected and forgotten, like an overgrown tomb or an attic choked with rubbish, and it needs an effort—the effort of contemplative prayer—to clean it up and make it habitable for the divine Guest. But the room itself does not need to be built: it is already there and always has been, at the very center of man.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

For a helpful discussion of some of these issues, I would recommend this episode of the Word on Fire podcast called “Distraction and Useless Things”.

For a more general introduction to Christian contemplative practice, I would recommend, Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird. It was given to me by a dear friend who was a man of prayer, if I have ever met one.

Is theology a map?

As a follow up to my post on theology as architecture, I mentioned wanting to write a post on theology as a map. I’m still thinking through that post, to be honest, and one reason I’ve yet to really write is that I’ve been pondering a provocation from Lesslie Newbigin’s commentary on the book of John.

Reflecting on John 14 and Jesus’ dual declaration that he goes to prepare a place for us and that he is himself the Way, Newbigin says that though we do know the one who is himself the Way, “We do not know the destination. We have no map of what lies beyond the curtain, though theologians—and others—often use language which suggests that we have.” As a theologian I’ve been mulling over this statement and trying to generalize a bit about whether or not I am guilty of the kind of overreach Newbigin mentions. In the immediate context, Newbigin is talking about not knowing what lies on the other side of death, so his comments about not really having a map are truly about what lies on the otherwise of the veil, but I think it has a more general application. Asking what it is theology can and can’t actually do and what it can and can’t accomplish is one of the recurring themes of this blog, and it is certainly one of the recurring themes in my thesis advisor’s work. In fact that’s part of the title of her forthcoming collection of essays, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology.

I wonder if my eagerness to describe theology as a map stems from the same kind of over confidence that Newbigin gently chides in this comment. Until I have good answer for that question, I will hold off on writing that post, and in the meantime mediate on the theme of theology as way finding.