On what is real.

On what is real. February 14, 2016

"The Gray Tree," Piet Mondrian
“The Gray Tree,” Piet Mondrian

“Trees aren’t made of stone,” a student said with a frown, “and stone doesn’t grow. I’m in science; this just doesn’t work like that.” I valiantly resisted dropping my head to the table and growling. We were reading a damn poem, just a poem. Which, apparently, should have been scientifically accurate. A freaking poem. Agh. Scientists in the liberal arts: ants at a picnic.

One of the reasons I had us looking at a poem was to push the very question, “What is real?”

Because poems don’t give a shit about physics and biology – or time or place – but do still have physics, biology, time, and place, they’re excellent training ground for thinking theologically. If theology is in any sense real, then “the real” needs to be more than we are willing to say it is, and yet still hinged to what we do say. It is not that science is real and theology unreal, nor that theology is real and science unreal. They are both real, but not identically real.

This is where we lose the modern mind, which means we lose it almost immediately: thinking more than one reality. Or rather, thinking more than one way of being real. Or that there is only one Real by which all else is also – analogously – real.

Try imagining a reality that does not in any way rely on this one, has no relation to this one – none at all, is nowhere at all, is no when at all – through which this reality nevertheless exists. These are not two realities. There is only this one real, which is not ours, by which we are real. Think that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought, says Anselm. That is God. Welcome to theology.

Poetry is not theology. It is a training ground. A place to be reminded that an image, a word, can mean more than one thing at the same exact time. This is important, or else stone cannot also be a sign of God.

And it’s always a fight, poetry. Walking into a classroom with a poem. My scientists want to ruin my day and my anarchist relativists want to ruin it too. People want poems to be “realistic” or they want poems to mean “whatever” they want. Either option just means that there is only one option: science or whatever. My whole point is why only one?

The temptation in theology is to retreat entirely to God (fideism) or to retreat entirely to history (historicism). As if we had to insist that only divine propositions are real, historical evidence be damned; or else that only what we can see in history is real, God be damned. It’s the same problem all over again: why only one?

Rather than growling at students while smashing my head against a table, I offered a strained grin and said, “That’s true. Scientifically. There cannot be a stone tree. So why is that image in there?” This the scientist could not say. Because science cannot say.

My students stared at the poem some more. I gently encouraged them simply to note things they found noticeable, interesting, familiar. They picked out lines here and there, smatterings of phrases that contorted something recognizable. I pointed out that they – a cluster of Catholics – had gravitated toward lines that mimicked Scripture. “You do know Scripture,” I said. “You just don’t know it in the form of lines. It’s a song you know the lyrics to when it plays.” They were quite pleased with themselves at this.

One student noticed the movement of the poem, and this is rather more advanced than anything I expected. Here was a mind that could so closely hold together more than one form of being real that these could communicate with one another, these real things, could share and shift. We tend to think everything is made of solitude, all self-enclosed integers of loneliness. Everything is not.

“Brilliant darkness,” a student said. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Where do you think?” I asked, grinning.

“A meditation of some kind.” He and another student traded conjectures. Some kind of collection of Catholic prayers.

“It ultimately comes from an ancient Christian named Pseudo-Dionysius,” I explained. “God is light, he says. Light beyond light. God, he says, is ‘brilliant darkness.’ ”

They stared at me in bewilderment, and I wondered now if the growing stone tree seemed simple by comparison. We often pretend as if our words can say everything. They cannot.

If science does not mean everything, if words do not mean everything, if things are not solitary – but they are still full of meaning – well then. Not only is theology possible, but so is God.

 

 

 

 


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