Listening to Lucy: The Short Way to God

The know-nothing and the pseudo-intellectual are the same personality type in different zip codes. The know-nothing cannot be taught, because even the possibility he might be wrong enrages him. The pseudo-intellectual cannot be taught, because he already knows the truth and has the credentials to prove it. This is even true of the pseudo-Socratic personality that will ask questions within a range of possibilities, but never allow himself to be challenged in ways that would cut him off from modern “intellectual culture.”

Dante understood there were two ways to Paradise: the short way and the long way. For some of us, there are questions that should lead us to truth and passions that should lead us to beauty. Instead, we become trapped by our desires . . . especially our intellectual desires and so we miss God. Like Dante, we think ourselves great poets or lovers, when really we have the same foolish sins of our community, just with better grammar or style. There is another person who ignores all questions, confuses his opinions with the truth, and his tastes with beauty. This boorish lout justifies himself by the pomposity of the pseudo-intellectual. The pseudo-intellectual never has to worry about his bankrupt mind because he compares his cultured life with the pig. Dante woke up from this nightmare lost and it was the piety and simplicity of the saints that brought him home.

There are saints with great wisdom and beatific intellect, but there are also simple teenagers with plain faith, allowed to go directly from Earth to Paradise. They don’t have the same questions and their mere living is their poetry. Lucy is an example Dante used: a martyr who burned with  a holy flame as she died. Lucy could see . . . her name (Light) expresses her inner vision. CS Lewis would pick up on her life in creating the character of Lucy in the Narnia stories: always the first child to see Aslan.

The pseudo-intellectual cannot learn from Lucy, because she has no credentials. The know-nothing confuses their ignorance with simplicity and misses Lucy, because they are busy consuming pop culture.

The know-nothing thinks he is like Lucy when he lacks her humility and holiness. Lucy did not pretend to greatness or seize power in some ministry. Lucy walked the simple way not because she rejected wisdom, but because she was already wise. She was not impatient with those of us who ask questions or who create art because she was too busy burning fiercely with her own holy flame. The know-nothing thinks he is Lucy when he is a pig and the pseudo-intellectual ignores Lucy because she did not earn her degree.

The prig and the pig are separated by less than nothing: reactionary, repulsive, regressive. One is proud of ignorance, the other of the little he knows. Neither will see God, but those who see God must fear Him and that entails knowledge of our ignorance, humility, and a desire to learn. The genuine wise person seeks wisdom, beauty, and virtue where he can. The real saint knows that some are called to write poetry, others to build roads, and more to sustain society by small acts of goodness. Christian academics are infected with both types: “professors” with no genuine academic credentials unashamed of their ignorance and “professors” who are utterly disconnected from the wisdom of the congregation.

We cannot learn, we cannot listen, we cannot see Lucy.

God help us to pause and if we must walk the “long way” to God, the way of poetry, pain, and study, to value what God is doing in humility. If we are a bit-like-Lucy, faith that takes the short way to God and just sees, may we have patience with those who are slower and appreciate the pearls of beauty the struggle produces. The reality is that all of us are probably a bit like Dante and a bit like Lucy: walking a blended way between artistic struggle and simple living. We need both voices in our lives. God help us never to be transformed from men to pigs by our brutish ignorance nor from students to prigs by our focus on credentials and position.

The pseudo-intellectual should leave the tower and humble himself learning from everyone who has something to teach. The know-nothing should leave their personal Vegas and learn better pleasures, deeper ideas, and greater loves.

Make us like Lucy: full of light. Make us like Dante for whom at last after so many words seeking God realized:

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —

140      Except that then my mind was struck by lightning

          Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

 

          Here powers failed my high imagination:

          But by now my desire and will were turned,

          Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

 

145      By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.