in search of areté

As the narrator travels west, he begins the long climb across the high plains of the Great Plains to the Rock Mountain Range beyond. As the high country approaches, he contemplates his inner conflicts and experiences. He says,

I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.

If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.

He speaks of knowledge here but I don’t believe it is limited to mere cognitive acquisitions. Any and all thoughts, ideas, concepts, information, and dreams constitute this cerebral structure. And it is, as he says, the most abstract of all areas.

For me, this includes all my theological studies, readings, lecture notes, and everything and anything else that has contributed to my understanding of God and who I am as an image bearer, a sinner, and redeemed child of God. I am all of these and more; I have read and reflected a lot about them.

Of course, I did not start out there. No one does. Whether one starts from a false premise (any non-biblical religion) and winds up wandering in the peaks of false knowledge, or starts with the truth as God has revealed it and begins an ascent of Mt Zion – regardless of the starting point the first steps begin at the base of the mountain.

The more I read and the more I began to understand of all the legitimate systems of theology, and how they seemed to be irreconcilable with one another, the more I wondered what was going on. Each step up was weighed down by the gravity of questions without answers, but at least the hope of resolution lay ahead, perhaps hidden by clouds at the summit. So I went on, reading Scripture and reflecting on the diverse understandings accumulated by true believers during two thousand years of New Testament faith.

The narrator continues his description of the high country of the mind:

Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.

There are indeed few who seem to travel above the timberline. There is no lack of people who are interested in the stories and tales of those who have been there, but there don’t seem to be many who have the aptitude or appetite for it.

And there is certainly no profit in such theological, spiritual heights. The money is in the traditional, the safe, the so-called certain things of our shared faith. Those who would disrupt the entrenched tranquility are viewed with suspicion and disdain. No matter how big the auditorium of the church, there never seems to be quite enough room for them inside. Harry Blamires wrote about this 35 years ago.

The [Christian] thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist. . . .

But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself . . . Thus our complaint against the education through which our [pastors] are prepared for their duties might justly be widened into a complaint against the bias of our educational system in general. It is not geared to the production of thinkers. It is geared to their obliteration. – The Christian Mind

Back in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator adds:

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out. . . .

It’s that one word – “uncertainty” – that is so much a problem. We don’t like it. We like answers and unanswered questions or incomplete information or knowledge troubles us, even when we logically know we cannot comprehend all the truth there is when it comes to God. But we strive to figure it out anyway. Because what we know we can predict and that gives a feeling of control.

And the fear getting lost is a real one, too. It’s the fear, perhaps, of climbing so high that perhaps we’ll discover something that will cause us to lose our faith. As though we found it to begin with. But we’re I’m afraid of what I might find if I go to far and so I want to stop. Maybe some Festus in my life will jump up and say, “”Mike, you are out of your mind! Your great learning is driving you mad.”

The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.

Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

I need to make an important clarification here. I said earlier in this post that some – or most – people start climbing the wrong mountain and wind up worshiping a god who is not there. But for those of us in the biblical faith of Christianity, there are indeed many paths to – not salvation – but maturity. That’s how I apply the previous two paragraphs: if someone is on the right mountain, there are a lot of paths that lead to and through sanctification. The means is always the same: the Holy Spirit causes the growth.

I look over my shoulder for one last view of the gorge. Like looking down at the bottom of the ocean. People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

This is the sad existence of a lot of Christians. There is higher ground to be gained, a spiritual maturity that goes beyond mere knowledge of spiritual things. I think we’re all called to this whether we do it or not.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that all our knowledge, which we mistake for a sign of maturity, is just hiking gear. It is what we learn from theology and our knowledge of Scripture that makes the climb possible. If we don’t climb, we’re like consumers who buy hiking gear and talk about the gear and argue over which gear is best and who used what gear to climb to what heights. We do all this but we never get out and climb.

It’s not the heights that reflects maturity: it’s the process of climbing – enabled by the Holy Spirit – that develops us and brings about the growth. It is hard work and it is the best work anyone can ever do.

The knowledge of theology and bible are tools for us to use to draw nearer to God; they are not God themselves. Without the climb there is no growing relationship with God, no true maturity.

Whenever I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I kept seeing applications of the author’s arguments to my own Christian life. And perhaps your Christian life, too. In order for anyone interested to be able to understand what I’m talking about, it’s necessary to work through the development of narrator’s thought as well as my own.

Early in the motorcycle journey from Minnesota to Montana, the speaker (for the book is written in first-person limited) takes time to explain his understanding of understanding. He says,

“But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds – classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . .

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. . . .

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. . . .

“The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior . . .”

The narration goes on but I want to interrupt for a moment. When I read “romantic” and “classic” I think “Praxis” and “Theology.” And by “Praxis” I mean the living out of the Christian life, not something divorced from reason or knowledge but instead something growing out of it and also informing it. I could call it Peripateo, the word for “walk” but Praxis, “practice,” is perhaps more familiar and thus preferable.

I am not saying that experience or Praxis should determine doctrine or Theology. I am saying that Praxis should illuminate Theology. And illuminate it by both demonstrating the truth of the doctrine and deepening or even modifying our understanding of knowledge and doctrine.

Then narrator says, “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical.” My application is this: “Although Praxis is romantic (as defined here), Theology is purely classical (as defined here).”

He adds,

“The classic style [Theology] is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control.”

And then he adds this important observation:

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one more or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

If this doesn’t describe most of the division in evangelical Christianity, I don’t know what does. It is not only in the “world” that reason is elevated and affect marginalized: it is certainly true any many segments of evangelicalism, too.

Having been spiritually raised in a Bible Church environment, I have looked disdainfully in the past at those who seemed to draw their knowledge of God almost exclusively from their experiences. And their experiences, it seemed to me, tended to dictate their doctrine and beliefs.

I no longer look at such people with disdain but I still think the generalization is largely true. Such people are the romantics of Christendom, enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of Christianity but negligent or ignorant of the structure and foundation necessary to support it.

But the knife cuts another way, too. My own experience has been largely, if not exclusively, in classical or Theological understanding. It has been cerebral and reasonable, clinical and sterile. Feelings, emotions, experience have been relegated to a lower status, as though they were creations of a lessor god.

The merging of these two ways of understanding lie down the path of Christian maturity. I have only begun trying figure out how to think about these things and how to live them out. I’ll talk later about what constitutes excellence or genuine maturity, but for now I’ll only say that it requires both of these modes in proper relationship to one another.

Important and significant as this has been for me, it is not what caused the seismic paradigm shift for me. That lies elsewhere, but much needs to be explained before I can get there.

I suppose I should start by saying a few words about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its author, Robert Pirsig. This book, as I mentioned previously, was an important catalyst in some changes that have occurred in me recently. But, whether you’ve read the book or not, I need to explain what I swallowed as meat and what I spit out as bones. Because there are some bones in the book and we should be careful not to choke on them.

First, the meat. Pirsig mentions early on that he was clocked at 170 on the Stanford-Binet measurement of intelligence, a score that puts him in the rarefied air of genius. Nowhere is his intellect more in evidence or more scathing than when he turns it on the sacred cows of our culture. His analysis of the educational system, for example, is a penetrating and refreshingly honest expose of what is wrong with undergraduate and graduate programs in America. This is not central to my own present writing, however, and I’ll let it go for now – but, since I am also in no hurry, will pick it up later: it’s just too good to be missed.

As a philosopher, Pirsig leaves much to be desired, but as a teacher of philosophy and a critic thereof, he has few peers. His treatment of Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle made me stop and reconsider some of the long-held presuppositions and assumptions I have had – and not really been aware of. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

It is often said that a fish does not see water or that a fish does not know that it is wet, either of which is meant to be an analogy for the difficulty of we have in seeing the metaphysical underpinnings or presuppositions of our own culture or subculture. Pirsig shows us both the water and that we are all wet. What he has to say about Aristotle and his effect on western culture has implications for western Christianity, too.

Pirsig is in fine form when he discusses, in addition to the educational system, such things as the nature of excellence, the limits of intelligence, insanity, conformity, and spirituality. I hope to write about each of these things in posts to come.

But there are bones to be careful of, and these are pretty much all found in his attempts to come up with his own philosophical system, something he will later call the Metaphysics of Quality. As I said before, he is at his best as a critic and teacher but at his worst as a philosopher seeking his own system. Well, no one is perfect.

I need to review ZMM to refresh my memory on some of the details of Pirsig’s writings. This means I may not post for a week or so. Or, it could mean that I’ll post a whole lot real soon. I don’t know.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for tagging along.

I do not presume to know all the ways God works in a person’s life. What that means practically is that I am often not sure if God is doing something in my life or if my flesh – egged on by Satan in the blender of the world – is simply doing what it wants to do. If I am considering some ungodly pursuit, then it is clear; when I am reflecting on esoteric and ethereal things, trying to see behind the wizard’s curtain, it is not always so obvious.

I do know what God is doing – conforming me to the image of Christ (to the extent I will allow it) and bringing glory to himself. I know, too, that it is the Holy Spirit who accomplishes these things. It’s the how that I am unsure of: Is this a rabbit hole God wants me to follow? Or is this a bad rabbit hole I need to get out of? I don’t know.

Such is the quandary in which I have found myself recently, shoved toward the rabbit hole by the debacle at a church with which I was involved. What precipitated the present dilemma was the – timely? untimely? – reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM henceforth) by Robert Pirsig.

N.B. – If you are of the sect that avoids secular stuff or anything that flirts with false religion, consider the author’s note at the beginning of the book:

What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.”

I’m pretty sure God prevented me from reading the book when it first came out for either one or two reasons: if one reason only, then it was because it was a book that would not have been good for me; if two reasons, then it was because God knew it would not have been good at that time but it would be good for me at a later time. So, if it’s one reason, then God didn’t want me to read ZAMM at all. But if it’s two reasons, then God didn’t want me to read it before he had first prepared me.

ZAMM came out in 1974; I became a Christian late in 1974. It could be that if I had read it then, in my B.C. days, it would have interfered with conversations I had with Christians and might have postponed my conversion for some time (I do believe in election, but not so much an appointment that I will meet God at such and so time).

More likely, though, is the very strong likelihood that had I read it 34 years ago much of it would have been lost on me. For one thing, I wasn’t so intellectually curious back then. For another, there was too much smoke in my neurovascular system, i.e., marijuana smoke. I might have been inoculated (following Bem’s theory) and the significance of the book lost on me permanently.

But now I have read it and I cannot undo the impressions or effects that it has had. So I have to figure out if the book’s impact is a good thing God brought into my life or some insidious evil that God allowed to come into my life. As of this writing, I think it was a very good thing for me to have read the book, although I cannot tell you why. And I can see how the book’s effect could be dangerous for me, too, and must admit that I would be sad if that proved to be the case.

Some of the effects I can describe and some I cannot. Some I understand and some I do not. And some I can attribute to God’s work in my life and others – well, I don’t know. Hence, the problem of rabbit holes.

Here’s one effect:

Pirsig says a lot in the book about people, psychology, philosophy, society, education, father-son relationships, and our relationship with ourselves. Describing one of the characters, he says:

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time . . .

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.“ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

There is a phenomenon that psychologists, not knowing how else to describe it, call “personality integration,” an Ah! Ha! moment wherein the psychic pieces come together to make a coherent whole. To anyone aware of my long history of, in Tom Petty’s words, “runnin’ down a dream that never would come to me,” it should come as no surprise that Pirsig’s words were remarkably healing. Suddenly almost all of my experiences of the past 34-plus years tumbled into a new category which was immediately understandable, recognizable, and (in many ways) vindicating.

Yes, but about that rabbit hole . . .

Is this a good thing or not? Is it merely a rationalization I can employ to justify or comprehend more than three decades of frustration with Institutions that (in my mind) ought to know better? Or is this a snare of the enemy into which I have fallen? Is it a subtle means of conforming me to the world?

There are no definitive answers. There are, however, hints and kindred spirits – hinting spirits like Harry Blamires, a great Christian thinker (so say some) who, in 1963, wrote:

The [Christian] thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist. . . .

But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself . . . Thus our complaint against the education through which our [pastors] are prepared for their duties might justly be widened into a complaint against the bias of our educational system in general. It is not geared to the production of thinkers. It is geared to their obliteration.“ The Christian Mind

But the fallacy is blatant, is it not? Blamires is a “kindred spirit” or “great thinker” because I agree with him. If I did not, I would hardly regard him a “great thinker” and certainly not a “kindred spirit.”

Perhaps (although this too may be nothing more than a rationalization) it comes down to this: do I have the courage or faith to follow and live out that which I believe to be true? Will I walk the path which is opening before me? And do this regardless of what others think of or say about me? Perhaps this is part of living by faith, something that devotion to Christ demands: a commitment to follow the path – down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass – wherever it leads as long as it does not depart from Scripture. And to do this regardless of whatever anyone else might think.

Perhaps. Who can say?

(The narrator and his 11-year-old son, Chris, are traveling via motorcycle across the northern tier of states with John and Sylvia Sutherland, longtime friends of the family. Chris has just asked his father if he believes in ghosts and, hearing a negative reply, pursues the matter.)

“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”

John nods affirmatively and I continue.

“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

“They seem real to me,” John says.

“I don’t get it,” says Chris.

So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”

“Of course.”

“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”

John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”

“Sure.”

“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”

Now John seems not so sure.

“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

. . .

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”

I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”

They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.

I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.

After a while John says, “It’ll be good to see the mountains again.”

“Yes, it will,” I agree. “one last drink to that!”