Meilaender:

It is true, of course, that the more painful the memory, the more difficult it may be to believe that anything in the future could transfigure it or could draw it into a life story that we could bear to acknowledge as our own—and the more tempted, therefore, we may be to seek a technological fix. At the very end of the story of Job, in its canonical version, the Lord restores Job’s fortune—indeed, his material and familial blessings become even greater than they were before his trials. Scholars, of course, often characterize this prose epilogue as an addendum to the poem that tells Job’s story—an addendum that drastically alters the story’s meaning. Instead of a poem in which Job simply suffers inexplicably, we are given—with the epilogue—a story in which Job’s suffering is finally redeemed and given coherent meaning.

Many—unable or unwilling to suppose that Job’s sufferings might be in any sense redeemed—are likely to prefer the poem without the epilogue. They will prefer Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., in which, without any claims for redemptive meaning, one simply bears what comes with human dignity.

The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see, by and by.

But note that neither reading—neither a reading which encourages us to hope that what is painful in the past may be transfigured and given new, redemptive meaning; nor a reading which encourages us to bear the ills of life with human dignity, finding in them occasions for courage, endurance, and mutual support—neither of these readings supposes that simply erasing the painful past takes seriously the narrative quality of human life.

“How great, my God, is this force of memory, how exceedingly great! It is like a vast and boundless subterranean shrine. Who has ever reached the bottom of it? Yet this is a faculty of my mind and belongs to my nature; nor can I myself grasp all that I am.” Thus, St. Augustine, in one of the most famous discussions of memory ever written. Dive as deep as we may into that “subterranean shrine,” into the depths of the memories that constitute the story of our life, and we cannot yet see the full meaning of any of life’s events. Caught as we are in the midst of the story, doing our best to follow a plot whose twists and turns we may not entirely fathom, we cannot see anything from the perspective of the end of the story—and, therefore, cannot say fully who we are or what the events of our life may mean.

That is the gist of Augustine’s “confession”: that because only God can catch the heart and hold it still, because we cannot attain that authorial perspective on the end (and, therefore, the full meaning) of our life, God knows us better than we know ourselves. Quite a different spirit is expressed in the famous claim made by Rousseau at the outset of his Confessions:

“Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: ‘ . . . I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being.’”

One who supposed that he could attain that godlike perspective on the meaning of his life might perhaps be in a position to know what experiences were so painful that they were better obliterated from memory. If, on the contrary, we know ourselves as bodies who live in time, whose lives must have a narrative quality but who cannot know the end or full meaning of our life story, then our task is not to erase memory but to connect and integrate memories ” to live the story as best one can who does not yet know how the plot will work out. Perhaps, in so doing, some of us will believe that there is no past so painful that it cannot be transfigured and redeemed in a truthful story. Perhaps, in so doing, others among us may suspect that the best we can do is blow on the coal of the heart and see by and by (how the plot takes its course). But neither approach will find good reason to act as if we already knew the full meaning of life’s story. In either case we are led to acknowledge our limits, to honor the narrative quality of human life, to accept our need to sustain the life stories of one another, and to wonder at the mysterious depths of a “memoried” human life.

From the new afterword to David Epstein’s book, Range:

One of the earliest recorded uses of the phrase “Jack of all trades” as an insult dates to 1592. In the New Latin form “Johannes factotum,” it was contained in a pamphlet by a playwright criticizing his own industry. The jab refers to a poet with no university education who was apparently involved in various other roles, like copying scripts and bit-part acting, even trying to write plays. The poet on the receiving end of the insult: a young William Shakespeare. The phrase evolved over time, and today it’s usually “Jack of all trades, master of none.” I think it is culturally telling that we habitually hack off the end of the long version: “A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

My sister asked me once, “If you were to pick one theologian or author you agree most with, who would it be?” I answered,

For me, it seems like it’s always in flux. But so far I’d say Karl Barth, à la George Hunsinger.

Hunsinger would be my theologian answer. For teacher/writer, and one who is probably a far more accessible writer, Gilbert Meilaender, hands down.

Looking for some past reflection, I’ve been going through some of Meilaender’s essays published at First Things over the years.

This one seems fitting for me over the last year:

Push hard enough on the demands of the Christian life, we might say, and we will learn that the “person” cannot float entirely free of the “work.” What we do both expresses and determines who we are.

There is, however, one way in which [John Paul II’s] Veritatis Splendor might profit from adopting a little of [Helmut] Thielicke’s perspective. The encyclical exudes a kind of serene confidence about the Christian life that may sometimes be difficult to reconcile with the experience of individual Christians. “Temptations can be overcome, sins can be avoided, because together with the commandments the Lord gives us the possibility of keeping them . . . . Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible.” Surely this is true. We would not want to say of baptized Christians that the power of Christ’s Spirit cannot enable obedience in any circumstance. “And if redeemed man still sins,” Veritatis Splendor continues, “this is not due to an imperfection of Christ’s redemptive act, but to man’s will not to avail himself of the grace which flows from that act.”

What we miss here, though, is some sense of our weakness, of the differences in strength and circumstances that mark individual Christian lives. In the famous refrain of Book 10 of his Confessions—give what you command, and command what you will—St. Augustine also expresses confidence in the power of the Spirit to enable virtuous action. But in his repetition of that formula we sense something that is also present in Thielicke’s thought—the precariousness of our lives as Christians, the deep divisions that sometimes continue to mark the psyches of believers, our sense on occasion that the best we can do does not measure up to what we ought to do, our sense (so strong for Augustine) that God knows our character better than we know ourselves.

Jonah Goldberg:

If forced to choose between the “liberal” or the “democracy” in “liberal democracy,” I’ll go for “liberal” every time. I’m glad I don’t have to choose, of course, because democracy is an important mechanism for sustaining liberalism over time. But a liberal society can be just with remarkably little democracy. A democratic society is almost definitionally unjust without any liberalism.

CS Lewis:

“It was the merest Enchantment to suppose that any human beings, trusted with uncontrolled powers over their fellows, would not use it for exploitation; or even to suppose that their own standards of honour, valour, and elegance (for which alone they existed) would not soon degenerate into flash-vulgarity. Hence, rightly and inevitably, the Disenchantment, the age of Revolutions. But the question on which all hangs is whether we can go on to Re-enchantment.”
“What would that Re-enchantment be?”
“The realization that the thing of which Aristocracy was a mirage is a vital necessity; if you like, that Aristocracy was right: it was only the Aristocrats who were wrong. Or, putting it the other way, that a society which becomes democratic in ethos as well as in constitution is doomed. And not much loss either.”

This Iris Murdoch quote from Alan Jacobs is crucial:

The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused. 

It’s also—like most good things—very, very old.

St. Augustine:

And so, every love that belongs to a studious soul which wants to know what it does not know is not a love of what it does not know but rather of what it does know. It is because of what it does know that it wants to know what it does not know. But someone so curious as to be carried away by nothing other than a love of knowing the unknown, and not because of something already known, should be distinguished from the studious and called curious. But even the curious do not love the unknown. It is more accurate to say that they hate the unknown because they want everything to become known and thus nothing to remain unknown.

From a class journal essay on the history of genocide and reconciliation:

---

Without in any way diminishing the importance of the truth or the policies that support it, the challenge is often in finding ways to seek this goal of healing not just as a result of the first two but in the process of pursuing them. This third goal can, thankfully, exist even in the midst of disagreement and unjust laws. This is, I think, because this goal has a life of its own. The truth is not (merely) something we seek for the sake of community, nor is community (merely) something we seek for the sake of truth—community is itself a form of truth. Truth and justice matter, but sometimes our efforts to define the truth, just as our efforts to find justice, can do as much to get in the way of community and healing as they can to champion it. This reality, probably more than any other, points at the difficulty—but also the profound possibility—of reconciliation.

“Sitting Around Your Table”

Sitting around your table

as we did, able

to laugh, argue, share

bread and wine and companionship, care

about what someone else was saying, even

if we disagreed passionately: Heaven,

we’re told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial,

eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium

partakes—for me, at least—of sacrament.

(Whereas the devil, ever intent

on competition, invented the cocktail party where

one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare

we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free?

Yes! Around your table we

knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless

the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest.

~ Madeleine L’Engle ~

Taylor Dotson at The New Atlantis (contra some scientist dingbat with an iconic/ironic voice for storytelling):

Like Popper’s philosophy of science, this vision of democracy emphasizes the tentativeness of political truths and the inherent cognitive limitations of any given citizen, even an expert. If political outcomes ever approximate what seems “objectively” most desirable, it is through a healthy process of negotiation in which “subjective” individuals challenge each other, rather than through assent to the superior understanding of an expert class.

But The Open Society was a product of its time. Because Popper did not anticipate threats to open societies outside of grand historical narratives, he did not imagine that the source of fanatical certitude would one day be individuals, who would fashion it out of a veritable flood of discordant facts and suspicions. Americans have increasingly come to see themselves as capable of sifting through all the available evidence to discover unerring truths that their political opponents are too biased, ignorant, or corrupt to see. Although some citizens still coalesce around shared visions of the ultimate makeup of society (such as that of white nationalists), the more significant drivers of polarized, intransigent politics are the twin afflictions of scientism and conspiracism. […]

Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world. […]

Let’s call this fact-ist politics. Under its influence, citizens no longer debate or deliberate but dedicate themselves to aligning the evidence to shore up cherished beliefs and interests. And they end up even more intransigent as a result, because they can tell themselves that their own ideas are unassailably rational and objective. […]

This diagnostic political style is both unfair and condescending. It eventually renders all disagreement into a cognitive disease — one to which the diagnostician just so happens to be immune. The diagnostic style reinforces the idea that the only legitimate grounds for participating in politics is having “evidence-based” opinions. Evidence matters greatly, but it isn’t the whole game. When we believe that it is, we shove aside our underlying value disagreements, thereby undermining our capacity to deliberate as our disagreements become ever more devoid of moral and practical complexity. […]

Democratic theorists have long recognized the dangers of rationalistic politics. As historian Sofia Rosenfeld writes, describing the thought of Hannah Arendt: “What individuals require is the return to a kind of public life that forces them to constantly weigh and consider things from the perspective of other people.” Political theorist Benjamin Barber has defined “strong democratic talk” as incorporating “listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting.” And theorists such as Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom — associated with a political theory called “pluralism” — have emphasized the need for democracies to foster mutual learning and accept the inescapability of disagreement. […]

We must learn how to see agreement as the end of politics more than the beginning — and, even then, as partial, tentative, and contingent. By abandoning the idea that consensus on the facts must precede politics, we can promote a style of governance that aspires to gradually earn trust by publicly testing new policies.

James K.A. Smith:

The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.

It is this necessary cultivation for surprise that is undermined by the cliché. The arts in the vicinity of faith seem especially prone to give us what we already love, to keep returning to tropes that are familiar, hence comforting. This is how to make the world smaller, shrinking it to the size of what I’ve come looking for, what I’ve come to expect. The comfort of the cliché is a buffer against surprise. …

A life hungry for aesthetic surprise does not settle for daily doses of predictably poignant comfort; instead, I need to expose my palate to strange, maybe even unsavory tastes as a way of making myself available for the sublime. While we can’t manufacture the surprise, we can learn to make ourselves available. …

Granted, there’s an objective force to works of art that can do this. It’s no accident that Bach and Cézanne hook so many. The mystery is what it takes for them to hook me. What did I have to go through for the epiphany to dawn, for the artwork to arrest me, unsettle me?

To Ross Douthat’s recent (less-than-helpful) pieces here and here—neither of which are worth rereading—I can hear Nadezhda Mandelstam responding to some who “find comfort in the doctrine of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”:

They hope they may last out till a new “synthesis” which will allow them to come into their own again with a vengeance. …

For my part, knowing that permanent ideas are formed in youth and are rarely revised later in life, I can only watch with hope and bated breath as more and more people read poetry—and the “Fourth Prose.” Between people like myself and those who stand on the other side, there is a clear division: we are thesis and antithesis. I do not expect to see a synthesis, but I would love to know whom the future belongs to.

Hope Against Hope (246)