Tag: Humility

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From my Commonplace Book: Vocation, Silence, and Knowing

One of my English professors in college had us keep a commonplace book where we wrote down important quotations, interesting images, central ideas, etc. from the things we were reading. It’s a practice I’ve more or less maintained since college, and when I taught high school English, I had my students keep a commonplace book as well.

A commonplace book is like a travelogue of the mind or a kind of map for the ideas and images that have served as landmarks. Mapping the world in this way is not an attempt at mastery but a desire for orientation, the desire to see what can be seen, to know what can be known in a lifetime, while recognizing the limitations of a single person to map the world in any comprehensive way. Loren Eisley reminds us of this with his striking image of the human journey in time and the desire for knowledge as a kind of caravan:

“We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all we hunger to know.” Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Here is a picture of one of the pages from notebook. Good luck reading it.

I recently filled up a notebook, so I thought I would collect some of my commonplace quotations here that dealt with similar themes. One benefit of keeping a commonplace book is the ability to review the themes and preoccupations that emerge over a period of time. As a preacher and teacher of scripture and as a student of theology, one perennial theme for me is the need for intellectual modesty and humility. Every intellectual pursuit has temptations and presumptions, but presuming to speak for and about God might be the biggest presumption of all. And yet as Pope Benedict XVI notes, it is the vocation of the theologian to speak, but before speaking one must listen:

“Silence and contemplation: speaking is the beautiful vocation of the theologian: in the loquacity of our day and of other times, in the plethora words, to make the essential words hear. Through words, it means making present the Word, the Word who comes from God, the Word who is God.“

The theologian speaks the word of God, but the theologian must first hear the Word and then speak. Theology then begins in contemplation, with closed lips and open ears. But the theologian does not stay silent. There are words to speak precisely because there is a Word who has spoken. There is a Word that has made and that even now upholds all things. There is a Logos that makes the -ology of theology not only possible but vital.

Such an approach to theology, one that begins in silence and then speaks, guards against two dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger of hubris, the delusion that in saying true things about God that we have said everything about God. On the other hand, there is the danger of paralyzing agnosticism. It is a kind of fear to say anything about God since it is impossible to say everything about God. Though this fear might masquerade as humility, real humility and silence in the face of mystery do not result in an agnostic throwing up of the hands or in a despairing resignation, but in a desire to more deeply indwell the mystery and then to speak truly of it.

Naming and knowing can be forms of appreciation and can be real knowledge, even if they are not comprehension and mastery. As Robert McFarlane says, “I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not knowing.” Robert McFarlane, Landmarks

And mastery itself is the wrong goal. As Balthasar reminds us, “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

Moreover, the God we speak of is love, and so we know him truly by loving him. “The person who prays begins to see: praying and seeing go together because—as Richard of St. Victor says—‘Love is the faculty of seeing’…All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and its faculty of beholding. “ Joseph Ratzinger, Beholding the Pierced One

In sum, what begins in silence ends in praise. Praise and thanksgiving are the fruit of true theological reflection.

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The City of God and the Citadel of Pride: Why Humility Matters

“The grace of God could not be commended in a way more likely to evoke a grateful response, than the way by which the only Son of God, while remaining unchangeably in his own proper being, clothed himself in humanity and gave to man the spirit of his love by the mediation of a man, so that by this love men might come to him who formerly was so far away from them, far from mortals in his immortality, from the changeable in his changelessnes, from the wicked in his righteousness, from the wretched in his blessedness. And because he has implanted in our nature the desire for blessedness and immortality he has now taken on himself mortality, while continuing in his blessedness, so that he might confer on us what our hearts desire; and by his sufferings he has taught us to make light of what we dread.” City of God, Book X.29

What is ultimately offensive and irreconcilable about the Incarnation may not be the metaphysics, the sheer improbability and seeming impossibility that God would become man, but the even more stunning implications about the kind of God who would become man. Who is this God who would subject himself to the vicissitudes of history? What is this uncontrollable mystery marked not primarily by power and might but by humility?

In Book X of City of God Augustine spars with the Neoplatonists, represented primarily by Porphyry. I have to admit that this section was pretty tough going for me. I’m not entirely familiar with Neoplatonism, and though Platonism will always cast a shadow on Western thought for good or for ill, I wasn’t entirely sure where Augustine was going. But a real payoff came in chapter 29 of Book X, where Augustine comes to a truth that is instructive for anyone engaged in evangelism and apologetics.

In this chapter, Augustine asserts that at bottom it is not for philosophical or intellectual reasons that the Neoplatonists reject Christ. Rather it is because Christ’s humility in the Incarnation and Crucifixion are affronts to their pride. Of course the whole of Christ’s life and ministry raises intellectual questions, but for Augustine, the hurdle is not primarily an intellectual one of unanswerable questions, but a spiritual one of utter humility.

This is not to say the Incarnation is not an unfathomable mystery. Of course it is bottomless and beautiful and worthy of our contemplation. Nor is this to say that intellectual objections are empty and therefore should not be addressed, but it is to say that there is often a deeper objection behind the presenting objection, and if that deeper objection is not addressed, intellectual answers, no matter how subtle or seemingly satisfying, cannot win the day. For pride is the final stronghold, the last fortress that must fall in the battle for our affection. To be sure, even when we have turned to Christ, skirmishes will be fought, offensives will be launched from this fortress, for pride resides in our most inward citadel, in the Helm’s Deep of very selves.

Here Augustine is addressing that special form of pride, intellectual pride. Augustine’s target may be the neoplatonist, but it could just as easily be the New Atheist or the materialist or any other such movement that will inevitably come down the pike. But to take the example of the New Atheist, for Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris to acknowledge the hint of the possibility that there is some reality outside of science as they have defined it would be an act of enormous humility. What they have to lose is credibility, platforms, and power, the very things that Christ laid aside in the Incarnation.

In The Lord of the Rings Frodo’s greatest advantage is his seeming inconsequence. As Gandalf says of the quest to destroy the Ring, “Let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.” Humility has its own power because it never occurs to the powerful that anyone would willingly sacrificing power. This willingness, this sacrifice is its own kind of power.

Yet anyone looking at the quest of the ring bearer from the outside would have their doubts.  Surely this hobbit cannot matter? Surely the fate of Middle-Earth does not hinge on a halfling? And many looking on the life of Christ have had their doubts. Surely the Christ cannot come from Galilee? Surely the Christ is not a carpenter, born and raised in obscurity? And we pile on our own objections. He never penned a book, never traveled beyond the borders of his occupied country, never directly affronted the occupying powers, never commanded the allegiance of the powerful. But if we would experience the humility of Christ and see its power to overcome darkness, and in seeing acknowledge the latent power of humility to destroy the one thing that seems unassailable, human pride, then we might come to a place of worship and awe, a place of understanding, not where all our questions are answered to our complete satisfaction, but where as Augustine puts it, “he might confer on us what our hearts desire.”