Front Porch Repulic recently published a piece of mine called “Where Can Wisdom Be Found? Gambling Pigeons, the Quest for Wisdom, and the Irreducibility of Poetry”. It’s a meditation on Job 28 and what that poem has to teach us about the quest for wisdom by means of its own poetry.
Here’s a taste:
While the search for mere information, raw data, can often be constrictive, the hunt for wisdom is meant to be expansive. My sense is that Job 28 calls us to a larger environment, summoning us to the quest for wisdom in which we will expand the boundaries of our own perception and current understanding. Wisdom is not found in mines, or in the places of the deep, and yet the implied exhortation is to mine for it, to hunt for it, to go in search of it. If we too are meant to be miners for wisdom, hunters for the real thing, how then do we do it? This poem has something to teach us about that quest and so too, I believe, does poetry as an art form. As a beautiful poem in its own right, Job 28 points beyond itself to the power of poetry writ large.
The poem itself performs the very quest it commends, seeking with image and rhythm, structure and rhetoric, for the heart of wisdom. As we have seen, so much of the poem speaks of the quest for wisdom, mining for it, seeking it, learning that wisdom cannot be found where gold and silver are found. While speaking of searching in vivid terms, the poem performs its own searching. Throughout the chapter, our poet speaks of mining and then acts as a miner. This poet, and all great poets, are spelunkers, repelling into darkness armed with little more than a headlamp.
Pieper’s book has been an absolute balm to me over the past few months. I will remember it, along with The Power and the Glory, as a book that helped me get through COVID-Tide. As I’ve written before, his discussion of the classical distinction between ratio and intellectus helped me name my own tendency, not to mention the broader cultural tendency, to not only privilege, but to live as if there is nothing but ratio, nothing but discourse, logic, practicality, nothing but total work. But Pieper’s book reminds us that not only is there something more than ratio, and the world of total work it brings in its wake, but that the contemplation and the leisure and the festivity of intellectus is what truly nourishes, what truly establishes culture.
There is indeed another “logic”, the logic of intellectus, which is the logic of wonder, the logic that fuels prayer, poetry, and philosophy, what Pieper collects together as the Philosophical Act.
Though a balm the book has also caused more than a little of what Pieper calls “existential disturbance”, mostly because I didn’t realize the extent to which I am myself under the sway of “total work”. Until any sense of normal working hours/conditions was taken away from me, until the normal metrics of success were suddenly unavailable (and, yes, this is true for a minister too. Imagine that), I had not known my own tendency to measure myself in terms of usefulness. In fact, early in the pandemic a friend asked me how I was feeling and I said, “I feel useless.” Pieper helped me understand that what on the face of it seems like a totally irrational and overly dramatic thought was in fact a sign that I had surrendered to the “logic” of total work. It is in fact rational, in the sense of ratio, for me to measure myself in terms of usefulness.
Importantly, Pieper is not arguing that we should do away with ratio . He is rather arguing for the recovery of and primacy of intellectus. By primacy I mean that for Pieper, intellectus is both the beginning place—it must come first—and the source of what really matters in life. And this is important because the things that intellectus brings are in a sense “useless” too, in that they ultimately do not produce value, rather they have value in and of themselves. (I’ve written previously in praise of useless things, but I had not yet connected that thought to my own sense of uselessness.)
Prayer, Poetry, and Philosophy
Such “useless” things come to those who attend to the world and to those who cultivate the sense of wonder, in a word to those who contemplate. Pieper numbers prayer, poetry, and philosophy among these “useless” things. They are useless yet indispensable, and when engaged in as acts of wonder are means of transcending the everyday, the working world, the world that recognizes only ratio.
But the pull of total work is so powerful, its promises so seductive, that there are also false forms of each of these. There is pseudo-prayer which is concerned with self and not with God, pseudo-poetry which merely follows trends or is nothing more than eloquent narcissism, and pseudo-philosophy which has no sense of wonder. We all must beware of these.
So if you too have felt useless, allow yourself to reimagine that feeling as an opportunity or as invitation back to wonder. In service of such wonder, might I recommendThe Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a book that deeply rewards attentive wonder. Here is a passage that captures that dynamic beautifully:
“Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.”
