Paying Attention To The Sky

The other day a fellow made a list of all the things that would be necessary (for him) to believe in the Resurrection. It so happened that day I had posted a favorite quote of mine from Michael Novak: “Gathering force over many years, one discovery has hit me with the force of a law: If you make mistakes about your own nature, you will make as many mistakes about God, and quite properly then, reject what your inquiries put before you. The god you fantasize will appear to you not very great, a delusion, a snare from which others ought to be freed. You will despise this god.”

I saw in his “list” a recitation of all the things most important in this person’s nature: chief amongst them a highly analytical nature, a no-nonsense approach to life, a refusal to engage in any metaphysical thought, etc. etc… I thought that I would reply in kind just to contrast what a believer’s nature looks like. It is, of course an incomplete list – most of it has at one time or another been the subject of a post on Paying Attention To The Sky:

 (1)   I have been loved into existence. My life has been a gift from God and I believe I have lived it under His most profound providence and generosity. Michael Novak writes: “Our intellects, our will — these can reach out to God, like arrows of inquiry shot up into the infinite night. These are not shot in vain. They mark out a direction. Waiting in silence, in abandonment, even in the dry sands of the desert, one comes to know His presence. Not believe in it. Know it. In a 1959 interview with the BBC, C. G. Jung once made the same point. Asked whether he believed in God, Jung replied, “I don’t believe — I know.” This is a dark knowledge. One cannot expect anyone else to know it, unless they have also walked the rocky and darkling path — or somehow by God’s grace been brought to it by a different journey, along a different route.” This is how I “know” things about God. I’m afraid it is of little use to anyone else. I can offer no one a scientific proof of God but can provide a number of paths to Him.

(2)   No matter how I struggle or wish it to be different, I know exactly what St. Paul meant when he wrote: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.” I know at some deepest level of self-awareness that I am a sinner.

(3)   I believe in Dostoevsky’s creed: “One sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy,” he wrote from Siberia. “And yet God gives me moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple, here it is: “I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Savior: I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one.”

(4)   “The creative action of a Christian’s life is to prepare for his death in Christ.” Flannery O’Connor wrote that. I wish I knew what that will mean for me. I’m hoping to make it something wonderful.

(5)   Josef Pieper emphasizes the close connection between moral and intellectual virtue. Our minds do not — contrary to many views currently popular — create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity (obedience) is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process (especially in my case). We have, Pieper writes, “lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity.” That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily — perhaps not often — be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must — by God’s grace — undergo “perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.” This is training in the divine school of obedience.  

(6)   A Half Dozen Things that Blaise Pascal taught me:

• We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness…Pensées 401
  Since no one can change human nature, no one can make us stop desiring truth and happiness; and no mere human being can gives us truth or happiness. We can mediate these two things (and get them in crumbs and droplets while wishing for great loaves and waves), but we cannot create them; we are aqueducts not fountains. (C.S. Lewis: “Human beings can’t make each other happy for very long.”)
• Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms and crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.
  Thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well: that is the basic principle of morality…  Pensées 200
  Man is unstable. His nature is double (body and spirit), his consciousness is double (exalted and wretched) and his potentiality is double (heaven or hell). In all three ways he is unlike all the things in nature, which rest stably within their nature. Roses can no more be unrosy than a triangle scan be nontriangular; but humans can be inhuman…man’s essence does not determine his existence but his existence determines his essence. We determine our nature, our character, our personality, by the free choices in our existence our life, our career in time, our history. Everything in nature has its life and history determined by its timeless pattern, plan or essence; with us it is the reverse. This formula – existence determines essence – is Sartre’s and the Christian will not buy into everything Sartre means by it (for instance, that we have no essence at all because there is no God to design it) but in itself it is true and profound.
• Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched…Pensées 114
  Thus the greatness and high dignity of Greek drama. It is not only that the wise sufferer is rewarded in the end, like Oedipus (and Job), but that even in the act of suffering well there is dignity, because the suffering is not just a negative event in the physical world but also a positive event in the spiritual world, by the sufferer’s understanding and will, his suffering is granted entrance into this second world. It becomes not merely an event in space but an event in consciousness. It is taken up to Heaven. This is part of is training in the divine school of obedience.
• If God had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day with such thunder and lightening and such convulsions of nature that the dead will rise up and the blindest will see him. This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness, because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, that he wished to deprive them of the good they did not desire. It was therefore not right that he should appear in a manner manifestly divine and absolutely capable of convincing all men, but neither was it right that his coming should be so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sincerely sought him. He wished to make himself perfectly recognizable to them. Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. ‘There is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”
   Pensées 149
• We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are to and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
  Let us each examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
   Pensées 47 [Matthew 6:34: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”] I wish I had learned that years ago.
• Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble impotent reason! Be silent feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master our true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God… Pensées 131
  Our reason and our nature contradict each other. Our reason insists on doubt, our nature insists on certainty. Our reason is a skeptic, our nature is a dogmatist. Our reason insists on assuming nothing, or nature insists on assuming innate principles. The point of the lesson now follows: Both nature and reason must learn faith, silence, humility, listening to God. Without this there is no fulfillment of our reason or our nature, and no solution to the dilemma between them….Only Christian “abnormalism”, only the Fall, explains these two primal truths: we are unhappy and ignorant, and that we long to be happy and certain. We cannot stop demanding our two foods, happiness and certainty. Nor can we ever attain them. They are the only two innate desires that are never satisfied, the only hungers for foods not found here on earth and in time….Aquinas declared all his writings mere “straw” and would not finish the Summa – not out of laziness but in light of God’s face seen in a graced mystical vision. Job, too, put his finger to his lips when he saw God [Job 42:1-6]. This is the chief use of reasoning, questioning and genius: that we may have something to quiet. The chief use of philosophy is to have something to immolate on the altar. The ultimate purpose of speech is to frame the great mystical silence.
  Philosophy is after, the love of wisdom and wisdom is alive like a woman. So how could we think our courtship of her is a one-way activity? This is true only for the pursuit of things and abstract ideas, but never for persons, not even human persons, and much less the Divine Person who is Wisdom [1Corinthians 1:30]

(7)   Enormous Things Depend On Tiny Things: Nothing in the world has such tiny and invisible causes, and such great and visible effects, as human love….enormous things depend on tiny things. “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a battle was lost; for want of a battle, a war was lost; for want of a war, a kingdom was lost.” This is nature of the world’s data. Anyone who cooks knows this to be true.
As Thornton Wilder says, in the Bridge Of San Luis Rey, “Some say that to the gods we are like flies idly swatted by boys on a summer day. Others say that not a hair falls from our head without the will of the Heavenly Father.”

(8)   No one can truly understand a book, Proust has said, unless he has already been able to ‘allow the equivalents to ripen slowly in his own heart.’ This profoundly human truth is what Augustine will always tell his readers: they must look into the Scriptures, ‘the eyes of their heart on its heart’. …let the scriptures be ‘the countenance of God’…a mind that once hoped to train itself for the vision of God by means of the Liberal Arts, would now come to rest on the solid intractable mass of the Christian Bible…‘Complete your work in me O Lord and open those pages to me‘… Seek His Face Evermore …Therefore let everyone who reads these pages proceed further with me, when he is equally certain as I am; let him make enquiries with me when he is as hesitant as I…Thus let us enter together, in the path of charity, in search of Him of Whom it is said: seek his face evermore.” With friends like Augustine, I can never go wrong.

(9)   Thomas Merton on the death of his father: “We went into the ward. Father was in his bed, to the left, just as you went in the door.
And when I saw him, I knew at once there was no hope of him living much longer His face was swollen. His eyes were not clear but, above all, the tumor had raised a tremendous swelling on his forehead.
I said: “How are you, Father?”
He looked at me and put forth his hand, in a confused and unhappy way, and I realized that he could no longer even speak. But at the same time, you could see that he knew us, and knew what was going on, and that his mind was clear, and that he understood everything.
But the sorrow of his great helplessness suddenly fell upon me like a mountain. I was crushed by it. The tears sprang to my eyes., Nobody said anything more.
I hid my face in the blanket and cried. And poor father wept, too. The others stood by. It was excruciatingly sad. We were completely helpless. There was nothing anyone could do…
What could I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone in the family, to get anything out of it. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Try to avoid it if you could. But you must eventually reach the point where you can’t avoid it any more. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much. But you will always have to take some of it. And it will all devour you in the end.
Indeed the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt., The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.”

This is what my life was like before faith. Diabolists live lives of dumb animals. I say that with no sense of condescension or enjoyment. It is a simple fact of my observations of having lived this long.