Wisdom and foolishness

A line from Pride and Prejudice is ringing in my head: "We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room..."

I've always loved and identified with Elizabeth. Not that, you know, my infrequent blogging has ANYTHING to do with a disposition disinclined to discourse with a disinterested audience. Perhaps I need to set myself a schedule to offset the genius impulse. And moving on to tonight's topic, I apologize for its incoherence; I'm running on far too little sleep. But where would I be if I posted only when I wished to say something which will amaze teh interwebs? (Yes, Mom, that "teh" is intentional. Remind me to explain net slang sometime.)

20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

-I Corinthians 1:20-25, NIV

I'm very fond of this passage of Corinthians - from around 1:10 till the end of chapter 2. I Cor 1:25-28 or so is quoted in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, and is possibly my favorite part of that whole book. (One of these days I'll figure out whether the psalms in that book are Scripture or her originals.) When I discovered the source, I kept returning there. I liked to read and reread it; it's about how God chooses flawed instruments to reveal His glory. I still love that quote. I have not quoted it above. Because the part I quoted seems more relevant tonight.

Last week I had the privilege of watching Dr. Francis Collins, head of the now-completed Human Genome Project, give a lecture on science and faith (huzzah for people in favor of ending a fruitless, misinterpreted conflict!). Shortly thereafter, my mother lent me What's So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D'Souza, an interesting book that seems interested in being the Mere Christianity for the scientific mind. Today, a coworker brought up a scenario from his philosophy class challenging the right of Christ to forgive sins. All in all, the ideas wrapped up in the intellectual defense of Christianity are front and center in my mind.

Maybe the reason I like this section of Corinthians - that 1:10 or so through around the end of chapter 2 - is that it contains one of the rare mentions of intelligence. "The intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate", in 1:19 - how encouraging! It seems that intellect is an ultimately insufficient means of understanding God. "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?" Frankly, spread across the board. It seems one can divine truth neither by opposing nor by agreeing with the psychologist, the professor, the scientist. No, one must abandon all hope of reaching true wisdom or power without the aid of God.

It's interesting to me the way people read this sort of thing - the Biblical warnings about Christ appearing foolish to the world, etc. I suspect the atheist would simply say Christianity foolish, a historical misunderstanding ranging from laughable to lamentable. Many Christians seem to react by smugly believing that we'll show them someday! They laugh now, but we'll get the last laugh! They're the fools!

I don't like either reaction. I don't think God's wisdom is foolishness only to the world. I think that as long as we are in the world, even we who say we follow God's wisdom will find it foolish. I also think a lot of foolishness is justified by claiming to be God's wisdom. Unfortunately, while even the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, the foolishness of men is not. To react to this passage in any way other than with profound humility is to become the philosopher of this age with all the answers. (I would also love to reiterate the parallels I see between the Jewish/Greek conflict in the early Church and the conservative/liberal conflict in the modern Church, but that's another topic and I'm already wandering a fair bit.)

All this to say I like a reminder that being a fool for Christ is more than accepting humiliation - it's accepting humility.

I mentioned Mere Christianity above. Lewis is one of the greatest apologists for the Christian faith since Augustine. His strong intellectual arguments are popular to repeat in Christian circles. Unfortunately, they (like all arguments with subjects as all-encompassing as Life, the Universe and Everything) are flawed and fallible. Lewis himself was stricken by a loss in a debate on the subject later in his career. I wish I knew the details or the line of the arguments presented! I wonder sometimes if this blow shook his faith in any way, a faith closely tied with his faith in logic ("why don't they teach logic in these schools!"). I like to imagine that he went through a period of wrestling with God and questioning his faith in the intangible. I also like to imagine that this led to his creating my favorite defense of Christianity:

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as ever I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

Puddleglum, The Silver Chair*

It is a divine foolishness, this search for Overland. And now that I'm done quoting more than Mrs. Who in A Wrinkle in Time, I'm going to bed.

*I suspected I wouldn't have to type this out for myself, that I'd find a quote by googling "Puddleglum four babies" (on the grounds that "four babies" is a rather unique part of the quote). I am happy to report that this worked beautifully. Except for the sloppy transcription on the first couple sites I tried. Linking turned out to be impractical.

Madness and musings

I really should have picked another time to start a blog. The end of my senior year of college, with its research papers and exams, is not the ideal time to have a distracting hobby.

The better part of my focus now is on my 20-page paper on fairies in seventeenth-century English literature. You'd think that would be specific enough, but no, there are a lot of possibilities to be narrowed down. I'm comforted by the fact that my authors were in something of the same predicament. You see, they lived in a time when understanding of the world was becoming increasingly scientific - or trying to. Alchemy, magic, philosophy, and natural history were all intermingled with theology and ancient literature, all trying to find a Theory of Everything. The medieval world had gotten it down to a fine art, explaining how the influences of the stars, plants, angels, animals, elements, and humans all interrelated and danced to the music of Divine Providence, to the rhythm of the music of the spheres. Copernicus had hammered this worldview in the sixteenth century. Philosophers began to question their fundamental premises, and came away frightened by the realization that many things could be explained by "secondary causes" - not everything was a divine miracle kept going only by the constant direct intervention of God. An attempt began to restructure everything, to take the pieces and put them back together in a new shape.

There was little division of labor in academia at this time. One man might be physicist, chemist, biologist, theologian, psychologist, sociologist, economist, historian, linguist... the list goes on. On one hand, it meant that any given writer tends to have a wide range of expertise. On the other hand, it means that any given writer tends to have a wide range of expertise. This is how a doctor creating An Anatomy of Melancholy (basically, a treatise on clinical depression) came to be one of my sources on fairies, in his Digression of the Nature of Spirits. (This doctor was named Richard Burton, but wrote under the pseudonym Democritus Junior. We'll call him DD, for Dick Democritus.)

DD is pretty clear on the subject of my thesis, i.e. the nature of fairies. Quite simply, they are devils. In fact, it's rather hard to discern the spirits known as fairies amidst the demons, pagan gods, classical heroes, and ghosts. Among his (demonic!) water spirits, for example, DD lists succubi, Diana, Ceres, "water Nymphs or Fairies," and the witches with whom Macbeth and Banquo had their friendly chat. "Terrestrial devils, are those Lares [Roman household gods], Genii, Faunes, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots [DD claims they're Italian sprites], Fairies, Robin Goodfellowes, Trulli [trolls], &c." Linnaeus would be proud. Each kind of spirit known to man is neatly categorized and labelled. (There are also sections on fire and air spirits, as well as subterranean and superlunerary; I'll leave that digression to DD.)

All, however, are demons. It doesn't matter that brownies and Lares seem to exist only to serve humankind without serious reward. Nor does it matter that a great many of the water Fae in medieval and Renaissance literature are portrayed as helpful to mankind, rewarders of virtue (think the Lady of the Lake).

Is this a universal trait? Do we take all people who don't readily fit into our preexisting categories of "angels" and "humans" and consign them to be "demons"? I don't want to demonize DD. He had likely never met a brownie and might have revised his opinion of them if he had. But demonizing is so easy, so natural with that which we don't understand.

How many people would demonize God if they understood how little we understand Him?

EDIT: I find that I misremembered the name of my source. Democritus ought to be ROBERT Burton, not Richard, and therefore Bob Democritus. Or Bob Burton, BB. Or whatever.