Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle: Review, part 1

After a slow and interrupted start, I gobbled up Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle and found in it much of relevance to those who have chosen a life within (or at least within earshot) of the university. I originally picked the book up out of interest in how Berry—an acclaimed poet who is also an essayist, a fifth-generation farmer, a conservationist, and a Christian (I believe)—would approached the issue of ‘scientism’ in contemporary culture. I did not expect to be so directly addressed as a prospective member of the profession of English within university culture.

As a poet-farmer with an MA in English, Berry has participated at times in university culture but for the large part remains outside of it, ‘in but not of’ its world. It is precisely the framework of that world and its capitulation to the ideals of science-technology-industry that draws a lot of fire from Berry, often causing me to wince and mutter an appreciative and somewhat chastened ‘ouch!’ at thundering denunciations such as this:

“The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic ‘profession’ of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly ‘revolutionizing’ itself in pathetic imitation of the ‘revolutionary’ sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, ‘publishable’ but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity” (69).

Lest you be tempted to dismiss Berry as an injured poet uninitiated in higher criticism, it is well worth noting that renowned literary critic and theorist, Peter Brooks, has also recently militated against the dominance of ‘ideological criticism’ and argued for the profession to return to poetics (although emphatically not to the liberal humanist assumptions that once drove the study of poetics).

To my mind, Berry’s most crucial insights are the way he links respect for mystery to the quest for knowledge and his insistence on the distinction between creatures and machines which in turn impacts not only economics, but ideas of community, ecosystems, and what and how it is that humans study in the university. I will treat these two in two separate posts.

Ignorance and Mystery
Berry in many ways regards ignorance as a fundamental part of the human condition, and not necessarily a negative part. Ignorance is not the mere absence of knowledge for Berry, but can also signal the human encounter with mystery. Some mysteries—and certainly the most important ones—cannot simply be reduced into problems to be solved as scientism demands. In contrast to scientism’s faith in the future solution of all problems and the limitlessness of human knowledge, Berry postulates that “The mystery surrounding our life probably is not significantly reducible” (11). As a result, the question of most importance is not a technological or educational question that pushes forward into new frontiers of knowledge, but “the question of how to act in ignorance” (11).

As someone writing up a PhD and worried about what I’ve left out, “how to act in ignorance” describes a daily dilemma. When faced with what I do not know, do I run to the library and spend days and days to try to gain exhaustive knowledge that, while very informative, probably will be left on the cutting room floor at the end of the writing process? How much time should I spend increasing my knowledge of _insert ancient or modern foreign language here_? How can I possibly publish my own opinions or claim a place in intellectual culture when what my PhD reveals to me is how little I know? Berry’s comments on knowledge and ignorance are worth repeating to myself on a daily basis:

“If there is an economy of the life of the mind—as I assume there has to be, for the life of the mind involves the distribution of limited amounts of time, energy, and attention—then that economy, like any other, subsists upon the making of critical choices. You can’t think, read, research, study, learn or teach everything. To choose one thing is to choose against many things. To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance” (59-60).

This statement may at first appear dismaying, but should not be. Ignorance is natural to us, and it signals not just our limitations, but also our interdependence and the grace of our encounter with mysteries both human and divine. To regard a limit to our natures solely as something bad is to not only to envy what we have not been given but also to desire to grasp at the place of a god, unlimited in knowledge and agency. To regard an encounter with mystery as a disappointment instead of a grace also shows the temptation of Adam and Eve to see ‘as God’ to be quite familiar to their sons and daughters. The question of writing up my PhD and preparing to be in some ways ‘an intellectual’ is not a question of knowing everything or even of knowing the ‘right’ things in order to pass muster, but is fundamentally a question of how to live in the state of ignorance, a question of ethics: “How does one act well—sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage—on the basis of partial knowledge” (149). And the crucial insight of Berry is that the answers we find to such questions are not limited to the concerns of the minutiae of our studies, but must address a context, a community, and a common purpose outside of those concerns. For me, then, how to write my PhD on the basis of partial knowledge is a question that includes but also goes beyond the details of late-medieval England, beyond the professionalism required of bona fide medievalists to include concerns larger than obscure understandings of literate history or my career.

“The question for art, then, is exactly the same as the question for science: Can it properly subordinate itself to concerns that are larger than its own?....It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture....to be operating strictly according to ‘professional standards’, without local affection or community responsibility, much less any vision of an eternal order to which we are all subordinate and under obligation” (88, 93).

Ignorance and the University
You may have already noticed the connection here between ignorance and the university. The partial nature of human knowledge is in many ways the founding condition for the university as a sort of ‘convocation’ in Berry’s terms, a coming together of those called to different specialties. A specialist chooses myopia, chooses to be ignorant of many things in order to see distinctly a few things up close. A convocation of the near-sighted needs to have a conversation which takes on the far-sightedness gained by questions from outsiders as well as by a sense of being subordinate to something larger than one’s own narrow concerns. To do so is not to eliminate ignorance; we don’t have a conversation to become specialists in more things. To do so is an appropriate act in response to the isolation and hubris that partial knowledge outside of community can occasion. To do so is to recognize our higher obligations outside of the concerns of our specialties, even beyond the range of our knowledge, and to work together to meet those obligations as best we can. As Berry puts it:

“[To become a conversation] the convocation would have to have a common purpose, a common standard, and a common language. It would have to understand itself as a part, for better or worse, of the surrounding community. For reasons both selfish and altruistic, it would have to make the good health of its community the primary purpose of all its work” (60).

Cross-/interdisciplinarity is clearly not enough, because its goals tend to be too narrowly focused on the narrow agenda of enhancing or spicing up one’s own work. Interdisciplinarity may stitch together various bits of knowledge into new forms and uses, but such translocations are not the main point of conversation within a university and tend to be done rather poorly. What is needed to inspire this conversation and determine part of its agenda is a larger vision of what academic work is for, and thinking hard about that larger vision in the context of a local community. The work of the academy has its own places after all, and there are not the virtual places in the pages of refereed journals or briefly popping into existence for a day conference, but real, solid, embodied places, each of which has a unique nature and provides a home to living creatures of all sorts. These are places and creatures to which we owe our stewardship as well as our loyalty as we make our home with them; in other words, we owe our love to them.

Ascensiontide with N.T. Wright - "Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't"

I've been listening to a lot of N.T. Wright on my nifty new lime green iPod shuffle as I walk into the Faculty from home. One 35-minute journey = 1/2 of a Wright lecture. Turns out, many of Wright's crucial themes are perfect for Ascensiontide: Creation and Covenant, Messiah and Apocalyptic, Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't, etc., all in light of what he calls (appropriately so, in my mind) an inaugurated eschatology. To catch a flavor of what I've been listening to, see his short article, "Paul's Gospel and Caesar's Empire", and here's a smattering of his conclusion there:

...if Paul's answer to Caesar's empire is the empire of Jesus, what does that say about this new empire, living under the rule of its new lord? It implies a high and strong ecclesiology, in which the scattered and often muddled cells of women, men and children loyal to Jesus as Lord form colonial outposts of the empire that is to be: subversive little groups when seen from Caesar's point of view, but when seen Jewishly an advance foretaste of the time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God of Abraham and the nations will join Israel in singing God's praises. From this point of view, therefore, this counter-empire can never be merely critical, never merely subversive. It claims to be the reality of which Caesar's empire is the parody; it claims to be modelling the genuine humanness, not least the justice and peace, and the unity across traditional racial and cultural barriers, of which Caesar's empire boasted. If this claim is not to collapse once more into dualism, into a rejection of every human aspiration and value, it will be apparent that there will be a large degree of overlap. "Shun what is evil; cling to what is good." There will be affirmation as well as critique, collaboration as well as critique. To collaborate without compromise, to criticise without dualism—this is the delicate path that Jesus' counter-empire had to learn to tread.

If you don't know of Wright's work, see this helpful biography and this interesting article on the challenges he posed to evangelicalism. I really really like his methodology, his commitment to being both priest and scholar and to thinking hard about how to bring those two worlds together, and his humility. He proffers many challenges to entrenched ways of thinking, but does so without claiming to have superceded the teachings of the past. The theme of his more controversial work is to build upon, not to replace traditional Christian teaching even as it adopts a questioning stance to habits of thought we bring to our hermeneutics often unthinkingly (like Paul isn't really Jewish anymore, Jesus isn't either, Pharisees are supposed to be seen as evil evil evil all the time, Jesus wasn't interested in politics, religion and politics are two separate spheres). Wright's message often is something like, 'take this, and you get all the glories and truths of traditional orthodoxy along with it but embued with an even deeper significance.' Listening to him doesn't always result in immediate affirmation, but does prompt a lot of "hm!" and "wow, that really works well in the context and makes sense of a lot more besides!"

So yeah, I dig him. Drumstick keeps admonishing me to read more criticism of his work (esp. on justification) to get a balanced perspective (particularly the criticism of Don Carson, whom I admire for similar reasons). I'll get to that eventually, but for now, I'm happy to think with him about proclaiming "Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not!" We'll see what I do after Pentecost.

In other news: turns out that Wright's prose style -- clear, thoughtful, engaging -- is beginning to influence my own. After all, I've been listing to about an hour of it a day on my way in and out of work, so when I take the headphones off and settle down to writing my own work (lately, on late-medieval English inquisition into heresy), I find myself writing with more clarity in my syntax, and even more of my own style even as I am inspired by his. So now I'm on the hunt for mp3's and podcasts of great prose stylists (like C.S. Lewis and Annie Dillard) to load up onto the lime green prose-improving machine and accompany me to and from work every day. Links would be appreciated...

Christ Jesus the Lord is Savior and King!

Grant, we pray, almighty God,
that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ
to have ascended into the heavens,
so we in heart and mind may also ascend
and with him continually dwell;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

May Christ, who has opened the kingdom of heaven,
bring us to reign with him in glory.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
~ Colossians 3:3

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
~ Ephesians 2:4-10

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
~ Phillipians 2:9-11

Oh and if you want to see the study I prepared, click here, and here for the passages in a print-out. Sadly, the formatting got a little screwy when I put it on googledocs, but oh well.

Support the ONE Campaign!

JMR on Scriptorium Daily the other day posted an open letter to his daughter, Jane, responding to her first blog. While I often enjoy his posts on homeschooling his children, this post was rather dismaying to me. JMR uses the ONE campaign in comparison to a church collection for the poor as an example of how one should not confuse like-sounding ideas (‘let’s feed the poor as a church’ and ‘let’s feed the poor as a nation’). Apparently there is some rumbling going on at Biola about supporting the campaign, which it appears by his comments on the post that JMR is not keen to do.

After listening to Jeffrey Sachs' BBC Reith Lectures on development (and reading the Jubilee Manifesto, and going to the Acton Institute several years ago...) I wanted to pick him up on a few things about the ONE Campaign that he mentioned, but I ended up writing a 6-page open letter! It was a bit out of proportion to his original post, but I got excited...and, well...it just happened. If you're interested in reading my arguments in favor of lending vocal support to the campaign, click through and have a read - they cover (briefly) such things as certainty and moral action, subsidiarity, corruption, international promises, Christian thought on international development, the different claims of the local and the global, etc., with loads of links to follow up on. I'll post my rousing conclusion as a teaser:

Yes, more and better aid, and let’s be optimistic about alleviating some forms of suffering, but let’s not fool ourselves that better material conditions alone can somehow create human flourishing.

At the end of the day, the ONE Campaign is not a cure-all for extreme poverty nor should it be an encouragement to ‘leave it to the government/UN’. We can support the campaign in a way that emphasizes that public sector solutions on their own are also inadequate and that the only way to reach goals such as the Millennium Development Goals is with a combination of and a conversation between public and private, local and global. The Acton Institute’s blog offers a riposte to Sachs and shouts out, “don’t wait for the government!”—a sentiment I whole-heartedly affirm. The ONE Campaign isn’t the only way to act, and it is not an excuse to do nothing else as individuals, as churches, as universities, as members of World Vision, Tearfund, Compassion International, and so forth. Let’s not wait for the government to uphold its promises and its responsibilities as a government, let’s do more starting now!

But at the same time, we can support the ONE Campaign as a way to keep extreme poverty not just on the political agenda, but on the agenda of public discourse as a whole, providing impetus not just for concerted political action, but for inspired personal action by ourselves, our businessmen, our students, our retirees, our empty-nesters, anyone with time and resources to give in love. This is the vision that I urge you to consider and to write in response to.

Any comments or rebuttals, go ahead and post to here :) As you may have noticed, I'd definitely be interested in them...

C.S Lewis, Ascension, and a New Nature

From Miracles, by C.S. Lewis

"The records represent Christ as passing after death (as no man had ever passed before) neither into a purely, that is negatively, 'spiritual' mode of existence nor into a 'natural' life such as we now know, but into a life which has its own new Nature. It represents Him as withdrawing six weeks later, into some different mode of existence. It says - He says - that He goes 'to prepare a place for us.' This presumably means that He is about to create that whole new Nature which will provide the environment or conditions for His glorified humanity and, in Him, for ours. The picture is not what we expected - though whether it is less or more probable and philosophical on that account is another question. It is not the picture of an escape from any and every kind of Nature into some unconditioned and utterly transcendent life. It is the picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general, being brought into existence. We must, indeed, believe the risen body to be extremely different from the mortal body: but the existence, in the new state, of anything that could in any sense be described as 'body' at all, involves some sort of spatial relations and in the long run a whole new universe. That is the picture - not of unmaking but of remaking. The old field of space, time, matter and the sense is to be weeded, dug and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not."

Eating all by my lonesome

My beloved husband is still in California for the next few days after we flew out all of a sudden for a family funeral. Work constraints have me back in the UK, and I'm faced with the prospect of eating alone for the next few evenings. Now I could in theory invite myself over for dinner with friends (which I may yet do tomorrow), but much as I seriously and actively dislike being without my dear Drumstick, I am rather looking forward to cooking just for myself. Hector, Drumstick's digestive alter ego, seems to require meat in large quantities in order to feel satisfied, whereas I can be happy noshing on bits of this and that. Case in point: when we were apart a couple weeks ago for the same reason, I moved away from spaghetti with meat sauce and starting eating spinach salads with pancetta cubes, chicken liver pate spread on french baguettes, yoghurt, and apples for my meals. Prospective menus (ones which leave Hector still a little rumbly) for this evening include:

• sauted filet of some white fish with pancetta and white wine sauce, served over a bed of spinach with wild rice on the side
• seared tuna, dressed with soy, ginger and honey and served with noodles and bok choy

Leon Kass in The Hungry Soul talks about taking time to dine, to relish a meal, even when eating alone. This means, at a minimum, eating for over more than 15 minutes, not watching tv while eating, and just generally observing the same proprieties one would in company. Part of the point is that one tends towards a particularly human sort of virtue when one takes the time to eat in a way that goes beyond necessity, beyond mere re-fueling and feeding and towards dining. This, I confess, is difficult for me when alone; dining for me typically reaches beyond necessity because it is also time with my husband to discuss things, chat over the day, and generally just talk and talk away until it gets so late that the dishes get left 'for tomorrow'. When by myself, I often turn the radio on or put on a dvd to keep myself company instead of missing Drumstick, paltry as the substitution is. I find reading while dining to be generally awkward, even with a bookstand, and I can't remember if that's even allowable by Kass' high standards. I suppose, though, at the end of the day as with all virtues it's not about a certain list of rules to apply, but about being a certain sort of person. Perhaps the care I take in shopping and preparing for the meal evinces the same sort of human virtue as leaving the dvd on the shelf for the moment, so I shouldn't worry too much about the temptation of watching the first episode of Firefly during dinner tonight.

Update: Menu turned out to be sesame-encrusted tuna, seared to medium-rare and served with a stir-fry of egg noodles, chestnut mushrooms, carrot, green onion, and chinese leaf cabbage (no bok choy at Sainsburys last night) dressed simply with soy and ginger. Drumstick called me right when I was tucking in, so I had a leisurely meal by default :)