How Can I Keep From Singing: the real beauty of philosophy and theology

A few weeks ago, I was watching, marathon-style, all the newest Doctor Who episodes with the new young thing they've got playing everyone's favorite Time Lord. I can remember having an epiphany while reading my Dante later that night: for all my talk of theology and philosophy, what use is trying to get all the nuts and bolts straight in my mind if I can't ever show anyone what I'm building with it, how it looks; on the road, so to speak? Or, in another respect, because most of my blog posts start with experiences, people get a small taste of what makes me so excited about this stuff, but in an incredibly indirect manner. Then, when I talk about it, the philosophy behind it sounds dry, chalky, bony perhaps. It is not supposed to be left in this state, this academic comatose state which simply stating the truth “without tenderness” displays to others. Philosophy is not supposed to be left out in the sun to die and be eaten by the vultures of academia, but to be nurtured and grown in the womb of the personal human reality. This is, in a manner of speaking, the role of the poet in relation to philosophy: to put flesh to the bones of philosophical inquiry by relating what would normally be a dry statement to the “wet” human reality, and in doing so, reveal the beauty implicitly locked in the vault of reason to the emotions.

I am no such very good poet. I am not technically trained; I lack that sort of creativity. I can create, on a limited level, a few small phrases, and perhaps they will rhyme; but upon examination I am far more an art critic than an artist. That being said, I would not wish people to think less of me for being a critic, for to every good poet there exists an excellent critic. Dante did not write the Divine Comedy in one go, all by himself. Moreover, as a writer, I fear I am too verbose. But this is not going to prevent me from trying to express something of what I have come to love, because I do not wish others to remain blind to beauty; or as Dante says, “Father, Virtue Divine, should you but deign / that I make manifest a shadow of / the blessed kingdom sealed upon my brain, / then at the foot of that great tree whose roots you love / you'll see me stand, and crown my brows with green, / made worthy by the subject, and by you.” It is important to remember that his entire pilgrimage is inspired by the intercession of St. Lucy, patroness of blindness.

When artists depict ordinary scenes like a starry night in an extraordinary manner, we recognize that they “see” something different about the thing, like Van Gogh's rivulets and profusions of golden light. Ramachandran, who I mentioned in a previous note, has even made the claim that mild to strong synaesthesia is closely tied up with the parts of our brain where things like analogy and metaphor are made physically. We see the gift of the artist as somehow taking the ordinary and revealing the extraordinary in the thing itself, and we recognize that this gift is itself extraordinary and precious, because if everyone had it, the extraordinary itself would be something ordinary to people.

The fact is, when I see things, I think differently than the norm. Apple could make a commercial out of my life. When I look at something like a rose, my mind swirls with possibilities. Of course, I am not disconnected to the immediacy of the thing; the first thing I apprehend is the immediate, stunning beauty and complexity inherent in the design of the rose, its color, its smell, its shape. But my mind will not allow me to disconnect from that experience without reflection, what I think St. Paul thought of when he claimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” Of course, the sensation and absorption in the rose is itself a sort of examination, but even my dog enjoys the smell of things, and indeed, many more smells than I enjoy. Everyone examines life this way, unconsciously. But for me, the experience continues into a conscious, almost frenetic series of connections between that and other things, like the Divine Rose in the Paradiso, or the diversity of the flowers in the world, which St. Therese so beautifully used to illustrate the more perfect uniqueness of the people God created individually. From these, I cannot help but jump to the most basic similarities between these different, amazing and beautiful things; the understanding of complexity in so much beauty, for example. A rose has so many petals, all fragile, delicate, easily broken away, and all individually beautiful, which come together in their simplicity to create this complex, beautiful thing, which nevertheless is definitely one rose, beautiful in its uniqueness, more powerfully able to grab our attention, and able to represent to us something as magnificent as the love of the angels for God and man.

Aristotle once said that he gained this by philosophy, that he did without being told what others did only out of fear of the law. I think only a philosopher, one who has been truly bitten by the love of wisdom, really grasps what he meant by this. And, I think, not all philosophers do, and that this is often evidenced by their philosophies. In fact, it seems to me that there's really only one way to guarantee that that love will come about, since nothing in this world can itself guarantee that it will change a person. Really, the only way to assure that this love will be borne out in a philosophy is an openness to theology. And such beauty is unlocked from that wonderful vault! I said before that the rose points to the love of the angels for God; but in the understanding of unity in complexity, it becomes far easier to see the beauty in the fact that God Himself is one God in three Persons, the classic formula for the Trinity. The rose, once an element in the understanding of high things, now points to the ineffable beauty of God in Himself. And if that beauty is something infinitely more than that of the rose which gives me so much current pleasure, if it can indeed promise me that happiness which all things in this world are for the sake of, then how much should I turn myself to seek it, like an artist devoting himself to his masterpiece, his Ninth Symphony?

The fact is that philosophers have, owing to a few bad apples, fallen victim to a more horrible sort of scientific bigotry. We are considered to be regurgitators of dead things, or the producers of ontological buffoonery. But it is, I suppose, the plight of the philosopher to be regarded thus, because to us, the roses are beloved to the angels; to the ones who claim to know what they are exhaustively through scientific materialism, the rose is just a rose. And the worst bigotry has fallen upon theologians, because we “don't study a real subject”, our God is a “delusion”, we “lack a purpose for being in academia”. Yet to us, the rose has a purpose in our happiness; to those bigoted fellows, the rose is just “matter, that will someday scatter, when peaceful, the world lays us down.” And what, I ask the reader, could explain why the rose is there, and so beautiful? If you believe the materialists, this question doesn't matter; if you believe the philosophers, this question becomes a labor of love. And it is a labor that, despite the bigotry, despite the lies about the history of my field, despite the sneers from the people who don't respect my field, despite the claims that my field is an academic mortuary, and despite the idiots who have never tasted beauty and thus refuse to believe it exists, I will not, cannot abandon it. The roses are too beautiful.