January 18, 2020

Knowledge and Mystery (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #03)

Hello again, readers! 2020 keeps 2020-ing, and happily, I'm on the mend from last week’s illness. Here’s hoping that’s the last such nonsense of the year: I’ve been sick more than I’ve been healthy since December 20, so I’m very ready to stay well.

A friendly reminder/explanation, in case a really dreadful enemy signed you up for this, a friend emailed it to you, or you simply forgot in the haze of the mad signing-up-for-for-newsletters rush that is the start of a new year (because that’s a thing, right?)—

This is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter by Chris Krycho. In this space I reflect publicly on the research and reading I'm doing—on Christianity, internet culture, technology, art, philosophy, you name it: all in the interest of continuing to build up a culture of learning. There's never any hard feelings if you need to unsubscribe; and forwarding it to friends or enemies is always a welcome course of action as far as I'm concerned.

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For readers who are here primarily for the tech angle, a heads-up: today is heavy on epistemology and theology, though I hope in ways that will still be interesting to you. Don’t worry, though, there will be plenty of stuff angled more directly toward tech as I work through my Winning Slowly Season 8 readings. I’ll mildly spoil the very beginning of the season by saying that we’re starting out with Plato’s dialog Phaedrus: that most cited and least understood of sources for commentary on technological developments. “But Plato had criticisms of books! See, everyone always just hates new tech; nothing to see here!” is about the level of general discourse on Phaedrus, so we’re going to try to elevate that just a little bit. More on that in the next few weeks!

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For this week’s adventure in reading together: I picked up David H. Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology as part of my prep for the Sunday School class on humanity that I’m going to be teaching at the end of summer.¹ Kelsey’s book has been an interesting and provocative read so far, and I have thoughts about… most of it. But today I want to focus on one particular thread from the section I read last night: on how science, philosophy, and theology approach the question of mystery, and therefore of knowledge in general, distinctively.

Allow me a fairly long quote from Kelsey (who is here leaning heavily on Michael Foster’s Mystery and Philosophy):²

Science and the “philosophy of analysis” assume that nothing is really “mysterious.” Therefore there “cannot be anything unclear that we can legitimately want to say” (17).… Science and the “philosophy of analysis” further assume that thinking “consists in answering questions and that “if you want clear thinking, formulate your questions precisely” (22). Accordingly, science construes something that we do not understand as a function of things we do not know about it. It construes it as a problem that can be solved, usually by asking well-framed questions about it that lead to the discovery of new information that solves the problem. Once solved, the problem ceases to be “mysterious.”

“Philosophy of analysis” construes something we do not understand as a function of conceptual confusion.… An example: On learning that the earth is a globe, a child finds it “mysterious” that people at the South Pole are not standing upside down because he conceives “right side up" and “upside down” relative to his own posture. Once he grasps the concept that “up” and “down’ are relative to the center of the globe, the mystery goes away. Once solved, every puzzle ceases to be mysterious.

Theology also uses the word “mystery to refer to things we do not understand. However, it leaves open the possibility that some things may in fact be genuinely and irreducibly mysterious. Accordingly, it addresses “mystery” on different assumptions about what makes it a rational inquiry and what makes for genuine understanding and communication about “mystery.” … The critical difference between [Christian theology and Greek philosophy] is that, where for much classical Greek philosophy it is the nature of Being to be self-revealing and unhidden, for Christians God is hidden and God's self-revealing is a free and deliberate act (cf. 41). Further, precisely as self-revealed, God remains “mystery,” that is, hidden.… Accordingly, as a form of thinking or rational inquiry, Christian theology is not a search for answers to our questions. “For Revelation is not an answer to our questions; God is prevenient in Revelation. Mystery involves Revelation and vice versa” (27). Such inquiry involves analysis and conceptual clarification if it is to communicate and is to be understood.… Here learning a concept involves existential shaping of one’s identity. “Clarifying” a concept as much involves clarifying one’s “forms of life” as it does clarifying one’s “ideas.” Here conceptual clarification is closer to the forming of phronesis than it is the forming of capacities for conceptual construction and theory making. As Foster puts it, such inquiry involves “something like a repentance in the sphere of the intellect” (46). It is repentance in response to God’s self-disclosure, communicating Godself in God’s holiness, which remains mystery to us precisely in its concrete self-revelation.

I am broadly sympathetic to Kelsey’s framing here (though I think it has an important gap, which I’ll get to below). However, before digging into his claims, I think it’s worth making explicit that there’s a very serious risk in making claims like this: that they can become answers which stop thought, rather than answers which provoke ever-deeper, ever-harder thought. The rationalist crowd calls thought-stoppers like this Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions:

But the deeper failure is supposing that an answer can be mysterious. If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.… This is the ultimate and fully general explanation for why, again and again in humanity’s history, people are shocked to discover that an incredibly mysterious question has a non-mysterious answer. Mystery is a property of questions, not answers.

Notice that this is just exactly the scientific and philosophical mode that Kelsey (via Foster) describes. While I have critiques I could offer of this summary, for the moment I simply want to take this criticism to heart.³ Descriptions of “mystery” cannot simply be the waving of hands and saying “We cannot understand this, so we might as well not even try.” In particular, if we say “God defies defies final comprehension” and let that become justification for no longer seeking to understand God, we have made a profoundly un-Christian, and therefore an anti-theological move. Christian theologizing is at bottom looking at and loving a God who is forever mysterious, perpetually beyond our comprehension—but who calls us to know him, and has made himself knowable to us, who indeed has come down and become like us in every respect (Heb. 4:12). The existence of God as a mystery to us is not a mysterious answer to a mysterious question, but rather an invitation to keep working, to keep thinking, to keep swimming deeper into the infinite depths of this mystery.

And this mystery stands a mystery because he is not an answer to a question but the one who answers us. God, as we Christians understand him to be, is not a “thing” in this sense, a problem to be solved, a riddle to be unraveled. He is the ground of being, himself eternally being and eternally relational. When we encounter other persons, other beings, we find not mere answers to questions—not mere collections of particles, though we human beings certainly are not less than that—but mysteries who confound us.

To put it less headily: even if I understood every chemical interaction, every neuron firing, every complex biological shift in my wife, that would not be the same as to know her. Persons are not mysteries in the scientific sense, not questions to be answered, phenomena to be sufficiently described. (Anyone who chooses to think of other humans in merely mechanistic terms is self-consciously deluding themselves out of the very joys of human existence, and has therefore my great pity.) A description of a thing is not the experience of a thing, and a relationship is a kind of experience that exceeds any other.

So coming back to Kelsey: the work of our intellects and our emotions when encountering a mystery—whether a little mystery like a cat, or a great mystery like another human, or the infinite mystery of God—is not merely clarifying our concepts about things. It is not less than that, to be sure! It matters whether, when I speak of (and, more importantly, to!) my wife, I understand her as clearly in a conceptual sense as I am able. But it is also important that I learn more and more how to speak to her—not as a bag of chemicals to be mashed on, but as a person whom I love. To truly love my wife is to commit myself to changing: how I think about many things, how I act toward her and others, what I do every day. To love her is to seek to apprehend her: to know her as she is (and as she changes also!) and to respond in the ways that are appropriate and good and right to who she is. The same—but to far greater extent—is true of knowing God. My wife and my daughters (and yes, even our cat!) may exceed my ability to comprehend; how much more so God?

The gap, as I see it, in Kelsey’s framing, is just that he fails to make explicit what I said above: that “mystery” here is not a foreclosure of thought. It is not, therefore, so much a contradiction to the kinds of work done in the scientific and philosophical modes, but a recognition of their limits. God-as-mystery (and other-people-as-mystery, too) is a call to work harder, not to give up. Can we fully comprehend what the eternal relational life of the Trinity is? No. But our response instead is to love the God-who-is-Trinity, and therefore to look more closely at Father-and-Son-and-Spirit, to try to understand a little more year by year. And that happens (just as in my marriage!) by hard intellectual work, and by committing to the practices reshape us.