Songs in the Key of Jesus

Having reread Chesterton's Orthodoxy, I can now understand why I wasn't particularly moved by it when I first read it. As I mentioned, it's anything but a systematic defense of the faith, more one man's idiosyncratic account of why he feels that Christianity is the perfect philosophy for him and for the world. But it seems to me that unless you already have a background in theology and metaphysics, you would not find his arguments particularly convincing.

As he points at in the beginning of the book, he tried -- as does any serious person -- to arrive at a comprehensive philosophy, only to realize, when he had completed it, that it already existed in the form of Christian Orthodoxy. I've pretty much had this same experience, allowing for the fact that Christianity is a rather large tent that accommodates virtually all temperaments and levels of intelligence.

This is an important coonsideration, since neither my intellect nor heart or soul could ever "find their rest" in some of the more visible forms of Christianity (which I sometimes think are a conspiracy to make Christianity look foolish). Only by first arriving at my own philosophy and then discovering -- to my surprise -- an antecedent Christian form of the more-or-less identical philosophy was I truly able to have the "ah ha" experience alluded to in a post by Walt a couple of days ago:

"The second assumption is that the Gospel has come down to us from a higher mind than ours. If there is something in it that we do not understand, the difficulty is likely to be in us and in our limitations. In attempting to make sense of the text, whenever there is any question about its intelligence, there is no doubt that the Gospel comes from a higher intelligence than ours. Where our best efforts do not yield a satisfactory sense in the Gospel, there is an opportunity for us to listen quietly with humility so that we may hear what we are not accustomed to hear."

I suppose it's similar to what so many adolescents have to go through on the road to separation and individuation -- to regard their parents as clueless idiots until they gain a little real-world experience and eventually realize how wise they were all along. The prodigal son, yada yada blah blah blah. (When I was in graduate school for my MA, I had an annoying female classmate who ended every sentence in that way [this was well before the yada yada Seinfeld episode]. I sometimes wonder how her patients fared: "Sounds like your mother never really understood you, and yada yada blah blah blah.")

The point is, when you keep independently discovering very specific rock-bottom truths, only to learn that others have discovered the same truths, it starts to look as if either human minds are built along the same lines, or else there is an independent but invisible reality that individual minds converge upon. Obviously both must be true, since our minds are made both for and from the truth. If both of these weren't true, then there would be no way for our minds to comport themselves with any truth. In short, our minds are composed of that which they ultimately seek. Which is an example of something I thought I had discovered, only to -- here, let's pick someone at random, say, Origen:

"The apostle Paul teaches us that God's 'invisible nature' has been 'clearly perceived in the things that have been made'; He shows us that this visible world contains teaching about the invisible world, and that this earth includes certain 'images of celestial realities'.... Perhaps that is what the spokesman of the Divine Wisdom means when he expresses himself in the words: 'It is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the unerring elements...'"

In other blah blah blah, the inside can only know the outside because the material world is an exteriorization of the same logos which interiorizes itself in the form of human consciousness. Thus, the acquisition of scientific knowledge and of truth in general is completely unproblematic in Christian metaphysics. But ask a thoughtful materialist if materialism is true, and that's the end of his materialism, since matter could never even know of truth, let alone possess it.

And it is because the world is mysteriously bifurcated into this interior and exterior, that life is (or should be, anyway) such an adventure -- adventure being the combination of strangeness and familiarity. Only human beings can be "at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it." If you are fully one or the other, you're really missing out on something vital. If you feel totally at home in the world, then you're more like an animal in the habitat it was selected to fit into. But at the same time, if you were only astonished at the world, you wouldn't be able to function in it. Psychotic people can experience each moment as a calamitous novelty, and the effect isn't pleasant surprise but nameless dread.

I would suggest that if materialism or atheism make total sense to you, it's only because you're walking around with invisible parts of yourself amputated or disfigured in some way. You're living in an environment, but it's not the human environment, which includes the invisible -- which is to say, immaterial -- worlds alluded to above.

For Chesterton, Christianity best realizes this balance of "something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without merely being comfortable." You might say that functional faith operates in the interstices of this dynamic tension between wonder and welcome, security and adventure. It is what spurs our evolution -- which could not occur if we default too far in one direction or the other, i.e., toward radical novelty or complete predictablity.

Once again, I find that jazz improvisation provides the best metaphor for this actvity, since it uses what is known -- the chordal structure of the song -- as a launching pad into the unknown, as the improviser explores the harmonic (vertical) and melodic (horizontal) potential of the chords. In fact, my book was basically an attempt at a sort of "musical performance," starting with the four chords of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit. Now, it would be easy enough to say that the latter three chords don't really exist, and that they're all ultimately reducible to the one and only chord of Matter. Can't play much with one chord, but at least you've solved every musical problem known to man. (By the way, you run into the same problem if you reduce the chords to pure Spirit, as do certain eastern philosophies.)

Materialism is a philosophy by the tone deaf and for the tin eared. But as I wrote in the book, if you really want to know reality in its fullness, "it is no longer adequate to be just a materialistic banjo-picker sitting barefoot on a little bridge of dogma; rather, one must have at least a nodding acquaintance with a few other instruments in order to play the cosmic suite. The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional musical score that must be read, understood, and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it can support diverse interpretations, but surely one of them cannot be 'music does not exist.'"

For each of us represents an unrepeatable melodic line that wends itself through the four great chords constituting the song of existence. Some solos are complete and musically satisfying, while others are banal, predictable, and unable to explicate the musical potential hidden in the chords.

I believe Chesterton is saying that for him, Christianity is the ideal accompaniment for this musical adventure we call "life."