How To: Approach
As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush,
though on fire, was not consumed.
So Moses decided,
“I must go over to look at this remarkable sight,
and see why the bush is not burned.”When the LORD saw him coming over to look at it more closely,
God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
God said, “Come no nearer!
Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place where you stand is holy ground.— Exodus 3: 1–5
Moses and Mill — a bizarre combination, right? But this passage from Exodus has been on my mind since I heard it at Mass a few days ago, during which I have been reading John Stuart Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge. I didn’t think I could draw any connection between the two, but it occurred to me yesterday afternoon that there is some interesting common ground to be found between them.
In the homily, the priest called attention to the fact that the conversation between Moses and God that begins in this passage depends on Moses’s curiosity and willingness to investigate the bush — “So Moses decided, ‘I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.’” He pointed out that Moses could very well have ignored the bush, decided it was none of his business, and went on his way. While the LORD initiates the meeting with Moses, He also waits upon his response to begin a dialogue. He makes himself known, but does not restrict Moses’s freedom to assent, or not, to this provocation, in other words, to say “Yes”.
When Moses does approach the bush however, he is not able to investigate it in the way you might think of the term, if you (like me) are addicted to detective stories that lead to a clean resolution and acquisition of all the “facts”. Rather, he is told, “Come no nearer!” and “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” While Moses realizes that he can converse with and even come to know God, it is not on Moses’s terms, but on God’s. That is to say, he can approach, but at a certain point he must remove his sandals, indicating humility and reverence, and he must admit his incapacity before the Divine, who reveals himself as he chooses.
In his essays on Bentham and Coleridge, Mill analyzes the contributions and limitations of the “two great seminal minds of England in their age.” If you know anything about these two thinkers, you may think it impossible to write about them together other than as representatives of a major intellectual dichotomy in 19th century Britain. And as good as Mill is at arguing for a dynamic interplay between Conservatism and Radicalism, allowing for mutual illumination, augmentation and restraint, it is actually the very pragmatic and humanized sort of epistemology he develops along the way that interests me most. It is certainly influenced by what we typically, though not quite accurately, call a Hegelian dialectical movement of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but I think that is an oversimplification of his methodology. I would suggest that George Eliot, certainly influenced by Mill, (perhaps) inadvertently depicts his approach well in her famous beginning to Chapter 29 of Middlemarch:
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea — but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.
In explaining what he calls “the importance…of antagonistic modes of thought,” Mill similarly describes the limitations, both moral and intellectual, of a single point of view, suggesting that “Were we to search among men’s recorded thoughts for the choicest manifestations of human imbecility and prejudice, our specimens would be mostly taken from their opinions of the opinions of one another.” Instead, he suggests that it is through a broadening of view, causing the “noisy conflict of half truths” to subside, that the complementarity and mutual qualification of these seemingly opposed “opinions” can be acknowledged:
“All students of man and society…are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.”
To clarify, Mill is not talking about some kind of “absolute” or “entire” correctness, as though the combining of two positions will lead directly to complete knowledge. Rather, he continuously suggests a process that is progressive and gradually improving, requiring the balance of extremes — in this case the extremes of Conservatism and Radicalism represented by Coleridge and Bentham. Because of the very simple fact of human limitation — the fact that in order to see one thing clearly we must select it to the exclusion of some others, it is highly presumptuous to claim “part of the truth” as its entirety.
I am also reminded of John Keats’ “Negative Capability” in this context. He points out the problem with totalizing systematization in a manner similar to Mill. Writing to his brother in 1817, he descrides Negative Capability as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.” In accusing Coleridge of neglecting “a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery” Keats is not simply asserting anti-intellectualism, so much as a willingness to be open to Truth in all forms, even when doing so requires us to “let go by” our own systems which have not found a way to work in, or work around, this particular “fine isolated verisimilitude.” There is a necessary humility, patience, and even passivity required in order to remain “content with half-knowledge.” For Keats, we must be receptive to the world around us, even to the point of letting it take priority over our own agendas.
In order to connect the experience of Moses to Mill and Keats, I think it is helpful to consider the Catholic tradition of contemplative prayer. From this perspective the correct word would not be “passivity” so much as “attention”. Teresa of Avila describes contemplative prayer as “nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” When described as a form of self-renunciation, contemplative prayer is often misunderstood to mean a dissolution of the self that eliminates the particularity of the individual, a pure “union” rather than a “communion”. However, because it is fundamentally a friendship with a Being who is Love, it depends on a response, a “Yes,” a fiat, which is not so much a destruction of the will as a willing self-gift. It is more dynamic than the active/passive binary because it paradoxically changes the will itself, such that the will recognizes its constitutive dependence and finds the greatest fulfillment of its freedom in returning to its source with a resounding affirmation. The only way, of course, for this to make sense, is to understand that the will is not simply a neutral instrument, but rather the capacity to love. While we might tend to think of a silent gaze as either vacant or violent, in this case it is actually pregnant with a renewal of life that comes through the total direction of the self toward “him who loves us”.
We can see this dynamic at play in a lesser form in the interaction between God and Moses. Because Moses precedes Christ, his meeting with God lacks a full awareness of God as fundamentally Love, and his response is still governed by fear of God’s power and doubt of his own worthiness. But we already see the beginning of a relationship with “him who loves us” through Moses’s recognition of his incapacity to fully investigate, comprehend, or encompass the one who speaks from the bush. It is not accidental that God manifests himself to Moses through a bush that “though on fire was not consumed.” The communion of fire and bush is not simply a strange trick to catch Moses’ attention. Rather it is can be read as a partial sign of what is to come — the consummation of the relationship between God and Israel in such a way that, though inextricably intertwined, neither is entirely subsumed into the other. But more importantly for my considerations here is the fact that Moses progresses from exploring an odd phenomena out of curiosity, to encountering it as a Being wholly other than him, beyond his capacity to grasp or control, and yet also One who will gradually make himself known through relationship.
Perhaps we can think of this moment as a metaphor for, or a symbol of, the process of scholarship. The “object of study,” so to speak, asserts itself in response to the scholar’s curiosity — it its not an inert specimen available for him to know absolutely and on his own terms. It exists separately from him, and there no guarantee that his modes of perceiving, knowing, and understanding of it will be adequate. The fascinating thing about revelation, however, is that while the entire world always simultaneously shows and hides itself from the inquisitive eye and hand, here Truth itself begins to make itself known as a non-neutral, dynamic, relational Being. In the story of Moses we are still a far cry from the Trinity and the Incarnation, but we do have a radical interruption of the self-directed and potentially also self-enclosed pursuits of the scholar.
While Mill remains unaware of this dimension of Truth, he does see that it is something which resists any forms of systematizing totalization. Instead he sees that in order for knowledge to grow, and praxis to improve, scholars must acknowledge their own limitations and seek for a greater completion of their scope through the work of others. Additionally, he recognizes that even with this what we might call “sympathetic” scholarship, there remain further limits to the “poor human intellect” such that our methods of description will always be somewhat faulty and insufficient. In criticizing Bentham’s obsession with “impracticable precision,” he exclaims, “Did Bentham really suppose that it is in poetry only that propositions cannot be exactly true, cannot contain in themselves all the limitations and qualifications with which they require to be taken when applied to practice?”
I suppose one of the connections I am trying to draw is between the relational (and therefore moral) dimension of knowledge, described by Mill, and the relationality of Truth experienced by Moses. To me it seems that these are necessarily interrelated — that the individual limitation and mutual augmentation experienced by scholars speaks to the very reality they are pursuing — One who though transcending the limitations of the individual “point of view” also establishes a relationship with it (her or him) through those very limitations. This can be experienced within a single discipline, as well as between disciplines as diverse as, for example, history and chemistry. (I will leave the discussion of a hierarchy of disciplines for another time.) And if we become discouraged by the somewhat reductive humanism of Mill and other 19th century scholars, we can also place his insights in dialogue with others as seemingly incompatible as Coleridge is to Bentham (Teresa of Avila being a prime example).
For the sake of our efforts here at Exigere, it seems to me essential to remember that we pursue Truth relationally because Truth is relational, and that self-enclosed, fearful and/or hubristic modes of scholarship do an injustice to their object of study and to the scholars themselves. Therefore we, or I at least, hope to engage in a dialogue that is neither echo chamber nor anarchy, but instead a place in which authentic movement can happen — intellectual, but also personal and spiritual — toward a Truth we will never fully comprehend, and yet who paradoxically made Himself (side note: I really can’t handle these masculine pronouns for God anymore guys…) known to us as/in/through Love.
