“In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought,” C. S. Lewis wrote in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. “It is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal man.”
Sometimes we have a picture of the world in which each of us works out the drama of his particular existence as if he were doing God a favor by seeking Him out, whoever He might be. Since we think the center of existence is ourselves, we suspect the world should be quite grateful if we let any of its alien elements into the closed circle of our own self-definition. We think we do God a sort of favor by wondering whether He exists or whether He loves us.
Introspection, as it is called, looking into ourselves, can often deceive us into discovering in ourselves only ourselves. I have always found this to be a rather unsettling prospect. The very last thing I want to discover about the world is that it is largely composed of and by myself.
But early on I had read Aristotle who told me that I could not even know myself if I did not know something else. Too, I had read St. Augustine who taught us in his Confessions that when we look into the depths of even ourselves, we do not find only ourselves.
Thus, I believe that great men and great books can save us in a way, if we are to be saved, even though it is not “men” who save us. I put little trust into collectivities, and I would not prefer one to a single human person. Our redemption — we must be found and healed, as Lewis and Augustine said — is only a “self-redemption” if the Incarnation took place. And even then, it is only ours if we choose it, given the grace to do so.
Humility, that virtue which enables us to be content with being somewhat less than the angels, advises us not to take ourselves so seriously that we must think that we “cause” all else to be. We are to allow what is to teach us. We misunderstand the virtue of humility, Chesterton said. if we locate it in the intellect and not in our will, if we use it to doubt our capacity to know anything instead of our capacity to do the right thing by ourselves.
What happens to us, then, if we picture the world and all in it, especially others like ourselves, not as a locus in which we seek truth and goodness, but where truth and goodness rather seek us? The first thing that happens, I think, is that we “dis-establish,” as it were, the intellectual from the center of reality. We are always not a little perturbed that publicans and harlots will enter the Kingdom before the scribes and the pharisees of every age. This seems “unjust” and perhaps it is, since it is not “justice” but “mercy” that rules the foundations of the world, as St. Thomas said. Whatever it is that seeks each of us out in our very particularities is not like a sort of 5-4 Court decision that went our way.
Yvor Winters once wrote a poem called, appropriately, “To William Dinsmore Briggs Conducting His Seminar.” To me, its concluding lines seem to be a monument to those who only seek, who only reshuffle the world into their own self-defining images.
And in the godless thin electric glare
I watched your face spun momently along
Till the dark moments close and wrinkles verge
On the definitive and final stare:
And that hard book will now contain this wrong.
(Collected Poems, Swallow, 1952, p. 47)
The perils of redirecting the chosen, “made” world back into possibility and probability are very much alive inside of each of us, especially those who pretend a certain excellence, a certain intelligence, a certain culture.
What is the alternative? To cease thinking? Hardly. Christianity is, above all, a religion of accurate thinking. It is a religion in which definitions count because the mind is a faculty for making them, in which “this is not that,” in which the Word was made flesh, and not air. Nothing today, perhaps, is more agonizing than the sloppiness of so much Christian thinking in which ideology passes for dogma.
Yet, it remains true: Even though we have intellects, given as parts of ourselves, to do what intellects do, to say what is, still our thought alone will not save us. Indeed, our thought will not long remain even thought unless we are open to the idea that we are first sought, first loved, first in need of being healed.
A two-year old Peanuts, then, showed Marcia going out the door by a forlorn Peppermint Patty: “I can’t walk to school with you any more, Sir. I’m on Patrol Duty…I have to get to my post.” Peppermint Patty, pondering the duty versus love theme by herself, sighs, “What are friends for if you can’t forget them?” (1-12-82, Field) The structure of the world is such that none of us is a forgotten being. We are creatures who, in being sought, can seek. When we know this, we know why we can have such a thing as a spiritual life, we who are mortals.