Wisdom is truth as it is lived

Wisdom is truth as it is lived

Posted on August 4th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

I have been reading George Santayana’s The Life of Reason. I downloaded all five volumes into my Kindle a few months ago and started reading it while ensconced in a cabin in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region. I’m not sure if I quite grasp Santayana’s line of argument, not because it is unclear, but because his prose is so intoxicating. It is all so perfectly phrased, one hardly bothers wondering if any of it is true, especially since, from time to time, he punctuates his discourse with aphorisms that seem so right that one simply presumes that everything leading up to them must have been eminently sound.

At one point, for instance, he notes in passing that “religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning.” This is a sentiment unlikely to appeal to those who would confine doctrine and scripture to the merely denotative, making necessary that overlay of reasoning that turns God into the terminus ad quem of a debating point.

What such people fail to realize is that this is a kind of reductionism that concedes to their intellectual opponents a major point, namely, that certain kinds of facts and certain applications of reason are the only ways to arrive at truth. All that remains of faith is a checklist of rules, rituals and formulae, its words and symbols mere signs, no ambiguity, no mystery to ponder, everything one-dimensional.

Oddly, those who insist on taking scripture literally never seem to take St. Paul literally when he says that “the letter killeth.” Nor do they take Jesus literally when he says that the law was made for man, not man for the law. And they insist that it was Satan who tempted Eve in the garden, even though the text says only that a serpent did.

Those of a certain religious mindset are not the only ones susceptible to the lure of the literal, however. As Mark Vernon makes clear in his excellent book After Atheism, some people are apt to take their science metaphors literally:

… DNA’s descriptive similarity to a code, coupled to technological age’s trust in data, inevitably leads to the assumption that DNA is not only the determining factor in life — the notion captured in Dawkins’s metaphor ‘the selfish gene’ — but is nothing less than the ‘code of life’. The insertion of non-scientific imagery does not stop here, for the idea that human beings are information-processing machines does not account for everything that is claimed for DNA. Again, religious metaphors are needed for that. For example, the idea that to read DNA is to understand life is a Protestant trope — DNA as the ‘Book of Life’ or the Bible. Alternatively, when coupled to genetic determinism, DNA comes to look very much like the immortal soul: it embodies in nucleotides an essence of life that survives the death of the body by being passed, incorporeally, from generation to generation.

I think people are inclined to the take literally the metaphors underlying their beliefs because they think that metaphors are less “true” than “facts” narrowly construed. They are wrong. Metaphors — as metaphors — are more true, precisely because they not meant to be taken literally. They are grounded in the understanding that, ultimately, reality cannot be put into words or images or even numbers.

If you recite the words of a given creed as if it were a poem, allowing your imagination to go to work on it, letting it sink down into your consciousness and resonate there, you will likely find yourself, over time at least, sensing something of what John Hick calls “transcategorial Reality,” the Reality behind, within, and beyond ordinary reality.

To take such things literally is to miss the point of faith, which is not meant to provide certainty, but to enable us to bear up in the face of the uncertainty that characterizes life through and through. We do not in fact know for sure from whence we come or whither we are going, and reality does not admit of precise definition. Take a circle. Its circumference can be calculated by multiplying Pi by the radius squared. But Pi is an irrational number that can be infinitely divided. So the circumference of a circle, in fact, is always an approximation.

To take metaphors, whether religious or scientific, literally, in the hope of arriving at some bedrock quasi-factual certainty is indeed to turn both science and religion into superstitions. Thence follow the conditional propositions and hypothetical formulations, the perhapses and maybes and supposes that constitute Santayana’s “overlay of reasoning.” Wisdom is truth as it is lived — it is indeed what enhances life — and it can only be expressed by means of the ongoing resonance bestowed by fancy.