Category Archives: Montaigne

Emerson Finds Montaigne

October 6, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne, reading, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy.  It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes.  I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.  It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.  It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.”  Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.

“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.”  My life has been punctuated by books:  Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days.  Who knows what book will speak to him?  Or when?  But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?

Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine.  My hour has not yet come.”  But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time:  emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation:  and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now.  I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come.  The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud.  When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine.  I think too of littler things:  the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on.  The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.

Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays.  He did not just read them.  Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives.  The covers of our favorite books enclose us.  Our lives are bound by our reading.

Some Underdeveloped Thoughts on Montaigne’s Style

September 27, 2011 By in Montaigne, skepticism, writing Tags: , , , 5 Comments

What should be said about the way Montaigne writes?  He writes essays–as he says, if his mind could gain a firm footing, he would not make essays, he would make decisions, but his mind is always in apprenticeship and on trial.  On apprenticeship and on trial:  what Montaigne says of his mind I apply to his words.  His words are on apprenticeship and on trial.  His words are apprenticed to his subject, they are on trial by their use.  The question is:  will this word do?  Do what it needs to do, stand the test it must stand, carry the burden it must carry.  Above all, his words must portray passing, not being.  They must be capable of illumining the moment of obligation in experience, where ‘moment’ means both a brief period of time and an important point in a course of development.  But they must be able to do so in a way that does not make of the moment of obligation anything that steps free of the experience, that steps free of time.  Even the moment of obligation in experience passes.  So his words must be chosen in such a way that they do not arrest time or run from it.

One of the deepest peculiarities of Montaigne’s essays is that they too pass in time, in his time and in the reader’s time.  Consider the way in which most essays are organized spatially and not temporally, even where on occasion their logico-rhetorical form is temporal.  Most essays are written in such a way that the entire essay is to be understood as ultimately present to the reader’s mind all at once, in a timeless present, as it were.  The introduction to the essay is not earlier than the body, or the body earlier than the conclusion; no, the introduction is above the body, which in turn is above the conclusion.  Although it may take the reader time to work from top to bottom, all the parts of the essay are compresent, and understanding it means coming to hold all its parts together in compresence, in what Augustine might have called the present of the present, available to one contemporary summary observation.  But Montaigne’s essays pass.  The introduction become the past of the body which becomes the past of the conclusion.  Each part jettisons the earlier part, takes its place in the present.  The essay is thus not available to observation, but instead to memory, where it is still not present all at once, but rather passes in review.

Now I should say that I am not venturing into the metaphysics of composition or of reading here.  Instead I am picturing two different processes and two different understandings of composition and reading.  The crucial idea is that the parts of Montaigne’s essays replace each other, they do not exist together with the other parts.  That does not mean that the earlier parts do not bear on the later, but rather that they bear on the later parts in a different way.  Montaigne changes as he writes the essay.  Sometimes he intends to change; sometimes he just does.  And the moment of obligation in his experience changes too.  So what he writes now may not agree or harmonize with what he wrote earlier.  But since what he is presently writing supplants what he wrote earlier, he sees no reason to treat the disagreement as vitiating the essay.  The essay may contradict or be in tension with itself but it does not contradict and is not in tension with the truth.  The conclusion of his essay concludes the essay but it is not a conclusion in the logical sense.  The essay starts and ends but its beginning is not a function of its ending in any argumentative sense, although the beginning and the ending are thematically united, united by subject.

The essay I have been leaning on as I have written this is Montaigne’s “Of Repentance”.  I have been leaning particularly on its opening paragraphs.  That essay’s title provides a way of focusing what I have been struggling to say.  Montaigne’s words are always in apprenticeship and trial.  Because of this, Montaigne writes so as not to have to repent for his essays:  He does not teach, he tells. He tells us what he sees as he sees it.  What Montaigne tells now may contradict what he told earlier, or at any rate may not chime perfectly with it, but what he tells now never contradicts him–he remains always in creative fidelity to himself.  He also remains in creative fidelity to the relevant moment of obligation in experience.  But he does not worry about remaining in creative fidelity with what he has already told; that is, in an important sense, gone.  He did his best with it as he does with what he is telling, but he is no longer responsible to it.

Spending time trying to unify a Montaigne essay wastes time.  If an essay is out of agreement with itself, then it is.  There is no deeper unity.  But that does not mean that each essay is out of agreement with itself.  It may be that the later parts of the essay are such that, although they do not follow from the earlier, they follow the earlier, in the sense that they progressively enrich and deepen the creative fidelity of Montaigne’s treatment of himself and of his subject.

Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change and vary.  The world is but a perennial movement.  All things in it are in constant motion–the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt–both with the common motion and with their own.  Stability itself is nothing more than a languid motion.

Orienting on Emerson on Montaigne

September 26, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne 2 Comments

I am interested in Emerson’s essay on Montaigne in two primary ways:  (1) I am interested in how Emerson understands Montaigne’s skepticism and (2) I am interested in what Emerson learns from Montaigne about how to write, in particular how to write essays.  Emerson says quite a lot, unsurprisingly, about the first; but he says only a little about the second, and that indirectly, by commenting on Montaigne’s style.  But I am convinced that there is quite a bit more to be said about the second question than Emerson himself says, perhaps more than Emerson himself could have said.  I also suspect that the answer to the first question itself sheds light on the answer to the second, since I suspect that the style Emerson learns from Montaigne can itself be described as a skeptical style.

I find Emerson’s style to be itself a puzzle.  That is one reason I hope for help from the Montaigne essay.  What is Emerson doing with words?  Cavell, of course, has quite a bit to say about that, and I may bring him into the discussion at needful moments.  Ultimately I hope to be able to say something about Emerson distinctive use of words, and about Montaigne’s too.

Philosophy and Childhood (Montaigne)

September 25, 2011 By in Montaigne, Philosophy, writing Leave a comment

It is very wrong to portray [philosophy] as inaccessible to children, with a surly, frowning, and terrifying face. Who has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing more gay, more lusty, more sprightly, and I might almost say more frolicsome. She preaches nothing but merry-making and a good time. A sad and dejected look shows that she does not dwell there.

Reading “RM” 11: “The Grace of Our First Certainties”

September 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism Tags: , 5 Comments

Now to address the final section of Merleau-Ponty’s “Reading Montaigne”.  The section winds together the earlier sections, attempting to describe the conditions and motives for Montaigne’s “return to the world”.  The initial paragraphs of the section set the tone:

It is not a question of reaching a reassuring conclusion at no matter what cost, nor of forgetting at the end what has been found on the way.  It is from doubt that certainty will come.  So we must measure the extent of it.  Let us repeat that all belief is passion and makes us beside ourselves, that we can believe only by ceasing to think, that wisdom is a resolution to be irresolute, that it condemns friendship, love, and public life.  And so here we are back to ourselves again.  And we find chaos still, with death, the emblem of all disorders, on the horizon.  Cut off from others, cut off from the world, incapable of finding within himself…and in an inner relationship to God the means of justifying the world’s comedy, Montaigne’s wise man, it would seem, no longer has any conversation except with that life he perceives welling madly within him for a little while longer, any resource except the most general derision, any motive except despising himself and all things.  In this disorder, why not give up?  Why not take the animals for a model–these neighing horses, these swans who sing as they die–why not join them in unconsciousness?  The best thing would be to go back to the puerile security, the ignorance of beasts.  Or to invent, against the feeling of death, some natural religion:  the extinction of a life is the way to a thousand other lives.

This movement is to be found in Montaigne.  But there is another one, too, which appears just as often…[T]he mind’s movement and irresolution are only half of the truth.  The other half is the marvel that our volubility has stopped, and at each moment stops again, in appearances which we may indeed show cannot withstand examination, but which at least had the air of truth, and gave us the idea of it.  Though, when it questions itself, never stops prolonging and contradicting itself, but there is a thought in act which is no little thing, and which we have to take into account.  The critique of human understanding destroys only if we cling to the idea of a complete or absolute understanding.  If on the contrary we rid ourselves of this idea, then thought in act, as the only possible thought, becomes the measure of all things and the equivalent of an absolute.  The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and that passion is ourselves.  At this moment, reasons for doubting become reasons for believing.  The only effect of our whole critique is to make our passions and our opinions more precious by making us see that they are our only recourse, and that we do not understand ourselves by dreaming of something different.  Then we find the fixed point we need (if we want to bring our versatility to a stop) not in the bitter religion of nature (that somber divinity who multiplies his works for nothing), but in the fact that there is opinion, the appearance of the good and true.  Then regaining nature, naiveté, and ignorance means regaining the grace of our first certainties in the doubt which rings them round and makes them visible.

Volubility, versatility, visibility; a truly astonishing passage.  Focus for now on the two Critiques, one of human understanding and one of human passion.  Merleau-Ponty reads Montaigne as a Critical philosopher, even as anticipating Kant’s first two Critiques, although Kant’s Critiques and Montaigne’s are deeply different.

But the idea of reading Montaigne as a Critical philosopher, for me a philosopher of limits, is deeply right.  Kant cartographizes transcendentally, finding reflection’s limits as reflection plays out.  Montaigne cartographizes existentially, finding his own limits as he plays himself out.  And what he finds is that unacted reflection plays itself out in a sickly, kill-joy chortle, chilling life itself in the pallor of thought; and that unreflected action plays itself out in pointless passions, vaunting vanities as lasting values.  Thought in act, as Merleau-Ponty says, becomes the equivalent of an absolute.  Thought in act:  the meeting point of the two Critiques, a place from which we can see what is genuinely precious and can see how we distort it, devalue it, by dreaming dreams of complete possession of ourselves in understanding or of completely dispossessing ourselves of our passions.  

The point is not, of course, that thought in act is always true–‘always true’:  both not false and not faithless.  We are all too often false and faithless.  But when we manage thought in act, we make ourselves available to the world and to others while remaining handy to ourselves.  Such availability and such handiness are not to be understood as complete self-possession or as complete apatheia.  In fact, such availability and handiness are irreconcilable with complete self-possession or complete apatheia, since thought in act is humble and vulnerable, not sequestered, aware of our opacity to ourselves and of the permanence of our passions.  We have to acknowledge that we are ringed round with doubt, like an island in an ocean, but acknowledging that allows us to start westward to Eden, to leave our nodding dreaminess.  It allows us to once again be graced by our first certainties:  graced—acknowledging that here where we are and there where we are going there are no Pelagian certainties.  Our original sin is our conviction that we can achieve the absolute.  All we can hope for is to live in an absolute relationship to it.  And, surprisingly perhaps, that requires that we live in a relative relationship to ourselves, without derision never taking ourselves fully seriously, never forgetting that we are investigators without knowledge, magistrates without jurisdiction, and, all in all, the fools of the farce.

Our Sickly, Kill-joy Mind…

September 2, 2011 By in Montaigne Tags: Leave a comment

Xerxes was a fool, who, wrapped in all human pleasures, went and offered a prize to anyone who would find him others.  But hardly less of a fool is the man who cuts off those that nature has found for him.  We should neither pursue nor flee them, and we should accept them.  I accept them with more gusto and better grace than most, and more willingly let myself follow a natural inclination.  We have no need to exaggerate their inanity; it makes itself felt enough and evident enough.  Much thanks to our sickly, kill-joy mind, which disgusts us with them as well as itself.  It treats both itself and all that it takes in, whether future or past, according to its insatiable, erratic and versatile nature.  Montaigne, “Of Experience”

Socratic Irony, Good and Bad

August 25, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , Leave a comment

In his talk, “In Praise of Philosophy”, Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of Socrates’ irony by considering his behavior at the trial:

What can one do if he neither pleads his cause nor challenges to combat?  One can speak in such a way as to make freedom show itself in and through the various respects and considerations, and to unlock hate by a smile–a lesson for our philosophy which has lost both its smile and its sense of tragedy.  This is what is called irony.  The irony of Socrates is a distant but true relation with others.  It expresses the fundamental fact that each of us is only himself inescapably, and nevertheless recognizes himself in the other.  It is an attempt to open up both of us for freedom.  As is true of tragedy, both the adversaries are justified, and the true irony uses a double-meaning which is founded on these facts.  There is therefore no self-conceit.  As Hegel well says, it is naive.  The story of Socrates is not to say less in order to win an advantage in showing great mental power, or in suggesting some esoteric knowledge.  “Whenever I convince anyone of his ignorance,” the Apology says with melancholy, “my listeners imagine that I know everything that he does not know.”  Socrates does not know any more than they know.  He knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.

To this good irony Hegel opposes a romantic irony which is equivocal, tricky, and self-conceited.  It relies on the power which we can use, if we wish, to give any kind of meaning to anything whatsoever.  It levels things down:  it plays with them and permits anything.  The irony of Socrates is not this kind of madness.  Or at least if there are traces of bad irony in it, it is Socrates himself who teaches us to correct Socrates…Sometimes it is clear that he yields to the giddiness of insolence and spitefulness, to self-magnification and the aristocratic spirit.  He was left with no other resource than himself.  As Hegel says again, he appeared “at the time of the decadence of the Athenian democracy; he drew away from the externally existent and retired into himself to seek the just and the good.”  But in the last analysis it was precisely this he was self-prohibited from doing, since he thought that one cannot be just all alone and indeed, that in being just all alone he ceases to be just.  If it is truly the City that he is defending, it is not merely the City in him but that actual City existing around him…It was therefore necessary to give the tribunal its chance of understanding.  In so far as we live with others, no judgment we make on them is possible with leaves us out, and which places them at a distance.

For me, this is a Janus passage: it retrospects Reading “RM” 10 (as well as another recent post) and prospects Reading “RM” 11 (or it will, when I produce 11).  –But for now I want to think about it just for Socrates’s sake.  Montaigne I set aside.  What interests me in the passage now is the contrast between good and bad irony.  I agree that there is such a contrast and I agree in the main with Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelian understanding of it.  Noting the contrast is important in reckoning with Socrates.  (It is therefore important in teaching Socrates, as I now am.  Students tend to react most strongly to the traces of bad irony in Socrates’ (good) irony and thus to treat his irony as (unalloyed) bad irony.  Merleau-Ponty’s description helps me sympathize with the students when they react that way, without yielding to their reaction.)  Socrates’ good irony hugs his ignorance, without crossing out that ignorance, rendering it merely apparent.  As I have said in previous posts, Socrates targets double ignorance–thinking that you know when you do not know–and having that target makes irony all but unavoidable.  Unlike simple ignorance–not knowing–double ignorance is not-knowing entombed in pride (self-conceit), coldly obstructed from the truth.  Socrates’ good irony aims to disinter a person’s simple ignorance, and to bring a person to acknowledge that simple ignorance.  Socrates’ good irony is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, a distant but true relation with others:  distant–because if he comes too close he aggravates their pride, risks losing himself or approbates himself against their freedom; true–because genuinely hopeful and genuinely humble.  Available, as I am now habitually putting it.  Sometimes Socrates fails because he cannot maintain distance or maintain truth, and then he either misses irony altogether or he slips into some degree of bad irony.  Good irony is Socrates’ way of making himself available to others without trespassing upon their freedom; it is also a way of targeting their pride, the pride that not only makes them unavailable to others, but makes them unhandy to themselves.  Pride creates only the freedom to fall.

(A puzzle in Merleau-Ponty’s passage is its use of ‘distant’ and ‘distance’.  Socrates’ irony is a “distant but true relation with others”, but Socrates will make no judgment on others that “places them at a distance”.  I solve the puzzle this way:  Socrates’ good irony does not place him at a judgmental distance from others.  It is not a standing over and above them.  In other words, Socrates can count himself among those he lives with, making no judgment on them that leaves him out, and which places them at a distance, even while his way of living among them is to maintain a distant but true relation to them.  In fact, his ironic distance even aids his refusal to place others at a judgmental distance from himself:  think of judgmental distance as a false relation to others.)

Reading “RM” 10: A Few Words on Montaigne, Socrates and Stoicism

August 23, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, Socrates 4 Comments

After addressing Montaigne and Christianity, Merleau-Ponty turns to Montaigne and the Stoics.  It will help us think about that relationship if we remind ourselves of a passage of Montaigne’s from Of Experience.

It is from my experience that I affirm human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the most certain fact in the school of the world.  Those who will not conclude their own ignorance from so vain an example as mine, or as theirs, let them recognize it through Socrates, the master of masters.  For the philosopher Antisthenes would say to his pupils:  “Let us go, you and I, to hear Socrates; there I shall be a pupil with you.”  And maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, that virtue was enough to make a life fully happy and free from need of anything whatever, he would add:  “Excepting the strength of Socrates.”

Socrates trumps Antisthenes, even for Antisthenes; Socrates is master of masters.  So he was for Montaigne too.  This passage is one in which Montaigne signals his passage from the Stoics to Socrates.

Hamann dubbed Socrates the prophet of the Unknown God (thinking, of course, about St. Paul on Mars Hill).  Merleau-Ponty notes of Montaigne that he invokes an Unknown God.  But Montaigne also invokes, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, an Impossible Reason.  Merleau-Ponty is driven to this phrase (and by the way, the capitalization is mine, not MMP’s) by Montaigne’s repeated strain of withdrawal, of preserving some piece of ourselves, some place in ourselves, from which we can see all that we do, all that we commit, all that we have committed to, as external–as something happening almost to someone else, as the vicissitudes of a role we play, but not of ourselves.  This withdrawal, this holding back, this is what tempts Montaigne in stoicism.  He can see that mixing in marriage, in love, in social life, in politics is to live according to others.  Montaigne would rather live according to himself.

But, Merleau-Ponty argues, Montaigne cannot really hope to do what he would rather do.  “He had described consciousness, even in its solitude, as already mixed according to its very principle with the absurd and foolish.  How could he have prescribed consciousness dwell in itself, since he thinks it is wholly outside itself?  Stoicism can only be a way-point.”

Montaigne knows that the world pulls us in, and does so not so much against our will as because of the nature of our consciousness.  We will be mixed up with the world–that’s that.  We cannot hole up in consciousness and let the world go by without touching it and without being touched.  Socrates is the master of masters–in the world but not of it.  Married with children, a soldier, an occasional (forced) politician, a man of conversation:  he was decidedly mixed up with the world.  But he somehow managed to avoid being mixed up by the world.  In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, Porphyry marvels at Plotinus’ ability “to be present at once to himself and his friends”.  Socrates had this ability; Montaigne could see it (as could Antisthenes:  it is Socrates’ “strength”).  Montaigne wants to find a way to live as Socrates did.  He wants to understand how to live according to himself while he lives according to others.  That could seem impossible–but Socrates realized the impossibility.  So what are the “conditions and motives for this return to the world”, for this overcoming of Stoicism, this mixing with the world?  That is the question Merleau-Ponty asks as he ends the section on Stoicism and prepares to begin the long final section of the essay–the answer to the question.  Put the question this way:  how can a person become disposable to the world, available to it, without becoming unhandy to himself?

A Little More on Church-Man’s Skepticism, and Hamlet

August 22, 2011 By in Montaigne, religion Leave a comment

Reflecting on CMS last night, I was struck again by how much Hamlet is shaped by it.  I suppose that is little surprise, really, since we know that Montaigne (in Florio’s translation) marked Shakespeare’s thought and language and that bits of the play rework bits of Montaigne.  But it is also true–and here I do not know whether to say that Montaigne’s presence in the play is cause or effect or something else–that the Wisdom books of the Old Testament (including the sapiential Psalms) are also present throughout it.  Hamlet is the Church-Man unbalanced, striving for some way of grasping per omnia vanitas without losing his grip on all that matters, and all that matters to him:  CMS melds with madness.  Hamlet strips Montaigne of the ironic strength of Socrates; Hamlet wittily but unwittingly depraves Montaigne’s skillful inconsequence into lived meaninglessness.

Hamlet forces his smiles.

Reading “RM” 9: Skepticism and Christianity

August 11, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, religion, skepticism, Socrates Tags: , , , 1 Comment

One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Montaigne is this, the final paragraph in the section on Montaigne’s religion, his Christianity.

What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance.  Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism?  Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic.  All solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition.  As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remain answerless.  It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us.  When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond.  What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide ourselves by our own lights. ‘In ignorance and negligence I let myself be guided to the general way of the world.  I will know it well enough when I perceive it.’  Who would dare to reproach us for making use of this life and world which constitute our horizon?

I am in almost complete agreement with this.  (My disagreements should show through in what I am about to say.)  One of the accomplishments of the paragraph is that it reveals Montaigne’s skepticism finally to be (what I am calling) Church-Man’s skepticism.  Merleau-Ponty inscribes into the paragraph Montaigne’s lexicon of Church-Man’s skepticism:  ‘ignorance’, ‘strange’, ‘our lot’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘monstrous’, ‘question’, ‘answerless’, ‘folly’, ‘secret’.  Montaigne’s skepticism has an epistemic side, and so can avail itself of failures to know of a standard epistemic sort, and subsequently use those failures to humble our pretensions to certain (forms of) knowledge.  This is one form of ignorance and one use of it relevant to Church-Man’s skepticism.  But Church-Man’s skepticism centers on existential, not epistemological, ignorance:  on not-knowing classified best as ‘alienation’ or ‘restlessness’ or ‘dissatisfaction’.  This skepticism is not one that construes religion, Christianity, as providing solutions or as yielding a self-satisfied understanding.  It construes religion as acknowledging mysteries, acknowledging our monstrous condition.  Its questioning is justified, then; as questioning of a mystery, it remains answerless.  (Not all answerless questioning need dehort.)  This is Christianity’s vow of ignorance.  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  A familiar passage; but not often enough reflected upon.  It stresses asymmetry:  I now see God’s face through a glass, darkly.  God now sees my face, face-to-face free of any darkling glass.  (A strange one-way mirror that has only one side.)  Now I know in part, I know partly.  God now knows in total, He knows totally.  We long for symmetry.  Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. 

And of course we will have to guide ourselves by our own lights—but we need remember that not every light we count as ours is one we lit or one we power.  No one should dare reproach us for making use of this life and world.  What else do we have, here under the sun?  As the Church-Man says (in Ecclesiastes 3):

So I became aware that it is best for man to busy himself here to his own content; this and nothing else is his alloted portion; who can show him what the future will bring?

In my days of baffled enquiry, I have seen pious men ruined for all their piety, and evil-doers live long in all their wickedness.  Why then, do not set too much store by piety, not play the wise man to excess, if thou wouldst not be bewildered over thy lot. Yet plunge not deep in evil-doing; eschew folly; else thou shalt perish before thy time.  To piety thou must needs cling; yet live by that other caution too; fear God, and thou hast left no duty unfulfilled.

We cannot help but to orient ourselves, or to dream of orienting ourselves, on something above the sun, some other side of things to which we make constant wordless appeal.  And so fulfillment, surely our own, perhaps not our duty’s, is denied us.  What we find here under the sun is not valueless, but it’s value is not full.  We live amongst valuable vanities. We are fools in the farce who eschew folly.  We are wonders, mysteries, to ourselves.

Astonishing.