The Categorical and the Ineffable

In earlier posts in this Does Nature Need Correcting? series I owned up to no longer believing in one of the most deep-seated premises of Christian thought: that nature, including human nature, is amiss and needs correcting. Now I'd like to explore one of the contrasting views I touched on in the original installment: the Taoist insight that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."

I discussed Taoism a some length in three posts (this, this, and this) I made some two years ago to another blog. Briefly: the tao is an ancient Chinese notion whose name means "the way." If we cultivate harmony with the tao, we will find the peace and tranquility of the nameless "uncarved block," a Taoist metaphor for the entity from which all named "vessels" are carved. Before "the myriad creatures" — the vessels — there conceptually came, in reverse succession, the "three," preceded by the "two," preceded by the metaphysical "one." The latter too has a predecessor, the tao.

As I review the first of my previous discussions, several things stand out:

• If the monotheistic God of Western religion personifies the metaphysical One, the impersonal tao principle conceptually precedes him.
  
• The tao transcends the person-nonperson distinction ... as it transcends all pairs of opposites. In actuality, calling the tao "impersonal" is as mistaken as calling it "personal."
  
• In the history of Western thought, Plato was the consummate anti-Taoist.
  

Plato was heavily invested in the notion that only Ideas (a.k.a. Forms) are truly real. Platonic Ideas or Forms, such as the Form of the Round, are necessarily immaterial; all material objects such as the circles we draw on paper or the spherical shapes of planets represent imperfect copies of Forms. No man-made or nature-made shape is perfectly round, or square, or oval, or whatever. Hence, it is not fully real.

If material things are not fully real, then they're not fully knowable. Plato's hope was to, as I say, invest heavily in that which is truly and fully knowable. Whatever is truly and fully knowable is necessarily a Form or Idea, without material substance. But knowledge of Forms/Ideas lets us control the material world in ways otherwise unavailable to us. For example, even if a wheel is less than perfectly round, our knowledge of its Form lets us predict what a wheel will do. Do that sort of thing consistently enough, and human "progress" ensues.

To the Taoist, it takes only "cleverness" to coerce material outcomes in the world this way. "Wisdom" is something else entirely. The distinction between cleverness and wisdom parallels that between the categorical and the ineffable.


Plato sought knowledge of categories, which are in effect pigeonholes into which we stuff objects, by which we give them their names. But the Taoist's "uncarved block" is expressly said to be nameless, ineffable. It is "rough," where the vessels are "smooth." (But the tao is also "smooth," since it logically precedes the rough-smooth dichotomy.)

Plato said the categories, as Ideas or Forms, lay at the basis of reality. But the Taoist says the ineffable is the true origin of all.

Plato, in his Myth of the Cave, said true knowledge of the categories of reality would destroy the illusions that beset most of us. The highest knowledge of all was that of the Form of the Good.

The Tao te ching by Lao-tzu

The Taoist, for his part, says such "cleverness" amounts to an illusion, and that real wisdom abandons attempts at exerting coercive power over the affairs of man and the world. According to the Tao te ching, also know as the Lao-tzu after its author:

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,
The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.

After they are transformed, should desire raise its head,
I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block.

The nameless uncarved block
Is but freedom from desire,
And if I cease to desire and remain still,
The empire will be at peace of its own accord.

Western thought historically combines Platonism (as neo-Platonism) with Christian ideas concerning the "fallen" imperfection of the natural world, our sinfulness, and so on. When you shift mental focus all the way back to the tao, pairs of opposites like good and evil vanish. This is why the Taoist would say, in contradiction to the neo-Platonist Christian, that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."

What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant is, oddly enough, a Christian book that (at least in my view of it) suggests that my last post, Only Natural, is not as un-Christian as it may seem. In it, I confessed to no longer harboring what I take to be the canonical Christian view that (human) nature needs correcting.

According to that view, the world is a "fallen" one. Our inner nature is too. It's the fallout of Adam and Eve's original sin in the Garden of Eden.

If I read Wills right — and I am by no means sure I do — the Apostle Paul, author of many of the "letters" that make up the bulk of the New Testament and which document the original Christian movement as it existed before it even bore that name — may actually have had the opposite view. The Christian churches down through the centuries may have simply misread Paul.

The heart of the problem is this [Wills writes on pp. 172-173]. Paul entered the bloodstream of Western civilization through one artery, the vein carrying a consciousness of sin, of guilt, of the tortured conscience. This is the Paul that we came to know through the brilliant self-examinations of Augustine and Luther, of Calvin and Pascal and Kierkegaard. The profound writings of these men and their followers, with all their vast influence, amount to a massive misreading of Paul, to a historic misleading of the minds of people ... down through the centuries.

In this context Wills, who is Catholic, applauds the insights of Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendhal, whose 1961 lecture "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" maintained

that Luther and his followers took Paul's argument for freedom from the externals of the [ancient Jewish] Mosaic code as a confession of his [Paul's] own ability to follow moral law in general. They read as autobiography Paul's exclamation at Romans 7:22-24: "In my inner self, I am pleased with God's Law. But I observe another law in my limbs doing battle with the law in my mind, holding me prisoner to the law of sin in my limbs. Miserable person that I am, who is to set me free from this body doomed to death?" These words echoed thunderously in depths of generations for whom they are an autobiographical outcry.

Wills shows that Paul did not mean these words to be taken as autobiographical. For one thing, the idea of secular individualism which exploded during the centuries after Paul's death would not have been recognized by Paul. Paul was not concerned with individual salvation. He was concerned with the salvation of nations.

To Paul, the Brotherhood which would only later become a church was the Body of Christ. As a corporate body, it would be rescued from the manifold iniquities of this world by a gracious God, simply because this was God's plan as revealed by Jesus's death and resurrection.

Paul simply would not have understood the idea that an individual's personal sense of guilt has anything to do with the prospect of corporate salvation. Wills (pp. 173-174) interprets Bishop Stendhal as saying

In all of Paul's undoubtedly autobiographical references, there is no expression of guilt. Far from finding it hard to observe the Mosaic Law, he [having been born a Jew and still considering himself one] says that he observed it perfectly in his days as a Pharisee ... and in his days among the Brothers [i.e., the original followers of Jesus] he says repeatedly that he has done nothing for which his conscience could reproach him ... . [Stendhal's reading is that] in this one place [Romans 7:22-24] he is not telling us about himself.

Paul's Letter to the Romans is, says Wills, after Stendhal, "a complex interplay of 'persons' in diatribe-exchanges, meant to show that Gentiles and Jews — not as individuals but as societies — have both failed to observe their covenant with God." One of these two hypothetical "persons," a personification of the Jews as a historical group, is the implied speaker of the oft-quoted words at Romans 7:22-24, castigating "himself" for his centuries-long history of infractions against the Law of Moses.

Likewise, Paul has it that Gentiles, while not subject to the Jewish covenant, were subject to the covenant of natural law as it is written in their hearts. But like the Jews, they as a body had repeatedly broken their covenant.


In the early Roman proto-church, the Jews who counted Jesus as their Messiah and the Gentiles who likewise counted Jesus as (yes) the Jewish Messiah were nevertheless at odds with each other. "Paul is arguing," says Wills, "that neither side can reproach the other, and that God is on neither side."

So Paul was not addressing personal sin/guilt at all. And Paul and Jesus both said

that the worship of God is a matter of interior love, not based on external observances, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods. Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of "religion" and punish those who try to escape them. ... They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. ... Paul's message to us is not one of guilt and dark constraint" (p. 175, emphasis added).

My interpretation of that is the following conjecture: our modern need to "correct" nature stems from the sense of "guilt and dark constraint" which — Paul's intent notwithstanding — got built into the Christian sensibility from the early days of the post-Pauline church on.

In Wills' own terse words (p. 175), "Religion took over the legacy of Paul as it did that of Jesus."

Perhaps my coming to see this, however inchoately, is why I no longer feel comfortable thinking of myself as a partaker of the Christian religion.

Only Natural

Of late I have been struggling with my faith as a Christian. I don't feel all that much like a Christian these days. Today it hit me that one of the reasons why I don't has to to with the conflict between what is natural and what is Christian.

In general, it seems to me, Christianity is anti-nature. What I mean by the words "nature" and "natural" is hard to pin down. Let me try to sneak up on it.

Leading "the Christian life" amounts to, when you strip it down to outtward essentials, doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. What you do and what you eschew are done or conscientiously not done in the name of God. But the question is, why do you need to consciously embrace virtue and avoid sin?

The answer would seem to be that, by our very nature, we want the "wrong" things. Instead of doing righteous deeds, we veer in the direction of iniquity ... unless we consciously undertake a course correction, that is. That's what Christian living is: a permanent course correction that we build into our lives by intent, analogous to what a driver needs to do to steer a car that pulls to one side. The Christian commitment is one wherein we assiduously cock the steering wheel of our lives away from what would otherwise be the "straight ahead" position, under the assumption that the car's front end is out of alignment.

But where does that out-of-alignment assumption itself come from? For what it seems to imply is that our very nature is askew. Absent a course correction undertaken "in the name of God" — since what we generally do proceeds from our inner nature — unless that inner nature is somehow askew, no course correction would be necessary.


Indeed, the whole story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden seems to tell us nothing so much as that our very nature — and indeed, that of the world as a whole — is out of whack. This is what it means to say that we, and it, are "fallen."

Recently I have begun to seriously doubt that perhaps most fundamental premise of the Christian stance. It no longer makes much sense to me to believe in the fallenness of (human) nature: my own, that of other people, or that of the world as a whole.

Today I took a walk around a nearby man-made lake, something I do quite often for air and exercise. This time, as I huffed and puffed, I found myself spontaneously meditating on what it means to say, as we often do, that something is "only natural."

The water level in the artificial lake I was hoofing it around was unusually low. Only natural, I mused, given how little rainfall we've been getting these last few months. But what about the fact that I responded to noticing the alarmingly low waterline by worrying about whether "global warming" is having something to do with its cause? Was my complex mental reaction to seeing the low water level somehow "unnatural" because complex and mental?

It too, I realized, was really only natural, given how much we have all been hearing about the global warming controversy. I am a (supposedly) intelligent creature, and it was only natural that my mind would construct such a hypothetical story about how our species' ever-growing "carbon footprint" might indirectly account for how many mud flats were visible at Lake Centennial. No matter how complex the activities of the individual human mind, there is nothing about them that can be deemed intrinsically unnatural.


Did I say "species"? Another thing I was keenly aware of on my health walk was just how many living kinds there were in that one modest-sized park. Every plant, every tree, every animal species — I saw squirrels and chipmunks and swans and Canada geese, and I knew by the avidity of the anglers (another animal species) that there were fish under the albeit diminished lake surface — was testimony to nature's vast diversity. Yet I knew the fact of the biosphere's diversity was "only natural" — Darwin showed us why.

Surely, though, the existence of each individual species was some kind of accident of nature, no? No, I found myself thinking, it was "only natural" that each particular species should have come about. Even if the long, tangled skein of causality that has led in the present moment to (saay) a Canada goose incorporated junctures at which "random" genetic mutations occurred, who is to say that some such chance-riddled skein was not bound to yield Canada geese and trout and squirrels and chipmunks and humans to appreciate them all, in the fullness of time? Who is to say that it is not "only natural" that chipmunks and willow trees and trout and avid trout fishermen should be expected to arise out of the complex, multidimensional processes of nature on this planet?

Well, what about man-made lakes and other copycat geographical features? Surely they are anything but "only natural"? Well, actually, no, I'd say they are in fact only natural. It is in fact only natural that a species such as ourselves, having risen to a unique level of consciousness and associated power over the forces of nature, should learn how to put lakes where none had been before.

And it is in fact only natural that this (our) species' unique power to manipulate the environment would tend to get things out of whack on occasi0n. If our vaunted carbon footprint does in fact threaten our whole enterprise of human progress, it is not surprising that this eventuality might crop up at some point in our history. And it is only natural that we should engage in heated debate about whether the "evidence" for global warming (in this particular case) ought to be credited. For if it isn't lying to us, we need to change our ways. It's only natural that we would be in no hurry to do that.


I was also mindful of another way in which the ideas of "natural" and "unnatural" have been understood by Christians. To wit, sex. Certain types of sex are said to involve "unnatural acts." But it seemed to me, as I walked and cogitated, that homosexual sex, said to be the most "unnatural" type of all, is actually perfectly natural for some people.

That phrase, "for some people," is key, I pontificated. Just as the natural world is so diverse that its living species are uncountable, the human world (which is, when you think about, it just one branch of the larger natural world) contains vast diversity as well. If this person is gay and that one is straight, who is to say that one of the two is "unnatural"?

We know now that many animals engage in "unnatural" (i.e., homosexual) sex. If one assumes that animals are simply incapable of doing anything which is not "natural," then calling this particular kind of activity "unnatural" beggars reason.

Yet the Christian stance has long been that there is a true, "one-size-fits-all" morality, and such things as homosexual sex, or any sex without the benefit of heterosexual marriage, lie outside its perimeter.

Any act or urge outside that perimeter is perforce, in Christian eyes, "unnatural." By this is meant that, were we not living in a fallen, post-Edenic world, we would not have such urges and would never commit such acts.


And that is precisely what I no longer seem to believe. I simply don't believe that "nature" can be corrupted ... not at its core.

I'm not saying that certain acts, under certain circumstances, are not unethical or immoral. All we need to do is look around us and we see immoral acts being committed right and left. All I'm saying is that this odd idea that the way to forestall immoral behavior is to "correct" nature is bogus.

Look at the prevalence of priestly child abuse over the course of recent decades in my own, Roman Catholic Church, for example. Look at the recent scandal of the prominent evangelical leader Ted Haggard being outed as gay. Look at the intolerance spouted by the late Jerry Falwell and the still very much alive Pat Robertson. They all bespeak the fact that even the most devout Christians fail at their attempts to "correct" their inner nature, because in the end nature wins.

It's like building a dam. For a while, the dam holds, but come a ninety-nine year hurricane or flood or earthquake, and the dam is history. It's only natural that we should try to control nature with dams and levees, and perhaps it's only natural that we should imagine that we are in fact bound to work assiduously to correct nature, but in the end nature always wins.

Which makes me think that the Taoists are right. Water eventually overcomes stone. "The most submissive thing in the world can run roughshod over the hardest in the world — that which is without substance [water] entering that which has no crevices [rock]. That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action ... ." So says the Tao Te Ching. The best stance is to align ourselves with nature, not try to correct it.