Daily Dreher Digest

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‘Only Wonder Understands Anything’ (April 1)

My friend Susanna Black tweeted out that image today, of the Cappadocian saints. I’m not sure who created it, but I love it. That’s the first time I have ever seen that line from St. Gregory of Nyssa. You will surely see it again as the epigraph in my forthcoming book, though maybe I will use the more complete quote: “Concepts create idols. Only wonder comprehends anything.”

Did you know that three of these saints were siblings? Gregory of Nazianzen is the only one not related to the others. What a family!

I spent some time this evening trying to find the context of that line. I read that it’s associated with Gregory’s Life Of Moses. Best I can tell, that line is not in the text. It’s a paraphrase of this far less pithy line:

The divine word at the beginning forbids that the Divine be likened to any of the things known by men, since every concept which comes from some comprehensible image by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the divine nature constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God. 

A drawing of our beloved is not our beloved. Words describing our beloved are not our beloved. Gregory is here talking about apophatic theology — an approach to determining who God is by talking about who, or what, He isn’t. Gregory is saying that the reality of God is beyond our ability to conceptualize. Only by falling on our knees in awe before the unknowable immensity that is God can we begin truly to know Him.

I love this passage from Life Of Moses:

For this reason we also say that the great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained. . . .

He shone with glory. And although lifted up through such lofty experiences, he is still unsatisfied in his desire for more. He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.

Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful. Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always visible as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype.

And the bold request which goes up the mountains of desire asks this: to enjoy the Beauty not in mirrors and reflections, but face to face.

Gregory’s point, I think, is that we have to see the world as icon, not idol — that is, as a sign pointing to the transcendent, and ultimately to the Creator. We can never fully behold God, and be united to Him (in this life), but our desire to do so and to be so plunges us further on in our search for Him. That is, the image does not satisfy us, but only increases our desire to see Him face to face. Gregory, who lived and wrote in the fourth century, is helping us to grasp that we move towards God, through the darkness that hides Him, by our insatiable yearning to experience Him.

Or, as the twentieth-century theologians Mick Jagger and Keith Richards put it:

Sometimes you ain't got nobody, and you want somebody to love
Then you don't want to walk and talk about Jesus

You just want to see His face
You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus

You just want to see his face

Building Re-Enchantment (April 6)

Yesterday I wrote about Christopher Alexander’s thoughts about the deepest meanings of patterns in nature. Tonight I want to examine a similar book: Jonathan Hale’s The Old Way of Seeing, which is about the re-enchantment of architecture. He’s on the same track as Christopher Alexander, but is a much better writer. Here are some excerpts.

The difference between our age and the past is in our way of seeing. Everywhere in the buildings of the past is relationship among parts: contrast, tension, balance. Compare the buildings of today and we see no such patterns. We see fragmentation, mismatched systems, uncertainty. This disintegration tens to produce not ugliness so much as dullness, and an impression of unreality.

The principles that underlie harmonious design are found everywhere and in every time before our own; the are the historic norm. They are the same in the eighteenth-century houses of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the buildings of old Japan, in Italian villages, in the cathedrals of France, in the ruins of the Yucatan. The same kinds of patterns organize Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Michelangelo’s Capitol. The disharmony we see around us is the exception.

If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds, or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.

Hale says that great buildings, or even a well-designed townscape of ordinary buildings, makes us “feel we belong.” In a badly designed townscape, “we feel no mystery, no promise. We are not intrigued; there is nothing to explore.”

Boy, does that ever describe my city, and I think it describes most American cities. There is nothing here that invites you to explore. There is nothing to find, or at least there is nothing about the way the city is laid out that suggests there is something to find. It’s a nice enough city to live in, but it could be any other American city. Hale puzzles over the fact that we simply accept the fact that our buildings and townscapes today are destined to be ugly and ordinary, and unlike the beautiful ones we travel to see.

Hale says the old way of seeing wasn’t a mystery. It was obvious to anyone who believed that buildings were made of harmonious compositions of patterns. We began to lose that ability to create buildings like that in 1830, Hale says. It had to do with the rise of elite planners seeing society not as an organic entity, but as a machine. Machine thinking caused us to lose our vision.

This is a book about architecture, so there’s a fair amount of architecturally specific discourse that I won’t repeat here. I loved his discussion of the Golden Ratio (1:1.61) and its use in architecture (read something about it here). Hale says it occurs often in nature, and in buildings we find beautiful. It is all over the Chartres cathedral, he says, and within the shell of a chambered nautilus. When we deploy the Golden Ratio in our buildings, they link us with nature and time. You might even say that this is evidence of a Logos embedded throughout creation.

Here is something else interesting from Hale:

Those who had the old way of seeing did not know what it was they were doing. Harmony came from pattern, as anyone could see. Pattern was measurable and teachable. It was understood that a building was a form of music.

The Gothics, intentionally following the Greeks, used musical intervals to determine architectural forms. They also understood the proportions of the human body, and they put those patterns into buildings. But they did not talk about the process of play; they did not talk about the designer’s frame of mind. Patter was taught; architecture as music was taught, and every place came alive. But when the music went out or architecture, rules and systems were not enough to get it back. It had not been understood that the village square and the great church embodied the same patterns, and that their primary source was unconscious knowledge. Until the Victorian age, the magical sense of place was not discussed because it was always present.

There’s a lot in this book — far more than I can talk about in this newsletter. Hale ends with a short chapter asking whether or not we can regain the old way of seeing. Excerpt:

Do all the reasons we have strip malls have to disappear before beautiful buildings can become the norm? I am not sure. I hope not. At the end of a Roman drama, as everything seemed to be turning into disaster and disorder, it was common for a god to be lowered from the sky to put things right. We say deus ex machina to mean a cheap solution. But I think it may have been entirely reasonable for the gods to show up and set things right. The deus ex machina means not every solution is complex but not every problem is within our conscious power to solve. When you make the shift to intuitive design, you get a deus ex machina; you get immediate gratification. Suddenly, what had seemed arid and uninspired becomes not necessarily “great” but rich with possibility. The change is not shocking, not unpleasant; you could say it feels like a gift.

Our architecture appears to be a failing in ourselves. The smashed and thwarted and denatured patterns look like a sickness. It is a kind of affliction to be locked into a false belief that creates again and again something we hate. However, it need not take much for us to learn to use our personal resources very differently.

The grammar of shape is innately understood. Unlike speech, it is visible in plants and animals everywhere. The intuitive design process gives access to that knowledge. You do not work at design, you play at it.

The question become clearer: not that you know there was an old way of seeing, do you want it back? And if you want it back, what needs to happen?…

What do we make of all this?

As I mentioned last night, the disenchantment of the world has a lot to do with the disenchantment of our places, of our built world. I have owned three houses, but only loved one: the Arts & Crafts bungalow we bought in Dallas, our first house. It looked like Home. I live now in a perfectly ordinary house, built in the 1980s. Before this, I lived in a perfectly ordinary house, built in the 1990s. Both were comfortable — more comfortable in most modern respects than that 1917 bungalow. But neither one is Home; the Dallas house was. Jonathan Hale explains why.

Anyway, what can we learn about the disenchantment and the re-enchantment of the world from what Hale says about architecture? Notice how Hale does not bring up God (Christopher Alexander, though, does). He simply points out that there are recurring patterns in nature, and architecture flourishes when it obeys them (and by “flourishes,” he means that they create beauty that makes people feel at home in the world). He does not mean that all buildings must look alike. He only means that they must use a pattern language.

We have forgotten that harmonies are natural. That they are to be preferred. We have trained ourselves to believe that disharmony is preferable as long as we have willed it. Hale’s work suggests that when we work against Nature — when we lose the Tao, the Logos — we cannot create beauty, and we therefore cannot live in harmony with ourselves and reality.

As with buildings, so too with life. But look, we can’t simply say that all we need is to convert to Christianity and all will be well. Just as many contemporary churches are ugly and dispiriting, so too do the lives of many Christians give evidence of inner disharmony and unhappiness. It is not enough to profess belief in God. You have to live sacramentally. That is, you have to incarnate the Logos in your own life. You have to recognize the patterns that God gives us to live by — most of all in the pattern of his Son, the incarnate Logos — and to live by them yourself. Maybe at first it’s just imitation, which is fine for beginners, but eventually the spirit lives playfully within you.

Come to think of it, that’s how it was with me, and my coming to faith. I have mentioned many times how the epiphany I had inside the Chartres cathedral was the start of the search. I tried to have God without having to submit to Him, but all I did was make a mess of my life. Finally I realized that if I wanted God, if I really wanted him, then what needed to happen was my surrender to Reality. That meant living in imitation of Christ, or trying hard to, out of obedience. In time, as I began to die to myself, it became natural to me. This is a lifelong project, of course.

If we want to live in a re-enchanted world, we have to learn to see patterns, recognize the Tao and submit to it, and live toward incarnating the Spirit of God in our daily lives. It begins with saying, There has to be more than this. Lord, show me.

If we learn how to read nature, and to see buildings rightly, and we learn how to see art in the same way, we will learn how to see our lives in terms of Logos, and learn, ultimately, how to see God’s presence everywhere, filling all things.

The Joy of Power-Washing (April 10)

My son Lucas, when he turned 17, asked for a power washer for his birthday. It made sense: he is my most practical child, and enjoys doing useful things. This afternoon, Lucas and I drove up to the country to power-wash my mother’s carport. Lucas connected the machine to the hose, and turned it on. I asked him if I could take the first turn. I’ve never used a power-washer before. He said yes. I took the sprayer in hand, and got started.

The kid could not take it from me. It was so much fun! The pressurized blast of water scraped away years, even decades, of gunk and algae (this is Louisiana, remember). Look:

I wish I could explain why it gave me so much pleasure to clean like this. It felt like I was driving the barbarians back, and reclaiming the mark for civilization. I could have stayed there all afternoon doing this. When my father poured the slab thirty or more years ago, he put a piece of cypress wood between the slab and the kitchen door. The slab was nearly black with the accumulated dirt of three decades. I blasted it all away today. Look:

When I tell you it was black, I’m serious. I wish I had photographed it before I blasted it clean. As the pressurized water hit the wood, the sweet smell of cypress wood arose in a plume. My father had this wood planed from the heart of a cypress tree that had been buried under the mud for who knows how many decades, or perhaps centuries. It was discovered by workers for Peter Kiewit, the construction company hired in the mid-1970s to build the nuclear power plant near our town. Somehow they gave some of the cypress wood to my father, who kept it for the rest of his life I have some of those boards in my garden shed. I hope to have a table made from them one day. This piece of cypress above served as a kind of doormat, but also a bridge over the gap between the house and the carport. Today, though, smelling that sweet cypress aroma, I was transported back to the days of my childhood when my dad talked about the heart of cypress discovery, and how much that wood meant to him.

My mom also gave me one of my father’s canes, which he made for himself. What a precious thing. Here is the handle. Putting my hand on it, knowing that Daddy gripped on it and leaned on it to get around in the final years of his life, humbles and comforts me. I can’t explain the feeling, but it is a lovely one.

It may sound strange to say it, but the reverie that came from smelling the cypress wood today, and feeling the handle of my father’s cane against the palm of my hand, reminded me that we are incarnate creatures.

The Code (April 5)

Over the weekend I watched the first episode of a three-part documentary on Netflix, called The Code. It’s a rebroadcast of a 2011 BBC show about mathematics in the natural world. In the episode I watched, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy talks about hidden mathematical ratios and patterns in nature and in architecture. He begins in the Chartres cathedral, and goes on to explain that the architects of Chartres used ratios that are found in musical chords as well, and elsewhere in nature. Du Sautoy’s point is that mathematical order (“the Code”) is found throughout the cosmos. This is not exactly big news, but it is pretty cool to watch the fun he has showing this.

As it happens, I am reading an odd but compelling book by Christopher Alexander (famous for writing A Pattern Language) titled The Nature of Order, Book Four: The Luminous Ground. Alexander seems to have self-published his Theory of Everything. I bought the fourth and last installment because he focuses on the deep order that undergirds his theories about buildings. It’s good, but I wish I had read the others first.

Here’s a link to an overview of each volume. This is the summary of Book Four:

The foundations of modern scientific thought, four centuries old, are firmly rooted in a conception that the universe is a machinelike entity, a play of baubles, machines, trinkets. To this day, our real daily experience of ourselves has no clear place in science. It is little wonder that a machinelike world-view has supported the deadly architecture of the last century.

This mechanistic thinking and the consequent investment-oriented tracts of houses, condominiums and offices have dehumanized our cities and our lives. How are spirit, soul, emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or a street, or a development project, in modern times?

The Luminous Ground, the fourth book of The Nature of Order, contains what is, perhaps, the deepest revelation in the four-volume work. Alexander addresses the cosmological implications of the theory he has presented. The book begins with a critique of current cosmological thinking, and its separation from personal feeling and value. The outline of a theory in which matter itself is more spirit-like, more personal in character, is sketched. Here is a geometrical view of space and matter seamlessly connected to our own private, personal, experience as sentient and knowing creatures. This is not merely an emotional appendix to the scientific theory of the other books. It is at the core of the entire work, and is rooted in the fact that our two sides - our analytical thinking selves, and our vulnerable emotional personalities as human beings - are coterminous, and must be harnessed at one and the same time, if we are ever to really make sense of what is around us, and be able to create a living world.

Alexander breaks away completely from the one-sided mechanical model of buildings or neighborhoods as mere assemblages of technically generated, interchangeable parts. He shows us conclusively that a spiritual, emotional, and personal basis must underlie every act of building or making. And then, in the middle of the book, comes the linchpin of the work - a one-hundred-page chapter on color, which dramatically conveys the way that consciousness and spirit are manifested in the world.

This is a new cosmology: consciousness inextricably joined to the substrate of matter, present in all matter. This view, though radical, conforms to our most ordinary, daily intuitions. It may provide a path for those contemporary scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the underpinning of all matter, and thus as a proper object of scientific study. And it will change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.

Alexander is trying to connect consciousness to the material world. I’m not far enough into it yet to judge his theories. From what I recall of his Pattern Language, he believes that buildings and streetscapes that give life, that make people feel more human, follow particular patterns that make them cohere deeply, at a subconscious level. In The Luminous Ground, Alexander talks about buildings and places as being life-giving, or not. They either invite us to feel connected to the world, or (if they’re bad buildings) they don’t. He writes:

I believe — and will try to demonstrate in the chapters which follow — that we are, each of us, literally connected to the tree stump and to these other things. People in a primitive society, where both the world which they themselves built and nature too had living structure, felt this connection with almost everything around them. We, in our world, where less of the built world has living structure, feel it more rarely. We feel such relatedness weakly with nature and for things which occur in nature. But I dare to say that it is, indeed, only experienced weakly. It is not an encompassing feeling of relationship, such as was felt in a primitive traditional society.

He goes on:

So whether our buildings have this quality or not — whether they themselves have this interior relation with the I [i.e., the Self] — is of the greatest importance. If I am right, it is the presence of living structure in our built world that decides the extent of our relatedness with earth. Buildings which lack living structure not only destroy our ability to feel relatedness through them. They also inhibit, somehow, and reduce the ability we have to feel relatedness at all, even in nature — places where we would otherwise feel it naturally.

Though he does not come across as a religious man, he says there is no coincidence that most great buildings of history, and most great art, comes out of a belief in God, or in transcendence. He writes that “human life approaches its clear meaning when, and only when, a person makes contact with this Void” — one of the word he (unfortunately) uses for God. More:

[T]o create living structure, we need a vision of the universe in which meaning exists, in which a vision of relatedness and self have a primary place. But it must be a vision whose feelings, whose depth of understanding, is as real for us — true and vibrant and real as part of daily life in the third millennium — as much as God was at home in Mozart’s heart.

That, I believe, is the challenge of our era.

Alexander insists that we can’t go back to the past, that we have to find some way of reaching God that makes sense for the 21st century. I can understand why he says that, but a Christian (or a Jew, or a Muslim) who believes in God, and not just a “Void” or a “Tao", can’t abandon what has been revealed simply because it doesn’t make sense to people in the 21st century. If we are capable of recognizing that we made a wrong turn at the Enlightenment, or perhaps even with Nominalism at the end of the High Middle Ages, then we can learn to see with premodern eyes. It won’t come naturally to us, of course, but our blindness can be unlearned. I believe that, because I’m living it out.