Critical Theory in the Place of Truth

I just read this article and really appreciated it. As usual, I got it from First Things, a Catholic blog. They have some great stuff, including this. It is a great warning against simply negative undermining of arguments. Rather we ought to be careful to set forth a clear positive position of Christian belief. After all, its easy to be an iconoclast.

Teaching in the Twenty-First Century

By R.R. Reno
Thursday, May 7, 2009, 12:00 AM

Another college semester is ending. Students are hustling around, trying to finish final papers and prepare for exams. Soon there will be plenty of grading to do. But right now I find myself looking back and wondering. What does a college education really amount to in our day and age?

I am not thinking about the professional value of a college degree or a cost-benefit analysis of education. In general, I am entirely acquiescent to the fact that nearly all college students seek degrees in order to receive a credential that has value in the marketplace. Colleges and universities may fail in many ways, but in the main all the testing and applying does a good job sorting students by aptitude, achievement, and inherited cultural values. The end result: a pretty clear picture of winners and losers in twenty-first century American society—which is why the kids keep coming, and parents keep paying.

Nor do I find myself all that concerned about the academic quality of undergraduate education, or the rise in plagiarism, or the tendency of a legalistic, corporate mentality to dominate academic administration. The problems are real, but many have offered astute analysis.

Instead, I find myself questioning our approach—my approach—to education. I wonder not so much about what we teach as how. I worry about the spiritual outlook presently encouraged by higher education. Do we (often unwittingly, and sometimes contrary to our conscious intentions) promise truth without love?

After teaching for twenty years, I can report that the phrase that can unite otherwise fractious faculties is “critical thinking.” Quite often the invocation of “critical thinking” is meant simply to suggest an ancient and honorable educational goal: the creation in students of a nuanced intellectual mentality, one both warm with desire for truth and cool with careful deliberation. The dialogues of Plato encourage this combination. So does the scholastic method perfected by St. Thomas. In his Summa, the Angelic Doctor carefully chooses objections to his own position in order to bring the truth into sharper focus. His students are asked to entertain what is false. They must delay the impulse to rush to a direct and unopposed affirmation of truth—and they do so in order to sharpen and heighten their perception of what makes the correct view the true view.

We do not, however, live in ancient Athens or medieval Paris. “Critical thinking” has a contemporary meaning that does not clear the way forward to deeper convictions. Instead, the moment of seeing falsehood has become the goal and summit of the intellectual life. One does no so much aspire to critical thinking as critical theory.

For example, when I was a college student, critical theory meant the Marxist analysis of the Frankfurt School. Very few people believed in Marxist claims about history, economics, and politics. In fact, figures such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse were popular precisely because they were “critical Marxists” rather than the dogmatic sort. They offered little in the way of prescription, and they demurred from the grandiose claims about historical progress that makes Marx so comical today. Their contribution was entirely critical. They used a refined version of Marxist categories in order to uncover and expose the oppressive and de-humanizing dynamics of social life.

The same could be said for the role of Freud and Nietzsche in the ecosystem of late twentieth century intellectual culture. There was something very exciting about being eighteen or nineteen and discovering that what seemed like refined cultural sensibilities were, in fact, the excrescences of primitive psychological processes. A person of profound self-discipline is “anal,” and lofty ideals of moral self-sacrifice are actually carefully crafted instruments of power and self-assertion. Or so a dash of Freud and a spoonful of Nietzsche suggested to our young minds.

Paul Riceour once dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the “masters of suspicion.” Their stars may have waned in recent decades (though not Nietzsche’s), but the larger role of suspicion has most definitely waxed. Some form of critical theory has become the overriding goal of almost all humanistic study these days. We do not so much read Aristotle or Aquinas or Jane Austen as take their ideas and expressions as instances of a patriarchal culture, instantiations of power-relations, rhetorically coded expressions of class-relations, and so forth. Critical thinking really means cultural studies.

Many have pointed out the gray ideological homogeneity of what passes for critical theory. David Horowitz has amply chronicled the rigidity and intolerance of the contemporary professoriate. Others have noticed that the preening theoretical vocabularies of contemporary cultural analysts tend toward rhetoric rather than argument. Back when deconstruction was the rage, John Searle wrote a devastating analysis of the gimcrack posturing that was being passed off as profound argument.

Yet endless theoretical elaborations of suspicion remain a growth industry all the same. “Truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten”—it continues to be said in a thousand different ways. The reason, I think, is simple. Critical theory plays a significant and important role in contemporary society: it de-mystifies and de-legitimates inherited beliefs. It is not, as some critics would like to think, simply Leftist ideology. Nor is it nonsense dressed up in fancy French words. These days critical theory is an intellectual project, the main goal of which is to show that conventional ways of thinking are hopelessly naïve, if not malign and corrupt. It is a deck-clearing operation—not to prepare students for truth, but to prepare them for life without truths.

Pope Benedict has called this mode of pedagogy a dictatorship of relativism. It is, of course, a soft tyranny. Nobody is imprisoning college students for having convictions. The dominant intellectual regime is satisfied with two basic strategies: continuous assault and a starvation diet. We take apart the belief-systems of adolescents with our multi-faceted and powerful modes of critical analysis—and we give them next to nothing substantive to believe.

Indeed, in the most progressive educational environments, we satisfy the desire for truth with critical theory itself, which is why it plays such an important role in contemporary higher education. The ability to probe beneath the surfaces of language and culture to show how they produce and manipulate beliefs becomes the sine qua non of the well-educated person. One is not wise in the sense of knowing how to live. One is critically astute and undeceived—and quite superior in knowing how others are in the grip of ideologies.

For a long time I puzzled over this image of the well-educated person, especially because so many of the men and women I teach with are actually strongly motivated by a love of truth. Slowly, however, I have come to realize that we tend to teach as much in response to our fears as our hopes. There are, perhaps, two main and very different intellectual fears. The first is a fear of opportunities squandered, of truths unnecessarily missed. The second is a fear of deception, of falsehoods wrongly cherished.

It is crushingly obvious that the present dictatorship of relativism is profoundly motivated by the second fear. Aside from the natural sciences, we give students little more than training in critique. Loyal to our critical principles, we can barely squeak out the slenderest of affirmations. Fearful of living in dreams and falling under the sway of ideologies, we have committed ourselves to disenchantment.

I find myself recalling one of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He urges us to remember that love is just sexual intercourse: “it is the friction of member and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus.” We are to apply this method of critical thinking to all aspects of our lives in order to free ourselves from fanciful notions. “Where things make an impression which is very plausible,” he advises, “uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves.” The goal is simple: Humanize yourself by disabusing yourself of illusions.

No philosophy or faith worth its salt endorses a witting love of illusions. It’s the truth we want, not fantasies. Yet, there is something desperate and loveless in the triumph of suspicion. Love falls. As the urgent, searching bridge in the Song of Songs reminds us, love risks the dangers of deception and betrayal. We cannot fall into the embrace of truth by way of cool, dispassionate critique. If we fear that truth will elude us, then we must search and seek with reckless desire.

Much ink has been spilt over the future of Catholic higher education. Endowing new programs and buttressing Catholic identity may help somewhat. But I am more and more convinced that the problems have a broader dimension. A pedagogy dominated by the critical spirit of our age will invariably make faith seem scandalously committed. What we need, therefore, is to rethink our educational self-image and subordinate the critical moment to a pedagogy that encourages the risks of love’s desire.

R.R. Reno, features editor at First Things, is professor of theology at Creighton University.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1410

Devotional Hymns from a Dead Time

I have been learning about the various movements in the English Church in the 18th century. Sadly, most of them were just sad. There was the Broad Church which, as the name suggests, became as shallow and wide as possible to allow all beliefs in. (Maybe you could call it the seeker sensitive position in the days of rationalism). There was the High Church, which was an effort to return to worship and theology all that was lost in the reformation. Basically an attempt to be as Roman Catholic without actually rejoining (including worship/veneration of saints and Mary!) Both of these movements are fairly disappointing. Yet there was also the Low Church, or the evangelical movement.
In the evangelical movement, there were many great names, like Wilberforce, Newton, Ryle (a bit later), Simeon, and one of my favorite hymn writers, Isaac Watts.

As always it is encouraging to think of faithful men amidst a generation of doctrinal laziness, and regrettable returns to works righteousness. So, here is a hymn I have been enjoying recently that came out of that time despite the Church’s weaknesses:

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all Thy quick’ning powers;
Kindle a flame of sacred love
In these cold hearts of ours.

Look how we grovel here below,
Fond of these trifling toys;
Our souls can neither fly nor go
To reach eternal joys.

In vain we tune our formal songs,
In vain we strive to rise;
Hosannas languish on our tongues,
And our devotion dies.

Dear Lord! and shall we ever live
At this poor dying rate?
Our love so faint, so cold to Thee,
And Thine to us so great!

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all Thy quick’ning powers;
Come, shed abroad the Savior’s love
And that shall kindle ours.

The Bible’s Literary Merit

I just read this article and thought it was quite insightful on the ins and outs of biblical narrative. It is written by Tod Linafelt.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i31/31b00601.htm

From the issue dated April 10, 2009
The Bible’s Literary Merits

By TOD LINAFELT

It is hard to deny that in many respects the Bible is the most unliterary work of literature that we have. Saint Augustine, already in the late fourth century AD, confessed that biblical style exhibits “the lowest of language” and had seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero.” It is easy to see what he means. Biblical narrative especially (things are different with biblical poetry) tends to work with a very limited vocabulary and consistently avoids metaphors and other sorts of figurative language, evincing a drastically stripped-down manner of storytelling that can seem the very antithesis of style.

Then, readers have not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value — that is, as a source of theology (What can we learn about God?) or of ethics (What can we learn about morality?). For Augustine, as for so many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or lack thereof.

Recent years, however, have seen great advances in our understanding of the particular literary — as distinct from religious — resources of biblical narrative and biblical poetry. So it is perhaps less surprising than it might seem that James Wood, in his recent book focusing on the workings of fictional narrative and the rise of the modern novel, spends quite a bit of time on the Bible. Wood has been chief literary critic at The Guardian and a senior editor and in-house book critic at The New Republic, and he is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. He also holds the post of professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. The appearance of his book How Fiction Works (published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) made about as big a splash as any work of literary criticism can be expected to these days.

For professional biblical scholars like myself, who work in a literary vein, it is good to see a critic as accomplished as Wood take seriously the literary art of the Bible in such a public way. At the same time, Wood’s treatment of the Bible demonstrates just how difficult it is for even the most discerning of readers to recognize the distinctive literary art of biblical narrative, since Wood, I am sorry to say, gets the Bible very much wrong.

It is in a key chapter of How Fiction Works, titled “A Brief History of Consciousness,” that Wood treats biblical narrative in the most detail, comparing King David with Macbeth and with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. As the title of the chapter indicates, Wood wants to trace the development of the representation of consciousness in literary characters. He begins with relatively simple, ancient characters (“religious lives and biographies of saints and holy men”), who may be vividly drawn and interesting but who give no evidence of a depth of consciousness or a complexity of motivation. He culminates with the complex, layered consciousness of the “deep, self-divided characters” represented in the best of novelistic fiction. And the Bible, for Wood, belongs pretty clearly in the former camp.

Wood frames his discussion in this chapter in terms of “who a character is seen by.” He seems to mean by that the extent to which the inner life of a character is available to be “seen.” David, on Wood’s reading, is seen by God but has no real inner life that might be represented. “David is opaque to us,” writes Wood, “precisely because he is transparent to God, who is his real audience.” David exists for Wood as an entirely “public” character, with “no privacy,” “no memory” that might impinge on his consciousness, and “no inner thoughts” or “subjectivity.” In short, David has “no mind to speak of.”

Macbeth, by contrast, is seen by the audience, which has replaced the God with whom David was supposedly concerned. So David’s “prayers” become Macbeth’s “soliloquies,” revealing to the audience his mental and moral agitation. And according to Wood, Macbeth, unlike David, is the “possessor of a memory.” Macbeth essentially thinks out loud, and in so doing reveals a consciousness that is “retrospective,” cognizant of a lived past that encroaches on the present.

But it is only when we arrive at the modern novel, with Raskolnikov as an illustrative character, that we have truly arrived at full, complex inner life and a full representation of consciousness. While David had no inner life to be represented, and Macbeth’s was tied to the spoken-out-loud soliloquy, Raskolnikov’s is laid open to unmediated scrutiny. The all-seeing reader has replaced both God and the theatrical audience.

Wood’s description of the workings of biblical narrative strikes me as not only wrong, but as almost precisely the opposite of its real nature. Far from presenting characters who exist solely in the public realm and who are solely concerned with God, the Bible exploits to good effect a genuinely private self in its characters, one that is largely unavailable to readers and to other characters. Biblical narrative consistently, though not slavishly, avoids giving access to the inner lives of its characters, to what they might be thinking or feeling in any given situation, even though that inner life is often vitally important to character motivation and to plot development and cannot always be filled in with reference to God.

The classic modern articulation of this aspect of biblical narrative is Erich Auerbach’s essay “Odysseus’ Scar” (the opening chapter of his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature), first published in German in 1946 and in English in 1953. Auerbach compares biblical narrative with Homer, describing Homeric style as being “of the foreground,” whereas biblical narratives are by contrast “fraught with background.” In other words, in The Iliad and The Odyssey both objects and people tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects — from physical descriptions to the thoughts and motivations of characters — in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background and are not directly available to the reader. On the question of the relationship between dialogue and characters’ interiority, for example, Auerbach writes that the speech of biblical personages “does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts — on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts that remain unexpressed.” Wood, like many readers, has mistaken lack of access to characters’ inner lives for a denial of the existence of those inner lives. But the literary convention is for the narrator to report action and dialogue (what the characters do and what they say), and not, for the most part, what they think or feel.

So when Wood writes about David’s sexual taking of Bathsheba that “he sees and acts” but that “as far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think,” he is at best only half right. David is indeed reported as seeing Bathsheba bathing and then acting to bring her into his bed. David’s thinking isn’t reported, but the reader is nonetheless encouraged to imagine what David is thinking. After seeing Bathsheba, David pauses and considers his next action: He sends to “inquire about the woman” and learns that she is “the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Only after learning those things does David carry out his act of adultery.

Why? Well, he learns that the woman’s husband is a Hittite, and so perhaps we are to understand David as having fewer scruples about taking the wife of a non-Israelite. (There is irony in the fact that, as the story unfolds, Uriah in fact proves a much better keeper than David of Israelite law.) David learns too that Bathsheba is the daughter of Eliam, who in turn, the attentive reader will notice, is the son of Ahithophel, one of the court counselors who will soon betray David by siding with David’s son Absalom in his attempted coup.

What, then, motivates David’s taking of Bathsheba? Wood assumes that David is “instantly struck with lust” upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David’s motivations, he clearly has some.

In biblical narrative, such examples of unstated but important character motivation abound. What are Eve and Adam thinking when they reach for the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What is God thinking in forbidding that fruit? (Despite Christianity’s long tradition of original sin, the answer to neither of those questions is immediately clear, and both prove quite interestingly complex if taken seriously.) Why does Moses kill the Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave in Exodus 2? (It is not clear whether Moses, raised an Egyptian, knows that he was born a Hebrew; and so his motivation might range from an elemental sense of justice, unrelated to ethnicity, to a specifically ethnic identification with the victim.) What is going through Aaron’s mind when his two sons are burned alive with fire from God in Leviticus 10? (The narrator reports only that “Aaron was silent.” Does that indicate mute acceptance? Crippling grief? A barely controlled anger? Pure shock?) Why does Naomi try to send Ruth back to her Moabite family in the first chapter of the Book of Ruth? (Is she genuinely concerned for Ruth’s welfare, or does she simply want to be rid of the burden of a non-Israelite woman as she returns from Moab to Bethlehem?)

As those examples show — and there are many, many more that could be adduced — biblical narrative counts on and exploits exactly that which Wood claims not to find: a genuine inner life and a private, complex subjectivity. Again, Auerbach is much closer to the mark when he describes biblical writers’ expressing “the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.” King Saul, for example, loves the charismatic David who soothes Saul’s demons with his lyre playing, even while he hates and fears the David who is clearly destined to take Saul’s throne. And David, many years later, will in turn be torn between his love for his son Absalom and the need to put down Absalom’s rebellion, leading to one of his most famous (and rare) expressions of feeling, upon hearing of Absalom’s death in battle: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

What makes Wood’s mischaracterization of biblical narrative so disappointing is the opportunity that is lost, the opportunity to have one of our best and most subtle analysts of fictional narrative go to work on our most ancient example of fictional narrative. For whatever else the Bible is or contains — scripture, ethics, history, lyric poetry — it also represents a genuine precursor to the modern novel.

Jane Smiley, in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf, 2005), gives this basic definition: “A novel is a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” One may nuance the definition, but that is a pretty common one. And classical biblical narrative brings together all those elements, probably for the first time in literary history. Indeed, the Bible contains, in the books of Genesis and Samuel, what is very likely the earliest ever extended prose narratives, presenting protagonists who develop and change over the course of a lifetime and who, contra Wood, demonstrate a genuine sense of a past that impinges on their present.

There are more-ancient narratives, of course, including the well-known and justifiably celebrated Epic of Gilgamesh and the lesser-known Ugaritic (or Canaanite) epics; but those ancient epics, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, take the form of verse and not prose, and their protagonists seem to body forth the same essential character traits in whatever situation they find themselves. Thus, Auerbach can write of Homeric heroes that their “destinies are clearly defined” and they “wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives,” whereas biblical characters are often portrayed as carrying the weight of a lived past, opening out into an uncertain future.

Robert S. Kawashima, in his important book Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Indiana University Press, 2004), has shown how the emergence in ancient Israel of a third-person prose narrator — as distinct from the first-person singer, or rhapsode, of epic poetry — is a major technical innovation. The flexibility of this new prose medium allows for, among other things, the representation of consciousness in literary characters. Sometimes designated by the French phrase style indirect libre, the German erlebte Rede, or the English “free indirect style,” represented consciousness essentially collapses the distance between third-person narration and the direct discourse attributed to a character, allowing readers access to the inner life of characters without having to “quote” either their speech or their thought. Given the reticence of biblical narrators to make such inner life available in an extended way, however, the technique is used sparingly and briefly, usually as an indicator of figural perspective, so that we briefly “see” a scene through a character’s eyes or, to use Kawashima’s language, as it registers on the character’s consciousness. Such perspectival shifts contribute to the sense of a depth of consciousness in biblical characters and, as Kawashima makes clear, are unavailable to a traditional epic poet, for whom there is only ever a single perspective — that of the singer of the tale.

Wood’s book opens with a lucid and helpful discussion of free indirect style, rightly emphasizing its importance for the specific effects achieved by the novel. He seems unaware, however, that ancient Hebrew authors, writing close to three millennia ago, had already developed the linguistic resources to represent consciousness. Such an awareness would have made it much harder for Wood to mischaracterize biblical figures as transparently pious figures, lacking in depth of thought and consciousness.

How is it that such an astute reader as James Wood can overlook much of what is most distinctive in the literary art of biblical narrative? Part of the answer lies, I suspect, in his emphasis in How Fiction Works on what he calls “thisness.” “By thisness,” Wood writes, “I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.” Beginning in the 18th-century novel, the description of seemingly insignificant details — the pungent smell of a character’s cigar, the wax picked up from the dance floor by a pair of slippers, the greasiness of a minor character’s hair — lends an aura of realism to fictional narrative. According to Wood, “if the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail.” If the Bible manifests the first of those, as I have argued, it is true that it lacks the second, the “thisness” of detail, rarely describing either objects or characters and including very little in the way of specifics not strictly necessary to the plot.

That should not be mistaken for the absence of style but should be recognized as a particular style, one that pushes the reader’s attentions from the foreground, where such details might be described and where character motivation might be made explicit, to the background, where objects are dimly perceived and motivations left unexpressed.

Beyond the question of style, however, it seems clear that Wood, like so many readers of the Bible, simply expects the Bible to be dominated by thoroughly religious concerns, to the exclusion of any literary artfulness, and then proceeds to find those concerns even where they seem not to be. How else to explain his claim that David, lacking inner thoughts, “speaks to God, and his soliloquies are prayers,” when in fact the books of Samuel record, over some three dozen chapters, only two or three prayers of David’s, the longest of which (in II Samuel 22) is more notable for its poetic line articulation, its metaphorical imagery, and its claim to martial prowess than for any spiritual content? Or the idea, quoted above, that David’s “opaqueness” as a character is due to his transparency to God, “who is his real audience”? Even if God were David’s “real audience” within the world of the story (an assumption that I do not think actually holds, since David is consistently portrayed as artfully playing to his various human audiences), as a literary character his audience is, as with any literary character, the reader.

And what can be made of Wood’s homiletically tinged statement that David has “no past, to speak of, and no memory, for it is God’s memory that counts, which never forgets”? It is hard to imagine such a statement arising naturally from a close reading of the grittily realistic story of David. For example, the failing and bitter king shows an unrelenting memory when, on his deathbed in the first chapter of II Kings, he bids his son Solomon to murder the minor character Shimei, who made the mistake of publicly calling David a usurper and “a man of blood” some 15 chapters and many years earlier in the story. David himself had pledged not to kill Shimei, no doubt for political reasons, but he has not forgotten the slight, and he trusts that his equally ruthless son will settle this old score. Alas for Shimei, Wood is quite wrong in his claim that David has “no memory,” as Solomon arranges the murder after David’s death.

One does not need to deny the theological and ethical content of the Bible in order to recognize its distinctive and intentional literary style. It is true that the Bible is religious literature, but it is no less true that it is religious literature. As such, it may be read not only as a foil to Flaubert (and other novelists) but also as a precursor. Not all of the Bible’s narratives (or its poetry, which works with a very different set of conventions and techniques) are equally compelling or equally artful; but the best of them both demand and reward the sort of close literary attention that Wood gives to modern novelistic fiction.

Tod Linafelt is an associate professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University and a humanities professor in the English department at Loyola College in Baltimore.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 31, Page B6

Church History Post 3

As you reflect on all that happened politically in England and Scotland, how was the Church involved? What do you think are some of the pros and cons to the involvement?

Given the basic assumption of the time that the state and church are to hold the same beliefs, the intertwined story is itself a surprise to my own sensibilities. The history of the reformation in England lends itself to dramatic twists in the story, as well as much frustration over the way in which the state intervened in Christ’s body.

As it benefited the desire and ambition of the monarch the gospel was prospered. So, when Henry VIII saw fit to disregard the Pope, the suppression of Luther and Wycliffe was lifted and the gospel spread rapidly. In fact it was Henry VIII’s desire to have multiple marriage that represented the various periods of freedom for the gospel in England. Thus, the different children’s loyalties varied according to the legitimacy of their mother’s marriage, the reformers either prospering or being persecuted.

Despite the fickleness of the royalty, the Church seemed to persist with clear vision of her goal. Obviously some clergy kept their posts simply by switching doctrinal badges when it was useful. Yet the degree to which the gospel took off when allowed to do so indicates that the Church never lost sight of the gospel.

One lasting effect of the times of governmental favor was the book of common prayer and the idea that what the Church does is to be common to all parishes and dictated by the monarch. I believe this sets the stage for the Non-Conformist and Puritan (if they are any different) clash with the Anglicans. Still it seems that the Church of England is bound to the crown in an unhealthy way, but I am not sure if that relationship has changed at all.

Scotland’s story seems just as dramatic with the Lords capturing the castle of St. Andrews, Knox’s capture and time in slavery etc. Yet, what seems to have happened in Scotland that didn’t in England was the constant confrontation (however stormy or calm) between the lead reformers and the monarch. Of course, Knox was only able to do what he did because all the people and Lords were behind him. Yet that tension between the Church and the State is what interested me the most.

Much of what we believe today is spawned materialism and evolutionary theory mixed with some good old capitalism. The belief is that it is possible to rule and govern with only objectively true assumptions. The problem is that even a completely secular government is determined by its own set of assumptions on the nature and metaphysic of man, his place in the world, what man is meant to do on earth etc. So to have a secular government is a small step from another monarch, since both are biased.

Yet, as much as I would like to reject secular rationalism and its attempt to establish some objective basis for law, I cannot admit that the State and the Church have nothing to do with each other. I hate the ways that the Church is led into heresy, ease and capitulation because of rulers who annex the Church. Yet, I have to admit that Luther, Knox and the British Reformers couldn’t have succeeded without the Lord opening political doors. Again, as much as Henry VIII is a great example of how the gospel can prosper under a good ruler, he is equally an example of the Church needing to be free of the reach of the ruler. Luther’s two kingdom’s view looks very appealing on this topic (though not so much in other areas).

So I am left in a tension and acknowledge the co-dependence of the Church and the State. The glorious part, however, is that the Church ultimately has Christ as her hope and trust.

Reno on Brazun’s House of Intellect

End of an Era

By R.R. Reno
Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 12:01 AM

Fifty years. It seems like a long time. But if you pick up Jacques Barzun’s searching analysis of modern education, The House of Intellect, the half century melts away. Published in 1959, this piquant critique of post-War American attitudes toward the life of the mind remains contemporary.

Barzun gives his readers lots of smart social commentary. He points out the way in which our egalitarian ethos encourages an “amiable stupidity.” The best man for a committee is someone who is cheerful, optimistic, and incapable of disturbing others with critical thoughts. The trend continues. These days the single most important qualification for academic administration is the ability to project an “empowering” and “inclusive” style of leadership.

He foresees the soft relativism of our day, noticing the way in which people take all the edges off conversations. Well-socialized people begin their sentences with “I feel,” or “I may be wrong but,” or “I’m only thinking aloud.” “The lexicon of pussyfooting,” he observes, “is familiar.” Things have only gotten worse.

The educational establishment attracts a great deal of Barzun’s icy criticism. Anyone who thinks multicultural education is a recent perversion should read his chapters on education. He states a plain fact that remains true: Those who formulate the ideologies for primary and secondary education in America are almost universally anti-intellectual. They think of schools primarily as institutions devoted to socializing rather than teaching. The young need to be “prepared for real life,” encouraged to become creative, inclusive, and empathetic. When attention turns to academic topics, emphasis falls on technique (“engaging the students”) rather than content.

Barzun also makes some pointed observations about the university. He has nothing good to say about the role of graduate teaching assistants as educational surrogates. But there is no solution to this ongoing problem. After all, what is the strange goal sought by the most accomplished academics? Like clergy of old, the professorial superheroes scramble for sinecures. “The highest prize of the teaching profession is: no teaching. For the first time in history, apparently, scholars want no disciples.”

His observations about grant applications are as true today as they were in 1959. He sees the way in which everybody champions everybody in glowing letters of recommendation (more “amiable stupidity”). Foundation executives show their true colors. In their own mind, they are providing the “venture capital of social change,” a cliche that sounds like it was minted yesterday. Therefore, “applicants hampered by sober ideas must impart to them an apocalyptic glow.” As a friend of mine once advised me: “Before writing a grant application, have a couple of drinks, and then write a proposal with the following basic message: This project will redeem the world, and I’m the only one who can do it. Revise in the morning.”

The particular criticisms are astute (and entertaining), but the lasting value of The House of Intellect rests in a deeper diagnosis. As a historian of culture, Barzun was the opposite of a Marxist. Instead of thinking that our mental attitudes reflect changes in social and economic conditions, Barzun recognized that shifts in our often sensibilities midwife important social changes.

Barzun saw that the intellectual scene in the 1950s was filled with misgivings and anxious worries. The very people who inherited new and prominent roles—vastly expanded university faculties, foundation-funded scholars, academic experts consulted by business and government—had become more and more pessimistic about the benefits of disciplined reflection. He observed a consensus: Our inherited disciplines of thought and sentiment are opposed to the immediacy and fullness of life.

Barzun’s interpretation of a popular book of art photography from the late 1950s, The Family of Man, suggests the depth of the turn against Western culture. He sees an implicit principle guiding the selection of photographs:

Whatever is formed and constituted (the work seems to say) whatever is adult, whatever exerts power, whatever is characteristically Western, whatever is unique or has a name, or embodies complexity of thought, is of less interest and worth than what is native, common, and sensual; what is weak and confused; what is unhappy, anonymous, and elemental.

The reading is prescient. Norman O. Brown, Norman Mailer, and the Summer of Love were just around the corner. Measured, cool reflection was on its way out; committed, hot activism was on its way in. The complexity of ideas and arguments were giving way to urgent feelings and primal desires.

As a cultural historian, Barzun knew that this shift in sentiment would be decisive for the West. It signaled the triumph of the Bohemian ideal, and the end of what John Lukacs has called the Bourgeois Era.

In a Europe shattered by religious division, divine truths no longer shaped life directly, and the central bourgeois imperative was to find and reanimate the sacred order. It was not enough to comply. The Bourgeois imperative was to find and articulate truths strong enough to compel an inner and spiritual obedience. Christian books and ideas played a very important role, but as the modern era unfolded, each generation placed old notions of sacred order into an increasingly wider range of reading, conversation, and considered judgment. According to Barzun, this Bourgeois project of discernment built the modern House of Intellect, one he saw being abandoned (and vandalized) in his own day.

Rereading The House of Intellect has helped me understand our times more clearly. Certain images recur: abdication, desire for release, and exhausted impotence. The adult world of achieved self-discipline abdicates to an adolescent world of spontaneity and desire. Among those charged with responsibility for cultural standards, Barzun sees a strong desire for “a release from responsibility.” People “idealize youth” and “hope that youth will bring to the conduct of life an energy that manners have sapped in their elders.” The really smart and ambitious intellectuals read the signs of the times and strike poses accordingly: “Nowadays it is assumed that all attacks on culture are equal in virtue, and that attacking society, because it is society, is the one aim and test of genius.”

Because these words were written in the late 1950s, they help us see that the 1960s was not the result of a youth movement. It is best understood as an abdication of the elders, a renunciation of responsibility by the adults. The Bourgeois Era ended because its intellectual project crumbled. The guardians of Western culture determined that they were custodians of inhumanity. Barzun pictures for us the forward-thinking man of the late 1950s, wearing a suit, going to the tastefully decorated offices of the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations. “He may be a minor foundation official living rather comfortably off some dead tycoon, but he talks like Baudelaire.”

This imaged foundation official circa 1957 tells the tale. The children and grandchildren of the old Bourgeois elite decided to throw their lot with the Bohemian project. We are to live as we wish, and the primary intellectual project these days is to beat down whatever remains of the old Bourgeois forms of sacred order. Repressive! Patriarchal! Logocentric!

Barzun is not happy about the change. By his reckoning, the modern bourgeois form of intellectual self-discipline and honesty “is a broom with which to clear the mind of cant.” This tradition of reflection helps us avoid “trumpery art,” “ideological drugs, “facile enthusiasms,” and a simple-minded worship of science. Intellect encourages what Barzun calls “fineness” and “virtuosity.” One does not just have opinions or commitments. One has a fabric of considered views that are woven from the threads of inherited traditions. They are nuanced, tenuous, and shaded with all manner of uncertainty, but even so, for the Bourgeois intellectual, considered views have the serious weight of truth, a weight that gives shape to one’s sense of self.

And the Bohemian project? It retails itself as the royal road to self-discovery through the alchemy of self-expression. It promises a more “real,” more authentic, and more individual existence. As Barzun suggests, the claims are hollow. The emerging Bohemian Era will be anti-intellectual: characterized by an externalized and collective sense of purpose (politics über alles) and an undifferentiated, amorphous inner life (the empire of desire).

Barzun was right to view the future with foreboding. Our Bohemian Era is and will be crude and thoughtless. All you need to do is go to P.S. 1, the contemporary gallery run by the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City. It is full of flat, ideological gestures and great gushers of the id. But Barzun was also naïve. The Bourgeois Era ended because so many came to feel it as a lifeless, artificial posture. “Fineness” and “virtuosity”? They seem awfully thin and precious. And what, exactly, do they serve? Without the commanding voice of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Western culture lost is ability to claim our loyalty. A soul-shaping demand shorn of divine sanction can easily come to be seen as an inhumane invasion.

R.R. Reno is an associate professor of theology at Creighton University and features editor at First Things.

Taken from http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1333

Church History Post 2

From the reading of Calvin’s testimony in his preface to his Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, how does he describe his own personality? Were you surprised by this assessment of himself? Why or why not?

Calvin describes himself as bashful, and apparently he isn`t just being modest. It sounds like the preface to this commentary is one of the few places Calvin speaks about himself. While I didn`t expect him to be boisterous like Luther, especially given the way he writes, I was nonetheless interested to see the particular workings of his disposition.

The stereotype (all too well founded) is that theologians have no care for people, the church, or really anything but the very focus of their study. (And sometimes their study is elevated above the Lord himself.) Yet Calvin doesn`t fit this category very nicely. His constant mention of desiring to `retire` to study clearly shows that he had a burning longing to know. Yet his love for God set him apart. It was his love of God that spurred him to publish the first edition of the Institutes, and thereby `come out of hiding`. It was his love of God that drew him back to Geneva `with many tears and sorrow`. Since he cherished seclusion it might be presumed his studiousness was only for his own benefit. Rather, he wrote, taught, preached, governed, and studied for the Church as a whole and in Geneva.

The general trajectory of his life might convince us that even with pure motives for study, knowledge is most useful as a benefit to Christ`s body. Calvin seemed to learn the lesson thoroughly enough that it shaped his theology. As he says that the trials with which God has exercised his soul have opened the door for him to better understand the prayers of the Psalms, he demonstrates the degree to which our understanding is dependent on God and not reason. This is a very humble (and I would say biblical) epistemology; our knowledge is subject to God in his creation, and therefore we cannot elevate ourselves above him. This is what Calvin constantly emphasizes in the Institutes. So it seems that the very pains, burning conviction for the Church, and tears also drew him to a fuller articulation of the place of knowledge (and therefore study) in relation to our Lord and his body.

It would be my prayer that I would be as concerned for the welfare of the Church in my studies as Calvin was.

Church History Post 1

I have been taking a class through Covenant Theological Seminary on Reformation through Modern Church History. Every week we are asked to post our thoughts on a certain prompt. I will begin posting these responses; below is the first.

As you study the life of Martin Luther, where are you challenged in your own life? How will you use the history of people like Luther and the other Reformers in your ministries?

There are many things that are welcomed as I read the account of Luther`s life. His coarseness, vulgarity, sharpness with opponents, all are close to my own failings and tendencies. His tenderness to Katie Von Bora, love of God`s word and people and willingness to stand for the truth are all things that I would aspire to.

The most surprising thing, noted in lectures and readings, was how aloof he was of all things political. Obviously he was aware of the great politico-religious monolith whose fury and wrath he was welcoming by his work. Yet he never once courted political support. It`s almost as if he didn`t care one way or another what the tides of political favor were, given their changing nature. He followed the instruction of his political superiors, but never sought to maneuver or manipulate for his own advantage. He ventured himself and his family (no less), completely on God`s care and kindness to him. It seems he never consulted the polls, but simply sailed out on God`s faithfulness into the very tumultuous sea in which he had no clout.

Despite his intentional ignorance of all things political, he continually benefited from the protection of Frederick the Wise. As well, much of Frederick`s ability to protect him derived from the constantly changing political-military landscape. Had it not been for the Turkish invasion on the East, Charles V would have been able to to prosecute Luther, and sharply so. As well, Francis I`s continual provocation of Charles left the Emperor in need of unified German support. The peace signed at Nuremberg seems mostly to have been negotiated by Lutheran princes. Some of these princes were involved in the Lutheran cause not for any theological convictions but because of their disdain for the Pope`s meddling in their lands. Nationalism was quickly joined to the protestant theology as dual force for the removal of Papal and Imperial authority from Germany.

All of this, of course, is a testament to Luther`s own trust in his `mighty fortress`. Moreover, it is a great picture in favor of his two kingdoms view. Much of the trouble he got himself into was when he dabbled in the civil (i.e. advising a violent suppression of the peasant rebellion.) As much as his two kingdom view has against it, it is certainly not in danger of any sort of Constantinian submission to evil authority. The church is preserved by its separation from temporal power.

What is striking in all of this, and convinces me of the value of particular ministries, is Luther`s keen focus on the Word, and ultimately on the education of the people in that Word. He was intentionally aloof from the political realm, it seems, because of his intense devotion to the Word of God. As well, he was not simply concerned with his own appropriation of Biblical truth, but of all people`s. He was deeply concerned with changing the worldview of people, and not the governmental structures. So much in missions (and sometimes in church work,) is focused on development and partnering with the government. While this is certainly a good goal, it succinctly ignores the primacy of the Church as God`s tool. Development is preferred to gospel teaching, changing men and women`s hearts. Much can be said in defense of either side, both having real merit. Yet, looking at Luther and the other reformer`s I am convinced that education, devotion to the word, study, preaching, and education of the polis are the means I am to be committed to in ministry. My work is to be a co-worker in the changing of men and women`s hearts and minds. Much energy is spent elsewhere on good things, but I (and I am convinced all of us), am called to be the Church to the local church and to the world through the ministry of the word.

Philosophy of Education

More and more as I read critiques of our time it seems to me that one thing is lacking: a right understanding of man as God’s image bearer. This has a direct effect in the way we view education.

One author I read recently described what he called the ’stewardship principle’, which was basically the cultural mandate.  I think he was right to emphasize this. The only reason we value education is that it enables us to think about the world in an orderly way, allowing us to cultivate it. The ways in which it enables us to take raw creation and make something beautiful from it, are the ways in which God’s image is reflected.

Obviously there are benefits to businesses for hiring employees who have been well-educated etc. But, I submit that this benefit is subservient to the ultimate motive; cultivating a beautiful society thereby reflecting God’s image.  Prosperous businesses are only good insofar as they benefit society. The emphasis on the trade-training aspects of education for the sake of job preparation puts the cart before the horse. Rather, it exalts one aspect of education and sacrifices the real goal.

I would think that education has three reasons for which we Christians ought to value it:

- It enables us to bear God’s image on many levels

- It enables us to make things beautiful and learn to see beauty

- It enables us to create cultural vocations or ‘covenants’ of specialized knowledge. (Here businesses would fit in. More like it would be trades, both the glorious and gritty.) This allows greater cultivation and greater prosperity.

Thoughts?

PS. This is borrowed from Gene Edward Veith’s blog, where he quotes David Brooks discussing vocation. Its good and its what I had in mind for the third benefit of education:

“In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant.

Busy

There is plenty to post about….but not much time or internet. I have started reading through N.T. Wright’s methodological preface to his “New Testament and the People of God”. He has some really great stuff there. As well I have started reading through my Reformation Church History book as I will be starting my class at Covenant soon. More to come on both of those.

Schaeffer On Epistemology, pt. 4, a

The last installation of Schaeffer’s positive account of epistemology. While he does an awesome job articulating it, I do find myself wanting a more philosophically technical account. His account is not lacking in the slightest, and even depends on God’s self-revelation in his stating  it. (How worthless would it be to state a Christian account of knowledge using a methodology that is in opposition to the account itself? We can’t substantiate/justify our claims about Christian knowledge with a positivistic, modernist, methodology, or any other for that matter).

(Note: see lovely similarity between Wittgenstein quotes at the bottom and what Schaeffer says in the following.)

In the effort to break it up into readable chunks, I will split this into 3 separate posts. Here is the first:

The Christian Position on Proposition Revelation and its Unity with Creation:

Nature and grace arose as a problem out of the rationalistic, humanistic Renaissance and it has never been solved. It is not that Christianity had a tremendous problems at the Reformation, and that the reformers rwestled with all this and then came up with an answer. No, there simply was no problem of nature and grace to the Reformation, because the Reformation had verbal propositional revelation, and there was no dichotomoy between nature and grace. The historic Christian position had no nature and grace problem because of propositional revelation, and revelation deals with language. (61 – 62)

…Heidegger and Wittgenstein realized that there must be something spoken if we are going to know anything, but they had no one there to speak. It is as simple and as profound as that. Is there anyone there to speak? Or do we, being finite, just gather enought facts, enough particulars, to try to make our own universals? (62)

…We find that there is someone there to speak, and that he has told us about two areas. He has spoken first about himself, not exhausitively but truly; and second he has spoken about history and about the cosmos, not exhausitively but truly. (62)

Is it possible to have intellectual integrity while holding to the position of verbalized, propositional revelation? I would say the answer is this: it is not possible if you hold the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in closed system. If you do, any idea of revelation becomes nonsense. (62)

The secular anthropologist agree that if we are to determine what is man in contrast to what is non-man, it is not in the area of tool making, but in the are of the verbalizer. If it is a verbalizer, it is man. If it is a non-verbalizer, it is not man. (64)

It is obvious that propositional, verbalized revelation is not possible on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes. But the argument stands or falls upon the question: Is the presuppostition of the uniformity of natural causes really acceptable? (64)

Christianity has a different set of presuppositions . It begins with a God who is there, who is the infinte-personal God, who has made man in his image. He has made man to be the verbalizer in the area of propositions in his horizontal communication to other men. Even secular anthropologists say that somehow or other, they do not know why, man is the verbalizer. You have something different in man. The Bible says, and the Christian position says, “I can tell you why: God is a personal-infinte God.” There has always been communication, before the creation of all else, in the Trinity. And God has made man in his own imgae, and part of making man in his own image is that man is the verbalizer. That stand in the unity of the Christian structure. (65)

If God made us to be communicators on the basis of verbalization, and given the possibility of propositional, factual communication with each other, why should we think he would not communicato us on the basis of verbalization and propositions? In the light of the total Christian structure, it is totally reasonable. Propositional revelation is not even surprising, let alone unthinkable, within the Christian framework. (66)

What we now find is that the answer rests upon language in revelation. Christianity has no nature and grace problem, and the reason for this rests upons language in revelation. The amazing thing is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein, two of the great names in the area of modern epistemology, both understand that the answer would be in the area of language, but they have no one there to speak. (67)

The God who is there made the universe, with things together, in relationships. Indeed, the whole area of science turns upons the fact that he has made a world in which things are made to stand together, that there are relationships between things. (68)

…He made the universe, he made man to live in that universe, and he gives us the Bible, the verbalized, propositional, factual revelation, to tell us what we need to know. In the Bible he not only tells us about morals, which makes possible real morals instead of merely sociological averages, but he give us comprehension to correlate out knowledge. The reason the Christian has no problem of epistemology is exactly the same as the reason why there is for the Christian no problem of nature and grace. The same reasonable God made both things, namely, the known and the knower, the subject and the object, and he put them together. So it is not surprising if there is a correlation between these things. Is that now what you would expect? (69)

The fact is that if we are going to live in this world at all, we must live in it acting on a correlation of ourselves and the thing that is there, even if one has a philosophy that there is no correlation. There is no other way to licei in this world. That is true for everybody, even the most “unrelated man” you have ever seen, the man who says there is no correlation. It does not matter a bit. He lives in this world on the basis of his experience that there is a correlation between the subject and object. he not only lives that way, he has to live that way. There is no other way to live in this world. That is the way the world is made. (70)

…the Christian view is exactly in line with the experience of every man, but no other system except the Judaeo-Christian one – that which is given in the Old and New Testaments together – tells us why there is a subject-object correlation that one does and must act on. Everybody does act on it, everybody must act on it, but no other system tell you why there is a correlation between the subject and the object. In other words, all men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true. (70)

In epistemology, this fellow creature is the object and I am the subject. We are both made by the same reasonable god and hence I can know my fellow creature truly. In ecology, I am to treat it well, according to the way God made it. I am not to exploit it. But it is deeper that this. I am not only to treat it well, but I can know it truly as a fellow creature. (71)

What amazes me is that as I read through Schaeffer and through Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, I feel like I am reading the same book written by the same author. What is sad is that Wittgenstein is so close and yet never knows the Lord (as far as I know). There of course needs to be a little explanation of Wittgenstein’s terminology, but really see if the similarity is apparent at a first pass.

(Language-game: he basically means a frame of reference, a  worldview, but points out an essential component of such, it is inherently language-based, and so conforms to the rules and assumptions of language.)

(He wrote this work before anyone landed on the moon, so he is not being sarcastic or provocative when he says no one has been on the moon.)

106. Suppose some adult had told a child that he had been on the moon. The child tells me the story, and I say it was only a joke, the man hadn’t been on the moon; no one has ever been on the moon; the moon is a long way off and it is impossible to climb up there or fly there. – If now the child insists, saying perhaps there is a way of getting there which I don’t know, etc. what reply could I make to him? What reply could I make to the adults of a tribe who believe that people sometimes go to the moon (perhaps that is how they interpret their dreams), and who indeed grant that there are no ordinary means of climbing up to it or flying there? – But a child will not ordinarily stick to such a belief and will soon be convinced by what we tell him seriously.

107. Isn’t this altogether like the way one can instruct a child to believe in a God, or that none exists, and it will accordingly be able to produce apparently telling grounds for the one or the other?

108. “But is there then no objective truth? Isn’t it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?” If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered. But suppose that instead of all these answers we met the reply: “We don’t know how one gets to the moon, but those who get there know at once that they are there; and even you can’t explain everything.” We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.

109. “An empirical proposition can be tested” (we say). But how? and through what?

110. What counts as its test? – “But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?” – As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.

148. Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don’t. This is how I act.

149. My judgments themselves characterize the way I judge, characterize the nature of judgment.

150. How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand? How do I know that my judgment will agree with someone else’s? How do I know that this colour is blue? If I don’t trust myself here, why should I trust anyone else’s judgment? Is there a why? Must I not begin to trust somewhere? That is to say: somewhere I must begin with not-doubting; and that is not, so to speak, hasty but excusable: it is part of judging.

151. I should like to say: Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of doubt and enquiry.

558. We say we know that water boils and does not freeze under such-and-such circumstances. Is it conceivable that we are wrong? Wouldn’t a mistake topple all judgment with it?  Moore: what could stand if that were to fall? Might someone discover something that made us say “It was a mistake”?
Whatever may happen in the future, however water may behave in the future, – we know that up to now it has behaved thus in innumerable instances.
This fact is fused into the foundations of our language-game.

559. You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable).
It is there – like our life.