Distinguish to Unite
This article beautifully expresses what I have long attempted to say...
Distinguish to Unite
http://www.dominicanajournal.org/distinguish-to-unite/
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Isaiah Berlin
once quoted this adage of the Greek poet Archilochus in his essay “The Hedgehog
and the Fox,” using it to classify authors and intellectuals into two
categories. Berlin’s
hedgehogs, like Plato, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, demonstrate a tendency to
reduce things to simplicity. They “relate everything to a single central
vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they
understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organising principle in terms
of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Foxes, on the
other hand, like Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Joyce, view the world as
irreducibly complex, they “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even
contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some
psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic
principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that
are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or
diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of
experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously
or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one
unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at
times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Although Berlin
warns of the limitations of over-pressing this dichotomy, he nonetheless finds
it useful for literary criticism, proceeding in his essay to conclude that
Tolstoy was a fox by nature behaving as a hedgehog because of his religious
convictions.
Today, one still encounters both approaches. Nor are they limited to
the intellectual realm—these tendencies in thought shape people’s lives.
In academia, in medicine, even in social interactions, knowledge and
practice are becoming increasingly fragmented. Not wanting to
over-simplify matters, scientists adopt models so complex that only a handful
of experts can grasp them; doctors become so specialized in treating a
particular disease that it becomes all they do; people increasingly separate
their professional life from their family life and from their recreation.
This impulse to break things apart, analyze them individually, and
determine the most effective course of action is quite strong and has benefited
society immensely, producing technological marvels and record-breaking
athletes.
Yet the fragmentation of knowledge remains in tension with another
deep-seated human impulse: the natural desire to find connections between
things. Students delight in discovering the relations between material
discussed in different classes; adults long to acquire wisdom, that overarching
understanding of how all things fit together.
Unfortunately, the world has lost sight of true wisdom and seeks to find its
unity in countless counterfeit ideologies that claim to solve life’s mysteries
while really just ignoring actual distinctions. Marxism, Nazism,
Scientism, Scientology, Postmodernism, Gender Ideology, Moral Relativism—the
list of pernicious totalitarian ideals, and the catalog of their calamitous
effects in the last century, could fill volumes.
The Church’s common doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, was neither a hedgehog nor a
fox. Instead, with angelic keenness of insight, he recognized that all
things come from God and reflect some share of His splendor. Yet the
Creator is infinite and His creatures finite. No creature can adequately
capture the fullness of God’s majesty, nor can even the sum of all creation
rival His brilliance. Nevertheless, creation is like a vast, multifaceted
gem—each of its myriad facets glimmering with some small reflection of the
divine light. God is the unifying principle the human intellect yearns to
apprehend, yet this unity of origin does not negate the real distinctions among
creatures: each shares a unique portion of God’s infinite goodness. Thus,
Aquinas and his students acknowledge a single universal organizing
principle—God—without reducing the real differences among things. Theirs
is no spurious man-made sapience, but the wisdom of God revealed to mankind.
Aquinas and his intellectual successors are famous—perhaps even infamous—for
their love of distinctions. Yet this is done according to an old
scholastic axiom that one should distinguish in order to unite. For
example, the better one understands the distinctions among the three persons of
the Trinity, the better one understands how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
are related to one another in the most intimate union of the Godhead. God
can unite many things that seem quite disparate. What could be further
from the infinite, self-sufficient God than His finite, dependent creation? Yet
God entered into His creation, redeemed it, and is drawing it to Himself.
With the Incarnation, the limitless God clothed Himself with human
nature, the uncontainable deigning to be contained in the womb of a virgin.
Similarly, when the Son of God ascended into heaven, He did not abandon
His disciples. Rather, He became more present to them. Our first
parents spoke externally to God and eventually tried to hide from Him.
Now, by virtue of baptism, the Holy Trinity dwells within the hearts of
the Christian faithful, more present to them than they are to themselves.
Similarly, creatures can now receive the very substance of Christ every
day in the Most Holy Eucharist. O the sublimity of the union God has
brought out of so great a difference!
In this time when the Church commemorates the anticipation of the apostles
in the upper room, let us pray that the Holy Spirit will come to us, uniting us
to the true wisdom that is Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment