The term “intellect” is often associated with a narrow sector of human life: the academic. It may even be associated with empty erudition in contrast to the solid realism of common sense. Boethius defined a person as an individual substance of a rational nature. Does that strike you as an impoverished way to think of your friends, your children, the Holy Spirit?
In fact, the project of human living and loving is intellectual to its core. In this article, we illustrate this by showing the same intellectual operations at work in a literary example as we saw from the more academic mathematical examples in Mathematics: Key to the Soul. The central three sections here directly parallel the first three sections in that article.
The Odour of Chrysanthemums
In D.H. Lawrence’s short story, “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Elizabeth Bates awaits her husband’s return home from the mines with festering bitterness. Walter had been known to go off drinking after work. As she waits for him at teatime, she watches their son John carving:
As the mother watched her son’s sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child’s indifference to all but himself.
Did she exaggerate Walter’s selfishness? Earlier she had complained to her father that Walter spent too much drinking. Still, when she considered the possibility that Walt had been involved in some kind of accident, her reaction was not entirely selfless:
If he was killed—would she be able to manage on the little pension and what she could earn?—she counted up rapidly. If he was hurt—they wouldn’t take him to the hospital—how tiresome he would be to nurse!—but perhaps she’d be able to get him away from the drink and his hateful ways.
Earlier in the day John had been picking chrysanthemums as they walked together. She had scolded the boy, but then guiltily plucked a few and put them in her apron band to lift his spirits. As they waited, their daughter Annie noticed them. Delighted at the sight of the flowers, Annie exclaimed:
“Don’t they smell beautiful!” Her mother gave a short laugh. “No,” she said, “not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.”
After the silence that followed, Elizabeth declared that their father could just sleep on the floor. He was just drunk, she was sure of it. And some time after the cowed children had retreated to bed and Walter’s mother had arrived, Walter’s body would be laid on that floor. He had been trapped in the mine. He had suffocated alone in the dark.
Person and Mystery
Mystery is what “one can grow into through increased understanding.”2 Unfortunately, it is somewhat common to use the word “mystery” to mean what cannot be known. Some take God to be such a “mystery” (Paul Tillich), others human consciousness (Noam Chomsky), or the human unconscious (Cormac McCarthy).
Calling something a “mystery” in this sense can become a license for suppressing curiosity. This may come from a well-meaning but mistaken view of reverence, from the less innocent attempt to protect one’s own views from scrutiny, or simple mental sloth.
But, as Elizabeth discovered too late, mysteries are intrinsically worth trying to know. The deeper the mystery, the greater the tragedy in turning away. And human beings are deep mysteries.
As Elizabeth stared at her husband’s body, a kind of understanding began to sink in:
“For a few moments they remained still, looking down, the old mother whimpering. Elizabeth felt countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it.”
The word “understanding” is deliberately chosen. Elizabeth’s intellect is at work as much as Archimedes’ was in his bath. But her understanding was not the joyous discovery where the pieces fell into place; it was the realization that the pieces had never come together at all.
Transcending Appearance
All human understanding begins with some experience that poses a problem. For Archimedes it was the authenticity of a royal crown. Newton had his falling apple, and Euler had the seven bridges of Königsberg. In Mathematics: Key to the Soul we had the written symbols 0.999… and 1. In each case, there is a leap beyond what merely appears.
Walter, however, had already taken his own leap to the afterlife. Someday she would follow. And what then?
She felt that in the next world he would be a stranger to her.
In this life, she had settled for the apparent Walter, who was just a selfish miner who sometimes went on his benders. That word “just” is the tell. Newton saw the movements of bodies and wondered what it meant. Archimedes saw the water flow from his bath, and it triggered his cry of “Eureka”. In each case, the apparent is transcended in order to grasp an idea: classical mechanics, specific gravity, and so on.
Elizabeth too had an appearance that set her to thinking: Walt’s body.
She had denied him what he was—she saw it now. She had refused him as himself.—And this had been her life, and his life.—She was grateful to death, which restored the truth…. And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered?
In Mathematics we used the example of how 0.999… is another way of writing 1. The identity is only grasped by an act of understanding as one moves past the way things look to the way things are. But Elizabeth had failed to grasp an identity, as had Walt. She had confused the appearance with the intelligible. She would not have been able to articulate the philosophical distinction between the for-us and the in-itself, but she grasped the distinction in that moment in a more visceral way than one could get by perusing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Or, for that matter, by reading Plato or Thomas Aquinas.
Nevertheless, she did start belatedly moving beyond his image as she asked, “What had he suffered?” For knowing others begins with getting a sympathetic feel for their own experiences, just as understanding the motion of bodies requires a familiarity with their behavior. And the bridge between mere experience and understanding is the question “What?”
False Certainty
In Mathematics: Key to the Soul, the transition from the intelligible to the real was motivated by recalling how often one thinks one has the right idea, only to discover oneself mistaken. Often one feels completely certain, as the Pythagoreans had been certain that all numbers could be expressed as ratios of whole numbers. Then something happens—you check your answer, or a Hippasus comes along to blow the whole thing up—and you discover your error.
One can feel so certain and yet be dead wrong:
she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt. In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known falsely.
Elizabeth’s disappointment deepened to despair:
Now he was dead, she knew how eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died.
Is it finished? Or do the anguish and hopelessness come from a suppressed love that had been there all along—what we might identify as operative grace?3
Unity: Love and Knowledge
In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas finds it natural to argue that, because God is completely intellectual, he is also infinitely loving and infinitely alive. Do we naturally make the same connection? Or does the notion of an intelligent but detached deist God seem, if not true, at least coherent?
Or does Boethius’ definition of a “person” as an “individual substance of a rational nature” seem richer, in light of Elizabeth’s grief?
We can get a very natural sense for the unity of understanding, love, and life in their tragic absence. A disinterest in understanding another leads to the bleakness Thomas Hardy spoke of in “Neutral Tones”: “The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing; Alive enough to have strength to die.”
By observing the way the tragedy ripples from a failure to understand, to a failure to love, to a failure to live fully, we can get a feel for the intrinsic, necessary relation between the three. The negation points towards what the positive relation would be. Love could hardly be disinterested or incurious. In the extreme—an absolute act of understanding—there would necessarily be love without reservation, life without boundaries. The traditional notion of God as an act of understanding, then, should give us a sense of the liveliness of God and his direct, attentive, and complete love for each and every one of us.
- The title is taken from a line in Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed”↩︎
- Mathematics: Key to the Soul↩︎
- See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.I q. 111 a2↩︎
