People of the Book
What has the library to do with the Church?
In the Qur'an Christians, along with Jews (and Sabeans), are frequently referred to as ahl al-kitab, people of the book. "The book" in Islam is far more important than a book, like the Bible. Rather, "the book" signifies the heavenly book--the book, we might say, of God's revealing. There are actually four holy books in Islam: the Torah given to Moses, the Psalms given to David, the Gospel given to Jesus, and the Recitation (Qur'an) given to Muhammad. The Qur'an is the summit and summation of divine revelation, but all of these books partake in "the book." So, in the Qur'an, Christians, like Jews and Muslims, are people dedicated to the divine book, to divine revelation, which also means to study of the divine revelation, to learning, to dedicated and living thought. Robert Louis Wilken opens his illuminating book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, with these words:
The Christian religion is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.
Unapologetically intellectual. I wonder if you've ever thought of Christianity that way. There are any number of Christian leaders who do not seem to resemble that statement at all. Wilken writes as a historian. His claim is that from the beginning Christians have been not only ritually grounded and morally driven, but also animated by the life of the mind. We have always been a people of the book.
The picture here is of Bookhandel Dominicanen in Maastricht, Netherlands (no, I haven't been there...yet). It's a bookstore housed in an old Dominican church. One post on Instagram tagged a photo like this with these words: "Imagine walking into a 700-year old church and being surrounded by thousands of books instead of prayers." Actually, if Wilken is right (and I think he is), that's entirely fitting. Or rather, being surround by thousands of books and prayers, would be entirely fitting. Christians have always been a people of learning, a people of the book. We forget that sometimes and we suppose that there is not really much of a life of the mind among Christians. And to be honest, sometimes some of the loudest Christian leaders seem to prove the point. But Christians have never abandoned the life of the mind or intellectual inquiry. Even the most mystical of mystics were more often than not involved in sophisticated philosophical meditations. Julian of Norwich ("unlettered" though she considered herself), Meister Eckhart, Origen of Alexandria, Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen--all of these were contemplating what lay at the edge of human intellect.
Nicholas of Cusa, writing in the fifteen century, wrote about the visio Dei, the vision of God, but before that he wrote about docta ignoranta, learned ignorance--that is, the unknowing that lies at the far end of learning. Learned ignorance is, in much balder terms, that strange recognition that the more we learn, the more we know what we don't know. Socrates, Cusa reminds his readers, claimed to know nothing except that he knew nothing. If the task of the mystic is, as a finite creature, to nevertheless find communion with the Infinite, then learned ignorance is the state of a finite mind as it approaches the infinite. (There's a whole lot of fun philosophy here: Cusa says that the human intellect is related to truth as a polygon to a circle--no matter how close it gets to a circle, however many sides one adds to the polygon to make it more circular, it will always be infinitely far away from becoming a circle. If anyone wants to have a fun conversation about that, come find me!) But it is not mere ignorance. Christians have never simply been fine with actual ignorance. Rather, learned ignorance is a product of deep and sustained intellectual inquiry.
Ok, that's a lot of preface material. Here's my point: part of being a disciple of Jesus is to cultivate the life of the mind. Educational institutions are not always well-disposed to fostering that sort of cultivation. Most of us went through school thinking that education was about gaining technical knowledge or menial skills like "writing" or "critical thinking" or the gaining of information. But real formation of our minds is far more capacious. St. Paul advises the Romans (12:2), "Do not conform to the pattern of this world/age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you will be able to discern what is God's will--what is good and acceptable and perfect." In our life together, in our life of common prayer, we ought also to cultivate a common life of the mind, that we might be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And since our minds are finite, reaching out for the infinite, it is a journey we will be on our whole lives long.
Maybe you think I'm asking you all to be professors and philosophers. I'm not. (A fair number of professors and philosophers also have forgotten what it means to cultivate a life of the mind.) But I am hoping you will remember that you have an appetite for intellect. Because this is actually not just a Christian thing. This is a deeply human thing. As humans, we have a number of appetites--for food, sleep, companionship, etc.--but we also have intellectual appetite. We want to know, to understand. In his book Intellectual Appetite, Paul Griffiths explores just this theme and what a Christian cultivation of intellectual appetite looks like. He begins with Aristotle, who identified this appetite as distinctively human. Like other creatures, who gain knowledge as a means to an end--gaining knowledge of where to find food so that we can eat the food, etc.--humans, too, often seek knowledge for instrumental or utilitarian reasons. "But sometimes," he writes, "we do something different: we cosset and indulge an appetite for knowledge quite independent of any other end. Sometimes, it seems, we just want to know: how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, whether there is life on planets in other solar systems, if that thing over there is an elm tree, what Dickens's plans were for bringing Edward Drood to a conclusion, how best to explain the slaughter of the innocents and the inevitability of betrayal. And it is this appetite, an appetite for knowledge simpliciter, that Aristotle seems to have thought of as properly and uniquely human."
Christians have always been a people of the book, a people dedicated to the life of the mind and inquiry, for the love of God. Another book about monasticism in the Middle Ages is deftly title: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. We are a people whose life of the mind is driven by the love of learning and the desire for God. Because has made us in just this way--to long to know and to understand and to be in communion with God. And so, common prayer and books truly go together.
Sometimes people say things to me like "You must really like books" or "you must be a book lover." In a sense they are right. But sometimes, as my younger son recently discovered, I offer a gentle correction: I don't actually love books. It's not the books that I love. It's not the physical object of just any book that draws me. That's like saying: "You're married--you must really like humans." It's not just any human that I love in this way. It's not just any book that excites me. Because it is not the books, but the learning that it opens up, the regions of the mind that it lays bare or unlocks, or, in the case of art or novels or poetry, my perception of the world and the use of language that it stirs--imagination, too, is part of the life of the mind. And so, I suggest, it is with us--we are people of the book, because we are people of intellectual appetite. We are people of the arts because we are people of imagination. We are people of learning and study and rigor in thought because we are people seeking after the God who made us so.
We should not that: it is not just textbooks that aid our learning (textbooks are one of the more boring vehicles for learning, to be honest). It's not even just nonfiction: history, philosophy, theology. It's also great novels and stories that touch the root of our humanity. It's also poetry that crafts words in ways that make us attend to life. It's also the visual and performing arts that unlock our capacity for contemplation. To be a people of the book is to be open to the many modes by which God moves in the world, the many ways in which humanity has turned over this marvelous thing we call living.
Let me encourage you, then, to ask yourself: when was it that you last loved learning? What was it that fascinated you, that made you wonder, that sparked that inquisitive human thing in you? Not just information you could use, but something you could marvel at and had to understand better? What's keeping you, then, from following your questions and following them as far as they will take you? Who knows, it may just take you into a land of unknowing, and into the presence of the One who is just beyond our comprehension. Maybe you will find there that you are found in the midst of your questions, and honored for your questions that make you more fully human. Maybe you will find there the love that made this world for our dread and our delight.
