Last night, I was reading through Czesław Miłosz’s last book of poems before his death, Second Space, and ran across a poem entitled, “Scientists.”  I braced myself, because science and poetry seldom meet, and when they do, science usually comes out of it the worse for wear.  I was not disappointed:

The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.

Science is all about depriving mankind of illusions.  It’s a “candle in the dark,” to demystify a “demon-haunted world,” to use Carl Sagan’s words.  By reducing every conceivable system into its component parts and describing them as fully as possible, scientists seek to understand from a materialistic perspective how everything in the world works.  If it were to remain within the arena of methodologic materialism–that is, restricting itself to natural explanations for the sake of reproducible and understandable experimental results–then I, and I suspect also Miłosz, would have no problem with science.  But some scientists, notably popularizers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, persist in making the philosophical error of equating methodology with metaphysics.  It is the proselytic fervor of metaphysical materialism that leads scientists to be “concerned to deprive us of illusion,” not the scientific method.

But I suspect that Miłosz is driving at something deeper here than simply the demystification of the world.  Just because I understand the development and composition of a flower does not mean that I cannot appreciate its beauty.  But, the language of science, and its past (and current, for that matter) actions are at issue.  Continuing the poem:

The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.

He goes on, in the rest of the poem, to point out some of the horrors inflicted upon mankind under the aegis of science–in particular, eugenics. “My God, what language these people speak/In their white coats.” By accepting metaphysical materialism, much of science has lost sight–lost the conception even–of beauty. Dignity also loses its meaning, because under the microscope, we all look much the same, and those that don’t look like the majority can be labeled defective. Materialism at its core is dehumanizing, not just debeautifying.

What is ironic, however, is that a passionate appreciation of beauty has driven many great scientific discoveries. We know–even if we don’t know how we know–that an elegant, harmonious system is more likely to be true. Existence of elements, and more recently of subatomic particles, have been predicted correctly based upon their adherence to a beautiful pattern. Mathematicians often speak of elegance. This rightness guides scientists toward greater truth, and I suspect if they would heed Miłosz’s warnings, they would see the beauty in humans, and nature, again.

Silva rerum they were called, commonplace books that contained a “forest of things”.  Excerpts of exceptional thought were dutifully copied into these bound books for further reflection and digestion.  Commonplace books were considered necessary tools for learning that commonplacing was taught in universities such as Oxford.  Milton, Hardy, Emerson, and Thoreau all kept their own commonplace books.

Commonplacing wedded reading and writing as necessary ingredients, they were inseparable.  Bits and pieces from one book joined with other excerpts from elsewhere.  The way the ideas were assembled revealed the personality of the commonplacer…what topics interested him, what key arguments did he find cogent that he could build upon…what turns of phrases could he learn by heart so that he, too, could express himself with clarity and winsomeness.

I often wonder, if in our present day, we have that same kind of joy in approaching new ideas.  If in encountering a novel thought, we are moved to write them down by our own hand.  Or if, because we are so inundated with information, we even have the ability to discover what is astonishing and clever.

In our present time, information is readily had at the touch of keystrokes.  ”Googling” is as ordinary as breathing.  I wonder what we lose in having a near-instantaneous access to information on almost anything.  How do we use the information once we find it?  I imagine us consuming the information as we would any fast food, quickly and without tasting.

I have read that weblogs can be considered as commonplace books.  In a sense, electronically, one is able to keep a voluminous amount of information in one place for easy reference.  For my part, the gathering and posting can consume one’s time and overcome the reflection that real live commonplace books demand.

Recently, my parents gave me a boxful of my old commonplace books spanning from childhood to collegiate life.  Leafing through the old pages where I scribbled down passages from Don Quixote or Henry V or Pied Beauty and sprinkled with my own prose or poetry showed the themes that have remained constant in my life.  The literary influences that have shaped my thinking and sparked an interest in the intellectual life were easily traced through these friends, my commonplace books from another time and place.

As I begin this new incarnation for me, I’ve chosen as my nom de plume of St. Hilary of Poitiers, not so much that he was the hammer of Arian heretics, but first, that I may not forget who I am, as he charitably said of the Arians, and second, to attempt to contemplate the greatness of God through the written word.  He wrote:

For one to attempt to speak of God in terms more precise than he himself has used: — to undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible.  

He fixed the names of His nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.

I don’t know how daring I am, but this Christian enterprise draws me outside of the comprehensible.  Whether I find the words to express my own understanding remains to be seen.  But I close with this prayer of St. Hilary’s which I hope can serve as my own manifesto here on Lightly Locked:

Bestow upon us, O Lord, the meaning of words, the light of understanding, the nobility of diction, and grant that what we believe we may also speak.

Hillary Poyters is Abbess of her Domestic Cloister.  Whether her family agrees or not is beside the point.

When I was little, I remember the television ads for Paul Masson Wines with Orson Welles declaring, “We will sell no wine before its time.”  With apologies to Mssrs Welles and Masson, I take the pledge that I will post no post before its time.