Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls, and a Synchroton, Part III
By Loren Wilkinson
We appreciate Dr. Wilkinson, one of our issue advisors for the soon-to-be-released Issue 119 on The Wonder of Creation, allowing us to make use of some excerpts on this blog from his article “Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls, and a Synchrotron: Some Thoughts from France on Science and Taste,” Crux 42 (Spring 2006): 9–16. Read part one of his thoughts on science, faith, God, creation, monks, and cheese here and part two here.
And stay tuned for Christian History issue 119. it's going to be gorgeous!
In the twelfth century, about the time that the first Carthusian monks started building their wood huts in the forest below the peaks of the Grand Chartreuse, a boy, Francis (named, perhaps for the popular new style of song which troubadors were bringing south from Provence) was born in the Italian hill-town of Assisi. His capacity for delighting in the tastes of creation was unusual. Even more unusual was the clarity with which he was able to recognize these creatures as gifts from the creator, as he recorded towards the end of his life in the “Canticle of the Sun” (which we still sing as “All Creatures of Our God and King”)
Francis’ unique combination of love for God, for Creation, for song and for his “Lady Poverty” attracted thousands of followers and led to the founding of the Franciscan order. The sensibility which they carried to the corners of Europe helped recover for Christendom the central Christian mystery: that in Jesus the Creator had entered his creation, shared our tastes, our hungers, our temptations and our death. (It was Francis who first brought animals into the church at Christmas, to help remind worshippers of the Creator’s creatureliness.)
One of those early Franciscans (legend has it that he was healed as a child by the aging Francis) was the man we know as Bonaventure. Bonaventure was a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, and he came to the cathedral school in Paris where Aquinas was forging and defending his great rational synthesis of Greek and Christian thought. Bonaventure combined a keen intellect with a passionate Franciscan love of Creator and Creation. And he was uneasy with the way that Thomas, like Aristotle before him, assumed a god-like perfection for the reason alone. We cannot anticipate or understand what the love of God will do: we can only ascend to that understanding up the ladder of the senses; for it is the senses, not the reason, which provide the foundation of knowledge.
Michael Foster argued, many centuries later, that the fundamental difference between Greek thought and Christian was this belief in the centrality of “sensuous experience.” If we can point to any place (beyond the Gospel of the Incarnation itself) where this stream of thought begins to flow clearly, it is in the Franciscan Bonaventure’s celebration of the tastes of creation as the first step on a ladder to knowledge of the Creator. In The Mind’s Road to God he wrote:
He, therefore, who is not illumined by such great splendor of created
things is blind; he who is not awakened by such great clamor is deaf; he
who does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb; he who does
not note the First Principle from such great signs is foolish. Open your
eyes therefore, prick up your spiritual ears, open your lips, and apply
your heart, that you may see your God in all creatures, may hear Him,
praise Him, love and adore Him, magnify and honor Him.
So it was the intellectual descendants of Francis, more than of Thomas Aquinas, (in men like Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste) who watered the first growth of modern science.
C. S. Lewis inadvertently provided an almost perfect commentary on Foster’s important idea that science is rooted in sensuous experience, in a poem called “On Being Human”. He begins by describing the sort of knowledge which an angel might have: a pure, disembodied intelligence. And the sort of knowledge he describes is knowledge of the idea of a thing, untroubled by the imperfections of the sensuous:
Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.
It is this lofty vision which Greek science sought to achieve—the same sort of knowledge of created things which we have of a geometric theorem. But creation cannot be known this way, apart from the senses, and thus Greek science never really developed beyond mathematics. Lewis proceeds to contrast such disembodied intellectual knowledge of a tree with a human knowledge:
But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
--An angel has no skin.
Lewis gets eventually to food, and to taste:
The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot,
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf’s billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges,
An angel has no nerves.
It is only in the immediacy of this engagement with the sensuous mystery of creation that science is born. The “angelic knowledge” of mathematics has an important place in science: but real knowledge of creation is born here, in the senses. Nowhere else in human history has such a high value been placed on the particular, the specific, the sensual. Lewis concludes the poem by explaining why.
. . . here, within this tiny, charm’d interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.
The tastes of cheese, or chartreuse; the mystery of a bird’s migration; the secrets locked in stone: tasting these things is at the core of our human-ness. And whether the love of these things goes further than sheer delight, into knowledge and usefulness, the arts and sciences begin here, in a recognition that the gracious Maker of all things shares and blesses our experience of them.
“Taste and see. . . .”