Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls and a Synchrotron, Part I
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. Stay tuned for more of his thoughts on science, faith, God, creation, monks, and cheese. And stay tuned for Christian History issue 119. it's going to be gorgeous!
The Christian experience of the Creator-God of love who invented physical reality, and who in Jesus, became a part of it, changed forever how we value that knowledge. We cannot know the world God has made simply by thinking about it. What God does, like who God is, is inexhaustible, surprising and gracious. Knowledge comes through engaged experience, not detached contemplation. The Psalmist said it well:” Taste and see that the Lord is good.” This recognition that sensuous experience is the source of knowledge is basic to Hebrew understanding. And it is here, rather than in Greek ideas of the superiority of the knowledge abstracted from the senses, that the tradition of empirical science took root.
Of all the senses, “taste” provides the best metaphor for this sensuous engagement with a creation of gratuitous goodness. Unlike vision and hearing, it does not operate passively, or at a distance; it combines the immediacy of touch with the infinite complexity of scent. And more than any of the other senses taste is mainly pure gift. It would be easy to argue, on the basis of “survival value” for the practical nature of the other senses. But the complexities of taste (beyond the simplicities of “sour”, “sweet” and “salty”) are all extras. Why should the world taste so good?
Through the generosity of friends, my wife and I had the privilege recently of living, for a few months in the winter and spring, in their old stone house in a village in Provence, in the south of France. France--particularly this rural part of southern France—is a small island of resistance to the waves of fast food and artificial flavours which have spread like a flood around the world from North America. No house in the old village is more than a five-minute walk from a bakery. Every morning, beginning before dawn, the people converge on the warmly lit doors of the Bannetes and go out again with croissants, baguettes, brioches, usually still comfortably warm from the brick oven.
And twice a week, again beginning before dawn, even in the sleety days of January, panel trucks converge on the village square, farmers get out, open doors, raise awnings, set up tables, and begin to sell an astonishing range of olives, fish, vegetables, sausage, and cheese. Ah, the cheeses! from hard, Savoyard monsters weighing 20 kilograms, to soft, palm-sized patties of fragrant goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves and tied with a bit of grass. You could sample one a day and in a year still not have enough time to taste them all (Charles deGaulle is said to have grumbled that it was impossible to try to govern a country with 200 kinds of cheese, but he underestimated the number by at least half).
And then, outside town, there are the various farms and estates, large and small, set in their acres of olive orchards and vineyards, inviting us to come in for degustation. Economic pressures are threatening all this local gustatorial variety. Economists argue that the ancient tradition of small farms in which it is rooted are artificially subsidized by the French government and the European Union. Factory farms, mass production, long shelf-life, plastic wrappers and factory-produced flavours are on the horizon here, as in most of the world. But for a while yet the ancient legacy of the tastes of creation, modified by human love and labour, will not be neglected in Provence.
This all is rather predictable, you say. France is famous for its food. But what does the taste of 400 kinds of cheese have to do with old arguments about the origin and nature of science?
I will tell you.
The friends in Provence whose house we stayed at are Peter and Miranda Harris, founders of A Rocha, a Christian Conservation organization. A few miles away from their house in the village, on the edge of a rare natural wetland, is Les Tourades, a big house which has become a Field Centres in the Arocha work which is now dotted around the world in such places as Lebanon, Kenya, England, Canada and Brazil. Arocha centres are small communities of people (some permanent, some transient) who work together to provide support for the study and preservation of the surrounding environment . They all grew out of the kind of community that took shape at the original A Rocha, in Portugal (Arocha is Portuguese for “the rock”). Peter Harris has told that story very well in his book Under the Bright Wings.
The Harrises and their young family arrived in Portugal with the unusual goal of facilitating a nature study centre as part of Christian mission. As is clear from his book, this goal was shaped by two things: one was a deep call to Christian mission (Peter is also an Anglican minister); the other was an irrepressible interest in birds: seeing them, naming them, learning more about them. For a long time he has been the sort of person who could be described by that slightly archaic word “the naturalist”. The word is archaic in the same way as “natural philosophy” is archaic as a synonym for science. But it is superior to “science” (which means simply “knowledge”) in one important respect: it contains (through the Greek root philo-) the implicit recognition that love is basic to both knowledge and wisdom.
The naturalist is a person who loves, delights in, and wants to experience and learn more about the great diversity of things in the natural world, whether they be birds, flowers, stones or butterflies. The naturalist tradition has nourished science immeasurably. Whether or not all naturalists are scientists, there is little doubt that all scientists are (or at least began) as naturalists. It is out of the very human naturalist’s passion to experience, enjoy and understand—in short to “taste”--the flavours of creation—that all true science is born. We humans are here to “taste and see” all the variety of Creation’s gifts. Birds are vastly more varied and important than cheeses, yet delight in the two sorts of creatures reflects this same unique human calling and privilege.
It is no surprise that bird banding, or “ringing” has become an important part of the science done at some Arocha centres. Placing small, light metal bands on the legs of birds enables study of their migratory patterns. Among the smallest of warm-blooded creatures, birds yearly travel the greatest distances, their mileages matched only (in a few cases) by the oceanic journeys of whales. As we gradually piece together a picture of these immense annual journeys, our appreciation both for the creatures themselves, and for the inter-knittedness of creation, can only grow.
Read part two here.