Every soul a cosmos; every other infinite
Musings with Josh Ritter, Howard Thurman, and Emmanuel Levinas
Upcoming Events
Just a couple of events to highlight, in case I might be coming to your neighborhood:
February 16 and 23 I’ll be teaching adult education classes as part of a series on “The Practice of Christian Hope” at Trinity Church - Wall Street in downtown Manhattan.
On March 29 I’m looking forward to a dialogue with our dear friend, Jeff Chu, on his brand-new book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand. The event begins at 2:30pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, MI. The event is free but you can register here.
Back to regular scheduled programming…
I think a lot—like, a lot, maybe too much—about a line from a song by Josh Ritter called “California.”
Don’t say, ‘It’s been done a hundred thousand times,’
’Cause this one is mine.
The setup of the song is itself cliché. The aspiring artist from the provinces–whether actor, singer, filmmaker, whatever–is making their way to the city of dreams to take their shot at making it big. But the lyric aims to puncture the cliché, or at least remind us that even the soul playing out the cliché for the hundred thousandth time is utterly singular and unique. So, yes, this is a story you’ve read before; but every single time it’s being played out by a unique soul for whom the story is theirs alone. Every replay harbors a secret. Every rendition is utterly new.
I don’t know what it is about my wiring, my personality, or my history, but this elasticity of experience between singularity and universality has long fascinated me. You watch a thousand people skitter by on a New York City sidewalk and they are a mass of humanity, a blob of generality, tiny dots in a pointillist painting that is the human race across time. But if you could zoom in on any one of them and then somehow plumb the depths of their consciousness you would be visiting an unknown galaxy never seen before.
I’m teaching Pascal again right now and he, too, is fascinated by this wonder of a human being’s insignificance and infinity. From one perspective, the human being is a veritable nothing—an ephemeral speck of dust in a vast unfurling universe indifferent to our very existence. But from another perspective, each of those ephemeral specks is a microcosm of the whole, a cosmos within the cosmos. Pascal evokes a somewhat strange metaphor: “the thinking reed.”
A human being is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. To crush him, the whole universe does not have to arm itself. A mist, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But if the universe were to crush the reed, the man would be nobler than his killer, since he knows that he is dying” (Pensées, §231).
Human being are like wispy reeds in the marsh—thin, blown about, vulnerable to anything and everything.1 But here is the mystery: this wispy, vulnerable reed is conscious, is capable of thought and self-recognition—something Nature that kills it lacks. Hence his brittle, vulnerable being, so easily crushable, is nonetheless “noble.” “All our dignity consists therefore of thought,” Pascal concludes (§232).
Every soul is a cosmos; every other is infinite. I was thinking about this while reading of both horrors and happiness in Syria and Palestine. Upon the fall of the Assad regime which crushed so many, a man was released from prison who had been in confinement for 19 years. One might imagine all those years as “lost,” and yet every moment of his waking life is a flicker of his nobility, even if the infinite cosmos of his consciousness was corralled by injustice all those years. Even if no one called and he was forgotten.
I think about this when we watch hostage swaps playing out between Israel and Hamas. In most mainstream coverage, we get the backstory of the 3 or 4 or 7 Israelis being returned, and then simply told they were traded for, say, 200 Palestinians held as political prisoners—their names and faces loss to a mass transfer. And yet each and every one of them, too, is a Face, an Other, a transcendence “from on High,” as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas sometimes puts it. Levinas traces something like Pascal’s paradoxical notion of the “thinking reed,” vulnerable and noble, in his sense of the “nudity” of the face.
“The nudity of a face is a denuding, and already a supplication in the straightforwardness that looks at me. But this supplication is an exigency; in it humility is joined with height.”2
The vulnerable, crushable face calls from on High—transcendent, infinite—with just a look.
For my next book I’ve been spending time with the writings of Howard Thurman, Quaker mystic and prophetic contemplative. You can see how Thurman is also fascinated by this play of macro/microcosm, vastness and smallness, infinite significance wed to cosmic insignificance. In The Search for Common Ground (1971), for example, he opens with his own perplexity about the utter privacy or secrecy of one’s own consciousness:
There is something so private and personal about an act of thought that the individual may very easily seem to be a private island on a boundless human sea. To experience one’s self is to enter into a solitary world that is one’s unique possession and that can never be completely and utterly shared. Here is the paradox. A man is always threatened in his very ground by a sense of isolation, by feeling himself cut off from his fellows. Yet he can never separate himself from his fellows, for mutual interdependence is characteristic of all life.”3
Self-conscious, ‘experiencing one’s self’ as he puts it, is its own wonder. Like Augustine in Book X of the Confessions, when we turn inward we arrive at an unplumbable abyss. Our own experience of consciousness seems so peculiar and distinct—“idiotic,” almost, our own idiom—that we imagine ourselves alienated from anyone else. To become aware of the “privacy” or uniqueness of our own experience (“This one is mine”) feels like isolation. We could never shout loud enough for others to hear the secrets of our heart. And yet, Thurman says, we are essentially connected, woven into a fabric of relationships of dependence.
In The Luminous Darkness (1965), Thurman’s “personal interpretation of the anatomy of segregation and the ground of hope” (the subtitle), he dwells on what it means “to experience oneself as a human being.” The realization of one’s humanness, he argues, is—paradoxically—a realization of one’s kinship with the vast cosmos.
“As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.”4
At first this feels like the uniqueness of the self is lost in a wash of cosmic livingness—“my” life dissipates into a vast “kingdom of life.” But that is to miss the hinge that Thurman emphasizes: this human sees himself as part of the vast continuing pulse of life. And that seeing is singular. This one is mine. No one can take it away. I am but a reed wavering in a vast cosmic marsh, but my seeing that—my awareness of this—is irreducibly mine. This is my nobility. This is your nobility: all the secret ways you are aware of the world.
Full confession: I’ve been thinking about these things because, last month, I became a grandfather for the first time. It is cliché to say: nothing prepares you for the wonder. As I daily foist photos of our beloved granddaughter on anyone and everyone, I am the very cliché of the doting grandfather. So be it. I know, I know: It’s been done a hundred times a hundred thousand times. But this one is mine. Her face denudes me. She calls to me from on High. When I look in her eyes, it’s as if she has chosen me. I am elect. I know you’ll never understand; this is our little secret. That’s OK. I hope you experience your own. This one is mine, and I wish you the joy of your own secrets. It’s been done a hundred thousand times. Do it again. And again. Each rendition a new creation.
I have a hunch that this metaphor of the reed comes to Pascal as a echo of Isaiah 42:3, read as a messianic psalm applying to Jesus in the Christian tradition: “A bruised reed he will not break; a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”
Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 54.
Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry Into the Basis of Man’s Experience of Community, p. 2.
Thurman, The Luminous Darkness, p. 94.