The poet Annie Dillard died last week at the age of 81. She was a writer who applied deep theological reflection to her detailed observations of the natural world, with works that include novels, poems, prose, journalism, and autobiography, resulting in her receipt of a National Humanities Medal in 2015. Her writings have been compared to those of Thoreau, Woolf, and even William Blake. In reading the various tributes to Dillard's work, I recognized that she was another early influence on Two Minds Theory. In particular, her book Holy the Firm is one that I first read as an undergraduate at Valparaiso University, and one that has remained my favorite piece of writing over the ensuing 33 years. This little book (only 66 pages in the first paperback edition) is classified under "Nature/Philosophy," and often described as a meditation on theodicy, the problem of how a good God allows evil things to occur. And it is that, but not only that. It is also a book about writing, and a reflection on the nature of human beings and our relationship with God -- or “holiness” in the term that Dillard later came to prefer when referencing the Absolute. I will note at the outset that Dillard continued throughout her life to identify as a Christian, although like many Christian mystics through the ages, she had little use for the formal belief-statements of organized religion.
In Holy the Firm, Dillard writes explicitly about the two types of thinking described by TMT: "Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of God." (p. 69 - all quotations are from the 1977 edition). First, there is the Narrative Mind, which Dillard calls simply “Mind”: “In one, the ascetic’s metaphysic, the world is far from God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling. This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning.” The Narrative Mind as here described is disconnected from the “stuff” of life. It sees reality through the abstract lens of Plato’s forms, and might be just as happy running on a CPU somewhere. The Narrative Mind is easily overwhelmed by the extravagance of nature: "If the Greeks had looked at Mount Baker all day, their large and honest art would have broken, and they would have gone fishing, as these people do. And as perhaps I one day shall" (p. 20). The Narrative Mind is also easily deceived about its own importance in the world: "Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh. The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy. One step on the rake and it's mind under matter once again" (p. 42). This fits with my view that the Narrative Mind is not in control of everyday behavior. In another spot, she writes: "We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all" (p. 62).
In contrast to this limited Mind, Dillard sets the “Heart,” a felt sense of connection to God and all things: “The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, of nowhere else.” Holy or not, this Intuitive-Mind viewpoint has a strong thread of materialism: "By these lights the world is flattened on a horizontal plane, singular, all here, crammed with heaven, and alone” (p. 69). And if the natural world is all there is, then despite all its splendors, it can offer us no guidance -- it leads astray just as readily as it leads ahead. With no valid basis for the abstractions of the Narrative Mind, "Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift. Then we reel out love's long line toward a God less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns. ... this one God is a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged" (p. 46).
Both ways of thinking have their shadow side: “To immanence, to the heart, Christ is redundant and all things are one. To eminence, to the mind, Christ touches only the top, skims off only the top, as it were, the souls of men, the wheat grains whole, and lets the chaff fall where? To the world flat and patently unredeemed; … to time and matter unreal, and so unknowable, and illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage” (p. 69). For Dillard, the central tension of reality is that it is both more solid than the Narrative Mind can capture, and also more mysterious than the Intuitive Mind can stand. "I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose? Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home? ... Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all?" (p. 47).
Dillard resolved the Narrative-Intuitive tension in a truly novel way, by reference to a concept from medieval alchemy: “Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a “spiritual scale,” and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of this substance is Holy the Firm. Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with metals and minerals? With salts and earths? Of course, and straight on up, till "up" ends by curving back. Does something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it and trees? Of course. … Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hold? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm." (p. 68).
I see two implications here that are relevant to my thinking in Two Minds Theory. The first, the simple one, is that the Narrative and Intuitive Minds are each incomplete on their own. I can credit Dillard with the both-and recognition that each way of thinking has its strengths, that they each put us in touch with the Absolute, in ways that are different but also the same. Our goal is not, as Kahneman suggests, to wake up the lazy Narrative Mind and quit making so many stupid Intuitive-Mind mistakes. Instead, we need to honor both systems’ strengths and find ways to use them most effectively. That’s the easy linkage to TMT.
The more complex linkage has to do with one’s posture as a scientist. If Mind and Heart are separate, and only Mind (for example) can connect us to God, then why spend all one’s time messing around with the physical stuff of data and experiments? If the physical world is illusory, or even just “passing away” as my childhood church used to emphasize, who cares? Better to pray, to meditate, and to argue from pure mathematical postulates. This is the Platonic or nomothetic view: We can reason our way to truth. If only the Heart matters, though, why work so hard to use the tools of reason and logic? In this view, the way things feel is enough of a guide for living, and we are wasting our time trying to establish facts; better to wait for direct revelation. This accords with an Aristotelian or idiographic approach, in which observation and categorization will do fine, without trying too hard to establish underlying principles or scope out the shadowy truth behind the veil of material things. Dillard says that both approaches are true and needed: If Holy the Firm is "underneath salts," if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle's materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is. Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas. Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base. Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea. Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher's stone" (p. 71). Like the complementary strengths of the Narrative and Intuitive Minds, the nomothetic (Narrative-driven) and idiographic (Intuitive-driven) approaches to science each have something valuable to say.
I appreciate Ms. Dillard’s assurance that there is value in all of these activities, that we don’t need to set aside our reason to have faith, or our faith in pursuit of reason. The Eternal is there, waiting, both above and below the world we can see with our eyes. And science, like poetry, is a form of prayer.
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