In the Preface to his book, "Insight," Bernard Lonergan writes of the ideal detective story in which the reader is presented with all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal.
He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, nor the mere memory of all them, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they bunked down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”
Watson replied, “I see millions upon millions of stars.”
“So what does that tell you?” asked Sherlock.
Watson pondered for a minute. “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Hierologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?”
Holmes was silent for a minute and then spoke. “It tells me someone has stolen our tent!” (Author unknown)
We live in a world where we employ the epistemological tools that have been bequest to us by the Enlightenment where they require us to think about the world in terms of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, etc. These tools do provide a certain amount of information but there are things going on right now which cannot be accounted for in those terms.
What René Girard has done is help us to understand how we came to know what we know and that there is something underneath these interpretive tools we have that has given rise to them and that thing is the biblical tradition.
There is a parallel between the tent in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson joke and the veil of the temple that was rent from top to bottom at the death of Jesus on the cross. It is at “that” moment when something changes and forms of illumination are available and the human race begins to move into new territory of knowing.
On one level we can describe this as the “aha” moment for an individual, but on another level the human race begins to move into this cumulative “AHA” experience where a “quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective” has become available.
One more joke, this is a pulpit joke:
There is a story of a pastor in a small, rural congregation. For some years, the physical plant of the church had been deteriorating and he did not have in his budget nearly enough to paint the church. He remembered that one of the members of the congregation was a professional house painter, so he paid him a little visit. In the course of the chat the topic of the need of the church came up and a little while later this man agreed to paint the church for his cost when he had time. So that was agreed upon. Of course, he came in the middle of the week when nobody was there. He came and started to paint the church. He painted around the bottom and then he built the scaffolds up and then he thought to himself, I could reduce my cost if I watered the paint down a little bit and it would go on faster. This would allow him to get done faster and get to more paying jobs sooner. So as he went up the church he kept thinking that logic and higher he got he thought, now who is going to be able to tell this high, so he thinned the paint down more and more. He got up to the bell tower and he thins it down even more and it is going on very nicely and he gets close to the top when he looks for in the horizon and sees this huge dark thundercloud coming this way. He thinks I had better get this job done before it starts to rain. So he thins the paint down even more. But the storm comes quicker than he thought and suddenly there is lightning and rolling thunder coming out of these dark clouds. He gets very anxious, and suddenly the storm is right on top of him and he notices that he is at the highest point in town. He panics and he grabs the scaffolding and prays, God please don’t let me be struck by this lightning. Suddenly the storm calms and there is this voice from heaven that says, “Repaint and thin no more.”
There is a point to this as we are always repainting the church. We Christians are always trying to understand this thing that has happened to us (whether on the road to Emmaus or Damascus). We are constantly trying to get to the bottom of it. It is a journey and so we need to realize that we are always representing Christianity in the historical context of our age and the challenge that each age presents to us calls us to draw out of that inexhaustible reservoir of Truth, new things that we didn’t know or could not have known without of that challenge. That is why we should never complain about the fact that the world rejects Christianity, that’s what it is paid to do! Our job is simply to respond to that rejection in a way that embraces the ‘no’ that the world has uttered and bring it into the affirmation. And so we are constantly re-painting and we should stop thinning. The re-painting that has been going on in the modern world in recent decades has been a thin, thin, thin version. There is no need for that. One of the things that René’s work does is that it gives us a robust and ‘thickly’ theological understanding premised on and in many ways assimilated with an anthropological understanding of the cross and the Christian mystery.
Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they really didn’t understand it. (And the sad thing is that, now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and many Christians are abandoning the terminology.) - John W. Dixon, Jr.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it.
René is neither impractical nor absent-minded, but we have had airplanes smashing that have smashed not for mechanical reasons but because of human calculations. That is all the more reason the need to have someone to help us understand the nature of human conflict – violence.
