Wendy Goes to Church

Wendy was raised in a Christian home. She attended church with her family every Sunday morning, unless there was a gathering with extended family, a sports event, vacation, or people were just tired. During worship, once she outgrew the nursery, she she spent the hour in junior church, and then graduated into youth church. If on ocassion there were no youth church, she would join the main worship service, but of course she sat with her friends in the balcony.

College disrupted that pattern of life. She was on her own, an adult in a city and community of her own choosing. Many other choices confronted her immediately. Early rising or sleeping in? Fast meals or sit down? And worship? What would that look like? Would it have a place at all? At home, she was carried along by the current of family life. But now she had to steer her own boat, and perhaps even dig her own channels. For the first year, she just followed the new currents. Those were established by (she would later admit) laziness (she would sleep in on Sundays, having been up until 3 a.m. the night before) and the hurriedness of life at an academically demanding college.

As Wendy began her sophomore year, she decided she had to become more serious spiritually and, as she put it, "make time for God." She began reading the Bible each night before bed (something she had never done with any regularity), and she also began attending a Bible study in her dorm. A whole new dimension of life opened up. It was like emerging from the forest and seeing the sky for the first time. God was speaking to her through his word. They Holy Spirit would apply passages, illuminating circumstances and troubling her conscience in ways she had never experienced before. She started praying regularly. She realized that her Christianity had been like a new car sitting in the garage, owned but never operated. Now she found that a driving faith is what faith ought to be, and driving felt good.

By her junior year, Wendy was no longer "making time for God." That is, she saw that it was not good enough to give God a small guest room in the mansion of her life where she could drop in on him from time to time. She had grown beyond that. She had learned in her study of Paul's Letter to the Romans that Christ had redeemed all of her, that he had redeemed her from the life of self-focus and to the life of Christ-focus. People are either "slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness " (6:16). As someone put it, if Christ is not lord of all, he is not lord at all. She knew in her heart that this was true. That little room in her mansion was no good. The whole mansion had to house him.  "From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever!" (11:36).

That year, all sorts of things changed in Wendy's life. Relationships. Language. Even eating habits. The Lord lifted burdens of bitterness from her heart because she asked him to. And she asked him to because she knew there is nothing that is not his business and his sphere of blessing. Wendy was changed, and people could see it the way they could see the sunrise.

But her senior year was a time of growth in yet another essential element of the Christian life. Her Bible study group had finished Romans and moved on to the Gospel of John. In chapter four, the Holy Spirit startled her with these words: "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (4:23-24). She worshiped in her personal devotions and also at a student praise event most Thursday nights. That must be good as far as it goes, she thought. But she had become very serious about bringing all of her life under the gracious lordship of her Savior, and she could see that she was offering worship strictly on her own terms: the day of her choosing in the form of her choosing and when she chose to give it. Has God commanded something that she is neglecting, however? Is there something he has told his people is pleasing to him and edifying to them?

At the Bible study, she addressed this concern to a friend, Charis, who lived on her hall and whom she knew to be godly. Charis was active in the church she had adopted for her college years, and, from things Wendy had picked up, she knew that Charis had attended church faithfully at home, morning and evening, and had carried that habit with her to college. She would disappear on Sunday mornings to what she called her "church family" and would not show up again until late evening. She seemed to enjoy it, and come back refreshed each Sunday. This girl surely would know something about what God wants in the worship life of his saints.

Charis did not disappoint. She took Wendy straight to Hebrews 10:25, "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another." She added that, in the Book of Acts, the believers gathered together as a church on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day on which Christ the Savior had risen. And Jesus appeared to them at more than one of those meetings to confirm his approval of that pattern of worshiping together. In this setting, Christians "spur one another on to love and good deeds"--not just college friends, but older saints, and Christians from other walks of life. She also mentioned the blessing that her pastor (who is a wise, older man) sumptuously laid before her each week in his sermons. She was always challenged, always blessed, always grew. She was also grateful for the elders of her church who were wise and took seriously the responsibility Christ had laid on them for the care of his sheep (1 Peter 5:1-5). Charis drew close and looked very intently into Wendy's eyes. She said, "If Christ has given preachers and elders in his church for the blessing of his people, then if I am one of his people I will seek and get that blessing!"

Again the Holy Spirit was pressing these words into her heart, and where the words sank in they seemed to find their natural settings. As usual, where Wendy had previously been quite self-satisfied she now saw a gaping hole that only joyful Christian obedience could fill. Was there anything she was doing on Sunday that was better for her and more delightful than worship with the body of Christ? Was she able to feed and shepherd herself, perhaps with the help of friends, without the contribution of pastor and elders? Apparently, God's answer to both of these questions is, "no."

That Sunday, Wendy went with Charis to church. It required a subway ride and a bit of a walk, but that didn't matter. After a month of this habit, a habit she would never abandon by the way (and she would one day refuse a marriage proposal over it), Wendy marveled at all she had been denying herself by overlooking this dimension of the Christian life. She also reflected on the pattern of church life in which she had been raised. Committed, yet not. Sometimes God, sometimes me, which was essentially always "me." Nonetheless, she thanked God for her parents and for the exposure to Christ and his church they gave her as a girl. But she thanked God all the more for his gracious patience with her meandering, her half-hearted, and distracted pursuit of him. And she thanked him, as she would with her last breath, for Jesus the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for her, and who sought her when she was not seeking him.

Francis Bacon on Climategate

The recent scandal at the University of East Anglia that blew the lid off of what many thought was the dispassionate objectivity of the science supporting global warming hysteria would come as no surprise to Francis Bacon, arguably the father of what we now call modern science. In the New Organon, his 1620 argument for a new kind of science based on the severe discipline of a patient and rigorous method, he warned against the unreliability of the human mind in investigating nature:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding (Book I, aphorism 49).

Read my slightly larger reflection on this controversy at WORLDmag.com in "Political Climate Science."

The Novelty and Genius of Francis Bacon

 

The frontispiece to Sprat's History of the Royal Society

(Francis Bacon is on the right)

For over two hundred years, the scientific and philosophic cognoscente lauded Francis Bacon as the father of modern science of of our technological mastery over nature. It was not just Abraham Cowley of the Royal Society who compared Bacon to Moses and his vision of man enthroned over nature to the promised land. Rousseau considered him, along with Descartes, one of the "preceptors of the human race." John Dewey, in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1950), called him "the real founder of modern thought."

It has become common these days to withdraw such credit. Many take the position that Bacon was a mere popularizer of what many true scientists were doing before and during his time. Or they say that his method was insufficiently mathematical or that it simply bears little resemblance to what science has become.

Paolo Rossi, a great scholar of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment period and of Francis Bacon in particular, offers this well-supported assessment of Bacon's importance as a founder in Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (1962, 1970[tr.]).

The founders of the Royal Society, the authors of the great Enlightenment encyclopedias, and not a few positivist historians and philosophers of the nineteenth century, were fond of the portrait of Bacon as the "father of modern science" because of his discovery of the inductive method. But to consider Bacon still from this point of view would be tantamount, as Benjamin Farrington has trenchantly observed, to placing him on an inappropriate pedestal in an inappropriate part of the gallery.

Nevertheless, the facts remains that when Bacon turned to the mechanical arts, considering them capable of revealing the actual processes of nature, and saw in them that capacity to give rise to inventions and works absent in the traditional knowledge--when polemicising against the logic of the schools, he projected a history of the arts and of technics as an indispensable prerequisite to the reform of learning--he truly became the spokesman for the fundamental demands for the culture of his time. Bacon brought to full awareness some of the thematic ideas that had been making slow headway at the margins of the official science in that world of technicians, engineers, and builders to which men like Biringuccio and Agricola had belonged (pp.117f.).

Many of Bacon's published thoughts on science were not original to him, even some of his more penetrating formulations. But he brought together, perfected, and gave force to what had been developing for a couple of centuries. That goes far beyond being a mere "popularizer."

Rossi documents that many of Bacon's criticisms of the medieval bookish approach to science and his great esteem for the practical over the merely theoretical were circulating among artisans and men of practical inquiry in the generations leading up to his own. Late medieval Europeans were not people of democratic views. There were noble classes and vulgar classes. Accordingly, there were activities suited to the dignity of a gentleman and there were activities as well as objects of study that were beneath him. The mechanical arts were considered base.

The defense of the mechanical arts against the charge of baseness, and the rejection of the notions that culture coincides with the horizon of the liberal arts and that practical operations are tantamount to servile labor, in reality implied the rejection of a certain conception of science, namely, of science as a disinterested contemplation of the truth... (p.x).

Whereas as early as 1603 Bacon called people to put their hope in a new "commerce between the mind and things," Bernard Palissy, a distinguished French potter (N.B. practical, base), claimed in 1580 that the art of observing nature must be founded on a "cult of things" as opposed to bookish learning and philosophical speculation (p.2). Bacon was not the first to emphasize the importance of closing with things themselves if there was to be any great progress in multiplying inventions. On the other hand, Bacon had far more in mind that Palissy, a potter, ever could.

Robert Norman, an English sailor who manufactured magnetic compasses and wrote on magnetism, was already in 1581 attacking the Western philosophic tradition for it's indifference to the practical fruit of inventions. He condemned the "learned" for "promising much and performing little or nothing at all" (p.5). Bacon despised them as boys, who talk but cannot generate (NO I.lxxi). He took his place among many who expected far more than the ancients and their followers could deliver, but his place was not among equals. The others saw some of the problem, and, accordingly, only some of the solution.

In the writings of various artisans and philosophers between 1530 and 1580, Rossi notices,

(1) the procedures of artisans, engineers, and technicians have a value for the ends of the progress of knowledge; (2) such procedures are recognized as having the dignity of cultural facts; and (3) men of culture must give up their contempt for "operations" or "practice" and discard every conception of knowledge that is merely rhetorical or contemplative to turn to the observation and study of techniques and the arts (pp.10f.).

While this statement makes it seem as though the cultural battle that must precede the wide embrace and successful execution of science was won, it was not so, and Rossi does not mean to suggest it was. Bacon took up that fight to his dying day because it was far from over and it required his genius for victory to fall to scientific civilization. A century and half after Bacon's death, in 1680, Richelet's  Dictionnaire Français, in it's article on "Méchanique," says, "This term, speaking of particular arts, signifies that which is the opposite of liberal and honorable; it has the connotation of baseness and of being little worthy of an honest person." Much later still, Rossi tells us, "the French Jesuits were scanalized by what they thought was an excessive number of articles on technical subjects in Diderot's Encyclopédie" (p.12).

The great artists of the Renaissance helped eventually to dignify the practical arts with social respectability. But it took time. Again Rossi:

As Antal reminds us, in the fourteenth century art was still considered a manual skill. The artist was addressed with the familiar "thou" as were domestic servants. ... Almost all artists of the early fifteenth century came out of artisan, peasant, and petty-bourgeois melieus. Andrea del Castagno was the son of a peasant, Paolo Uccello of a barber, Filippo Lippi [1406-1469] of a butcher. ... The goldsmith's art was common to painters and sculptors. Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, and Ghirlandaio were all goldsmiths at first (pp. 21f.).

Despite these facts, the Renaissance artist of the fifteenth century was rising socially. As Rossi puts it, "No affluent citizens and nobles would have considered the artist's status humiliating" (p.21). Rossi traces this change in people's estimate of art and artists to "the increasingly profane character of artistic production, to the ever greater weight of the opinion of lay persons, as well as to the social transition of artists from the status of artisans to that of bourgeois. Whereas Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had been not only a painter and sculptor, but also an engineer, architect, and many other things, by the mid-sixteenth century, "commissions of an artisan character no longer appears in keeping with the dignity of the artists. This was the age when Charles V stopped to pick up the brush dropped by Titian [d. 1576]" (p.22).

We note from this, however, that artisans and engineers remained objects of disdain among the powerful and well born. Bacon labored not simply to defend the benefits and dignity of the mechanical arts. While the mechanic had been able to gain some insight into the workings of nature by his attention to "things" and had produced useful works, this field of activity was not the answer to the miserable condition of mankind.

In the New Organon (I.v), Bacon points us beyond this type of labor. "The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all (as things now are) with slight endeavor and scanty success." Engineers have done good work with what they know, but a true attention to "things" will produce an understanding of nature's inner workings, formulated into "axioms." "The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and derivations from a few things already known, not in the number of axioms" (NO I.vii). These can be derived only from what he called experiments of light, which are to be preferred over what were overhastily and exclusively pursued as experiments of fruit, and these would have to proceed by the disciplined method of investigation that he was proposing. "For axioms rightly discovered and established supply practice with its instruments, not one by one, but in clusters, and draw after them trains and troops of works" (NO I.lxx).

But to get to this point, people's approach to the world, one another, and all things had to be democratized. Bacon had to undermine and bury all notions of noble and base. We see that in New Organon Book I, aphorisms 119-121, where he calls serious searchers into the secrets of nature and all those who are ambitious to bring her under human dominion to overcome their indisposition to investigate things that are common, mean, or subtle.

And for things that are mean or even filthy — things which (as Pliny says) must be introduced with an apology — such things, no less than the most splendid and costly, must be admitted into natural history. Nor is natural history polluted thereby, for the sun enters the sewer no less than the palace, yet takes no pollution. And for myself, I am not raising a capitol or pyramid to the pride of man, but laying a foundation in the human understanding for a holy temple after the model of the world. That model therefore I follow. For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike. Moreover, as from certain putrid substances — musk, for instance, and civet — the sweetest odors are sometimes generated, so, too, from mean and sordid instances there sometimes emanates excellent light and information (NO I.cxx).

Think of the many and various breathless investigations that had to be undertaken before we could come to the understanding that there was much useful information hidden within stool samples. The humor in the Scrubs number, "Check the Poo," is premised on the still common notion that looking into these things is beneath human dignity. But a scientist sets aside all such notions of dignity and nobility. Or at least he does today. Bacon had to argue for an attitudinal reorientation to get us here. Thus he entitled one of his major works defending his new science, Of the DIGNITY and Advancement of Learning. Learning had always been considered dignified...but not the sort of learning that Bacon argued was necessary to raise the dignity of the human race in power and comfort.

Howard White, in his seminal work Peace Among the Willows (1968), calls this new moral understanding that Bacon not only presents in argument but also insinuates with rhetoric his provisional morality. We see it largely in the Essays. "One has to see what kind of men are to take us from the world where politics controls science to the world where science is to control politics..." (p.43). The men of the future in whom Bacon's provisional morality has taken hold will be "the kind of men who are intended to take the voyage to the New Atlantis..." (p.32; also p.16). But once we all land on the shores of that blessed future and the regime of science takes charge, Bacon expects that we will transition to what White calls the "definitive morality" that Bacon pictures, albeit subtly in New Atlantis. The provisional is what we would call democratic, though not immediately and obviously, but the definitive is far more regimented than the mess that is individual liberty.

But I digress.

While many of these ideas were in the air that Bacon was breathing, and quite self-consciously, Bacon went far beyond them. Rossi points beyond these ideas to Bacon's novelty.

The appeal to "nature" and "experience" so widespread in the culture of the Renaissance (what type of knowledge and what culture, after all, do not appeal to a certain "nature and to a certain "experience"), the rejection of authority (Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy), the "disputation" with the "ancients," and insistence upon the necessity of observation as such do not themselves imply acceptance of this ideal view of science.

This ideal has a public, democratic, and collaborative character, composed of individual contributions organized in the form of a scientific discourse and offered with the view of achieving a general success which becomes the patrimony of mankind. This conception of science, which found its first expression on a "philosophical" plane in the work of Francis Bacon, played a crucial role in the formation of the idea of progress...(p.64).

Tomasso Campanella, in his utopian work The City of the Sun (1602; published in Latin, 1623), expressed the hope people had in this notion of progress, linked as it was to the conquest of nature through an explosion of inventions, and that was buzzing among those who were at the forefront of learning. "Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that it has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years before, of the wonderful invention of printing and guns and the use of the magnet..." (Rossi p.65). But he really had no way of getting there. It took Bacon to provide the instrument, the reliably effective organon.