Note: Hand over heart, I substantially drafted this post — including its core conceit — long before reading Josh Brake’s latest Substack post. No plagiarism here!
I have two sorts of problems with “AI” in general and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular. One is the (infinitely ramifying) ethical problem. LLMs are built on deception. They are not human (and not “alive”), do not possess human cognitive faculties, and cannot “know” anything in the ordinary human sense of that word, and yet their model is built on — after vacuuming up an enormous amount of human-created linguistic “content” — mimicking human cognition and knowledge to such an effective degree that you spend all your time relying on GPT-4o or what have you, rather than other human beings. I take this to be a fairly straightforward form of deception, and because of the incommensurability of truth and falsehood, this first problem to be the most fundamental. What does constantly being deceived, and constantly self-deceiving, do to a human being? In what ways are we damaging, and might further damage, ourselves by using such a false tool? (See also: Mammon.) But that’s for another post.
The principles of scientific forestry [TC: planting a single “crop,” in evenly-spaced rectangular grids, in place of the old ecologically diverse forests] were applied as rigorously as was practicable to most large German forests throughout much of the nineteenth century. The Norway spruce… became the bread-and-butter tree of commercial forestry. Originally [it] was seen as a restoration crop that might revive overexploited mixed forests, but the commercial profits from the first rotation were so stunning that there was little effort to return to mixed forests… Diverse old-growth forests, about three-fourths of which were broadleaf (deciduous) species, were replaced by largely coniferous forests in which Norway spruce or Scotch pine were the dominant or often only species. In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity was a resounding success… the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted… An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora—which were, and still are, not entirely understood—was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest. … Apparently the first rotation of Norway spruce had grown exceptionally well in large part because it was living off (or mining) the long-accumulated soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest that it had replaced. Once that capital was depleted, the steep decline in growth rates began.
To apply the analogy: Maybe, just maybe, you can implement LLMs without too many problems in the first generation, among a population of adults who have already been educated. Their values have already been formed; they have already learned to read and write and think critically. (This already concedes far too much to the “AI” boosters, but for the sake of the argument, we will not pause overlong.) Perhaps they really could achieve the stunning productivity growth which we are constantly promised (though so far the results don’t seem great!). But even if that were true, can you expect those gains in the second generation, among children who are still being educated? Or would you rather expect systemic failure to ever form values, to learn critical thinking, essential reading comprehension, and basic writing skills? The adults who received pre-LLM educations have an existing store of cognitive and intellectual capital on which to draw as they encounter and learn to use LLMs. But children who never experience education without LLMs will never have the chance to develop that capital.
Furthermore, the broader environment in which this “first rotation” is encountering LLMs is not remotely the same as that in which the “second rotation” will encounter them. Indeed, the environments are being treated as if they are the same, when they should be different. My local school district is now integrating “AI” into primary and secondary education, because “universities and employers will expect AI literacy” — what tool is easier to learn to use than a natural language chatbot? Now, the workplace may appropriately demand certain kinds of efficiency from adult workers, and LLMs may just prove their usefulness in such cases (though in my view the jury is still out). Education, by contrast, should be inefficient, frictional, resistive. The mind is like a muscle: in order to grow, it must be repeatedly stretched to the limits of its capacity. The LLM chatbot is the ultimate anti-friction, super-efficient (except in, you know, water and energy) machine, which promises that you will never encounter resistance ever again; with the new “reasoning” modules, you’ll never have to think for yourself again. The implications for education hardly need to be spelled out.
Scott continues:
As pioneers in scientific forestry, the Germans also became pioneers in recognizing and attempting to remedy many of its undesirable consequences. To this end, they invented the science of what they called “forest hygiene.” In place of hollow trees that had been home to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local schoolchildren. Several species of spiders, which had disappeared from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced. What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production purposes. In this case, “restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity.
I leave the resonances between this virtualized ecology and the state of education today as a trivial exercise for the reader.
(Scott’s remarks here of course have many parallels. Ivan Illich makes a remarkably analogous argument, with respect to medicine, in the opening of Tools for Conviviality; and Michael Polanyi offers a structurally similar observation about the Enlightenment “critical movement” that sought to banish belief from knowledge: “its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away.")
The first sequence of feasts in Leviticus 23 — Passover/Unleavened Bread (vv. 4–8), Firstfruits Offering (vv. 9–14), and Weeks (vv. 15–21) — maps to the sequence of Christological events from Passion through Resurrection to Pentecost. The Gospels, and St. Paul (1 Cor. 5), of course spell out the Passover/Passion connection. But what I hadn’t noticed before is the Firstfruits Offering. This offering, less familiar perhaps than Passover and Unleavened Bread, is a wave offering of a single sheaf of the firstfruits (probably of the barley harvest) “that you may be accepted” (v. 11), and accompanied by an ascension offering of a male lamb a year old with (unleavened, of course) bread and wine (vv. 12–13). No bread may be consumed before this offering is brought (v. 14). And this offering takes place on “the day after the Sabbath” (v. 11) during Unleavened Bread: that is, on the first day of the week. On Resurrection Day — well, Christ rises as the firstfruits of those that had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Weeks marks the ingathering of the firstfruits of the (probably wheat) harvest, seven weeks later; at Pentecost, the Spirit descends to gather in the firstfruits of the Church, harvested from all nations.
Is St. John the Evangelist subtly hinting that he was present at the very beginning of Christ’s ministry in John 1? John the Baptizer is “standing with two of his disciples” (v. 35) when the Lamb of God walks by, and the two follow Jesus. One is Andrew, the brother of Peter (v. 40), but the other goes unnamed. Is this the Evangelist? If so, it helps make sense of some of the curious features of John 1. The dramatic action of the gospel begins with the Baptizer’s confrontation with the Pharisees' emissaries, which one of his disciples would have been well-positioned to observe. But perhaps more significantly, the Prologue — otherwise a carefully crafted poem about the Logos who was in the beginning with God, who was and is Light and Life, who came into the world and became flesh to dwell among us — contains two prima facie odd interjections about John the Baptizer: that he was sent from God as a witness about the light, but was not the Light himself (vv. 6–8), and a part of that testimony about the Light’s preeminence (v. 15). If the Evangelist initially had a life-altering encounter with the Baptizer such that he became one of his disciples, then subsequently encountered Jesus of Nazareth and was sent to follow him at the Baptizer’s behest — this all makes sense of why, in his old age, as he was giving final shape to his own testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, he and his followers still could not do without the Baptizer’s testimony. (There is also a point about the historical particularity of the Word becoming flesh: remove the specifics of John the Baptizer that intrude upon the Prologue, and it could resemble a passage of Platonic speculative theology.)
The question is still haunting me: Why is there no New Covenantal analogue to the Feast of Booths? Is it because the temporary dwellings and tabernacles and temples of the Old Covenant, made by human hands, have received their fulfillment in the Word who became flesh and tabernacled among us, the new Temple not made by human hands?
The Gospel always says: Yes, then No, and then Yes again — and Amen.
Yes. Christ wants you: you, exactly as you are, as who and what you are. What Christ wants is no less than everything you are and have. He wants the whole of you because He loves you: He loves you because He made you, and He made you because He loves you. There is nothing in you that prevents you from coming to Him. There is no better or worse time, no more or less fitting state. Whenever it is called “Today,” if you hear His voice, the command is the same: “Follow Me.”
No. What this means is that when you come, you cannot offer anything more than the whole of yourself, in simple, complete, and undivided submission. You contribute nothing yourself, for what do you have that you did not receive? No part of what you now are is worthy as it is. Nothing can remain unchanged about your life or within your being. There is no power within you, no performance you could deliver, no height of virtue you could reach, which could make up the difference between what you are and what you would need to be: it is not a finite quantitative lack, but an infinite qualitative difference.
Yes — and Amen. When you offer nothing less and more than the whole of yourself, Christ Himself will make you what you ought to be. He takes your sin and gives you his righteousness; he takes your heart of stone and gives in its place a heart of flesh. He removes the veil from your sight and teaches you the true spiritual law. He will instruct you in the way you should go, shine His lamp upon your path, and give strength to your weary feet. He will at first perfect your feeble efforts at obedience and in time give you full power to do His will. Only then you will know what it is to say, with the Apostle, “Indeed, I worked harder than anyone: yet not I, but the grace of God working within me.”
Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!"), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.
Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?
Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?
Imperial conquest — or “national” unification by force, which is hardly so different — requires first that the army be restructured to be highly legible and loyal to the State, rather than organized according to local customs and loyal to their own localities; then that the government of the empire (or nation) be remade in the image of the army; then, finally, that local society be remade in the image of the government.
Any institution, movement, or ideology that appeals to the priors of wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women — especially those who (or whose families) have attained wealth, success, or power via success in business — will, as a rule, be surpassingly better funded than any institution, movement, or ideology that questions, undermines, or contravenes those priors.
Success in business, while (in most cases) requiring the development of certain skills and capabilities which bear resemblance to (and may even participate in) important virtues, is not domain-transferable. It offers absolutely no credit or guarantee that the model successfully used — or the businessman or woman who achieved that success — is in any way applicable outside of business.
Indeed, success in business may indeed blind the successful to their need for the virtues which enable “success” in other fields of life, by leading them to assume that those fields of life all work on roughly the same principles as the business world. Success in business may thus, absent a deep and thorough process of virtue-formation which cannot originate from or primarily take place in the business world, produce wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women who radically lack insight into what is truth.
The support, or lack thereof, of the wealthy, successful, and power for an institution, movement, or ideology therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of such an institution, movement, or ideology’s core commitments or doctrines. Not only is there definitively no causal relation; there is no necessary correlation whatsoever.
It is almost defensible, as a result, to say that if one wishes to find truth in an institution, movement, or ideology, one should begin by looking as far as possible from where the wealthy, successful, and powerful congregate — and donate.
this post brought to you partly by a reading of Plato’s Gorgias and Protagoras
Though it now seems like a fairly obvious point, probably already made somewhere by St. Augustine or the like, it has never before today struck me what is the nature of the basic contrast between the false seed of Adam, represented by Cain and his son Enoch, and the true seed, represented by Seth and his son Enosh.
Cain, cast away from the gate of Paradise and alienated from the ground, goes off and establishes a city — which he names for his son, linking the future of his line metaphorically and literally to human civilization (which begets agriculture, technology, and culture). Enoch, it is worth noting, means something like “dedicated” or “disciplined.” As a result of Cainite man’s alienation from the world through sin, he dedicates himself — not unfruitfully, in a way — to the civilizing practices of building, making, growing, and so forth, that will “discipline” the world towards his ends. Nevertheless, since these attempts at civilization began in Cain seeking to escape the consequences of his brother’s murder, they will inevitably tend towards and end in Lamech’s celebration of a young man’s murder.
But Seth stays, it seems, with his father and mother at the gates of Paradise, and continues to worship the true Creator rather than dedicating himself to overcoming creatureliness. And this is just what Enosh means: man, as frail and weak, mortal, yet relationally bound. Sethite man “remembers that he is dust” and “calls on the name of the Lord” — the only name that can deliver from death.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.") There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
Relativ-ism, plural-ism, modern-ism, secular-ism — these are agendas, characteristic to the ethos of the present age, which we must resist accommodating or tacitly embracing in our thoughts, plans, and decisions; such resistance depends on carefully cultivating our core commitments and pruning the habits that express those commitments.
Relativ-ity, plural-ity, modern-ity, secular-ity — these are brute facts, descriptive of the reality of the present age, which will provide friction and resistance to our thoughts, plans, and decisions unless we deliberately shape our plans and decisions to them; such shaping depends on carefully observing how these facts work in and on us and our neighbors.
I’m continuing to be amazed by the depth and prescience of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Here is a sequence of quotations from (really, the bulk of) chapter 8, “The Logic of Affirmation,” section 12, “The Fiduciary Programme”:
The critical movement, which seems to be nearing the end of its course today, was perhaps the most fruitful effort ever sustained by the human mind. The past four or five centuries, which have gradually destroyed or overshadowed the whole medieval cosmos, have enriched us mentally and morally [TC: morally? somewhat dubious] to an extent unrivalled by any period of similar duration. But its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away. [pp. 265–66]
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of the idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[p. 266]
Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which cannot tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent to which there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know also that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so. Otherwise they are not even beliefs, but merely somebody’s states of mind. [p. 267]
[We] can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any piece of knowledge. If an ultimate logical level is to be attained and made explicit, this must be a declaration of my personal beliefs… An example of a logically consistent exposition of fundamental beliefs is St. Augustine’s Confessions. Its first ten books contain an account of the period before his conversion and of his struggle for the faith he was yet lacking. Yet the whole of this process is interpreted by him from the point of view which he reached after his conversion. He seems to acknowledge that you cannot expose an error by interpreting it from the premisses which lead to it, but only from premisses which are believed to be true. His maxim nisi credideritis non intelligitis [“unless ye believe, ye shall not understand”] expresses this logical requirement. It says, as I understand it, that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises. [p. 267]
[The] greatly increased critical powers of man… have endowed our mind with a capacity for self-transcendence of which we can never again divest ourselves. We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has for ever imperilled [sic] our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive. [p. 268]
Recall: this work was written at the same time as Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and predates by over two decades MacIntyre’s trilogy that runs from After Virtue through Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Those works, of course, have immense value in their own right (though I am beginning to suspect that Kuhn ought to be read as basically a special case of Polanyi). Yet it is remarkable how many of their core insights are anticipated here and elsewhere. MacIntyre’s “there is no rationality that is not of some tradition”? Here it is. Gadamer’s “the Enlightenment instilled an unjustified prejudice against prejudices”? Bingo. Kuhn’s recognition of regnant scientific “paradigms” that depend largely on the standards of scientific satisfaction in a given period, rather than the totality of available evidence? Ding, ding, ding. It’s all in here, folks, at least in highly compressed form.
Of course, Polanyi’s prose — which I am finding far slower even than MacIntyre’s — is a real hindrance to his reception. (The above quotations, some of which are remarkably snappy, are not exactly representative!) But in my own fields of theology and biblical studies, I cannot help thinking that discussions of method and comparison of different works which do not attend to these core insights amount only to so many exercises in wheel-spinning. Such exercises, at best, may result in a good workout — but at the end you are still sitting in the same place you were, with a great deal of sweat and exhaustion but no forward progress to show for it. Is forward progress then possible? That is the burden of the final chapters of Personal Knowledge.
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
Two notes, with no pretense to originality, from my most recent reread of The Lord of the Rings (probably the 15th lifetime or something like that):
One of the many things that elevates Tolkien’s trilogy to true greatness is how deep and subtle an exploration it offers of political philosophy/theology. What is the ideal king like? What is the good, if any, of political violence? How is power to be used? What is true peace? What does a flourishing society look like? What responsibilities do we have to the past — and the future? What is true greatness, and what responsibility do the great have to the humble? Tolkien addresses all these questions, and more: sometimes by way of explicit statement (usually in the mouth of Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, or Faramir); sometimes less directly but still explicitly spelled out in the course of events (the tragedy of Boromir, or the Scouring of the Shire); sometimes more by the narrator’s showing than telling (the spiritual dimension of the conflict, or the changes in narrative voice and register). One wonderful narrative example: the transformation of Merry and Pippin through their great deeds and their sufferings (and the Ent-draughts), and the great authority and “lordliness” they possess on returning to the Shire — yet without losing their deep love for and connection to the Shire and its people, who do not really understand what they have survived and done.
The conflict in The Lord of the Rings is more spiritual than it is material. Of course there is much heroic violence and the clashing of great armies and many glorious deeds and so forth; but Tolkien perceives, and shows, that his heroes and armies depend more on their hope and the strength of their spirit than on their bodies and their arms, and that before and after any physical blow is struck the chief weapon of the Dark Lord and his servants is fear and despair. The powerful weapons and tokens that appear in the story — Aragorn’s sword Andúril, Galadriel’s star-glass — all work by possessing and exerting a spiritual influence to bring hope and courage in dark places. Most of all, the One Ring is no mere MacGuffin, but it is a malevolent agent in the plot: drawing the allies of Mordor to harass and hunt down the Ring-bearer, while tempting the Ring-bearer and his companions with delusions of grandeur and unearned power — yet ultimately the Ring’s malicious hold over the wills of both Frodo and Gollum is its own and its true master’s undoing. The strength of will and spirit of any character is always his or her most important and relevant feature to the plot, before the ability to perform any particular deed. So the great ones — Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Faramir — all pass the test by refusing to take the One Ring from its humble yet rightful bearer, so enabling the only bearers who could creep undetected into Mordor to take the Ring to the Mountain of Fire. Aragorn has the strength of will to wrestle with Sauron in the palantír of Orthanc, so inducing him to strike Gondor before he is fully ready. Sam fights off the Ring’s temptation on the fences of Mordor by love for his master and the characteristically hobbitish practical humility (a small garden at home is quite enough for him to manage!). The spiritual dimension of the conflict is more important to its progression than the material. A lesson for us all.
Before making a purchase, my wife and I make a habit of asking these five questions. Is it…
needful?
beautiful?
convivial?
wasteful?
simple?
Obviously, most of these terms are positive, one way or another, though #4 is an obvious exception — the answer you hope for there is “no” whereas the others ideally would return “yes.” Nevertheless, there are no hard and fast rules here. Some things truly are needful, and for the exact same reason they are needful, they are inevitably wasteful. Some things are convivial, and that redeems their wastefulness. Some things are beautiful because they are not simple; some things are beautiful because they are simple. (Few wasteful things are truly beautiful, though I imagine there are exceptions.) Many needful things are not beautiful, convivial, or simple, and that is okay.
I own plenty of things that satisfy just one or two of these criteria; several that qualify for three; a few that manage to swing four out of the five. Do I own anything that is needful, beautiful, convivial, and simple all at once — and not wasteful, to boot? If a musical instrument can qualify as “simple,” and if music-making is “needful” (as I take it to be!), then my viola does. Maybe nothing else.
An oddity of philosophical / theological history: the great minds, whom we now remember, often developed their ideas in contradistinction from, not principally a preceding great mind who founded a school, but that school’s later and lesser lights who took their founder’s insight too far — whom we do not now remember.
There could be a worse hermeneutical lens (read: many, many worse lenses) for New Testament theology than the four poems that anchor the opening narrative in Luke’s Gospel: Mary’s song (1:46–55), Zechariah’s prophecy (1:68–79), the angels’ announcement (2:10–14), and Simeon’s blessing (2:29–32).
I personally believe that [the doctrine of the Trinity] has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (and other essays), 5
The great philosopher’s comment — near the outset of his classic essay in aesthetics, “The Relevance of the Beautiful” — hints at the challenge of articulating in a theological/philosophical register something which can only truly be “understood” through being loved, through being worshipped. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the features of my previous articulation of — not the doctrine of Trinity exactly, but its raison d’être.
The articulation of this doctrine is an exercise in biblical interpretation. To be specific, this exercise requires, and presupposes, a kind of theological interpretation of a) the Scriptures of Israel, b) the New Testament, and c) the two Testaments together.
It thus presupposes — even as it inevitably influences — an account of interpretation, viz., an understanding of hermeneutics, which (in order to be adequate for the task) must be philosophically informed.
It also presupposes an account of how the Testaments relate to one another; which is to say it presupposes an account of history — and an adequate account of history must be, well, historically informed.
Furthermore, it presupposes an understanding of creation, as what the Creator is not. Yet that creation is capable of decisively receiving the Creator’s divine nature in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son; thus, the account of nature and creation must itself be Christologically informed.
Finally, it presupposes an account of the church: the community that identifies itself as called by the Father of Jesus Christ, its members sharing in his eternal inheritance through adoption and experiencing (subjectively and objectively) the presence of his life-giving Spirit, and worshipping the Three in — as — One accordingly. (Not to mention: the church has sought to say some authoritative things about the Three-as-One from time to time.)
At least these five factors, as one constructs them, will impinge upon the particular shape and articulation of one’s Trinitarian construction: a two-Testament approach to biblical interpretation; a philosophically informed hermeneutics; a sense of the biblical relation to history; a Christologically informed account of nature and creation; an understanding of the church and its worship. I am certain there are more. (I have not even mentioned where most Protestant theology has begun the task since the sixteenth century: the doctrine of revelation!) But the complexity of the task suggests that the particularities of the doctrine will thus inevitably be, in a sense and to a degree, contingent.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological/philosophical apparatus necessary to talk sensibly about and hold together an apparent paradox as truth:
“Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is One” (Deut. 6:4). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in Israel’s Scriptures — the confession on which the theological unity of those Scriptures depend — is that there is one God, the sole subject of worship, the sole Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them, incomparable with any other putative god, incommensurable with any creaturely reality.
“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19f). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in the New Testament — the confession on which the theological unity of that Testament depends — is that the One God of Israel is to be rightly worshipped in the person of the Father of Jesus Christ; also worshipped in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of the Father; and also worshipped in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is given freely by the Father to all those who belong to Jesus Christ.
In other words: the Church is right to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God alone, and in that worship they are (despite appearances!) in essential continuity with Israel’s worship of the One God YHWH. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is seeking, in a theological register, to articulate.
Why you should not use ChatGPT, large language models, or other “artificial intelligence” (falsely so-called) tools in your research or work, for any of the synthetic tasks (summaries of data or information, etc.) for which it is proposed as a helpful time-saver:
The process of pattern recognition and synthetic integration is the basis of how human beings come to know and understand the world.
This process is an inextricably bodily process in humans. (This is true of human cognition in general: the whole of the human body, not just the brain, is involved in every act of thought — and in fact other bodies are involved, too, because thought is an intersubjective process. But I digress.)
ChatGPT and similar tools are, however, definitionally disembodied. Even if they are in fact “just pattern-recognition machines” (dubious), by virtue of being disembodied their pattern “recognition” is not the same as the real thing in humans.
In fact, insofar as ChatGPT exists in the physical world, it is under a very different sort of embodiment — a non-organic sort — which is antithetical to the human sort.
Therefore, ChatGPT and so forth cannot be trusted to faithfully simulate human knowing — and if the mechanism cannot be trusted neither can the results.
Additionally, by using such a tool, a human being forgoes the opportunity to practice and experience such knowing, kneecapping his or her capacity to learn from the experience.
In a nutshell: the promise of LLMs is “impersonal knowledge” — but no such thing exists. Relying on it is thus, in a meaningful sense, worse than nothing.
Addendum: true personal certainty is much rarer than one thinks. Strictly speaking I am, I think, only confident that 2 + 2 = 4; very confident, since I know from trustworthy authorities that arithmetic may be proven logically consistent and from experience that categories of twos added together produce fours. Confident enough, even, to bet my life (if such a bet were necessary) that adding two to two in any life-threatening scenariorio would make four. Confidence is a real part of knowledge. But am I certain that 2 + 2 = 4? I do not understand the rules and axiomata of mathematical logic by which such statements are proven logically certain in the strong sense. I could, I suppose, be living in a remarkable delusion which has filtered out all experiences of 2 + 2 failing to equal 4 — which seems highly unlikely, but is that not just what such a deluded person might say? My certainty is “only” functional, which is actually — a species of confidence. Is there anything regarding which I am truly certain?
Important to explore, in all fields of life and thought: the practical difference between confidence and certainty. I.e., what action is the right one to take in any given situation may depend significantly on whether you are confident in vs. certain of a given outcome.
“Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of ‘openness.’ We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic ‘localist’ tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.”
I think often about two subspecies, or effects, of the phenomenon Brooks describes in this last sentence. The first is how the abandonment of clear status-signaling and deferential modes of address in hierarchical settings — academia and ecclesia being two such realms — actually makes it more challenging for entrants from lower economic and culturally powerful strata to a) accurately navigate those realms upon entering, when they possess the lowest level of power in the hierarchy, and b) be recognized as having truly arrived once they ascend to the higher levels of power. The second is how the contemporary world, despite the radically increased cultural visibility of neurodivergence, is in certain experiential ways a more hostile environment for persons on the autism spectrum, who need clear rules and overt signals for social settings rather than the muddy and inconsistent rules and covert signals with which our neurotypical ruling class is comfortable. Deference and clear social rules are contingent, socially constructed fictions; but they were and are useful fictions, in ways wholly unappreciated by their meritocratic destroyers. No society can function without socially constructed useful fictions. The question is whether or not the new set represents genuine improvement over the old.
UPDATE: My (very clever) wife pointed out that the therapeutic language and culture predominant among the teenage to early-30s set is another manifestation of this phenomenon. The need to “normalize” being “not okay,” seeing a therapist (and talking with friends about what “my therapist says”), having some form of neurodivergence or (at least) severe social anxiety, etc., can be read as both a response to the low-deference, muddy-social-rules culture we now live in and a replacement for older forms of deference and clear social rules. It serves as a way to cope with the unpredictability (uncontrollability?) of the world and as an imposition on it of new, somewhat clearer rules. It makes some social facts certain again. One cannot, in 2023, dismiss a diagnosis (even a self-diagnosis) of a mental health disorder, or do other than honor the boundaries that one’s friend declares he or she is setting, or veto anything that one’s friend’s therapist says — although thanks to a certain ubiquitous podcast advertiser, the idea that you can “get a new therapist” anytime your old one makes you uncomfortable has now been, er, normalized, which severely blunts the scalpel edge that true talk therapy ought to have, slicing through our self-protective layers of irony and self-deception to get at and treat the genuine underlying problems!