With the beginning of this year, I have determined to patch some of the (very large) holes in my reading of the classics. I have never read Plato or Aristotle in any sort of panoptic way, let alone later major philosophers of antiquity such as Seneca or Plotinus; my reading of the Church Fathers has been almost entirely occasional and extremely selective; it has been years since I have read either the Iliad or the Odyssey (and I have in fact never read the Aeneid). My major reading for roughly the last two years has instead focused on the characteristic novelties and problems of modernity, as articulated by modern writers: George Steiner’s Real Presences, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Lorraine Daston’s Rules, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and the Stars, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry; in a more explicitly scriptural/theological key, my teacher Jeremy Begbie’s Abundantly More, my teacher Kavin Rowe’s essays on New Testament hermeneutics, Brevard Childs’ Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word, and Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery; and, of course, the granddaddy of them all (by at least volume if not temporality), Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.
If your guiding intellectual question is “how shall we live with integrity as Christians in modernity?”, as I am beginning to suspect mine is, this body of literature possesses obvious importance. I am nowhere close to having plumbed the full depths of this tradition (or complex of traditions), and do not intend to stop reading in this area. My reading project on the nature of tradition will bring me back up to the present age with (at least) Gadamer, Lindbeck, and more MacIntyre, and I have several more major works of twentieth and twenty-first-century philosophy and theology already waiting for me on my shelves (Heidegger, Cassirer, Adorno & Horkheimer, Bultmann, Frei, Jenson, Rosa, and so forth). And I’m currently reading through David H. Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence, which (whatever else, good or ill, I might say about it) represents a one-man (two-volume) masterclass in theological engagement with modernity. So in no way am I withdrawing my attention from modernity. Rather, two things have crystallized my sense that it is time to turn (at least more of) my attention to the Old Things.
The first is that I have found myself increasingly overpowered by what I call in shorthand the “I do not understand Hegel” problem. The great theologians and philosophers of the not-too-distant past — and, still, the greatest in the present — were staggeringly, now almost incomprehensibly, literate and erudite figures. Before publishing his great work on hermeneutics, Gadamer was a noted expert on the pre-Socratics. Karl Barth is sometimes accused of not having read the tradition fairly, but he has never been accused of not having read it thoroughly. Brevard Childs seems to have truly read every book ever written. Part of what makes Hegel singularly difficult is, of course, his ruthlessly abstract and intensely tedious style; but no doubt another part is that very few people today are educated the way that he and his peers were. Take a slightly more recent example: what man of letters teaching at the University of Michigan today would dare assign his undergraduate students a reading list like W. H. Auden’s? If philosophy and theology are the Great Conversation, one must learn to discern and hear the enduring presence of the older voices who have left the room before one can truly contribute or at least understand.
The second is that, despite the immensity of my to-read list and the paucity of my already-read list, I do feel that I reached an inflection point with the turning of the year. That was when I finished reading Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century — the bulk of which is actually about eighteenth-century philosophy and theology as the “background” to nineteenth-century theology; and it must be said that Barth appears to enjoy writing about Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and so forth a great deal more than the nineteenth-century theologians who are the book’s ostensible subject — and an unofficial trilogy by Lesslie Newbigin: Proper Confidence, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. These, somehow, coordinate in my mind: Barth and Newbigin (who was, not coincidentally, heavily influenced by Barth) together outline the negative space for and sketch the positive content of the properly Christian post-liberal synthesis which we desperately need — or which, at any rate, I need in order to feel intellectually satisfied. In the coming months, as the intellectual dust from my aforementioned reading settles, I may take a few stabs at describing what seem the chief features of that synthesis. But I also sense, if dimly, that in order to know what I really mean by those features, I will need some more pre-modern context and contrast. I can thus leave Barth and Newbigin for a little while, confident that I will return to them better able to understand what is fruitful in what they offer.
It is high time, then, that I actually read Plato and Aristotle (not to mention Seneca and Plotinus); that I (begin to) read through the Church Fathers; that I revisit Homer (and meet Vergil anew). I am doing so as follows. For Plato, I have launched into the Ukemi Audio series dramatizing the Socratic dialogues (in Benjamin Jowett’s translation), with the astounding David Rintoul as an unforgettable Socrates — and intend to write here, for my own benefit, at least a short reflection on each dialogue. For the Fathers, the obvious place to start is Volume I of the old Schaff set, with Sts. Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and their comrades. With the Iliad, which I have at least read before (perhaps more than a decade ago), I have cracked open Emily Wilson’s recent translation. In none of these cases is the point a deep, doctoral-seminar level understanding. Rather, the point is familiarity, breadth, and fresh inspiration: to drink deep from the old and honored wells.
If [you have quoted this passage] because you imagined that you could throw doubt on the [preceding] passage, in order that I might say the Scriptures contradicted each other, you have erred. But I shall not venture to suppose or to say such a thing; and if a Scripture which appears to be of such a kind be brought forward, and if there be a pretext that it is contrary, since I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another, I shall admit rather that I do not understand what is recorded, and shall strive to persuade those who imagine that the Scriptures are contradictory, to be rather of the same opinion as myself.
— St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 65 (in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1).
My reading project on the concept of tradition commences in earnest with Origen’s De Principiis (I use John Behr’s translation, with minor punctuation and formatting alterations):
All who believe and are assured that “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, “I am the truth,” derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ. And by “the words of Christ” we mean not only those which he spoke when he became human and dwelt in the flesh; for even before this, Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses and the prophets… And that he also spoke, after his ascension into heaven, in his apostles, is shown by Paul in this way, “Or do you seek a proof of Christ who speaks in me?” [Pr.1.]
Since, however, many of those who profess to believe in Christ differ not only in small and trivial matters, but even on great and important matters — such as concerning God or the Lord Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, and not only regarding these but also regarding matters concerning created beings, that is, the dominions and the holy powers — it seems necessary first of all to lay down a definite line and clear rule [Gk Vorlage: kanon?] regarding each one of these matters, and then thereafter to investigate other matters. … [Although] there are many who think that they know what are the teachings of Christ, and not a few of them think differently from those before them, one must guard the ecclesiastical preaching, handed down from the apostles through the order of succession and remaining in the churches to the present: that alone is to be believed to be the truth which differs in no way from the ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition. [Pr.2.]
[The] holy apostles, in preaching the faith of Christ, delivered with utmost clarity to all believers, even to those who seemed somewhat dull in the investigation of divine knowledge, certain points that they believed to be necessary, leaving, however, the grounds of their statements to be inquired into by those who should merit the excellent gifts of the Spirit and especially by those who should receive from the Holy Spirit himself the grace of language, wisdom, and knowledge; while on other points they stated that things were so, keeping silence about how or whence they are, certainly so that the more diligent of their successors, being lovers of wisdom… might have an exercise on which they might display the fruit of their ability. [Pr.3.]
A rich, and pointed, passage by Sertillanges on the intellectual’s need to be solitary but not isolated:
[Do] not forget that in association with others, even in ordinary everyday meetings, there is something to be gleaned. Too much solitude would impoverish you. … [You] must feel that you cannot shut yourself up entirely. Monks themselves do not do it. You must keep, in view of your work, the sense of the common soul, of life, and how could you have it if, cutting yourself off from human beings, you had in mind but a dream-humanity? The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: he stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look upon you as if you were a “proposition” to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook. In the inexhaustible wealth of the real, too, we can find much to learn; we must move in it in a spirit of contemplation, not keep away from it.
— A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Condtitions, Methods, 59. “The inexhaustible wealth of the real”: what a marvelous phrase.
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.
A ChatGPT query requires roughly 5x the electricity of a normal Google search — that is, a Google search from the days before Google’s “AI Overview” itself 5xed the energy use of every single Google search you perform. If this is the case for a purely text-based response, I don’t even want to know how much energy an image or video generator like DALL-E — or a “music” generator like Sora — requires per query.
Furthermore, LLM chatbots — due to both their design and their inefficiency in completing the tasks for which they are designed — invite far more queries per day than your typical search engine. The teenagers who spend hours a day chatting with their LLM “therapists” or “AI girlfriends” may be the high tail of the bell curve, but there is no doubt that they are living right into the technology’s basic affordance. I challenge anyone to find a large number of people who literally spend all day Googling things (well, okay, actually, I do know at least one person like this). OpenAI wants everyone to use GPT-4o for everything, 24/7.
To keep up with this insane and constantly-escalating scale of usage (think also of how every shopping website is suddenly integrating an AI-powered helper chatbot!), new data centers are being constructed every single day. Worldwide data center energy use probably doubled between 2022 and 2023, probably due in substantial part to the impact of rolling out generative AI tools, and seems on pace to keep doubling annually (in a sickening update to Moore’s Law).
Note also that server farms and data centers are frequently built in regions like the American West which have plenty of available land but scarce water resources. In energy economics, there is a well-known tradeoff known as the “water-energy nexus:” the more water you are able to use (mostly for cooling), the less energy you have to use, and vice versa. In other words, there is ecologically no such thing as a free lunch: degrade your local ecosystem through water use, or pump carbon dioxide and other more noxious pollutants into the air somewhere else. Furthermore, by all accounts data centers significantly degrade quality of life and health outcomes (through, fascinatingly, steady noise pollution in both audible and inaudible frequency bands) for the people who are misfortunate enough to live near them.
The easiest technologies to eliminate from the economy are, by definition, the ones which have not been integrated into the economy yet. Unlike the automobile, industrial agriculture, air travel, and the other technological revolutions to which we are constantly hearing “AI” compared, the “AI revolution” has not happened yet. It is incredibly unpopular — the American public views “AI” with something like 70% unfavorability the last time I looked into it, which is more unpopular than Donald Trump was at any point during his first term in office — and consistently becomes more unpopular as people learn more about it and have more experience with it. So why not simply say, with Bartleby the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to”? If you want to be serious about climate change, ban AI.
This, of course, will not actually happen. For one thing, it might not be legal (and certainly would not be legally practical) for, say, the US government to ban generative “AI” development. For another, all the incentive structures are aligned against it. To simply “not develop AI” is, clearly, a step that no currently existing tech company (and many not-yet-existing tech companies as well) is willing to countenance, for fear that they will be left behind by their AI-developing competitors — a classic race-to-the-bottom collective action problem. The incoming administration is filled with unapologetic cryptocurrency boosters (another infamously environmentally degradatory technology). And I should pause to say that I don’t quite wish to launch a Butlerian Jihad against all “AI” tools — I am very optimistic, for instance, about the improvements to weather forecasting which the new AI-based models seem to provide when used in conjunction with traditional computational physics-based models, and if AI tools can effectively replace human content moderators to keep porn off social media, all the better.
It’s also true that ending “AI” development would not come anywhere close to reversing anthropogenic climate change. Automobiles, industrial agriculture, and air travel are far larger contributors still to the problem, and there is no good replacement for fossil fuels in these domains (electric car boosters to the contrary). It is impossible to avoid the truism that if you want 18th-century emissions, you need an 18th-century lifestyle. Nobody in the 21st century is going to voluntarily revert to an 18th century lifestyle. What we need, rather, is a massive and non-fossil fuel source of energy that could not only, say, power AI, but also make planetary-scale carbon capture & storage economically viable. No solar or wind power technology is capable of providing this, for reasons of basic physics, and the ecological costs of resource extraction to make solar panels and their battery packs are so significant that it is not clear to me a solar panel will ever, environmentally speaking, “pay for itself” in emissions reductions. Hydropower sounds great if you have a massive river nearby (not the case everywhere!), but every time we check in on the maintenance requirements and ecological impacts of dams, the answer gets worse and worse. That is why I consider it enormously telling that AI developers such as Microsoft, recognizing that the new product they are shoving down all our throats requires an astounding quantity of energy which the current American grid is simply not ready to provide, are making quiet but massive investments in the future of nuclear energy.
The real proposal, then, might actually turn out to be: anthropogenic climate change, widespread generative “AI”, new nuclear energy — pick two.
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
Those who aim at what is beyond their powers, and thus run the risk of falling into error, who waste their real capacity in order to acquire some capacity that is illusory, are also men of curiosity in the olden sense… Do not overload the foundation, do not carry the building higher than the base permits, or build at all before the base is secure: otherwise the whole structure is likely to collapse. What are you? What point have you reached? What intellectual substructure have you to offer? These are the things that must wisely determine your undertaking. “If you want to see things grow big, plant small,” say the foresters; and that is, in other words, St. Thomas’s advice. The wise man begins at the beginning, and does not take a second step until he has made sure of the first. That is why self-taught men have so many weak points. They cannot, all by themselves, begin at the beginning.
— A. G. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (tr. Mary Ryan), 27.
Goal for the next stage of my intellectual life: Answer his questions. Begin again from the beginning.
