God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
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trying to laugh. Our family thought of her in cosmic terms, as a being whose presence held the universe—or ours, at least—together against the natural urge to dissolution.
Grandma pleaded for me to spend some time at the campus Hillel, but her agitation only made me afraid of how the other Jews there would see me. I didn’t go.
As she lay on her dying bed two years later, unable to speak, I could only hope she heard me say, I haven’t rejected you. All that you gave me, I will keep . . .
∴
Translated into Latin in the seventeenth century, Ibn Tufayl’s little book about Hayy would become part of the European Enlightenment, influencing Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, and, of course, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It portrays a fetching if deceptive version of the human ideal and the ideal religion: rational, self-sufficient, mystical, and emphatically male, living and thinking with no need for anyone else. Hayy finds a philosophical friend in Absal, finally, but only after he has found himself. There are no better conditions than an island, it would seem, for proof.
Hayy is the template of so much in the genre of proof that would follow. He’s a blank slate and thinks pure, male, prepolitical, asocial thoughts. No mother whispers prayers into his ear as a child to steer his grown-up reason. We may not all get to be spontaneously generated like Hayy, but through proofs perhaps we too can have a new birth—bloodless and pure, into an invisible brotherhood of minds who’ve touched the divine.21
So, which is the real person, finally? The islander? Or the creature at the mercy of a life among others? Jacques Derrida—another philosopher from the borderlands between North Africa and Europe—discussed Robinson Crusoe in a seminar near the end of his life, when he was already diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him. He spoke of how separate we all are from each other, in our own worlds—“forever uncrossable.” We see shadows of other people, but nothing more. We live in societies together, but do we really hold anything in common? Is the planet I live on really the same as yours? One can’t know. “There is no world, there are only islands,” Derrida said.22
As if against Derrida, centuries earlier, John Donne wrote and prayed that “no man is an island.” And, with time, the idea of an island came to me less and less the way it had before. The gospel’s command to love started compelling me to believe Donne. Christians pray, in relevantly geographic terms, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Mercy comes to our islands when we give it to others. There have to be others, since it’s in them that we find God’s image on earth. My island alone wouldn’t do.
Or maybe it was this: the God I was discovering would be my portable island—an unworldly presence, yet closer than my jugular vein, in the words of the Qur’an. Maybe I longed less for islands because I was really beginning to live on one. This path I was taking, and the decision it was leading toward, was turning more and more solitary.
THREE
Grammars of Assent
A COMEBACK IN CHRISTENDOM
Anselm couldn’t sit still. Rising before the sun, even on the coldest winter mornings, he and the other monks would gather in the church to chant psalms. They all wore the same habit, and their voices all sang the same tones, whose echoes cascaded through the stale air and against the stone walls. But Anselm was distracted. The prayers on his lips couldn’t compete with his thoughts, and his thoughts were stuck. “I hoped for gladness,” he wrote, “and, lo, my sighs come thick and fast!”1
The Benedictine abbey at Bec, in what is now northern France, was less than a century old in 1077, but it had already become famous thanks to its celebrity abbot, Lanfranc of Pavia. Anselm—whom history calls Anselm of Canterbury—came from the Italian Alps. Back home, he and his father differed in every way but their stubbornness, and living together turned unbearable. After his mother’s death when he was in his early twenties, he set off northward. He traveled through all of France, past the universities at Chartres and Paris, arriving at Bec in 1060. Becoming a monk wasn’t his plan at first, but word of Lanfranc’s school there captured Anselm’s imagination. He entered Bec as a novice, and under Lanfranc he mastered the medieval curriculum’s catalog of doctrines, categories, and distinctions, held together by church authority and the daily ritual of liturgy. Anselm became a teacher in his own right. But his own assent to faith didn’t fill him as he thought it should. It didn’t saturate his mind and will the way a living God deserves.
He wrote a book called An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, which begins with an Augustine-style proof from the degrees of perfection. Some things in the world are more perfect than others; a horse’s nature is better than a tree’s, in one example Anselm gave, but human nature is better than a horse’s. These degrees make sense only if at the top of the scale there is a most perfect God. Adducing other familiar proofs, he further reasoned that this God is uncaused and the source of every other thing’s existence. But these didn’t satisfy him—too worldly and piecemeal, unequal to what he believed must be the simplicity and elegance of the supreme being. “I began to wonder,” he recalled, “if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself.”2 The problem nagged at him and wouldn’t let go. He lost the desire to eat, to drink, and to sleep. Worst of all, as he would piously tell his biographer Eadmer, it distracted his attention from prayers.
Yet it was during Matins, while the monks’ voices mingled with darkness, that Anselm’s rupture of insight finally came. Recounted Eadmer, “The grace of God shone on his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and jubilation filled his inmost being.”3 This grace may have been in the form of a proof, but it entered into his world like a trance.
His idea, and his way of explaining it, would blow through the schools where monks studied and debated over their hand-copied texts. There had been arguments for the existence of God circulating before, but this was something new. It was simple and puzzling and ecstatic. If Anselm was right, no longer would proof be an affront to humility or a substitute for faith; it would be their fulfillment.
Anselm proceeded to record his discovery in a short treatise. He called it Fides Quaerens Intellectum—Faith in Search of Understanding. It was a phrase found in Christian literature since antiquity. But for Anselm, the words aren’t quite right. More than searching for it, he craved understanding. He pined for it.
After this second work was completed in 1078, however, he changed the names of both his books. The first he called Monologion, meaning “monologue” or “soliloquy.” The second became the Proslogion, meaning “discourse” or “discussion.” It was not just Anselm speaking now; God had entered the conversation.
∴
The house I grew up in had a monastic character. In a neighborhood full of ramblers, it was the lone modernist cube. My mother loves that kind of architecture, so it’s what she got: yellow-brick walls inside and out, enormous panes of south-facing glass, and a leaky flat roof, full of skylights. The interior, though, was more my father’s doing: antiques, as many medieval ones as he could afford. Most of the furniture was made of dark wood, standing against the light walls of the house. There were a few uncomfortable black thrones. In one corner, on a tall, columned base, stood an old statue of Christ victorious, with the paint long gone, arms missing, and wounds in the feet. Basically, I spent my childhood in a museum. When I go back home now and step through that door, I whisper to myself the name I’ve given it: the House of Great Silence.
Frank Lloyd Wright, my mother’s architectural hero, used to design clothes for the people—the women, at least—who lived in his houses. In a house so carefully and consciously made, you’re not just living there. You’re part of a work of art that serves the higher purpose of the whole.
The house was big enough that we could all be there and not really notice one another’s presence. This happened a lot—one person per floor, each going about what we were doing, more or less quietly. In the back was a woods, with a little stream that led to a bigger one, which led to the Potomac River. We were right under a flight path, but when you grow up with the sound of airplanes,