An essay on theology and history

“We speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen” - Jesus Christ

Christians read our story in the Bible the way we visit family photo albums and all the scraps of history we can recover of our ancestors. And not only by that, but by prayer, and by hope and faith, we have the evidence we look for when we wonder about God’s purposes.

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Ernst Cassirer writes, "The opening passage of the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus describes how Socrates lets Phaedrus, whom he encounters, lure him beyond the gates of the city to the banks of Ilissus. Plato has pictured the setting of this scene in nicest detail, and there lies over it a glamour and fragrance well-nigh unequaled in classical descriptions of nature. In the shade of a tall plane tree, at the brink of a cool spring, Socrates and Phaedrus lie down; the summer breeze is mild and sweet and full of the cicada's song. In the midst of this landscape Phaedrus raises the question whether this be not the place where, according to a myth, Boreas carried off the fair Orithyia; for the water is clear and translucent here, fitting for maidens to sport in and bathe. Socrates, when pressed with questions as to whether he believes this tale, this "mythologemen," replies that, although he cannot be said to believe it, yet he is not at a loss as to its significance. "For," he says, "then I could proceed as do the learned, and say by way of clever interpretation, that Orithyia, while playing with her companion Pharmacia, had been borne over yonder cliffs by Boreas the Northwind, and because of this manner of her death she was said to have been carried off by the god Boreas...But I," he adds, "for my part, Phaedrus, I find that sort of thing pretty enough, yet consider such interpretations rather an artificial and tedious business, and do not envy him who indulges in it. For he will necessarily have to account for centaurs and chimaera, too, and will find himself overwhelmed by a very multitude of such creatures, gorgons and pegasuses and countless other strange monsters. And whoever discredits all these wonderful beings and tackles them with the intention of reducing them each to some probability, will have to devote a great deal of time to this bootless sort of wisdom. But I have no leisure at all for such pastimes, and the reason, my dear friend, is that as yet I cannot, as the Delphic precept has it, know myself. So it seems absurd to me that, as long as I am in ignorance of myself, I should concern myself about extraneous matters. Therefore I let all such things be as they may, and think not of them, but of myself--whether I be, indeed, a creature more complex and monstrous than Typhon, or whether perchance I be a gentler and simpler animal, whose nature contains a divine and noble essence." (Phaedrus, 229D ff.)"

I quietly wept at this.

“It was Collingwood’s lifelong belief that the goal of philosophy is and always has been to unify the forms of life and thought. … He sought, therefore, to break down the dogma of specialization by showing how the forms interpenetrate and feed each other’s integrity and by warning that corruption in one form of life means a deterioration in each of the other forms. Collingwood made this point in the Principles of Art (1939). Good art, he argued, is possible only in a healthy society which is founded on a “truthful” consciousness. But if the self as revealed in one sphere of activity is corrupt, then it is just as corrupt when revealed in all the other spheres. Corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art and bad art is the same thing as corruption of consciousness. “Just as the life of a community depends for its very existence on honest dealing between man and man, the guardianship of this honesty being vested not in any one class or section, but in all and sundry, so the effort towards expression of emotions, the effort to overcome corruption of consciousness, is an effort that has to be made not by specialists only but by everyone who uses language, whenever he has it. Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art.” (Editors intro to Faith and Reason, essays Collingwood)

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INTRODUCTION

Gabriel Marcel’s two-volume work, "The Mystery of Being" illuminates a crucial distinction between first-order and second-order reflections that has profound implications for how I have begun to conceive of philosophy, especially as it's taken to be the pursuit of wisdom. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Marcel’s distinctions have changed my thinking. They have led me to consider the confluence of recorded history and the arts to be a record of human suffering with or without hope. Throughout the essay I will also be honing a more precise definition of true philosophy as an essentially hopeful endeavor.

I’m influenced by my Lutheran tradition to look skeptically at the grand edifices of abstractions that philosophers have built over centuries — Tower of Babel-like spires that would emerge above the clouds of ignorance in which the rest of humanity is doomed to grope and scrape their way through otherwise meaningless suffering. Frankly, I don’t believe anyone can attain that God's-eye view above the clouds; instead, our vision is limited by the reach of our imaginations. This, to me, appears to be the inherent humility of the historical, human, condition.

Yet, in the way we share our reflections on the mysteries of life with others in our writing, our arts, and so forth—not the least of these mysteries being suffering itself—I believe we possess a gift as co-sufferers who find themselves wandering in the fog together. There are fraternal bonds in this, whether or not they are seen; insofar as wisdom is some kind of guide to life with others, I believe suffering is an essential way to it. The Christian Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.1” This stepwise movement from suffering towards hope that our lives should in some way transcend our ‘chains’ and our ‘thorns in the flesh’ is revealed to us as we walk the narrow way, reflecting upon what we experience and learning to love those who walk alongside us.

Given the unpredictable nature of our suffering, however, this movement towards the hope isn’t something that can be neatly systematized or assembled for an intentional escapist transcendence on demand, so to speak. In this essay I will try to show that Christian philosophers must wager on hope for a lasting meaning; and they will not have real hope if it is a mere product of their imaginations, no matter how towering their intellects may be. Wisdom is learned not despite suffering, not by having transcended suffering, but in and through it.

With the help of Gabriel Marcel (and others whom I reference in this essay), I have begun to see this process of becoming wisely hopeful through suffering as a matter of contemplative and historical reflections. We begin with an account of what motivated me to write about this.

Before I read Gabriel Marcel’s "Mystery of Being," I would sift through my modest collection of philosophical or theological books in half-slidden and collapsing stacks scattered around my room. I would take maxims, whole essays, or even simple references to other authors, and mine them like gems from marginalia and footnotes; then I would discard the excess materials in their own separate book piles, where they would lay for months, shamefully exposed as ultimately empty words to use as mere means and not as insights into the reflections of a fellow traveler along the way. I was on a quest for the philosopher’s philosopher—or what I might’ve called the one true thing we all must know.

Having learned from Gabriel Marcel, what I've come to realize is that should I ever unearth my elusive treasure its exalted status will crumble to ash the moment I acknowledge my profound misjudgment of its actual importance. Much like Madame Mathilde Loisel in Guy de Maupassant’s, “The Necklace,” my bad habit was to pursue the panacea for a despairing self image only to discover that I sacrificed too much in pursuit of it. There was no one true thing we all must know.

I arrived at this conclusion by the following reasoning: When we reflect, we commonly
turn our attention to the world of abstracted concepts and theories—the sorts of objects analytic philosophers try to universalize and which serve as building blocks for grand, interconnected, purely intellectual traditions (the “towers”, as it were). These can be any concepts at all; the world of symbols, for instance, or that of virtues and vices—but also the sort we take for granted like desire, happiness, or motherhood. We ponder these and adjust them according to our lived experiences, asking questions about their meanings or importance within a bigger picture, and then trying to answer those questions ourselves so that we might have a better map of the world to study.

But Marcel tells us that “the true questions are those which point not to anything resembling the solution of an enigma but rather to a line of direction along which we must move” . So, if I am to believe him, then when I not 2 ice that I have spent an unusual amount of time on just one supposedly prophetic tome, I should recognize that, whatever I am doing with my reading, I am no longer asking after truth.

There is far more than this one distinction to be learned from Marcel’s “Mystery of Being”; but this one thing I learned from him was essential to my discovery that, perhaps paradoxically, no singular discovery could ever exhaust my drive to find more; there are no prophetic words that could ever leave me wholly satisfied and restful in their all-encompassing wisdom. I will always carry a torch in pursuit of deeper truths hidden in literary catacombs. If there is such a book out there with the one true thing we must all know in its pages, I am confident that it will bid me return to the stacks: keep digging!

The core of Marcel’s contribution to my way of thinking about these matters we’ve discussed so far has been the distinction between first-order and second-order reflections as I encountered it first in “The Mystery of Being”. First-order reflections are our abstracted concepts, theories, and intellectual systems. Second-order reflection, by contrast, is a grappling with the mysteries of existence itself, anchored in the experience of being a subject in a particular historical situation. This second-order reflection is participation in an identifiable mystery from which we can’t extricate ourselves and which goes beyond anything we can fully conceptualize without losing sight of it. This inability to remove ourselves for a more objective view of the lay of the land, so to speak, will become especially crucial further on when we discuss the problem of suffering.

For now, let’s try to understand what is meant by reflection tout court. For Gabriel Marcel, “the point of philosophic thought is that it is reflective.” 3 The goal, in other words, is contemplation itself, not just the abstraction and manipulation of ideas. The philosopher contemplates worthwhile things—just as, I argue further on, the historian rethinks, as it were, only important data from the past—so “reflection is never exercised on things that are not worth the trouble of reflecting about.” This contemplative act of reflection is itself integrated with experience. Marcel continues, “the act of reflection is linked, as bone is linked with bone in the human body, to living personal experience; and it is important to understand the nature of this link.” He explains it this way: “If I take experience 4 as merely a sort of passive recording of impressions, I shall never manage to understand how the reflective process could be integrated with experience. ... reflection itself can manifest itself at various levels; there is primary reflection, and there is also what I shall call secondary reflection ... Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the
function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.”

This distinction between primary and secondary reflection is the singular theme that I’ve taken from Gabriel Marcel’s Mystery of Being, so it’s essential that we understand it thoroughly before moving on. The main idea is this: Marcel emphasizes the potential for connection, love, and transcendence through reflective thought. He believes that when we reflect upon an experience, doing so helps us to understand our relationship with other people. Moreover, through secondary reflection we restore the unity of experience that we’d dissected with our typical analytical thoughts. This secondary reflection aids us in reconnecting with others through participation in the mysteries that bind people together (most essentially through love).

Something else that may further clarify what he means to do by distinguishing between two orders (primary and secondary) of reflective thought is Marcel’s distinction between problems and mysteries. “A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as ‘a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity’. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.”

Problems and mysteries both concern us. It’s not, in other words, as though philosophers are wise to ignore altogether the sphere of the problem, with its technical answers, which comprises much of what we consider the analytic school of philosophy. Rather, we are to understand the separate roles played by problems and mysteries, and I think one helpful way of seeing how each of these connects to primary and secondary reflection is to understand the one set as the substance of the other, such that we might say mysteries are the substance of secondary reflection whereas problems are substance of primary reflection.

At any rate, in defining mystery, Marcel cautions against a common mistake that isn’t only committed by the layman, but by philosophers as well. “We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it—an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being thus reflected in them.”

LOVE AND PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS

Now that we have had a good look at the differences between primary and secondary reflection as well as problem and mystery, we should return to the main focus of this essay which is how the categories Gabriel Marcel explicates in The Mystery of Being changed the way I think. First up is how I think about love.

Love, for Marcel, transcends mere analytical thought about human connection. One of his contributions to the topic is found in his essay "The Mystery of the Family" from "Homo Viator.” He writes, ”Love is the supreme act of faith, the luminous affirmation of the other in his or her irreplaceable being, which goes beyond the individual and his or her immediate existence. It is through secondary reflection that we grasp the unity of this experience, reconciling the fragments of primary reflection and restoring a holistic understanding of our relational existence.”

Love is a mystery, a substance—as I’ve called mysteries— of secondary reflection. It reaffirms our unity with another person, the beloved. By loving, we move beyond analytical thought which might focus on someone’s individual traits or isolated moments we shared with them, and we integrate these experiences of them into a cohesive and meaningful whole. The following from Marcel captures the relationship between our key theme of secondary reflection and the love that bind co-suffering pilgrims on our individual and collective journeys toward transcendent hope. He writes, “Secondary reflection...involves a deeper engagement with the mysteries of existence. It is rooted in our subjective experiences and historical context, and it grapples with the fundamental questions of human existence. Love, being one of the most profound and mysterious aspects of human experience, is a primary focus of secondary reflection. Through love, we confront the ineffable nature of existence and come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.”

Before encountering Marcel, my definition of philosophy resembled a sort of loveless moral reasoning. Here’s how I defined it: Philosophy is a synthesis of particular abstractions driven by conscience in search of an emergent whole, motivated by a love of wisdom. Given that Marcel believes secondary reflection has love as its primary focus, therefore, and in agreement with him, I’ll reaffirm the latter portion of my definition, namely, that philosophers whose work consists in secondary reflections are motivated in their work by love (as the primary focus can be reasonably identified as the telos, following Aristotle, to know the inherent purpose or telos of an action is to know what drives its pursuit).

We should pause a moment to rest from these points about terminology and briefly consider the actual state of things on the ground in the academy where professional philosophers are doing their work. Perhaps it’s helpful to evaluate the state this academy is in by asking whether academic philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom, are demonstrating that they really do love wisdom. To delve into scandalous detail would take us too far afield for this paper, but I would suggest that they are not; regardless, though, of the truth of the matter, let’s assume for the sake of argument that I am right.

What then? If the philosophical academy seems to be lost, does that mean philosophy has been proven fruitless? After all, it’s fair to wonder what sort of philosophy should be so aimless. To answer, I don’t believe there’s a real dilemma here; it’s easy to survey the broader landscape of philosophical thought in any age and despair the apparent lack of focus—never mind any discernible progress—that would indicate a true love of wisdom among philosophers. My hope is buoyed however by my certainty that, the broader contours of academic philosophy notwithstanding, within every true philosopher (i.e., for every true lover of wisdom) measurable progress occurs across a lifetime in their increasing love for wisdom.

To demonstrate the natural and obvious ring of truth in this claim consider an analogy to academic research, where individual researchers can become highly skilled and respected within their disciplines, yet where systemic issues can lead to a degradation in the overall integrity and reliability of the academy. As a group, they do not coordinate this pursuit in any notable or visible way. Likewise, though we are neither more ethical nor more self-aware (to name two definitive philosophical injunctions, namely, to be good and to know oneself) on the civilizational level due to the output of professional philosophers, so long as any philosopher loves wisdom and pursues it, he or she will grow in it.

My definition of philosophy needs another adjustment. The love of wisdom, according to my old definition of philosophy, was something static; and the intellectual synthesis was the locus of activity or growth. With Marcel’s clarifying distinctions in hand, and now having this deeper understanding of love as dynamic, I can see that the “particular abstractions” and their attempted syntheses in my working definition of philosophy should be considered mere first-order reflections. They do not grow. In contrast, the love of wisdom I referred to in my definition implicates second-order reflections, which do indeed grow. In other words, my earlier notions of philosophy as being a synthetic system of abstractions assembled by the intellect as we’re driven to this work by our consciences, was the product of my too-limited, first-order perspective; only through Marcel did I gain the categories to appreciate the deeper second-order work of cultivating a love of wisdom that unfolds or grows over the course of a lifetime.

This is a good place to pause our progress to a new definition of philosophy, for a little map-making work by way of a short reflection using the concepts we’ve just discussed. We’ll do so by way of a question: Why don’t more philosophers escape their abstractions to pursue philosophy’s namesake, the love of wisdom, and thereby grow in it? One reason why philosophy as a discipline flounders, or lacks progress, is that, on the one hand philosophers conflate healthy skepticism with cynicism, and on the other hand they conflate broadmindedness or a healthy expansive awareness with equivocalness or prevarication. Stated differently, philosophers tend towards cynicism rather than the avoidance of credulity which honesty requires; and in a sea of choices, they tend towards willful indifference about the rightness or wrongness of their choices. To give a couple of examples, whereas a cynical philosopher may attempt to demystify or demythologize love and describe it as a purely biological function, the true philosopher knows that love experienced individually implicates the whole person and not merely her biological functions.

Marcel refers to the total demystifying of love as a phenomenon into its biological components as “a stripping away of something that is an intrinsic part of our experience of love, thus impoverishing our understanding.” A healthy a 11 nd honest skepticism about love, on the
other hand, would be warranted—but only in a limited and patient way, with the
acknowledgment that the individual who has experienced love cannot simply abstract the
experience from herself. Similarly, a more honest broadmindedness about the range of human
experiences, such as love, would never allow her to expand the concept beyond her own lived
experience to other experiences, such as desire or pleasure, without doing injury to it as a unique experience. Marcel describes the willful expansion of love into mere relations of desire or pleasure as a “failure to recognize the essential character of love as something that transcends mere phenomena.”

As for the willfully indifferent philosopher, he is impervious to the uniqueness of love as a singular phenomenon; he closes his eyes to the fact that the experience of love cannot infinitely expand with tangential relations to other phenomena, continually broadening the contextual definition of love until it loses all definition at its borders. The true philosopher acknowledges that love is a real phenomenon that can be objectively identified. As do the other mysteries, love deepens and becomes more multi-faceted as we pursue it; love, in other words, does not undo itself or become diluted in a sea of other experiences. So, returning to our question—why is it rare for philosophers to escape the first-order reflections and increase in wisdom? I’d answer that the reason why our cynical and indecisive philosophers are caught in these snares, unable to confidently pursue love of wisdom, is that they are uncertain that they can trust whatever definition of love or wisdom which they know they’ve just invented. In short, they do not trust what they see because they think they’ve created it themselves—and they don’t know that they can be trusted. They don’t trust that there is anything behind their words that makes them meaningful in any permanent or ultimate sense.

As we’ll find further on, essayist George Steiner’s wager can come into play and rescue these supposed wisdom-lovers who are so afraid of their own shadows. For the moment, though, we will take a deeper dive into mysteries like love—the only phenomena that seem to transcend our particular restrictions to a time and a place in history.

REVISING MY PHILOSOPHY: BEYOND ‘THEORIES OF EVERYTHING’

In my definition of philosophy which we’ve begun to take-apart for revisions, I claimed that philosophers strive for a certain “emergent whole”. Although it’s a vague notion, this refers to a powerfully-enticing drive to find what is commonly referred to as a “theory of everything”—the comprehensive and unified network into which data can be fed and processed without surprises or infinite revisions of the principles governing the system. Eyebrows should be raising at this. We’ve already learned from Gabriel Marcel that such a systematic analysis isn’t elegant enough; it doesn’t go far enough; it remains within the bounds of first order reflection.

Following such lessons we’ve learned from Marcel thus far, we can already see that understanding a mystery involves a participatory form of knowledge where the knower is involved in, or participating in, what is known. In this sense, mysteries require a different kind of knowing than would come together into a unified theory of everything; mysteries are known in a way that is relational and involves a sense of communion.

Though we can speak of the transcendence of mysteries, nevertheless, the philosopher is always reflecting from within a setting in space and in time, which means the philosopher is always bound to the experiences available in their historical situation. Whereas universal desire and satisfaction nevertheless exist, the pursuit of a sort of emergent whole theory of everything will only produce frustration. We cannot attain this singular whole by philosophical straining. Comprehensive knowledge of infinite details is a philosophical system-builder’s futile work in primary reflection, which means it isn’t the aim of the true philosopher whose work is motivated by a love of wisdom accessed by secondary reflection alone.

As we’ve already established, a true philosopher is by definition a lover of wisdom, and love grows because its object is not a static and limited whole that we take in all at once. The true philosopher’s work therefore never stops unless his beloved muse has disappeared or has lost all of its radiance—an impossibility with regard to wisdom. We have therefore yet another reason to consider it impossible that there should be a universally satisfactory one true thing to jot down in a book; and we likewise have another reason to abandon the search for a singular “emergent whole” truth which would, in any case, be impossible to conceive without infinite imaginative powers. We never see anything emerge from beyond our imagination, and we never see anything at all in its entirety.

ART AND COMMUNITY: BRIDGING STORIES THROUGH EXPERIENCE

The older I get (I’m now thirty-seven), the fewer reliable connections I anticipate making in this life. While aspiring to love my neighbor, the scope continually narrows and time seems insufficient for attaining ultimate satisfaction in loving others. And yet the artist is not alone. As an artist and composer, I've found that seeking recognition for my art only makes sense with the prior faith or wager that I share a world with others with whom I may bond over our mutual love of beautiful things. In what follows, I will bring us nearer to something tangible and experiential, especially in a way that heightens our sense of belonging to a community. Gabriel Marcel had the following opinion on the role of the artist: “I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion.” We are indeed united to other people. It may be paradoxical, but we can and must affirm that our stories are connected, though there is not one single story. Artists—painters, illustrators, sculptors, poets, songwriters, novelists, and filmmakers alike—provide a glimpse of this unity. In contemplating Marcel's differentiation between first and second-order reflections, my perspective on the arts has evolved such that I believe that the arts are the very means by which experiences of suffering are woven into our separate and combined histories, thereby revealing to us what we share as human beings.

Gabriel Marcel wasn’t the only philosopher to believe as much about the role of the arts in the formation or preservation of community. Albert Camus, in his 1957 Nobel Prize reception speech, confessed: “For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.”

Gabriel Marcel had similar thoughts about the novelist’s role in expressing the otherwise inexpressible: “The novelist communicates directly to us something which ordinary conditions of life condemn us merely to glance at. ... the greater a novelist is, the more he gives us the sense that he is not making anything up. I quote Charles Du Bos on Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: ‘Life would speak thus, if life could speak’. I have no hesitation for my own part in saying that it is through the novelist’s power of creation that we can get our best glimpse of what lies behind and under the reverberatory power of facts.” I believe that this is the reverberatory power of facts: As we shuffle down the corridor of time, listening to the resultant symphony of every experience, our record of what we hear is what we call history. That brings us to our next topic.

THE WAGER ON MEANING: HISTORY AS A SYNTHESIS

The philosopher’s role isn’t to merely describe a world of phenomena, or of ‘sense impressions’ if you like, but to recount life as history. “Says who?” comes the sneering reply. I answer that reply with a quotation from essayist George Steiner. He believes there’d be “no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any ‘social contract’.” In other words, there is a metaphysical assumption we’re all making when we recount our lives in our histories. Moreover, like the arts, which presuppose other people, true history reconciles us. In the introduction to this essay, I noted that I would be considering what I called a “confluence of recorded history and the arts”. We have already looked at, in some detail, the human expression of lived experiences through suffering, sometimes towards wisdom. There is a history of this: the history of the arts.

Despite attempts to create individual histories, our common history enriches us when pursued collectively in a spirit of love. Our second-order reflections are communicated through diverse symbols drawing on diverse experiences, overlapping only as we weave them into our shared history—which I consider a means for reconciliation. Social bonds are only possible through reconciliation, as everyone is somewhat estranged, and strangers don’t fully embrace one another in the sin-warped stories they tell.

Returning briefly to Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery, both the arts and history presuppose not only other actors but interconnectedness in ways that cannot be reduced to the sphere of the ‘problem’. George Steiner's argument about the wager on God resonates with what has been drawn so far from Marcel. Steiner’s version of Pascal’s wager expands on the concept by asserting that humanity does wager on God, whether it is admitted or not. The wager isn’t merely a rational calculation but a profound engagement with the mysteries of existence, dynamically engaged with experience. Steiner writes, “The text, the painting, the composition are wagers on lastingness. They embody the dur désir de durer.”

There is, therefore, a wager on the lastingness in art. Steiner calls it a wager “on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence. This wager–it is that of Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom we have explicit record– predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ within language and form. It supposes a passage, beyond the fictive or the purely pragmatic, from meaning to meaningfulness. The conjecture is that ‘God’ is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates worlds because there is a wager on God.” ... “To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. Accurate recollection and resort in remembrance not only deepen our grasp of the work : they generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows. As we change, so does the informing context of the internalized poem or sonata. In turn, remembrance becomes recognition and discovery (to re-cognize is to know anew). The archaic Greek belief that memory is the mother of the Muses expresses a fundamental insight into the nature of the arts and of the mind.”

Much of the world’s magic remains unknown due to a lack of initial effort that could lead to one discovery after another. There could be a whole universe of meaning out there that remains undiscovered because of a missed direction. Consider what may be the reflections of someone who climbed Everest. Imagine he is driving down a highway, years later, and catches his reflection in his rearview mirror. Imagine he remembers a fleeting glimpse of his warped image reflected in his mountaineering partner’s goggles as the two of them made an alpine ascent years earlier. Imagine this experience—not of the climb but of this memory—prompts him to record it in a book along with other reflections, and that this book eventually lands in the hands of hundreds or thousands of aimless young people who are inspired to change their own lives after reading it. In the end, it wasn’t the act of climbing Everest that had the bigger effect; it was the person the climber became, with the thoughts he had later, which was shared with others and changed them.

Steiner concurs: “The archaic torso in Rilke’s famous poem says to us: ‘You must change your life’. So does any poem, novel, play, painting, musical composition worth meeting. … Commentary breeds commentary: not new poems. There is not, in the truth-hour of his consciousness, a commentator, critic, aesthetic theorist, executant, however masterly, who would not have preferred to be a source of primary utterance and shaping. There have in courts been all-powerful eunuchs, as there have been critics or deconstructionists magisterial over creation. But the basic distinction remains. ... No man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose ‘nerve and blood’ are at peace in skeptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if. ... The density of God’s absence, the edge of presence in that absence, is no empty dialectical twist. The phenomenology is elementary: it is like the recession from us of one whom we have loved or sought to love or of one before whom we have dwelt in fear. The distancing is, then, charged with the pressures of a nearness out of reach, of a remembrance torn at the edges.”

Steiner’s wager goes further than Marcel to say that we all do wager on God. I would affirm this, but clarify that everyone doesn’t know they’ve done so—which would be a matter of secondary reflection. In other words, the short of it is that there is no escaping responsibility to reflect or not reflect if we’re to maintain some posture of honesty and truth-seeking. This is partly what I meant in my original definition of philosophy as being a moral, conscience-driven, pursuit. All of humanity is implicated in not only our suffering and ignorance but also in our reflections on our way through the fog. Thanks to Marcel, I was able to parse further distinctions within what I knew to be true of this old idea of a wager on God for the possibility of meaningfulness in suffering. As we consider the wager on a transcendent meaningfulness, we can draw all of these threads together into the sort of synthesis which I referenced in my working definition of philosophy. That synthesis is history.

HISTORY AS WAGER: COLLINGWOOD’S SECONDARY REFLECTIONS

Another thinker to whom I’ve returned with new eyes is R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher of history who reveals the importance of secondary reflection. In R.G. Collingwood’s historical re-enactment, historians engage in a wager on the meaningful reconstruction of past events. This commitment involves a reflective and imaginative immersion into the thoughts of historical figures, acknowledging the limitations of historical evidence and embracing the inherent mystery in understanding the past (this embrace involves trusting history despite our ignorance). The historian's wager is not just a scholarly pursuit but a conscious choice to participate actively in the interpretive process, recognizing the complex interplay between evidence, imagination, and historical consciousness. It is my view that Collingwood's historical re-enactment and Marcel’s secondary reflection exhibit similarities, particularly in their shared emphasis on imagination and historical reflection.

Collingwood's method requires historians to reconstruct the thoughts of historical figures through reflective imagination. Similarly, Marcel's concept of secondary reflection involves a deliberate reflective process reaching beyond immediate experiences to a deeper understanding of who we are in relation to our history. Simply describing an event rather than rethinking the thought of the person living through it results in an impoverished material ‘history’ which is no history at all. To put it in Marcel’s terms, I believe Collingwood’s historical re-enactment, with its focus on comprehending the thoughts of individuals from the past, involves a form of secondary reflection. Moreover, it would be consistent to the philosophies of all three thinkers we have cited so far (Marcel, Steiner, and Collingwood) to assert that historical reflections endure in the annals of history when one person’s thought-world is replicated in another mind, with both people wagering on God’s transcendent value.

It will serve us well to permit a lengthy passage from R.G. Collingwood that, as long as it is, explains rather succinctly his reasoning for defining the work of the historian as he does: “The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event. ... For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. … All history is the history of thought. ... History constructed by excerpting and combining the testimonies of different authorities I call scissors-and-paste history. ... merely the transshipment of ready-made information from one mind into another.” He also echoes Marcel’s insights about the nature of secondary reflection when he stipulates that history isn’t a matter of mere spectacle, or noting of what has happened: “To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to believed through in his own mind; they are objective, or known to him, only because they are also subjective, or activities of his own.”

Collingwood’s approach to history also informs what is becoming my new definition of philosophy—slowly coming-together in this essay—insofar as it will imply that the philosopher’s historical reflections make moral demands that she change her life to become a better, wiser, person. He doesn’t make this moral injunction here; nevertheless what he does claim is a common-sense step away from that when he writes, “If I want to know whether I am as good a man as I hope, or as bad as I fear, I must examine acts that I have done, and understand what they really were.”

The small step is simply granting that a philosopher-historian would only seek to know himself if he is not hopeless to change for the better. Then it’s only one additional step to their responsibility or duty to act and to us affirming with another nod to Rilke that philosophers must change their lives in the light of the truths they have discovered about themselves—not only as the subjects but also as the objects of their historical reflections.
It will clarify much to cite Collingwood once again in order to close this section in which
we’ve considered history as secondary reflection. He tells us that history is a sort of Cartesian
“innate idea”—that it is “an activity of the imagination”; but in a way reminiscent of our earlier
reflections on the incompleteness of the task of the philosopher, the historical imagination is also always imperfect and incomplete.

Nevertheless, the historian-philosopher shouldn’t despair or concede to nihilism or cynicism in the face of so many unthought thoughts because, as he puts it, this shouldn’t inspire skepticism: “It is only the discovery of a second dimension of historical thought, the history of history: the discovery that the historian himself, together with the here-and-now which forms the total body of evidence available to him, is a part of the process he is studying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of view which at this present moment he occupies within it. ... The historian, however long and faithfully he works, can never say that his work, even in crudest outline or in this or that smallest detail, is done once for all. He can never say that his picture of the past is at any point adequate to his idea of what it ought to be. But, however fragmentary and faulty the results of his work may be, the idea which governed its course is clear, rational, and universal.” Steiner’s wager i 23 s compatible with Collingwood’s account of history as re-thought thoughts and this synthesis should be a source of hope, too.

The historian discovers himself involved in the process of secondary reflection as he does his work of recording history. That very realization should reveal to him a source of hope that transcends his sense of incompleteness.

HISTORY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Gabriel Marcel’s existentialism emphasizes the particularity of an experience in time and space by an individual grappling with the mysteries. Collingwood's perspective on historical reenactment likewise emphasizes the relevance of the historian’s situatedness in time and space rather than projecting all relevant information into a transcendent Platonic realm.

Steiner gives these an eternal grounding by maintaining that any coherent understanding of language and human speech's capacity to communicate meaning is underwritten by the assumption of God’s eternal presence. Consequentially, it isn’t only the artist who communicates as though her words have more weight and meaning beyond their pragmatic or expressivist value; it isn’t only the artist who wagers on history being more than sound and fury. On the contrary, we are all historians then—the artist, the professional historian, and the philosopher. The wager on God implicates every last human being. The way Steiner puts it, "The wager on God is not simply an intellectual proposition but a fundamental aspect of our human condition. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all engaged in a wager on the meaning and purpose of existence.

Our beliefs, actions, and choices are all informed by this wager, shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.” Philosophers that truly love wisdom order the cacophonous into a cohesive history, revealing reasons for seemingly absurd events. Thus, the story becomes their story—a material history, a mirror image of nature, spun and told by them in silk. Understanding history is recognizing a larger story, a bigger picture, where individual stories, events, experiences, and relationships contribute to the overarching narrative. With Marcel’s distinction in hand, then, I not only see history differently, but the whole of philosophy in the way philosophers synthesize what they abstract from meaningful experiences.

A RESTLESS HEART: EMBRACING MYSTERY ON THE JOURNEY

We’d be taking-on too much information, probably, to consider faith as a tangent from the main ideas in this essay, but even with regard to faith, now I can see that a sort of catechetical approach to spiritual growth can be dangerous in the way it provides the reductive questions and the reductive answers to problematized issues that should be mysteries. This method of stepping in front of a mystery, so to speak, to do the work of handing-on abstracted concepts, denudes living faith and supplies a facsimile dead-letter pondering in its stead.

Another helpful example of this sort of catechetical approach—remaining within the bounds of our topic—is found in the way we may grapple with the problem of evil and suffering. With Marcel’s distinctions, we can immediately see that this is a ‘problem’ only when we reduce it to abstractions, which is how we lose sight of evil itself. We can only experience or participate in real evil or else we’re just talking about a concept and a problem of a machine-world malfunctioning. Marcel puts it this way: “It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence. The ‘problem of evil’, as the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly instructive example of this degradation. Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have ‘heard talked about” but which I refuse as only ‘being for other people’; and that in virtue of an illusion which these ‘others’ are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.”

Reflective, philosophical history, stained as it is with suffering, prompts me to reevaluate the philosophical consolations sought by philosophers like Boethius, himself a real prisoner (the great Van Gogh’s La Ronde des prisonniers springs to mind). When we adopt a reductive, analytical view of evil as a problem, we lose sight of the communal aspect of responding to evil because of our own corruption, which, viewed from another angle is our own participation in evil. Marcel states, “One must bear in mind that suffering and evil are realities which cannot be confronted in isolation; they call for a communion, a shared response that transcends the individual's capacity to endure.”

When we consider the problem of suffering evil longitudinally in history, and not just latitudinally as a cross-sectional sample of humanity at one moment in time, we notice that human history contains suffering, absurdity, and chaos, already mixed-into it. We can no more remove ourselves from the study of suffering than we can abstract the good, true and beautiful phenomena and contemplate each—like I sought to do with my literary gems in the introductory section of this essay—with hopeful designs for little blissful glimpses into the transcendent glory of God.

Whether history is finally a record of loss or gain would be a paradoxical question that mirrors our understanding of pain in the context of the movement of history. In our shared condition, we suffer losses together, and it is tightly-logical that the final meaning of any single loss (never mind the totality of suffering or loss) remains uncertain until we cease experiencing losses altogether. The philosopher would be foolish to seek her consolation in philosophical systems instead of finding it in a community with likeminded thinkers.

A literary trope becomes relevant: the only way out of trouble is to go through it. We must experience suffering; there is an existential imperative in it. The bare intellectual problem of suffering requires traversing its darkness with a light, acknowledging our ignorance about human history in its totality.

In my unraveling definition of philosophy, I had rather vaguely accounted for the conscience as being what drives the philosopher in their work. I also mentioned being a Lutheran. Fear, love, and trust are common touchstones for a Lutheran piety. By my lights, for a good conscience we will have a filial fear of the Lord such that we are convicted of our failures to love, but are reassured and not cowering before our Father as a result; our reconciliation with other people will demonstrate genuine love of the Lord; and our Pascalian wager will show our trust that He is the Lord of history. Moreover, we’re now equipped to replace my old definition of philosophy with the following: Wisdom is to fear, love, and trust, God through suffering; philosophy is the synthesis of historical reflections for the love of wisdom.

In conclusion, Gabriel Marcel's insights into the nature of philosophical reflection in “The Mystery of Being," have transformed my understanding of the pursuit of wisdom. His distinction between first-order and second-order reflections has deeply affected my understanding of philosophy and even of the human experience. Like Augustine's restless heart finding its rest in God alone, my reflections cannot provide lasting hope or satiate the deepest longings of the soul. Desire and its fulfillment will never cure despair and only secondary reflection or recollection re-involves us in the mysteries that issue in hope. I've come to recognize that true philosophy transcends mere abstraction and theoretical constructs; true philosophy involves a deep engagement with the mysteries of existence which are rooted in our historical and subjective experiences. Marcel's elucidation of the distinction between problem and mystery, exemplified by his exploration of love, further reinforces the significance of second-order reflection in deepening our understanding of reality. As I reflect on my own journey, Marcel's teachings have prompted me to reevaluate my earlier conception of philosophy as a synthetic system of abstractions, driven solely by conscience. Instead, I now see philosophy as a continual process of engaging with the mysteries of existence through historical reflection.

Moreover, Marcel's insights have reshaped my perspective on suffering and the human condition. Rather than seeking consolation in philosophical systems, I now find solace in communal, historical, reflection, and in the shared experiences of fellow sufferers. Some of the other philosophers in our communal work, such as R.G. Collingwood and George Steiner, have contributed not only information to sort with Marcel’s categories, but also their fraternity. Philosophy, as I now understand it, is not merely a quest for knowledge, but one towards reconciliation as well. Therefore, in redefining my understanding of philosophy, I affirm that wisdom is found in fearing, loving, and trusting God on the suffering servant’s reconciling path, while philosophy itself becomes the synthesis of historical reflections we share for the sake of love of wisdom.

I am reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Bibliography

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. London: Albion Press, 2015. Kindle edition. First
published in the United Kingdom in 1946 by the Clarendon Press.
Marcel, Gabriel. Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2010.
———. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery. Translated by G. S. Fraser.
Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960. Gateway Edition. Fourth printing, 1966.
———. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 2: Faith and Reality. Translated by René Hague. Chicago:
Henry Regnery Company, 1960. Gateway Edition. Sixth printing, 1970.
Steiner, George. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber & Faber,
2010. Kindle edition.