Ask the Right Question First

Letter twenty-seven is divided between two interrelated topics. The connecting point between the two is man’s innate inability to see and fully understand God’s perspective. It is a point at which this writer often sticks. I cannot, with my finite, miniscule mind, truly get what it means to see the entirety of creation as God sees it, an ongoing but timeless whole in every dimension. Some of us get closer than others at grasping God’s reality. For instance, a twelfth century scholar named Nachmonides read the Genesis account and deduced there are ten dimensions, four of which we can perceive, six which we cannot. His deductions have their counterparts in today’s particle physics, notably string theory.

The bottom line to both particle physics research and the deductions of Nachmonides is time. Both try to explain the interactions of the time dimension with what we perceive to be physical reality. But the human mind cannot make the jump from seeing events in a sequential order, to the mind of God and His perception of creation, including time. To God, creation is a singular event of an eternal present in which He can observe everything in simultaneous, minute detail. Put simply, for God, there is no Past, Present, and Future. There is only the Now.

It is this inability of the created mind to get a visceral, rather than solely theoretical, understanding of God’s Eternal Now that Screwtape manipulates. There are two ways by which he does this. The first is somewhat easy to see. Because we humans view events in sequence, we think God watches us and uses those events to force us down a particular path of His determination. By that scenario, God has negated His second gift to us, free will. But when we turn the perspective of events around to God’s view we reach a different conclusion. Because He sees the entire scope of creation as an Eternal Now, He observes but does not manipulate us as individuals, leaving free will intact.

I just wrote that concept, and I still have a hard time trying to come up with a day-to-day illustration of it because every analogy falls short. Try looking at this seemingly unsolvable situation in this way. A scriptwriter lays out the entire story. He knows the outcome and every thing and every person involved leading up to it. But the characters within the story do not, but must follow and react freely to each event and encounter as they come. The characters have free will within the setting, but do not realize the outcome until they reach it.

Screwtape’s second use of the inability to see things with God’s perspective will sound familiar today. Screwtape calls it, The Historical Point of View. That viewpoint asks many questions, which individually, all sound on point. Who influenced the ancient writer? How is it consistent with his other works? At what phase during the writer’s career was the piece written? Where does the piece fit into the general history of thought? What influence did the writer and this particular piece have on those who came later? How was it misunderstood by that writer’s contemporaries? And possibly the most tellingly pack-mentality question, what has been the general course of criticism of the ancient author’s piece over the last decade or so? Such questions never address the single most important issue of all: was what that ancient author saying actually true?

Of course, if one never asks the question about truth, one never has to act on the implications of that truth. One never need ask, does this truth cause me to re-evaluate my own thinking? Does this truth have a bearing on my words and actions? In other words, will it change my life?

For most of us, the truth can make us uneasy. So why not bury it under a weight of questions that are actually, when one thinks about them, both totally subjective and totally irrelevant if the notion of truth is left out of the inquiry in the first place? Leaving out the truth component creates a pile of marginally useful knowledge, but no wisdom.

The implications of such a mind set are both personal and generational. There is an old saying that goes like this: if one knows not the past, then one cannot know the future. But the remedy is actually simple. “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” Proverbs 4:7