Top 100 – Part VII

What?! 700 posts on exlibrismagnis.com?! Yes, even with my slower pace over the last few years, I have made it to my seven-hundredth contribution to this blog. Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from writing about current reading to offer moments from my past reading, ideas and stories and images that I think about often. My original idea for the subseries was to outline my hundred favorite books, but that idea quickly changed. These books are not necessarily in my top 100 books, in spite of my misleading title. In fact, if I were ever to put such a list into black and white, at least four of these titles wouldn’t make it. (I don’t even remember one of the titles.) Maybe if I get to 1000 posts I’ll actually try to decide what my favorite 100 books are.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a distantish relative (the exact description of our relationship would involve the phrase “in-law” three times) wanted to talk at me about the Commedia. Knowing my education, he still assumed I knew nothing of this greatest of all classics, and tried to explain to me that no one reads anything but the Inferno because the other parts aren’t enjoyable. I told him that I read all three parts every few years and actually preferred Purgatorio and Paradiso. He corrected my pronunciation of commedia and moved on to his next topic. I think of many passages from all three parts of the epic poem often, but for now, I want to mention just one moment, when Dante gets to the empyrean heaven and sees all the concentric spheres of the heavens turned inside out so that God is at the center while everything else revolves around Him in a dance of love. I fail in all my attempts to put the image into words, and yet the topographical oxymoron shines clearly and distinctly in my inner eye. It is the master image in my mind of the God who encompasses all things, is at the center of all things, and yet stays separate from all his creation, the God who rules by orderly love. I love Dante, and I love God more because of Dante.

• John Milton, Paradise Lost. While we’re on the subject of epic poetry about Heaven and Hell, let’s talk about Milton a minute. In book IV, Satan visits Paradise. Many readers have thought that Milton makes Satan too sympathetic in these passages. Perhaps the poet, seeing his own antimonarchical bent in the archfiend who rebelled against the Divine Throne, injected too much of himself into the character. In any case, Satan’s sympathetic moment (“Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King! / Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return / From me”) works for me and makes his next scene even more powerful. The Deceiver now takes the form of a cormorant and sits on the walls of the Garden of Eden, viewing first the flowers, the fruit, and then our first parents. “Ah! gentle pair,” he says, “ye little think how nigh /  Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe.” An unforgettable turn!

• H. W. Brands, TR. President Teddy Roosevelt is visited by a French ambassador and takes him on his daily rugged walk. After crossing a river, the President looks back to see his visitor, still on the opposite bank stripping naked except for a pair of pink gloves. “Why did you remove your clothes?” asks Roosevelt once his fellow hiker completes the crossing. “I do not think we will meet any ladies out here,” replies the Frenchman. “Then why did you keep the gloves on?” “Just in case we do.” I hope the story is completely true.

• John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. I love Newman’s description of the properly educated mind and aspire to approach its condition. “It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.” Without the “almost,” the description would be heresy. With it, it is merely overly optimistic: I believe in the vision of this mind, but how could even the best university ever produce it?

• Malcom Gladwell, Blink. Forget careful, prolonged judgment of new people and situations, advises Gladwell. The human mind is equipped to make reasonable judgments in the blink of an eye. In one example, he cites a study showing that students viewing fifteen seconds of video of each of several professors rate them essentially the same as do other students after taking entire courses with the same professors. I thought about times I made decisions to hire people as soon they walked in the door; I no longer feel privately ashamed to have done so. (Not one that I chose in this way gave me any cause for regret.)

• Isaac Asimov, A-story-that-has-a-title-which-I-have-forgotten. In the future, everyone uses calculators. One day one person shows his ability to add up a couple of multi-digit numbers, and everyone else is amazed. Thus does new technology diminish traditional skills. Have we already reached this future?

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Michael Ward, admitting that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist, says that he has discovered the secret organizing plan to Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a plan so secret that no one – not one friend of Lewis, not one professor, not one faithful reader, not Warnie, not Joy, not Douglas – no one suspected it. And yet his evidence is totally convincing not just to me but to apparently all C. S. Lewis experts. Each of the volumes in the series corresponds to the Renaissance image of one of the seven planets. (OK, more exactly, each corresponds to Lewis’s image of the Renaissance image of one of the planets.) And each is ultimately about Christ, displaying Him not only in the person of Aslan but in the pervading atmosphere of each book, the very medium through which each plot swims. Christ is Jupiter, the jolly King with a red spot on his wounded side (LW&W). He is Mars, Forger of iron, Master of courage, Lord of Hosts (PC). He is the Sun of Righteousness, our Light, more precious than gold (VotDT). He is the Moon, Reflector of God’s glory, Mediator between Earth and Heaven, Great Physician of health and sanity (SC). He is Mercury, the Word, He who sunders and unites (HaHB). He is Venus, God of Love, Creator (MN). And He is Saturn, End of Desire, Keeper of the keys of Hell and of Death (LB). Is this a favorite book? I don’t know. It is a book about other books. All of its virtue cultivates love but directs all that love away from itself. And yet it has changed my thinking more than any other book I’ve read in the last twenty years or more.

There you have it. Seven more bits from my reading that I think about often. If I make it to post 800, I’ll have seven more. I hope you stick with me until then.

Come, Let Us Reason

A facebook friend recently alerted me to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times reporting a scientific study showing that analytical thinking tends to undermine faith. I’m glad that I read about half of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink a few months ago; his account of recent studies of intuitive thinking and snap judgments helped me think analytically about the Times article.

The article (search “los angeles times analytical thinking faith”) tells about several experiments. In the first one, subjects were given three tricky questions for which the first, gut-instinct answer is usually wrong, questions that usually demand a little careful thinking to answer correctly. A boy buys a bat and a ball for a total cost of $1.10. (What store is this boy shopping at?) The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Depending on the answers to questions such as this one, subjects were labeled as either analytical or intuitive thinkers. They then answered questions about faith, and the analytical group tended “to score lower on the belief scales.”

In another experiment, subjects were given words to rearrange into a sentence. One group dealt with trigger words such as “think,” “reason,” and “analyze.” Others were given “neutral” words. The group dealing with the “analytical” words described themselves on average as less religious.

In a third experiment, a control group read a passage in a clear font, while the test group read the same passage in a format that made them squint, an action that supposedly brings out analytical thinking. The test group then rated lower than the control group in their belief in “supernatural agents.”

Before I critique the article, let me say that I haven’t read the actual study, so I don’t know if the Times reported its methods and findings faithfully. But I’m all for research, and applaud these researchers for their contribution to an important and neglected problem. And I readily concede several of the study's findings. I admit that in many believers the strength of faith fluctuates. I admit that most Christians I have known don’t think very analytically about their faith and that some believe that thinking hurts faith. I admit that some evidence for religious beliefs is intangible and that some people believe in a given religion for emotional reasons or from peer pressure. Finally, I admit that analytical thinking can diminish faith; since faith is belief in an intellectual proposition, analytical thinking can either begin, increase, decrease, or demolish that belief, depending on what one thinks about. But I still have some concerns with the study:

• The first experiment included only tasks in which first-instinct answers were wrong. Gladwell’s Blink discusses several studies showing the accuracy of intuitive snap judgments in some contexts.

• Gladwell also discusses experiments showing the power of priming human subjects with trigger words, a process that works through subliminal, intuitive thought processes. So the second experiment, designed to bring out analytical thinking, did so by calling on intuitive thinking.

• Gladwell makes the case that we base even “intuitive” thinking on experience and reason but relegate the process to automated, subconscious levels of our system.

• The first experiment may well show that analytical thinkers in contemporary America tend to have less faith, but to claim that analytical thinking causes the lower level of faith is to commit the primary fallacy of statistics: assuming that correlation implies causation. And the study (probably) says nothing about people in India, Korea, or a New York Torah school. It certainly doesn’t say anything about seventeenth-century Americans.

• If the survey statements dealing with faith were all as vague as the samples provided in the article (“I feel the presence of the Divine,” “I just don’t understand religion”), then the study may not have shown anything about faith at all, since faith is a belief in a specific proposition. Perhaps analytical thinking prompted some subjects to realize more clearly that they don’t understand “religion” as a whole. I know I don’t understand Shinto. Maybe getting a subject into a pattern of analytical thinking causes him to analyze broad statements like “I believe in supernatural agents”; a devout Jew, for instance, thinking in an intuitive mode might answer “yes” to indicate her belief in God, where an analytical mental streak in the same person might cause her to answer “no,” reasoning that a positive answer would technically commit her to a belief in vampires and leprechauns.

• Aristotle, Augustine, al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, Newton, and Einstein form a tiny sample of famously analytical thinkers who believed in a God.

By the way, the ball costs 5 cents.