Foreword to The Manifold Letters.

Resolving Ambiguity; King Solomon and Dr Faust.


When I was seven years old I was much impressed by a school teacher's story about King Solomon. Here was a man that chose wisdom over all other gifts from God. Perhaps I was drawn to him because Solomon says “..I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people that I may discern between good and bad...” God is so pleased by this that he grants him his wish, plus riches and honour and long life. (I Kings 3: 3-15).

At the start of Solomon's rule he behaved like a gang leader who ruthlessly eliminates his enemies. His hit man was Benaiah son of Jehoiada who was always “falling upon” people at Solomon's command and it was no good entering the tabernacle, taking hold of “the horns of the altar” to claim sanctuary as Joab had done, Benaiah still “fell upon him and slew him.” Solomon even used a dispute with his elder brother Adonijah, over the marital rights to Abishag the Shunammite – who had supported King David in his last aged days when his body could no longer keep itself warm-- as an excuse to set Benaiah son of Jehoiada to fall upon him too.

Nevertheless Solomon is celebrated not only for his wisdom and his knowledge but also for founding the first temple in Jerusalem, a symbolic root of the Abrahamic religions. Who cannot warm to a man who not only “spake three thousand proverbs”, but also:

“...spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things and of fishes. “1Kings 4:33.

Another figure that fascinated me in my youth and who was obsessed with the acquisition of knowledge was the theologian Dr Faust or Faustus, that peculiar man who sought after wisdom but seems to have become bored, looked to esoteric practices and was targeted and tested by the devil who manifested as Mephistopheles. When a child, at my home we never had less than four poodles, mostly the large ones, and I was fascinated that in Goethe's version of the story (written 1770-1832), Mephistopheles first appears disguised as a poodle dog running in circles in a field with sparks coming from its heels.

Faust proposes that if Mephistopheles's is able to expose him, Faust, to such extreme pleasure that he utters the words “oh stay this beautiful moment” then he will be bound to Mephistopheles forever. That would halt his further development both as a man of learning but also his progression towards God and heavenly eternity. Mephistopheles gladly takes up Faust's challenge and as a consequence innocent people are damaged or die.

Running through the early Faust narrative is ambiguity. All his life Faust has studied Law, Medicine and Theology yet he has concluded he knows nothing. When the poodle is first seen only Faust can see the sparks coming after its heels. His servant, Wagner, perceives it as only a black dog, just looking for its master, quite ordinary. 

The resolution of ambiguity lies at the heart of the acquisition of knowledge and is crucial to how we understand the world. We humans find resolving ambiguity and discerning truth and reality very difficult. That is shown, for example, by the difficulty many people have had in pursuing their own best interests by taking an effective and easily available vaccine during this Covid-19 epidemic. We use intuition, we induce and deduce, we observe and record, we hypothesise and think of ways of testing those hypotheses, we calculate probabilities, we talk and listen, we challenge the ideas of others and those which we believe to be our own, and on bad days we resort to cynical, negative and destructive criticism of the ideas of others. The best of it, as Goethe liked to think, is that we strive but the reality is that, as Faust realises, we know little or nothing of the vast possibilities of creation and thoughts about creation.

There is a transition from earlier versions of the Faust legend such as that of Marlowe (c 1590) in which Faustus is damned. In Goethe's story Faust becomes a local ruler and it is the moment when he conceives of the good that he can do for his subjects that becomes the beautiful moment, a moment of compassion for his fellow men and women, which he wishes would stay for every. There is then a tussle between angels and Mephistopheles to claim Faust's soul. 

The angels win the battle and carry him off to heaven. As it will be for most of us, it was a close run thing. Human knowledge does not necessarily confer innocence.


Of course the scientific verification of reality is relatively new in human history (see DB Letter 75) and there is much in human belief, experience and behaviour which does not accord with science. There is the ontic bulge for example, things we have difficulty understanding -- (DBL No:48) and of course there is Religion and in the context of these letters -- the Christian Religion. Christianity runs into the area of things we cannot verify; God is an unsinkable hypothesis. Yet this is a loving God who leads humans out of their tendencies to dominate one another and commit cruel acts in the process (see DBLs 57, 33, 26, 28, 27). At the Christian center is the God who is King but who is humiliated and killed by humanity only to rise again as a leader clothed in compassion and love for humanity.  Humans can love others and show compassion but most of us can only apply that to a few others, mostly in the same family or tribe. Christianity demands that love and compassion be extended to the whole human race. It is a very demanding religion but its embrace can be joyful and ecstatic (see DBLs 18, 65).

Perhaps that is why Christ is best understood in the quiet of the desert far away from the noise and strife of mankind (see: DBL65).

Peace and Love to you all,

Paul.


"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these". (Matthew 6: 28-29).


Photo: Paul Munton.

A woodcock orchid Ophrys scolopax growing beside a road in

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Rosa Celeste :  Gustave Doré 's illustration for  Paradiso  Canto 31, where Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean Introductory Notes for the Discussion Group for St Clement's at Andrew Day's residence on 23 rd February 2024 on the subject of AJ Ayer's statement that: “ If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. “ Contemplative Experience. I will use “contemplative” rather than “mystic” in honour of “Mystic Meg” a News of the World sub editor and later astrologer associated with predicting things about National Lottery winners (which I am told, were rarely accurate!) I am going to start with describing some tiny portions of the experiences of contemplatives and will then go on to deal with AJ Ayer's objections. I shall leave a few seconds before I identify each quotation to allow people to think a
Read more
Image
24. On War. Dearly Beloved, It is difficult for us to cope with a war in Europe so close to home, especially because it is a war within Christendom between Christian communities. Apart from the civil war in Herzegovina, there has been peace in Europe for 77 years. My father was 28 years old and my mother 22 when war broke out in 1939. My father was already in the Royal Navy and my mother joined the Auxillary Territoral Service. “The War” in my family continued in talk and discussion long after the fighting had actually stopped. It was the background to my childhood and was made more prominent when my mother organised her family to fly us out to Malta in 1953 where my father's ship lay in Sliema Creek. We lodged close by whilst he finished an extra year of service obligated by the Korean War. One my earliest memories is of looking down from a prop driven Vickers Viscount aircraft at the ships on the Mediterranean sea shining in the sun far below. That was the same Mediterrane
Read more
Image
  Nearly Beloved, 91 Questions About the Nature of Questions . Last night at St Clement's Church the choir sang a diversity of music including, Poulenc's Four Motets entitled Tenebrae factae sunt – which might be loosely translated as “ There was darkness ”. These are difficult, modern, meditative pieces but they were beautifully and movingly sung by St Clement's Choir conducted and trained by Karol Jaworski. The source of the Tenebrae is to be found in Mark 15:33 which describes Christ's crucifixion: “ And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour .” T his service, its hymns, motets and varied readings, raised the most demanding questions of Christian belief. Is any question more demanding of our understanding than that posed in the second of the motets, Christ's cry from the cross: “My God, why hast though forsaken me?' Altogether the varied texts on the service sheet contained twelve qu
Read more