I can't show you the Creation, those kairos not chronos "molecules" of the Presence and Fathering of God through the Son, the dance of the Holy Spirit on the face of the deep; you can't show me the moment when a chance variation was burped out of other chance existences: we are both left looking at a mystery, a spiraling beyond, behind, effectively infinite.
So what?
Well, it matters, doesn't it? I mean, in all forms of human understanding--not data accumulation, but understanding--the truth of Origin matters; more than that, the Origin drives, grounds, completes any system of thought, any belief system. So where are we if we cannot understand the Origin of that worldview we hold? How do we understand Euclid without knowing that "the point is that which has no part"? How do we account for all if we limit ourselves to our own mind, or to a model? What is the hope of finding truth without sure knowledge of it? It seems to me that all understanding of Origin demands faith and inquiry simultaneously. Simplicus, writing in the 6th century AD a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, summarizes Anaximander, one of the "Presocratics":
Of those who say that [the first principle] is one and moving and indefinite, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian who became successor and pupil to Thales, said that the indefinite (to apeiron) is both principle (archē) and element (stoicheion) of the things that are, and he was the first to introduce this name of the principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other indefinite (apeiron) nature, from which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them; and those things, from which there is coming-to-be for the things that are, are also those into which is their passing-away, in accordance with what must be. For they give penalty (dikê) and recompense to one another for their injustice (adikia) in accordance with the ordering of time—speaking of them in rather poetical terms. It is clear that having seen the change of the four elements into each other, he did not think it fit to make some one of these underlying subject, but something else, apart from these. (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24, lines 13ff. = 12A9 and B1)
Anaximander and the other Presocratics like Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and others would not have considered science as distinct from philosophy and theology; in fact, philosophy, or "love of wisdom" would have been the activity, a desiring of truth; in reading the almost mystical love-poems to God or the gods of some Prescratics interspersed with logical deductions about fire and water, one begins to understand how the desire for understanding is truly personal, a longing, an adoration. And these lover-thinkers, writing about a thousand years before Simplicus was building a bridge between them and the sharp and clear focus of Aristotle on the Prime Mover, focused upon origin. Was it one of the four elements, or an archē (principle) and stoicheion (element) that has a nature and indicates thus a kosmos, an ordered creation, with laws and purpose that allows for a criteria for all things: natural laws, moral laws, a justice that is based not on human will or the super-wills, the will to power of Hesiod's Theogony, but rather flowing from this "must be," this Esse?
In the foundations of Western thought, here between the philosophers and the poets, one sees three streams begin to develop: the inquiry into order, the indwelling of personified forces, and the unity of both. The Presocratics are astounding because they see Origin as fundamentally ordered, discernable, and yet also mystical and poetic. Xenophanes says: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature cloud / purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold.” He references the poetic and does not parse the cloud into separate drops. Socrates and Plato follow this unified inquiry and indwelling via the Socratic method of defining, questioning, and the doctrine of recollection, a kind of indwelling of the Forms; Hesiod and Homer are not scientific in any way but are those possessed by nature as super-persons, willing servants of the Muses; conversely, Aristotle begins, in a sense, the almost total focus on logical inquiry, and though he unites the physical and meta-physical realities into one great pyramid resulting in a Prime Mover as Origin and End, he seems to turn away from the poetic as anything more than "medicine" for the emotional pressures of the human polity, writing treatises and manuals, not mystical works (see the more medical language of the Poetics).
The search for Origin becomes thus less unified, the different foci (on inquiry or on mystical indwelling) becoming potentially different towers of worldviews built on different methodological foundations. I find these different foci somehow connected to the difference between the view of time, of the present, as kairos and sequential, as chronos. Kairos means, literally, "opportune" or "critical" moment; the best illustrations are the humble ones--kairos is that moment when Odysseus could most effectively and beautifully string and bend back his great bow, arrow poised perfectly, to shoot through the axes; kairos is the moment when Penelope's weaving shuttle can move through the loom-threads most beautifully. It is, in a sense the best activity at the present moment; the fullness of time. It also has a sense of the indwelling of the gods, the 'propitious' moment, the moment when all forces come together to produce something. Yet, if one observes Socrates, each moment has its kairos: there is the moment, always, to stop for Beauty, and his apparent "lateness" in terms of chronos, or sequential, measured time to the feasts of the Gorgias and the Symposium, respectively, is a criticism not truly of Socrates but of the focus of those around him on purely human, rational matters. For Beauty there is no chronos, only kairos. For a more purely logical inquiry or scientific 'cause and effect,' methodology, the sequence is essential.
It seems to me that Origin lies also within kairos, and is prior in nature to chronos, the sequential, the measurable on a more subjective human scale. Thus, Origin is essentially mysterious, unknowable except perhaps by the mystic or the poet. However, is it then no longer inquiry? As science and religion and poetics slowly, over history, become strangers, separate disciplines (not even activities anymore, but mountains of data and theories), is Origin now archaic? Or do we amputate the hope of it altogether, living within scientific models like Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Copernicus as one might live inside a tent and look at the stars through a special window created for viewing?
Can we have truth without being able to demonstrate through a microscope or an extrapolated theory that seems grounded in available rock samples?
As I live more on the front lines of the secular world, I see more clearly the sharp divide, and the impossibility of dialogue without knowledge of Origin--for even the more radically scientific, not poetic, Aristotle helped us to see that origin is also end, in the sense that it is the sense of everything that flows from it, and so creates the purpose via the creation of order. Aristotle's Prime Mover is removed, in a sense, from the world that flows from it, but the world is a child of that One, and only fulfills itself in the sense that it fulfills the order set in motion by the Prime Mover. Therefore, in Aristotle I also find kairos, though in a less poetic or mystical way; perhaps he does have a kind of synthesis, and this makes him a kind of bridge between the threads of pure rational inquiry (science) and the ecstatic, poetic, mystical, recollected sense of the whole in the kairos.
I believe, with Socrates, and later Christian thinkers that Origin, the true Origin of all we know, of reality, is eternal kairos, meta-chronos; it is the moment of indwelling, the propitious present out of which everything else flows, takes meaning. If we cannot know it, or have hope of finding it, we are lost in a deep cave, in the dark. We can, of course, do experiments on the rocks, observe the hints in the darkness, and if our inquiries are not infected with the desire for personal gain, we can see glimpses of That for the sake of Which all else is, the Source. The inquiry for the human person is the activity, reason working in accordance with reality, that is one side of knowing, of wisdom. But in order to know the whole--or to have a 'worldview'--one must see the Wholeness in some respect, first. And we are meant to see the Whole, made to see it, which is what sets us apart from other levels of being. Inquiry is the struggle to get out of the cave and to see, eventually, the sun itself, symbolic in Plato's Cave as the Truth, the Origin, the Beauty: Truth itself as One, as Origin and End. Yet the turn from the things we see by the light of the Sun and seeing the Sun itself, Truth itself, is like a turn from chronos to the eternal kairos, outside of, beyond chronos, and only one who participates in this eternal present, as Augustine describes it in the latter half of the Confessions, can truly have hope of a coherent and truthful worldview.
How do we then speak to each other across disciplines and cultures and 'views' if any hope of knowing the Origin is gone? How, if we are no longer working with models but rather are locked inside them? Or, after Kant, and Hume, and Descartes, we cannot even truly be outside our own minds?
Much of our world now has lost the ability to see beyond self--my ideas, my preference, my reality--and so my only hope as a teacher is to do what Socrates attempts with the proto--Nietzsche Callicles: to try to reach a young, more flexible person through the love found in questioning. And to model the search myself, as I am searching, in love and trembling, to find the Origin. Teaching is not rhetoric primarily, but a combination of many things--first, it is a realization that one is an image to a student, easily confused with the images on the wall of Plato's Cave. One does not want to become another image for a young soul to mistake for the arduous journey; thus, if one's students become addicted to the you as teacher, it means you have become too important, and the search for Truth, for Origin, will die with you, or as soon as the student is old enough and wise enough to see that you, also, struggle often in the dark.
The best metaphor for teaching is a mixed one--sorry--first, that of educare, or "leading out," and second, a kind of midwifery. How do these go together? As Socrates states in the Cave metaphor, only one who has gone on the search out of the Cave can truly lead, for as Aquinas and even Chaucer (through the mini-polis of the pilgrimage under Harry Bailey) relate, a leader cannot lead if he does not know the purpose for the human person, the telos for both the human person and for human community. A leader must have a sense of the Truth, the End. In Aquinas, this is why the state and Church must cooperate; in Chaucer, this is the clue to the failure of the pilgrimage. Harry Bailey from the first mistakes the telos of the pilgrimage itself; in fact, he goes farther and introduces a contrary end: that of pleasure in the place of penance. He cannot lead, because he cannot see Origin and End. Therefore, he cannot "lead out" and order the stories, nor can he help the pilgrims "birth" stories that will further the pilgrims toward the true end of the road; instead, disorder and division and sin are introduced almost from the end of the first tale. Perhaps it is no mistake that Chaucer never finished the Pilgrimage; perhaps as it was set up, it could have no good end, but must be re-founded.
Like any good leader, then, a teacher is not focused solely on persuasion (too tempting to self-aggrandizement and narrowing both logic and poetics to dispose towards certain judgments decided upon first by the teacher--not true inquiry, which is dialectical, not rhetorical) but rather on giving the human person the situation and tools to begin to search: for if humans are truly made by and for Origin and End, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, then as fire desires "up" and earth "down," we will naturally, with our particular human faculties, desire Origin, the fullness of Truth: and we will find ecstasy, eternal happiness, in beholding this, because it is Beautiful. And the most important truth is that the human person, in order to find, must also search, for as love is a movement towards what is True, Good, and Beautiful, so the rational struggle and search is the natural precursor, the disposition to the poetic, the mystical, the receptive. We are rational animals, not plants, capable of relationship and love on a cosmic scale. Thus, teachers work to develop reason, and like a father putting his son on his shoulders to see the view, as leaders and midwives we offer instances and images and orderings and inquiries that are themselves indwellings, the kairoi.
We then get out of the way and this, for a teacher, is the propitious moment, the moment when the student is able to bend back that Odyssean bow, or send the shuttle like a bird in flight through the loom-threads, and we shoot and weave and search alongside: this is the kairos of teaching, when God imbues the art with His love and power, and can begin to indwell, calling us both, student and teacher, to the sight of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: the Origin.
