By DONALD DeMARCO
I came across an anonymous remark that stirred my imagination: “We don’t need farms anymore, we buy our food from grocery stores.” Whether the author of this gem was being facetious or whether he was a candidate for the Naiveté of the Year Award did not matter to me. It was the implications of his words that set my mind spinning.
Philosophy began when certain individuals realized that there is something beyond appearances. A stick appears to bend when placed below the surface of the water line. In reality, however, it does not bend. Appearance and reality are not identical. This insight (which is truly an “in-sight”) inaugurated the philosophical quest for truth.
What is it that causes us to grow? Is the secret of life to be found in atoms? Is there an unseen God who superintends the cosmos? What is the principle that we cannot see which, nonetheless, is the cause of everything that we can see?
We experience shopping for groceries. But we know that the grocery store does not produce the food that it sells. It is a seller and not a grower. A minimum of knowledge leads us to recognize that it is the farm that produces food. We could go further in tracing the farm to the principles of nature, and nature to God. The pursuit of the ultimate cause of what we experience is the essential task of philosophy. We want to find out what came first. We have a hunch that this impulse will prove to be most rewarding.
At night the spectacle of the numerous and numinous stars fills us with wonder, the experience of knowing the effects without knowing, but only imagining, what their cause might be. Wonder, then, becomes the stimulus that sets us on the path of philosophy.
We experience a certain amount of freedom. That is axiomatic. But our freedom cannot come first, though we might be seduced in thinking so if we cannot get beyond experience. If freedom came first, however, it would be unbounded, chaotic, meaningless. Yet we treasure freedom and long for its more complete possession. There must be something anterior to freedom that makes it both meaningful and desirable. That something, which is so commonly denied, is truth. Truth is to freedom what the Creator is to creation.
A homey example may illuminate the point. If I want to purchase a suit, I am not interested in any size suit whatsoever. I want a suit that fits me. My body, therefore, precedes my suit. No one would think I was born with the suit I am wearing. I am measured so that the suit conforms to my size and shape.
Truth precedes freedom. Our love for truth should exceed out love for freedom. The fundamental and overarching message that Pope St. John Paul II proclaimed in his lengthy encyclical, Splendor Veritatis (The Splendor of Truth), is found in Christ’s comment “Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). It is a notion that is emblazoned on mottos of several institutions of higher learning.
I offer a few examples, though there are many, to illustrate the point: Johns Hopkins University: Veritas vos liberabit (The Truth shall make you free); University of Tennessee: Veritatem cognoscentis nos liberat (You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free). The verse “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” is inscribed on the Main Building at the University of Texas and at Parks Library at Iowa State University.
We may ask, what impels us to seek the causes that operate beyond the realm of appearance? Why can’t we be satisfied with mere experience? The answer, I suggest, is that what is first is foremost, and the wonder we feel that impels us to discover the cause of things is a manifestation of our desire for God which is indelibly inscribed in our souls. To think that God does not exist because we live in a world of experience is just as erroneous as thinking that there are no farms since food is plentiful at the grocery store. Philosophy can be enlightening.
If we believed that grocery stores, and not farms, provide food, we would soon die of starvation.
At the same time, if we believe that all there is to life is what we see, we will die of spiritual starvation. What is first is foremost. This is the path to wisdom, simply stated.
We all have the ability, whether it is exercised or not, of seeing hints of another world peeping through this one. The philosopher, the poet, and the theologian all utilize this ability to see the world as mirroring God. C.S. Lewis has expressed the matter elegantly:
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of God-light’ in the woods of our experience.”
I have adapted Lewis’ thought to verse. And I include a portion of it as I conclude this brief essay:
When God appears within our life,
It is between extremes
Of death’s abysmal emptiness
And sun’s bedazzling beams;
His entrance in our world of gray
Is gentle and discreet;
Through patches of His God-Light
At the altar of our feet.
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