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Columbusity

Serendipity is the word we use when someone who is looking for one thing discovers another, more valuable thing. It is odd that we have no word for serendipity’s close-by but troublesome cousin, especially because it is a more common variety of experience. I refer to a situation in which someone looks for one thing, discovers a more valuable thing, but doesn’t know it. I propose the word ‘columbusity,’ in honor of Christopher Columbus, who in looking for China discovered the New World but persisted in believing he hadn’t.

Neil Postman, Columbusity, from Conscientious Objections, pp. 129-130

I disagreed with this essay as much as I have ever disagreed with anything of Postman’s I’ve read. That’s fine. But the word ‘columbusity’ seems helpful to me. I am not really sure at this point why. Perhaps it simply reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s trek in Orthodoxy (and since it’s one of my favorite books…). Chesterton himself likened his pilgrimage to a boat-voyage:

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town? (from the Introduction to Orthodoxy).

Anyhow, Postman makes the point that we sometimes discover things we don’t expect, and then fail to realize that we’ve discovered them at all. It often takes me years to discover that I discovered something a few years ago.

Jonathan Edwards’ Fountain Analogy of Creation

Thus it is fit, since there is an infinite fountain of light and knowledge, that this light should shine forth in beams of communicated knowledge and understanding; and, as there is an infinite fountain of holiness, moral excellence, and beauty, that so it should flow out in communicated holiness. And that, as there is an infinite fulness of joy and happiness, so these should have emanation, and become a fountain flowing out in abundant streams, as beams from the sun…
…The diffusive disposition that excited God to give creatures existence, was rather a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fulness of the divinity to flow out and diffuse itself…
Therefore, to speak strictly according to truth, we may suppose, that a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fulness, was what excited him to create the world; and so, that the emanation itself was aimed at by him as a last end of the creation.

– A Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World, from The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Banner of Truth), p. 100 (Read it for free HERE).

Summary: God’s glory relates to his fullness (in Hebrew it denotes weight). By way of analogy, God is brimming with beauty (holiness), love, and joy; and this love, beauty and joy, as it were, overflows into the act and substance of creation.

The danger here is Pantheism. If God is like a fountain, and creation is the overflow of that fountain, then creation itself is God (as though God were extending his being into creation). This is where the analogy fails. The point to make here is that God’s way of overflowing is through speech.

  • Psalm 33:6 By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

Jesus says that it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks (Mat. 12:34, Luke 6:45). In Greek, the word abundance here indicates an overflowing. The abundance of the heart overflows into the speech of the mouth. Whatever the heart is full of tends to come out in words. Using Edwards’ analogy, and relating it to Jesus’ words, the true analogy becomes clear. Out of God’s abundance he speaks creation into being. It is the overflow of his heart (who he is in himself) coming out of his (metaphorical) mouth.

Thus we avoid pantheism. The fact that creation is the overflow of God does not mean that it is God. Rather, creation belongs to God in the same way that our own speech belongs to us. Our words reflect who we are and our words belong to us. God’s words, which make the worlds, reflect his fullness (glory) and they belong to him.

A Paradoxical Humour

In her essay The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, Dorothy Sayers makes this passing comment about  Jesus Christ:

…When confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by a rule of thumb.

– From Creed or Chaos?, p. 6

I don’t think I have ever read a better summary of the subversive character of Jesus as a man of conversation. He confounded men with the head-side of a coin, and with heads of grain. He asked trick questions. He told the educated that they knew nothing. He could take any man and make him a character in a story that inevitably demonstrated that he (the man) was a real-life bad guy (Imagine if Jesus were to turn your life into a parable). He would tell people that the way up was the way down, that strength was actually weakness, and weakness strength. He promised life through his own death. And he was not afraid to be misunderstood – for our misunderstandings of him do not harm him, rather they only reveal us to be what he said we were in his parables.

By ‘humour,’ Sayers does not mean that Jesus was a comedian. She speaks of his mood or state of mind. He spoke in paradoxes, which means that he thought in paradoxes. Chesterton said that a paradox is the truth standing on its head. I’ve added to that that a parable is the truth rolling around in the dirt, and irony (another favorite of Jesus) is the truth doing a back-flip. What fun it must be, therefore, to have the mind of Christ. His mind is doing gymnastics. Therefore his speech comes out like cartwheels – which is a lot more fun (and of course true) than the vast majority of speech we hear these days, which seems to only walk (slowly) in zigzagged lines and backpedal from time to time.

Jesus’ opponents often considered his speech to be blasphemous. They also likely considered him to be flippant. He wasn’t flippant, he was only flipping – the truth on its head. That was his mood, and it should be ours as well. Call it subversiveness. Call him the greater Jacob – the Usurper – he grabs ahold of the truth’s ankle, picks it up, and lets it dangle upside down as a spectacle. And men still don’t want to look – or more precisely, they don’t want to listen.