Think Again

James Tonkowich
November 12, 2010

This article was originally published on Boundless Webzine and has been reposted with permission.

Having been unceremoniously tossed out of his English boarding school, Patrick Leigh Fermor thrashed about wondering what to do next. He considered several options including a career in the Army, but in the end, he decided on something less conventional. At 18, he decided to walk across Europe following the two great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul).

Gathering up essentials including a backpack, boots, greatcoat, and, most importantly, pencils and notebooks, Fermor set out on December 9, 1933. Years later he revisited his trek through his abundant notebooks and described the journey in two books: The Gift of Time and Between the Woods and the Water.

In reflecting about his decision, Fermor wrote, “All of a sudden it was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do.” It is fair to say that sometimes we know “all of a sudden.” There are times when the results are marvelous, but, then again, it can also result in disaster. In fact, the next “all of a sudden” in Fermor’s story made my blood run cold.

Mind Tricks

None of us is fully aware of the historic moment in which we live, and Fermor was no exception. He and most of the friends he met along the way were blissfully ignorant — or perhaps willfully ignorant — that the charming, tranquil lives they were living would soon come to a violent and ugly end. Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and more and more people were drawn to him and to National Socialism. There were already concentration camps and war was on the horizon, visible to any who took the time to look.

In Germany with its numerous signs of Nazi power, Fermor stopped at a local bar where he met a factory hand about his age. The young man lived in his parents’ home and invited Fermor to sleep in his absent brother’s bed. Trying to save every penny, Fermor accepted the invitation, completely unprepared for what he found. He wrote:

When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine to Hitlermania. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans, and emblems. His [Stormtrooper] uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger. He explained these cult objects with fetishist zest, saving up till the last the centerpiece of his collection. It was an automatic pistol…

When Fermor asked whether the room seemed a bit “claustrophobic” with all the decorations, his host laughed. “You should have seen it last year!” At that time, he explained, “it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin, and Stalin, and Workers of the World, Unite!”

His new friend had been a Communist and, as such, the sworn enemy of the Nazis — some of whom he had met and pummeled in numerous street fights. Then his ideology took an abrupt U-turn.

‘Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood [Communism] was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!’ He snapped his fingers in the air. ‘And here I am.’

“All of a sudden!” he was a Nazi, an enthusiastic — even fanatical — follower of Adolf Hitler. Suddenly he just knew and there he was. I find that very scary.

All of a Sudden

Now I confess that there is something to intuition, to knowing “all of a sudden.” Fermor’s decision to walk across Europe that then allowed him to document the last days of an entire way of life strikes me as a good intuition. But to “all of a sudden” become a Nazi — even if you began as an equally violent thuggish Communist — seems more than just ill-advised. It’s downright evil.

Yet how many of our decisions, including our beliefs about morality and God, are explained with a subjective “suddenly I just knew”? For example, a well-loved hymn written (oddly enough) in 1933 enshrined this subjective sort of knowing when its chorus proclaims regarding Jesus: “You ask me how I know he lives, He lives within my heart!” How do I know? I just know.

While this is a perennial problem in the modern world as the hymn and Patrick Fermor’s experiences indicate, the problem has become increasingly acute. Rather than deferring to the authority of church, tradition, or reason, we have come to make decisions — particularly decisions about religion and morality — exclusively on subjective experience.

In his book Souls in Transition, sociologist Christian Smith presented the data that backs this up. He notes that among “emerging adults” (18- to 29-year-olds):

The vast majority are moral intuitionists — that is, they believe that they know what is right and wrong by attending to the subjective feelings or intuitions that they sense within themselves when they find themselves in various situations facing ethical questions.

They are also theological intuitionists, believing in the same way of knowing when it comes to questions about God. Smith writes:

What or who gets to determine what is true or good or right in or about religion for most emerging adults is each person for himself or herself. Religion doesn’t have any authority per se, any more than shopping malls have authority over their customers. Each individual knows best for himself or herself what ideas or help he or she might need.

Reasonable Faith

Not to pick on emerging adults, Smith makes it clear that emerging adults take their moral and religious cues from their parents. They learned to be intuitionists and, in the final analysis, relativists at home and, for the Christians among them, at church.

Yet Christianity has never until very recently been a religion of intuition or enlightenment. It has been a religion of revelation and reason. This is not to say that Christianity is not experiential. It is highly experiential. But Christian experience is based on revelation and reason, on truth that goes beyond our subjective “all of a sudden.” That is, Christians have believed that experience needs to be tested, evaluated, and even critiqued by revelation and reason (see 1 John 4:1-3).

After all, our faith rests, first and foremost, on Jesus who is the divine Logos, that is, the divine Word. “In the beginning,” John wrote in the first verse of his Gospel, “was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

One New Testament scholar notes that the Word “points to the truth that is of the very nature of God to reveal Himself.” Another adds:

Greeks used [logos] not only for the spoken word but also for the unspoken word, the word still in the mind — reason. When they applied it to the universe, they meant the rational principle that governs all things.

Thus when John calls Jesus “the Word,” he affirms that God reveals himself, that Jesus is that revelation (“the Word was God”) and that all things are ruled by reason since reason (logos) is central to God’s nature.

This has enormous implications for everyday life. It directs how we know God and what we know about Him. It gives us an objective way of determining what is moral and what is immoral. It lends order and structure to our lives and personal decision-making. It is even the basis of science on which we so fondly rely as the single source of objective truth. If God were not rational and did not reveal himself, we could know nothing reliable about God and the world and science would be nothing but a sham.

Elegantly summarizing this idea of Christ as the Logos, Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our own existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness.

Over the past hundred years or so, reason has fallen on hard times. Experience alone, we’ve been told, is authentic and real. Regardless of whether we are aware of it, we tacitly assume that morality and religion are private, inner matters that are not open to objective examination. As a result, we have come to believe that our morality and religion can only be found through experience or intuition. “All of a sudden,” we think, we will know.

It is time to think again.

Basing moral, theological, and ideological decisions on subjective experience and intuition is, as Fermor’s Nazi acquaintance reminds us, a dangerous and unstable business.

This is even true in the Church where, when we declare that “Jesus lives,” we come to the right conclusion even if it is for inadequate reasons. We dare not forget that the One who lives is the divine Logos and so we can look to revelation and reason as well as experience to know the truth about God and all he requires of us.