Mystery's Critique of Logic

Two decades ago, I remember Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and being taken aback by the way that the author referred to there being great mysteries of the faith. As a young man raised in a Protestant environment, this was not something I was familiar with: how is there mystery in the faith? What is the mystery? Isn't that which has been revealed a dispelling of mystery? It came off as being something that almost managed to hurt the faith: something which emphasized the faith in a way that is non-rational. I never thought it was more about emphasizing that which is beyond us -- beyond rationality itself.

I would later learn that the sacraments themselves are referred to as Holy Mysteries and that the word is used by Saints even describe the totality of the revealed truth as a mystery:

Just as soul and body combine to produce a human being, so practice of the virtues and contemplation together constitute a unique spiritual wisdom, and the Old and New Testaments together form a single mystery.

St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia, Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue & Vice (Location 9206 on Kindle)

St. Maximus the Confessor

This knowledge very much rocked my perception of theology. At that time, I simply wrote it off as some romantic flourish of words and hadn't taken it fully in for what it meant. It didn't truly affect the way that I saw the world, and nothing had really changed inside of me.

Like virtually all Westerners, I had always felt that there should be no mysteries when it comes to the revealed truth. After all, it is truth, and I had always perceived the world (and my religion) as something that could be fully understood. One of the hallmarks of being a modern is living in a mystery-less world, after all. A world in which everything can be explained, and the levels on which it cannot be explained are so far deep into the issue that no normal person could possibly be that interested in it.

While I have no theology degree and I am definitely not equipped to speak with the knowledge of a theologian on the topic, it seems rather plain that when the Saints speak of the mysteries they are speaking about the revealed truths as they stand beyond the full comprehension and logic of man. This idea itself is a criticism and a rebuttal of Western modernity: it contests that some things are unknowable, revealed, and beyond us.

It is also in the concept of mystery that we find our first dispute with logic: logic is incomplete. 

By believing in mystery and revelation at all, the Christian has criticized logic and empiricism, and has cast doubt on the absolute certainty of the scientist's world. For we must remember, if logic and evidence are not enough to explain the totality of the universe (and as Christians we believe in the necessity of divine revelation), then any system which is based entirely on them is bound to be problematic for it cannot contain within it the totality of the truth. Any full acknowledgment of the truth must contain within it a genuflection to the great mysteries and revelations that are beyond the grasp of man.

In a very real sense, to try to overcome these things is like building the Tower of Babel: the attempt to supersede God by reaching the heavens ourselves. Yet, it is heaven alone that is accessible by God, just as the mysteries are accessible alone by God. This leads to a conclusion that does not sit well with people who believe that everything has an answer, we may just not have found it yet.

Moreover, logic is incomplete because it leads to deconstructions. Logic requires some form of value judgment to have a direction. And, even when a value is inserted, it is quite easy to come up with circumstances by which the values begin to deconstruct themselves...

For instance: Is a man who is a slave to his passions free when he indulges his passions? Is it logical for man to "fight for peace" when it is fighting itself that is the means to disrupt peace?

Even when we attach values that give us lofty assumptions about how the world should be, we see that logic only succeeds in twisting itself into contradictions. It is almost as if logic conspires against us by destroying the paradoxes which are necessary for understanding the world in a holistic manner, like the coward who is somehow courageous in admitting he is a coward (thank you, George R. R. Martin).

Logic gives birth to morbid dispositions that only mystery can fix. 

This might be the most interesting point I am going to try to make today.

When we believe that everything must be assessed on the short track of logic, then the suffering that we endure and the injustice of the world appear as a cruel joke that cannot be justified. The problem of evil becomes insurmountable because we are always cutting the cake in such a way where the passage through suffering does not produce edification, or where endured injustices does not produce glory but is simply an ugly moment that the guilty party and God ("if he exists") have to be held accountable for. In a godless world, there is no justice, there is no righteousness: there is only the suffering moment and the joyous moment, and the suffering always seems to hurt us more than the joy seems to heal us.

Logic ultimately produces a world where everything has to be reflective of the tyrannical demands of a man with a value and an ax to grind who is unwilling to admit that God could disagree with him. The man who remembers suffering and places it at the forefront of his mind and has already denied that a soul can advance spiritually, that suffering can have meaning, stands before everything shouting that it is all for naught.

The irony of this, of course, is that he may later in the day find himself in a discussion with another man where he agrees to disagree on value judgments or understands pragmatic decision making as acceptable, sacrificing a little A for a little B, but when it comes to God, no such flexibility is permitted. It can be good, in his world, to punish his daughter so that she learns to pick up her toys, and it can also be a good tale to hear about the man who became homeless from drug addiction but this homelessness saved him from his desires in the end..  Everything must conform to near-sighted human logic and tricks of language and structure, but only when he is in a certain mode with a certain attitude -- namely, only when he desires to be mad at God.

God has given us mysteries and the Old & New Testament themselves are to be understood as a mystery according to the Saints, but in the Western Christian mindset, everything is meant to be interpreted through a strict rationalism that deconstructs itself and everything with it.

This is quite reminiscent of the meme of the "Sword of Tactical Nihilism," in which the atheist wields strict, unforgiving, high-bar logic against that which he dislikes but does not do so against that which he likes.

The real lesson is, though, that logic itself usually functions as tactical nihilism, and many people are sucked into it because they feel that they are actually doing something because, in so many words, they hadn't crossed any wires that they can see.


Conclusion

While Stephen Pinker and others would argue that man engages in ego-protective reasoning, I would go a step further and say that all logic ultimately functions explicitly to serve the biases of the thinker, and that what liberates us from bias is when we understand the limitations of logic and no longer look to this as the final answer is mystery. For just as surely as we make mistakes that benefit ourselves whenever given the option, and just as surely as rules can be deconstructed as arbitrary when you look at it from another way, logic fails us.

But when we are open to mystery, when we are open to divine revelation, when we have faith that God is at the helm, we understand that the world is not subject to the  whims of despot with a dialectic, but is in the hands of our Father.