“Thinking and speaking of creation as the gift of being from nothing, and of creatures as recipients of and participants in that gift, suggests some things to say about what it is for creatures to know — or, better put, to perform the act of knowing. By definition, this act must establish a relation between knower and known, and this relation will inevitably be, if participation is the right category to use to specify the relation between God and creatures, a relation between one participant in God and another. This means, to begin with, that knower and known share a fundamental likeness and intimacy because each participates in God. This intimate likeness at the level of being is what makes knowledge both possible and desirable for those capable of it. Most creatures are of course not capable of it: they can be known but they cannot know. But for us, who can know other creatures, which is itself a rare gift, a radiant trace of the being of the creator, such knowledge is a lure: it draws us as the scent of a fox draws foxhounds, kindling our desire and delight and ordering our action. A little more precision about what this act of knowing is like will show why.
“Any act of knowing by one creature of another is an intensification of their shared creaturely intimacy as participants in God. This shared intimacy is a prerequisite for knowing’s intensification of it. You, because you are already related to any creature you may know or seek to know by the fact that you too are a creature (I leave out of account here the question of God’s knowledge of us and of our knowledge of God), can intensify and deepen that intimacy of being by intentionally making your likeness to and difference from the known a matter of admiringly interested reflexive delight. ‘Reflexive’ is the key term here. Every creature enters into relations with particular other creatures of a peculiar intimacy: this bee extracts pollen from just that sunflower, burrowing deep to get it; that particular ficus religiosa strikes its roots deep into the drily acidic soil of exactly this place; Anna, my siberian husky, recognizes me as among her significant human others. These are all particular relations between individuals, and they are all in some sense intentional intensifications of the ordinary creaturely intimacy each creature shares with all others, which is to say that they are all in some sense sought, moved toward, actively pursued. Even the blindly desperate light-seeking of the green plant in a dim room is intentional in this relaxed sense. All living creatures, certainly, intentionally seek intensified intimacies in these ways, and there is a case to be made, too, for extending this description to the performances of nonliving creatures: for the fire’s seeking of fuel, and so on. This way of talking does not, of course, imply or suggest that plants or insects (and much less fire or water) have consciousness of the intimacies they seek, or of the delight they produce. It implies only that intensified intimacies are sought by all living creatures.
“Admiringly interested reflexive delight in such intensified intimacies, however, is a much rarer possibility, and this is what knowledge is: it is distinguished from other creaturely intimacies by being potentially or actually reflexive. Reflexivity, in turn, includes the knower’s awareness of herself as being acquainted with some particular other in just this admiringly delighted way: knowers are aware (or could be aware) of themselves as creatures who are ecstatically intimate with that, whatever it is, and of exactly that as being the recipient of their intimately ecstatic acquaintance. ‘Ecstatically’ here bears its precise etymological sense of ‘standing outside’ (ek-stasis): all intimate acquaintance with a creature other than yourself involves leaving yourself behind in order to go out and meet the other. The act of knowing, then, always bears upon both the creature known and the knower, and specifically upon the former as intimately intended by the latter, and the latter as intimately intending the former. Understood in this way, the relation established in an act of knowing comes in degrees, as do all intimacies: a particular knowledge of any creature by another always occupies a place on a gamut running from complete ignorance, utter lack of acquaintance, to full and complete admiring delight in everything about the known other. This last is of course available only to God.
“Knowledge understood in this way is itself an instance of the participation-relation. You, as knower, gain from the creature known a property you could not have had without the known’s being what it is, which is not merely your delightedly reflexive intimacy with it, but also your awareness of yourself as delightedly intimate in just that way. Your knowledge of any creature is therefore a kind of participation in it, as is its being known by you a participation of it in you. In both cases, the participation in question is derived from the more fundamental participation present in the order of being — participation in God, that is — shared by knower and known. And finally, your acts of knowing are in a limited sense creative acts. They make actual a good that without them was only potential: the dual good of your knowing something you can know, and of something’s being known as it is by one who can so know it. Both goods make richer and deeper the ordered harmony that is the cosmos, healing the damage of ignorance and spreading the light of knowledge. In this, human acts of knowing bear the vestigial trace of God’s knowing act of creatio ex nihilo.”
— from Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (The Catholic University of America Press, 2009)
James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)
William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)
What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 minutes)
Learning to live interrogatively — Matthew Lee Anderson reflects on the fact that questions can be asked about faith from a posture of doubt or from an eagerness to grow in understanding. (42 minutes)
Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
Everything about everything comes from God — Theologian Andrew Davison discusses how the idea of participation informs our understanding of God, of Creation, of being, of knowing, of loving, of law, of economics, etc. (28 minutes)
Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)
A.I., power, control, & knowledge — Ken Myers shares some paragraphs from Langdon Winner‘s seminal book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977) and from Roger Shattuck‘s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). An interview with Shattuck is also presented. (31 minutes)
Deconstructing the myths of modernity — In order to counter modernity’s fragmentation, Paul Tyson argues that we must recover a foundation of reality based on meaning and being. (35 minutes)
Recovering a sacramental imagination — Hans Boersma argues that we need to recover the pre-modern view that Creation not only points to God, but that it participates in the very being of God — that in God we live and move and have our being. (29 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
This world is now my home — Belden Lane describes several approaches to understanding how we experience the sacredness of earthly places and how we learn to see God manifest in His Creation. (48 minutes)
Living in a meshwork world — Theologian Norma Wirzba believes that Creation is the “material manifestation of God’s love” and that this fundamental teaching affects everything, especially our understanding of the meaning of modern environmental crises and climate change. (17 minutes)
Sneaking past watchful dragons — Junius Johnson describes how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Creation resonates with that of C. S. Lewis and Bonaventure, all three of whom served as mentors in his thinking about beauty. (18 minutes)
Faith born of wonder — Theologian Andrew Davison echoes a theme in the work of G. K. Chesterton, describing the work of apologetics as awakening a sense of wonder in the reality of Creation as a beautiful gift. (23 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
Cosmology without God — Modern science is practiced in the context of beliefs that are intrinsically metaphysical and theological, even though practitioners of science claim (and usually genuinely believe) that their disciplines are philosophically neutral. David Alcalde challenges such claims within a sub-field of astrophysics. (21 minutes)
Dallas Willard on discipleship — Dallas Willard talks about how pastors should understand their vocation as one of making disciples — apprentices of Jesus — and that the training of pastors must include a commitment to pursue spiritual wisdom and faithfulness. (21 minutes)
Carelessly invoking “science” in the pandemic — Historian of science Steven Shapin talks about about how the authority of “science” has been invoked by many political authorities during the pandemic, yet how scientific pursuits are deeply human endeavors. (18 minutes)
Hans Boersma on For the Life of the World — Drawing from Alexander Schmemann’s book, Hans Boersma asserts that a recovered understanding of the relationship between God and Creation is essential to addressing a host of modern cultural crises. (17 minutes)
The revelatory power of Creation — Gerald McDermott explains the theological and cultural obstacles that prevent us from recognizing Creation as an epiphany (16 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 139 — FEATURED GUESTS:
W. Bradford Littlejohn, Simon Oliver, Matthew Levering, Esther Lightcap Meek, Paul Tyson, and David Fagerberg
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 117 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Dickerson, Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Jeffry Davis, Philip Ryken, and Robert P. George
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 104 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Le Fanu, Garret Keizer, Daniel Ritchie, Monica Ganas, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Peter J. Leithart
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
After irony — Richard Rorty’s tangled spiritual pilgrimage has origins in being the grandson of social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and the son of committed Leninists.
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 66 — FEATURED GUESTS: Leon Kass, Nigel Cameron, Susan Wise Bauer, Esther Lightcap Meek, John Shelton Lawrence, and Ralph Wood
