Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Mountain Springs

Pope’s Pierian Spring - Ranges

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In this chapter, I start with Pope, using his famous metaphor of the Pierian Spring to initiate a journey into skepticism and into what I’d call poetic nature mysticism, aspects of which can be seen in the writings of Daoists, Stoics, Montaigne, Rabelais, Voltaire, Camus, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, Forster, and Rushdie. In addition to using a range of nature imagery and water symbolism, I’ll use Heraclitus’ river of eternal change as a central paradox.

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Pope’s Pierian Spring

Agnostics contend that no one’s qualified to understand the meaning of life, not even those who are extremely knowledgeable or wise. It may seem surprising to say that those who think deeply can’t know the meaning of life. Yet while superficial knowledge is a dangerous thing, deep knowledge can be an even more dangerous thing. Think the atom bomb, anthrax, or Herbert Spencer’s worry about the dangers of Europeans mating with Japanese. What matters is having the humility to see that no matter how deep our knowledge, there are always depths we can’t sound. Or, to put it paradoxically, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.

Spencer errs in his view of miscegenation, yet he understands that the advance of science holds within it an advance toward grand mysteries, the type of unknowable ‘knowledge’ traditionally associated with religion. In his 1867 work, First Principles, Spencer argues that science sometimes acts as if it existed in a world apart from religion, “by alleging agencies of a radically unlike kind.” Yet in doing this, science assumes a ‘deep’ knowledge similar to religious gnosis: by “tacitly assum[ing] a knowledge of these agencies, it has continued unscientific.” Using the examples of magnetism, heat and light, Spencer suggests that the explanation of natural effects doesn’t necessarily lead to scientific certainty, but rather to scientific uncertainty:

the most advanced men of science are abandoning these later conceptions, as their predecessors abandoned the earlier ones. Magnetism, heat, light &c., which were awhile since spoken of as so many distinct imponderables, physicists are now beginning to regard as different modes of manifestation of some one universal force; and in so doing are ceasing to think of this force as comprehensible. […] Every deeper and more general power arrived at as a cause of phenomena, has been at once less comprehensible than the special ones it superseded, in the sense of being less definitely representable in thought; while it has been more comprehensible in the sense that its actions have been more completely predicable.

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In his Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope writes that A little learning is a dangerous thing, yet he’s careful to emphasize that more knowledge should create more humility. It shouldn’t create hauteur, which in French primarily means literal height but in English takes the French secondary meaning of a disdainful or superior attitude — une attitude méprisante. If you’re looking for truth, rather than status or superiority, to know more means to know that there’s always more to know:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring*: [*near Mount Olympus;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, gives insight & learning]
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But, those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lengthened way,
The increasing prospects tire our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Pope’s point is that even if we drink deeply from the Pierian Spring of Mount Olympus (haunt of the Muses and home of the gods), we should still understand that our knowledge isn’t absolute. There are other sacred founts, other deity-laden rivers, other valleys of mystical depth, and other jagged peaks of power and insight.

This isn’t to say that knowledge isn’t valuable, or that all levels of knowledge are equal. Clearly we’d rather be taught by a geography teacher who understands that Lyon is on the other side of the Alps from Turin. It’s perhaps even better to be taught by a poet-geographer who, like Shelley, has climbed Mont Blanc to see “Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down / From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,” and has travelled through the Simplon Pass to study the rugged beauty of the Jungfrau, with its powerful comrades the Eiger and the Mönch, and has travelled to the Tyrol to wonder at the jagged beauty of the Saslong Peak.

My hypothetical poet-geographer may well begin to suspect, with Shelley, that such “wilderness has a mysterious tongue / Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, / So solemn, so serene, that man may be, / But for such faith, with nature reconciled.” All of which will only make him want to travel further, perhaps south down the spine of Italy or northeast to the Austrian peaks of the Ennstal Range, and from there to scour the skies for yet other ranges and other peaks.

Pushing Pope’s point about Alps on Alps further, we also have to recognize that the Alps aren’t the only, and certainly not the highest, mountain range on Earth. If the teacher only knows about the Alps, then he shouldn’t be giving lectures on the Indian subcontinent, mixing up the Ganges with the Indus.

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Ranges

Nor should the educated climber, planting his flag on the top of Everest and calling it Sagarmāthā and Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng, imagine that the vertical metaphor confers on him some sort of intellectual honour (much less hauteur) on account of his personal achievement. He shouldn’t forget that vertical metaphors can be applied elsewhere and otherwise. These metaphors can even be reversed and yet retain the same meaning of erudite: a deep-sea diver can reach knowledge that’s just as profound, intoxicating, and helpful as the elevated knowledge of a mountain climber. Moreover, literal values can be as important as metaphorical values: farmers and biologists understand wheat and cows better than either the mountain climber or the deep-sea diver, both of whom need bread and butter on their plate.

Knowledge is often seen in terms of fields, yet this metaphor tends to depict things as if one field of knowledge was separate from another. It makes more sense to see disciplines or areas of expertise as overlapping spectra, and then place these spectra on a sphere that rotates around a vertical pole, and then a horizontal pole. The more we displace and re-place the notion of a field of knowledge, the more the mountain climber, the scuba-diver, and the farmer are understood to be part of one larger system of human knowledge. What they find in the depths of the sky, at the bottom of the sea, or in the soil, will determine our understanding of air, water, and earth; of weather systems, water currents, and soil conditions; of bird migrations, fish stocks, and plant cycles; etc. These things determine the survival and prosperity of our species. There’s no strict hierarchy in knowledge, unless at the top of the list one puts interdependent, interconnected, influential, conditional, contingent, relative, interdisciplinary, and co-operative.

Pope’s metaphor of a sacred fount of knowledge suggests a European expansion rather than a global one, yet it can easily be extended to the Carpathians, Caucasus, and Himalayas.

Such an extension is in line with Samuel Johnson’s opening couplet in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1748): “Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru.” While neither Pope nor Johnson drank deeply from either Indian or Chinese fountains of knowledge (and certainly didn’t sound the depths of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Daoism), they nevertheless articulated paradigms of open-mindedness that urged continual expansion and exploration. Like Montaigne, Descartes, Locke, Swift, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, they pried open the European mind, so that it might see larger vistas of geography, history, culture, science, philosophy, religion, etc.

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Next: A Chinese Interlude

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