God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
is the same for everybody. And on wisdom, which chooses what is more perfect over what is less. Plato would be nodding at every step. Augustine goes on to talk about the pleasure of discovering the truth that is highest and most perfect, and how truth is our guide to happiness. This universal truth, he says, is God.
He seems to like the proof, and even rejoices at the end of it—but only for a moment. Ultimately, he doesn’t want a religion made of proofs. There’s no Christ in there, for one thing; one must hold to Christ by faith, Augustine instructs. Human reason has limits, and it depends above all on divine revelation and grace. Christians before and after him therefore had to worry that proofs might be a sin against humility, against the proper posture of human beings before their crucified God.
The major character in the Confessions, besides Augustine himself, is his mother, Monica. She was a Christian and hoped that her wayward son would become one too. He finally did convert while far away in Italy, where his thoughts caught up with her influence; Monica was made a saint for the role she played in his conversion. But she didn’t lead him by proofs—instead, by her faith, her love, and those powers and pressures that only a mother can exert. It turns out that my own mother’s birthday, August 27, is Monica’s feast day.
I was still little when Mom discovered Ramana Maharshi—not to be confused with the Beatles’ Maharishi—a man who had spent his life on a mountain in southern India, as little concerned with metaphysical proofs as with material possessions. Maharshi sat in silence, composed hymns to his mountain, Arunachala, and answered the questions people asked him. Though he had died fifty years earlier, my mother was growing more and more devoted to him and his teachings. I witnessed her turn to meditation, to walks in the woods, and to learning Sanskrit, determined to find the peace that she believed must lie beneath the pain of divorce. A hundred different ways, she would tell me that no search is more worthwhile than the search for the highest.
Meanwhile, what my father turned to was more of this world. He remarried, designed gardens for his clients, took up poker, and adopted a cat. He started going on trips back to Italy, and switched from making family trees of the English royals to even more magnificent, full-color ones of the Medicis. Dad’s rescue was in the people and places around him, while the help my mother sought took her further inward. I wanted some of both.
As they fell apart, my center didn’t hold; I had to find one of my own. I kept on reading Mom’s Bible and, when she wasn’t home, borrowing her books about meditation. I remembered the few prayers that she insisted I memorize as a child—the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm. I visited local churches on Sundays and during the week ducked into their prayer chapels, trying not to be seen, since I didn’t know what to do in front of an altar or in a pew. The very foreignness of those places, though, was a kind of comfort. My parents had always told me that what I believe would be up to me, and now it really was. Urgently.
Plato thought that all learning is really recollection, remembering what one’s soul already knew from the eternal forms before birth. Religion felt to me like a rediscovery. Even as I tried to hide what I was up to, my mother kept encouraging me. She has given me the essentials. She has given me the search, I wrote, after I had come to accept my new obsession. But my mind, that is truly my father’s. I brought to the search his skepticism, his feeling, and the desire, at least, for his meticulousness. By the middle of my senior year in high school, I could hardly think about anything else.
Augustine stressed that his capacity for faith came from God. But the desire for it, the pining, and the asking—that was from his mother, Monica. These drove him into doubts so deep that the only way out would be a new kind of conviction. “I have become a question to myself,” he writes in the Confessions.25 God became a question for me.
During Augustine’s life, the Roman Empire was collapsing, and its fall would consign the genre of proof to obscurity in the West for centuries. The end of ancient philosophy is usually marked by the murder of the philosopher Hypatia, daughter of the librarian of Alexandria, at the hands of a Christian mob in the year 415. Greek thought nearly disappeared from Europe, and away with the philosophical classics went the God of reason. Other religious genres took over instead among Christians: the suffering of martyrs, mystical prayer, cathedral building, asceticism, crusades. But wherever the Greeks were still being read, the genre of proof would live on in other guises.
TWO
The Island
MUSLIMS AND JEWS MAKE PROOF SAFE FOR REVELATION
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a fad for tropical islands. This was the generation of Americans that had fought on such islands in the Pacific and had since begun blowing up some of them with nuclear tests. People couldn’t get enough of island music (lap-steel guitars), island swimwear (named after the Bikini Atoll test site), or island fantasy vacations (in the country’s newest state). Gilligan had an island of his own on TV. The anthropologist Margaret Mead’s stories about life on distant islands described a liberated sexuality that would influence both the coming counterculture and the consumer culture that would succeed it. There’s still a picture at my father’s old house in San Diego of my grandmother next to Mead. Grandma would arrange for Mead to give a lecture at the university when she was in town, and then they would go shopping together.
Our truest selves live on islands—so goes the mythology—because they’re free from all the junk of society, with its distractions and phonies and stale dogmas. Islands are Eden before the Fall, where we can still walk around naked, unashamed. (Eden, protected from the world outside, was itself a kind of island.) This is life as it was meant to be. Philosophy started on the islands scattered around Greece, and it was on one of those too that John the Revelator saw his visions of how the world would end.
As a teenager I used to think about islands a lot. Lonely islands. I would draw pictures of them and imagine them while I was falling asleep. This threatened to divide me into two people at once: the one I ostensibly was—with this family, these friends, these expectations—and the one I would be if finally left on my own, just me and my island, alone with the melodrama of existence. It became an Occam’s razor for cutting down on habits and possessions; I would try to minimize what I would miss if I were instantly transported there; things like contact lenses and coffee became sins against it.
I mention all this to give some indication of the feeling that rises up in me when I read a singular book about an island, written in twelfth-century Granada by a Muslim philosopher named Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl. It’s called Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. The title is also the protagonist’s name, which means “Alive, son of Awake.” His story was popular and cosmopolitan, even while describing just about the most solitary kind of life imaginable. It also happened to be a pithy summary of what philosophers at the height of medieval Islamic civilization longed for with their proofs, and what they thought proofs could accomplish.
In the centuries after Rome fell, the ancient Greek classics found a new home in the world under Muslim rule. More than ever before, the genre of proof familiar today began to take shape in earnest. There was a God that some people felt the longing to prove, and there were ancient proofs in need of a God. The reappearance of the genre later on in Christian Europe owed a lot to what happened there and then, in the cities of the Muslim world.
It’s fitting, I think, that one of the world’s first philosophical novels can’t decide between science fiction and plagiarizing scripture; Ibn Tufayl gives two possible explanations for how his hero came to be, from infancy, the only human being on his entire island. Initially we learn that, by a convergence of natural forces explained in poetically licensed pseudoscience, Hayy comes about through spontaneous generation, from a mix of supernal sunlight and island mud. But Ibn Tufayl realizes that not everyone will think this plausible. So as not to obstruct the narrative at its outset, he offers a second alternative: Hayy is born elsewhere under suspicious circumstances and set adrift in the sea by his mother, like Moses in the Bible and the Qur’an, entrusted to God’s care. Natural or mythic: take your pick.
In either case, the mystique necessary to suspend our disbelief comes by way of the story’s location. We’re told that Hayy’s island lies in the equatorial seas near the coast of India. This was, for Ibn Tufayl, like setting a novel in low Earth orbit would be now. India