New Year's Resolution

2025 is going to be wild

Sertillanges once said, “We must recognize and adopt the causes of knowledge, then provide them, and not defer attention to the foundations of our building until the moment of putting up the roof.” I've been meditating on this house analogy for the past two months. What teachings are essential for building the house of our mind?

As I've mulled this over, I've found another underlying principle hidden within the quote. A house is composed of many parts all arranged into a system, yet it is a house because of the unity of the house. Plotinus says, "Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity gone, neither remains; thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart and their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity."

Looking around, I find that Sertillanges agrees (at least on this basic principle of the quote, which is taken out of Plotinus' broader context), and that the unifying principle for Sertillanges' philosophy of worldview is his theory of truth. "Each truth is a fragment which does not stand alone but reveals connections on every side. Truth in itself is one, and the Truth is God." Somehow, according to Sertillanges, all truth is united, and that this unity is related to the unity of God as Truth. Because he was a Thomist, I assume he means this in an analogous way, since, though he believes in both God's transcendence and immanence, the Thomist's place more emphasis on the transcendence of God.

Practically, though, even if truth is analogous to Truth, we can still find an interesting principle. He says, "The true springs up in the same soil as the good: their roots communicate. Broken from the common root and therefore less in contact with the soil, one or other suffers; the soul grows anemic or the mind wilts. On the contrary, by feeding the mind on truth one enlightens the conscience, by fostering good one guides knowledge." Truth, then, should be thought of as related to the good. This is a very helpful thing for him to point out, as it helps guide us on what knowledge ought to be fostered; on what knowledge is the foundation. He goes on to tie the analogy closer to God: "This universal, which is at one and the same time the true and the good, cannot be honored as the true—we cannot enter into intimate union with it, discover its traces, and yield ourselves to its mighty sway—unless we recognize and serve it equally as the good."

I don't have room here to get into the implications of this idea, suffice to say that any foundation of knowledge must be tied back and through a knowledge of God and must be ordered to serve the good and the truth. Thus, a foundation of knowledge is one which acts to order all other knowledge as well as one which serves God. This may not seem to be important, but it has huge implications. We can see this principle of thought played out with Spinoza. When talking about the problem of the one and the many, Spinoza critiques others for having started with the observable universe and moving up towards God instead of starting from God and going down toward the created universe. He says the Divine "ought to be studied first because it is first in the order of knowledge and in the order of things... Hence it has come to pass that there was nothing of which men thought less than the divine nature while they have been studying natural objects, and when they afterwards applied themselves to think about God, there was nothing of which they could think less than those prior fictions upon which they had built their knowledge of natural things, for these fictions could in now way help to the knowledge of the divine nature."

Though I disagree with Spinoza's broader argument, this idea is helpful. If all things come from God, meaning all of ordered creation comes from God, then the knowledge of God is the foundation from which all truth is united. If we are looking to build a house of knowledge, a unity of truth, then we must first begin with the thing which will unite them, and that is a thorough understanding of the knowledge of God.

My plan is simple but requires a bit of explanation.

Remembering a thing is only demonstrated by your ability to recall it. If I tell you there are seventeen pigs in the field and then the next day you cannot tell me that there are seventeen pigs in the field, then you did not remember the information. Now, you may remember us talking about it, and have an impression of the experience, but this is not the same as remembering the information, it is instead reminiscing about the experience you had with me. Reminiscence is not the same as remembrance.

When it comes to theological study, almost everyone I know says they have knowledge, but they only demonstrate reminiscence. They cannot articulate their knowledge unless they are reading it from whatever source they are reminiscing about having once studied; they must go back to the book or video or podcast and get the information. But how is this like building a unity of truth inside the mind? Remember what Plotinus said, that if the parts are scattered and not in a unity then the being of the thing is shattered. If I want to build unity of knowledge, then I must remember. This is why Aquinas says, "Try to store everything that you can in the cupboard of the mind, like one who aims at filling a vessel." He says this because, as Sertillanges points out, "The creative faculty largely depends on the wisdom and controlled activity of the memory." If we want to have a comprehensive, creative view of the world which is unified in truth, then we must be able to recall the unifying truths which underlie all of reality.

Let's think, then, of what these underlying truths are which need to be remembered. Primarily, I'd say that this unifying principle needs to be based on the scriptures, as they are the revelation of God to us for our benefit as humans. They are the sure truth.

To that end, I'd say we need a comprehensive and robust Prolegomena, or an understanding of the underlying assumptions for believing in the Word of God. Though I believe Christians have knowledge of God through a sense of the Divine, I still think for any unifying system of thought a comprehensive Prolegomena is needed. Following Geisler, I'd suggest that these underlying beliefs are that there is a theistic God who created the world and can miraculously intervene in it, a God who has revealed Himself in both general and special revelation, which revelation is subject to the laws of logic and which contains objectively meaningful statements that are objectively true and true exclusively; which statements can be properly understood in analogous language, the meaning and truth of which can be understood objectively, including those elements relating to historical events and which revelation can be systematized by a complete and comprehensive theological method. All of this would need to be thoroughly understood, articulated, and memorized. I am currently working through Geisler's explanations (and plan to find other resources, like perhaps Bavinck's Prolegomena) and am chipping away at it slowly. This work will take many years to tie down, as it involves complicated philosophical problems that I am unable to articulate.

Next would be a basic knowledge of the bible. To this end I am working through the book of Genesis, as it is the foundation for everything else. I'm following the work of the Theopolis Institute (James Jordan and Peter Leithart) as well as the likes of Mike Heiser, Nathan French, Catherine McDowell, ect. Essentially I'll be writing out long essays chapter by chapter, though Genesis, and then working to memorize them.

The way I will be memorizing them is through a Lukasa board. This is a complicated idea I don't have time to explain, but, essentially, I will use odd rocks, seashells, and any other inorganic thing I can find, and I will glue them to a cutting board. These objects will then have ideas tied to them, and the order they are placed on the board will tied not only the concept to a concrete object, but will give a tangible path though which to connect the ideas together. Weird concept, but this is a method pre-literate cultures used (and still used) to memorize massive amounts of oral information. The plan is not to have verbatim memorization, but only to have conceptual memorization, and to that end the Lukasa board is especially equipped, since the idea of verbatim memorization is completely foreign to oral cultures but only exists as a concept within highly literate society.

I'm going to be posting these essays on my blog, joshuabuzzard.com, as I go through both my study of the Prolegomena and the book of Genesis. I'm hoping to have the entire book of Genesis memorized (conceptually) and be part way through the Prolegomena by the end of 2025. It is a lot to bite off, but I know it will be worth it.

Here is a link to my playlist for the Theopolis Institute. Their app and website don’t show any episodes before like episode 250, and the only way to access them is on Sound Cloud. I looked through every episode and hunted down the ones having to do with Genesis. Then I tried to arrange them in a basic order, though it may be nonsense in some places. Here’s the link if you’re interested. It’s about 78 hours of content.