Weekly Update 1

"Where Sinks the Voice of Music into Silence" Ancell Stronach, 1924

(The image has nothing to do with anything. I just like it. The auction catalogue notes, "Stronach's poetic title does little to reveal the meaning or moment that this work depicts, but it assists in evoking the atmosphere that the painting itself conveys. The feeling is symbolic and meaningful with a sense of mysticism, creativity, and spirituality.")

The goal for this week was 6000 words written and Chapter 2 fully drafted. These were meant to be the same thing, though Chapter 2 is done at 5300 words and I have another 1000 written on Chapter 3. So I'm nicely on schedule at the moment. Since I didn't have any desperate catching up to do, I took the morning to rehearse with my violinist friend for the first time in months. The voice of music very much did not sink down into silence.

A snippet from the week's work:

            Anselm probably never met a professed atheist. He knew non-Christians, certainly: formidable objections to the Christian account of redemption raised by some learned Jews recently arrived in London were a key impetus to his treatise on the Atonement (Cur Deus Homo, 1094–1098). But complete unbelief was something he knew as a possibility only from Scripture: “The Fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Yet he took seriously the challenge of proving that there is a God, and that God is what Christians believe he is. Why?

            It was not because unbelief was a live option, for him or for anyone he knew, but because he longed to understand what he believed. We owe to Anselm the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” which was the original title of the Proslogion, in which he set forth his most famous argument for the existence of God. We entirely miss the point of faith seeking understanding if we think of it purely as a matter of intellectual restlessness: I believe x, but I won’t feel as though my belief in x is intellectually respectable until I can offer a proof that x is true. The enterprise is at least as much a matter of love as it is of knowledge. I love the truth, and in faith I glimpse it, but only partially, fleetingly. I want to rest in it, luxuriate in it, possess it fully instead of merely yearning for it.

            Anselm’s arguments for the existence of God are efforts to possess the truth of God’s existence and nature as fully as possible. They begin with faith, in the sense that the motivation for engaging in the arguments is the lively desire to know in full what at first one only glimpses in part. But the arguments are meant to be persuasive, at least in principle, even to the unbeliever: for if I cannot put the existence and nature of God beyond the range of all scruple and doubt, how can I rest in it as something fully known?