Light On Dark Water

I think I mentioned a few days ago that I had come across a very interesting essay bringing together the central insights of these two men, Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” and Newman’s “illative sense.” At the time I hadn’t finished the essay, but now that I have I recommend it very strongly. I haven't read any of Polanyi at all, and although I read Newman’s Grammar of Assent some years ago it was a very fragmented, late-night reading and I really didn’t get it. The basic idea in both cases seems to be summed up in the phrase “we know more than we can say”—that we can have genuine knowledge that is not reducible to propositions and not expressible in words at all (or not fully expressible). Here’s a key paragraph:

The faith that can be put into words is not the real faith. At the core of the act of faith is a personal encounter between God and the believer. Newman held that there were two luminous beings in our experience, the self and God. But the very fullness of direct apprehension of the self and God mocks all of our efforts to capture self or God in words. Even in the act of speaking as best we can, we know that the self that can be put into words is not the real self and the God that can be put into words is not the real God. No set of propositions can fully disclose who I am. Even as I try to tell a few truths about myself, my mind surveys other aspects of my interior life that run deep into the tacit dimension. When the words run out, I remain—a mystery even to myself, luminous, real, incommunicable, a small image of the inexhaustible mystery of God. In both cases, the material that resists abstraction and that cannot be communicated in words is not a negligible residue, devoid of intellectual meaning, but is instead the heart of the whole matter and the point of every proposition.

(My emphasis). I can’t agree strongly enough with this; it’s behind a lot of what I write, including the name of this blog. The echoes of the Tao te Ching (“The way that can be known is not the eternal way…”) are deliberate.. But don’t think there is some kind of mushy syncretism going on here. On the contrary, this is a model of the way insights from other religions can illuminate and augment Catholic thought without being used as a tool for undermining it.

Here’s the essay. The author teaches at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. I had not encountered his name before but I may read his book, Personal Catholicism, although maybe I should read Newman (again) and Polanyi first. By the way, the formatting of the essay leaves something to be desired; it isn’t typographically obvious where the quotations are.

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