“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect.” – Jesus of Nazareth
There is something wrong with the world. Can you feel it? I think we all can. We all act like it’s the case even if we can’t quite put a finger on just what we feel. We all are trying to fix some perpetual problem and if we can’t find one, we are apt to make one. In our nobler moments we wish to change the world for the better. In our more human ones, we want to bend reality to our will. We rush to consume something, anything, that will fill that gnawing void that screams, “something’s just not right”. And as I see it, the only options we’ve got are to fix what’s here or try to transcend and ultimately discard it. This leaves us with a fundamental dichotomy. Either the present world (Reality) is Good and worthy of redemption or it is radically bad and we need to do away with it.
And this is also the chasm between Optimistic philosophies that celebrate this life with all its faults or Gnostic esoteric attempts to leave this veil of tears behind. I submit that the latter idea is the cry of a wounded soul, filled with ressentiment and a subtle hatred of all that is human disguised as a noble aspiration to the spiritual realm. The former philosophy declares with the God of Genesis that creation is “very good” and it would be a terrible mistake to give up on it. I’ll throw out here for our later consideration that the famous verse, John 3:16, states “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son”. We are certainly included in that domain, but the Greek word “κόσμον” (kosmon) covers reality in its totality. It would perhaps be more accurately rendered “God so loved the Universe”, but that doesn’t have the poetic ring of the Authorized Version.
I’m going to take a stab at explicating this dichotomy and propose a path through it by dealing with the idea of “perfection”. And to throw a wrench in the gears up front, I plan to eviscerate the idea of “perfection” as we know it, as I consider it to be a vicious lie with all manner of horrid downstream effects. But I’m also an open Christian and I believe with all my heart in the Goodness and absolute possibility of attaining the state described in the epigraphic quote above. If that doesn’t make sense now, come along and I’ll do my best to show you what I mean.
The Quest for Perfection
Just a few more tries and we’ll finally get it right, right? Just a few more social programs. Just a neo-neo-Enlightenment. Just a bit more Reason. Just a bit more Progress. Just a bit more Technology. Surely we can fix this problem of a thoroughly dissatisfying world if we just put our collective nose to the grind and innovate and iterate and add some other “–ate”s too. Or maybe an “–ism” will do the trick? Communism, Capitalism, Romanticism, Neo-Romanticism, or maybe “Enlightened” Consumerism. That modifier will keep us from our greed and bring Adam Smith’s glorious vision to bear on the world.
I am tempted to emblazon above all the aforementioned paths the warning provided Dante: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”. And indeed I think that all those seemingly beneficent Utopic quests are all side paths of good intention on the proverbial road to Hell. What progress have we really made toward reforming the human heart? Let us be honest. The historical record of human suffering puts the lie to all the superficially noble ideologies that Man has as yet proffered. If you will forgive the vulgarity, all our schemes of improvement are so much pissing in the wind. Now I’ll grant you that certain ideas leave us all much less urine-soaked than others. The track record of the Commun- variety of “-ism” has an undeniable track record of death and misery. But many of the others do great violence to the spirit of Humanity. Are we only to survive bodily? There is a cogent argument for the psychic and spiritual damage done by chasing a dream that keeps our body running but kills our souls. At least the physical slave has the dignity of knowing he is on the side of Justice. His soul and mind have the potential to remain free. The Man who embraces as good for him a philosophy which destroys his Spirit faces only the slow and shameful death of a life polluted with confusion and ennui.
I’m a cheerful sort, am I not? Bear with me, dear reader, for Hope springs eternal. We are getting there and if I try your patience perhaps it is because, in this world of shiny distraction and platitudinous positivity, your patience indeed requires trial.
I’ll give a taste of my conclusion to tide you over. Is the world perfectible? Yes. But likely not in the way we are now (or ever?) accustomed to thinking.
So now we come to the crux of the matter. I argue we are all trying to perfect the world and ourselves. The rub? Our concept of perfection. How would we even know if we got it right? Who is to say what “right” or “perfect” even are? The competing (and largely mutually exclusive) philosophies of Man attempt to answer these questions, to varying degrees of success. Let us see if we might come to an accord on some or all these principles. At the least, I hope I will provide sufficient food for thought should you wish to explore this further in your own life, agree with me or no.
What is Perfection?
I maintain that the prevailing idea of perfection in our world is mathematical, or at least vaguely Platonic. We even have the phrase and associated metaphorical concept, “a perfect circle”. What does the word mean in this context? We mean that the ratio of the circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly π. And I think this is indeed the type of image that comes before the average mind (as in normal, not 100 IQ) when presented with the idea of perfection.
Now I’ll ask a loaded question. If I were to paint a landscape, with a shining sun and lakes reflecting its brilliance, and used a computer program to ensure a “perfectly” circular sun and “perfectly” circular lakes, would the resultant vista be a perfect painting? No. Of course not. It would be jarring and unnatural. Why? Because perfect circles do not exist in nature. I think this should give us pause and prod us into pondering just what we mean by perfect.
As to the sort of washed-out Platonic vision, we should say something about his Forms. I’ll give a small disclaimer here that while I am about to attack him, I have great fondness for the old wrestler himself and immense gratitude for his contribution to human knowledge. He was one of the good ones, as we say. But Plato envisioned that every object in creation had a non-physical ideal that he called a Form. So the chair you’re sitting in is a flawed imitation of an ideal chair that exists more or less in the ether. In a way it’s a beautiful idea. But I think it is quite wrong. Or at least off track. But this idea sits nicely with the concept of mathematical perfection. Somewhere in a realm we cannot see exists an ideal version of everything with which we are dissatisfied. And the goal is to lift ourselves above this world of illusion to access this “perfect” realm. And I’m sorry to say that much of the common Christian concept of Heaven is just this. A world of ideal forms.
Consider a tree at your favorite park. It is beautiful. But is it perfect? Maybe a rearranged limb here or a bit more leaf density there and then, perhaps then. But who can fathom the perfect tree? Have you thought ever that the particular tree is perfect, in some way, just how it is? I am not suggesting some Panglossian vision that everything is the best it could be just the way it is. I agree with the gut feeling that something is wrong with the world. That tree is indeed not all it could be. How much more so ourselves?
Let us take a small detour into the epigraph I’ve offered. The word in Greek that Jesus uses (this is not the place for digressions into whether he was indeed speaking Koine or if Matthew translated him) is τέλειοι (teleioi). Perhaps you will recognize the root word “telos”. This is where we get the concept of teleology, or loosely speaking the study of ends. I like to think of it as thinking about purpose. What is the point of that tree? Or for that matter human life? A big question no doubt, but an essential one if we are to understand our lives, nature, art, even Love and God Himself.
To circle back to my painting example, the “perfect” way to paint the sun and the lakes according to a teleological view is to do so in the manner most fit to purpose. If the style is Realism, the perfect manifestation of the sun on canvas would be that which most closely resembles the actual sun. If my style is impressionistic, the perfect manner is that which conveys most strongly the emotions I strive to represent to the viewer. And so on.
So I’ll tease a definition of true perfection now before we travel back through the weeds of some modern missteps:
A thing is most perfect when it embodies most closely the purpose for which it was made.
Anything not to feel
Back to the mire. I want to tell you what I think the perennial quest to transcend the imperfect world is really about. It is the hopeless grasping after something which will dull or eliminate the pain of life. This is to me the root of all Gnostic philosophy, esoteric practice, religion that embraces the concept of Maya (that the physical world is illusory), et cetera. Siddhartha Gautama, the man we commonly call Buddha, taught that life is suffering (dukkha). Of course he didn’t mean all of it all the time. But he meant that pain is inextricably linked to accurate perception of Reality. I agree. To a large degree this life is one of pain. You cannot escape this. He taught as a corollary that this was caused by our desires or trishna (thirst). We want things to be a certain way, they are not, and so we suffer. Again I agree. But as a long-time Buddhist who converted to Christianity, the following teaching of the Buddha is where we now diverge. Siddhartha’s solution was to eliminate desire from our lives. I will tell you from personal experience and relatively long study of human life that such a task is impossible. Ironically, I’ll say that it is not even desirable. I have come to view the chasing of Nirvana as an elaborate form of spiritual suicide (none of this is to say there is no wisdom in Buddhism or that I am casting aspersion on sincere followers of that faith). What we want are properly ordered desires. Then only will we function properly. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There is a trend in the online world toward reading almost exclusively non-fiction, self-help style books and I think I’ve mostly figured out why that is. Primarily because this was formerly a habit of mine as well. I think what I’m about to lay out is also the driving force behind the revival of (sorely misunderstood) Stoicism and various ideas about manipulation of the physical universe through the power of our thoughts. As I said at the beginning of this section, I believe the goal here is to stop the pain at all costs. Reading non-fiction distances you from the raw and pummeling assault of feeling that comes from reading a great work of tragedy. Even distances you from the laughter that accompanies the seemingly absurd working of the world. Any story that punches you in the gut and gives you that feeling that you’re about to be hit by a train, you avoid for the comforting illusion that you are the Master of your Fate and Captain of your Soul. I make no argument for sentimentality or excessive emotional response to life. But the dead-behind-the-eyes retreat into cold rationality is ill-advised and, despite that being the apparent goal of modern “Stoicism”, would have made old Epictetus’s skin crawl.
This avoidance of difficult feeling is also why such practices come to resemble addictions. I might know that excessive boozing is destroying my body and soul but when I’m drunk I can’t feel the pain anymore. And so it goes with “positive thinking” and “mindfulness”. There is no end to the destructive fluff you can read to feel like you are in control of your life. Of course being in tune with the flow of your thought life is a great good, but that’s not what these books are teaching at root. What they are offering, the hook if you will, is to escape the suffering inherent to life. But let us get gravely serious for a moment. What will positive thinking or mindfulness do if your daughter dies in a tragic car accident? If your beloved son becomes a hopeless heroin addict, destroying not only his life but those of every one that loves him? We are but frail creatures and I guarantee that no philosophy of perfect thought will prove a balm for the wound in your soul these fates occasion. What words can we offer to soothe such loss? If you have the misfortune to suffer such things, you will break. In your own power, you are helpless before these “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Saying that “all things are impermanent” or that “nothing can affect me if I do not permit it” will not save you from the onslaught of misery. To the business book addicts, making loads of money will not save you when sorrow comes knocking. Is my characteristic cheer coming through again? I promise you a message of Hope. Hang on. For that is what we must do sometimes in this life.
A Word on Esoterica, Technology, and Transhumanism
At this stage we’ve only touched a completely understandable desire to escape the inescapable pain of life. I get it. You get it. We’ve all been there, as the saying goes. And there again we will likely be throughout life. However, this pain aversion can readily metastasize into something far more sinister. As another saying goes, hurting people hurt people.
This proliferation of the darker side of pain avoidance seems to occur in a somewhat stepwise fashion, with some natural exceptions and overlap. The first manifestation I perceive is the dive into esoterica. Perhaps there is some secret that I can learn which will allow me to alchemically transmute the raw ore of suffering into the shining gold of transcendence? Surely we are not meant to struggle so, I have just not learned the magic power that I need to impose my vision of perfection on this unfeeling Reality. And so another vain foray into my own power begins. Maybe I dabble in the Gnostic idea that Reality is an illusion created by a terrible demiurge and through special knowledge (gnosis) I can see through this façade to the True God and taste the ecstasy of leaving this world behind. But back of my mind now there is the idea I can’t shake that something about this world is radically evil. I must leave it behind, for it is beyond reform. And so a subtle suspicion of limitation creeps in. What if I am not worthy to achieve this power? What if the thing keeping me on this accursed plane is my own inadequacy? I have to work harder, learn more, uncover the hidden wisdom. Perhaps, reader, you will see the parallel to “hustle culture” and the “one weird trick” mentality. Here though, in the vaguely “spiritual” realm of the esoteric, I likely still preserve some of my joie de vivre. I want to be alive in this world, just on some special tier. Surely this life is good for some people who have the secrets.
But if I fail at this (and one certainly will), I come to resent the imperfection of this life. To where do I turn? Ah, technology (this progression from esoteric dabbling to tech obsession may happen in a reverse order in some cases). We as the human race have achieved an absolutely remarkable control over the external world through technology. I’d suggest the rise of atheistic ideas owes itself largely to this fact. Who needs God when I can level a mountain by splitting the atom? On the more mundane level, through a combination of devices and applications I can achieve a similarly remarkable control over my own life and person. I can dial in down to my heart rate variability how effective my workouts are. But now what realization rears its head? I am yet imperfect. I need rest. I still have these feelings that I don’t know what to do with. I come face to face with my own limitation. And I begin to despise that I have limits. What could I do if I could just shake off these shackles of my human feebleness? And so I begin to resent what I am. The kind of creature I am by nature imposes unbearable restrictions on what I can imagine. Now I look for a way to transcend these limits.
And these two impulses now meet in the unholy union of Transhumanism. I’ll define that term here to mean the transcendence of human limitation through advanced technology. I don’t have enough time to accomplish everything I desire to, but what if I lived forever through uploading my consciousness to the cloud? What if through cybernetic enhancements I can run faster, think better, remember everything I ever learn? And so through the envy of an impossible ideal I come to not only resent my humanness, but actually loathe it. I hate the petty bonds of this weak body and faltering mind. But lo! I can be more, do more, access never ending expansion of my personal power. Now I hate what I am. What someday I will no longer be if my schemes succeed.
If we take Aquinas’s definition of Love, “the will to Good of the beloved”, then its antithesis is Hatred. I actively will the destruction of the thing I hate. And now I have come to hate the very things that make me human. Limitation of all kinds is despised. In the most advanced cases I come to see humanity as a pox upon the earth. A disease which limits the, while still imperfect, overwhelming power of Nature. Life would be better if most us were just wiped out and the true Übermensch lived a virtual existence of unlimited possibility. Alas, I have become Evil. My desire to stop the pain has transformed me into the type of demonic creature that seeks to inflict it. Of course, this is all for the “greater good”.
And at the end of this tragic road I find that in attempting to overcome the inevitable death of my body I have murdered my soul.
The Way of Art
So where does our Hope lie? For I have promised you Hope. On the human level, I believe it is in Art that we find redemption. I think that there is greater redemption still in the work of God, but Art properly practiced is but a reflection of God’s work in the world. So let us take a look at the redemptive power of Art. After which, I will proffer an explanation of the source of this power in God Himself.
Here is an assertion: what makes art truly great is that, from the mathematical common-sense view of things, it is imperfect. Now I’ve hinted at this earlier on, but to evaluate art we need to revise our definition of perfection and differentiate it from technical facility.
When Vladimir Horowitz returned to his home country for a concert after the fall of the Soviet Union, he recorded one of the finest solo piano albums I’ve had the good pleasure to hear. But there are mistakes in the performance. He plays wrong notes. Not even just notes that are incorrect according to the score, but a few missteps that are not even in the correct key of the piece. There are many pianists that could play the score with technical accuracy surpassing his. The obvious question is: why do we revere his playing instinctively in contrast to the mere technicians? The answer is that the playing has what I will loosely call “soul”. This quality is different from “The Soul” that a human being has but has notable similarities. I’ll address this shortly.
Now, to keep moving I will state that I consider the recording in question to be “perfect”. This is according to the definition I offered earlier which is teleological. If you’ll recall, I argue:
A thing is most perfect when it embodies most closely the purpose for which it was made.
In other words, what is the purpose of this performance and indeed even of the music itself? If the purpose of music is to correctly execute the notes on the page, then a convincing MIDI performance would be the most perfect iteration of any given piece. But, if the purpose is the elevation of the human spirit, the imbuing of the written page with the spirit of a man, the healing and redemption of the spirit of the listener, then the electronically generated “perfect” performance will fail to accomplish these ends. And this is what happens in reality. The computer performance, pardon my colloquialism, sucks. And that is because the purpose of music is something more like what I described in the latter case. There is a quote dubiously attributed to Bach that music exists “that we might pray without words”. And indeed a performance like Mr. Horowitz’s opens to our hearts and souls that transcendent dimension that some poor wraiths seek through the means I previously described. Music is a way that the REAL God chooses to speak to us.
And what does He say? Here is where I want to emphasize again that several passages of playing in this performance have notes that are wrong. Now we’re getting at the matter. Redemption is to take something that is wrong, broken, seemingly beyond hope and restore it to its proper glory. Through his interpretive ability and musical sensitivity, Horowitz is able to turn the mistakes for good. It’s not just that we overlook them. It’s that the performance would be worse if it was technically perfect. And we forgive the mistakes because we know the ultimate destiny of the music, which is sublimity. The errors make manifest that Horowitz has limitations. And yet, from those limits something emerges which is greater than what he could achieve through his own power. His surrender to the music, not the bare notes, uplifts us all and makes us more of what we are meant to be. It has a perfecting quality, using now our new definition for the remainder of this discussion. The performance almost completely accomplishes the purpose for which it exists. Thus, it is perfect.
I want to take a small journey into literature to underscore these points and we’ll round off with taking aim at understanding the very nature of God Himself.
What is the purpose of human life? Grand question, isn’t it? Well I’m going to attempt to answer it. The point of human life is to manifest Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in cooperation with God. We could write volumes on how this plays out in the world but I’ve yet to come across a more complete idea of the Telos of Man. And I would say that Love is the means by which we accomplish this. Love being the simple decision to set your Will on creating and cultivating more Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.
Further, one of the main expressions of Love is compassion. Compassion literally mean “to suffer with”. Sharing in the suffering and burdens of others is way of expressing our Love and the best relationships (and literature, as I’ll argue presently) do not shy away from this fact, but involve people diving in with everything they’ve got.
So the way “out” of the problem of suffering is not to eradicate it but to redeem it. To make it count for something greater than just pain in a fleeting life of misery. And as I’ll say in a moment, I think the consequences of this pursuit are eternal. But first, literature.
What makes a great book? It won’t surprise you at this point, but I offer the teleological criterion yet again. And what is the purpose? Again, it won’t be a shock, but I’ll say that redemption is the aim and Art is one of the ways we can best accomplish this by human means. Though I do think God is involved in Art as well.
Here then is another sort of rub. The way we can best accomplish redemptive artwork is by looking evil straight in the face and dealing with it. Compassion is the way. And so many of the Great Works are almost incomprehensibly tragic. They deal in infidelity, murder, abuse, addiction, betrayal, genocide, horror, and even just deceptively simple disappointment. In short they display everything that is wrong with the world and with ourselves. But. The Great Works always do so with a mind to transforming these things into Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. Lesser “art” degenerately celebrates these horrid conditions and because it views redemption as an impossibility, resigning itself to the sordid and temporary pleasures that come from eager wrongdoing. Great Art shows us all our limitation, frailty, evildoing, fickleness, weakness, half-heartedness, greed and lust and says unquestionably: “there is still a spark! An original Goodness that shines in the face of the wayward soul.” This is the thing that is celebrated in great works. And it is the thing we look for in the world. We see what is Good and we work to help it grow with compassion. Our hearts break for the lost soul of the whore in Dostoyevsky. We see that we could be her in a different life. And we dare not cast the first stone if we are convicted of our own faults by the work.
Great artwork tells us what we could be. What we are meant to be. And what is that? Not some inhuman supercomputer that does everything right. But a flawed creature, awash in selfish sin, that by some miracle can yet do Good. A human being who stares the depths of evil in the face and says, “No. There is another path”, and tries to follow it.
I promised you Hope. Hope is “the confident expectation of Good to come”. And we can yet Hope in people to take the path of Goodness when they are dealt with compassionately and seen through the eyes of Love. A great writer loves his creations. And in so doing loves us. This compassionate love redeems us and heals our fractured Wills that we might be able to love in turn. As far as humans go, this is perfection.
But there is still more. These are all but signs pointing to the True Creator. The master storyteller, who loves what He has made, knows it is radically Good, and is resolutely set on redeeming it in all its glorious destiny, down to the last soul.
The Way of God
I mentioned back there about Horowitz and artwork having “soul”. What did I mean? I have come to see that as representing the piece of the creator that the work bears. In Biblical terms this is called the “image”. You probably see where I’m going here but Great Works bear the image of their creator. Something about that creator that is vital to his or her character and aims. I’ve said that the image of the creator in Art, the Soul of Art, is the redemptive power of Love and Compassion that manifests Goodness, Beauty, and Truth in the world. This is a reflection of the image of God in you.
You can choose to see everything I’m about to say as allegorical and it will still serve you. I believe it to be an accurate and True picture of the nature of Reality. As we would say nowadays, I take it literally. Regardless of your stance, I ask you to read it with an open mind, we’ve come this far after all. And as to that Hope, the ultimate Hope is what follows here.
We are told that we are created in the image of God. And we are able to create because of this. Creation is an essential aspect of God’s nature and it is one of the primary things that separates us from other animals. No other creature produces anything resembling what we call Art. And by extension I’d say that no other creature truly Loves, if you take my definition involving the Will aimed at manifesting Goodness through compassion.
See, I left out a bit of the Genesis account earlier. As God makes everything else he declares that it is “good”. Only when he creates Man does he say that it is “very good”. You are in fact God’s masterwork. The greatest thing he ever made. Perfect. But of course we have to continue to modulate our definitions a bit here. Stay with me.
Indeed, something is very wrong with the world and it’s our fault. That’s what sin is about. It is a force in the world and not just our individual actions, though it is that too. Now people often ask why there is evil in the world. It’s an old philosophical problem. But given what we can observe throughout history and in our own hearts, I am more apt to wonder “why is there any Good?” For that matter why is there anything at all? Why not just scrap this messed up world and start again? God could do it. The answer is that He Loves it. “For God so loved the world”. Kosmon. Everything he made. If you want to keep your sanity, I submit this is one of the most important things you could ever learn.
So what is God doing? His aim is to take all the suffering and evil in the world and redeem it so that it is Good in the end. But this is obviously not a Hollywood happy ending situation. The Biblical record itself is full of death and suffering and misery (this is also part of why it’s regarded as high literature even among non-believers). People say “why not just fix everything?” Well, how would you do it? Any scheme I’ve been able to come up with involves fundamentally altering the nature of human beings. But God doesn’t want to do that. He loves what he made, and transforming it into something else to make it better is not redemption. It is destruction of the thing in question. God is not a Transhumanist. He Himself became a man to show us this.
I’m not going to lay out the entire Gospel for you even if I could do so. But I ask you to consider the story of Jesus merely in light of what I’ve argued here. What is God’s solution to the problem of everything wrong with the world and with us? Compassion. Love. Redemption. Jesus said “greater love hath no man than this, that he might lay down his life for his friends”. And that he did. For us all.
I’m not asking you to believe that right now, I want only to come to my conclusion about perfection. God doesn’t say, “to hell with this world”. He came up with a way to bring it back from the brink of destruction, his great work of art, that He loves so much. He says “No, I understand. I will be with you. I will walk as you walk. And I’ll give up that precious life to show you how much I love you.” And so we are confronted with all the evil in the world and ourselves and we are given a path to redemption through His plan that we can fulfill the purpose for which he made us. To be perfect. Τέλειοι. One day we’ll be exactly what he planned for us to be from the beginning, like Him. This is the fruition of the epigraph I gave. And in the meantime each moment is suited to His purpose in doing this, and so is perfect as well. Everything is going according to plan. From the teleological view, everything is perfect the way it is and will just keep getting better. And we get to play a part in this by acting out that Love and Compassion through our art and relationships.
To end, I’d like you to consider something else. Most schemes I can think of for fixing the world involve either eliminating some particular people or some fundamental aspect of what we are, desire for instance. In contrast, the all-powerful Creator of the Universe loves you, yes, you individually, even the broken way you are, so much that He would rather be brutally tortured to death than be without you. He has a plan for you. And it is perfect.