The Importance of Things
Glory be to God for dappled things. And hammers.
It’s not news that we’re surrounded by a culture of lies and confusion. Daily, millions insist that men are women and women aren’t different than men, think that one day you’ll own nothing and be happy, or that one day you’ll upload your mind to some computer network - and that will still be you. What poppycock.
We can beat these obvious falsehoods back by exposing their contradiction, but if we offer nothing in lieu, more falsehoods will enter (Matthew 12:43-45). So while this may bear slight fruits,
The lie cannot be defeated by a vacuity. It has to be defeated by truth. We have to immerse ourselves in things: trees, stars, mud, grouse, hay, stones, brooks, rain, dogs, fire; and the manmade things closest to the human hand and its work: hammer, shovel, paintbrush, wrench, wheel.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
We can’t just suck wrong ideas out of people’s heads and then put ‘right’ ones back in place which are just as liable to leave. We need things to do. We need to recognize the whole reality of the human person as created - from the Logos, yes, but first from clay, not from sheer information. It’s not about information, it’s about experience.
Information technology encroaches the modern world on all fronts. It is a cornerstone of modernity. Yet, it is a degree separated from the divinely Created world: it is subcreation and as such, can be a lie obfuscating the reality of things. Information can be muddled unlike things.
Things, in their beautiful and imposing integrity, do not easily bend to lies. A bull is a bull and not a cow. Grass is food for cattle but not for man. A warbler is alive but a rock is not. The three-hundred-pound stone will not move for a little child or a boy or a feminist professor. Water expands when it freezes and will break anything unless you allow for that. Things are what they are. They know no slogans, and they do not lie. And they give witness to the glory of God.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
Things give witness to the glory of God, and we shouldn’t reject them in favor of pure information or theory.
The word was made flesh and dwelt among us. His was and is a relationship not of telepathy, but experience through created things.
Our faith is incarnate and to deny this is heresy - gnosticism or nominalism. The things we do - the atoms we manipulate - have moral significance. In an era of vapid communication over bits and bytes, I think we often forget this. And what is more, interaction with things grounds us to the moral realities; the divine plan is written upon the heart of every man and into every subatomic particle if we are only attentive to it.
There is an absolute importance, then, that man maintain a degree of mastery over the world: to remember our inheritance as sons and daughters of the King. But to maintain this finite portion of an infinite inheritance, we must do finite things that are connected back to the infinite. We must perform particular duties at the service of God. Some of us (not all) need to fix motorbikes to grow in attentiveness, as one mechanic puts it:
In diagnosing and fixing things made by others, one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgements. This is easier said than done. Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance in our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
Abstract men do not grow in abstract virtue. Particular men grow in particular virtues.
One could conjecture, then, that all productive pursuits allow us to grow in virtue. This is true along with the converse - that pursuits are productive so long as they allow us to grow in virtue. Development of virtue points to productivity (even if indirect) and vice versa.
If we find ourselves in a position where we can be productive, we can find a path to virtue.
Sometimes, the road is unclear though when the road is covered by lies - stories we make up to obscure something (as opposed to a story we make up to illuminate something, even if the way it is illuminated is by the form of a veil). When something is obscured, it is difficult to engage with it. When we make things difficult to engage with (for no good reason), we make it difficult to initiate apprentices. In an age where we have fewer masters by which youngsters may be initiated into the arts and must do so themselves, we need less layers of abstraction and lies, not more.
This, by the way, is why I have somewhat of a moral apprehension to paint. I'm not a hardliner - painting existing drywall isn't a sin, and putting a good protective coat over your handrail is good sense, but paint over mahogany is downright reprehensible. It's ugly, messy, expensive, and it decries the beauty of Created things in favor of blue-shifted-grey latex paint.
We need more direct engagement with reality. If we want to beat back any of the heresies of our day, we don’t need to spend more time ‘going into the enemy territory’ by flooding comment sections with well-formulated arguments. It’s like arguing with the men in Plato’s cave. No argument is worthwhile.
They need to go touch grass. And if you think that your rhetoric is better than getting someone to actively participate in the world, you do too.
Correct interaction with things gives us the ability to develop all the virtues necessary to be subcreators without losing sight and respect of the immense power of Creation - we must still be obedient to Him at the end (as Christ was on the cross).
One can't be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one's fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician's power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from a prior submission... her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically... [which] do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them.
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
... and these natural necessities of music answer to the divine will. Again, a bull is a bull and not a cow - if you castrate it, it doesn't become a cow, but a steer. Engagement with Things reminds us that there are certain fixed limits which are not to be passed, but that within that, there is still freedom - even if we are perfectly proficient. The skilled craftsman is simultaneous master and slave - just as our Lord Himself was.
I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Active participation with created things allows us to work out our salvation - through work we immerse in the great mysteries of the world and internalize them.