When John Ruskin visited the Scuola San Rocco in Venice, which contains no fewer than sixty paintings by his revered Tintoretto, he characteristically spilled paragraph after paragraph in The Stones of Venice interpreting each of the vast canvases, often dingy and difficult to read even today, and which would have been far harder for him to see then, by the light of a single candle. But when he came face-to-face with the culminating Crucifixion in the final room, he wrote just one sentence: “I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator; for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise”. Not only do we believe this verdict even more than we believe anything else that Ruskin wrote about the Scuola, but in an important sense it also tells us more. His very inarticulateness is more profound than anything he could have said at greater length.
The word ‘enchantment’ carries two distinct meanings in the dictionary. Typically, the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries disagree about which is the primary. According to the Oxford, the first pays homage to its roots, and evokes the casting of a spell by magic or sorcery. The second, wider meaning refers more generally to ‘the property of delighting; an enraptured condition’. Enchantment occupies the space where language fails, as it failed Ruskin; but the failure is of words only, not of experience.
I want to try in these remarks to identify what I see as one of the chief disclosures of The Matter with Things, which is relevant of both of these dictionary meanings. This is that the book seeks to restore to its proper and central place in our lives what I call the authenticity of the inarticulate.
In part, this restoration is a product of the book’s basic theme, which even the most inattentive reader cannot miss, that processes are more fundamental than things. (Not only did Heraclitus say ‘All things flow’ – panta rhei – but he also cleverly remembered the grammatical rule in Greek that the neuter plural takes a singular verb.) It is intrinsically harder to be articulate about movement than about stasis. The flickering flame is far more elusive of verbal description than the apparently rigid crystal.
Even with objects at rest, however, you cannot capture their true essence in language. In chapter 15, Iain cites Bryan Magee’s example of the towel left carelessly in a heap on the bathroom floor. It is impossible to use words to convey the real look of it. The more words you use, the further away you get from your goal. True as this is of bathroom towels, it is truer still of things which are more important. They simply cannot be explained without either missing the point, altering their essence, or destroying the very thing sought to be explained. As Magee goes on: ‘How does one say the Mona Lisa or Leonardo’s Last Supper? The assumption that everything of significance that can be experienced, or known, or communicated is capable of being uttered in words would be too preposterous to merit a moment’s entertainment were it not for the fact that it has underlain so much philosophy in the twentieth century’.
This limitation arises because we encounter these things either not in words at all, or not ultimately in words. This introduces another key concept in the book: the realm of the implicit. The explicit is the bright glare of midday; the implicit is the eloquent luminosity of twilight. It is a paradox that a half-light is more illuminating than the full beam – what Wordsworth calls the light of common day.
I have mentioned the concept of flow, and the notion of the implicit. Connected with these is the point, again familiar to readers of The Matter with Things, that relationships are more important than the things related. These betweennesses are also inherently dynamic. (Outside mathematics, a relationship that does not move is scarcely a relationship.) As such, relationships are much more like flames than crystals. They cannot be pinned down or reduced to words. They are mysterious.
The act of listening to music provides not one but two examples. First, there is the relationship between the notes. Although this is a gross oversimplification of the myriad relationships which arise in a piece of music, take the familiar falling sevenths of Elgar’s Nimrod. Each is composed of just two notes: but what an emotional charge they carry. Where is this falling seventh? It is not in the first note. It is not in the second. You cannot see it in the printed score. When does it start, or finish? The only answer to these questions – a half-answer – is provided by the second relationship which listening to music highlights. The musical encounter, such a precious experience that some people organise their lives in pursuit of it, is located in the metaphorical space which arises from the interaction of the purely physical world of sound, and the mental world of intentionality brought to bear by the listening subject.
A mystery, then. But that which is mysterious is not for that reason untrue, as quantum mechanics demonstrate. It is only that the mystery invites us to enter into a more profound understanding of where truth might lie. Even in a poem, which is made up of words, the essence is not in the words. It is in the spaces between them, like the spaces between the notes of a piece of music. In each case, it is in these gaps that there arises the infinity of associations, conscious and unconscious, which constitute the true artistic experience.
There are many cases of prolific writers falling silent at the last. In the book, Iain cites the well-known case of Thomas Aquinas. I have already mentioned Ruskin standing before the Crucifixion of Tintoretto. In Roger Scruton’s terms, Ruskin had (for once) come face-to-face with the problem of ‘effing the ineffable’. In his essay of this title in Confessions of a Heretic, Scruton too quotes the example of Aquinas. Mindful of the irony of those who spend hundreds of pages attempting to describe what they acknowledge to be indescribable, Roger here confined himself to four. Happily, Iain has no such inhibition. (By way of an aside, one of the larger aesthetic pleasures of The Matter with Things is its very length; its hypnotic iterativeness draws you in like Indian classical music, and you can wander in it as if it were a literary Mandelbrot set, where any page you alight on has a fractal relationship with the whole).
It is not only Ruskin who was inarticulate in the face of a great painting. As many have pointed out before me, we are all inarticulate in the face of beauty. I mean beauty itself. We acknowledge the concept. Many of us live our lives in search of it. We are sure that it exists, though our certainty is a matter of trust, not knowledge. We cannot define what beauty is, but only recognise examples of it. Even there, we cannot pin down what it is that makes our preferred cases beautiful. We disagree with each other about where beauty is to be found, although we are, in Kantian phrase, ‘suitors for agreement’ and make bonds with those who share our tastes. Moreover, while all this may be of interest to the philosopher of aesthetics, it tells one nothing of value about the actual experience of the beautiful. The authentic experience of beauty is comprehensible, but it is inarticulate.
As with art, so perhaps with religion, the greatest adventure in enchantment than any human being can have. In one of many passages where he exposes the sterility of the so-called divide between science and religion, Iain reminds us that it was Nils Bohr who said: “The fact that spiritual traditions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality”.
In the tremendous concluding chapter 28 of his book, Iain offers his own meditations on the realm of the sacred. Given how meticulously the previous twenty-seven have laid the ground, there is no one better placed to do so. But in the end and after so many words, language fails and, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, must be discarded. For he follows the well-trodden apophatic tradition of Dionysius the Areopagite and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, as well as Whitehead’s process theology, according to which God is to be seen more as a verb than a noun. The two core and interconnected elements of the book, those of flow and of relationship, are here most fully realised.
Even more satisfyingly, the hemisphere hypothesis, which is where everything began, confers in this chapter its final and most metaphysical insight. The gravitational pull of the divine upon the human heart – (‘the drawing of this Love’) – is experienced by the right hemisphere, which expresses it naturally and intuitively in rituals and devotions. It is the left hemisphere that through language creates a Babel of inconsistent theologies and creeds. I have always enjoyed the paradox that the less one believes, the greater the conviction with which one is free to believe it. But it is now possible to understand why this is so.
It is because in the realm of the sacred, the renunciation of language is the beginning of wisdom. Faith is trust, as is shown when we translate the words back into Latin. One must trust in the experience of the divine, as one trusts the experience of music, or of love. Perhaps the prayer that only progresses as far as “My God, I – ” has already got as far as any prayer can: there is only I and Thou and the relationship between them. We have reached the heartfelt heart of the authentic inarticulate.