From Alan Jacobs:

Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Some 20th-century thinkers who have been vital for me over the years:

Explainers: Charles Taylor, Mary Midgely, Freeman Dyson
Illuminators: Mikhail Bakhtin, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott
Provokers: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Simone Weil

Jacobs later claims that one makes a vital error mistaking one roll for another. For example, he says of Rousseau the Provoker, "God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously." In thinking of this potential mix-up, one general, Rousseauian principle comes to mind.

Because he thought that everything was good the nearer it was to the "hand of the Maker", Rousseau generally left his children to be taught by nature itself. He once neglected, with one group of his children, to record their dates of birth or genders upon their birth. This led to all sorts of problems that he later detailed in a letter, saying that the oversight would kill him.

Biblical hermeneutics has traditionally been understood as the study of right principles for understanding the biblical text. “Understanding” may stop short at a theoretical and notional level, or it may advance via the assent and commitment of faith to become experiential through personal acquaintance with the God to whom the theories and notions refer. Theoretical understanding of Scripture requires of us no more than is called for to comprehend any ancient literature, that is, sufficient knowledge of the language and background and sufficient empathy with the different cultural context. But there is no experiential understanding of Scripture - no personal knowledge of the God to whom it points - without the Spirit’s illumination. Biblical hermeneutics studies the way in which both levels of understanding are attained.’

—J.I. Packer

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

—George Herbert

Thanks to poet Malcolm Guite for mentioning this poem during a conversation hosted by the Trinity Forum.

This morning, I watched a few minutes of a Robert Wood lecture on Martin Heidegger. The lecture was given in a series titled, "Beauty in The Tradition." Serial lectures given at the conference of The Hildebrand Project.

Wood begins his lecture on Heidegger by first illustrating the priority of Renee Descartes's philosophy. He draws a tree on a whiteboard and names some branches.

As Wood draws, he tells the philosophical story that has shaped—how and what we think—us modern folk, and the world in which we find ourselves.

By using Descartes's own 'Tree of Knowledge' illustration, Wood explains Heidegger's priority for tilling the soil in which the tree is planted. Heidegger wants to know what the tree of knowledge is planted in. His answer?

Being in the world. This is the soil. Humanness by virtue of being is the terra firma of knowing. Being is the ground of knowing.

For the Christian, 'being' is of course foundational in the three-person-ness of, "I believe: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." God is being and he gifts us his being by virtue of his forming us in his image, in the act of creation and Incarnation.

Matthew B. Crawford's Book The World Beyond Your Head has helped me understand this very fundamental fact.