Wager

Raymond Barfield’s Wager is a lovely meditation on beauty, suffering, and the variety of philosophical “styles.” Everyone, not only philosophers, has a “philosophical style”: “Constructing a life is a philosophical act. Philosophical acts that are shaped by a life, and that shape a life, constitute philosophical style. . . . Philosophical style is not primarily about the sentences we create to state ideas, though the way we tell others about our experience is certainly part of it. Philosophical style is fundamentally about the way we live in the world through our bodies, our reason, our imagination, and our virtue. It is about what we love and how we are loved” (x).

Philosophical styles arise within “local universes,” that is, not the universe as such, nor in the worlds created by post-Cartesian philosophers who deliberately philosophize in detachment from lived worlds. We develop a way of living within the experience of living, in the universe that is evident on the surface of life. A local universe is 

lived as grass beneath my feet, breathlessness after running up a hill, a glass of wine, a kiss, distant mountains, the moon, and pleasures or pains felt in my body. The local universe is lived through our minds that are able to explore, experiment, tell stories, argue, write poems, pray, hate, believe, woo, rend, make music, and breed dogs with exactly the shape and behavior that will win a prize. . . . From within our lived experience we seem to encounter truth, beauty, virtue, justice, love, hope, gratitude, and a sense that our impending death is somehow important, strange, and mysterious. (27)

Barfield knows that he can’t offer certainty about that grand list—truth, beauty, justice, love, etc.—not the kind of certainty that Cartesians demand. Hence the “wager” of the title. A philosophical stance that acknowledges the beauty of the world is inevitably risky. But he insists that his consciousness of beauty, truth, love is real. We may try to account for beauty and love as part of an uncreated, meaningless universe, but the experience of beauty and love is “a real part of our experience,” even a “brute fact” (24). It seems rather nonsensical to cultivate a philosophical style that rules out such experiences from the outset. 

The wager seems a decent bet: “We get inklings of such unseen things in the thrill of then uncanny, and in the joy that erupts when we find hints on the path toward the highest object of human longing, whatever that may be” (4). Grant that certainty is impossible here, but “the existence of God lends a glow and glory to the universe that is inaccessible to the methods of the natural sciences, a radiance that thrills me.” In one of the most elegant lines in a book full of beauties, Barfield writes, “the dam doesn’t have to break for me to suspect that the water seeping through a crack is from the ten million gallons on the other side” (xii).

The alternative position—that it’s all meaningless matter, accidentally assembled—works with a truncated version of the ontological question. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why this universe rather than nothing?”: “We want to explain the existence of the universe as it is, complete with conscious, loving, longing, moral, creative persons, as well as suffering and moral evil” (28).

Beauty takes up on corner of Barfield’s palette; suffering takes up another. Not one or the other, not a beauty that negates the “maybe not” of suffering, nor suffering blind to the “maybe so” of beauty. Rather, his style brings suffering and beauty together in a way that refuses easy reconciliation. At one point, Barfield makes the point by reference to divine providence: “Providence changes everything because everything in creation is either intended, or else is the unintended consequence of something that is intended.” This intention comes from “a God who in some fundamentally important way is a person” (9). Providence means that “love” is at the very heart of the universe. Providence doesn’t soften the problem of evil, but exaggerates it; if love is the deep-down of things, then evil and suffering are simply “baffling” (10).

The clash of suffering and beauty produces a philosophical style of praise and prayer: 

This form of philosophical style is above all the pursuit of the very person of God, and all that follows from the mind and will and love of God. Death continues to shape philosophical style . . . because it has been overcome by love and made a servant of God’s purposes. This servant is not passive or weak. It has teeth, and it is a hound that will bare its teeth and growl if the child tries to escape into the darkness unprepared for danger.

In this style, “we let go of every certainty, every familiar crook in the universe” while at the same time “reaching inward and upward through the mysteries of faith, hope, and love.” It’s the philosophical style of St. Francis, who greeted wind, air, moon, stars, sun and death as sisters and brothers (10-11).

I have quibbles here and there, but only one main complaint: If we deflate “certainty,” it seems that we can rehabilitate it. Barfield provides much of the ammunition: Can an atheistic account of the universe answer the ontological question in its specific form, explain this world as it is actually constituted? Can it explain our experience of meaning and love and beauty and suffering, even of the beauty and meaning of suffering? There’s room here for an existentialized version of what Cornelius van Til, following Kant, called a “transcendental” argument: A personal God is the condition for the possibility of human experience as we actually experience in the local universes that make up our homes. If that’s not “certainty” enough, there’s just no pleasing some people.