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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.188)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Jeremy Begbie, the Thomas Langford Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School. And we are talking about his book, abundantly more, The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World. Dr. Begbie, wonderful to have you on today.
Jeremy Begbie (00:22.67)
Great to be here. Thank you so much, Vijay. I can call you Vijay, is that all right?
PJ (00:25.94)
Yeah, yes, please. Yeah. Like I've told many of my guests, I'm just some random dude in central Florida. That's why I have people on to talk. Yeah. So as we look at this book, why this book? And even I look at some of the other things you've done besides the research professor at Duke Divinity, you're also the founder of the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. What has been the trajectory of your career and how has that kind of led you to writing this book?
Jeremy Begbie (00:54.254)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. Up until the age of about 19 or 20, I wanted to pursue a career in music, and I began doing that as a classically trained pianist and OO's, conductor and a few other things as well. And that really, that's all that I was really dedicated to or interested in. In 1920, I came to Christian faith.
And then a lot of things changed, music became much more interesting, and so did all the other arts as well. And since then, I've been trying to bring those worlds together, which are often held apart for various reasons. So I'm trying to think about music within this wider worldview, and not just think about it, practice it as well. So I do performance lectures, I play in recitals quite often, and...
engage with a lot of musicians of all sorts, not just the classical musicians but many other types as well. So that's it, I'm trying to integrate things which are often held apart, I'm kind of intrinsically interdisciplinary, that's the gist. So that's how the career has developed, I teach in Duke of Edinburgh School and we have a large number of artists there and a lot of musicians and we put on courses and classes for them.
to help them think about these things, to think together these things which are often divorced.
PJ (02:29.044)
Can you talk about why it's important to have people who practice the arts with people who think about the arts working together like that?
Jeremy Begbie (02:36.814)
Yeah, good question. I think it's important because who we are as human beings, in my own view, the arts are not, first of all, things called works or texts. They're practices, they're things that... So music is often thought about as if it was really about a score or something written. But actually, before any of that started, before there were things called works of music, people were singing to each other and playing pipes.
PJ (02:52.052)
Mmm.
Jeremy Begbie (03:06.254)
and plucking strings and all the rest of it. Music, excuse me, music happened between people before it became a thing. And that applies to all the arts as well. So I see the arts as practices, ways of interacting with the world around us and interacting with each other. And that's why when we think about the arts, we're not just thinking about things called works. We're thinking about what people do.
with the arts, a way in which the arts function in their lives and bring consolation, bring hope or not. So that's why we need practitioners along with thinkers and writers as well. Sadly, a lot of writing about the arts is done by people who don't play anything or write poetry or write novels or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't want to make anyone feel guilty about that. But...
If you are going to write about this, you've got to speak to those who actually practice it. You can write about, I don't know, almost anything. Economics, you've got to speak about people who deal with economic realities the whole time. And those different skills, whether it's the thinking and the doing, they should be able to inform each other and come together. That's what I'm about.
PJ (04:25.876)
Yeah, I've had a couple artists on precisely for that reason and so I really appreciate the way that you articulate that. One thing that I guess it didn't surprise me, I just hadn't thought about it. It was kind of a no -duh moment. I had a master sculptor on and I said, what are common misconceptions about your work? And she said, people really romanticize it. It is very hard work. It's very physically demanding. And even with music, you're talking about lots of repetition. It's very...
boring and craftsman -like at times.
Jeremy Begbie (04:57.966)
It's absolutely, and people forget that too. They think that, you know, being a musician you sort of sit at the piano and dream and think about blue skies and lovely romantic thoughts or whatever. In order to play well, it's hours and hours of practicing and a lot of that practice is very routine and very dull in itself. It's worth it in the end, but it's very hard work. Also, it's very physically demanding. It's...
PJ (05:19.604)
Yes.
Jeremy Begbie (05:24.334)
If you're practicing as I was at one stage, five or six hours a day, I mean, you're aching. But golly, it's wonderful. It's exhilarating in the end, but it's a great deal of hard work. And it's not just an activity of the mind or the spirit or emotional life. It's about our physical bodies as well. I actually, for a hobby, I make string instruments. I make violins and cellos. I'm part of a workshop here. And on Monday, just this last Monday, I was...
gouging a cello, which I'm involved in, but every part of me was aching, I was dripping with sweat. And I thought, well, this is what it takes to make a cello. And you might think, it's absolutely lovely, it's like a kind of gentle basket weaving or something, or a terrible, easy going. You're reminded of the sheer muscularity of certainly all craft. And actually, virtually every artist is the same, whether it's a sculptor or a painter or whatever.
or sound mixer or whatever it is.
PJ (06:25.076)
So that kind of leads us into your book, Abundantly More. Talk about how that fits inside this vision and this kind of lifelong project.
Jeremy Begbie (06:37.262)
Yeah, well, I suppose over the years, if you spend a lot of time in this area, you often think, well, what can the arts do that nothing else can? What can music do that no other form of human interaction can do? You think about what I call the singular powers of particular art forms. And in my case, that's music, but it could be anything. You say, why do people paint pictures when they could just say things much more clearly, you think?
Why do we write, why would, you know, in churches to people set lyrics to music? Well, why not just say them? Then you have to think, well, what's the music doing? What special powers does it have that make us want to sing and that human beings, as long as human beings have existed as human beings, they have made music and they painted pictures and they sculpted and they crafted. It just happens. And so you have to, well, maybe something very important is going on there.
And one of the powers of music, it's only one, but one of the powers of music, and I think all the art, is to resist a habit of mind that I call reductionism. So the book, Abundantly More, is about this thing called reductionism and the way in which the arts can push against this habit of mind, because I think it's really quite a dangerous habit of mind, reductionism.
And this is one of their greatest gifts, and I think it's one of the great gifts in a culture which is often very reductionist. So what's reductionism? I suppose that inevitably raises that question. I'm so glad you're doing this interview. Reductionism basically is trying to find one explanation.
PJ (08:16.852)
I had it written down.
Jeremy Begbie (08:33.23)
for everything or one type of explanation for everything, one kind of language. It's a one size fits all worldview. And you can spot a reductionist to Myloff because they'll use phrases like no more than or merely or simply or nothing but. That's the classic thing. The brain is nothing but a computer. The physical world is nothing but atoms and molecules and subatomic particles, whatever, just oscillating.
together. It's that nothing, what Donald McKay, the scientist, called nothing buttery, when we think that we think we'll have a way of accounting for everything using just one model, one language, one way of knowing. Now the commonest form of productions in the modern West,
PJ (09:10.74)
I like that.
Jeremy Begbie (09:28.078)
particularly since about 1800, whatever's called scientific reductionism or naturalistic reductionism. And typically, yes, the brain's nothing but a computer. This table is nothing more than certain kinds of particles. And once you've analyzed the thing in terms of its particles, you've explained it. That's the reductionist tendency. So we know about it in the science. I mean,
Richard Dawkins would be a would be call himself a reductress, but he comes very close to it. Crick and Watson who discovered the DNA double helix structure actually just about half a mile from here. I forgot which one it was. I think it's it's great. Francis Crick said that in the last resort, you know, all our feelings, emotions, hopes, dreams, desires, whatever can be analyzed quite well in terms of.
well, whatever it is, genetics or physical particles or whatever. That's all we're ever going to need. And eventually everything will be squeezed down, he thought, to physics, because physics then seems the kind of ultimate discipline, because that deals with things at their component, at the component level. So it is alive in the sciences. It's much less alive than we often think. We tend to think sometimes that all scientists think like that. It's a very small...
number would actually be as arrogant to say that. There are a few, but not many around that, who believe that science can explain everything basically, and particularly anything important in life. But what I'm interested in is not just reductions in the sciences, but reductions as a habit of mind. That is, when we tend to reduce, when we tend to try to think we can explain everything in terms of, well, let's say evolution.
or let's say what I call socio -cultural reductionism, which is to say that all my behaviors and my desires and beliefs and whatever can be explained perfectly well and completely and wholly in terms of my cultural influences, my place in society, my drive for power, whatever it is. People say, you're only saying that Jeremy because you're a whatever it is. And that can go in hundred directions, you know, white.
Jeremy Begbie (11:52.558)
middle -class privilege or whatever, we can all reduce, that's all, all these things that you say you believe in, whatever, can be reduced quite well to that. That would be another example of reductionism. It's a habit of mine and I find I meet it in all sorts of places. But I think it's profoundly mistaken because it can't account for huge amounts and it's also tends to be very self -
undermining. I mean, if someone says to me, you're only saying that because of your culture, I can just retort and say, well, you're only making that objection because of your particular. And so on, you know, and we get nowhere, basically. You just disappear down plug holes. That's the sadness of the whole thing. But it's also very narrow because there are a whole lot of things that really matter to us.
But we can't explain in this way. We can't... I have a friend here working in the music department who said at High Table once in her college, Emanuel College, she was next to a neuroscientist and said, have neuroscientists found the secret of consciousness yet? Can you explain human consciousness? And they said, we're miles off that and I don't think we'll ever do it. It's just a complete mystery. We really can't explain in terms of neuroscience.
the phenomena of consciousness, the fact that I have beliefs about things, that I have convictions about those things, those are not things that you can analyse in purely neuroscientific terms. But also things, of course, like love, like perhaps love is the most inexplicable of all, but many, many other things that really matter to us, we wouldn't naturally turn to a physicist to try to explain.
or a counter for it. Physicists might throw light on something but wouldn't try to do everything with it. So I meet this in all sorts of places and I think it's still alive even though amongst natural scientists it's not nearly as alive as we might like to think. Anyhow, so that's a broad picture.
PJ (14:11.028)
Yeah.
Yeah, even as you're talking about that, my day job is I'm a digital marketer. And so when you talk about how journalism has changed in the past, journalists got paid per article. Now companies are much more concerned with clicks, right? You used to buy a whole newspaper or magazine. And so what's interesting about what you're talking about is the neuroscientist who says, yeah, we're miles from that is not going to get an article published because.
Jeremy Begbie (14:18.093)
All right.
PJ (14:43.508)
You're not what title are you going to put on that? Right? Are you going to put, hey, we aren't really close to figuring out consciousness. That's not a good title. But if you can say another phrase that came to mind is basically we're basically computers, you know, we're nothing but computers, but organic computers. Great title. You'll have you'll have both types of people, people who want that to be true and people who are really angry that you're saying that will both click on that. And so.
Jeremy Begbie (15:11.054)
is interesting.
PJ (15:11.284)
even though it's a small amount of scientists, it's disproportionate in their voice.
Jeremy Begbie (15:16.206)
In other words, it's got a kind of grip on the part of our imagination, among some, that if we were really concerned with truth, with hard reality, you'll go to a certain kind of scientist in order to get at that, because they know best in some way. Yes, it's funny, you mentioned the computer thing. There's a very good writer in this area, and you may have had him on, but you need to get him on if you have him. That's Ian McGilchrist.
Ian McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and His Amazery, which has sold about half a million copies by now. And it's about left brain and right brain, but he's revising the whole theory, the kind of popular theory of left and right brain. But amongst many things, he attacks the idea that the machine model can account for, say, human beings. And this extraordinary, dazzling
mesmerizing effect the machine model has had. And I heard him speak to some medics two or three months ago in Duke University and he just went through all the things about human beings that are not mechanical, things that can't be explained, things about machines, the things that are true of human beings but not of machines, like machines are not conscious, they can't feel pain.
they can't have desires, they don't die. And he just went through, I think it was about 14 dissimilarities. And yet, amongst many people, we are computers or the brain is a computer. Behind the whole AI thing is this imaginative, what you call it, overreach, is imaginative construction.
that this is the model that will unlock reality. But of course it unlocks some reality, but so much that it doesn't. Now that's a book I cannot recommend highly enough. Another thing just to throw in here, I think it's important about reductionism, is I think in the last resort what's so appealing about it is that it feeds our desire to be in control.
Jeremy Begbie (17:38.83)
A reductionist, hardline reductions of any sort. I found the secret to explaining things with this way of looking at the world. What they're of course saying is, I can see reality as it really is. I have the overview. I'm in the know because I know what the really real is. And a hardline reductions of any sort will therefore be...
love this world, it's a kind of high -ground, mountain top view of reality because they see things as they are. And that's very, very appealing. You see, if we can get, I was saying genetic reductions, if we can just get the genetic combination, we can unlock reality, human reality. If we can get at the tiniest particle, like the Higgs boson or whatever the latest,
If we can get that, we can unlock the whole thing. And this is, it's so it's, I'm not saying that all reductions are power mad necessarily or whatever. I'm not, they're very humble people, but it's a drive towards we've really got the key to everything. And of course it's just an illusion. We don't, we're not in control. And that's why another writer I think is incredibly important at the moment.
German sociologist called Hartwig Rosa, R -O -S -A, and he's written a huge book called Resonance, which is really a model of knowing what philosophers would call epistemology. But, and if that sounds unattractive, a German sociologist writing a book that thick, well, it's incredibly readable, but he's written another much shorter one called The Uncontrollability of the World, and it's really a kind of anti -reductionist.
tracked almost which is we feed up we love to feed this illusion that that we are in control or if we're not yet completely controlled we soon will be once well you know where there's ai or well perhaps that's the opposite but what once we eradicate this virus once we get then we'll be fully in control everything will be all right and then of course covid comes along and shapes the whole
Jeremy Begbie (20:05.038)
Well, maybe we're not. And maybe we're still at the mercy of all sorts of things that we can't instantly understand and can't instantly control. So I think reductioism feeds this almost godlike stance that we can see things as they really are and then tell everyone else to see everything in that way. And then they'll meet reality with a capital R. You mentioned, so there's one other thing you mentioned in...
in passing there, I've lost it now, there was something you mentioned in passing in your last thing I want to pick up, but we'll pick it up later.
PJ (20:40.212)
Yeah, one, I haven't had the privilege of having Ian McGillcrist on. I think I actually have on a list to reach out to Cartwood Rosa about Resonance, so that's kind of interesting, yeah.
Jeremy Begbie (20:52.943)
It's one of the most exciting books. We had him to do a whole two days here with us. He's absolutely delightful. He's a heavy metal fan. He thinks metal is the secret to a lot of things. He knows vast amounts about culture and history and philosophy and science. And he says we've got this kind of...
PJ (21:06.004)
Hahaha!
Jeremy Begbie (21:20.782)
controlling attitude to a world, and we should learn, Hughes is of course the metaphor of resonance that is massively amplified in that book, where you indeed you prod and poke and then you listen to what comes back, and you adjust yourself and your life and your ways of knowing up to the reality that speaks to you. So he believes that, like many phenomenologists would believe, that the world is as it were calling out to us.
PJ (21:34.132)
Hmm.
Jeremy Begbie (21:49.71)
and has its own integrity, the physical world and of course other people, and that integrity has to be respected and interacted with. And even music is particularly important to know.
PJ (22:03.572)
Particularly metal, right. Yeah.
Jeremy Begbie (22:05.806)
You can't quite convince me about that, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it.
PJ (22:11.764)
Yeah, so there are two things I want to clarify. You've kind of referenced them, but I just want to make sure I'm tracking with you. One is there are two things about. Your view of reductionism I really appreciate and I would love to steal one is that you think of as a habit of mind and I think that's really interesting because at a popular level I would say at a personal and relational level it's also useful because. We do that to other people right?
Jeremy Begbie (22:39.726)
Absolutely.
PJ (22:40.756)
Like we look at, you know, it's like, well, you're just doing that because you're hurt, you know, and we relate it to one incident in a person's, and we explain everything about that person in through one lens. And it puts us in control of the relationship. So at a very fundamental level, it's not, this isn't, it is something we see it in high culture and low culture. It just, it's a human thing to do. And the other one, and I really appreciate is,
Jeremy Begbie (23:04.846)
Absolutely.
PJ (23:08.948)
You're not negating the explanatory power. They have tremendous explanatory power. It's that truth is bigger than just whatever they're explaining.
Jeremy Begbie (23:18.702)
Absolutely. It could, I mean, let's take the second one first. It could be seen as a kind of anti -science or anti -physics or anti -international science. On the contrary, we ought to celebrate that my daddy was a physicist, mathematician, medic, and yet he adored poetry and things that you wouldn't think would instantly fit into all that. And he was a magician. He was into sleight of hand.
PJ (23:44.82)
yeah, fun.
Jeremy Begbie (23:46.702)
in this extremely wide cultural interest. And yet he was basically at heart a mathematical physicist. That's what he did. We mustn't negate that at all. What needs negating is what's sometimes called scientism or the expansion, the inflation of what we think of as the powers of science into areas where they're not competent to speak. For instance, just the very basic thing.
Why is there something rather than nothing? One of the great philosophical questions that keeps coming up, and it's a very important one. A natural scientist can never answer that, and that's not to denigrate natural science, to say it's beyond the competence of the scientist. The scientist is dealing with the phenomena of the physical world as they appear to her or him, and as to why they're there in the first place, the scientist can't pronounce on that.
It's simply beyond the competence. On the first point, Habit of Mind, I know that is interesting, I got that phrase already, it was inspired, the phrase was inspired by a book by Rita Felsky. Rita Felsky is a professor of English at UVA, another fascinating person you get, I mean really fascinating, and she's written a number of books really criticizing her own literary guild.
for trying to reduce, well the kind of classic thing, reduce all literary criticism to analysis of power moves or colonialism or whatever it is, whatever the latest key is, it's going to unlock reality in literary text. And she doesn't make the mistake of saying these insights, disciplines or whatever, or these approaches have no validity. She says the world is wider than that and the world of literature is wider than that.
and people read things for all sorts of reasons that can't be explained simply in those terms. So likewise, she's not trying to dismiss and denigrate a whole discipline. She's trying to say you've taken one particular thing or one mode of access or one mode of known and you've inflated it because it's so exciting to you that you think it can do everything. And the 20th century, as you know, philosophy, 20th century, 21st century is...
Jeremy Begbie (26:14.542)
full of that, all these, all these systems that are now going to unlock everything, the lens, as you put it, through which we're going to see everything. No, not at all. So it then becomes, this inflation becomes a kind of habit of mind. And you're dead right, of course, we label people, we say, you know, well, you would say that because you belong to this political party, or you would say that because you're a supporter of him or her or whatever it is. And that's a wonderful feeling of...
of not having to engage with someone. It gives a terrific excuse for not having to listen to them. So, well, he would say, I'm not going to bother reading him or listening to him or whatever, or she's just saying that because she comes from that discipline, that's her background, or the psychological thing, and that's another kind of reductionism, of course. As you say, you're a terribly hurt person, so that's why you're saying this. Even if that's the case, she still may be right.
You know, when someone kundasizes you, an old friend of mine said, it's very easy, as I do, you know, well, they're just saying that because they're jealous or something, or they're jealous of their mother or whatever it is. And as a friend of mine said, yeah, that's probably right, you know, they might still be right. It's a psychological, which might have nothing to do whatsoever.
PJ (27:35.86)
Yeah, it has nothing to... Yeah, absolutely.
Jeremy Begbie (27:43.47)
And you might need to hear that. But the labeling to dismiss is part of the reductionist habit of mine, very much so.
PJ (27:55.988)
We miss out on a lot of theological significance, very valuable theological significance when we reduce. In particular, what I think of with the interpersonal relationships, we miss out on forgiveness and repentance. Once that person is that thing, they cannot change.
Jeremy Begbie (28:18.478)
Absolutely. I feel these are very sensitive areas. But there are some protest movements that leave you mired in guilt and where you feel whatever you do, you will actually never be forgiven by whatever the accusing force is.
PJ (28:21.204)
and
Jeremy Begbie (28:46.958)
and that you're just stuck there. As you say, therefore, there can be never any real progress. Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a thing on politics and forgiveness, which I thought was ridiculously unrealistic of mine. And it can be ridiculous, but actually, you think about it, there can be no political progress without forgiveness. It would run a hole the wrongs of 1563 or something against this or that.
PJ (29:08.404)
Yeah.
Jeremy Begbie (29:16.75)
national person for eternity, can there ever be political progress of any sort? There can't, ultimately, because the revenge will never stop. I mean, you know, that the cycle of revenge and counter revenge will never end. So you're dead right, there can be no... I mean, forgiveness is an extremely radical thing, because it has to come in from outside this very closed production system, has to come in and change everything. Yeah.
It's a hard one.
PJ (29:48.98)
So we've talked a lot about reductionism. How do you feel that music helps us combat this habit of mind?
Jeremy Begbie (29:57.646)
Well, in my chapters on the arts, I've got two or three, particularly on the arts. And again, I don't want to be a reductionist and say I found the secret to the arts. But I do point to something that is very characteristic of the way artistic practices operate on us and work on us. And the key component there is metaphor. The metaphor involves a combination of unlike elements.
when you bring together, artists typically bring things together not normally brought together. And very often in a way that this is very unlike that. And they, as a word, clash but produce a gorgeous new meaning. Shakespeare, Juliet is the sun. That's a very powerful metaphor. And the important thing about metaphor is that this generates a whole host of allusions.
and waves of meaning, ripples of meaning, that you can never completely enumerate, you can never completely spell them all out. There's a kind of contrast, I often use something that a good friend of mine once pointed out to me, contrast between if you go to a shoe store and you see a shoe box, there's a sketch of the shoe on the side, just make sure you get the right shoe. You compare that to Van Gogh, or Van Gogh as we say over here,
Van Gogh's pictures of a peasant boot. He actually did a number of them, but where you get these extraordinary paintings of just a pair of boots which are rough and earth encrusted in an extraordinary light. If you look at those long enough, the illusions are just hard work, toil, poverty, drudgery.
many hours. I mean, with an audience I'm sure that, and we have about 30 things this suggests to them. Now, no one's going to do that with the side of the shoebox. You don't people keep queuing up in the shoe store looking at the side of the shoebox and saying, wow, just take a look at this shoe. The point is that diagram is there so that the store owner or whatever can find the right shoe.
PJ (32:12.468)
You
Jeremy Begbie (32:24.75)
and then its function is complete, it's done with. But this other thing, this what we would call art, normally is much more than that. It creates this explosion of meanings, multiple meanings. And therefore it's a reminder to us that you can never say or enumerate everything about anything. So I can never say everything about you, nor you about me.
for anything we encounter there's always more to it than we could ever spell out in language or in thought but another way we can't contain it we can't control it we can't master it so the art typically work against this desire to master and think we've got a reality all wrapped up and that's why artists can be very irritating to people because when you
say well what does it mean? They say well this and that and this and that and whatever. Of course please note for your listeners I really am NOT saying a work of art can mean anything. I'm just saying you will never get to the end of a multiple meaning. After all a pair of shoes that can't mean a spaceship right? No of course it's still about something connected with shoes.
But however much I talk about it, I will never get to the end of it. That's what the arts remind us of. We're living in a world that we can't control, that we can't master, that we can't sum up neatly, which always exceeds everything that we could think or say. Now, you asked me particularly about music. This is particularly the case with music. And the reason is because music doesn't really picture things.
very obviously. It has a hard time saying something like, this is a table. It has a very hard time directly denoting things. Sometimes music does a bit of that. But in the last one, it doesn't have terms which point directly to particular things. It's got this sound and then that sound and that sound. And yet, and yet, it's incredibly meaningful and moving.
Jeremy Begbie (34:49.742)
So it makes sense. We want it. We spend billions on music every year. But we can't, it reminds us that whatever you say about it, you'll never get to the end of it. It's the least controllable of the arts, the least tied to the things of this world, you could say. And that's what has always fascinated, I think, well, particularly in the modern era, it's fascinated.
people about music and of course this goes against reductionism. So you'll find in the 19th century when reductionism was beginning really to expand the scientists were willing to expand in Europe, that's the very time when people start exalting music as delivering us from the kind of mechanistic, closed, crusty world of of scientism. We need music. Hundreds of, well I say hundreds, dozens of scientists I've met.
who spend every day in the lab working with the tiniest phenomena, dozens of them just adore music. It's a sort of reminder to them that the world is bigger and richer than what can be analyzed in just this way. And there's more to human life that can be managed in just this way.
PJ (35:56.276)
Yes.
Jeremy Begbie (36:12.366)
Last comment on that, I was speaking to a surgeon the other day, a trainee surgeon, he wasn't quite finished, he was almost qualified. What I didn't realise is that, at least in the States, by far the majority of surgeons now work to music. I never knew that, I thought that was just on soap operas and the old crazy film, but it's actually the case. It's like they need it.
PJ (36:26.676)
That's right, I'd forgotten that. Yeah.
Jeremy Begbie (36:40.078)
They needed to, I don't know, we can theorise, do they need it because it's suggesting a wider humanity behind just what I'm having to deal with here? I don't know. It helps them relax, I mean music does all sorts of things, but it's a lovely kind of reminder, just that picture of whatever music's coming out and there they are doing this highly concentrated, deeply technical task, which is very, very narrow and has to be narrow in order to be successful and yet...
yet they have music. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting thing that there's a transplant surgeon at Duke, very distinguished transplants, who's learned the piano and he's extremely good pianist. We played duet for every together. It's his primary love outside medicine.
PJ (37:24.148)
Yeah, very interesting. I can see why you brought up resonance and the uncontrollability of the world. That's a lot of what this manifold revelation that comes out is that it is uncontrollable. This may be a good question or it might be a complete dead end. Are you familiar with Hans Ruckmaker? okay.
Jeremy Begbie (37:42.798)
Yeah.
Jeremy Begbie (37:49.614)
Yes, very much so. Yeah.
PJ (37:52.052)
One of the questions that kind of comes up in this is why do we feel the need to justify art? And that was such a, when I read his little kind of pamphlet on that, it really, I was, why do we feel the need to justify art? And we just keep doing it regardless of whether we can justify it or not. Do you have, I feel like that kind of fits into this discussion of reductionism.
Jeremy Begbie (38:17.23)
Very not so. What Rochmark was getting at there was a little pamphlet called Art Needs No Justification. It would have come out, I suppose, in the 1960s and 70s. Rochmark was an art historian who was one of the very first to help particularly evangelicals take visual art seriously. You might say, or high art, gallery art seriously. And so he got people into the galleries and he said,
What is this art telling us about our culture? And you need to listen, you can't just dismiss it. It was a very, very, now, something very critical of Ruckmacher now. Okay, it's easy to criticize now, the benefit of hindsight, but some things that he did, but he generated, a bit like Francis Schaeffer, he'd be another, who generated extraordinary interest in the arts that is still going on today. So it's unlikely I'd be doing what I'm doing if it wasn't for the likes of Ruckmacher back in the 70s.
And that book was a bestseller, sorry, not the justification one, the other bigger one called Modern Art and the Death of the Culture became a bestseller because it was really the only thing at that time that Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, had to help them bring together the world of the visual arts and Christian faith. When he said the arts needed a justification, what he was really getting at was the tendency, again, of a certain kind of reductionism amongst Christians.
for some Christians who wanted to say, this piece of art or whatever, it will only be useful if we can say that it carries a message, an evangelical message of a particular sort. It must be able to preach the Gospel directly and unambiguously, otherwise it's not worth anything. And that's a dreadful form of reductionism, that he wants to say, no, art does its own kind of work in its own kind of way, and it doesn't need that kind of justification.
in order for you to practice it. And as you say, people will just get on and make it. Now, he wasn't saying that therefore art is useless, or it doesn't bring great joy and all the rest of it, or that it has no functions or anything. He wasn't saying that. He was just saying, don't think you can reduce it to... don't think its only value is if you can reduce it to a particular kind of statement or proposition about the Krishna faith. And he was dead right in that.
Jeremy Begbie (40:43.438)
He got criticized for it quite a bit because there were a lot of those days who thought, why bother painting a landscape or portrait when you could be out evangelizing the world? And if we're going to use music, let's do it together, people, for Jesus. So I think there are far fewer people like that now, but he was reacting against that and quite rightly so.
PJ (40:57.044)
Right?
PJ (41:08.532)
I think that leads to kind of a, yeah, I want to be respectful of your time. As we look at your book, we've talked about reductionism, we've talked about the promise of the arts. Can you dwell a little bit on the theological promise of the arts? What makes the promise theological that it reacts against this reductionism?
Jeremy Begbie (41:30.478)
Well, of course, if we're going to say that the arts push us against the idea that we're in control of the world, inevitably that's going to push you into theological territory. So, well, if we're not, maybe the world has its own integrity long before we got here, and therefore perhaps something or someone else is actually in charge or brought it into being. Now, that's not a proof for the existence of God, it's just saying,
you're going to be pushed into theological territory. If we find, over and over again, that the world exceeds all that we can say about it, and all that we can think about it, could it be, we just ask, could it be that the world as a whole, the entire world, has a significance beyond itself that it can't explain?
So just as you might say of a single object, it's more than it is, so to speak, just there in that little enclosed space. It's significant, it's much greater. We might, by analogy, want to say, well, maybe the world as a whole is pointing beyond itself and cannot explain itself, but needs some explanation beyond itself. I think what the arts do is that they imaginatively open up that possibility. They don't prove it.
But they definitely open up that kind of possibility. So I found in my own work in music, particularly music amongst musicians, there are very few musicians, and I find through a hardline closed reductionist, very few, because music seems to be, by its very uncontainability, seems to be pointing to the world itself as uncontainable, you know, but not explaining itself.
which also points you in the direction of God, or a reason beyond this world that brought it into being. I don't think that's a hard -headed argument, but that's not the point. I think the arts witness to that possibility. They don't prove it. The arts are not the business of proving anything. Having said that, it's pretty hard to see why they're around otherwise. But I mean, that's another discussion for another time.
Jeremy Begbie (43:53.614)
Then what I try to say therefore that the arts seem to have this constant movement beyond themselves and ultimately I say this is the way that God actually is, that within the life of... that the God's own buried being of love is to move beyond himself. God himself is uncontainable and God himself is constantly pouring out his love to the world.
Even within what Krishna is about, it's the Trinity, there is a movement always from Father to Son to Son to Father in the power of the Spirit. There's a kind of uncontainable, what I call an uncontainable pressure within the very being of God. So that the uncontainability of the world and the uncontainability of people and all that we've been dealing with, the uncontrollability thing we've been talking about, that is a kind of...
glimpse, a hint of the very God who made it, who made it to be such. That's the way. Now that's a very compressive sign of the argument the last two or three chapters. But the gist of it is that in thinking about the arts, it is no accident that thousands, I mean thousands of thinkers and practitioners in the arts are pushed in theological directions.
I had, with lots of artists I worked with, I had no trouble provided, if I begin with their art form and their music or whatever, no trouble raising theological questions. It happens very quickly. If I start with a certain kind of argument against a naturalistic reductionism, philosophical argument, that's much tougher. I think it's important people do that.
But there's something about the arts that can release the imagination from its closed habits of mind. In the last resort, I think, it's a question of what I call imagination. That is, are we going to imagine the world as a closed mechanical system? Or can we see it as something much richer and much bigger that points to something infinitely rich? That's why C .S. Lewis is so popular and will always be popular. Tolkien.
Jeremy Begbie (46:18.222)
Likewise, because they don't, well they do have, they do argue, yes he writes books like that, but the Narnia stories and you know Tolkien of course, what they're saying I think, at the very least is, try thinking of the world this way, try looking at it this way, and to do that, I can't argue for that, what I can do is I can paint this glorious
where you know like the beginning of the Silmarillion or like the beginning of the creation of the world through music you get in C .S. Lewis. Think of it as a vast cosmic symphony ever expanding. And think of some kind of infinite life at work making that possible. that's an imaginative vision. And it's not that the world is a machine, which we all kind of know doesn't make sense. So what we need today amongst the artists, I think, is...
is we need to allow them to jolt our imaginations, to help us dream about the world in a very different way. I was in the Gilgamesh alphabet earlier, he went to speak to these medics, very distinguished medical practitioners, and I was fascinated by their reaction, which I thought would be
because he was very critical, he's a medic himself, but he was very critical of the reduction of people who cases or things. Would you know when you go to doctor's surgery, this happens in the States, also happens here now, they come in and they go straight to the computer. And he said, could we have a doctor's surgery where the first thing they do is look at you and put their hands down and look at you and listen to you as a whole person before they see you as a case.
Could we at least start with a non -mechanistic view of medicine? That this is a person and they've got multiple relationships, which, yeah, we can make lots of notes, but we'll never be able to capture all that. It's the kind of thing you can never completely write down or contain or whatever. And so what McGilchrist and others are trying to do is stimulate our imaginations.
Jeremy Begbie (48:37.198)
Instead of seeing a person as a case or a thing or a bunch of molecules, try looking at them this way. As humans who do things which can't be explained in those terms, who love and desire and who forgive and who love others way beyond what evolution would ever require.
That phrase is one of my favorites, I mentioned it in the book, you might have seen it. I think it was David Brooke who said of a friend, she just had her first child and said, I realized I was loving this child more than evolution required.
PJ (49:21.428)
haha
Jeremy Begbie (49:23.374)
We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can't see that. We can
PJ (49:24.308)
man, it's, yeah.
PJ (49:48.308)
I think to kind of wrap things up, I'll have a final question after, but you use a lot of the metaphor of pressure. Even as you talk about, you're talking about the arts here, but you talk about medicine. I've had people on to talk about the current American crisis in healthcare. And probably part of the reason, and I'm speaking a little bit outside my field here, but when you talk about them responding positively to Ian McGilchrist,
the medical field is under tremendous pressure from insurance companies to turn out, right? And so you take that idea of being under pressure in that kind of reductionist view, and then you talk about pressure and X pressure. And you kind of mentioned this with like that movement. Why pressure and X pressure? And you do the EX with the, yeah, why did that strike you?
Jeremy Begbie (50:40.014)
That's very good. That is very, very perceptive. It's given me an idea for a new article.
PJ (50:48.18)
Is that there?
Jeremy Begbie (50:49.87)
Yeah, I'll definitely acknowledge you in a put note. Is that alright? Yeah.
PJ (50:55.924)
I'm not sure.
Jeremy Begbie (50:57.398)
But the ultimate exile, you're relegated to a terrible place to be.
PJ (51:04.852)
No, that's more than I have right now, so I'll take it.
Jeremy Begbie (51:08.878)
I mean to fill that out, I talk about reductionism as involving a series of pressures, a pressure to think that there's only one kind of thing, a pressure to control and mastery. In other words, it's a habit of mine, but it's pressed and it presses again, you know, it's a real momentum. And I suppose I haven't thought about this before, that you're absolutely right, that the answer to that is a different kind of pressure.
And it's the pressure, as Chris was saying, it's the pressure of love. That is, where you're not out to control, you're out to release and liberate another person. Or you're not out simply to put pressure on the clay or the sound or whatever you're dealing with, but you're out to turn it into something even better, which is what art is about. When you take some materials and you make something,
even greater. That's also pressure and involves, as we said right at the start, very hard work. But it's the pressure of love because you want the very best for the clay, the sound, or whatever you're dealing with. And of course, that applies to other people. You're now not properising to control them and fit them into a box or label them or put them into a category or reduce them to just a series of things. You're out to help them be more the people they were made to be.
And that's the pressure of love. And that of course is, that's what I'm saying theologically here, that there's a pressure within God, a liveliness within God, which I call the pressure of love. And it's this that is expressed in the creation of the world and then by God relating to the world with love. So there are two kinds of pressure there, and I hadn't thought of that contrast quite so...
So I'm extremely grateful. That was very well -spotted. You're obviously highly qualified and really able to do this job well. I mean, it's, yeah.
PJ (53:07.06)
PJ (53:17.46)
I appreciate it. No, thank you. I'm just looking at the chapter headings here. It's like under pressure, pressure, express your, you know? Like, yeah, the movement's there.
Jeremy Begbie (53:26.958)
brought out the contrast a bit more. And if I was explaining this book another time, I'd say it's the contrast between two. And do we believe that first kind of pressure, which is very dehumanizing, do we really think that's all there is in life, ultimately? We're under the pressure of death, under the decay of entropy, you know, of all the negativity. Is that the final pressure? Or is there another pressure at work within the world that is working to turn it to good?
and that pressure will ultimately win through. There's a good talk in there. Thank you very much.
PJ (54:03.124)
Yes, yes, absolutely. So, and again, I want to be respectful of your time. If you don't mind, one last question, and this is why I normally end on...
If you could give our audience one thing to walk away this week, obviously not, besides reading your excellent book and not asking for a summary of everything we just talked about, because we covered a lot, but if you could give them one thing to kind of chew on and meditate throughout the week after listening to this episode, what would you encourage them to think about?
Jeremy Begbie (54:35.406)
my goodness me.
PJ (54:37.172)
Hahaha
Jeremy Begbie (54:38.478)
Well, I think that's me.
PJ (54:41.78)
What would you encourage them to do?
Jeremy Begbie (54:45.07)
Well, I mean.
Jeremy Begbie (54:50.574)
I would come to try to develop a habit of mind that says there's always more, there's more going on here than you think.
Nothing is boring, ultimately, because there's always more going on here than you think. And it's the art's job, and Mark's art of it, to remind us of that.
PJ (55:02.196)
Hmm.
Jeremy Begbie (55:13.23)
Now, theologically, that means God is at work here and is an infinite resource of enrichment. That more than is now infinite from a Christian point of view. But even just to sit in a... go into one of these galleries that's just free and sit in front of what most regard as really good art of one sort or another. Just sit there and...
if it really is good. And that means more than 30 seconds. It means passing on because you get bored with this. There's more going on here than immediately meets the eye. Like what? And then find a book or a commentary or something that helps you see that more and experience that more. Now that applies to music, applies to your sculpture friend, whatever it is. And it applies to people.
It's important at all. With this person who seems so dull, shy, unpromising, whatever, you know, you fill in, there's more going on here than I can now see and I need to have my eyes opened.
PJ (56:31.188)
A beautiful thought and a wonderful way to end a beautiful discussion. Dr. Begbie, it's been a real joy talking to you today. Thank you.
Jeremy Begbie (56:38.254)
Thank you so much. Delightful.