Lo those many years ago when I was writing my thesis and thought myself an old man – at thirty five, little did I know – I came across some unexpected problems. One group of Indians I had lived with in back-woods Venezuela used bananas, along with sweet potatoes, as their staple food. The problem came when I looked up the provenance of the original banana. Did it come from tropical Africa, the Near East or Southeast Asia? Not a bad question to ask when we know that potatoes, tomatoes and corn came from the New World, sugar from the Nile delta, and pineapple from far east Asia. It should have been a question answered simply, right?
It was not. It happens that no one really knows where the domesticated banana came from, and there are, or at least were in the 1990’s, still arguments about where the original wild species sprang from. Archaeological sites with banana traces, they tell us, are hard to find, as the banana is tropical and things in the tropics that are not made of stone do not last long, and as for seeds, well, domesticated bananas have no seeds.
The problem came up again with dogs. The same group I lived with had this small, very agile hunting dog breed that I had not seen elsewhere, so I looked up the origins of the domestic dog. Were dogs, in general, world-wide before the arrival of Columbus? Answer: unknown. Many authorities on the subject tell us that the domestic dog arrived with Europeans, but we all know about the Aztecs and the Chihuahua breed, made small and hairless and docile for the culinary appetites of the Azteca upper class. So, dogs were here, but barely, according to the records (and what about Huskies and Eskimos, aka, Inuit?) Or were they here big time and simply not noticed? Early dogs and wolves and coyotes, after all, are from the same source and are capable of interbreeding and creating viable offspring. Maybe those canine bones at the old camp sites were Fido in the rough.
The same can be said of human species. It is still held that we all came out of Africa, and a DNA marker test claimed that Eve – the mother of us all – spilled out her troublesome, world-trotting brood about 50,000 years ago, meaning that all of modern humans were once brothers and sisters just a few years ago, in geological terms. That sat well with the crusaders against racism in my graduate days in the 80’s, but the past twenty years has seen a remarkable change in the genetic records. Now it is thought that humans had many genetic offshoots from an original proto-hominid over the past several hundred thousand years, including Denisovan, Flores, and the well-known Neanderthal species, or sub –species. These can no longer be dismissed from the modern Sapiens sapiens because it is believed that most of us carry some of these “other” genes, somewhere between one and three percent among Asians and Europeans, although less to nearly no percent in sub-Saharan Africans. And don’t get started on the Australian Aborigines.
Meaning, at least to me, that things are still up in the air, which is a challenging place to be. We need a foothold if we are to start an investigation, and air allows only wing-holds, which are fluid and unsubstantial. With no foot holds, we can begin to accommodate all sorts of ideas, crazy and standard alike. We can say that aliens seeded the world, literally mating with the proto-hominids on earth. There is some possible reference to this in the Bible, in fact. Or we can say that races are fundamentally different, as common knowledge once had it. As the author of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fennimore Cooper) wrote, “we [races] all have our gifts.” This, unfortunately, was the belief which opened the door for slavery based on race, which led to the anti-racist “one out of Africa” preference later on, with or without paleoanthropological evidence.
Meaning, we don’t know even a slice of what we think we know. Our knowledge is hindered not only by a shocking lack of evidence – some hominid species are represented by only a hand-full of bones – but by several twists of prejudices and preferences that cloud the correct interpretation of evidence. We can use this to take a second look at all our beliefs today, both those before “PC” and those of “PC” itself, or at any other beliefs or interpretations. I believe I could even make a stab at clouding the objectivity of mathematics, but I won’t because my time on this earth is limited. Let me only conclude that we don’t really know where we came from and certainly do not know where we are going to.
Boy howdy, do we see this in the old movies and TV shows. Often, our reaction to them is, “How sweetly naïve they once were!” But they were not naïve at all. They – those people behind the black-and-white images on the screen - started wars, developed massive corporations and nations, tortured and saved and loved and hated, all with the complex passions we have today. They were not naïve, but rather were working off a different set of facts using different reference points. It is nearly a guarantee that we will look really, really stupid – perhaps criminally so – to some generation or to generations in general to come.
It is this that St Augustine was working towards when he wrote that real knowledge was a gift from the Holy Spirit, not an intellectual acquisition. Dipping back into his work Confessions once again, he reminds us that he studied with the intellectual greats of his day, 4th century Rome, at a time and place when most kinds of thought were allowed – certainly, I would say, as much as is allowed in America today. As we do today, they had a vast array of cultures to learn from as well as vast resources in historical records, preserved as they were in the great library at Alexandria. They were closer to the greats then– to those Einsteins known and unknown who invented the fundamental roots of technology and formal logic. Many scholars were aristocrats whose slaves did all the work for them as they studied and thought without disturbance. This was Augustine’s world. And yet he discovered real truth only in the writings of the crazy Jews from now-destroyed Palestine. The truth was not just in the writing itself, but in what was behind the writing, buried layer upon layer within.
Which brings me back to that odd time in Jerusalem’s Museum of Scrolls where I saw dozens of faces embedded in the calligraphy of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the prophets most closely identified with Christ. They were not there, of course; they could not be. Only an older woman and I could see them. The faces seemed much bigger than the writing, but were still none-the-less embedded in it. Impossible, but there was no doubt that they were there for us. This seems to me to be an example of what Augustine was talking about. The faces, just as the writings, did not portray the truth, or at least not all the truth, but acted as a door-way to the truth, a door that was opened only by the gift of the Holy Spirit. For me, that gift is still giving, even as I write this. It is a lesson from Spirit that what we know – the facts – and what we believe we know – our reference points – signify no more than squiggles on a piece of paper. What is important is what we are allowed to know beyond our ignorance and prejudices. Such is the gift beyond human knowledge, and the only truth of any people or age.
All we think we know by our own devices, then, is contingent, and will forever be. Real knowledge is only that gift from the Holy, sparked by our investment of time and effort into the spiritual keys we have been given, such as the Book of Isaiah (or not. Rain falls on the just and unjust alike). It is so because truth is far, far beyond what we can even imagine on our own. See how alien the faces in the scrolls were, how unexpected and surreal. See how impossible it was that the promised King of the Jews should come as a common laborer who was tortured and killed like a common criminal. Such things are forever outside our expectations until they are revealed. Such it is with every truth – outside, beyond, given to us only at the whim of the infinitely creative principle.
Where did we come from? Where from the banana? I imagine the latter might someday be answered, and the former never, but it is enough to know that even the most basic questions can lead us into an endless maze. That is why we were told by the prophets to be like children; not to be immature and rude, but to be wide open to learning, to things beyond our smug premises. God works in mysterious ways because we cannot know a scintilla of how he works unless we are given the gift of insight. Few will then understand what we have learned, but it will be alive at least within us. We might peal the banana, but knowledge of the heart of Man will remain only within the realm of the miraculous.
Lo those many years ago when I was writing my thesis and thought myself an old man – at thirty five, little did I know – I came across some unexpected problems. One group of Indians I had lived with in back-woods Venezuela used bananas, along with sweet potatoes, as their staple food. The problem came when I looked up the provenance of the original banana. Did it come from tropical Africa, the Near East or Southeast Asia? Not a bad question to ask when we know that potatoes, tomatoes and corn came from the New World, sugar from the Nile delta, and pineapple from far east Asia. It should have been a question answered simply, right?
It was not. It happens that no one really knows where the domesticated banana came from, and there are, or at least were in the 1990’s, still arguments about where the original wild species sprang from. Archaeological sites with banana traces, they tell us, are hard to find, as the banana is tropical and things in the tropics that are not made of stone do not last long, and as for seeds, well, domesticated bananas have no seeds.
The problem came up again with dogs. The same group I lived with had this small, very agile hunting dog breed that I had not seen elsewhere, so I looked up the origins of the domestic dog. Were dogs, in general, world-wide before the arrival of Columbus? Answer: unknown. Many authorities on the subject tell us that the domestic dog arrived with Europeans, but we all know about the Aztecs and the Chihuahua breed, made small and hairless and docile for the culinary appetites of the Azteca upper class. So, dogs were here, but barely, according to the records (and what about Huskies and Eskimos, aka, Inuit?) Or were they here big time and simply not noticed? Early dogs and wolves and coyotes, after all, are from the same source and are capable of interbreeding and creating viable offspring. Maybe those canine bones at the old camp sites were Fido in the rough.
The same can be said of human species. It is still held that we all came out of Africa, and a DNA marker test claimed that Eve – the mother of us all – spilled out her troublesome, world-trotting brood about 50,000 years ago, meaning that all of modern humans were once brothers and sisters just a few years ago, in geological terms. That sat well with the crusaders against racism in my graduate days in the 80’s, but the past twenty years has seen a remarkable change in the genetic records. Now it is thought that humans had many genetic offshoots from an original proto-hominid over the past several hundred thousand years, including Denisovan, Flores, and the well-known Neanderthal species, or sub –species. These can no longer be dismissed from the modern Sapiens sapiens because it is believed that most of us carry some of these “other” genes, somewhere between one and three percent among Asians and Europeans, although less to nearly no percent in sub-Saharan Africans. And don’t get started on the Australian Aborigines.
Meaning, at least to me, that things are still up in the air, which is a challenging place to be. We need a foothold if we are to start an investigation, and air allows only wing-holds, which are fluid and unsubstantial. With no foot holds, we can begin to accommodate all sorts of ideas, crazy and standard alike. We can say that aliens seeded the world, literally mating with the proto-hominids on earth. There is some possible reference to this in the Bible, in fact. Or we can say that races are fundamentally different, as common knowledge once had it. As the author of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fennimore Cooper) wrote, “we [races] all have our gifts.” This, unfortunately, was the belief which opened the door for slavery based on race, which led to the anti-racist “one out of Africa” preference later on, with or without paleoanthropological evidence.
Meaning, we don’t know even a slice of what we think we know. Our knowledge is hindered not only by a shocking lack of evidence – some hominid species are represented by only a hand-full of bones – but by several twists of prejudices and preferences that cloud the correct interpretation of evidence. We can use this to take a second look at all our beliefs today, both those before “PC” and those of “PC” itself, or at any other beliefs or interpretations. I believe I could even make a stab at clouding the objectivity of mathematics, but I won’t because my time on this earth is limited. Let me only conclude that we don’t really know where we came from and certainly do not know where we are going to.
Boy howdy, do we see this in the old movies and TV shows. Often, our reaction to them is, “How sweetly naïve they once were!” But they were not naïve at all. They – those people behind the black-and-white images on the screen - started wars, developed massive corporations and nations, tortured and saved and loved and hated, all with the complex passions we have today. They were not naïve, but rather were working off a different set of facts using different reference points. It is nearly a guarantee that we will look really, really stupid – perhaps criminally so – to some generation or to generations in general to come.
It is this that St Augustine was working towards when he wrote that real knowledge was a gift from the Holy Spirit, not an intellectual acquisition. Dipping back into his work Confessions once again, he reminds us that he studied with the intellectual greats of his day, 4th century Rome, at a time and place when most kinds of thought were allowed – certainly, I would say, as much as is allowed in America today. As we do today, they had a vast array of cultures to learn from as well as vast resources in historical records, preserved as they were in the great library at Alexandria. They were closer to the greats then– to those Einsteins known and unknown who invented the fundamental roots of technology and formal logic. Many scholars were aristocrats whose slaves did all the work for them as they studied and thought without disturbance. This was Augustine’s world. And yet he discovered real truth only in the writings of the crazy Jews from now-destroyed Palestine. The truth was not just in the writing itself, but in what was behind the writing, buried layer upon layer within.
Which brings me back to that odd time in Jerusalem’s Museum of Scrolls where I saw dozens of faces embedded in the calligraphy of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the prophets most closely identified with Christ. They were not there, of course; they could not be. Only an older woman and I could see them. The faces seemed much bigger than the writing, but were still none-the-less embedded in it. Impossible, but there was no doubt that they were there for us. This seems to me to be an example of what Augustine was talking about. The faces, just as the writings, did not portray the truth, or at least not all the truth, but acted as a door-way to the truth, a door that was opened only by the gift of the Holy Spirit. For me, that gift is still giving, even as I write this. It is a lesson from Spirit that what we know – the facts – and what we believe we know – our reference points – signify no more than squiggles on a piece of paper. What is important is what we are allowed to know beyond our ignorance and prejudices. Such is the gift beyond human knowledge, and the only truth of any people or age.
All we think we know by our own devices, then, is contingent, and will forever be. Real knowledge is only that gift from the Holy, sparked by our investment of time and effort into the spiritual keys we have been given, such as the Book of Isaiah (or not. Rain falls on the just and unjust alike). It is so because truth is far, far beyond what we can even imagine on our own. See how alien the faces in the scrolls were, how unexpected and surreal. See how impossible it was that the promised King of the Jews should come as a common laborer who was tortured and killed like a common criminal. Such things are forever outside our expectations until they are revealed. Such it is with every truth – outside, beyond, given to us only at the whim of the infinitely creative principle.
Where did we come from? Where from the banana? I imagine the latter might someday be answered, and the former never, but it is enough to know that even the most basic questions can lead us into an endless maze. That is why we were told by the prophets to be like children; not to be immature and rude, but to be wide open to learning, to things beyond our smug premises. God works in mysterious ways because we cannot know a scintilla of how he works unless we are given the gift of insight. Few will then understand what we have learned, but it will be alive at least within us. We might peal the banana, but knowledge of the heart of Man will remain only within the realm of the miraculous.
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