I have recently had the misfortune of hearing a truly terrible happy-clappy rewriting of Newman’s hymn Lead Kindly Light, arranged for guitar, drum kit, and Hozier-wannabe vocalist. I don’t mean to slate anyone who likes that kind of thing; only to say that the wild incongruity of the genre and this particular text grated on me. I admit that I have not always been a great fan of the more traditional setting of this hymn. My first impression was that it was a bit of a dirge; a dirge that sandpapered down the gentle anguishes and hopes of the words, sat painfully in my passaggio range, and ended on a dismal John Rutter-style descending scale that I always misremembered in ways that were more interesting than the reality. I think bad settings of this hymn particularly irritate me because Lead Kindly Light is one of those prayers that I repeat, in full or in part, as part of the mundane rhythms of my day-to-day life. It sits very close to my heart. It’s not as simple as the rhyme scheme or language of the text would suggest.
In his infamous doorstop of a book Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter describes the state of being a conscious, thinking entity (rather than a ‘number-shunting machine’) as a product of self-reference, or what he calls “strange loops”. A quick example of a strange loop would be:
- The following sentence is false
- The preceding sentence is true
wherein the meaning of each sentence is both created and obfuscated by its reference to the other. The two sentences are locked together like two mirrors set opposite each other, endlessly reflecting the same image back and forth. It’s impossible to say which sentence is the originator of the meaning contained in their mutual reference. Hofstadter’s thesis is that this strange loop is a simple archetype for the human being, which finds its humanity and “beingness” in the immensely complex kaleidoscope of self-reference around it. In short, “the vortex of the I” is a thing created by the causal power of mutual reference between us and the world around us. The greater and more complex the degree of self-reference, the more fully actualised a thinking entity is. The human brain is an example of a more complex strange loop system, wherein simple, “meaningless” building blocks (neurons) interact reciprocally with the complex, self-aware system they make up (the thinking brain). When I think a thought, I consciously shunt some neurons around. Conversely, neurones shunting without my say-so can produce thoughts and feelings in me that I have not deliberately come up with (think, for example, of your involuntary reactions to certain events, or a bad mood that comes out of nowhere). There is a reciprocality involved in thinking thoughts between the shunter (you) and the shuntee (the little grey cells) in which it is not wholly clear whence the meaning or origin of any particular thought comes.
Although Hofstadter takes a fairly dim view of faith-based questions, his ideas resonate well with the Catholic worldview, even to the point that to take them to their logical endpoint seems to lead you straight there. If consciousness, or “beingness” (the state of being actualised, however you want to to term it), is a sliding scale on which systems can be more or less actualised than others according to their capacity for self-reference (and I am including both the strange loop sentences above, and the human person as “systems” of differing complexity), then the end of that scale must end with the maximally self-referential consciousness, which is God. When we say, therefore, that humans are made in the image of God, what we are saying is that the human person is effectively a neuron in the mind of God. It’s hardly a groundbreaking statement to say that our relationship with God is in some sense reciprocal: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us; judge not lest ye be judged; ask and it shall be given to you. The problem of free will is in this sense a problem of reciprocality. The Christian life is all about recognising that your power to shunt is in necessary and inevitable tension with your capacity to be shunted, and that the whole dynamic of shunter and shuntee forms part of a formal system so large and complex that you can never perceive even a fraction of it. Does the cerebellum know about the hippocampus? Possibly. Does the hippocampus know that it was named after a little bony creature bobbing about in the great blue sea? Does the little bony creature know it was named after a much larger, land-based creature to which it bears almost no functional similarities whatsoever, but that some ancient bipedal creature with a higher capacity to shunt electricity around a little coily brain structure designed to retain information looked at it one day, and with the causal power of his ancient language, tied them together forever? Certainly not. We can only be fully aware of systems when we can step outside them, and we can only step outside a system that is of lesser complexity than ourselves. The seahorse is less complex than the system that named it, and the formal system that we call our brain is less complex than the great web of providence. Defined in this way, we could argue that sin is when we try fruitlessly to step outside the system, isolate ourselves from that system of mutual self-reference between ourselves and God that causes us to have both meaning and life. The temptation of Eve to be greater than we have capacity for in fact makes us less human, less actualised, less referential.
To step away, for a moment, from the great headache-inducing task that is contemplating the mind of God, it seems to me that we can approach this kaleidoscopic network of mutual reference through a great many smaller strange loop systems that sit under the God, that strangest loop of all. The interplay between Old and New Testament; the lives of the saints guiding our own lives; the Trinity reflected in the causal mutual reference of the family unit. It has struck me of late how much going through life is a series of strange loops. If I met my ex for the first time now things might work out better because of what I learned when we separated– but if we had never separated, I would still be the person I was when we met. In the friendships and relationships I have had since, I have seen that relationship reflected and re-run again and again, and each time I play a different part. The infinitely recursive loop of two people has been teased out and transformed and re-travelled over and over again, like stepping through the looking glass into each successive refracted image. I phoned a friend recently and found we’d both been through eerily similar experiences with the male species of late, and again I was struck by the profoundly interconnected, referential nature of human experience. It seems that from the dawn of humanity we have all been walking around the same mobius strip hurtling through space and time.
This realisation that humans never really change is a source of constant amazement to me. I am hardly unusual in that when I read John Henry Newman for the first time, I felt like I had met a friend; his life looked in many ways like mine, his concerns about the church (both as an Anglican and a Catholic) were the same ones I see bandied around The Tablet and at the Newman dinner table; the Oxford he describes is in essence still very much the Oxford I know. Newman, I feel, had a strong sense that the lines providence draws around us often resemble an MC Escher painting, connecting in ways that are implausible yet somehow inevitable. One step enough for me, he says. Lead thou me on. I hear those lines echoed in the notes he made on the back cover of his school exercise book between the ages of eleven and eighty-three: And now on the way to Greek. And now in my rooms at Oriel College. Led on by God’s hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me. And now a Cardinal. Time drives on, like some relentless and baffling spiral staircase. There’s a certain sense of awe in reading these notes, watching the staircase wind round and round through the decades of his life, and now beyond, folding him into the choir of saints whose lives revolved and unfolded around the same axis. You could keep writing: and now beatified, and now a saint, and now Doctor of the Church. And now patron of some 20 something who, like me, swore she’d never become Catholic. The lives of the saints are prolepsis and analepsis rolled together. Lead Kindly Light taps into something of that elusive substrate of human experience, that wandering in the desert and around perpetually ascending staircases. There’s another essay in here about the linear cycle of doctrinal development (as Terry Eagleton so acerbically puts it, ‘moving from one state of certainty to another state of certainty’), but that’s for another dinner table conversation where everything is the same and yet entirely different to the last time, or the time before that.
I suppose if Newman is to be properly set to music, it ought really to be to a JS Bach fugue. Whether or not the average parish congregation is musically up to the job of singing such a thing, nothing else could really capture the recursive awareness and drive towards some ungraspable apex of self-reference that Newman’s thought was capable of. I hope in the New Creation I will get to hear that impossibly strange loop– and for the time being, I fear I will have to make my peace with that awful descending scale.