On Adoring Or Analysing

Humans seem to be able to experience pleasure, or analyse our own pleasure, but not both at the same time. We can experience something, or we can objectively scrutinise our experience, but we cannot do so simultaneously.

C. S. Lewis said this more than once:

“This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyse the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.”

“But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words, the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.”

“The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look “inside ourselves” and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it.”

Lewis is right. You cannot admire and observe your own admiration. You cannot fully experience a sweet taste, or a delightful touch, or a stirring sound and also watch your own emotions. One precludes the other.

This is important for Christians, and especially for Christians who teach. We who teach do a lot of analysing of the Christian life. We analyse ideas and concepts like love, faith, humility, grace, and beauty. We define experiences such as worship, prayer, illumination, obedience, and sanctification. Teachers are forever finding new ways to categorise, summarise, and compartmentalise the many truths that make up the Christian life.

But teachers run a great risk. When they are in the mode of rational analysis, they are not experiencing the things they teach. When thinking about prayer in the abstract, the person is usually not praying. While defining worship with definitional precision, the teacher is not worshipping. And while this absence from the Christian experience is necessary to teach well, to dwell only in the world of objective analysis is to chill your own soul.

Some Christians fall into this trap. They allow their growing competence in thinking about the Christian life to substitute for an actual experience of the Christian life. They believe their superior grasp of the concepts of Christianity is tantamount to obeying the truths of Christianity.

But the net result is like a man who becomes expert in the meaning and modes of romantic love in marriage, but fails to engage his wife in any of those things he has learned. He can regale crowds with masterful summaries, analogies, and anecdotes about married love, while his wife dines alone every night.

We can adore God, or we can analyse the meaning of adoration. Those who teach should analyse the meaning of adoration. But once done, once taught, the teacher must himself enter into that experience he recommended to others. If he fails to do that, his soul will wither, finding substitute satisfaction in his intellectual hobby of categorising the Christian life. He will be like a man with his back to the window in his mountain cabin, forever arranging stacks of mountain-vista postcards in some kind of order, while the glory outside beckons.