Practicality is overrated, or, Lizards and Learning

Saint Augustine (Confessions X.35) chalks up the urge for knowledge with the desires of the other senses, and therefore considers it a possible danger.

For instance, instead of considering it pretty much a good thing (as we would) to sit and watch a lizard do its thing, he considers it a distraction from what he ought to be doing, such as contemplating God. The lizard might lead him to praise God, but in the meantime it wasted his attention. This is profoundly not the way I go about it, but whether that’s the medieval or modern influence, I’m not sure.

Dr. Esolen, in his article “A Manna for All Seasons,” talks about how sacrifice is not practical, and the Sabbath is not practical, but it gives God glory to spend part of our substance not being practical. Miserliness in sacrifice is bad.

Art is not practical. Math and science are not necessarily practical. Look at Gauss, who did his doctoral thesis working out hyperbolic geometry with no clue it would be worth anything, and then Einstein came along fifty years later or so and discovered that his geometry exactly described the gravity he’d been trying to express.

Augustine then might retort that expressing gravity isn’t worthwhile either. Augustine certainly argued that he didn’t need to know the courses of the stars. But I think Proverbs 25:2 is relevant here: It is the glory of God to hide a matter, but it is the glory of kings to seek a matter out.

Learning is a good thing. It is not the best thing: that is God, as Augustine and is quite right to point out: but learning is a good thing, and I’m not convinced practicality is always a good thing. Vocation and calling also figure into this debate, I think: not everyone is called to be a mathematician, but those who are should do it and do it well.

Back to contemplating lizards, it occurs to me that Proverbs spends the entire book extrapolating Truth from natural things, including lizards, and if you never notice lizards you’ll never get the point. “Though the lizard may be grasped with the hands, yet it is found in kings’ palaces.” Lilias Trotter, an “intrepid woman explorer” and Victorian missionary to North Africa—and an excellent artist, it occurs to me—wrote a lot of very good devotionals, each looking at a little natural thing and drawing out the Truth.