Lost Youth

It's a bromide that an important component of maturity is finding out how much you don't know. Profession of profound ignorance, nonetheless, has been admired by many in figures such as Socrates, to name the most famous. Admission of ignorance, with its attendant attitude of epistemological humility, is widely regarded as ushering one into the enlightenment of that wisdom which comes only with age. Those of us who have been so enlightened usually wait with a certain degree of impatience for the rest of humanity to join us; most particularly our impatience is reserved for those who are "old enough to know better."

We excuse youth, to an extent, for its sureness of itself. One must learn a fair bit about God, man, and the universe in order to truly comprehend the insignificance of one's knowledge. Usually it takes some living to get to that point.

I got to that point rather earlier than most, I think. Possibly because I was so exorbitantly sure that I had the cosmos in a noetic box; possibly because that box was unusually small; possibly because I suddenly had rather more of the world to cram into my box than many would have at 18.

I remember clearly when the box tore. It wasn't a moment, but 90 days in Chile that did it. I had started reading theology at the tender age of 12; soon after, listening to taped sermons was a favorite pastime of mine. I continued to read, but I became really serious about my studies around the age of 16. Calvin's Institutes, Luther's The Bondage of the Will, Jonathan Edwards' sermons; that type of thing. The expected rebelliousness of the teen years was in my case channeled into strict Protestant theology and radical right-wing politics of the American sort. I became a die-hard Covenanter by 17, had read a lot of the pertinent 16th- and 17th-century writings by 18, and I had the world figured out.

Until I went to Chile. My mother is Chilean; she did her utmost to become a devoted Midwestern stay-at-home mom, but her assimilation did nothing to erase the reality of friends and a whole lot of family in Southern South America. I went down there, not to discover my roots--too liberal a concept for my radical teenage self--but to put faces to my mother's stories. And it was then that I discovered that you can't really fit Chile into a Steelite Covenanter box. I tried, initially, but it was just too absurd a project, even for a perverse contrarian like me.

After that, I tried to slough off the brainiac act. I read Louis L'amour, collected guns, got a job doing carpentry work, learned to like country music, went hunting, drove a 4x4 pickup, and made a Herculean effort to learn to speak in the proletarian manner (the one thing I never could quite get down). But I still thought that I had a decent, if tenuous, grip on Total Reality.

Then I went to college, a very conservative Presbyterian one, of course, where I took an "Introduction to Philosophy" course. Now the torn remnants of my box were burning to ashes, and the original vision of my epistemic poverty had become the epiphany of nearly complete ignorance.

I've never fully recovered. Okay, it's only been 5 years, so maybe I'm over-dramatizing my personal narrative. I got past the temptations to theological liberalism, simply by presenting myself with the personal consequences of such a move. I would have missed God and heaven and hell too much, plus I couldn't do that to my folks. Anything other than orthodoxy seemed malleable to the point of laughability, and trendiness had always appeared despicable. So what to do with my framework of Presbyterian orthodoxy, since I was intent on keeping it?

I still don't know. I've toyed with various ideas, dabbled in metaphysics and epistemology. I once professed to be a semi-neo-Thomist, just to irk my Van Tilian peers. I've poked around in the Reformed Epistemology, which I like, but it's just too generic and spineless. I'd still like to intellectually ground the convictions to which I cling, to do the sort of thing that Anselm attempted in his Proslogion. I guess I find too much irrationalism in the leap that kept me an orthodox Presbyterian; I guess I got too much air on that particular jump. Maybe what I miss is just the certainty of youth.