The Big Itch

Thanks to--I'll call him/her "an anonymous benefactor"--and to our sovereign Lord, I'm here in St. Louis creating my blog entry from a room on the seventh story of the Pear Tree Inn near Union Station.

Rachel (my wife) and I arrived much earlier than we expected, and have been using the extra period of rest to catch up on some reading and enjoy each others company. I just finished reading several chapters of a book my sister (we'll call her Rachel B.) gave me for Christmas, The attributes of God, by Arthur W. Pink.

During my reading of Pink's chapter on The Sovereignty of God, I came upon a metaphor that I'd like to capture here in words, and share with anyone interested. By came upon what I really mean is that in some way what I was reading inspired my thoughts unto a certain trajectory, which ended up somehow landing on what I about to share with you.

Every person at some time or another has experienced the phenomenon of an itch. There are many kinds of itches, all of which might come about for a variety of different reasons. Some itches come from an infection such as chicken pox, while others come about by way of suggestion, the way a friend's sneeze might in turn make you want to sneeze. In fact, some of you might be experiencing this very kind of itch right now, after reading the word "itch" so much, you may have developed some kind of hypersensitivity to the formations of itches all over your body. If this has happened, I apologize, and suggest you not read much further without some ointment close at hand.

I want to talk about a particular kind of itch, the chronic kind that does not go away after scratching it a bit. You might remember this sort of itch from your childhood, it was the one your parent may have told you not to itch because it would only make matters worse, like the kind of itch you get from a scab. You know that if you itch it the scab will break, or at least increase the chances of scarring, and at worst elevate the opportunity for infection.

The itch that I have specified above is a very intriguing phenomenon, because it is an obvious illustration of an instinct working counter-intuitively. We are taught to believe that all instincts are in some way self-preserving for us, but in this case our instincts tell us to do something that will very probably make us the worse for wear. We must be told by someone older and wiser NOT to do what our bodies are telling us to do, and then we must decide whether we will believe them, and if we decide to believe them we then must test our own limits of self-restraint.

Very often, if we make it that far, we find that our self-restraint is not so herculean as we might have guessed, and we end up scratching the itch. And what happens when we do? The itch grows inflamed, and with it our desire to itch it more grows respectively. Again, this is counter-intuitive. One would think that if we gave our body what it needed to satiate its frustrations, similar to the phenomenon of hunger, then the annoying "itch" would stop, but instead the itch demands only more itching, which, if received, will only demand ever it more and more.

By now you may have guessed where I am going with this. As a Christian, I have come across this same phenomenon, on a spiritual level, every single day. My sin nature gives my soul an itch, and I must decide what I will do about it. Will I indulge in what my own soul craves--the relief of further agitation--,or will I abstain from what my soul is telling me I need and heed the warnings of those wiser than I?

Well, as any Christian knows, there are days when my self-restraint proves strong, and others when I can't help but try the futile scratching technique again...and we all know how that always ends.

Like most metaphors, the itch metaphor can only take us so far, because scratching an itch doesn't really ever affect anyone else around me drastically. I suppose you could stretch it a bit, and say that if you scratch an itch long enough it will become inflamed to such an extent that your temperament could become disagreeable to those around you. But, there are many sins (perhaps all sins) that have a much more direct affect on my neighbor than the irritated state a scratched itch would leave me in. For instance, I might have a "sin-itch" that is telling me to belittle those around me, because, as the sin would tell me, they are dumber than me and deserve it. In that case, and many others like it, scratching the itch would be sinning against my neighbor directly.

So, one blaring question remains. How does one rid himself of an itch? Well, in most cases we can assume that if the itch is ignored for long enough, if one occupies himself with things that do not focus on the itch, it will somehow lose it's hold on the body and mind, and dissolve away. But what if an itch persists for a long time...a very long time, and no matter how much the person tries to ignore it, it just doesn't seem to go away? Should we cut off the limb with the itch altogether? Modern medicine and common sense would say this is preposterous! Imagine going in to see your physician with the problem of a chronic itch on your left hand, and his first instinct is to pull out the amputation saw to cut off your arm! How terrifying!

And here we come to the second limitation of the metaphor, an itch is not severe enough to warrant any dramatic action by a physician. But, let us imagine a world where instead of the phenomenon of itching coming about for a variety of reasons, an itch would only arise for one singular reason--terminal cancer of a limb, which cannot be eradicated by radiation or medicine of any sort. Now imagine you have walked into the physician's office and delivered the awful news that your left hand is itching. At this juncture only the most callous or ignorant doctor would withhold the healing touch of the saw from you. This type of itch is much closer to the kind that sin produces, and the physician with the saw is much more like the Christ that shows sinners compassion.

Wrestling with Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Aphorism 1

Nietzche believes that all wise men before him were infected by the same sickness, namely the idea that life is worthless. Ostensibly at the onset Nietzsche sees himself as the only defender of or champion for a certain kind of fullness and joy to life. Yet this type of life or way of living that he fights for, that he spends his whole life devoted to, is never fully explained to the reader. Furthermore, it doesn’t really seem to have legs of its own to stand on, as it is always found in opposition to the prevailing and evident ways of life surrounding Nietzsche. I imagine Nietzsche’s philosophy will deflate rather quickly once it runs out of things to yell at. He points endlessly to the people around him, and exclaims that they are sick, that they have been fooled by the legacy of philosophers before them. Yet, he has the audaciousness to begin this particular book with the assertion, “In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless…Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.” By this definition of wise, Nietzsche ought to count himself the wisest.
It also seems apparent to me that Philosophy ought to have a prescriptive function; if it speaks anything wise at all it should be for the welfare of the people receiving it. If people are already well off when a philosophy finds them, I doubt it would have much more to say than, “well done, carry on.” And if that’s all it has to say to us, do we really have any use for it? Clearly then, any philosophy worth hearing, worth remembering, is one that points to the ills of the people in order that they may be healed. Indeed, this is exactly what Nietzsche aims to do with his own philosophy, even if it is a philosophy that deconstructs all others, it still functions in this way: for the good of people…or so Nietzsche would have us believe. Thus, the “wisest” of every age are those individuals who have prescribed a new and better way of living to the people than the one they are presently living in. Nietzsche, the “deconstructionist,” seems to be functioning in the exact same manner as the wise men of every age who he abhors. As he puts it, he is just another raven “inspired by the smell of carrion.”

my title

Wittenberg is the university that Martin Luther attended, and in their own fictional worlds both Hamlet and Faustus were rumored to have been students there. I learned about Wittenberg after seeing a play by the same name last year at the Arden theater in Philly. The play portrayed an imagined scenario where Professor Luther's theology and Professor Faustus's philosophy batted poor hamlet around like a ping-pong ball. "My own private..." is an allusion to Gus Van Sant's 1990 film "My own private Idaho" which tells the story of a narcoleptic hustler, Mike Waters, and his search for his long lost mother; the film ends with Mike standing on the same long winding road in Idaho he started on. I hope as you read my blog, my posts will help to further reveal the meaning of my title.