The Necessity of Exploration

What our need to know can tells us about our purpose

In an average week, I listen to several hours of podcast episodes. Given the amount of time I spend chauffeuring my son to different activities, preparing meals, and supposedly weeding my garden, this allows me to keep learning during otherwise “dead times.” I have recently listened to two episodes which led me to contemplate what it means to be human.

• Ian Lasch and Harry Gibbins appeared on the Autism and Theology Podcast to discuss how some definitions of the imago dei (what it means to be made in God’s image) unintentionally exclude disabled persons by focusing on rationality or sociability. This was of particular interest to me as my son is on the autism spectrum. (Listen here.)

• Zena Hitz appeared on the Credo Podcast to discuss the meaning of intellectual life and the purpose of education. She spoke of the disenchantment she experienced upon discovering how much of teaching involves simply relaying information that disinterested students spit back out for the test and then discard forever. She also discussed her hope that students will come to see the joy of learning for learning’s sake. (Listen here.)

Hearing these two interviews in quick succession led me to think about how the pursuit of higher knowledge is a uniquely human activity and thus part of the imago dei. When I think about how my son reflects the image of God, I see that he loves to create order out of chaos, bring new things into being through building, and follow his curiosity into new situations. Tolkien would say he is a sub-creator, and that is certainly true. It is part of the image of God in him. But I would add that he is also an explorer.

In T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he speaks of exploration as a driving purpose of mankind, interweaving it with his considerations of time. In the second poem, “East Coker,” he writes the following.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.[1]

He picks up the same theme in the fourth poem, “Little Gidding.”

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning[2]

Eliot argues that exploration is something that should continue for one’s entire life. At the core of who we are is our constant need to press on to greater knowledge, greater communion, greater experience. The result of all this, Eliot says, is that we will eventually come back round and find that our end is our beginning.

Another poem which strikes a similar tone is “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is told from the perspective of the titular character (also called Odysseus) whose quest to return home from Troy forms the heart of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, one of the central works of Western literature.[3] Tennyson imagines Ulysses near the end of his life, having seen much of the world and overcome many obstacles. Rather than retiring to his estate and living out his days in solitude, Ulysses chooses to set out with his men again in search of new discoveries.

“I cannot rest from travel,” Ulysses tells us. “I will drink / Life to the lees.” He cannot bear the thought of stagnancy. “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” He speaks of his desire, “To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” The span of his life shortens, but he is not bowed.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

Finally, the poem closes with Ulysses’ bold pledge to go, to move, to explore as long as he has breath.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” is the proper motto of an explorer. Our desire to learn, to see new things, to know and be known is at the heart of all we are, propelling us even into old age. A person who has given up on exploration is, in the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses, “an idle king.” The term is practically an oxymoron. Kings ought to be doing things, even as all humans ought to be doing things.

But does our status as explorers have anything to do with the imago dei? Perhaps it is better to ask, is God an explorer? By the tenets of classical theism, I must confess that he is not. Creator, yes. Savior, yes. Explorer, no.

Note how Eliot and Tennyson speak of movement, restlessness, change, and expansion. The God of the Holy Scriptures is by nature immutable, i.e. unchanging. To use Plato’s terminology, he is the unmoved Mover. There is nothing God does not know or see, and thus nothing to be discovered.

Here I must revisit Eliot’s poem. “In my end is my beginning,” he tells us. Here we must remember that the word ‘end’ serves a double purpose: it can signify either a termination or a telos. The telos of a thing is its ultimate purpose and meaning. So, Eliot may be saying that linear time is looping back on itself, or he may be saying that we find our true beginning by knowing our purpose. Perhaps he is saying both.

Eliot also writes that “the end of all our exploring” will be to “arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time.” Once again, the words “end of all our exploring” could mean either the termination or the purpose of our exploring. To arrive where we started is to comprehend or experience our origin. To know this, Eliot argues, is the purpose of human exploration.

Our purpose as explorers is therefore to discover our telos and order our lives according to it. Our telos lies in the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. What is the ultimate good, truth, and beauty? None other than the one from whom we derive our origin: God.

The first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism famously says,

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.[4]

There again we see the language of an ‘end,’ this time unambiguously meaning telos. Man’s chief purpose, according to the drafters of that catechism, is to glorify and enjoy God, which is another way of saying to know him, praise him, and follow him. Following our telos points us straight back to God, the source of all we are. In book one, chapter one of his Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[5]

To be an explorer is none other than to seek the face of God—the beatific vision. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)[6]

Is exploration part of the imago dei? I would argue the answer is yes. It is the function by which we seek out and return to the one whose image we bear and thus find our own purpose and meaning. The end of human life and the practice of Christianity is to know God and find one’s self in him.

Exploration is therefore not an option for humans. It is a necessity pressed upon us by our very nature. To bear the imago dei is to be an explorer. The only question is, will we live in line with our telos or in rebellion against it?

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[1] Eliot, T.S. “East Coker,” V.202-9 in Four Quartets: A Poem (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 32.

[2][2] Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding,” V.239-46 in Four Quartets: A Poem (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 59.

[3] Full text here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

[4] https://thewestminsterstandard.org/westminster-shorter-catechism/

[5] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm

[6] 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation