Dissecting the Universe
Understanding doesn’t come by annihilation
This Mid-Week Edition of Ecstatic features Josh Nadeau
In grade ten we had to dissect a mouse. Blue latex gloves were handed out and put on, as were some old, stained aprons, and those clear plastic safety goggles that smelled like sweat. The classroom reeked of formaldehyde.
I remember walking to the front of the classroom, grabbing the plastic bag with my embalmed mouse in it, and I remember when I put it on my desk, stretched out on the cutting board, that it had a blue barcode stamped on its stomach, and you could see the preservatives that stained the cobweb of veins along its torso.
We had to pin the mouse down, belly up, limb by limb, and to get the torso tight enough, we had to break the mouse’s legs and stretch it open. Kits were handed out, tools of the trade, I guess—scalpel and tweezers, scissors, and some metal utensil used to poke and probe.
And there was a little booklet of instructions, a step-by-step guide for the dismembering, I remember cutting the mouse open, from the jaw, down the chest, over the bloated belly, and down around the tail. There was no blood, and the organs spill out as the skin and muscle peel back behind my incision.
Our preparatory readings for class were about biological structures and how organisms were more than the sum of their parts. And while cutting and plucking, labeling and setting aside, all that’s going through my mind was that this mouse, Mickey we called him, was made up of the same stuff as me. Heart and lungs, intestines and kidneys, a brain and a liver.
But it wasn’t like you could put all these parts into a jar or plastic bag, wrap it all up in cellulose or collagen, give it a shake, and call it Mickey, or Josh, for that matter. There was something else, something more.
Our instruction book told us that by dissecting, by taking apart, that all these drawings and anatomical diagrams would make sense—that they would come to life. And in some ways, the drawings did take on new life, but in another sense, it made no sense at all. These were just the cogs and tubes and nuts and bolts; but it wasn’t these that made a mouse. This is just what a mouse was made up of. These were the parts, but they did not necessarily equal the sum.
And I remember, after plucking the mouse up from its board, spending an hour or two picking it apart, observing it, and throwing it away into in a special tub, I remember thinking that I had never really looked at a mouse when it was alive. Studied it, watched it, understood it.
The anatomical drawings were abstract, the dissecting was a bit less so. But it didn’t make me understand the mouse; it made me think less of the mouse. Like it was simply some amalgamation of organs, like it was just a machine.
And lots of my thinking, and even my living, seemed to be that way—more machine and less alive. It was my conception of the mouse, and it was also my conception of self. I was trying to understand by annihilation, trying to apprehend by destruction; by dissection.
It was also my religion. As if God was pinned down, stretched out, under the scalpel of all my questions. And as the proverbial “skin and muscle” peeled back, doctrine and dogma spilled out. And I took notes, defining everything.
Like I could put all these theological ideas into a box or a jar, shake them up, and somehow create another Creator. Like I could wrap it up in skin and have another Incarnation. But God, like the mouse, like me, is more than the sum of his parts—infinitely so.
Maybe all the abstraction, all the defining, muddles more than it clarifies. Just like I had only studied the mouse when it was dead and flayed open, maybe I had never studied God as alive. Maybe I’d never observed him, as a Person. Maybe I needed less science, less data, less analysis. Maybe I needed a bit more awe, a bit more wonder. Maybe that’s what we should mean when we talk about a good education—about wonder.
I remember going to the school library a few days after the dissecting to read a few encyclopedia entries about mice—which were, up to that point, carcasses to be emptied out of traps in my parents’ basement, or a cadaver to be explained on my school desk. But those articles began to give me a new lens with which to experience the mice in my life.
I learned that they were mostly nocturnal, a bit territorial, and that they build nests close to food sources. I learned that when the getting was good, when food was a plenty, they breed like crazy and their social group slowly forms a hierarchy. But when things are scarce, all kinds of aggression bubbles up; an isolation sets in. I learned that they can communicate with secreted scents and that they can feel the vibrations of their surroundings with their whiskers.
I was in awe of these little critters, amazed at their industriousness. I had a new appreciation. Seeing them, alive and living, and not just their insides, labeled on my cutting board. I began to see the sum rather than the parts.
And this way of seeing, the whole rather than merely the parts, began to show up everywhere for me. I’d seen an engine before, and learned how combustion works, but I didn’t really care. It’s the car I care about, and driving with the windows down, in early autumn, listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival.
It was the same for the mouse. I didn’t care about the tubes and glue and machinery; I cared about the living.
And it was the same for me. I don’t understand self by cutting apart; I understand self by becoming a part of something else, something more: a living community.
And it was the same for God; all the abstractions seemed to make me less full of awe and my vision of him was mundane, nothing more than a machine to be examined. And all the premises, all the syllogisms, and all the doctrines never did what I needed them to do: Fill my heart.
I was poisoned by a modern way of thinking—that mere explanation is enough—and the deeper I went into all the arguments and evidence, the more I tried to label and define, the more I tried to understand God by annihilation, the less he made sense.
This was my loophole: knowing the complexity of it all seemed to get me off the hook of obedience, or commitment, or trust. With the right answers, I was in the clear when it came to a life of prayer and devotion.
I could simply get lost in the tomes written by all the greats of the Christian Tradition, and I could define it all, but that was simply dissection. And God is more than the sum of his parts—infinitely so. Dissection isn’t enough. I needed new ways of seeing.
Chesterton once said that he was a pagan by twelve and an agnostic by sixteen, and that all the apologetics, all the dissection, in the world didn’t help bring him back. No, it was stories that sowed seeds of doubt into his rational and analytical mindset; tales and lore that started to dismember his whole view of the world as machine. Beauty was his apologetic.
It was wonder that began to re-enchant his normal mode of living, moving and having his being. When I read this, I remember thinking that maybe the goal of life wasn’t accumulation—the gathering or memorizing of data or doctrines—maybe it was about beholding the Person. Alive and infinite.
Maybe that old way of seeing, dissecting the universe, the one taught to me and forced upon me, could never yield the Good Life I wanted. Maybe the good life was stirred up by beholding, beholding love and stirred to love. And maybe that highest form of love—the Source of all love—informs all the rest. In loving first things first, says Lewis, we can love second things best.
And maybe all the answers I was looking for, the ones I was dissecting God over, found answers through participation in his great love. I think Alyosha taught me this when he kissed his brother Ivan. I think Aquinas taught me that when kneeling before the altar, he said, “Only you, Lord”—And maybe that rightly ordered love leads to rightly ordered viewing; and maybe in that indefinable space of enjoyment, of pleasure, everything becomes clear and articulate—not with words, but in the soul.
Maybe, the starting point matters, and maybe it’s the poets, the painters, the prophets, who can give us new eyes to enjoy that love. Maybe their every word, their every brush stroke, their every oracle is an invitation, up out of the modernist machine, and further up and further into the Living Person of the Christ.
Maybe these, the artists, invite us to kneel, like Job, before the amaranthine storm of God in humility and silence. To listen to his still small voice, and have the whole cosmos slowly settle into place in his aftermath. Maybe it is not dissection we need, maybe it is an all-consuming union.
Josh Nadeau
Writer & Artist
Josh is the Artist Behind Sword and Pencil and is the Founder of Every Day Saints. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Room for Good Things to Run Wild.
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Yes! This is just the sort of thing Charlotte Mason talked about in her various educational books. She contrasts the two types of education: analytical and synthetic (or synthesis). She points out that while analytical education is necessary and helpful we make the mistake in modern education of having it proceed the synthetic education. That is, like your example, you had dissected a mouse before you had even truly experienced a mouse. She also points out that joy and love for something can only come through a synthetic (whole/unified) relationship of the thing. One of my favorite quotes of hers, "Education is the science of relationships."
This is such an desperately necessary topic to address. Thank you for writing on it.
Maybe neither way of questioning is poison or cure but just two different ways of knowing the world? The difference between ‘who?’ and ‘how?’ Like melody and harmony: alone, insufficient, but together, resoundingly beautiful. To know the ways the world works and also why it does, and for both answers to turn us back to the glory of the Creator! (Credit where it’s due: Marty Solomon teaches this idea at the beginning of the BEMA podcast)