“We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”
Matthew 11:17
nu·ance noun
- a subtle difference or distinction
- sensibility to variations (of meaning, tone, or value)
The gospel is as binary as it gets. Jesus doesn’t leave much wiggle room when it comes to God. “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he tells his disciples. Peter reiterates when he is questioned by a hostile tribunal of Jewish leaders: “Salvation is found in no one else,” he proclaims. “For there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” Those who flinch at the exclusivist claims of Christianity have only its founder to blame—though shooting the messenger continues to be a popular sport. And those who soft-pedal the gospel in order to lessen its offense and widen the narrow way know little of Jesus and even less about road construction.
So it might seem odd that I, a die-hard devotee of definitive doctrine, should decry the dearth of delicate discernment in these dehumanizing digital days. (Sorry. I got carried away.) But it is indeed the case. Our engagements with the world—politics, the arts, religion, sex—are being reduced to surfaces and stark polarities. Ideas atrophy into ideology. Sublimity sinks to sensuality. Values devolve to volume. Meaning mummifies into meme. There is no mistaking it: nuance is dying—and I mourn its demise.
If it were a matter of cultural deprivation alone, it would be lamentable enough. Inhabiting the current landscape can make some of us feel like three-dimensional beings trapped in a two-dimensional world. We take refuge in old-school literature or classical music and with these fragments shore against the advancing ruins of the wasteland. We have learned to keep our condemnable opinions to ourselves, having experienced the quick-draw, blunt instrument wrath of the new enlightenment. We comfort ourselves with the words of the Spartan commander when his small band of warriors faced an overwhelming Persian army: “They have the numbers; we, the heights.” We fortify our courage, even though we well know how that ancient battle ended.
As I say, if it were merely a matter of cultural privation, we might hunker down with a good book and quietly hope that the barbarian hordes will leave us to ourselves. But it is not merely a cultural issue. The end of nuance also means a stunted spiritual imagination; that is, a shrunken capacity to perceive spiritual realities—and this has dire consequences for both believer and nonbeliever alike.
The generation of Christ’s own time also suffered for want of spiritual imagination. The Jews were zealous guardians of divine law, but they could not grasp the reality that it spelled out; they could perceive only the flat facts of the world. They could read the law of Moses but not the writing on the wall. “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky,” Jesus tells them, “but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.” The implications of this imaginative poverty were devastating. Jesus wept over Jerusalem:
“If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”
Our own generation is increasingly handicapped by an evaporating capacity for both nuance and spiritual imagination. The roots of the problem aren’t difficult to identify. That humankind exchanged the truth of God for a lie is, of course, the primal seed which, as Milton decants it, brought death into the world, and all our woe. But from this has lately sprung a garden of noxious seedlings—substandard education, pervasive digital media, relentless social indoctrination, and biblical illiteracy, to name a few. These creep like invasive vines into the mind and suck all but a husk of lower functions and instinct.
The result is a culture that cannot make connections. Nuance employs allusion, and allusions require a meaningful shelf life. In a world of instants there can be no allusions, for there is nothing to allude to. Experience is caught in its own echo chamber, amplifying itself out of all context. There is only this/now which is blind and deaf to all but itself. Nuance also demands discrimination. Discrimination is a learned ability that is developed by practice. The multiplicity championed by the culture is, in fact, monolithic, a many-faced facelessness that only erodes true discernment. Above all, nuance requires margins where reflection can occur. Velocity is the enemy of contemplation. The relentless onslaught of information and images floods the mind and the senses, leaving no refuge for contemplation, no vantage point to behold anything beyond everything.
Good medicine, it seems to me, is to purposefully nurture a capacity for nuance. Reading is a good start. Making time for prayer is also profitable as it offers you a wider vista. Conversation—without added entertainments like games or movies—enhances attention and feeds the soul. Our culture may lack for nuance, but we don’t have to. The capacity for nuance clarifies and enriches, and—very importantly—can save us from the fouler snares.
