Month: May 2026

Is There a Scheme of Things Underlying Everything?

In The Thibaults (the novel sequence for which Roger Martin du Gard won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature), a fundamental motif is the question of whether the universe is coherent. Roughly speaking, there are three competing schools of coherence—science, religion and art. Antoine Thibault discusses with the Abbé (French title for abbot):

Antoine did not seem to hear him. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “what it means to a youngster, when he’s turned loose, by gradual stages, on mathematics, physics, chemistry! Suddenly he discovers that he has all space, the universe, for his playground. And after that, religion strikes him as not only cramped, but false, illogical. Untrustworthy.”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 762.

The climax of this debate appears when Antoine says:

“…I talked just now about Universal Order and a Scheme of Things; but that was merely to talk like everyone else. Actually it seems to me that we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a kind of ‘personal’ destiny? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside, but join up with them, which do nothing more than in some way stimulate them.…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects. Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?…”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 768.

The topic of an underlying scheme of things is close to the central question of Western civilization. In Plato’s Republic, we have the allegory of the dark cave occupied by humanity. It looks at shadows dancing on the wall, projected by a fire. Liberating humanity requires leaving the cave and climbing to the surface of the earth, glimpsing the sun for the first time. From here, with the help of philosophy, humanity flies off and encounters the Logos and the Eidos. Mathematical truth crowns this journey.

Aristotle, Plato’s star pupil and later rival, takes this quest and focuses on the biological. The Athenian tradition invents theory, a pillar of Western tradition, culminating in modern science. Jerusalem’s competing tradition, the Judeo-Christian worldview, derives its scheme of things from divinity before biology and mathematics. Thus, the novel’s debate is ultimately the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem.

Poetry and Tweaking Our Understanding

Consider the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. In the last stanza, Arnold describes a world that remains very familiar to us, even over 150 years later. The “ignorant armies” of the final line describe today’s warfare just as aptly as the conflicts of his time.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

We can tweak our understanding using poetic tools. In a later poem by Rilke, he begins with an invocation to god before abandoning religious overtones, despairing at the root of modern restlessness.

After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Day in Autumn” (translated by Mary Kinzie)

The first stanza of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” shares the same tone as Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. The overall intuition of these authors was that the world is coming unstuck and unravelling, leaving the individual metaphorically homeless.

Come gather ’round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times, they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”

Rilke’s metaphorical homelessness is also reflected in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, which he expands with “with no direction home.” Rilke wrote about creeping homelessness, where there may or may not be an actual physical home. French philosopher Simone Weil echoes this in her L’Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (English: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind). There is a need for roots, and in our current world, these roots are often unattainable.

The movie Triumph of the Spirit depicts the life of Salamo Arouch, a Greek-Israeli boxer who survives Auschwitz by fighting in exchange for rations and protection for his family. His German “handler” Rauscher loses his mind and is shown in drunken maudlin hysteria, realizing that the war is lost, stumbling around killing people while reciting Rilke’s poem.

See also: Is Poetry Sometimes Informative in a Special Way? (which also discusses Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”)