Blood, Phlegm, Bile, and How I'm Not Smarter than the Ancient Greeks

In ancient Greece there was an ongoing argument about what humans were made of. Hippocrates begins the famous Nature of Man (which was actually probably written by Polybus, but details) refusing to participate in the debate of which of the four elements people were made of: fire, air, water, or earth? None of these things, he points out, are “an obvious constituent of a man.” In other words, this is a stupid question. Hippocrates/Polybus is more interested in the more scientific proposals, specifically “some . . . say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that he is phlegm.”

I read this in a class on the conception of Christian bodies (which, naturally, has to start with non-Christian Greeks, because Western bias), and I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone who walked this earth seriously contemplated that people were formed “in unity” of phlegm.

I imagined a time traveler coming up to me and saying, “Excuse me, are people made of blood, phlegm, or bile?” and I, the humanities major with a high school and nonfiction essay informed idea of the human body, would have to say some version of, “Your assumptions are so wrong, I don’t even know how to answer your question.”

As I was thinking about it, though, it occurred to me—this is definitely, for sure, exactly how God feels about me sometimes. I, like the ancient Greek philosophers, actually know very little about this enormous universe and its complexities. It’s easy to look back at people who lived thousands of years before me and think how benighted and unenlightened they were without processing one of literature and history’s most frequent lessons: no matter who we are, when we live, or how much we know, we are all basically benighted and unenlightened. You and I are not the culmination of human knowledge. We don’t even get to begin to start to think that until we know how people made Stonehenge.

My assumptions about the world are probably not noticeably less wrong than the Ancient Greeks were from God’s perspective. We all live in un-realities. We always have, and the questions we ask God have always reflected this.

Joseph Smith wandered into a grove of trees and asked God which Church he should join, and God said “none of the above.” After the burning bush, Moses asks the Lord why and how He made the earth, and the Lord says, essentially, “None of your business.” (“For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me” (Moses 1:31)). Moses didn’t know there were continents an hour before this conversation. How on earth was God going to take him through the creation of an earth in the midst of a galaxy?

Moses and the Burning Bush, by Darius Gilmont, aka, my screensaver, I love it so much.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” God tells us in Isaiah. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This was true when it was written, thousands of years ago. It isn’t really less true now.

I’ve thought a lot about why God doesn’t always answer the questions I ask, and I think there are a lot of reasons. Sometimes I think God wants me to practice not knowing (a seriously undervalued skill for those of us who aren’t omniscient). Sometimes I think He realizes that the desire for an answer is more valuable to me right then than the answer itself would be. But also, I think, sometimes the way I ask the question makes it almost impossible to answer. Sometimes my assumptions are so wrong, He has nowhere to begin.

Communication is complex, especially when the communicator is an all-knowing eternal being and the listener is a not very knowledgable mortal who isn’t all that good at listening. I think God can often give us yeses and noes without too much trouble—but what about when He has to shift the framework of our question entirely? What if that means shifting our reality completely?

So when I say, “Should I get a PhD?” or “Why, why, why don’t you/didn’t you intervene when church policy was so harmful to so many people?” and I get crickets back—maybe there is no place for Him to begin. Maybe my assumptions are wrong in ways I can’t possibly imagine, or maybe this just is more of an essay question than multiple choice. Either way, His answer is as perfect as my question allows it to be.