Timber Framing, Poetic Knowledge, and the Curse of Sin

We stood at the ridge marking our property line, admiring our neighbor’s mature forest of mixed hardwoods and looking back with not a little distaste at the tangle of vines, thorns, and immature saplings on our side of the line — the mess from which we had just emerged. I counted fourteen holes in my shirt and more in my skin. We generally avoid this grim section of our otherwise beautiful farm but went that day to survey the forest and develop a timber-management plan. Standing on the ridge, I realized that I had never fully appreciated the thorns and thistles of Genesis 3:18 — which is to say, I had a superficial grasp of the curse of sin. I said as much to my companion, a professional forester and Christian, who remarked that it would make a great object lesson for our students — if we could find a way to get them there without getting cut to pieces. The insight struck with force: “No,” I said, “we’re going to go right through it! … just once a year, I don’t have enough shirts to spare.”

Perhaps there might be a less painful, less costly way of getting to the same spot to see the same sight. It would be more efficient to borrow my companion’s smartphone, record a video, and then show that to the students. No need to bother with any hike, much less a bloody one!

But then there is St. Thomas Aquinas’s peripatetic axiom to contend with: “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” Ensouled bodies that we are, we cannot get to intellectual principles, much less spiritual realities, without attending to materiality. To know thorns and thistles — to know them sensibly, not conceptually or intellectually — is to know in your bones something of the curse of sin that cannot be otherwise known. Going through the brambles, I came to realize in my gut something to which I can only gesture vaguely here — and which you, dear reader, can only grasp if you have experienced thorns and thistles in all their cursedness, in your own flesh. The only way for our students to have that same experience, that same gut-level knowledge of sin’s effect on landscape, is to make their painful, bloody way through the thorns.

Thorns, Sin, and Poetic Knowledge

I am thinking about this as an educator and a priest — specifically, as the chaplain for an all-boys boarding school we are building on a 176-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The implications are both theological and pedagogical.

The Bible’s agrarian metaphors are explicable only insofar as we know agrarian realities. The thorns on our campus teach us how the “cares and riches and pleasures of this life” (Luke 8:14) choke out the seed of faith. The garden that my wife tends in our front yard illuminates St. Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 3:6: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”

However, not all agrarian images in Scripture are metaphorical. The thorns and thistles of Genesis 3 I take to be entirely literal. More to the point, the kind of knowledge I have in mind — called “poetic knowledge” by St. Thomas — is a knowledge of things in themselves rather than things as vehicles for meaning. Poetic knowledge is a participation in and communion with the thing itself. I want to take my poor students through the thorns not just because doing so teaches them about this other thing, namely sin (although it does do that), but because it teaches them more about thorns themselves, which somehow result from the curse of sin.

Though a result of the curse, thorns are good in and of themselves, as are all things that exist. The evil of sin does not have its own existence. It is parasitic on reality — a distortion and disordering of that which is, and which is therefore good. What we want is an encounter with the fullness of reality, a reality now travailing under the curse of sin (Rom. 8:22). We want an encounter which tells the truth about sin — that it cuts us to pieces.

Timber Framing and the Transcendental Imperatives

We will go through that thorn patch once a year. Our students will spend their other days stewarding the land and its bounty: caring for chickens and cows, collecting eggs and milk, harvesting vegetables from the school garden — and timber framing.

There are many reasons for emphasizing skilled trades in general and for focusing on timber framing in particular, not least the intimate relation between timber framing and living trees. Timber framing is the skilled trade which most insistently demands that the tradesman attend to things as they are created to be. This is particularly so when he uses timbers from trees he has chosen, felled, and milled himself — a process we are in the middle of at the moment as we construct our second timber frame on campus.

By contrast, conventional stick-frame construction is an essentially industrial building system. The lumber in our local Home Depot comes from massive plantations of spruce, pine, and fir (SPF), grown, harvested, and processed to be as identical and interchangeable as possible — wood as commodity, milled, graded, stamped, and assembled to industry standards, then joined with factory-made nails and screws. By the time it gets to Home Depot, it is just “SPF lumber” — specific species unknown, unknowable, and irrelevant. Though useful, this system’s pedagogical value is limited.

Timber framing teaches the basics of woodworking and carpentry, as well as geometry, physics, and trigonometry, and it provides a range of competencies and habits of attention readily transferable to trades of more recent origin and wider use. It has also proved the most durable of trades. In the foreword to Will Beemer’s handy 2016 book Learn to Timber Frame, legendary timber framer Jack Sobon claims that timber framing is “at least 7,000 years old.” Hence none of the tools, methods, or joinery require industrially produced goods.

We use these old tools and methods not because it is antiquarian or Romantic, but because of the pedagogical power of working slowly and using, so far as practicable, tools powered by human muscle, ingenuity, and problem-solving. The kind of timber framing we are doing, for example, requires that we evaluate a living tree for its utility in a specific project. But we cannot simply identify a useful tree and fell it. First we must evaluate the tree within its own ecological context, in relation to its living neighbors, anticipating the effects of removing that tree and considering whether doing so fits within the timber-management plan we are pursuing. If all is well, we fell the tree in such a way as to minimize damage to surrounding flora — not only as it falls but, just as critically, in the process of removing it after it has been bucked and limbed into usable logs. These logs are then milled at our portable sawmill and evaluated for defects before being cut into joists, posts, nailers, wall plates, tie beams, braces, rafters — whatever pieces are needed for the particular frame we are building.

Each stage requires careful attention to the timber in its particularity. Should a neophyte fail to account for the differences between, say, a yellow-poplar tie beam and a white-oak post, he might end up breaking his colleague’s (extremely useful) antique boring machine before breaking his electrical hand drill and then using a friend’s drill to get a drill bit stuck fast in white oak for forty-five minutes at 11:30 PM the night before about a hundred people are set to show up for a frame-raising party… speaking purely hypothetically, of course. Timber framing, in short, requires a tradesman to develop what the Jesuit priest and philosopher Bernard Lonergan called “the transcendental imperatives” — attention, intelligence, reason, and responsibility.

A timber framer should have a solid foundation of factual information about the advantages and disadvantages of wood from different trees, a similar knowledge of various woodworking tools, and an education in building systems — not to mention the increasingly onerous demands of local building codes — as well as familiarity with the growing literature around timber framing. All of these are for naught, however, without a deep poetic knowledge of trees, tools, and the art of timber framing. He cannot simply know about it; he must know it — intimately, personally.

This participatory knowledge of timber framing strongly correlates with Lonergan’s fifth transcendental imperative: love. Timber framers love wood in all its diversity and particularity, and they love trees. The craft itself all but requires this love. Not so with conventional construction. I am grateful for the nominal 2x6s I purchased from Home Depot in order to build a non-structural plumbing wall in my house this year, but building that wall required little attention to the plantation-grown factory-milled lumber I used — much less the nature of the trees from which they were taken. In fact, I could have replaced the boards with plastic “lumber” and built the wall in almost exactly the same way.

Interchangeable Parts, Interchangeable Persons

Interchangeability of parts — and of persons — is a hallmark of the industrial revolution. We need not be blind to the benefits of this interchangeability, but we ought not be naive about its costs — in particular its poetic malformation about the nature of created things.

The creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 emphasize the unity of the human person, male and female. The divine mandate of Genesis 1:28 sums up the created purpose of humanity — to be fruitful and multiply and to subdue the earth. These shared purposes, given to both together, are accomplished by both together — through a unity that is not at all uniform. The realities of biology and agricultural life — experienced in human societies throughout history and indirectly affirmed in Genesis 2 and 3 — suggest that men and women pursue mutual tasks in differing but interdependent ways. Biologically speaking, the task of fruitful multiplication is not one that can be done alone but only through a non-interchangeable interdependence — procreational unity inherently requires meaningful difference.

The need for sexually differentiated, interdependent cooperation in agriculture is not as obvious in our post-industrial society, but it was intuitive to our agrarian forebears. Broad sex-correlated differences in size and strength matter, but a woman’s ability to get pregnant and nurse babies makes agrarian labor division absolutely necessary. Although modern critics interpret the socio-cultural divisions of labor in agrarian societies as a product of patriarchal oppression, they are not arbitrary, much less are they a result of the curse of sin as such. While we do not experience them in their prelapsarian innocence, at their heart they flow from created and divinely blessed realities. Hence, our move away from sex difference in post-agrarian societies is not a move toward restoring prelapsarian innocence but quite the opposite.

We may believe all of this in our heads, but in a post-industrial economy such as ours, what we know in our bones is that we are, all of us, interchangeable parts. The human person, like plantation-grown and factory-milled lumber, has been commodified and reduced to uniformity for economic utility. We can remind ourselves that we are not disembodied spirits, that our bodies are created by God and are good in all of their uniqueness. We can remind ourselves that men and women are fundamentally different — even as the things which unite us are deeper and more fundamental than our differences — and that these differences are good. But so long as most of us spend forty hours a week laboring in jobs in which bodily particularity is irrelevant, so long as we spend our free time staring at screens with our bodies immobile if not catatonic, we are fighting an uphill battle. What we will know poetically is that our bodies do not matter.

We must find ways of teaching ourselves the truth about ourselves poetically. We cannot just read books about embodiment. We cannot simply come up with persuasive intellectual arguments for the truth and expect that reasoning to reorder our imaginations effectively. We must embody the truth. We must develop habits, practices, skills, competencies — ideally, vocations, communities, and economic systems — in which our bodily differences are recognized, utilized, celebrated, and honored. We must know bodily difference, and we must know it poetically.

To be clear, I am not advocating a return to preindustrial agrarianism. Even were that possible — which it is not, absent a terrible collapse of civilization — it would not be desirable. It is foolish and naive to pine for any past era. But we can mine the past for resources for present living, and we can be clear-eyed about the evils and insufficiencies of the past without dismissing their goods. We must do so if we are to find ways to restore a holistic understanding of ourselves as embodied beings. If we wish to escape the sexual, ecological, and cosmic catastrophes of our day, we will need to find new ways not to escape but rather to embrace and restore our primeval calling as embodied, sexual creatures.

Fortunately, embodied poetic knowledge is already built into the Christian tradition in the ancient practice of fasting, as well as in our primeval calling in the Garden of Eden.

Fasting, Family, and Gardening as Poetic Knowledge

In some Christian circles, fasting has become a casualty of disembodied pietism. Some suggest that we skip the physical fast and pray harder, or that we engage in metaphorical fasts from television or social media. But because we are not merely souls who have bodies but rather body-soul unities, the benefits of bodily fasting are unique. They cannot be gotten by any other means.

Fasting ultimately trains us in self-control over bodily desires, and it is always a form of recollection, recalling us back to the prayerful purposes of fasting. In our present age it is also a particularly powerful reminder of embodiment itself. It is hard to forget your body when you are hungry. The Church’s insistence on fasting bodily is an implicit recognition of the significance of poetic knowledge.

So too is our primal calling as expressed in the divine blessing of Genesis 1:28. Fruitful multiplication and subduing the earth as a gardener both require poetic encounters with reality. We can see this in its inversion: the collapse in Western fertility rates both flows from and also reinforces disembodiment. By contrast, pregnancy, childbirth, and care for infants make it much harder to think of human persons as fundamentally interchangeable. As economist Richard Reeves has recently affirmed in Of Boys and Men, both mothers and fathers play distinct and irreplaceable roles in raising up children. The absence or insufficiency of either is a great disservice to children. Parenting is a partnership — not between any two sets of hands but rather between two fundamentally different parents. It is a partnership of non-interchangeable interdependence. There is no version of parenthood — particularly in the earliest stages of human development — in which parental obligations can be split 50/50. Fairly or not, inequitable parental burdens and blessings are inscribed in our very bodies.

Gardening, as the model for our divinely blessed exercise of dominion over the earth, also constitutes a faithful rebellion against the disembodiment of the age. It is not an accident that our first father Adam was called to be a gardener, nor that the second Adam was mistaken for the gardener (John 20:15). Gardening, like timber framing, brings us into intimate communion with things as they are created to be. We should know gardening, poetically. Even those without a single square foot of land on which to garden can grow fruit and vegetables in pots and window boxes.

For already formed adults, fasting, parenting, and gardening are remedial practices — a poetic reorientation to one’s body. But what our culture most desperately needs is the proper formation of young people. To that end we should prioritize agricultural and vocational education in our schools. This makes good economic sense, given present realities of skyrocketing college costs, diminishing returns on many degrees, and the severe and growing shortage of skilled tradesmen. But the most critical reasons are spiritual and formational. The worldview model of Christian schooling in which I grew up conceives of Christian formation as primarily dedicated to explaining, understanding, and affirming theological truth. This model had (and has) much to commend it, but it is incomplete. It treats boys and girls as disembodied thinking things — “heads on sticks” in James K. A. Smith’s memorable formulation — and it treats the Christian faith as nothing more than a set of intellectual propositions to be affirmed or denied. Insofar as worldview education does this, it participates in the postindustrial disembodiment of our age, and it acts as an unwitting handmaiden of cultural chaos and confusion. We may give our young people the right ideas, but if we treat them as thinking things — even things thinking the right things — we give them a poetic education in disembodiment.

Jesus the Tekton

I asked our forester what we should do with the choking mess of thorns on our side of the ridge. “Nothing,” he said. So long as we do not damage the area further, it will continue along the way to renewed health. Creation groans under the curse, but God never revoked his verdict. Though we misuse and abuse our stewardship, the world remains very good. As Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us — after noting the devastations of trade, industry, and indifference — “And for all this nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

But how long does it take for “dearest freshness” to emerge after a period of abuse? How long, I asked, will it take for our side to look like our neighbor’s mature and healthy hardwood forest? The answer: “About a hundred years… it’ll be well on its way in fifty.”

On another and much better section of the farm, our forester taught us how to encourage the growth of white oak trees — an ecological bedrock species currently struggling throughout Virginia. Here we are able to steward actively and not just passively, cooperating with “deep down things” to improve the land with which we are blessed. He advised selectively removing the forest’s mid-story above white-oak saplings, giving space and light for them to grow. After ten years we will thin the surviving white oaks, harvesting about half of them to allow the remainder to grow for decades before selectively timbering. Even then, the trees will be far from full maturity. Given the right conditions, a white oak may continue to grow for up to two hundred years — and can live another four hundred years after achieving full maturity.

“This isn’t for you,” he said. “It’s for your children. And their children.”

The arduous task of sanctification is a lifetime’s worth of work — more, when we remember that the curse is not only individual but also communal, social, cultural, and ecological. Cosmic, in a word. The ongoing process of cultural devolution, the signs of which are all around us, will not be repaired in our lifetime nor that of our children — even if we were blessed tomorrow with a sudden sweeping revival of authentic Christian faith and an embodied, holistic Christian culture. The scars of poor stewardship outlive the bad stewards. The thorns remain.

We have to start by remembering that, just as the goodness of creation was complete and entire, just as the curse reverberates throughout the cosmos, so too will redemption touch all things.

Perhaps this is why Jesus was a tekton (Mark 6:3) — a builder with hard materials such as a carpenter, stone mason, or, perhaps, a timber framer. If, as the classical education pioneer Andrew Kern has enigmatically put it, “The tree is the interpretive key to the cosmos,” then it makes sense that our Lord in human flesh knew trees intimately as a skilled craftsman. While God shaped Adam from the dust of the ground as a potter shapes clay, he acted more like a tekton in building Adam’s bride Eve out of Adam’s rib. In his translation and commentary on the book of Genesis, Hebrew scholar Robert Alter notes that, although “built… may seem an odd term for the creation of woman, it… is more appropriate because the Lord is now working with hard material, not soft clay. As Nahum Sarna has observed, the Hebrew for ‘rib,’ tesla‘, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.” The verb, wayyiben, is used elsewhere in the Old Testament for all kinds of buildings — temples, cities, towers, fortresses — but most often for altars. Just so did our Lord, hanging from the tree, build his bride, the Church, out of that tree.

This article was first published in Touchstone and is reproduced here by the author’s permission.

Photo by Chris Haws on Unsplash.