Reading Time: 4 minutes

He was late for his meeting with the Senate. His wife’s troubling dreams through the night had detained him to the point of tardiness. Perhaps it was the light of the full March moon that had kept her awake and prompted her imagination to run wild. Perhaps it was something more. He had recently been named the dictator perpetuo, the dictator in perpetuity, but the events of this day would soon show the falseness of the title. 

Julius had been called to a Senatorial meeting at the Theatre of Pompey. As he entered the hall, one stepped forward and petitioned him for the pardon of a relative. Caesar waved him away, as another Senator pulled down his toga and lunged for his neck with a dagger. “Why this violence!” shouted Caesar in shock. But in a moment the circle of Senators closed in and the stabs multiplied. Among the assassins, Caesar sees the familiar face of a friend, Marcus Brutus. All hope is lost. He covers his head and resigns to his fate. Shakespeare describes the scene with the haunting words, which most historians contest were never spoken, “Et tu, Bruté?” You also, Brutus? Spoken or not, one can easily imagine the expiring Caesar thinking, “Is my friend really also among my assassins?”

When I think of the phrase, “Et tu, Bruté”, I’m reminded of the lethal concept of Brute Fact. The name and word have the same origin. In philosophy, this position states that some things just are, and have no explanation. A brute fact is that which exists and yet has no reason for existence, and thus no meaning. Those who hold this belief aren’t suggesting the meaning of a thing is simply not yet known, but that there literally is no explanation or meaning to be found. 

The problem with this position is that if a brute fact can exist then all facts ultimately are brute – there is no meaning at all to anything. Why is this? Well, consider: if some strand of reality could really have no meaning, no foundation for its existence, then there is nothing ultimate, which gives meaning to all things. Take the universe itself. If the universe “just is”, and has no ultimate meaning, then nothing in the universe has meaning.

Holding to the notion of Brute Fact is a lazy position. It refuses to consider an ultimate meaning because of the ramifications. In taking this position it undermines its own. For if nothing has ultimate meaning, then why state any “fact” at all; they are all without meaning. The foundation for making a logical and coherent statement is destroyed. It is a willful ignorance. This is one example of what is meant by Paul’s words in the first chapter of Romans, when he refers to those who “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” 

Now, I don’t think most people consciously consider the things around them to be brute facts; I think, rather, they don’t consider them at all. They take for granted that things are the way they are, and don’t attribute any further meaning to them. They are the comfortable stuff of their everyday life. If things seem to have a certain beneficial beauty, they are waved off as a coincidental glory. An assumption is willfully made and the conclusions passively follow.

The average viewer of M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 hit movie The Sixth Sense makes an assumption in the first few minutes of the film that is only solidified with successive scenes. By the end of the movie the audience understands exactly what is going on…until that one brilliant moment when everything changes. In an instant their entire understanding of the information is reversed. My wife and I saw the movie in the theater only a week or two after it opened. We knew nothing of the movie and saw it on a lark. At that pivotal scene, you could hear an audible gasp in the crowd followed by whispers as the revelation sparked sudden commentary.  My wife and I drove home replaying each moment in our minds, trying to find an error in how the story was told that would justify our original position. There were none. We simply had assumed the wrong thing and moved on.

I have often thought that there will be a similar experience on the Day of Judgment. In one piercingly pure moment, we will see what was hidden in plain sight. All self-imposed veils will be removed and we will acknowledge what we knew all along. The friendly facets that surrounded our everyday life will close in around us with jabs of judging recognition. “We knew, we knew all along that God existed! The things of God were clearly perceived in the things He had made. They were seen and suppressed.” 

When God sought to enlighten the minds of Job and his friends, whose counsel only darkened, He did so not by a display of miraculous power, but by the mundane glory of the world they already knew. God spoke of rain and snow, wind and waves, birds and beasts, all of which Job had known from his earliest memories. But he had seen them all as merely things that were, and not expression of the kindness and care of his Creator. They were all brute objects with no Personality displayed in the particulars. In an instant this perception was altered forever, and he repented in dust and ashes.

Oh, how much better to walk through each day recognizing the manifold ways our God communicates Himself to His creatures. To look for and ponder the works of His hands and see in them not brute facts, mindless and mute, but heralds of our God’s presence. To allow their testimony to close in with pangs of delight, and to find ourselves, each day, saying of those we once thought silent, “You too? You too are testifying of God? And you, and you and you…” Scripture doesn’t say that the heavens prove the existence of God, it says they declare His glory. May we receive this testimony with increasing regularity and respond with praise and communion!