My Pattern Breakthrough

After my last post on pattern languages, I felt I had the missing piece: patterns are problem-solution vehicles. They are not merely answers. But little did I know how prescient this would prove. I took my deck of patterns to lunch and began to randomly spread them out on the table: TIME, WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, BREAD, TEMPLE and so on. Suddenly, the questions behind these answers began screaming out at me. It was as if I could finally hear. They were always there, but I hadn't considered them. When I created the cards, I was regurgitating concepts with little thought as to why they exist in the first place. Now, the questions revealed themselves. TEMPLE, I read. This answers questions about God's presence with his people and the world. CHAOS AND DISORDER. This is about identifying the problem itself--why things are what they are and what God is overcoming. WISDOM. This answers how we know what to do in the world and how to recognize God's way versus other ways. One by one, as I picked up cards at random, I could easily see the questions behind the answers I'd written down. And then, something more came into view.

I saw real taxonomic order within the questions and their pattern-answers. Let me explain. CREATION. This is about the origin of the world, why it exists and what sort of moral entity it is. Other pattern cards such as HISTORY or the IMAGO DEI or WORK fall naturally under CREATION as they are more narrow in terms of taxonomic categories involved, more influenced rathern than influencers, and have a finer specificity of application. The same kind of relationship exists on the question side. WORK, for example, asks an ethical question about what it is proper to do. The question of what we should do exists within the larger question of where we come from. But, say, one asks about euthanasia. There is no card for this. The pattern language is not meant to be defined by cards. The cards are meant to create a framework of address. Anyway, euthanasia and whether it is morally right to kill yourself or another certainly is a narrower question than the question of why do we die, which is itself a subset of the question why we exist at all.

The taxonomic order extended into the type of cards I had written. Besides obvious patterns like THE SWORD or KENOSIS were cards that aren't patterns but buckets that organize patterns: The last things, Jesus of Nazareth, the missio Dei. These are the classic categories of the craft and creeds. They are probably answers to questions themselves, yes, but they are different too. They are category cards, such as the ones in Group Work's deck, and they answered a nagging question for me about exactly how the categories might fit in a pattern language without making it uniform. I see now there's little danger of that.

A pattern language as I understand it now is highly individual. Even if two were constructed by brothers of the same mind, I think their resemblance, though present, would still differ such as with franternal twins. The patterns that express the language are unique, and how they are grouped together is unique. Using Gadamer's term: what is expressed and how it is expressed is governed by prejudice. Not only, but how it is used to categorize and address questions is unique. As in real life, one man talks constantly of God's simplicity and another of the church and its sacraments. My initial insight was correct: the use of a theological pattern language could allow one to map (and interrogate) their own system and to do the same with the systems of others.

A final thought: like any language, a pattern language has three audiences. In this case, the question, the answer, and the reader or user of the pattern language who is thinking along with it. All three must ultimately be taken into account to make a living language.