The mystery of God

Suppose you have never heard music, and you are watching a video of a superb ballet, with the sound turned off. And then someone turns the sound on. You now know a dimension of the dance you wouldn’t have expected or thought of. It transforms your understanding of the ballet radically.

Similarly, but more radically, when we humans learned that the perfectly one God is three persons, we learned something that we would not have expected, something that not only we wouldn’t have thought of, but something that we would have likely denied is at all possible. It is something that should radically (in both the etymological and the common senses of the word) transform all of our understanding of God. Of course, what we learned turns out to be logically compatible with the doctrine of God’s unity, but that it was compatible is a part of the surprise.

I suspect that similar transformations of our understanding of God await in heaven. Doctrines that are related to our doctrinal understanding of God as the doctrine of the Trinity is to the unity and simplicity of God. Experience that are radically different in kind from anything we have had.

But is it not plausible that God is such that any finite understanding of him is subject to such transformation? If so, then this gives us one way of countering the “eternal ennui” worry about heaven. For such transformations of our understanding of, and hence of our loving relationship with, God could occur for eternity then.

Variety and ontology

A major part of the ontologist’s dream has always been to find a small number of fundamental categories—maybe one, maybe two or three or maybe ten—into which everything falls.

Aristotle says somewhere that the philosopher knows all things—in general terms. That’s the kind of knowledge the ontologist’s dream accomplishes. But I worry: isn’t there a deep hubris in thinking we can categorize fundamental reality? And aren’t we destroying the deep richness of reality by pushing into into a handful of categories?

Well, maybe not. After all, all books could be seen as finite sequences of a small number of symbols. (Recall the lovely argument in Plato’s Euthydemus that one can’t learn from books, because if you don’t know the alphabet, you can’t read, and if you know the alphabet, you already know all that is in the books, namely letters.) And yet among these arrangements—all of which are ontologically the same sort of thing—there are the Summa Theologiae, The Deluge, Hamlet, the Psalms, the best of the scientific literature… and the latest tweets from world leaders, too. One doesn’t destroy the richness of literature by noting that ontologically it’s all of a piece. Being all of a piece ontologically is compatible with great variation.

That said, I still have the worry. While there is great richness in literature, culture be impoverished if there weren’t painting, sculpture, dance, etc. Similarly, even if there can be enormous richness among monads, their apperceptions and their appetitions, wouldn’t reality be impoverished if monads, perceptions and appetitions were all there is?

The scholarly life: Two views

The pessimist:

I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.
Magister, doctor styled, indeed,
Already these ten years I lead,
Up, down, across, and to and fro,
My pupils by the nose,--and learn,
That we in truth can nothing know!
That in my heart like fire doth burn.
'Tis true I've more cunning than all your dull tribe,
Magister and doctor, priest, parson, and scribe;
Scruple or doubt comes not to enthrall me,
Neither can devil nor hell now appal me--
Hence also my heart must all pleasure forego! (Goethe, Faust, Part I)

The optimist:

The ennui of the accustomed explains not only why elderly people like to travel, but also why they incline to live vicariously in the doing of the young. However, this is far less of a problem with someone whose life is dedicated to learning, for there lies before one an endless horizon of more things to learn about. To be sure, it might seem that, very abstractly considered, learning and thinking themselves are "more of the same." But that is altogether false because, concretely considered, the idea at issue is always something new, something fresh." (Nicholas Rescher at age 73, Enlightening Journey, p. 266)

One should also, I think, supplement the quote with Rescher's idea that as one learns more, the knowledge makes possible new questions, and so the quest for knowledge is, in principle, without end for finite knowers.

I think Rescher gets right what Faust gets wrong. It may be true that the more one knows, the more one realizes what a small fraction of the questions there are one knows the answer to. But that is not reason for despair--for one can, after all, know more and more, both more facts and more questions.

I sometimes have suffered from a fear of the ennui of eternity in heaven. I realize that this is an irrational fear--the vision of God, our infinite lover and beloved, can unchangingly satisfy us forever. But it does seem plausible that growth, progress and change are important aspects of human nature (that's one reason I don't like the account of heavenly life as timeless--another reason is the apparent nonsensicality of saying "after this temporal life, there will be a timeless existence"). I was thinking about these ideas from Rescher yesterday, and I think they did much to take away the fear of the ennui of eternity. Here's the argument: I can see the life of ever increasing inquiry, truth leading to questions leading to truth, synoptic view leading to new questions leading to a wider synthesis, as a life worth engaging in for eternity. But what God has prepared for us, which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, either includes that or--quite likely--includes something even more satisfying. So the idea that eternity would produce ennui is mistaken--at least if one loves truth.