Love is probably undefinable but we can at least understand some aspects of that love and can probably come to a substantial narrative understanding of some loves in their specific contexts. We can maybe even understand some of the ways in which a truer and incorruptible love will make the world of the resurrected, heaven, a far better world than this.
In the poem, The Country of Marriage, Wendell Berry, speaking to his wife, prophesies:
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
There’s more, before and after, but what interested me was the last sentence in what I’ve quoted: “In [love’s] abundance it survives our thirst.” Love never runs out. This points to a claim, a la St. John the Evangelist, that “God is love.” I’m making my way toward an issue I’ve dealt with before in a very cursory way. In an essay I published on this blog more than four years ago, What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven?, I tried to make sense of the question in that title, a question seemingly simple but actually the question needed to be answered by anyone who takes seriously (without necessarily holding any strong beliefs) about both the nature of this universe as currently understood and also the possibility of a world where some or all might live for time without end with their God, whether understood in Christian or Jewish or Islamic terms. In effect, we need to be able to speak about created being in a way that can help us to believe that there can be a realm, a form, of created being not subject to decay.
As I’ve stated many times: the Christian principle is that grace completes and perfects nature rather than replacing nature. If this principle be true, there must be some way of talking coherently about the world of the resurrected — Heaven in traditional terms– in terms drawn from our understanding of Creation which itself has to be based upon our understanding of this world.
Let’s strip thermodynamics of its particular nature in this universe. Is there some abstraction behind the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that entropy or `disorder’ increases, or at least doesn’t decrease for an isolated system? There’s one abstraction well-known and discussed by physicists — the increase in entropy is actually an increase towards a state of higher probability.
This means we are discussing not necessarily well-behaved functions but rather movements along paths through state-spaces which might be somewhat `pathological’ as we might say. For example, there might be no paths to the state of greatest entropy but for those which pass through states with far lower entropy than the system currently has. This would put us in a valley of sorts, surrounded by insurmountable barriers, at least seeming `insurmountable’.
The mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose has claimed, in constructing a plausible way of speaking about reality, that our universe is so well-behaved in moving relentlessly towards an overall state of greater entropy because it began to expand from a state of extraordinarily low-probability and low-entropy. When the universe began its current expansionary phase at the time of the so-called Big Bang, the opening in the balloon was pointing into the valley in which we find ourselves. This universe seems to lie in a region surrounded by regions of far higher entropy or disorder. There is no obvious way to escape this region, but there remains so much we don’t know.
When we seek to understand the true possibilities for worlds in this Creation, we would have to first explore the nature of the state-space of possible universes which could provide the stuff of a world, a universe ordered as a coherent narrative, that is, ordered to a purpose.
If I were willing to suggest that Heaven lies not in the empirical realm but rather in the transcendental realm where the Holy Trinity has His absolute existence, I could say that the problem is solved. God, who is love, who is beyond even absolute infinity, will take us into His own life so that we will stay there. Creation, any contingent being or even the set of all possible Creations, is so small compared to God that there would be zero probability of moving out of that transcendent realm — unless God willed it to happen.
The previous paragraph will almost certainly prove to be wrong in terms of better ways of thinking about these issues but perhaps, like many human thoughts about far lesser matters, it points towards a better way of speaking. In any case, it might provide many believers a way out of the intellectual ghetto in which they find themselves because they have no way, are putting no effort into discovering a way, to discuss this universe in terms of a Creation of the God of Jesus Christ.
I’m going to lay out a basis for part of an intellectual program which might help us find a way to reunite faith and reason (my writings over the past 20 years, including my novels, are all parts of a greater such program):
- God is true to His self-chosen role as Creator and will remain true to Creation in the way that He shapes the world of the resurrected, that is, He won’t suddenly bring His friends into a realm outside of Creation properly understood;
- To first appearances, that world of the resurrected will be much like this but will not have decay or disorder, nor processes which might lead to such;
- To provide for the dynamic nature of a world suited for the resurrected individuals and the Body of Christ of which they are members, there will have to be a movement towards an ever lesser entropy or — far better — a greater and more God-like order; and
- In terms appropriate to this universe and at least indicative of the more abstract terms suited to a description of all of Creation: movement of the physical stuff of any world, corruptible matter or matter perfected by grace will be a movement towards a more highly probable realm, an infinitely larger realm for the situation I’m dealing with here and so it is that I claim that love, God’s realm in a manner of speaking, is effectively all that truly exists.
If only we understood the state-space of Creation — to use the terms appropriate for physics in this world, we could see this more clearly. But the greater situation in this world, at least from the Christian viewpoint, is obscured. It would seem God has given us a valley as our place of birth and development and this valley is eroding and flowing locally toward the lowest spot in the valley. We’re surrounded by mountains which prevent us from moving toward better regions of Creation. Or maybe there would be a way to, somewhat, reverse the processes of decay in this world if we could understand the mountains and learn how to move over or through them. I would doubt it but no human community has done well betting that any given level of human understanding would prove plausible or even rational in a few centuries. No human community has done well betting against the possibility of advanced technologies pulling off miracles of a sort.
More importantly, at least to a Christian and certainly one who takes seriously the viewpoint in the writings of the school of St. John the Evangelist, love is all. Love is the highest probability state of all though we might have trouble understanding that while we remain stuck in this valley, this “vale of tears” as a prayer to the Mother of God, Hail Holy Queen, terms it. Without God’s help, we can’t pass beyond all barriers to enter the absolutely good regions of Creation, though we might be able to pass the immediate mountains and better our situation. In any case, God — for reasons He hasn’t told to us — has isolated us from regions where we could move toward greater order rather than to the disordered muck at the bottom of our valley.
Am I satisfied with my current understanding of this aspect of Creation? Am I satisfied with my understanding of the ways in which the world of the resurrected will have better thermodynamic properties than this one? No, I’m not satisfied with my current understanding by a long shot but I am pretty happy with my understanding as a very tentative position. I’ll end by pointing out that, ultimately, we should question if it makes sense to use thermodynamic concepts to discuss the better-ordered, higher-probability regions of Creation. Yet, we have to be realistic about our limited natures and the general situation we’re in. We have to make our way slowly toward a better understanding.