I’m currently struggling, but joyfully at times, to finish my book, The Shape of Reality. Alas, it won’t be finished by year-end as I had hoped, which hope I’ve stated on my blog. The end of January or even during February is more likely. As I struggle to complete this book, I’m obsessed with questions about human being, individual and communal but also mortal and `divinized’. By the term `divinized’, I mean simply the state in which human being, individual and communal, is sharing God’s life in Heaven. I use such a term as a Western Sacramental Christian who is positively impressed by some of the powerful insights of Eastern Sacramental Christians. I also write as one impressed by the potential of modern mathematics and science to provide powerful new abstractions, concepts, for better understanding God’s Creation including those creatures who are we.
Think of a landscape in which there are mountains and hills with valleys and gullies, paths up and down some of the slopes. There are dangerous regions where the ground might give way and cliffs appear without warning, where various temptations might take the traveler off the road for a respite or for an attempt to make that small and mortal region into the goal of it all. This is the world in which God has placed us for some sort of journey toward Heaven.
I could go on and fully prepare the ground for an allegory in the mode of C S Lewis. I won’t.
Some of these sorts of concrete allegorical elements are anticipations of powerful conceptual tools which can be more clearly seen in the mathematics and the physical sciences which have highly developed mathematical models. In other words, those allegorical elements are literary attempts at developing concepts which are needed, and I believe them to be a necessary step in our modern, deeper understanding of many aspects of God’s Creation. It’s likely not just an accident of history that Dante came as a forerunner of the modern age, the age in which science and mathematics and scientifically developed technology has blossomed.
Since I believe that abstract being is true being and part of the same Creation as is concrete and thing-like forms of being, I am saying that an insightful poet or novelist or philosopher who draws upon properties and things of this concrete and thing-like world to make some point is trying, if not always with full awareness, to get at some abstraction lying behind or beneath or above the mountains and gullies of his tales of wonder, some abstraction which is shaped from the very same abstract being as is the abstractions of, say, statistical physics and the spaces of states of being which it studies.
The concrete allegories and other necessarily indirect ways which are used by novelists and poets and philosophers to explore and communicate difficult concepts are good but also limited. They are particularized, sometimes highly particularized shapings of the abstract forms of being which lie behind difficult climbs in both the moral and spiritual journeys through life and the physical journeys of explorers and of weekend wilderness warriors. Those two types of journey are linked and not by mere whim of the poet nor by pure accident.
Many animal species can think well, for their purposes, in terms of the concrete and thing-like being of this highly particular universe. Some species other than human beings, most notably chimpanzees, have some limited ability to think in abstract terms. Only human beings can think abstractly well enough to have a deeper understanding of God’s Creation; following Aquinas, I often claim we have minds of the sort which are capable of encapsulating God’s Creation in our minds, though any individual human mind is too limited to understand much at all. This power of the individual human mind itself leads to human being with much more complicated states of being and more complicated paths through a very complex space of possible human states of being. It also leads to some hope of understanding, which understanding would probably lead to more complicated and complex forms of human minds and, hence, of human states of being and of paths toward that glorious state in which we can share God’s life. It leads to such possibilities largely because it leads to very, very powerful communal human minds and those minds can certainly be understood, or even conceived, only in terms of the sorts of abstractions I’ve been developing recently, hoping to provide some useful tools for exploration and understanding of these regions of abstract being in my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, and maybe in future works. God willing.
I’m certainly not one to underestimate the importance of heart and hands, but…
More abstraction is needed, which means that we need to pay more attention to developing the minds of those Christians who can do that job of abstracting from various particulars so that we can learn how to think, for example, in terms of traveling across paths in the possible spaces of states of being as if we were traveling across possible landscapes in n-dimensional spaces where the value of `n’ might be large and the number of possible landscapes might also be large. We modern Christians, as well as many others, act as if we need to turn young people into good students of the sort preferred in our prosperous and morally decadent age, well-behaved consumers who are obsessed with playing or watching sports.