If we are flesh-and-blood creatures perceiving only what comes through our eyes and ears, our noses and the nerves on our fingertips and our elbows, how could we ever have transcendental knowledge? How could we know of God as other than a conjecture? Are we even likely to make a conjecture under the dualist assumption that flesh-and-blood be not enough for a creature to have consciousness, self-consciousness, rationality, longing for what lies beyond this world of flux? Would our God have remained a this-worldly god likely tied to our particular tribe?
We know various possible answers to this question, one of which is considered by some to be
Let me suggest a different line of thought, one that doesn’t posit some sort of `magic’ in a Creation not seeming to be much of a `realm of magic’ (no matter how many Christians delude themselves into thinking Middle Earth has anything to do with the God who presented Himself through Jesus of Nazareth) nor with acts of special creation (mostly, the creation of a first man and a first woman) by a God who otherwise acts through His effects in a rational world which existed prior to that act of a special creation of men and women. More concisely: let us see if we can take God seriously as the rational Creator of a rationally ordered Creation.
Human beings (designated as `men’ from here on) are creatures which evolved from lines of clever, apish creatures. Those long-ago ancestors likely had some simple technology, such as the twigs altered by modern chimpanzees to make good tools for fishing for termites; interestingly, for a while, our ancestors were considered to be `anatomically modern humans’ but existed for tens of thousands of years without going beyond chimpish levels of technology. By various paths, lines of such `modern’ human beings evolved and then developed in specific environments—the environments in which they developed so as to display interesting and useful traits might have been different from the environments in which their recent ancestors had evolved. The previous sentence gives only a slight taste of the complexities and complications which have to be considered when analyzing natural processes, evolutionary processes in this case. A plausible, global analysis true to human reality would be sophisticated and not so schematic as to be profitable material for popular science, though such knowledge has to be somewhat reduced to teach the basics to young people or to provide material for general understandings on the part of literate scientific laymen or to provide entertainment for those fooled by such phrases as `chaos theory’—which is actually about the study of systems modeled by equations, those systems and their plausible models being both well-determined and impossible to calculate accurately beyond a certain time.
If we take God seriously as the rational Creator of a rationally ordered Creation, then we must take seriously our best knowledge of Creation, starting with the levels of Creation which we can directly perceive, perhaps through instruments such as microscopes, and can most readily develop theories, which are explanations or even symbolic encodings of what is known and not speculations. In small pieces or specific attributes, Creation is an observable and even testable manifestation of certain thoughts of the Creator. When we theorize or speculate, in science or mathematics or theology or philosophy or making of music or images, we are reaching for those thoughts of the Creator. (See Making God’s Thoughts Our Thoughts, God’s Ways Our Ways: Why Christianity Is Not Simple.)
As man himself has grown more complex and complicated in the various (intertangled) parts of his nature—most especially in his intelligence and in his social relationships, he has changed the environments in which he lives and in which he evolves. Among other dynamic traits, men have rational minds and social relationships which allow for the passing of knowledge from generation to generation through education and the accumulation of knowledge in libraries and by way of training in specific skills and so forth. These processes can become self-sustaining—so long as the surrounding human community survives. In recent centuries, such processes have been most powerfully productive in the physical sciences though also quite productive in the historical sciences and in small regions of other social, or `soft’, sciences when there were practitioners both talented and honest.
So it was that certain regions of the mind of the Body of Christ and lots of individual minds in the West and some in other regions, were advancing in many ways into Creation. That is, they were making the being of Creation into human mind-stuff. Human minds, or least some—especially the communal mind of the Body of Christ, were reshaping themselves in imitation of the relationships of the Creator to His creatures, human and other. Moreover, the process by its very nature was self-reinforcing—as man became more god-like though not often more God-like, he could learn more from studying himself and his increasingly complex and complicated relationships with himself and with other human beings and with all the creatures around him. And his relationships with all the abstractions which emerged so gradually—reading one or more accessible histories of mathematics will give some idea of what was involved.
Abstractions are relationships. Objects don’t exist in an abstract sense and can only be described abstractly in terms of relationships, their perception by God or a living creature or their attractions to (involving forces between) God or other creatures. (In mathematics and physics, a repulsion is a negative attraction.)
To think or even feel and act in a more abstract way is to think and feel and act according to a different and, in some ways, higher realm of creation. We move closer to God’s act of Creation, the Act-of-being in which the abstract foundations of our concrete, thing-like world came to be. And, yet…
My overall understanding of Scripture and of our world leads me to believe that God, the nature and common Being of Father and Son and Holy Spirit, is both the most concrete and the most abstract of all possible entities. He’s not concrete in quite the sense of being thing-like, though His divine Concreteness is as particular as any possible thing.
But I diverge. In a necessary way, creating various forks which will be explored in future writings.
My main paths and my divergences alike will allow me to deal with the questions:
- So how can we know about transcendent truths and regions, about the Transcendent God Himself, if we have a non-transcendent form of being?
- Can we directly access transcendent being, to know it or to be in more intimate communion with it?
These are two paths, starting out as if somewhat in contradiction to each other. The contradiction lies in the direction of movement for our explorations. The first item above attempts to jump, as it were, to someplace in transcendent regions and then to move to the concrete and thing-like regions in which man lives—top-down thinking and exploration of reality. The second starts in those concrete and thing-like regions and attempts to move toward transcendent regions—bottom-up thinking and exploration of reality. At any given time, a particular thinker might be able and willing to provide a plausible description of one path and not the other. More than that, expansion of one line of human thought or of human exploration of reality might well lead various human communities to think one path is the true way of human thought.
The modern world has seen a new complication due to the weak efforts of theologians—do they have weak minds or weak spirits or both?—at a time when the bottom-uppers have recently had a few centuries of (soon ending?) great accomplishments. The Christian top-downers continue to work as if the knowledge of our physical worlds circa 1800 were adequate for a theology for modern men and the explicitly Christian bottom-uppers have nearly disappeared. The bottom-uppers of more recent generations have not been devout Christians or have been Christians who have kept their beliefs private and separated from their work in the real world.
In any case, I plan on using, probably have been using, both pathways—bottom-up and top-down. And I use them imperfectly. Only one man traveled both directions of knowledge in their fullness and that was because He followed both directions of being. The Son of God came down from Heaven to incarnate Himself as man, `emptying’ Himself of divinity in the process. He rose from the grave which is the fate of mortal men, taking up His full divinity. Christ knew of both paths (even during His kenosis—see the article, Kenosis) because He was and is and always will be both paths.
It’s important to note I’m not claiming that men have traveled toward transcendental truths only through explicit belief in Jesus of Nazareth as being the Son of God. I am claiming that the fullness of these paths (top-down from God and bottom-up from Creation) are through Christ and are Christ. Yet, it’s certainly true that, for example, mathematicians can move from the empirical world of simple counting and measurement by rulers into more abstract realms and then move back again. It’s not always the same mathematician who discovers some truths in abstract number theory and then develops algorithms for encoding of secret information.
As a first step, think of this as such: There is a continuum of sorts here, some dimension of Creation which runs from concrete, thing-like being to abstract forms of being. In fact, this a crutch. We know of some aspects of this divide between the concrete and the abstract, thought it really isn’t so smooth as to be a spectrum: the quantum wave-function is a form of being quite abstract and mathematical and that entity `collapses’ to concrete, thing-like being in ways still being explored by theoretical and experimental physicists alike. I’ll note in passing that I’m writing in a highly speculative mode to provide ways of speaking and writing about these issues.
`Inside’ of the system which is all, both God-to-Creation and Creation-to-God, and which is united in Jesus Christ, we can go partway toward the transcendental God, the source of all truths, and then return to Creation so as to make sense of it all. Some mystics might be able to start in transcendental regions and travel partway, not all the way, back to concrete regions of flesh-and-blood creatures—I don’t know. In any case, all such journeys remain inside of Creation and most remain deeply inside of Creation; all such journeys enter abstract regions but do not reach God’s primordial act-of-being, the act in which He created contingent being.
To say that the journey of a mathematician to even realms of transfinite (greater than `ordinary’ infinity) is comparable to the journey to the transcendental regions is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is—again—a way of starting a journey only to be completed by those who choose to accept God’s offer of adoption as sons and daughters of the Father. In some abstract sense of distance, we travel a distance to God which is greater than infinitely long—Cantorian theories of transfinite numbers would speak of absolute infinity, the Omega, which is more than infinitely larger than the ordinary infinity of counting numbers (1,2,3,…); I would hedge any statements that even Omega is truly comparable to God. leaving open the possibility that God is in some true sense still `richer and larger’ than absolute infinity. At the same time, I would freely admit that I don’t quite know what that could mean and would also point out that being as understood in any age of philosophers or theologians or poets has always proven to be richer and larger than any prior thinkers had thought it to be. And those thoughts prove to be inadequate to the possibilities seen in later ages of men.
But how can I speak of the abstract reasoning of some branches of mathematics and some branches of other fields of human thought as being analogous to the spiritual and theological thoughts of God?
My first response to the above question is: I can only speak of such a matter bravely and honestly, hoping to make greater sense of it than has been done in recent centuries. Catholic thought is wedded to an understanding of Creation, circa 1800; Protestant thought is that bad or worse—depending upon the denomination.
Though there are hints of the transcendental in some of the oriental religions, Christianity is the only religion which matches, I think exceeds, the great metaphysical schools in seeking transcendental truths. In addition, the history of science and technology indicates that Christianity, at least that of the West, also deals better with the concrete, thing-like aspects of created being.
It is in that tradition, the real tradition of Aquinas and his master—Albert the Great, that Christianity reaches for a unified understanding of all created being and even an understanding of the Being of God, however limited that understanding might be. The ancient, and potentially hubristic but noble—if properly controlled, goal of reaching for the heavens has become the goal of reaching far beyond the heavens toward what I call the primordial stuff of Creation—stuff which is a particular manifestation of the very Being of the Son of God.
We see certain aspects of the transcendental in the pages of the Bible, especially in the Gospel, but we see other aspects in the abstract realms of Creation explored by mathematicians and physicists, theologians and philosophers, poets and musicians, builders and sculptors, craftsmen and women taking care of children, and many others. This global vision, what I often call a worldview, is an incomplete and imperfect vision of Creation including the boundary regions where the Son of God provided the raw stuff of created being from His own divine Being.