An offering for the feast of St Anne in loving memory of my parents, who first took me to her shrine at Beaupre, and of Catherine, Josephine, and Matilda, my grandmothers
Is there something about the human that endures after death? If there is, what is its nature? If there is, are this life’s inequalities, moral triumphs, and moral failures therein addressed? The object of this endeavour is not to feign divinity and provide answers, merely to espy Western culture’s more notable ideas concerning immortality and note the questions they evoke.
Historical foundations:
The earliest recorded speculations concerning immortality come from the ancient cults of India. Immortality belongs to the “atman”, the animating principle of self. Atman is beyond the ego identity and its attributes. Its thrust is to return to oneness in its source, the divine Brahman, the world-originating principle. Because there is no religion or cult that is completely homogenous in thought or vision, this world-principle is found alternately understood as personal or impersonal. While evil deeds in this life lead to a cycle of rebirths ever descending into lower forms of being, right living leads through a cycle of rebirths to ultimate release from this world and its incessant changing to the constant, blissful, absolute, and abiogenic freedom of Brahman. In Buddhism, the focus is neither a soul nor a divine. The central issue is right living. In this world of flux, it is “life” which is reborn. It is reborn in a cycle until it reaches the purity, the transparency, of selflessness. In that state [if such can be called a state], there is transcendence beyond all that might be considered as defining the self: desire, a consciousness of a personal and individual history. It is beyond every sense and notion of this transient world. It is beyond any god, any notion of a god. It is to not-be. A celestial eternality may be the Western world’s approximation, but the Buddha’s eternal is devoid of either rational or personal endurance. It is of such absolutely void. The West may claim there is a rest eternal in peace, but that peace is always tied to being, to a being having that peace. A short distance from the Indian subcontinent, the earliest Greeks where less philosophical. They believed that whatsoever followed this life was merely a disembodied shadow-existence, a hypnogogic return to the womb of the earth.[i] Some might, by Olympian grace or heroic valour, arise beyond this after-life of Hades to a type of glorified bodily existence in Elysium, the Greek rendering of something between Yahweh’s Paradise and Odin’s Valhalla.
These ideas are the antecessors of the two great fathers of Western thought: Plato, the idealist, and Aristotle, the realist.[ii] They move to place the issues of theology, psychology, and cosmology, (of god, man, and world) into the matrix of their own culture. How, in the emerging Greek identity, the Greek mind, does one enunciate the great questions of existence? What is the construct of the cosmos? How does one come to know it? How ought one to live within it? How might one endure beyond it and its changeability? In Plato’s predications, this world is merely the penumbra of a realm of eternally enduring forms (ideas, or perfect formulae). The essential eternal formula of man is rationality or the rational mind. All the ideas or concepts in this mind are there innately. Like the mind (the rational principle of human animation, the “soul”), they are, not merely immortal, but eternal. They exist before this world and continue beyond its endurance. They are fundamental trace elements ultimately of beauty, goodness, and truth that in-form or give form and comprehensibility to this fleeting world. Through their rightful consideration and understanding they lead back to the truth, beauty, and goodness of the eternal and unchanging. Unlike Plato, Aristotle may have believed in the concrete reality of this world, in ideas, concepts, and knowledge being built up through reflection upon the experiences of this world, but continued to hold that it was the rational aspect of being human that endured beyond this life in a type of universal and transcending mind. Both these scholars hold that the item (the eternal formula) that makes a man “man” is essentially impersonal. It may be in some sense a spark of the divine descended into matter, but the divine is itself non-personal. When it is freed of the body, it returns to its natural unencumbered reality—an impersonal rationality. Having, through right thinking and living, purified itself of any attachment to the sensual and emotive aspects of life in this world, it freely moves beyond them, knowing them unworthy of entering into the eternal life of pure thought. Despite the fact that this stance takes us not far from our Indian roots, from the reflections of the great mystics of sundry types and cults, such discounting of emotion and sensibility sits not well with the perspective of the modern West with is propensity to disjunctively value individuality and its personal history.
Beyond the ideas of ancient India and Greece, we have another twinned ideological ancestor: Judeo-Christian scripture. In ancient Judaism there is no thought given to life after death. Death ends life. The focal point is life in this world. The good life, the truly authentic life, is itself the reward of living this life in accord with the heart and mind of God. To live at-one with God is to be with the eternal Lord of the universe. They that die go down into the earth wherefrom they were brought forth, and sleep in the grave (Sheol). About the time of Plato and Aristotle, about the time of the Buddha and his rethinking of the multifarious teachings of the cults of his land, Israel became the captive of that churner of world power and ideas, Babylon. It is there, amid weeping for a land and a cult lost, hoping for a restoration of its fortunes, and an ultimate exoneration of its God and his omnipotence, that speculations of an afterlife take form. The idea of a sleep in the grave gives way to something more grand. The prophets begin to voice the hope of a Messianic age, an age wherein God will send his personal emissary to deliver Israel from all enemies and enmity, and make it the centre of a new world order. There arises within this salutary vision the idea that there will occur a vindicating resurrection of the righteous dead that they might share in the reign of the Messiah and of Israel’s God. Notably, the resurrection will be of the righteous only. The evil will remain quasi-comatose in their earthly graves. This is also a time wherein moral responsibility is becoming centred in the individual rather than the social grouping, be that the tribe or nation. Thus, ideas of some type of cosmic justice begin to brew. The topic, however, was not given scholarly prominence. In Jesus’ day the powerful faction of religious scholars known as the Pharisees championed the idea of a resurrection. They debated its nature. Betraying a dualism not to be found in the ancient texts, they asked if it would be a reunion of body and spirit? Would worldly relations be retained, renewed? The gospel accounts have Jesus reject the idea of resuming worldly relations, but not of reward and punishment in accord with fidelity to the mind and heart of God. The Apostle Paul writes that the life after this life, while a reuniting of body and soul, would be within the context of a “new heaven and new earth”. Thus, the resurrected would have a “spiritual body”, an embodiment recognizably continuous with that of this life, but incorruptible and unchangeable.[iii]
These ideas—together—constitute our ancestral heritage concerning immortality and its nature. It is necessary to understand that they stand emmeshed. Plato and Aristotle are heirs of the ideas that percolated in India which they in turn Hellenized, and the Judeo-Christian vision cannot be understood outside of Hellenic ideas and ideals for sundry reasons. First, after the conquests of Alexander, Greek ideas colour the latter prophets and writers of Judaic apocalyptic literature (Haggai, Malachi, Zacharia, Daniel, Esdras, Maccabees). Second, it is through the logic and terminology of Greek philosophy that Christianity is first argued and defended to the pagan world. Third, it is through that same Greek philosophical lens that Judeo-Christian vision is transmitted and defined in the founding dogmas of Christendom. Fourth, it is through the temper of these dogmas and their theological, sacerdotal, and ritualistic epiphenomena that the thrust and contours of Western culture are set. The Christian of today, the world of today, cannot read the sacred scripts of Christianity without deterging the mind of Greek philosophical “forms” and ideals. And beyond this, the world of today thinks it can blindly read the writings of a civilization Eastern in orientation, staunchly patriarchal, and long gone as if the texts were contemporaneous creations. Annotations are required by most to make way through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and yet, with blissful ignorance, most proceed to take the foreign and ancient at face value and meaning.
Excursus: I am ever astonished by them that take literally the apocalyptic notion that there stand in heaven them of robes washed in the “blood of a lamb”. Is there no sensitivity for metaphor? Can it not be seen that all that is being said is that the blessed, that is the “happy”, are they who have interiorized the experience of being transformatively loved as evidenced in the embraced vision of a divine self-sacrifice, that is a de-finitive self-giving, for the well-being of the world. The message is startlingly simple: self-lessness is the essence of the Holy and the blessed. I am ever beside myself when I hear complaint that God is horrid because he caused his son to die on a cross. Such cry betrays no understanding of ancient and Middle Eastern patriarchy wherein the son is the avatar of the father. The son is the continuance of the father. When the son is sent, it is the father who goes, who is present as re-presented. Father and son are one genetic identity. One precedes the other in time, but the father contains the son and the son continues the father—in time. Thus, it is God who dies upon the cross—in the son. If one considers the above few sentences, a great deal of early dogma about the relation of Jesus to God, of talk of father and son in the eternal godhead becomes patent. Items, be they facts or symbols, shrived of their history, shrived of their context in time and space, shrive us of, not only understanding, but life. We—more and more—fail to appreciate history as the matrix of time and the evolution, not only of our biology, but of our ideas and ideals. History exists as the milieu in which we are commanded by nature to learn to do better. It is by reflection upon history’s contents and contextualizations that there emerges the potential to grow in wisdom and understanding.[iv]
Traditional ideograms: heaven, hell and in between:
Christian scripture tells us there will be justice for lives lived. It is not restorative or rehabilitative justice, but punitive justice. We hear: “Accursed! depart from me into the eternal fires prepared for the devil and his angels…And they will go into everlasting punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:41-46). In the fuller text we hear the extent to which God is incarnate in his world for it reads that: “I was hungry…I was thirsty…I was a stranger…I was naked…I was imprisoned…and you did nothing to care for me…Whatsoever you did or did not to the least of them among you, you did to me.” The Johannine writer does not shy from detail as to what exile from God entails: “The smoke of their torment goes up forever, and they shall have no rest.” (Revelation 14:11). These words must be understood in the idiomatic context of the prophetic and apocalyptic literature of the day, but they do ground speculations about immortality within ideas of a heaven and a hell, within ideas of reward for right living and abject punishment for evil. As the above text from Matthew reveals, these notions of reward and punishment, of heaven and hell, underscore the inherent sacredness of human life. In the Gospel according to John (17:22) Jesus is given to pray: “The glory [full substantiality of nature] Thou has given me I have given them that they may be one as we are one.” Here, the basis of glory, of eternal life with God, is disclosed. It is about more than doing the good, propitious, and right; it is about God’s graciousness to the world elected for salvation (boundless well-being) in his Christ (his plenipotentiary emissary). It is also about faith in that divine graciousness: “This is eternal life—that they know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou has sent.” (John 17:3). While every torment is the lot of the evil, the state of them at-one with the heart and mind of God and his worldly emissary, the Christ, is beyond description. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived that which God has prepared for them that love him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Nevertheless, Revelation, being apocalyptic, that is, a work utilizing idioms of cataclysmic dimensions, does venture into poignant visions of what awaits both the damned and the blessed. The blessed stand about the divine throne day and night and sing God’s honours and praises (Revelation 7), and they shall forever reign in the pellucid presence of God (Revelation 22). The accursed share the fate of him who denied God’s plan to surrender his life (in twinned kenosis and incarnation)[v] for the well-being of his creation, and are evermore tormented in their self-frustrating desire to be the world-sovereign and god (Revelation 20, 21:8).
Inspired by scripture, a good deal of speculation that erroneously applies Greek logic to Hebraic symbols, and a respectable amount of insightful psychology, Christian iconography has provided a treasury of images and ideas about the world to come. Such potent and mass consumables have imbued the heads and hearts of most ordinary folks with rather firm and exact ideas of the “life to come”. It is a rather human thing to do. We want to keep ourselves and the treasured contours of this life into eternity. There is the humorous tale of a protestant minister gone to heaven. While walking along with St. Peter he saw in the distance a great city. The height of its walls vanished into the clouds. The minister asked of Peter what it was, and Peter replied: “That is Catholic heaven. We keep them enclosed because they think they alone are here.” Despite the persistent want to preserve self, self-achievements, self-defining kith, kin, and institutes, we are endlessly admonished by saints, martyrs, and mystics of varied types and cults that selflessness marks the heart of the blessed. The Mahabharata records the narrative of the great king Yudhishthira. Upon his death he is called to heaven. Defying the divine Indra, he refuses to go without his faithful dog. He moves on, and finds another heaven. But there he encounters his worldly enemies in glory. Again, he refuses to embrace heaven. He hears then his friends and family calling from hell. Rejecting the glory he has been twice offered, he elects to be with them. Only then, revealed as care-less of his own well-being, as selfless, is he elevated to a place of bliss among the divine. The thrust of this sacred drama is revisited in countless variations and cultures. In Christianity, feeling the full weight of being abandoned by his God and father, the anti-glory, the crucified Christ descends into hell. The meaning of the creed’s use of the word hell has been debated. Does it refer merely to a realm of the dead or to the fire pit made for the devils? But God’s victory in his self-sacrifice is not over death, but evil itself. The routing of death is simply consequent to that. Thus, it is neither from the cross nor from the realm of death, but from Hell itself that the Crucified One becomes the Risen One.
Popular mythology provides us pictures of heaven and hell. Heaven is the place of endless bliss wherein every desire is satiated, and the blessed gaze evermore on the face of God and God on them. It is the locus of light, love, and joy unending, but it is nuanced. The best of the earth enjoy the deepest and highest of its benefactions. Hell is a place of burning torment, of unending pain in wanting God and not being able to move toward him, of wanting more to be him than to be with him. It is the pit of pride, and it is the abyss of its existential frustration. As with heaven, in hell there are degrees. Degradation and suffering are not for all the same. (After I departed Rome in favour of Canterbury, my RC mother seemingly felt constantly compelled to be meritorious and inform me: “You’re going to hell.” One day after such admonishment a friend came to my defense replying: “Yes, he is going to hell, but to Anglican hell where they have air conditioning and martinis.” My friend is not a theologian, thus one may make of that as one will.) There are, as all know, prior residents in both heaven and hell—the angels. In heaven they stand ever about the Throne of Grace and its Sovereign and with the blessed of earth serve and praise him. In hell the rebellious and fallen angels add to the pains of the wicked of this world whom they had once tempted and enticed to be at-one with them in their diabolical denial of God’s creative and redemptive plan for the salvation of all in electing Jesus to inaugurate the fullness of his presence in the world for the world as his initial and revelatory ambassadorial presence (his Christ).
There arose, even within the Judaism shortly before Jesus’ day, the question: where go the souls that deserve not hell but are not purified sufficiently of self-interest to be admitted into bliss? In the Second Book of Maccabees we read about making “propitiation for them that had died, that they might be released from their sin.” Christian holy writ claims the Christ is the propitiation of our sin, and that ought to settle the matter definitively. But we are creatures who wallow in want of punitive justice, especially so of them that “sin against us”, our ideas and ideals. While the church has seemingly always prayed for the departed, the exact nature of the invocation may be debated. Is it for the remission of sin, or of punishment due for sin?[vi] Is it an intimation that this life is not totally ended until the final judgment and the coming of God in the new heaven and earth? It is an area of shadow, perhaps more so of our lack of faith in divine mercy than of feeling compelled to “pay for our sins.” Whatever the cause, the effect was the appearance of a place called Purgatory, the place of purging. There, in tortuous pain, the punishment of sin is endured until the soul is purified and sufficiently rarified for heaven. While it is a place akin to hell, its pains are mollified by the knowledge that heaven awaits. How the proposed existence of such place can exist in the face of the doctrines of sanctifying and sufficient grace, and more pointedly, the doctrine of the cosmic efficacy of the divine self-sacrifice in the Christ is well worthy of consideration. However, with an impulse not incongruous with Eastern ideas concerning reincarnation, the idea of a purgation persists in some venues of Christendom.
There are questions that must present here. Is the defective soul repairable after this life is ended? Is free-will still operative after death? Can the damned change their minds about God–eventually? Can the souls in purgatory be aided by the prayers of the living? What is the extent our intimate interconnectedness? To what extent do we, can we, influence the being of another individual? Before that question is dismissed as a fluff piece of parapsychology, keep in mind the influence we bear—psychologically, physically, existentially–upon the being of another with love, hope, trust, forgiveness. Such powers are soul-powers, non-material forces. They do not put things in context. They de-contextualize things. They, being spiritual (psychic) are not time-space items. They are more fundamental than time-space. They are aspects of creativity, a spirit over a void making new things and places, giving life, disclosing new avenues for life. They empower a synaptic arcing within life, a leap over the context. They literally empower something new, something richer, something more. There is, of course, the negative of these aspects of creativity resident within. We can sink to being destructive—of both self and other—in hate, anger, negativity, prejudice, and the like. There is not a question of our ability to influence the life, the soul, the spirit of another, but can we do so to another after they have this life departed? Can, as many religions opine, the heart and mind concentrated in prayer have effect upon the state of the departed? Can the mind that moves the muscle help remove the stains of the past? Is there a power in our interconnectedness that is primed to the self-correction of things past? Is this iconicized as the divine omnipotent and merciful? In our interconnectedness have some become stabilities of power capable of affecting substantive changes within the interconnectedness? In other words, are there “saints” to whom we can affectively adjoin ourselves to make confident intercession for aid, not only for ourselves, but for them that “stand upon that farther shore”? If one accepts the premise of “saints”, potently whole or holy persons, is their potency in having become “great souls”, or in the power invested in them by devotees, or a commixture of the two?
There remains another location in the eternal many tend to forget because its discovery hinges upon the question: what happens to them that merit neither hell, nor heaven, nor purgatory? While the very word “merit” is betraying in a religion set firmly upon the love and mercy of God, the question was nevertheless asked, as were its adjuncts. Where go the infants without the baptismal washing that pours sanctifying grace into the soul? If heavenly blessedness is in “knowing [the truth about] God and his Christ” where go the good but unbaptised? The answer given: they go to a place of “natural” happiness, a paradisiac existence where God is felicitously and satisfactorily near, but not intimately so, not “face to face”. This is Limbo [in Latin limbus: boundary]. It might be thought of as a suburb of heaven for them never cleansed of the stain of “original sin”. It is a place of natural happiness whose enjoyment is undeterred by any notion that there is a better realm just over the horizon. There are actually [sic] two limbos: limbus infantium, and limbus patrum. The first is reserved for infants unbaptized, the morally innocent. The second is for the morally meritorious, the “fathers”, originally them that before Christ lived wholesome lives, but which eventually came to include all them of moral rectitude that never had the benefit of gospel being preached to them, and thus also of baptism. This Roman imagining was never doctrine, and has fallen into theological disrepute. It is now opined that God can, not unsurprisingly, wave the stain of original sin, which itself has fallen into disrepute as it always was a radical disorientation from God and not a purposeful defiance of God. Furthermore, contemporary liberal theologians find themselves free to count them in accord with the mind and heart of the Christ, although they be not baptised, as crypto-Christians. They are essentially-Christians if not technically-Christians.
There are more nuances to these ideographic places. There is expected in scripture a final judgment of the world, an end of time when the Christ stands before God and makes a final separation of the good and the evil. After that Christ will hand everything in creation back into the hands of the Father, and God will reign with all reconciled, as the “all in all”. What happens to all them that die before this final accounting of creation? Is there for each a “particular judgment” at the time of death, or do the departed rest until the “last trumpet”? There is, it is said, a preliminary trail at the time of death wherein the soul standing before the throne of the all-holy sees itself for what it is, and freely embraces its proper state, be that of blessedness, purgation, or damnation. There are questions about the specifics of blessedness. The blessed are enfolded into heaven, but in the interim between particular and final judgments, do they enjoy the “beatific vision”, the joy-full bliss of knowing God in intimacy, or is it delayed until after the final judgement at the time-space terminus, and the full revelation of the new heaven and earth? There are questions about the condition of the damned. Will hell dissolve or be annihilated when there is nothing but a new heaven and earth? Will the damned finally surrender into God’s mercy and love? Will they go on in darkest pain without end? Will God burst triumphant upon hell’s boundaries and his love melt away the defiance of its captives?
In Christianity, the issue is not only about immortality, but the integrity of being. Man is body-and-soul. One without the other is a lacking. The soul in heaven may be blissful, but it is wanting of its full expression. Classical Greek thought considered soul demoted or entrapped in the body. Immortality was about rising above worldliness into an incorporeal and impersonal type of endurance. Judaism had always held man as an integral being; spirit (soul) was an indicative of being alive, and death ended life. In Jesus’ time, the notions of resurrection imply the divisibility of man. There is a sense of body being not animated, “spirited”, but inhabited by a spirit. Such idea may not persist in Judaism, but in Christianity becomes central. When body and spirit are by death divided, whatsoever endures is, in real sense, merely a trace of life. Soul is dis-embodied, impoverished, an interiority without exteriority. As soul (spirit), thanks to Greek ideas, has always enjoyed a higher cache than body (matter), it is said to implicitly contain and retain corporeality. It is also, by God’s grace, preserved until it will be re-united with its corporeality, the risen-body, on the last day. Christian sacred writ is unambiguous: body and soul belong together, and the resurrection of the Christ is not only the handsel of that wanting, it is its satisfaction. The Christ is risen into the life of God both body and soul, that is, as a fully substantial human being, or in the terminology of scripture, as glorified. The resurrection restores fallen man to God who is eternal life. Death does still come for man, but it has lost its sting. Man’s life is again with and in God. It stands under the triumph of God and his Christ, thus, under the promise of resurrection and glory. The how and what of that is not something expressible or understandable. It is a mystery. It is an item of faith. Unfortunately, the purity of this position is lost to a great deal of Christian theology because from the earliest days many theologs have been more deeply under the spell of Plato’s ideas than those of scripture. For them, the soul is meant to be free in its glory of any sensuous and emotive attachments, of any worldliness, and so Christian theology and spirituality have beclouded and befuddled the issue. The man of faith must give way to a stoic, neo-Platonic asceticism. In this distortion of gospel, the souls of the blessed are the soul-full. They have overcome the body and the world. It is not God who here triumphs, it is they. They have suffered and sacrificed to merit, to earn, that which scripture professes to be God’s freely given gift. It is not until the 13th century when the philosophy of Aristotle is discovered by the West that there comes some amendment of the situation. Aristotle had divided reality into two originating principles: matter and form. The soul was the form that made matter human. One without the other was an abstraction, a deprivation, an un-naturalness. That ought to have given a sound intellectual ground to the biblical understanding of the harmony and balance of life, the intimacy of body and soul. However, Platonic ideas seem more well planted in the Christian mind than the salvific cross, and the would-be “saved” scurry about thinking they are the better for suffering than being happy.
Immortality—nature or nurture:
While Plato, Aristotle and their disciples held the soul to be eternal, existing both before and after this worldly existence, Judeo-Christian scriptures confess God creates each soul in time. The question is then: is this created soul made for endurance after its world-time? Enter: theologians. It was speculated that there was an “original justice” within which the human nature was embedded until the paradisiac fall. Human nature was there endowed with the overriding super-natural gift of sanctifying grace whereby man could live in untrammelled harmony with the heart and mind of God. Human nature was also added to with preter-natural gifts: the ability to readily acquire any necessary knowledge, the full integration of bodily passions with reason and will, the integrity of physical being, that is freedom from sickness and death, and an environmental integrity that is, an inherent con-cord (one-heartedness) with all the rest of nature. The paradisiac fall negates theses super- and preter-natural gifts. Man becomes at odds with God. Man becomes prey to ignorance, concupiscence and shame, sickness and death, and in discord with the world about him. (Genesis 3: 8-19). The paradise-man would have died, but the sting of death would not have been there. Man, in perpetual harmony with self, world and God, would have simply known when his time had ended and his eternal rest in earth and in God had come.
Talk of a proto-existence and preternatural endowments, of a “golden age”, is revelatory of the fact that we are in a world of symbols not facts, of iconic truth not the literal. It is of note that the fall from the original justice in this paradise is through a woman. It must be. That is not some form of creeping misogyny; it is semiology. Paradise is the womb of humanity. The “iconic” fall is on the universal and archetypal level from God. On the particular level it is from that other “source”, the mother. The “fall” is the emergence from the blissful and unitive life within the Whole, be that God or mother, and out into the ever-emergent harshness and light of differentiation and individuation. As the tale is about morality, the prime differential is the knowledge of good and evil. The human is no longer enwombed and insulated, but exposed—naked. The human now must maneuver reality, must pick and grasp, must suffer the pains of wanting and desire, and so know what it means metaphorically to crawl in the dust, to bite at the heel of the other, must endure the divergence of self and other, its constant desiring, unveiling, violence, and shame. The creature is free to the world of its own making, its own suffering. Only the memory of a Paradise lost is there to give it salutary vision, a hope that a better place exists, that perhaps it can be again found, regained. But that is the ground in which is planted religion, a ground guarding eternal life with flame and sword, that is, in sacrifice and surrender (Genesis 3: 24).
Therefore, contrary to Plato and Aristotle, most theologians will stand on the ground that immortality was never a human attribute. It was a divine endowment above and beyond human nature, lost consequent to the paradisiac fall. Man is—by nature—mortal. Anything beyond that, either before or after “the fall”, is a gift over and above nature. It is the resurrection of the Christ—body and spirit into the life of God—that opens the door to immortality. The resurrection is the gift of God who is encountered in faith as the very life, the fundamental-most animating spirit, of Jesus. That divine vitality, the Holy Spirit of God, is indefectible and all-prevailing. But this opens another question. Is this gift of the resurrection given to all? Scripture claims all are elected to glory in God’s singular chosen one, his Christ, and that by divine allowance, in the rising of Jesus as the Christ of God the universe is also risen to newness of life—in eternal promise (the new “testament”). Yet, some asked if all are “predestined” to glory?[vii] Are some not? Are some actually predestined to damnation? Is the immortality opened to man in the resurrection an aspect of creation redeemed and thus, universal? Does it need to be embraced in faith and the incarnation of that faith in righteous living? If it is universal, an aspect of the “new heaven and new earth” inaugurated in the resurrection, can it be by man voided? Do the evil souls have immortality in the torments of hell? Do they forfeit immortality (annihilationism)? If there is such annihilation of the evil souls, does it happen at the final judgment after they have endured the transit of world history in hell, or does it occur immediately at death? If there is an annihilation at death, how is hell to be understood? But if God is all-powerful, all-loving, all-creative, is there anything in creation that can eternally defy his outpouring of love? Are the human heart’s failings greater than the loving glory of God? Is the freedom given greater than the Giver? After the final judgement, in that moment that God becomes “all in all”, is there an apocatastasis, an “after all is said and done”, when the glory of God bursts all bounds and boundaries, and all are joyfully enfolded into his embrace (universalism)? A number of these questions are arcane imaginings and unfortunately hard-hearted positions in a religion founded upon the love of God for this world. Fundamentally, however, the reality of the dogmas, dogmatics, and theologies of Christendom that attempt the faithful disquisition of such questions are set neither in stone nor haltingly exacting. Despite appeals to logic, illuminations, or revelations, how could they be? How could a terrestrial whose entire mind and understanding of reality is based in time-space comprehend [literally “bend the mind around”] that which is beyond and without time-space, that which is spiritual, that which is “of the eternal”? Even if one appeals to the word of sacred script as literal, how does the human mind penetrate the meaning of the divine heart? Is that why scripture claims salvation is continuous, God continuously pouring himself into history in kenosis and Holy Spirit, a continuity of being present and revelation? Last and pointedly, how does the creature whose love is ever faltering under-stand a perfect Love?
We need be mindful that all these items rehearsed above are metaphors, symbols, archetypes. Their artistry, their depth, is in-itself their meaning-fulness. They may pose questions to man, but they cannot be answered. Their questioning exists to create a quest: life and life well lived—whole, holistic, holy.
The why of our asking:
If man is mortal, why does he think about immortality? Why does he ask questions about it? Martin Heidegger could weave a philosophy about man’s orientation toward death and the fear of it. Karl Barth could churn out a good deal of theologizing about man’s fear of death, denial of that fear in stoic or skeptic postures, and the failure to understand the Christian profundity–the de-profundis–of living life in God’s gracious and eternal presence in the age wherein the “line of death” separating God and man has been dissolved in the fulgurant light of the Christ risen.
We are made to fight self-destruction. More positively put, we, along with every other creature, seek to preserve ourselves, our environments, our well-being. Looking beyond our ending, even if that ending is written into nature, seems on the one hand misguided, and on the other connatural. That may be a frustration, but it is often the irritant that stimulates change, forces life and nature itself into new venues and directions. There can well be less positive causes to our looking for endurance beyond our time. Despite the voice within that calls for integration– personal, social, environmental–there is a vast capacity for retrograde behaviour and disposition. We can be unbendingly egocentric. We are capable of being selfish, insular, anti-social, vindictive, mean. We are emotive beings longing for acceptance and love, and thus, we can be pained and hurt. We want for ourselves and them we hold dear justice for that which we have done well, and mercy for that in which we have failed or fallen short. But beyond that circle of “affection”, we are inclined to be less generous. We want “the others” to pay for what they have done. Retributive and punitive justice seem also written into us, perhaps as a disoriented trace of a more foundational pulse for harmony. Yet, I shall opine that beyond all such possible causes, perhaps the core of our asking of immortality is a drive, a vitality, that seeks out com-prehension, understanding, not only of good and evil as in that founding myth, but of the very function of the world. Two aphoristic items may allude to this. First, it was the picking of the forbidden fruit that was to make the nascent earthlings like unto the everlasting God. Second, the postulates about preternatural gifts in the golden age of Paradise spell out the self-image human nature iconicizes. Preternatural man had readily whatsoever he needed or yearned to know, was in harmony with nature, could walk with God and talk with the animals. The Genesis and related “golden age” mythologies are not frivolous narrations. They espy a thirst in nature to understand itself, to under-grid itself, and the creature with the brain structure and spirit to do that is man. Nineteenth century German philosophy thrived on that premise. It is not in a life-time that one can thusly encompass reality. One needs an eternity to see both the source and the end of all. Such is not about having the “theory of everything”, but about experientially, existentially be-holding the meaning to everything. However, in this drive, it is all the above possible reasons and a multitude of others that coagulate into a coherent causal nexus of our asking about immortality, hoping for it, and in the icons of religion, the descants of philosophy, and the investigations of science look for some grounding in which to anchor that hope, that vision, not only of self-continuance but of cosmic meaningfulness, balance, and harmony.
Excursus: It will indubitably be objected that not every individual is moved to be satiated by knowledge. It is a valid objection. The issue here is not a matter of individual want. It is a matter of the species, or more exactingly, of its immateriality. Few may manifest the thirst for embracive knowledge, and given our definitive finitude, never comprehensively. Evolution is not about the individual. It is the interplay of variance, momentum, and mass. Thus, we–as a species–have a vision held out to give momentum, to create variance from the mundane and diurnal: the divine omniscient. That which we divinize, that which we hold up to adore and worship (that is, to love and obey, to seek wholeness in and hope to follow after in growing con-formity), is that which we yearn to be. The world may brim with souls that seemingly care not to know anything beyond the meagre most requisites of existence, but there are and shall always be them among us who pine for the transcending of ignorance in its every form. By them, in their variance from the anonymous masses, will ever come the momentum that carries the mass forward as species and world. In them creativity has its face, its breath, but the face and the breath need always the body, the mass, in which to be.[viii]
In the last century, as the power of religious icons waned, there arose ideas and investigations into the nature of time and of the interconnectedness at the base of the species and, indeed, the world. I wish here to summarily review some of the positions put forward by the philosophers, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and biochemist and parapsychologist, Rupert Sheldrake. Such exercise is not an investigation toward answers, but toward amending the prevailing superficiality of our perspective. As such, it may serve to more richly elucidate why we have an intimation of immortality, why we ask the plethora of questions set out above in this text.
The work of Henri Bergson might be considered a corrective of how we envision time and the implications resultant of that vision. According to ordinary awareness, time is a line of moments external to one another. It is spatial in nature: a succession of objects or moments or events occupying an empty medium (space). It is a linear extension. It is quantitative. It is the product of reason.
Reason is not the supreme power of being human. It is a power for navigating the world, an evolutionary tour de force beyond instinct. Its function is to “cut out” from the flow of reality “objects”, items defined according to their utility or the attitude they rouse. Reason “acts” upon reality to make it manageable, useful. It reduces reality to a quantitative multiplicity spread out in homogeneous space, governed by laws, deterministic in nature, operating by cause and effect. Thus, it reaches its zenith in science, because science makes the most exacting “cuts” into reality—the mathematical and form-al. Reason cannot see the wholeness of reality. It knows only space-time, not duration.
Duration is the immediate data of consciousness. It is a totality of being-with and being-in the other. It may be glanced upon in sympathy, in freely and affectively being at-one with another in his/her situation. There is in this immediacy an undercurrent within the whole of sympathy. There is both horror at the situation and an impulse to aid, a fear of the pain and yet a drive to embrace it. There is thus a progress within from repugnance and fear to a humbleness allowing the being-with the other. These aspects of the undercurrent within the whole do not negate one another; they are, even in their opposition, their polarities, interconnected and continuous. They are heterogenous, and they are a movement. Every duration is such a continuousness, a contin-uity of movement and heterogeneity. There is a qualitative multiplicity wherein qualitative changes melt into one another, each representing the whole, and emerging into a richer content, an “inexpressible” unity. We find this duration also in the aesthetic experience wherein the work of art is “entered” and experienced in its completeness. Consider looking at a painting. It can be dissected by reason, rationalized. The canvass and its preparation, the technique of paint application, the distortion of subject matter for effect can all be analysed. But that is treating the work as an object of reason. The aesthetic experience is an immediacy, an impact wherein the work and the beholder collide into one. In that union, the work speaks its wholeness and the beholder holds it. The experience is global, whole, singular, without rationalizing quantitative division or differentiation. Such examples can only point toward the experience because words are rational tools, quantitative devises, that cannot capture the qualitative. They merely can point toward it metaphorically (from beyond the form-al), ana-logically (on a level above or below the literal). Such experience, in its very qualitative-ness, is to the rational world useless, without pragmatic purpose. However, it expresses of the nature of the life of the deeper self.
The ordinary idea of self is also corrupted by our rational time-space orientation. It is superficial, reducing self to a succession of states, a temporal flow of objective positions. Within this vision of self comes the notion that feelings, motives, and the like are–or are treatable as–quantitative objects subject to the laws of cause and effect. The strongest or most intense “mental fact” dominates. Admittedly, most of our diurnal deliberations and actions can be described as determined by cause and effect. Yet, this is not how we encounter ourselves in the depths of self. There is an inner-most awareness of an incessant flow, a totality. There proceeds from the whole of the psyche a whole personality brimming with free will, qualitative-ness, duration. This freedom, this free will, is the relation of the depths of self to its actions. It cannot be proved. It cannot be defined. Proofs and definitions require concepts, and concepts are bits and pieces of reality extracted by reason for utility.
The ability to communicate with, to grasp, life in its inner most depths Bergson names intuition. When evolution proceeded beyond instinct, it branched into two: intelligence or reason (the vertebrates), and intuition (man). Intuition is not communicable in words because the word, like the concept, is always about something distinct, “cut out”. That which is held in intuition is a unity, continuous and indivisible, a multiplicity held in a tensor of singularity. That which is seen is the movement rather that that which moves. It is a tuning into and finding at-oneness with reality, with its very vitality. Every intuition is of a duration, and every intuition opens out into the whole, towards the whole, ultimately towards the very vitality of the whole, the living creative principle from which all emerges, and which Bergson names the elan vital.
If the world cannot be taken as simply a machine operating by the laws of cause and effect, if there is more to reality than can by explained by deterministic, mathematical, quantitative theories, how then does the “cut out” world of objects and the intuited, qualitative world of psyche (soul, spirit) relate? We may begin with the body. It is known by perception as an object and it is known from within as duration. Determinist systems of psychology may claim the mind (psyche, soul, spirit) is merely the brain. If it is, there is no need to obfuscate the situation and speak of consciousness. For the determinists, the material brain governs the actions of the material body, thoughts are illusions, and consciousness merely an epiphenomenon of the brain’s materiality. But there is a manifest point between mind and matter: memory. There is the motor-mechanical memory of bodily habits. These are the movements learned through repetition and stored for opportunistic use. There is also pure memory, the images left behind by events, each of which is as unique as the event of which it is re-presentative. Pure memory is a conservation of the past, has duration, and prolongs past into present. It is re-cognition. Pure memory is the non-material (spiritual) storehouse of all events of daily life. This implies an awareness, a consciousness, but also a realm of consciousness below the everyday. The door to this infra-consciousness is guarded by the brain. The brain acts to prevent the totality of memory flooding into consciousness and overwhelming it. It filters the contents of pure memory such that only those recollections related to and required for some contemplated action emerge.
Perception is about brain, matter, potential action. Pure memory is about spirit and duration. In perception the perceived object is present as a rationalization of the real. In memory an absent object is re-collected. But perception is never “pure” and simple. It is utilitarian, and thus, it is always a synthesis of perception and memory, a perception “interpreted” with memory. The union of perception and memory, of matter and spirit, of body and soul, for action is not in space-time, but duration because it is spirit which nourishes itself upon the perceptions it takes from matter, and in return trans-forms matter with its freedom. Such is life in its creativity that unites the simplicity of the whole and the multiplicity of matter, and therein reveals the singular, omnipresent creative force manifest in diversity. This fundamental creative force, the elan vital, leaves behind not merely the material world, but the living world, the human world of knowledge and freedom much as the artist leaves behind a body of works.
Excursus: Does Bergson free eternity to duration and memory? Spinoza envisioned reality as determined, and when one came to understand that essential necessity at the base of all things, resigned oneself to it, one touched upon its eternality, entered-into it. It might be phrased that one became free in “enlightenment”. Does Bergson provide the vitalism obverse? Does the elan vital have a pure memory of its own deep life? Does the recollection of its history live within it? Is this the base within reality from which we are moved to pray: “Remember, Lord, them that proceed us and sleep the sleep of peace”? Is this the font from which emerge our memorializing threnodies? We want, we yearn, to remember that which we value, that which we love. Do we, as a species, have such love? Is that why we call the divine “Love”—that we will be remembered?
Alfred North Whitehead[ix] began his philosophical work collaborating with Bertrand Russell to compose a mathematically sound basis for argumentation. Although he came to see its rational exactitude did not account for the whole of life, he never abandoned the premise that philosophy needed to be “in-formed” of science that it might harmonize its varied disciplines and find for them the capstone.
Whitehead consolidated his vision of the world in a day when the fixity of Newton’s world was crumbling. Relativity theory meant there was no “simple location”, no absolute point in space, no unique moment of time. Quantum theory meant motion was neither local nor continuous in time-space. These theories did not negate Newton’s insights, but they did relativize them and expose them as abstractions of reality. Both philosophy and science have fixated upon these abstractions and erroneously taken them as concrete reality divisible into quantitative extension and qualitative sensation, into matter and mind. By so doing they have committed the logical “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. Reality is not a mechanistic abstraction. Reality is concrete, organic, and whole.
Matter is energy, and energy is activity. The whole of the universe is thus a process. Within that process we perceive particular processes. Whitehead conjures many names for these processes, but given the brevity of this examination, I shall delimit usage to one: event. Every event is spread out over time-space, is open to all other events, extends into, and is being woven into all other events in an organic unity. Each event is in continuous movement in time. It is through sense perception that we experience the passage of events, and also the permanence of some of their features. This permanence we call “object”. Thus, we may say there are two types in nature: events (the constant interconnecting flux), and objects (aspects of events abstracted from them and denoting some degree of permanence).
In this constant interconnecting flux, there is a basic and abiding un-consciousness to everything. (Before proceeding there is a need to introduce a note of caution. Because the whole is organic, there is a sense in which it might be called “living”, and thus, Whitehead uses terms such as subject, feeling, and satisfaction to describe the unfolding of events.) Objects ingress or enter-into events. Events prehend or grasp objects. The coming together of multiple objects is a concrescence, a forming. In the act of concrescence the event absorbs only that which is suitable to it. This implies there is a subjective aim, an internal striving for realization. This, in turn, implies a feeling, a process of feeling the way forward. This feeling has an aim: satisfaction. Thus, no event is static. Every event is an experiencing subject that self-creates through its own experiencing. It is both sub-ject and super-ject, a maker and the made. The subject emerges from the world as a superject, makes its own self out of the experiencing of the world, feels its way toward the satiation of its subjective aim. The new emerges as a natural striving toward definite aims and values. In man, intellectual apprehension is the elevated form of prehension, consciousness the intensity of subjective experience.
Each event arises through self-causation, self-creation, creativity. Creativity is the ultimate ground of the universe. It is not itself an event; it exists only in its individual instances, its “creatures”. It is real potentiality engendering actuality. Because it is the ultimate ground, this creativity cannot be explained.
God, for Whitehead, is not, therefore, the traditional transcending creator. God is the governor of concrescent activity, the principle of concretion. God is himself an event in the process of self-formation. God is the formative element within the universe, the source of all subjective aims governing the activities of all events, directing events, and giving definitiveness. God has a dual nature. In his primordial and eternal nature he envisions or feels all possibilities, all possible subjective aims that can be realized. These limitless possibilities are not made by God; they simply are, and they and God are mutually bound. God has also a consequent and everlasting nature. This is the immanence of God in the creative process that shapes the world by the ingression into events of the suitable possibilities. In this the world participates in the eternal possibilities felt by God, and God is affected by the world, enriched by his own conscious experience, and his own self development. Thus, the principle that all is interconnected applies to both God and the temporal world. They form an organic whole. (We teeter here somewhere between Plato’s eternal Forms and the Demiurge, and Christianity’s creating Father and the incarnating Logos, and thus, it is not surprising that Whitehead’s process philosophy has inspired an entire movement within contemporary theology.)
All temporal events perish, but they do not vanish. They may cease to exist “subjectively” as processes, but they endure “objectively” as past facts woven into the composition of subsequent events. This is objective immortality. God, envisioning all potentialities, and guiding all subjective aims towards satisfaction prehends, that is, infolds all that is suitable, preserves all that is of value into his own life, and thus, re-deems (saves, recovers) the world into his everlasting nature.
The influence of Whitehead’s philosophy can be seen in the work of David Bohm. Bohm argues for the primacy of structure and process over individual objects. That which the quotidian mind takes for reality are merely surface phenomena. They are the explicit and temporal forms unfolded out of an underlying and implicit order, or in his terminology, the implicate order. The implicate order exists in pre-space-time. The implicate is the basis on which the explicate unfolds. It is the whole, the explicate its temporal manifestation. Quantum theory itself implies such wholeness of nature because nature cannot be dealt with as a set of separate parts. Any structure we devise out of nature is neither static nor complete. Any structure we extract from the whole is a dynamic whose stability is temporal. The explicate is the world of objects perceived according to Newtonian ideas. It is akin to a series of photographs, images whose information is stored locally. But reality in-itself is implicitly more akin to a hologram wherein every bit of information is stored globally, wherein each part stores the entire three-dimensional image and allows its to be seen from a range of perspectives. The complete order, as in the hologram, is implicit in each region of time-space. The implicate is the “signal” which is manifested as the image in the explicate order. There is nothing that is independent. There is a whole in a constant state of flux.
Excursus: Do we here stand in a resolution of those ancient antagonisms: the world stability of Parmenides and the flux of Heraclitus, the Platonic ideal world and this, the metaphysical, if not the epistemological, idealism of Plato and the realism of Aristotle? Do we here revisit a theory of the “unity of being”? Do we here find a more modern enunciation of the relationship of spirit (soul) and matter? Does such assist in re-focusing the why of our questioning of human immortality? Do we sense the implicate in its endurance and know ourselves in some manner held within it? Does the primacy of process and structure over individual give rise within us to notions of justice and harmony and their endurance? Does the primacy of process and structure over individual generate ideas of heaven and hell, reward and retribution, and therein a being with the endurance to receive such?
Bohm notes that ordinary awareness looks upon the notion of time and sees an irreversible flow of changes aimed at ends and goals. In this it fails to see time is a construct of consciousness, of the conscious intellect. It fails to see, as Bergson argued, this is time segmented into frozen slices, set out like a series of photographs. It is lacking its vital wholeness. Consider that we experience a deeper awareness of time, an awareness of the implicate order, in listening to music. We “hear” each note or chord successively and separately, but the mind be-holds them in a whole, allowing us to appreciate not only the flow of the succession, but the meaning of the whole, the com-position. The mind is therein “everywhere and nowhere”. The same evocation to suspend the flow of time and enter into its endurance, its singular qualitative non-differentiation, marks every aesthetic experience. One might say that there is a transcendence in the contemplation of art. The work of art and the beholder of the art are contemporaneous, lost into each other, elevated above division, passing, coming and going. Conversely, when the mind’s attention is constrained merely to external goals, to observing successive events, to differentiating objects, to understanding life merely as mechanistic causality, the openness to creativity is depleted. This leads to the loss of vitality, to frustration, and ultimately to loss of con-fidence—that spiritually foundational co-faith in self and world. Man then is reduced to an ever-widening chasm of utilitarianism, and the world to a machine operating on cause and effect.
Excursus: From the consideration of physics Bohm brings us to that same prospect uncovered by others in modern psychology and existential philosophy. Thus, may we here ask if this wholeness at the foundation of nature is found in more than the ability to appreciate an artistic com-position? Does it reveal an implicate pulse, ripe with randomness (possibilities), that is replicated in the human want to experience the wholeness of life, be that named life everlasting, immortality, eternality?
Biochemist, Rupert Sheldrake, was influenced by the considerations of Bergson. His interest in parapsychology has its roots in early twentieth century hypotheses concerning evolutionary biology and embryology. In these proposals, morphogenic (form-generating) fields are central. It was argued that fields of cells, not specific or individual cells, provided the patterns for varied organs. By the 1930s this line of investigation fell to the hypotheses concerning the functions of chromosomes and genes. However, seventy years later, the idea of “fields” re-emerged. Again, it was asked: do mutations affect complex structures as a unit? Are morphogenic fields the middle ground between genes and evolution? Do genes in fact act upon fields which in turn act upon the organism? Sheldrake asks further: do fields re-present a memory inherent in nature? Are they the deposit of a collective memory of all things previous of a kind? Are they the “morphic resonance” of a kind? Does every life-form have a collective memory of its history, its evolution, its shape and form and function throughout time? Is this resonance something that can be “tuned into”? If it is, is this the basis for ideas about telepathy?
Sheldrake’s ideas are controversial, and he acknowledges this theory is not testable. A field does not leave an observable material trace. The field brings about a material effect while a system is tuned into it. As with a radio receiving signals, the signal is known only as it is the “received” by the receiver. The morphogenic resonance is a field of information. It is the whole of which the genes are receivers. There is a type of morphogenic resonance in individual habituation. The repeated pattern of behaviour becomes a self-resonance which sheds its observability because that which captures our attention is not permanence, but change and variance. The habit becomes the unconscious memory, a resonating background against which and within which the individual functions and becomes aware of change.
Excursus: Following upon the idea of resonance and a receiver, it has been asked: is the brain itself the store house of individual memories and ideas? Or is it a type of transmitter/receiver tapping into the hominid sphere, a field in which inheres the knowledge and memories of the species, a “cloud” wherein is stored all movement, thought, feeling, aspiration, and failing of human history? Is this idea akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary vision of the bio-sphere of earth interjacent and enlarged by a noosphere (mind-sphere) wherein humanity finds the truth of its natural unity, eventually to be transcended by a Christo-sphere wherein humanity finds its spiritual truth, and love and creativity come to inform the life of the planet? Is this akin to Aristotle’s idea of a universal mind? Is it toward such as this that mystics glance when they speak of a singular dream or thought or logos in the divine ubiquitous mind? Have we here something we are on a pragmatic level primed to ignore yet on occasion accidentally “tune into”?
Is there here a parallel to linguistic abilities? While the child is born capable of making every possible value sound of every language in the world, the ability to do so soon atrophies as the environmental pragmatics of making the sounds of the parental tongue come to dominate. Thus, the flawless pronunciation of a language learned later in life is for most impossible. The ability, or at least the agility, to “tune into” the sound is at best stunted. The “ear” for it is lost. Have we here a corresponding loss of ability? Children are ever wont to report seeing and hearing things the adult world takes for nonsense and over wrought imagination. But have children simply not yet learned to be environmentally practical, to be sufficiently immersed in their quotidian worlds, and so freely allow the influx of information from the “species’ memory cloud” to pour in unfiltered? Do some adults retain such agility and freedom? Do we all on occasion tap into something beyond our own stored memories and ideas, and feel a tinge of the anomalous? Is this “well of history”, if it is, a basis for not only telepathy, clairvoyance, and the like, but for revelations and notions of the eternal and everlasting? Could Sheldrake’s idea of resonance be the item Jung was looking for in his investigations into “synchronicity”, into meaningful coincidences that seem to be without observable cause? Is morphic resonance the acausal base of the archetypes, of the collective unconscious, of the inexplicable psychic connections between persons or events at a time and/or space distance?
The investigations of Sheldrake and Jung point toward a variance in how we understand reality in the age of quantum theory. On the surface, in the world where Newton and Einstein rule, physical processes are local. There is, as Einstein had it, no “spooky action at a distance”. But quantum theory opens a world quite contrary to the “surface” of things, wherein movement is dis-continuous, not causally determined, and not well defined. Non-locality and randomness are characteristic of the quantum world. Science today would be inoperative without the ideas of uncertainty (randomness) encoded by Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac.[x] Is it necessary, as Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen thought, to make the divergence of quantum and relativity theories a paradox? Cannot the two be viewed as aspects on one whole, one reality, as, in Bohm’s terms, implicate and explicate? Can they not be morphic resonance and manifest structure? If a morphic-resonance is the memory of the species, is it into it that we tune the psyche and feel the “eternal” in a moment, a pulse, and know ourselves to be of it part, partakers? Does this interconnectedness play upon the species the feeling of an intrinsic timelessness and in that an implicit immortality?
There is a sub-text in the ideas above rehearsed: we think too small about life. We glissade over the interconnectivity of life, and the dynamic inherent within that interconnectivity out of which we, with our individuated self-consciousnesses, arise and subsist. We are but fragments within a species within a phylum within ever-widening spheres penultimately constituting a global life within an ever-expanding universe. The contribution of the individual matters as individual. Where, however, does the individual stand? How stands-out [ex-ists] the individual within the whole? Does individuation and consciousness endure forever? How is one “alive” without a sense of history, of “my” internalized time-space, “my” feelings? If there is a type of consciousness to all that is, what part plays “mine”? Is the question of individual immortality itself an indicative of the eternality of life, the everlasting quality we each into life impart? Freud advanced the theory that the memory of early childhood vanishes from consciousness but persists as the sub-conscious, and therefrom influences life. Does the individualized consciousness become a sub-consciousness constitutive of the life of the world? Is such an everlasting constituency an “objective” immortality? Is such really the immortality we seemingly seek? What ought the Christian to make of the icon of the Christ risen and hidden in God who in the Christ redeems (saves) the whole of creation? Are they “in-Christ” the infra-consciousness of God in his worldliness, his experience of the world? Is this the point at which Whitehead aims in claiming God in his immanence saves and preserves all of value into his everlasting nature?
Speaking in symbols:
The traditional Western “answers” of heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo no longer hold. Is it because they are inherently defective? Is it because their enunciation—their en-word-ment—is ineffective? Have they become too simplistic for a world whose ideas of cosmogony and cosmology have matured beyond those of the ancient and mediaeval minds in which they arose? Is it because in this modern world we fail to appreciate the language of spirit is symbolic? To this last question, at least, a definite yes may be given. We have become besotted by empiricism and deterministic systems of science. We think there is an answer to everything, and in that our ability to be inspired has been desensitized. Art and artistry have in good part become pedestrian or trite, and in that, we have become the lesser. Imagination suffers. It is imperiled. Religion, into whose care for so long the great symbols of life have been entrusted, has failed to preach the depth of their meaningfulness, has allowed them to become idols rather than items iconic. In that, religion has itself become discounted and discredited.
There can be no literal talk of immortality, eternity, eternal realms, or eternal beings because we are creatures of rational time-space and have no point of reference that allows us to speak literally of a medium that by definition is spiritual—non-spatial, non-temporal. Of such profundities we can speak only in metaphors, symbols, analogies. We can receive such things as archetypes around which we may con-solidate aspirations, actions, life. The notions of god, soul, immortality, love, and the like are not concrete items. They are non-materials that present as patterns for value organization, that give ground for the concrete, give form to the concrete. They are meaning-fulness awaiting materiality. These symbols of order, consequence, wholeness give direction to personality, direct the integration of person in self and in world.
How does one materialize the non-material? That is the essential question that separates craft from art—how in paint, stone, wood, sound, movement, how in a segment of reality, does one capture the spirit of the whole which can have no parts? Whatsoever the result of that endeavour, it is a “forming” of the formless, a giving of form to, a formalizing. It is also a degradation, a negation, a sequestering, a frozen second of that without seconds or space. This is Plato’s insight regarding the Eternal Forms or Ideas. They are not things. They are the pure meaningfulness and in-spir-ation of things that render them evaluative and comprehensible. They are infinite possibility and dynamic purposefulness, and their “falling” into matter dilutes them, conceals them because matter is always finitude. Thus, while every aesthetic experience offers a transcendence, none can offer the ecstatic—that is reserved to the art of the Spirit itself.
The symbol’s transcending and boundless potential of is why ritual, liturgy, must respect the symbol as symbol. The threshold of ritual is the boundary of time-space. The diurnal world ends at ritual’s door. The symbol is the portal into sacred time-space (the new heaven and the new earth), into not meaning, but meaningfulness. Ritual is both art form and forum for appreciation of art, for the sensitivity to become lost in that twinned double helix of artistry and its beholder which in itself ultimately denotes the inter-spiraling of matter and energy, permanence and flux, body and soul, that transforms cosmos into uni-verse. Ritual is the ground to hold up, to elevate symbol as symbol, to celebrate its power, to succumb to its power. It is not the ground to deconsecrate it, to de-sanctify it, to desecrate it, to treat it as fact, as history, or object of quotidian time-space. God and the Christ, bread and wine, sacred words and sacred texts—these all stand symbols for powers that create us, redeem us, give us value, life, personhood and personality, that express the depths of us that call for our self-integration and our integration onto our society and our world. They are-for soul-growth. They give communal place to manifest their power. This is as true in the rites of holy communion as in the social rituals of a candle-lit dinner, gifts of chocolates and roses. They all are rituals, on varied levels of communal intensity, that seek to express and make real the ultimately same ubiquitously longed for non-material and vitalizing power: love.
God, Christ, sacred words and sacred actions are symbols denoting creativity, integration, love. They are real potential, but their actuality requires their incarnation. They are really-actual only in being lived, trusted, celebrated. Their potential reality and their actuality are, however, spiritual. Even in actualization, they remain the power that creates, loves, transforms, carries forward (fore-gives). Their spiritual nature, indeed, their sacred nature, is revealed in their essence, their giving of self toward an other. Christianity claims they are known, can only be known, as incarnated, as experienced, as acted out in the world of man. A god who is not worshipped (con-formed to) and adored (loved) is a god unknown. Were the Christ not embraced, were grace not acted upon, how would they be encountered?
The symbol exists to be acted upon in living its spirit, its dynamic. It is the ideal for life around which cluster and coagulate the suitable experiences of life. The symbol is a core (heart) element. It cannot be cut apart. It cannot be conceptualized, made into concepts, and thus, cannot be by reason analyzed in terms of its logic. Symbols reside in a deeper part of man than reason. They inspire the making of concepts, the logic of concepts. They are the dynamic behind, below and above the machine of reason and its logic. They are not facts. They are not abstractions from out of reality. They are the artistry of the whole impregnating itself upon life to make it whole.[xi]
Jesus did not produce rational arguments with logical progression and well-defined terms. Jesus taught in parables. He told stories. He did not write out rational or psychological analyses concerning the divine or the human soul. His interest, as was Buddha’s, was life in this world. His interest was very Hebraic. The reward of life is to live well here and now in harmony with the heart and mind of God, a God he personified within the depths of his soul as parent, as creative, as loving. To live properly is to live at one with the eternal and everlasting God. To be faithfully and lovingly united with him and his will here and now is to be united to him in his eternality. His will is not deterministic. He is not bound to cause and effect, or to legalities of any type. To be thus would make of God a demiurge. God is creative and loving, capable of turning void into cosmos, to forgive and turn sin into salvation. His will is propitious action—action proper to give the knotted situation a creative path forward. He may of his “nature” transcend his work, but of it he is not transcending, not aloof. He pours himself into his creation even unto death. He is the incarnating-one to the end that creation becomes filled with his creativity, positivity, love, openness to novelty, and thus, progresses forward as the truth of his own self, as his child, “his Christ”. Therefore, says Jesus, the Kingdom of heaven, the Kingdom of God, the living directionality of creative love, is “here among you”. Be open to it. Live it. It is not a horizon to come. The pertinent time, the decision time, the time to live with purpose and openness, “the fullness of time” is always “now”. Immortality is living “now” in the singular One who is the “Holy immortal one”.[xii] We are soberly reminded that this life with God is about the present. It is not about negating this world, but being immersed into it, being at-one with it in its needs, its thirst for harmony, justice, sympathy, and healing. The “blessed” are the merciful, the meek, the poor of spirit, the pure of heart, they that mourn, they that thirst for justice, and they that suffer for righteousness (Matthew 5). Thus, when the disciples asked of Jesus that he reveal God: “Show us the Father”, Jesus replied that to see him, to see God’s re-presentation in action, was to see God (John 14:8). The Apostle Paul tells the would-be Christ-ian that he/she is commanded–for the well-being of the world–to materialize, to incarnate, to “put on” God’s re-presentative presence as one’s own identity and glory (Romans 13:14). Thus daily the church (the body of Christ) rehearses the command: This is my body, my life, given, my blood, by spirit, poured out; this also do, in remembrance of me.
We do not see light, but cannot see without it. In like manner, we do not see this kingdom, this directionality of creative love, but cannot see the truth of self, other, or world without it shining within us. We see not our emersion in the eternal because it is not something we possess. It is something within which we are possessed and eternally preserved. We read of God identifying himself to Moses: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”. But these patriarchs of Israel were long dead before Moses. How then is it that God speaks of them as present to him? They, says Jesus, are present because they live in God. God is the God of the living, not the dead (Mark 12:26-27). In bursting enthusiasm the Apostle Paul adds that all who embrace God’s creative love for this world are thusly held in the God who so loves this world, for “there is no power, in heaven or on earth, there is in creation no-thing, that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God made manifest to us in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). The task to man is to accept that love, that positive estimation and grace—here, now.
It is in such confidence of life that Jesus surrenders his life: “Into Thy hands…”. It is in such moment of acceptance of life that life ends, and a spirit of creativity is imparted to world. It is in such surrender that death becomes without sting, accepted for its nature. It is in such moment of surety and faith that one allows self to stand aside and finds self standing beyond self, knows that moment of “ec-stasy” wherein “I’ is lost to “Thou”. It is here, in such “sacred moment of creativity” that the question of “I” and eternal continuance is not asked, because self beholds Self. There is no question of being, or having, or ceasing to have. There are no wonderings, no nouns, no verbs, no words, for as the sacred texts tell, at time’s end even the time-creating and living Word of God surrenders into that inexplicable dynamic and singular eternality, the Power of which this whole cosmos is but a fleeting, albeit, sacred song boundless in its duration.
[i] The Egyptian ideas concerning soul, immortality, reward, punishment, and return to the divine or divine realm do not notably impact Western thought until a later date. Then, the cults of Isis and Osiris will wield significant influence. It is fundamentally Indo-Aryan ideas that impact the earliest Greek visions, and many of the residents of Olympus can be seen to be Greek editions of their subcontinent counterparts.
The earliest Greeks, like many of the early peoples of whom we have record, accepted the equation of life and body. When the body ceased its functions, life ended, or life ended when the body ceased its functions. The corpse was returned to the earth whence it had come to decompose and again become fertile earth–a telling cycle of death and rebirth. “From dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” There is also a notion of a continuance or abiding preservation, but it was neither formulated nor formalized. There lingered an ancestral presence over the tribe, an umbra of the past that was to be respected. It is noteworthy that the corpse is returned, often in fetal position, into the earth. Could this be the trace of matriarchy before the rise of patriarchy wherein the sky-god of manly power, of life-domineering lance become thunderbolt, tops the divine feminine, and in her nurturing passivity fertilizes her with his life-giving sperm, the rain? Is this the last Western trait of the divine Mother-earth and her fecundity before the Father-sky of spirit, that is of wind and air, mounts the throne of impressively erect Olympus? Is the rise of patriarchy itself, with its symbols of the hunter, a compensation for the passing of hunting-man into agricultural-man? Does it carry a subliminal anger?
There is the exemplary, Mars, who slowly transforms from being protector of the fields to making them battle-fields. His rape of Rhea Silvia ends with him becoming, through Romulus, the “grandfather” of militaristic Rome. She–a virgin priest–becomes its “grandmother”. One might ask if, as the power of Mars declined, did hers arise? Is fate writ in our stars, or in our myths. Are the myths a “resonance” of life past in which we live and carry life forward? To what degree are we conditioned by the past? There is also the patriarch of Olympus, Zeus, who is ever wont to sweep down to earth and rape one of its beauties–not all of them, of course. There is Ganymede, the original “pretty boy”, who gets swept up to Olympus to be ever near Zeus, and serve him in the intimate position of “cup-bearer”. Patriarchy has no limits as to whom is expected to serve the father. Again let us ask: in these and the multitude of like tales, do we detect a compensation and a sub-verted anger for man having lost the adventure of being provider/hunter and having by economic circumstance been forced to become care-taker of the mother-earth? Is “roaming” man fighting back against his confinement? Is he angry with the mother he ought to love because she will not allow him the freedom to which he feels entitled? Is this why the feminine must be invalidated? Is this why patriarchal society is still flush with the rape of the earth?
This patriarchal domination is not an exoneration of the power of the feminine. While patriarchy makes the Olympian goddesses occasionally testy and conniving beings, and Christianity turns its mother-goddess into the point of grace between God and man, there are their potent Indo-Aryan ancestors: Camunda, and Durga-Kali. They not only dominate earth, they consume it. Is then the question one of the feminine versus the masculine, or of whom has dominion? When the supreme power is conceived of as feminine is it any less domineering of the masculine than the masculine of the feminine? Power and privilege are not paired; they are identical.
[ii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 2: Plato (Nov. 2013); Part 3: Aristotle (Nov. 2013); Part 5: Plotinus (Plato revisited) (Dec. 2013); Part 6: Augustine (Plato baptized) (Jan 2014); Part 13: Thomas Aquinas (Aristotle baptized) (April 2014); Spirituality, Part3: Aspects of our genetic code: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus (Mar 2017).
[iii] Cf: Spirituality, Part 4: Aspects of our genetic code: Jesus, Paul, John (Mar. 2017).
The mediaeval mind proposed the spiritual continuance of body would be based upon the physical body at age thirty-three, the accepted age of Jesus at the time of his death. This would be the case regardless of age at time of death.
[iv] We are the product of the history nature commands us to under-stand. Within it, to understand it, we must ever be in dialogue one with another because history cannot produce harmony. That is exactly the point made by the sacred narrative about the expulsion of humankind from Paradise. History craves harmony, and creates division and divisiveness, fosters e-liminations, sets up boundaries. This tension amongst us exists for no more arcane reason than the fact that we are oriented to self-interest, and we utilize every conceivable commixture of society to promote our self-interest from cliques and clubs to bureaucracies, nation-states, and empires. In the name of our individuated egos each such structure vies to be the centre, the ego of the world or a world. Yet, be it one man or a continent of men, the centre can never be the ego. If ego attempts to be the centre, it finds itself essentially deadly. If the ego attempts to be the boundary, it finds itself essentially dead. The centre and boundary are always the other. It is the other that de-fines the ego. It is mutuality of de-finition that creates the authentic society, that ultimately manifests love, and hence in Christianity the Ultimate Centre and Boundary of the world is named Love. The question of life—individual and corporate–is how to re-spond to the other, how to co-re-spond. Consider the word in its Latin form: respondere. It is of two parts: re, denoting again or a repetition, and spondere, to pledge oneself to, to solemnly promise (akin to espouse, and also to the Greek σπένδω [spendo]: to pour out a drink offering, to make a peace treaty). To give response is to pledge oneself toward establishing peace. To correspond is to pledge the creation of communication, communion, community, togetherness in unity. Thus, selfless, non-egoistic openness to dialogue is to respond with creativity (the espousal aspect) under the guise of our mutual medium of time-space extension, our history. Harmony will always be the illusive goal, but without it as cynosure and guide, we are left only to wallow in tension, ego-frustration, and the other earthly hells of our own allowance and making.
[v] Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton (April 2013).
[vi] Once something is forgiven, how can there be expected a recompense? When I say I forgive you, I do not expect some type of payment to mollify me. I do expect the person forgiven and I will be able, will be freed, to move forward together into a new, more healthful situation. To fore-give itself means to give the situation a forward leap, and that is always a creative leap into the new. There will be implications to be considered, consolidated, lived-out, but they are not, cannot be, some type of punitive burden to compensate the offended party. That precisely negates the very notion of forgiving. Recompense is an ego-desire, and to expect it of a God named Love is to denigrate the divine—both in itself, and in its symbolic potency.
[vii] Cf: Regarding predestination, from Occidental Ideas, Part 8: Beginnings (Feb. 2014):
The more dreadful inquiry than the root of man’s sinfulness was the question about God’s role. Did God know the Fall was coming? Did God will it?
The Hebrew scriptures speak in places about God preparing some for salvation and some for everlasting disgrace, of hardening hearts. Paul writes of some called according to God’s purpose, foreknowledge, predestination, election, of being chosen not by merit of works but faith, etc. (Romans 8, Ephesians 1, 2 Timothy 1). All of these texts are susceptible to being used as “proof texts” that God wills some to be saved and some to be damned. However, neither any one nor the lot of them can be taken for such meaning if read in context, a context that is always the sending of Christ to save the world, to redeem the whole cosmos—not this or that bit of it. Nowhere does Christian scripture have God bowing to sin, to evil. God in Christ acts that all be saved. If there be truth in the saying the Devil can quote scripture to his own ends, here be a proof, for this portrayal of whimsical divine favouritism has in too many hearts and minds sown the sins of anxiety, hubris, and adiaphora (John Wesley), wrecking faith and hope and love, exalting an idol of vengeance in the stead of the thrice Holy God and Father of Jesus Christ.
Once again, it is Augustine who sets the stage for the ages to come, claiming God is free and just, his decisions inscrutable, his will undefeatable, even in consideration of man’s free will. And this is true. Augustine failed to underscore that this divine freely willed and indefectible plan is Christ, the salvation of all. Once again, I note we filter the ineffable vision of God through ourselves and our histories. Augustine’s life and times were anfractuous, to put it mildly. Interestingly, in the Greek world there was a less pessimistic socio-political situation, and that attitude is reflected in church. The divine will for universal salvation does not supersede human free will and thus, damnation continues to be available for the reprobate, but there is quietly acknowledged the question: given the grace of Christ, is reprobation a probability for any (John Damascus)? Some were less equivocal and expected a final and total enfolding into blessedness that would shatter even the bounds of hell, an apocatastasis (Origen). In mediaeval times the Western church sought out a more embracing stance, and stress was placed upon the sovereignty of divine will (Peter Lombard), divine causality (Bonaventura), or divine love (Thomas Aquinas).
For most, until the Reformation, predestination (as a matter of spirituality and as a topic in academia) was neither a grave nor great concern. Members of the church were the saved, and the sacraments were both the instruments and the assurance of their salvation. If anxiety ought to have raised its head anywhere it ought to have been among the heathen and infidel.
Calvin, ejecting the sacramental, devotional, emotive, and organizational core of mediaeval spirituality, focuses his theology on the omnipotence of God to the point of dismissing the value of man. Whatsoever man does or does not is inconsequential before God’s will. Furthermore, God has, in his inscrutably wisdom, willed the salvation of some, and the damnation of others. This is neither ruthless nor unjust, for all men are sinful and deserving of damnation; some, mercifully, are granted a covering for their sins thanks to the merits gained by Christ specifically for them, and therein saved. This gracious allowance, this grace is irresistible, and so “assures” them who have been “elected” the beatitude that would have been available to all by man’s natural powers had they not been utterly corrupted in the Fall, which event the omnipotent and omniscient God did will! As staggering and stupefying a spiritual vision this constitutes, some had the courage to ask on: when did God so will damnation for some and salvation for others, before (supralapsarianism, antelapsarianism) or after (sublapsarianism, postlapsarianism, infralapsarianism) the Fall (lapsus)? There were a few within this reformed church tradition that rejected the entire idea of predestination. Arminius held Calvin’s position made God the foundation and author of sin itself. He rejected the divinely appointed damnation of some, and stressed man has the ability to cooperate with the divine grace, that salvation is open to and possible for all men.
Post-Tridentine Rome tried to look away from the entire argumentation. It focused on man’s free will and divine grace. Some held God’s gift of efficacious grace to do good is founded in his foreknowledge of human cooperation or lack thereof (Molina), others stressed the pre-eminence and priority of the divine will for universal salvation over and above human merit (Suarez).
[viii] Modern science stands firmly on the ground that the observer, in the act of observation, causes the emergence of a particular out of a field of possibilities. Outside the experiment, outside the laboratory, however, there is no one observer, there is no single point of reference, there is no first observer. In our world, our reality, every observer must be treated as “collapsing the vector state”. The world is our world because we, the species interconnected over, not simply time and space, but in pre-time-space, consciously make it so. Consciousness collapses the field of possibilities into one item, and that cause of the local is itself non-local, non-temporal. It is consciousness that brings about possibilities, and by selecting, by willing, out from among them makes them into moments, thoughts, experiences, actions, events. This raises a question as to the expanse of consciousness. Is it, as observer, exclusive to the humanity or does the species stand within a greater field?
The questions of consciousness and observation raise a question concerning the relativity of time. If Einstein’s time is “bendable”, can time be reversed, more specifically, can we go back in time? I ask this question not because of any scientific investigation it has fostered, but in recognition of an interesting inquiry put to me: how might time travel impact the Christian understandings of sin, forgiveness, redemption? First, I need begin with the confession that I decidedly am not au fait in the arena of physics. Second, one ought to ask as to the motive of investigation, as motive matters. Is the consideration of time travel a thirst for pure research? Is it a wish to observe the past, to fill in details history has failed to record? Is it a desire to amend the past? The last two questions open other questions, which admittedly may be rooted in my academic deficiencies. Respecting the differentiations between micro- and macro-world, if the active consciousness of the observer collapses the possible into a singular, how could going back in time take one back to the “same” time-space? Would not the “collapse of the vector state” be new? Time may be bendable, but outside of memory, can a conscious state be made to duplicate a series of conscious states from the past? If they are replicates, are they ours? If we “go back in time” would it be to “the past”, or simply us altering (alternatively collapsing the possibilities in) an-other’s time-space and making it our present? There here arises the question: do they who would travel into the past imply the past is “alive”? Does every moment live on, and merely our flittering consciousness passes? Still, our consciousness entering the past would, it seems, make it our present and the past would, as ever, slip away from us. Perhaps it is best that I confine myself to a discipline in which I am not an abecedarian. From a moral, a religious, perspective, have we not done ill enough with our present that we would venture also to disturb and dis-locate the dead?
There is in our ancestral spiritual genetics the tale of Orpheus and his attempt to travel back in time. He yearned desperately to be again with his wife who now was of the absolute past; she was dead. He went into Hades to retrieve her. At the moment of optimal “vector state collapse” he looked back, and his awareness, his consciousness, changed the world he had hoped to have emerge. The past was forever lost, and all that remained was his present. As do many when the world that emerges from our choices is not the world of our dreams, he turned to religion. This he did not to heal himself or allow himself to be healed, but to give himself a forum in which to consecrate his self-pity. He could not–as every religion essentially commands us to do—arise. He had no will, could embrace no higher will, to collapse possibilities into a new reality, into something whole and wholesome. The ramifications of that decision (or indecision) proved fatal. The women who would present themselves as a new field of possibilities for him eventually—in frustration—gave him that which he in his own frustration wanted: death. They tore him to pieces, at least according to one version of the myth. Does the myth of Orpheus speak to us of our time-limitation? Is the grave a frustration of self we cannot accept? Do we live upon the surface of the world with its clocks telling us time is a mechanism, or can we live more deeply and see time as the medium of our interconnectedness, our eternal and forever internal dynamism, our duration?
Is the Judeo-Christian experience open to the concept of time travel? Where in such venture stands the God who turns void into cosmos, parts the Red Sea, halts the Jordan, falls the walls of Jericho, tells the lame and the dead to arise, and that speaks to the sinner “your sin is forgiven”? How stands the God of creativity and fore-ward-giving-ness? Both creativity and forgiveness are about leaping beyond the voids and the knots of the past, and opening a new place for life and growth. God is about the present and the future, not the past. God is “I am”, not I-was. The Spirit of God is about the potency of the “new” heaven and earth, not a recalibration, restoration, or re-visitation of the past. What implication is there to the spirituality resident in “redemption” and “resurrection” if physics could allow a rectification of the past? The placing of these questions is not to question the efforts of science, merely to inquire how certain possible accomplishments of physics might relate to the value Judeo-Christian thought and spirituality have placed upon leaving behind the past–as did Abram/Abraham, the child Samuel, the carpenter Jesus, the sundry disciples become apostles–and embracing the present and the future with vitality and promise, embracing the kenosis, incarnation, and the Spirit of the divine and wholly One. Given, however, the fundamental forward-ness of God into creation, I have no doubt that wheresoever science may go in its discoveries and disclosures, theology, if it be authentic to both God and world, will follow, and uphold the value of the world God so loves.
[ix] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 24: World Progress (Sept. 2015).
[x] I have recently been quizzed on several occasions concerning both free will and miracles. I have no desire to dissert upon these topics. I shall merely note that in an age that operates, on so many levels, on the scientific premise of “uncertainty” at the most basic levels of world function, that proceeds upon the assumption that variance is the heart-beat of biological evolution, that to doubt freedom in choice, even if it be not the quotidian standard of behaviour, seems, at best, odd. And the same may be said for miracles, occurrences that defy the deterministic world of unbending abstractionist laws of cause and effect. The miracle simply tells us the universe is a dynamic field of possibilities below and above the surface world of our navigating rules of rationality. If quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology can be accepted, then—implicitly—we accept there does occur variance, there does emerge from possibilities that for which cause and effect rationalistic determinism cannot account. Were there in this world no extra-ordinary events, we all would still be particles in a mass of cosmic gas—if without variance and chance the cosmos got that far.
Certainly, superficial religiosity and misdirected religious fervour have not been friends to the notions either of free will or the miraculous. That, however, while denigrating them either in an over-wrought self-degradation before the Almighty or in over-acted histrionics concerning his omnipotence, does not negate their existence. There is a time to overcome the misuse of the emotionality religion can arouse, and there is a time to overcome the prejudice such has engendered concerning religion.
[xi] Cf: The Serpent and the Symbol (Jan 2016).
[xii] Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton (April 2013).