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Sunday, March 28, 2010
Knowledge Versus Vision: A Palm Sunday Rumination
Palm Sunday. Holy Week is upon us once again.
American Catholics who go to Mass today will hear, and participate in, the recitation of the Passion according to Luke. Yet today is the commemoration, not of Jesus's trial and execution, but of His entry into Jerusalem, the sacred city of the Jews. He was greeted with jubilation by His admirers in the city. They spread cloaks along His way, and palm fronds before His mount. They chanted hosannas, overjoyed that the promised Messiah had come at last to His capital. He and His disciples entered the city through a celebration that might be compared to a victory parade.
Mere days later, an even larger and louder crowd, in which were many of those who had chanted hosannas at Jesus's appearance, demanded His torture and death.
He knew. He had always known.
Among the great and permanently insoluble mysteries of existence is the nature of time. We don't perceive time directly, as we do the other manifestations of our universe. We infer it from duration and change. We see things happen, pairs of events whose elements cannot be rearranged by our perceptions, and deduce that time has passed between them. We experience causes and effects. We see birth, growth, and death. We watch as the mainspring of the cosmos, in obedience to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, gradually, inexorably runs down.
No lesser creature endures that burden. An animal's whole life is a single flash of its consciousness. Things happen, but he does not sequence them nor draw conclusions from them. Blessed is he.
Time is both the ultimate gift and the traitor whose guaranteed betrayal cannot be pinpointed. Indeed, time is even more than that. Because it invisibly suffuses our universe, it renders us temporal creatures incapable of grasping the absence of time: the condition called eternity.
As we cannot comprehend eternity, we cannot comprehend the Being Whose nature is founded in it: God.
We know only this much: God created time and embedded Man in it. Time gives us the opportunity to become more than we were; in this, it's among the greatest of our blessings. But it also gives us a universal matrix for reality as we know it, confining our thinking without release. If we study greatly and strain much, we can see forward in time, if only a little way. But we cannot stand above time and view its tapestry whole.
He does.
Man, with great effort and diligence, can know a little of the world. He can attain a partial understanding of the laws graven into the fabric of reality. With that knowledge, he can make some confident predictions about the outcome of certain processes, the effects that will flow from certain causes. For it is the nature of knowledge that it's involved in its entirety with prediction, which cannot be separated from time.
God does not "know." He doesn't need to, for He has no need to predict. He sees -- all at once.
The only partially comprehensible analogy we have to eternity is the mathematical concept of infinity.
An infinity cannot be measured or manipulated by ordinary means. Add one to infinity, or take one away, and it remains as it was. Indeed, add one infinity to another, and the result might be no larger than either of the addends. It took a very unusual mind, that of Georg Cantor, equipped with a sheaf of unprecedented techniques, to bring Man a glimpse of the nature of infinities.
But infinity, as elusive as it is, is more comprehensible than eternity by far, for it is a mathematical concept bounded in ways to which eternity is not subject. Cantor was able to deduce that there are orders of infinity -- that infinities of one type contain more members than infinities of another. No human mind can perform a similar operation on eternity. Whatever we conjecture about it will remain only that -- conjecture -- until we pass beyond the veil of time.
But some conjectures about eternity confer a peculiar sort of illumination. Some such conjectures might be the closest we can come to appreciating -- not understanding -- God's Plan for Man.
One of the many magnificences of Christianity is its celebration of the cyclicality of life. The Christian calendar is a three-year cycle, which embeds a one-year cycle familiar to nearly all of us in the West:
- Advent: the time of preparation for the arrival of God made flesh;
- The Nativity and the passage of Jesus's early years;
- Jesus's time preaching and ministering to the Jews of Judea;
- Lent: the time of preparation for the Passion;
- The Passion and Resurrection of Christ;
- The forty days to the Ascension;
- The ten days to the Pentecost;
- "Ordinary time," during which we celebrate the Apostles and their embrace of their mission to "Go and teach all nations."
That one-year cycle repeats endlessly, and well that it should, for the repetition is a human-scale recreation of God's own view of those events. To us, they are in the past: we can read of them and commemorate them, but they are temporally behind us. To God, they have happened, are happening, and will happen forevermore, until the end of time itself.
To God, the incarnation, birth, maturation, ministry, sacrifice, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus is, in our inadequate human language, an ongoing event.
Man knows; God sees. His Now is unbounded. What He sees is in His vision always. He does not discover, remember, or forget.
Jesus, being God Incarnate, stood simultaneously in time and outside it. As God, He saw. As Man, He knew -- and we know from the story of His final hours that He feared and suffered as a man would, not with the indifference and invulnerability of an eternal and omniscient God.
The cycles of the calendar are a common man's sole pale foretaste of eternity. The seasons will repeat inexorably, for as long as we live. Each day has a clock-face like all the others. Each hour is like the hour before and the hour after. And so with the minute, and the second, down to the tiny time-reversible cycles that characterize matter and energy at the lowest levels to which we can penetrate.
These things, from their repetition, give us a little of the flavor of eternity, but they cannot reveal anything much of its nature. It might be best to say that it has no nature, for "nature" in human terms is inseparable from definition: the assignment of a thing to a genus according to the characteristics it shares with other things, and the elucidation of the differentia by which it's distinguished from those others. Those aspects of eternity, if I'm not distorting human language merely by saying so, are barred to our examination as temporal creatures.
Yet we will see them when we come into eternity. We've been promised so. Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through to Easter, is our most dramatic reminder.
As there are greater and lesser infinities, there could be multiple eternities as well. A creature outside time has no experience of duration; in that regard his consciousness is closer to that of the animals than that of a living man. Thus it's feasible that one could experience an eternity in Hell and an eternity in Heaven. It's a conundrum no theologian, past, present or future, can unravel.
But of this we may be sure: God endures. He Who gave us the gift of time awaits us in eternity. As He sent His Son to inform us, we who wish to do so can join Him there. Just as the rainbow was His seal on His promise to Noah, that His Son died and rose from the dead is His seal on His promise of eternal life.
The hosannas at the gates of Jerusalem did give way to the jeers and tears of Golgotha. But those too gave way: to the Alleluias of the Resurrection, and Christ's promise to mortal Man:
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you of earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. [The Gospel According To John, 3:11-15]
And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round the throne and the beasts and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice,'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain
To receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength,
And honor, and glory, and blessing.'And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying:
'Blessing and honor, and glory and power,
Be unto him that sitteth upon the throne,
And unto the Lamb for ever and ever.'And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever. [The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 6:11-14]
In eternity, it is all one.
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
Thank you, Fran, for a particularly beautiful and meaningful Rumination. Your distinction between knowing and seeing is one of the best descriptions I have ever read of the fundamental disconnect between us as creatures bound in time, and our Lord as Creator unbound. Truly, as Paul said, we know in part, and we see through a glass darkly. Were it otherwise, our temporally-conditioned minds could scarcely fail to slip their moorings. But one day, we will see in full. As we enter into Holy Week, I look forward to that day, while at the same time admitting that I cannot conceive even dimly of what it will mean to see fully.
Posted by on 03/28/2010 at 11:43 AMThat is some very unusual thinking you have going there.
There’s that idea of the Ain Suph Aur in Kabbalah—a living splendor beyond anything we can conceive. How do we define God? We can’t. I’ll be turning the idea of orders of Eternity as I drive.
Beats thinking about politics!
Posted by Irish Cicero on 03/29/2010 at 08:24 PM
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