The Great God

It is thus, in a sense, from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us.  To a mind that did not share our emotions, and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument from size would be sheerly meaningless.  Men look on the starry heavens with reverence; monkeys do not.  The silence of the eternals spaces terrified Pascal, but it was the greatness of Pascal that enabled them to do so.  – C.S. Lewis from Dogma and the Universe

Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness … -- Job 38:19

The universe,  a bubble floating in nothingness – space itself, a matrix nestling atomic furnaces, Jovian near-suns, and rocky balls of debris, who knows what it all means, from where it comes and where it goes.  Mathematics is a corral for wild horses – better yet, for griffins, unicorns, and the occasional dragon.  It makes us feel safer, as if we understand that around which we have thrown an familiar barrier. 

I went to sleep last night listening to Emerson’s essays.  This resulted in a stubborn dream about losing my wife’s Traverse that I had parked in an auditorium in a building with many auditoriums.  I suspected it was moved, while I was asleep on the floor, to make room for a dance recital by some school children.  The most distressing part was trying to get the buttons on the key fob to flash the lights and honk the horn so I could locate the vehicle.  I have that a lot when I go fall asleep wearing my earphones.  Sometimes it’s actually the MP3 player in the dream that I’m so frustrated by.  It won’t stop no matter how hard I press the dream controls.    

I fell out with Emerson when I understood that he denied the deity of Christ.  He didn’t think that through very well and adopted the flawed analysis of Higher Criticism.  I wasn’t much of a believer at the time myself, but it was too much for me.  I made the mistake of purging everything else he had to say because he was wrong about what is, without question, a vital issue.  Thinkers get off track for any number of reasons, including the influence of their age’s time ghost.  The atmosphere of pre-Civil War America was charged with Greek error and the ardent Yankee version of hubris.  Man cannot be the measure of all things, but Emerson was able to see that when a man measured the pyramids what he really measured was himself. 

So it is as we go out into the cosmos.  We find, not the limits of the infinite, rather the asymptote that runs on up until parallax convinces us that the line of our model and reality are one.  Calculus works fine, except at the limits, those infinitesimally tiny moments of discontinuity.  It’s close enough for building bridges and skyscrapers, for going to Mars and flying by Io.  That’s not at all unimpressive. 

The wise see and know that the more we do, the farther we go, the finer we divide, the greater is God.

Updated to add from Father Stephen:

But Christians cannot point to a point of origin as evidence of the Cause, only as evidence of an origin. At that point, we must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who do not believe and simply wonder. For it is in our wonder that we encounter Jesus to whom the Apostles bare witness that He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Be sure and read his post in its entirety.  

Just Add Wonder

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth — Matthew 5:5

A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make our knees knock under as with religious fear. — G.K. Chesterton from Heretics

I wonder, in reading through Heretics, about whom a Chesterton would write today. Mark Steyn, he of the sons of the prophets, speaks most often on politicians and popular culture figures — as if there is now any difference between politics and pop culture, which may be a good part of our problem. Chesterton safaried on an intellectual savannah trod by Shaws, Wells, and Orwells, to name but a few. I'm afraid he would hardly waste a round on the lock-step lemmings, swarming rodents, and shambling opossums that have inherited the plain today. Perhaps there are no Chestertons because there is no quarry worthy of such hunters. Did Nimrod stop to weep for himself when he saw the end of Smilodon?

Truly the old, bold socialists, eugenicists, and strong men who stalked under the noon sun are gone, replaced by careful and cowardly creatures of the night that scurry from shadow to shadow lest we see their true form. Apart from the insulated and the tenured like Peter Singer, few of the "pro-choice" advocates in our day admit that they long for a better race of men through more selective breeding, and, by the way, far fewer men for the most part. They have learned the chameleon trick of taking on the surrounding colors, especially the color of freedom, as they lurk and wait to strike. It's just me probably, but I'd rather take my chances face to face with the grinning tiger of the day than be struck by an ambushing death adder.

I can't say as I blame the skulkers, at least here in America. Coming out and saying that you are for de-populating the earth, turning North America into a theme park, and breeding slave races on the old government plantation probably isn't going to get you a whole lot of votes or funding for the U.S. Department of Indoctrination. Camouflage and stealth: it's not just for tanks and planes any more.

In Chesterton's day he could still talk about the "humility of the man of science", a phrase many of us find quaintly amusing. Even Chesterton was amused by it for he saw their day passing as surely and swiftly as those hunters with the Clovis point saw the passing of the giant ground sloth or the mastodon. Projecting forward, he could see the inevitably of rising pride and the creation of the lordly scientific priesthood who shake their big, rattling gourds at us in the Twenty-First Century of what is now called — so appropriately — the Common Era.

The path of devolution is always the same. First comes wonder with its beloved foster child, humility. Humility gives birth to discovery. Discovery always rebels against his parent, sows his wild oats, and reaps his bastard offspring, power. Power and pride form their unholy union from which comes their first-born, unintended consequences, then his twin brothers, death and destruction. A rebirth of discovery is always denied to power and pride. If we doubt God, He answers us thus. Still, the reign of power and pride may be long, counter-balanced as it is by God's grace in raising up children to humility from the very stones of the earth.

That's Chesterton's point in the opening quote: that merely looking at things as they are tends to make us more humble, to set ablaze our sophisticated cool. We humans are very good at thinking that a name for something is the same as an explanation. It's not the facts that poison humility; it is someone's interpretation of the facts. We could walk well on the stones in our path. It's the bumperstickers that trip us up.

I even miss the good old days when we thought science was impressively objective, isolated, and concerned only with discovery for discovery's sake. You know how it used to be in science fiction when the lone, eccentric genius created some grand new thing in his basement la-BORE-atory. The emotional humanist hero would come along to ejaculate, "But think what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands!" Yep, those days are long gone. Too many of our current heroes are Boromirs who see the power of darkness as a "gift" that they may conquer, only to become that which they vanquish.

Reading through the New Testament, everyone has come to the Beatitudes. To this day, every time I read through the Sermon on the Mount, I fight the same thought: He's got to be kidding. Jesus, I find myself saying, You can't be serious about this stuff. Anybody who tries to follow Christ's teaching here will be eaten alive in this world. If you are going to try this, your best bet is to go ahead and die young because otherwise you'll wind up living in a cardboard box and getting mugged on a daily basis. Shoot, they'll probably even take your cardboard box.

The better part of me says, though, that cynical-me is wrong. He meant what He said, and He meant for us to live it. He did not promise that it would be easy. There are snakes in the brush, and, while old Smiley is gone, there are still lions and tigers and bears, not to mention jackals aplenty. All that's missing are the meek — or as more modern translations sometimes say, the gentle.

The meek are ones strong enough to be gentle, brave enough to fear, and bold enough to be humble. They inherit the earth because those who reject meekness reject man and his abode along with it. We'll inherit what we appreciate — that is, what gains value for us, or that to which we give or add value. We wonder at ourselves, at the cosmos, at the Creator. The legitimate explanations of science only serve to deepen our wonder, to add even more value to that which we have been given.

The world will always prefer the giants who look from a distance with disdain down upon the meek and — don't miss it — the lowly. They are impressed by his man-made armor of snark, his heavy weapons of vulgarity and mockery. They see no vulnerability and gather fearlessly in his wake.

Across the way comes one of those hillbillies, some kid just in from herding sheep and goats. Perhaps the crowd behind the giant smells the intruder before they see him, for indeed he must smell like sheep. They see him pause and stoop at the brook to pick up five stones cut out from the mountain and polished smooth without hands.

The humble shepherd looks up at the giant. He doesn't seem to see the armor or the shield or the spear. He looks the giant in the eye and sees the bare seat of his opponent's thoughts. The hillbilly says, "He's so big! How can I miss?"