Another Lewisian non-epigram

“There is no morality in Heaven.”

-- CSL, Letters to Malcolm

[baffling out of context, sensible within]

Twinned Eternities

In the poem portion of Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), we read:

Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and infinite aftertime.

The basic lexicon of Classical Arabic, as it happens (with its wealth of words), distinguishes these two, with a brief, monomorphemic word for each:

أبد  [abad] prospective eternity (with a terminus post quem but no end)

أزل [azal] retrospective eternity (with a terminus ante quem but no beginning)

Reflecting separately on these  raises interesting philosophical questions, e.g., regarding the indestructibility of the soul.  But as a merely intellectual matter, the picture will be clear to anyone who has got as far as geometry or calculus -- "half-infinite" directed intervals (such as the non-negative reals).

In Laughter in the Dark (English version 1938), Nabokov plays with the twinned hemi-eternities, in a passage full of satire:

“Haven’t I met your sister once?” queried Dorianna in her lovely bass voice.

“My sister is in Heaven,” answered Rex gravely.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dorianna.

“Never was born,” he added.

Much is rustling beneath the sheen of this. First, Rex, po-faced, lays a logical snare for Dorianna, knowing that she would automatically assume that the now-absent soul is residing in the after-eternity (Arabic abad), which is all that most people ever think about, or even conceive to exist. An extra twist is provided by Dorianna’s automatic, flustered response at the unexpected reply – the conveyed sense is meant to be, “I’m sorry for your loss,” but simply stringing bits of syntax together yields, “I’m sorry that your sister is in Heaven.” (**) Rex then, indirectly pointing out the ambiguity in his initial statement, and implicitly rebuking Dorianna for failure to perceive ambiguity (again, in whatever sphere, most people don’t), reveals that this sororal Arlésienne is in fact at present domiciled in the ante-eternity (Arabic azal).

That passage, incidentally, rests as well on the paradox alluded to last time, that of the indestructibility of the soul. Intuitively, we think of a soul as the sort of thing (being brewed, after all, from the aethers of the Eternal One) that doesn’t simply wink out of existence. But by the same token, it shouldn’t be the sort of thing that simply winks in – in which case it must, as in the Platonic conception, be “stored up” somewhere (Rex specifies Paradise as the ‘green room’ or on-deck circle, though probably more from a faux-polite convenance than from any committed Platonism).

That observation does not exhaust the (depthless!) well of paradox subtending such insight. Follow it out, and you’ll encounter a retrospective version of the quantum-mechanical “many-worlds” scenario.

(**) P.G. Wodehouse plays on the same effect. In his world, earls are crotchety and idiosyncratic, and butlers are perforce imperturbable in the face of all.

            “Dash it, Beach, this egg is undercooked!”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “What – is the cook out sick again?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Well, I’ll be damned!”

            “Yes, sir.”

(Picture an infinitesimal lengthening of the glide initial: “Yyyes, sir.” The joke is, the double-meaning will be completely lost on the earl.)

~

It was the contention of “The Stokes Conjecture” (a chapter in my book, The Semantics of Form in Arabic)  that possession of such a neatly twinned pair of monomorphemes as azal and abad, as opposed to such roundabout (and nonce) phrasal confections as “infinite aftertime”, should track with a greater tendency of speakers of the language so outfitted, to be clear on the subject, for it to be cognitively relatively accessible, and thus to accrete around it  further developments both morphological (derivata) and semantic (metaphors).   Whether this be the case for Arabic letters and Islamic theology, I leave to my learnèd readers to make out.

~

The casual reference above, to the isomorphism of azal and abad, as constituents of infinite Time, to the half-rays  as subsets of the real line, conceals a textural disparity, in point of richness.   Not, as you might imagine, in favor of the human/experiential conception of Eternity, but the mathematical/intellectual science of the Real Line.

We really don’t know what to do with Eternity -- and literally, wouldn’t know what to do in it.    Like the silence of the infinite spatial reaches that so dismayed Pascal, we stand aghast at the prospect of doing anything “forever”, be it strumming harps or standing around on clouds swapping New Yorker captions.   The prospect of an infinite afterlife, for which we are supposed to yearn, is strictly baffling.

(Note that there is nothing heretical in that observation of human psychology;  notably, C.S. Lewis was converted to Christianity  before any sort of belief in or appreciation for  an infinite afterlife  was granted him.)
(For a mathematician's take on how the afterlife shall be spent, try this.
For an equine perspective,  this.)
(I riff upon the bafflement in the azal case, here.)

The Real Line, by contrast, is … infinitely diverting.   To begin with, even in a low-focus broad view (abstracting from the  so to speak  “quantum foam” of the infinitessimally inspected continuum), it harbors a great many other infinities within itself.  Thus, that infinite ray or half-line,  [0, ∞ ), is topologically equivalent to a mere half-open interval,  [0, 1):  in both cases, you can cover the space with a countably infinite sequence of disjoint intervals, no finite subset of which can do the job.  Thus, for the ray: [0,1), [1,2), [2,3) …. etc;  for the interval, [0, ½) [½,¾), [¾, 7/8) …

Further, the infinitude lies not only in thus stretching out forever, but in drilling down.   Any interval (even one that is closed, and thus compact) harbors infinitely many intervals as subsets;  and any such patch contains an uncountably infinite collection of points.  (We recall Dyson’s title, “Infinite in All Directions”, but with ‘directions’ differing qualitatively rather than simply like a compass needle.)

And those are just the appetizers.  The continuum is a regular zoo of exotic creatures -- the Cantor set, the Borel sets, projective sets, and a host of others studied in the discipline of “Descriptive Set Theory”.

~

As for those specifically twinned infinities, staring at each other from opposite sides of a mirror, they have a counterpart in modern physics, which takes reversibility of Charge, Parity, and Time (separately for some processes, in combination for others) as a kind of credo, like Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.   Traditionally, time-reversed solutions were usually dismissed out of hand as unphysical;  other, more venturesome theorists, embraced them, telling fables of antiparticles as simply particles moving backwards in time, among other scenarios that chill the blood.

[ShoutOut:  Many thanks to Djinn ibn Sayârah  for help in formatting this for posting here.]

[Afternote]  My friend the Arabian theologian writes in :

Mark Twain wrote, regarding death:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

That's kinda funny for as far as it goes, but no one who has experienced consciousness can be seriously flippant about it being snuffed out.

.

P.G. Wodehouse in memoriam (expanded)

I have just finished reading the prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel, Money for Nothing (1928).

Someday  I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,

but for now, the following observation must suffice:

He is both unfailingly wholesome, and (to a degree you do not fully appreciate  till you have lived a while, and beheld the alternative, and seen how, decade after decade, he soldiered on  through it all)  deep-seatedly humane.

Usually he is jolly and joshing, by choice;  but when he wishes, he can conjure up effects out of Wind in the Willows.   As here, describing a pair of young lovers drifting the river:

The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling softly to itself.  It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes seeing young people happy.

Many of his characters are -- designedly -- stock figures, recycled from story to story with slight variations.   (Cf. the Commedia dell'arte -- there is no blame in this.)  But Wodehouse can capture the mind’s movements exactly, when so inclined.   A disappointed lover:

‘I hear you’re engaged to Hugo,’ he said, speaking carefully  and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.

 (A simple-seeming sentence, yet with much art.  A while after reading it, I tried to recall it from memory, but could not fetch up such perfect wording.  All I could think of was “as they seemed inclined to do”, which is not nearly as good.)

Yet later, as she accepts his proposal and offer her hand, the pan-psychism of a benevolent world  springs up anew, now with a touch, not of Willows, but of Mary Poppins:

The garden had learned that dance now.  It was simple once you got the hang of it.  All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round.   So the trees jumped up and down  and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.

If a Heaven there be, which I am bound to believe, then I likewise confide, that old P.G. is up there, chuckling with contentment, and playing golf atop the clouds.

Pleased as Plum

[Update]

When considering writers like Petrarch, a primary consideration is his influence on later authors:  he lives on abundantly, in the works of those unblushing borrowers the Petrarchians.   For Wodehouse, the case is otherwise.  He wrote in a century when, unlike in olden times, great premium was set upon originality.  Furthermore, once he found his voice, he kept doing the same thing over and over -- but so devilishly well, that he formed a sui-generis genre, which none dare ape upon pain of being dismissed as derivative.   So, there is no-one, certainly no prominent writer, who can be called a “Wodehousian”, in anything like the sense that whole passels of poets are Petrarchians.

The thing, then, for those who relish parallels, is to keep an eye out for antedatings of the Wodehousian manner.  After all, he must have derived his distinctive manner from somewhere, unless it were dictated to him directly by Comus (in lieu of the Spiritus Sanctus).   Thus, herewith  some attestations from our own random readings -- foreshadowings of the droll style on which Wodehouse later took out a patent.

~

Travellers gathered in an inn:

“And was there anything remarkable in her history?”

Never was question more unlucky.  The little Marquis immediately threw himself into the attitude of a man about to tell a long story.  In fact, my uncle had pulled upon himself the whole history of the civil war of the Fronde, in which the beautiful Duchess had played so distinguished a part.  …

[some time later]

“… I’ll tell you how it was.  Her father, Henry de Bourbon …”

“But did the Duchess pass the night in the chateau?” said my uncle rather abruptly, terrified at the idea of getting involved in one of the Marquis’s genealogical discussions.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Adventure of my Uncle”, in Tales of a Traveller (1824)

Compare Wodehouse’s recurring character, “The Oldest Member”.

~

And, from the pen of an American:

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul.  Not a chicken, or turkey, or duck  in the barnyard, but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed to be reflecting on their latter end.

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a serious book;  it is said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs Stowe, said, “So you’re the little lady that started a war!”  But here we have a passage that might have wafted over from Castle Blandings.

~

The first place you’d look, for PGW-parallels, might be Dickens -- the early Dickens of The Pickwick Papers.   Therefore, we shall not fish in so shallow a pond.  But the masterpiece Our Mutual Friend is another mostly rather somber novel; yet even there, one finds snippets that, did they follow the Wodehousian oeuvre, rather than precede it, one might have deemed echos:

When R. Wilfer returned, candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he found the bosom agitated.

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 4

Pure Wodehouse:  deniching a word from an idiom wherein it figures in a special sense,  to comic effect.  Even the name, “R. Wilfer”, sounds somehow Wodehousian.

“Inasmuch as every man … appears to be under a fatal spell  which obliges him, sooner or later, to mention the Rocky Mountains  in a tone of extreme familiarity  to some other man, I hope you’ll excuse my pressing you into the service of that gigantic range of geographical bores.”

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 6

That passage is not so close to PGW as the other; moreover, is at least as close to any number of other English humorists, some of them from the Dickens era or earlier, others quite modern (Kingsley Amis, Aldous Huxley).   I cite it merely to show how difficult it is   truly to unearth such correspondences.

We ourselves noted a possible (though problematic) Dickens/Wodehouse parallel, in our notes to the previously unpublished fragment:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

There we remarked, in a footnote to the recovered text:

(²) boil his head:  Connoisseurs of both authors will here instantly recognize a favorite phrase of Mr P.G. Wodehouse, so strongly influenced by Dickens in point of style.  Yet he cannot actually have read this particular passus, since, as mentioned previously, it was never published before this very day.  Consequently a direct le-style-c’est-l’homme influence of the earlier upon that later novelist, cannot in this instance  be established.

Whether the contavenient influence, of Wodehouse upon Dickens, might be surmised in this case, mediated perhaps by signal-bearing tachyons traveling backwards in time, we must leave to the physicists.

Scholars are divided as to the proper interpretation of this suggested influence -- indeed, as to the status of the resurrected fragment  as a whole.

~

Earlier than Dickens, indeed:

“The good wine  did its good office.” The frost of etiquette … began to give way … and the formal appellatives with which the dignitaries had hitherto addressed each other, were now familiarly abbreviated in Tully, Bally, and Killie.

-- Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)

Psychological Epigrams (weiter erweitert)

From random reading, things worth noting -- things worth quoting.

(Plus some of them I made up myself.)

(0)

If analysis worked, the Japanese would long ago have adapted it, and flooded the market …

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 205

(1)

The self-betrayal of another  is sucked in through all our pores.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

(2)

In localities where people belch at meals,

it is unwise to ask after the womenfolk;

and in localities where people are asking after the womenfolk,

it is unwise to belch at meals.

-- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

(3)

Fat people  are more inclined to eat their object  than to bite it.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

To appreciate the epigrammatic force of this,  you need to know that, in psychoanalytic parlance, “object” refers, not to an object,   but to a human being.  -- The basic idea behind the epigram, is that of Caesar:  “Let me have men about me that are fat / bald-headed men, such as sleep o’ nights …”

(4)

The dream is not prophetic of ill  but is ill itself.  It is bad to dream certain things.

-- Jonathan Towers, characterizing shamanism; in Io viii (1971)

(5) Re joining the “Magic Mountain” sanatarium for consumptives, Hans Castorp (etwa the naïf of the novel) observes:

Manche gewöhnen sich nie, sagte mein Vetter mir gleich, als ich ankam.  Aber man gewöhnt sich daran, daß man sich nicht gewöhnt.

-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

 (6)

The quicker  second childhood kicks in,

the happier U will B.

-- Bozo the Button Buster

(7)

Prostitution ist ja eine Angelegentheit,  bei der

es einen grossen Unterschied macht,

ob man sie

von oben sieht ….

od-er    von ….

un-ten  betrachtet …

-- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohneEigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

(8)

Observe the curious working of history:  Archimedes’ death is familiar  because of Plutarch’s interest in Marcellus;  of Marcellus  it is generally remembered  only that  one of his soldiers  murdered Archimedes.

--  James R. Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 179

(9)  Freud on Nacktheitsträume and the origins of Paradise:

Diese  der Scham entbehrende  Kindheit 

erscheint unserer Rückschau später  als ein Paradies,

und das Paradies  selbst

ist nichts anderes

als die Massenphantasie  von der Kindheit des einzelnen.

-- Die Traumdeutung (1899)

Actually, if that were true, you would expect an individual’s conception of Heaven to correlate strongly with his personal experiences in early childhood;  but seemingly they do not. 

I myself, for example, had quite a nice childhood, with storytime and Pooh-bear and my very own coonskin cap.   But my idea of the Afterlife  is purely that of doing math, with the insight of angels.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

(10)  

Civilization consists in progressive renunciation;

 contrariwise  the superman.

-- Sigmund Freud, letter to Wm Fliess, 1897.

(Note:  Very early in his career;  don't call him on this.)

(11) Finally, one perhaps pardonable autocitation:

Every normal male must repeatedly withstand the beckonings of his testes, and is the better for having learned to do so.  Yet some of those who do not share his natural inclinations,  are proceeding extraordinarily far in punishing and repressing that inborn bloom, on the strength of which -- and without which, not -- civilization has managed to survive and thrive, through wind and wars and pestilence.

-- Dr J, Looking at Someone Up and Down

Age-old Theological Conundrums cheerfully solved by Dr J

Q:  How many penguins can dance on the head of a pin?

A:  Three.

Q:  Why is there Something  rather than Nothing?

A:  Because “Nothing” would suck.

Q: What happens after we die?

A:  Much like what happens after we are born:  something absolutely unimaginable  prior to the actual event.

Mysterium magnum

The Challenge of Darwinism, updated for Lent (and further updated for Advent)

In the post below, originally published during the Lenten season of this year, we locked horns with the Darwinist défi, from a mathematical/philosophical/theological point of view.  Herewith, by way of preface, a brief companion-piece, which abjures all those disciplines, and sticks to biology and sociology.

Characterizing Freud’s stance in 1908, in an article published in Mutterschutz  (“Defense of Motherhood”), his admiring biographer Jones writes:

The glorifying of monogamy  paralyzes the process of selection, which is the only hope of improving the human constitution, a hope which humanitarianism and hygiene  has already reduced to a minumum.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 293

This passage may be difficult for today’s young people to understand.  By selection he means Darwinian Natural Selection, nowadays mostly known as “Evolution” -- Nature’s ruthless culling of the unfit.  Constitution here means ‘genome’.   Humanitarianism refers to welfare payments and the like, which provide survival -- and opportunities for further procreation -- to individuals who would, in an earlier age, have gone by the board without issue.   Hygiene refers to state-sponsored measures of Public Health,  which, reducing mortality across the population, again nurtures the frail along with the rugged.

Such thoughts are no longer publically expressed these days, let alone in such old-fashioned words.  In earlier decades, such qualms were mainstream:  though seldom was monogamy singled out  as a factor in devolution.  Yet the thrust is meet, and must be met.

Jones’ preceding paragraph  reports, from the same article, Freud’s view that “the prevailing sexual morality of civilation is characteried by the transference of feminine demands  on to the sexual life of the man” (though on the next page he avers that “women suffer more than men from the prevailing morality” -- the apparent contradiction  is never addressed), which “leads to a double moral life, with evil consequences”.  In that context,  I at first assumed  that Freud was referring to garden-variety marital fidelity.  And that, surely, is immune from Darwinian attack:  the appalling consequences of agamy in our barrios and ghettoes  are apparent to all.  Now, I have not actually read Freud’s article -- unaccountably, that issue of Mutterschutz is missing from my shelves (probably one of the pesky neighborhood boys  has made off with it) -- but I venture to suggest that he may have had in mind an idea that grew to prominence in his later years, the years of Totem und Tabu:  the scenario of the alpha male, lording it over his harem, infusing their wombs with his übermensch übergenes, while his less-fit cousins and brothers circle, snarling, just outside of the firelight.

Now, if the highest pitch of your ambition  is to hunt the mastodon,  such a scheme might well work;  certainly, it works for walruses.  But if you set your sights higher -- on the Gospels, on Paradise Lost, on the Riemann Hypothesis -- you need a system maximally protective and nurturing of each individual offspring, since the monogamous couple’s offspring are so few;  a goal favored in that now each child has both a dedicated-mommy and dedicated-daddy, schooling him daily in Scripture and in analytic number theory.   This happy scenario  does not refute the truths of Darwinism, but simply sublates them, or transcends them:  for we, cognitively alert and free-willed beings, have other goals, not shared by the newts and toads, for whom Darwin is surely good enough.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[And now to the original essay.]

~     ~      ~

It would ill become me, as if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical conclusions;  or to be angry with science  because religion is bound to take cognizance of its teaching.

-- John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864)

In Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (2002), Edward Craig writes (p. 92):

 For Descartes, human reason was a faculty  given to us  and guaranteed by God … and that was why he could rely on it to tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter ... What if, instead , he had thought of it as a natural instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that [emphasis in original], it gave its possessors a competitive advantage over those without it?  Would he then have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matters could, with complete confidence, be taken as the truth?

This challenge is absolutely valid.  On this basis, we should, indeed, do as Descartes did, and call everything -- all our beliefs, absolutely everything -- into question.  Yet alas, now without the Cartesian certainty that our Idea of the Perfect must come from The Perfect, Himself.  Epistemologically, we are much humbled. We are sweaty, dust-caked survival machines -- that has been shown -- much like the cockroach and the rat.  Are we anything else as well ?

At this point, some despair, and take to drunkenness or drugs or Postmodernism (I cite these in descending order of worthlessness).

And yet, when we look about the landscape, we find something unexpected, unexplained, and entirely surprising:

  =>  ~ ~ ~  the Urysohn Metrization Theorem ~ ~ ~ <=

along with all the other truths of abstract mathematics: truths that are seen to be true, by anyone with wit enough to see them; truths not relativized to space or to time, to culture or to … species.  If the Humble Woodchuck should ever make it as far as point-set topology, he too will discover , and celebrate,  this truth.

Its survival value:   Zero.

What gives?

Well, we don’t know what gives, but something does.   We have a stark staring ideational miracle in our midst, something no-wise selected for, something simply True.

Now, it is no contradiction to Darwinism to posit that, quite independently of the brute world ever evolving and evolving, to no purpose and upon no plan, there might be a world apart, of Platonic forms, or celestial calliopes, or whatever you will.   What does contradict Darwinism -- fly in the face of it, knock its socks off -- is our repeated and reliable ability to discover this World of Forms, again and again struggling through jungles of calculation and conception, to arrive, from different directions, at the same ice-crowned mountain.  A World of Forms of no use at all  in escaping the sabre-tooth, whose bite is so fierce, or in hunting the mighty mastodon.

Though, let us hasten to add, among the facts that attest to the reality of these abstract truths, is that, in recent times, these have manifested themselves, not only in the clear understanding of minds suitably prepared, but in sheer physical engineering :  our spacecraft land where we want them to, and our nuclear power plants generate useful energy, owing to applications of our understanding of these Forms.

And if this be true, might it likewise be, that our insights and intuitions about our Maker, at first dimly conceived, but gradually taking form across the millennia, and finally developed to a state of great excellence by the finest minds in Christendom -- might it be that  these too  contain their share of truth?

~

Notice that, despite what we repeatedly read about the advance of science undermining the foundations of faith, we are now intellectually in a much better position to appreciate what it might mean for there to be a God who is the maker of

     visibilium omnium et invisibilium

-- all things visible and invisible -- than was Aquinas. 

[Update:  I had the sense, writing this, of committing a certain hardihood;  yet just now  happened upon the following passage, by a Jesuit of impeccable credentials:

Intellectual virtues may be an essential aspect of our existence, and prepare us for what is revealed.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 198 ]

~

Note:  Despite possible appearances to the contrary, nothing on this blog should be taken as an attack upon Darwinism, or even a critique.  Charles Darwin himself is  for me  an intellectual and even a moral hero, who just gets better  the more you learn about him.  The whole field of evolutionary biology has been characterized by remarkably brilliant practitioners, who in addition are often philosophically alert.  The appearances-to-the-contrary stem from the accidental facts that,

            (a) You don’t need me to expound the findings of this fine science, since there are easily available volumes from writers far more professionally qualified, and who, by happy circumstance, are in many cases quite gifted writers, simply as writers:  Darwin himself, Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, H. Allen Orr, in writings too numerous to mention, along with excellent though lesser-known figures like D’Arcy Thompson, George Gaylord Simpson, J.B.S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, Matt Ridley, Paul Colinvaux, Richard Fortey, George Williams, and John Maynard Smith.

            (b) With Darwinism, just as with any scientific idea in fashion, starting with atomism, magnetism, radiation, vortices, relativity, quantum mechanics, and even some mathematical ones like point-set topology and nonlinear dynamics, there have been some fanciful overreaching and stupid abuses  in attempts to apply these ideas to things to which they do not apply, mostly in the popular media.   With these I feel the need to break a lance, particularly when their agenda is to reduce those created in the image of God, to the level of cockroaches.  But the tick that feeds upon the rump of Pegasus, in no wise lessens the majesty of that noble steed.

~

A word on the … evolution (not by natural selection) of our ideas about science and about theology.

In both cases, if, naïvely, we thumb through some books and behold what our distant ancestors used to believe, we gape and gasp.   And in the perspective -- long regnant, but by now adequately criticized -- of the Whig Theory of History, those poor old dotards were simply clueless.

If, however, we examine the matter with more study and attention, we learn that the best minds of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages  were a lot smarter than our shallow understanding of their doctrines  would imply. 

For science, this post-Whig re-evaluation has been ably and painstakingly carried out by a distinguished body of historians and philosophers.  For theology -- I really don’t know;  but I do recall  that C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the old folk-images  tended to be held until some historical juncture causes them to be actually examined:  in which cases the Historical Church proved generally capable of refining its conceptions and language. Yet -- a subtle point, but crucial -- this replacement of the traditional image  is a dialectical sublation, and no mere negation.  Even from the standpoint of our modern and more nuanced understanding, the original idea, while dethroned, is yet in a sense  preserved -- aufgehoben.  Thus, the image of Jehovah as a tribal patriarch with a long white beard, sending down laws on stone tablets  and speaking, should occasion demand it, from a burning bush, remains yet a more faithful and more fruitful symbol, a more adequate gateway to eventual fuller comprehension, than would the alternative representation, as, say, a black-face minstrel, or a used-car salesman in a bow tie.  True, He is ultimately none of these three; but he participates of one of them  more than he does the others (proportionate to our understanding).

In science, it is the same.  You’ll hear it said that the Copernican heliocentric theory was resisted because

            (a) it “demoted the earth from its privileged position at the center”;

            (b) the Bible declares that Earth is stationary.

The efforts of the debunkers have decisively refuted (a) -- Craig himself has a good short summary of their findings -- but just a word about (b), since for some reason, philosophers of science are less eager to come to the rescue of the Bible.  True, it takes the Earth as stationary.  And so, by the bye, does any modern scientist in his right mind, when solving any practical problem such as the trajectory of a shell or a baseball:  the pitcher lobs it due south at x miles per hour;  the bat strikes it, traveling due north with such&such momentum; the wind is from the northeast at eighteen miles per hour, and the Earth… is stationary.  You do not factor in the sweep of this green planet round the Sun, nor Sol’s more stately wheeling along the rim of our spinning galaxy, nor that nebula’s proper motion through the celestial void, a vagrant among the observing unspeaking witness of the Fixed Stars -- which, as we now know, are not fixed in the least;  it’s just a manner of speaking.

~

A note on that last proviso, “proportionate to our understanding”.  This is actually a key idea.

By chance, I just now happened to re-read a most amusing poem from 1913, by Rupert Brooke, entitled “Heaven”.  Here he depicts fish, contemplating the afterlife:

somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

is wetter water, slimier slime!

and they imagine their unimaginable Maker,

immense, of fishy form and mind,

squamous, omnipotent, and kind

-- along with much more in this vein.

Now, this is satire, possibly even intended to be offensive;  yet let us take no offense.  Rather, the poem expresses a truth, from whatever base motivations.  For we are each, each species, but a small and finite part of the visible Creation;  which in turn is only an infinitessimal part, of the Creator.   We each receive, and cherish, such tatters and fragments of truth as we may.  And let Saint Francis be my witness: I doubt not, indeed, I do not doubt, that whither those fishes are destined, they shall find water  wetter than wet; that the celestial penguins shall throne upon ice-floes frozen to perfection, immutable; and that the sweet small vole, that dwelleth in the fields, shall … dwell there forever:  World without end.

Heaven for Horses

Beppo the old wheelhorse  confides his vision of Paradise:

“The place I’ve always dreamed of,” said Beppo, gazing across the landscape with a wistful look in his old eyes, “is like this -- part of it is sloping and part of it is flat.  Slopes are such a nice change:  the grass is nearer to your nose, and the flats are restful to get back to  after the slopes.  Then it has trees, big spreading trees with fat trunks -- the kind horses love to stand under and think, after a hearty meal.  It has a copse where herbs and wild roots grow, the sorts we love to nibble for a change -- especially wild mint, which is soothing to the stomach when you’ve eaten too much.  It has good water -- not a muddy little pond, but a decent brook where the water is always sparkling and clear.  In a hollow  it has a nice old shelter with a dry floor  and a mossy, tiled roof that doesn’t let the rain in.  The pasture varies:  some places are firm, croppy turf;  others are deep, luscious, long hay-grass with buttercups and fragrant wildflowers mixed in it.  At the top of the hilly part  you can get a view of the sunsets to the westward and the south.  And on the summit there is a good firm post to scratch your neck on.  I love to watch the sun go down as I scratch my neck of an evening.  The whole place is protected with good fences from snappy dogs and worrisome people.  It is quiet.  It is peaceful.  And that, John Dolittle, is the place where I would spend my old age.”

-- Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (1924)

Blessings, blessings;  amen.

For further fun adventures of nice Doctor Dolittle, simply click right here!

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html

P.G. Wodehouse in memoriam

I have just finished reading the prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel, Money for Nothing (1928).

Someday  I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,

but for now, the following observation must suffice:

He is both unfailingly wholesome, and (to a degree you do not fully appreciate  till you have lived a while, and beheld the alternative, and seen how, decade after decade, he soldiered on  through it all)  deep-seatedly humane.

Usually he is jolly and joshing, by choice;  but when he wishes, he can conjure up effects out of Wind in the Willows.   As here, describing a pair of young lovers drifting the river:

The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling softly to itself.  It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes seeing young people happy.

Many of his characters are -- designedly -- stock figures, recycled from story to story with slight variations.   But Wodehouse can capture the mind’s movements exactly, when so inclined.   A disappointed lover:

‘I hear you’re engaged to Hugo,’ he said, speaking carefully  and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.

 (A simple-seeming sentence, yet with much art.  A while after reading it, I tried to recall it from memory, but could not fetch up such perfect wording.  All I could think of was “as they seemed inclined to do”, which is not nearly as good.)

Yet later, as she accepts his proposal and offer her hand, the pan-psychism of a benevolent world  springs up anew, now with a touch, not of Willows, but of Mary Poppins:

The garden had learned that dance now.  It was simple once you got the hang of it.  All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round.   So the trees jumped up and down  and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.

If a Heaven there be, which I am bound to believe, then I likewise confide, that old P.G. is up there, chuckling with contentment, and playing golf.

A Linguist Contemplates the Afterlife

Now, one or two of you might’ve maybe’ve noticed, that from time to time -- when the spirit takes me -- I let loose a comment or two  about Christian theology and Christian living.   These comments may or may not make sense -- half the time, I’ve had a few.  But fact is:  Not a one of us can avoid -- no matter how much TV we watch and stuff our brain with  in the meantime -- nary a one of us can keep from staring Mister Death, there, right in the face:  when our time comes.

So -- whether you’re a priest, or an atheist, or just a ramblin’ gamblin’ man, time comes, you’re gonna wonder about that thing (if it even is a thing) they call the Afterlife.   We have -- from time to time -- touched upon that matter here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/afterlife

Funny thing about the Afterlife -- any one of us might be a sight lot closer to finding out about it, than we rightly reckon.   And for an old man like me, whose heart is still ticking, but which sometimes fails to tock -- well, any time the doorbell rings, I have to wonder:  Is it those Seventh-Days again, or is it the Guy with the Scythe ???

Fact is -- Don’t worry about it much.  Seems I trust in my Maker more deeply in my heart, than ever I can in my fretful, sinful mind.  But - be - that - as it may.  All we really need to know, in this life here below -- me ‘n’ you ‘n’ Sister Sue -- is summarized  right fine  right here:

"O Death" (Ralph Stanley)
"O-oh Death -- won't you spairrr me over till another year."

~

This frame of clay which Thou hast shaped

and quickened with Thine inblown Word,

a cloak about my spirit draped:

Mold it a little longer, Lord.

            For that I feel  the flesh grow slack,

            the inward wind  begin to leak,

            the cloak grow threadbare  on my back,

            and life's flame  gutter  on the wick.

Thou didst a sand-glass  but upend

when in the world  Thou sent'st abroad

the life  Thou didst not give,  but lend:

Lend it a little longer, Lord.

            For that  the very time grows nigh

            wherein, obedient to their fate,

            my father, and his before, did die:

            Oh Lord, do not advance the date!

Nay let me live, that with these days

I might yet pray, and pen thy praise.