Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

On Warnings

Ecclesiastes 11:5 - Meaning Without System

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Ecclesiastes 11:5

The advice in Ecclesiastes 11:5 was perhaps helpful during an age when meteorology and medicine were primitive, yet it now contains a faulty premise:

As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

God may be the ultimate Maker of all things for all we know, yet we’re no longer ignorant of wind or womb. Our ignorance of nature can’t be used to warn us from further knowledge, because our search for knowledge has in fact explained things. The apple may have once been forbidden, yet biting into the flesh, discarding the core on the ground, and letting the seeds grow in the soil, has born fruit.

We can’t go back to a state of Edenic innocence because we now exist in a state of both knowledge and ignorance. We know a great many things and yet this knowledge reveals to us how much more there is that we don’t know. Knowledge can now reveal to us the positive side of ignorance: if we respect the unknown, we can continually transform ignorance into knowledge, which, once obtained, pushes us further into ignorance and hence into the desire to explore what it is, exactly, that we don’t know. Ad infinitum. This may not be the old definition of wisdom — a definition that could operate when there was no real science, archaeology, philology, or history — but neither is it wise to ignore what we already know, or to look down on attempts to know even more.

Unfortunately, our ignorance doesn’t include the certainty that all will become known on some higher level, in some glorious future. Ecclesiastes 12:12 tells us, “Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to [the sayings of the wise]. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” But the books and articles have already been written. On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543). Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). Micrographia (1665). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). Philosophie Zoologique (1809). The Origin of Species (1859). “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” (1865). The Chaldaean Account of Genesis (1876). Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916). “A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae” (1929). Silent Spring (1962). The Cosmic Connection (1973). The Selfish Gene (1976). The First Three Minutes (1977). Gaia (1979). Gorillas in the Mist (1983). Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). There aren’t enough bonfires in the world to make these disappear.

Burned at the stake in 1600 for openly defying Christianity, Giordano Bruno can now rest in his grave — or wherever his soul may or may not be. His statue looks out over Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, while at his back lies the infinite space that he believed had no centre.

The dilemma, or human condition, is that once upon a Medieval time we had a religious system that explained everything. It made us feel important and central in the universe. We had a code of conduct, ten succinct laws, and a golden rule. We had hellfire justice for the wicked and eternal bliss for the good. Now, we don’t have any of those certainties, and yet we’re the same old willful, insecure, aggressive, idealistic, opportunistic, caring, brutal, contradictory species. Maybe this is what the early warnings and dogma were mostly about: to give us a sense of belonging in the universe and to rein in our destructive tendencies.

Still, we can’t unsee what we’ve seen, and we can’t unlearn what we’ve learned. Putting our heads back into the sand is abhorrent to those who value practicality and reason.

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Meaning Without System

This doesn’t mean that we can’t salvage or recuperate meaning. We do need to redefine it, however. Instead of being an unmoving and all-encompassing set of ideas or beliefs, meaning can be something much more fluid, something that adapts to the changing currents of our existence. It needs to accommodate Heraclitus’ notion that we experience life as we experience a river: the only thing we seem to know for sure is that everything changes, all the time.

The agnostic takes this logic to its paradoxical conclusion: the paradigm of eternal change may also be subject to change. Perhaps at some point we’ll find the eternal, either inside us as soul or around us as God. Until then, the agnostic can hope, but can’t be sure.

Geology, evolution, and genetics tell us how we got to be where we are, and astronomy shows us where we are in relation to the larger universe, yet none of these fields of knowledge suggest a mode of gaining certain meaning. The type of religion that gives firm answers to everything — to the date of Creation and to the destiny of the soul — gives answers to questions that don’t seem to have an answer. For who can verify Creation, in any way whatsoever? And who can prove that what we call soul isn’t the complex biochemical experiential state of an organism capable of deep thought and feeling?

Speaking in terms of epistemology, the study of how we know something to be true, perhaps the most honest of the religious thinkers are the mystics. In general, mystics agree that they don’t understand their experiences. They may call their experiences spiritual and they may refer to God, yet many of them also believe that the soul is annihilated by the infinity of God, and that God has a million names and can’t be defined. In this, they’re like astronomers who see that the universe is so vast and our perception of it so tiny that we can’t say for sure what it all means. If we pretend to know it all, we know far less than Socrates, who professed to know nothing, far less than the Vedic sages who asked unanswerable questions on the banks of the Saraswati:

Who knows from where this creation came? … Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it didn’t. The one who looks down on it from the highest heaven, only He knows. Or perhaps He does not know. (Rg Veda 10:129)

It doesn’t matter how educated you are, or how old you are. What matters is knowing that you don’t know it all. And, in Keatsean terms, what matters isn’t positive affirmation but rather negative capability, that is, the ability to live in uncertainty without the angst of always trying to make sense of everything. What matters is to see the river changing, to know that you’ll also change, and to dip your toe in the water and swim.

In many ways it’s easier to admit I don’t know than to insist that you do. For as soon as you give a definitive answer to the question What is the meaning of life? you have to defend that answer against the thousands of insidious, incipient, inevitable questions that flesh is heir to. It’s easier, and perhaps more honest, to admit that neither religion nor science has a crystal ball to see into the future: neither can say with any degree of certainty that there is or isn’t an afterlife. There’s still no Italian lens sharp enough to see, or to verify the absence of, Hamlet’s country beyond whose borne no traveller returns. The dead may be in that country or they may not have gone anywhere at all.

Some say it’s impossible to live without certainty, without knowing where you came from or where you’re going. Yet isn’t it the exact opposite? It’s easy to admit not knowing. You don’t have to prove the existence of a God or a soul that no one can verify. Nor do you have to argue that the lack of verification constitutes proof that God and the soul don’t exist. In saying I don’t know, you really don’t have to prove anything at all.

While it’s easy to admit you don’t know, it’s much more difficult to insist that in all the vast and tiny spaces of the universe there is no country beyond whose borne no traveller returns. It’s equally difficult to say that you know the country’s name and can speak the language.

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Next: ❤️ The Problem with Explanations

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