An Intelligibility Gap

     Advent to me has long felt like a time of endings -- as the darkness gathers, and the old order rolls on to its long awaited consummation.  I'm out of tune with that ghastly tinselly thing called the "holiday season."  I play carols on the piano, and advent hymns, and go rummaging through antique stores and other quiet places for gifts for my wife and children, and find myself among a crowd of memories.  I see a sled on the snow at night.  The air is cold in the way that only the cold of childhood can be.  I hear the voice of my father, who died a long time ago.  I am surprised there's still so much left in me of the small boy that I was.  And the years will pass, and those memories will dwindle, and be no more, like the print of the snow.

     Then my mind returns to the words of Saint Paul, who begins by singing the praises of love, and ends rapt in contemplation of the life to come, when "we shall know, even as we are known."  We shall know -- we shall see God face to face.  But that's not the only thing Paul says in that verse.  We shall also be known.  I'd always taken for granted that being known was no problem; everybody is known by someone, and now, in the resurrection, we shall know God, too.  But it comes to me that here nobody is known, not to the depths of knowing.  I don't even know myself.  That small boy whooshing down the dark hill on the Flexible Flyer is more than half a stranger to me.

     Will all of that be lost?  I'm looking out of the window now at a fencepost covered with snow and draped with Christmas lights.  It's an intelligible world out there, all of it, whether natural or fashioned by man's hand.  How strange, that the world should be intelligible, when such a tiny part of it is actually intellected, if you'll forgive the word, by the mind of any creature.  What of all the rest that could be understood, if only one were there to understand it?  I imagine a beautiful and intelligible universe, bursting into existence, producing works of staggering splendor, obeying the most elegant and intricate laws of mathematics, but no creature in it to behold it; then collapsing upon itself and blinking out into the dark.  Wouldn't that be the deepest imaginable absurdity, intelligibility without intellect?  Nor will it do to say that my example is comparable to the old conundrum of a tree falling in the forest.  It's not absurd to imagine that a creature that can be heard or seen will happen not to be heard or seen, because hearing and seeing are properties that depend upon the beholder; there is nothing about the inner being of a thing that makes it visible.  But there is something about the inner being of a thing that makes it intelligible -- indeed, intellection is precisely a being's insight into that inner being, that inner order.

     If we accept what the materialists say, we are left with an epistemological chasm as wide as the cosmos: all that to be known, and yet, finally, virtually none of it known, and what little that qualifies as knowledge, vague, generalized, shaky, mainly local to our brief span of time and space.  And a chasm as deep as the heart of man, too.  All those people we see, and all those many others we will never see because they died long ago, would be knowable but unknown, their tragedies and comedies as pointless as bits of cosmic dust.  None of that makes sense to me, which is another way of saying that a world so splendidly intelligible and yet so stupid to the core is incoherent.  There must be One who knows.  If so, then there is One who knows that dimly knowing part of the world called man.  He who hasn't forgotten His own childhood, I suppose, will not forget mine or anyone else's.  We're told by our faith that we will meet many a blessed soul taken up into the life of God.  We may even come to know ourselves.

Comments

[maria horvath]

ADVENT: A CAROL

What did you hear?
Said stone to echo:
All that you told me,
Said echo to stone.

Tidings, said echo,
Tidings, said stone,
Tidings of wonder,
Said echo to stone.

Who then shall hear them?
Said stone to echo:
All people on earth,
Said echo to stone.

Turned into one,
Echo and stone,
The word for all coming
Turned into one.

~ Patric Dickinson

[Beth]

This is lovely, Tony, and came as a welcome encouragement in a difficult time. "To be known" is truly awesome -- in the real sense of the word.

[Bill R]

"He who hasn't forgotten His own childhood, I suppose, will not forget mine or anyone else's."

We in turn also have a duty to remember, e.g., "Do this in remembrance of me." To know even as we are known means, in one sense, to remember as we are remembered (by God). In other words, even our memories are to be redeemed in Christ, allowing us to remember as we ought, that is, as God would have us remember, and not as our disordered will would have us remember.

[Maclin Horton]

This is *really* good. I've posted a link to it at my blog.

[J Dave G]

Thanks to Maclin who steered me here. Yes indeed, this is beautiful. "That small boy whooshing down the dark hill on the Flexible Flyer is more than half a stranger to me." Wow.