By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Perhaps the greatest joy that has come to me in the last 73 years, the thing for which I feel the deepest gratitude, is the gradual emergence, over those years, of a clearer and clearer consciousness of the order of all things, the consciousness of the universal community of beings, an ordered whole, which has beauty, unity (in multiplicity), goodness, and truth — in short, what we call being.
The knowledge reflects many years of analysis and struggle to find clarity but in the end is something I know, intuitively, as a presence. Along with that has grown the appreciation of the goodness of human community to the extent that is achieved in this world, as well as the goodness of the moral law that guides us. When I experience being in this way, there is also, in the background of my thinking, an awareness of the divine presence.
That is so because I can see what I see because I am given light to see it with, the light that shines in the darkness and reveals the world to me, the light that is God (“in His light we see light”).
But we don’t generally look directly at light but see things in the light. The light is the background, the things seen by the light are in the foreground. When I try to focus on the light, on God, in isolation from the order of being, to make Him the foreground, what generally happens is that He is replaced by some mental image I have of Him, whether it is the stern old man with the white beard, or something more abstract, like the “ground of being” or “ultimate reality.” When I do this in prayer, I feel no divine presence, because I am usually not focusing on the divine at all but on the image. It appears that, to the extent that I see God at all, I see Him in my peripheral vision. We pray by faith, not by sight.
Certainly, our relationship to the ordered whole which is the creation (with all that entails) implies something about our relationship to the Creator.
I am reminded here of the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the one-time abortionist and active campaigner for the legalization of abortion, who eventually changed his mind and became pro-life. At the time I first heard of him, back in the 1980s, he was still calling himself an atheist. I remember thinking at the time that this guy really didn’t understand what was happening to him, because, if you affirm the sanctity of life, you are affirming the law of God, and if you affirm that, you are affirming the sovereignty of God. If you affirm that, you can call yourself an atheist, but you’re not. And Nathanson eventually proved me right by becoming a Catholic. Requiescat in pace.
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One of the many offenses against public decency for which I would like to see public flogging (or at least a few days in the stocks) become the routine punishment, is the mindless repetition of the old cliché to the effect that “the only thing constant is change.” The offense is greatly compounded when, as often happens, someone actually has the chutzpah to attribute this nonsense to the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
Poor old Heraclitus has been getting a bum rap for centuries now for supposedly being the philosopher of constant change without underlying continuity. Nothing could be further from the truth. If one reads his fragments with any attention, it becomes evident that the constant theme in his thought is the continuity and order underlying change. Heraclitus actually characterized the underlying order as the Logos, the Word, which is the ground of all change, something which makes it very difficult for a Christian not to be reminded of St. John’s use of the Word to refer to Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity.
The fragment most commonly used to justify the idea that Heraclitus is the philosopher of change without continuity is the one that says, “You cannot step twice into the same river. Other and yet other waters flow.” But he has a related fragment which says: “Into the same rivers we step and do not step; we are and are not.” But the central fragment is the one that says simply, “Changing, it rests” (two words in Greek — “metaballon anapauetai”). This is the paradox of the One and the Many so basic to Aristotelian-Thomist thinking, the experience that there is unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity, change in continuity, continuity in change.
But the people who bombard us with “the only thing constant, etc.” are not talking about change as one aspect of the ordered world, with continuity as the other. These are people whose whole life is about attacking the permanent things, and when they promote change as such a supposed good, it is change without order or continuity that they promote.
When we hear people telling us that change is good, or talking about change you can believe in, invariably what we are talking about is not the change which is one aspect of an ordered world with permanence as the other, but rather change forced on us by our elites, invariably at the expense of order and continuity, as part of an attack on traditions and institutions and any sense of permanence in life. No one would have objected to this more than Heraclitus.
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I notice that fellow traditionalists tend to bristle at the suggestion that Hell is, most fundamentally, eternal separation from God. I can understand this, given that, when the suggestion comes from modernists, it seems to mean “merely” eternal separation from God — i.e., there is no fire, no pain of sense, only the comparatively minor penalty of eternal separation.
Several comments occur to me:
First, there is no such thing as merely eternal separation from God. To be eternally cut off from the infinite goodness which is the whole thing God created us for is, objectively, the greatest horror there could be, eclipsing things like flames, devils with pitchforks, and so forth. The problem is that the phrase “eternal separation from God,” especially when used by liberals, seems abstract. But when it actually happens, it will be a horribly concrete reality.
Second, eternal separation from God happens because the damned soul has made the final, irrevocable decision for the love of self that completely excludes the love of God, that excludes even the slightest openness to divine love. The soul closes the door, locks it, and throws away the key (Bernanos’ country priest defines Hell as no longer being able to love). Even the love of self, separated from divine love, is distorted, turning inward on the self and becoming, not the proper, ordered love of self which, like the love of neighbor, follows from the love of God, but a source of torment.
St. Teresa of Avila once recounted a vision of Hell that she experienced, in which she found herself locked up in a tiny closet, tormented by reptiles. That about sums it up. Hell is imprisonment within a self that has closed up and collapsed in on itself, like a black hole.
And, one could argue, the various pains of Hell, things like fire, torture by demons, and so forth, are an integral part of this, self-inflicted, not inflicted by God.
I am reminded here of an old science fiction film called Forbidden Planet, which should be familiar to readers as elderly as I am. It features a mad scientist who invents a machine which concentrates and amplifies the power of the human mind, and which he uses to construct and power the home where he lives an isolated existence with his only daughter. Along comes a group of space travelers from Earth, one of whom falls in love with his daughter. Suddenly, terrifying monsters appear and begin to attack and kill the earthlings. What the scientist doesn’t realize until the end is that he is their creator — they come from the dark places of his unconscious and are amplified as physical beings to attack the people who threaten to take his daughter away from him.
If you are imprisoned within the self, you are locked up with the monsters which fill the self that has separated itself from divine love, and that means as many torments as you could imagine, and more.
So eternal separation from God, actually experienced, is a horribly concrete reality. There is nothing abstract about it.
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(© 2015 George A. Kendall)
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