Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (24 page)

The mysterious author of a work entitled
The Divine Names
claims that God is inaccessible to human cognition, and that the Divine Names appear to us merely as His shadow. Paradoxically, he devised a name for himself which has successfully concealed his true identity. When the Apostle Paul preached in the Areopagus of Athens, the Greek men of learning listened to him attentively for as long as he spoke of the Unknown God. But as soon as he mentioned the Resurrection, “some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.” Only a few showed an interest in Paul's teaching. One of them was Dionysius the Areopagite. So much on the subject in the
Acts of the Apostles
(17 , 16-34). An unidentified author, most probably a fifth-century monk who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite wrote a few original theological works. It was not so much an appropriation or hiding behind somebody else's name, rather an act of modesty in line with the custom of the times on the part of this author, who did not want to steal the limelight but instead to endorse what he had written with the authority of someone more widely known. Today we refer to him as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Pseudo-Dionysius was an unusual author. On reading his texts we have mixed feelings. He is terribly “out-of-date,” embroiled in Neoplatonic deliberation , mystical ( in fact he coined the word “mysticism”), with an excessive predilection for classifying the Choirs of Angels. It takes a certain amount of patience and a sense of taste to discover in his works theological reflections worthy of a master . And it is to one of his themes that I would like to devote some attention at the end of this book, which has been concerned with the struggles that have been going on with the most difficult questions that can be put to the universe.

The word “struggles” seems particularly apt. In the first part of this book we reviewed a series of heroic attempts to “explain the universe by the universe itself.” Inspite of numerous spectacular successes “on the way” the undertaking ended in ... an opening up on further attempts. In the book’s second part these attempts took the form of speculations on the anthropic principles and an infinite space of universes. I think that the principal message of that part of the book is that in the search for answers to ultimate questions it is hard to get away from infinity. In the third part of the book we considered the philosophical and theological idea of creation. The question of an ultimate explanation for the universe was answered, but at the cost of being immersed in the Infinity of God. And so we have come up against the Mystery, or rather-as we ourselves are part of the universe- we have let ourselves be overwhelmed by the Mystery. Not without misgivings or opposition. We have seen how some of us have resisted the Mystery by invoking lesser mysteries: the brute fact of existence or the intricate relations between the syntax of language and reality. Letting oneself be overwhelmed by the Mystery, even with misgivings - that is the problem addressed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Pseudo-Dionysi us is the most articulate representative in Western Europe of what is known a s negative theology. In the East, from the Greek Fathers of the Church right up to the theology of contem porary Eastern Orthodox Christianity, apophatic theology ( meaning a bout the same as negative theology) has been wellnigh inherent in the religious thinking of Eastern Christendom. The gist of this line of religious thought is the standpoint that God is so transcendent that effectively He is unknowable. Every time we try to describe Him, we should attach at least a mental negation to the epithets we give Him, since He is certainly not as we imagine Him.

Pseudo-Dionysius was not the first to propagate such a view. There had already been an apophatic tradition in the Eastern Church for a long time. What Pseudo-Dionysius accomplished was to turn it into a system. He was well-versed in the Neoplatonic system, in which the One is inaccessible to reason; we have a sort of access to it through its supreme emanations, the Henads. The whole of reality is a hierarchy of consecutive emanations. Pseudo-Dionysius replaced emanation, which the early Church firmly repudiated, with creation, changing the terminology to a more Christian one, putting the Choirs of Angels into the hierarchical structure, and endowing the whole concept with a strong mystical accent. According to him God is unknowable, but then our aim is not to comprehend Him but to be united with Him. Perhaps the reason why the line of thought Pseudo-Dionysius represented made such a huge impact on the theology of the West was because its hierarchical system fitted in so well with the love of organisation and classification characteristic of the Middle Ages in the West.

I shall not go into the intricacies of Pseudo-Dionysius'ideas; instead I shall cite a few sentences from an article on him,
¹
which I consider worth a moment's thought at the end of this book on the search for “ultimate explanations.”

The word “Henads” does not occur in Pseudo-Dionysius’ system, instead there are names which may be attributed to God , such as Goodness, Life, Wisdom. All the time Pseudo-Dionysius insists that the Godhead Itself is beyond all these names, and It may be spoken of only in the categories of supreme negation.

In Its transcendent dimension Divinity is beyond the reach of all assertion what so ever, to such an extent that it is impossible even to assert Its existence or non-existence.

Pseudo-Dionysius was not denying the existence of God; what he meant was to warn us against using the same language when speaking of God that we use to speak of other things. The later Scholastics would say that our language relating to God is analogous to our ordinary language. Pseudo-Dionysius was more radical. According to him, whenever we say anything about God - even that He exists - we are more wrong than right.

We say that God is the cause of all that exists, that He is the Creator. We are not so much speaking of Him and who He is, but rather who He is with respect to creation.

We speak of the nature of God only apophatically, that is by negating all that we have said.

By means of relational, cataphatic
names
²
it is possible to speak of God, not so much of His nature as of the way He works and of His works
.

The mainstream of Western theology did not follow the path set by Pseudo-Dionysius, however, although it never discarded the
via negativa
as one of the important paths. The Scholastic struggles with language to describe God were a good exercise preparing the way for the scientific method, but they made Western philosophers and theologians subconsciously confident that by strictly adhering to the rigours of logic they would be able to cross all the barriers. In a certain sense we are in agreement with Pseudo-Dionysius. He was not promoting irrationalism: he was not saying that the truth was whatever anyone wanted it to be, or that it all depended on psychology and social relations, or that “one opinion is as good as another.” He was very far from such claims. All he was saying was that human rationality is limited. And that this reservation was a necessary condition for any human to be truly rational. That is why at the end of this book on the search for “ultimate explanations of the universe” I decided on an encounter with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

I do not intend to go in to a discussion of the relative merits of the apophatic and cataphat ic trends in theology. Banking on an exclusively negative line of thought would no doubt run the risk of brin ging everything to a halt; but ignoring it completely would be naiїve and an oversimplification . The point is that it is not just a purely theological issue. We will find aspects of the tension between the apophatic and cataphatic styles -
toute proportion gardée
- in all thinking which reaches beyond the rigid bounds of empiricism. Especially in thin king which endeavours to face up to the task of understanding the universe.

Do we not encounter essentially the same philosophical motives in the reservations the analytical philosophers of language had about the sense of asking why something exists rather than nothing, that made Pseudo-Dionysius claim that the names we ascribe to God are merely attributions for our own ideas of what He in any case is not? Is not calling the existence of anything whatsoever (therefore also of the universe) a “brute fact for which no explanations should be sought” like the notion latent in all of Pseudo-Dionysius’ reflections that the existence of the Unnameable is an “irreducible given,” the grounds for everything else – in other words something of a “brute fact” as well?

Both of these opinions were a result of the same thing: a profound awareness of the most fundamental limitation of human rationality. But there is an important difference between them. The former opinion, the modern view, rules out whatever might be beyond the confirmed bounds of human cognition (in other words, it holds that whatever is beyond those bounds makes no sense). Thus it assumes that reality is geared to our potential for cognition. The latter opinion, represented perhaps somewhat haphazardly by Pseudo-Dionysius, effectively recognises the same limits to human cognition, but has an open attitude to those limits; although our knowledge of what lies beyond them is merely negative (apophatic), nonetheless it is a knowledge. The former opinion disavows the Mystery, on the strength of its own decree as the criterion of what has a sense and what has no sense; the latter opinion immerses itself in the Mystery. The former fulfils a therapeutic function, eliminating the discomfort of ultimate questions; the latter intensifies that discomfort in order to find a remedy therein (like a vaccine which relies on the injection of viruses to make the vaccinated organism build up its immunity to them).

Pseudo-Dionysius's strategy, appropriately modified and transferred to the realm of the philosophy of science, has one more advantage in comparison with the contemporary therapeutic measures. In the light of Pseudo-Dionysius’s approach the scientific adventure embarked on by mankind - not only on the quest for ultimate theories but also in the more mundane research - is not a hit-and-miss contest with brute reality, but a true Adventure of Rationality.

This book grew out of a paper I delivered at a symposium dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein. This philosopher shares much of the attitude assumed by Pseudo-Dionysius. His
Tractatus Log ico-Philosophicus
concludes with the famous thesis that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
³
In contemporary philosophy there are about as many interpretations of Wittgenstein as there were of Pseudo-Dionysius in the Middle Ages. So while refraining from interpretation, I shall conclude by citing two passages from the last propositions of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
( with his emphasis marks):

The sense of the world must lie outside the world . In the world every thing is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental . What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. (Proposition 6.41 )

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (Proposition 6. 44 )

We are collectively driven by a powerful yet not fully explained instinct - to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. We want nothing to remain without rationale, such that would remove all suspicion, all doubt, all questions. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of grey. Yet this longing for “ultimate explanations” is in itself immune from being the subject of an “ultimate explanation,” for when we try to understand it, we are immediately faced with the following question: what does it mean “to understand”?