Metaphysics Imaginatively Engaged, For Thomists Only

I wrote this as an April Fools' joke a few years ago.  I'm still amused by it, so I decided to blog it.  Enjoy!



Question 687 of the Summa Cogitationum Seretharum "Whether it is a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking"

Objection 1.  It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because Rebecca O.  is capable of perfect multitasking. 

Objection 2.  It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because traveling at the speed of light gives the appearance of doing all things at once, and many things can travel at the speed of light, including light, and although God is light, light is not God.

Objection 3. It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because the Doctor is capable of perfect multitasking by use of his TARDIS, wherein he may do an infinite number of things at the same time.

On the contrary, only God is capable of perfect multitasking about everything at once, properly.  

I answer that: "Traveling at the speed of light and multitasking" contains within it two necessary ideas: lack of mass and personhood.  But only the angels and God lack mass and are persons.  Angels are present at locations (and thus times, for all locations are time-locations and all times are location-times as the Physicist said in Relativity) by means of their power, and because their power is finite, it follows that they may not be in an infinite number of places ("spacetimes") at once.  The Angelic Doctor has said they may only be in one place (one spacetime) at once.   He also says that while the angels have no potentiality in regards to their knowledge of God (in beholding the beatific vision, the intellect is in act rather than potentiality), they may have potentiality regarding the knowledge of natural things, as they are not always contemplating everything in their intellect at once.  Therefore it is possible that angels are capable of multitasking, but because of the finitude of power, not about everything at once, or as one who is "simultaneously whole".

Reply to Obj. 1.  Although Rebecca's acts of multitasking have the form of supernatural virtue, they are not infinite and may not be mistaken as acts of divinity.  This may be proved from either the finitude of her power, or from my observation that she could not read a treatise of systematic theology, knit a garment, and hold a conversation simultaneously.  She was capable of the first two together, but not the third.

Reply to Obj. 2.  The above suffices as a response to the second objection.

Reply to Obj. 3. Although the Gallifreyan race is capable of feats of power and intellect matching or surpassing that of the angels though they are somewhat, if loosely tied to corporeal form: neither they nor TARDISes are capable of infinite power because they like the angels are created and therefore finite.  An infinite act cannot proceed from a finite cause.

***I originally wrote this as a little April Fools Day challenge to myself.  I still like it.  For those of you who aren't Thomists and braved the reading of this little spoof, I parodied the format and language of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae to ask my own little theological question.

Metaphysics Imaginatively Engaged: God's Infinity, Large or Small?

    The theologians tell it is impossible for us to wrap our minds around God's infinity, which is part of the reason we struggle so much with it when it shows up on our radar screen. "On which part of what radar screen?" you might be thinking.

   How often have you heard people say they would pray about something, but felt guilty about taking up God's time?  How often have you heard people say they are afraid to bother God with a seemingly insignificant request?  Or, like in the Bruce Almighty film of yesteryear, if prayers are like emails, how could God possibility have time to think or even read them all, let alone compose a response . . . which is what we all really want?  Or, sometimes people stumble over concepts like "providence"--which is basically thinking through how God, as the one who both sustains the cosmos and keeps it running, can possibly keep track of all the details?  Or, take things a step further, if God has trouble with the present details, how could he know about the future details?  As a churchgoer and a student theologian, I've heard all of these questions and more!

    Principally, we tend to get stuck on God's infinity when we think about God's ability to multitask, if you will.  A professor of mine at Westminster seminary cleverly called this "omnicompetence" and I think of it as "perfect" or "divine multitasking".  How, when I pray, or when I think about how complicated the world is, can I imagine the ways in which God's mind works different from mine if I, quite literally, have no hope of comprehending how God really works?  Am I just stuck, or what can I do?

    There are many ways to answer these questions and some of them are very technical indeed.  If you enjoy that sort of thing, I am happy to recommend you a book or two.  We're not going to do that here.  Instead, we are going to imagine.

    In order to imaginatively engage infinity, you have to make one of two choices.  Basically you have to think about something small and singular (a point-particle in physics, or a point in math) or something big and multiplied (the unbounded cosmos or the biggest number you can think of, or a infinite series of big numbers).  So, itty-bitty, smaller-than-one-stuff, or really big, really long stuff.  That makes it hard to imagine God, doesn't it?  Either I think of him as not being spatial and thus he's small--and hardly able to cope with the big stuff, or I think of him as being really big and thus the little stuff is beneath his notice.  Quite the quandary.

    Instead of rending our garments in despair, we're going to try an imaginative process that gets us small stuff and big stuff together.

    Imagine with me the smallest space into which you can insert your mind.  Imagine the space between spaces--zooming in on the space between dust motes in the air.  Go farther than that if you can and imagine what it would be like to be just one atom of one of those dust motes--one dust mote is like a baseball stadium to your baseball of an atom.  Then imagine God looking square at that little atom, giving it the eyeball, and quite calmly and quite lovingly saying: "I am here."  All of God's glory and personality and presence is focused on that little atom.  He knows it by name because he made it, and he still holds it in existence in the palm of his hand.  If you can, imagine him holding that atom in the palm of his hand and just chillin' with it for a while because he has nothing more pressing on his mind.

    You know why he has nothing more pressing on his mind?  (Don't let go of the image of God holding the atom.  Imagine and read.)  It's because God's mind doesn't get pressed.  How, you say?  Well, as you may have noticed as you've got this little picture of God hanging out with a carbon atom (or whatever you chose--he does seem to like the number 12, so there's my rationalization of carbon as a choice) . . . there is a major difference between God's ability to be present to one little carbon atom and yours--you are actually limited by your bigness and God is not.  Physically speaking, for me to be able to get on carbon's level, I have to be its size.  And I can't be its size, because I am bound by my physical body.  God isn't limited by body, which is exactly why he is free to be as small as he needs to be.  Or it turns out, as large as he needs to be.  

    Bring back that picture of God holding that atom again.  Then make a picture like that again, with another atom.   And then do it again and again--and fill up the room you are sitting in with images of God holding atoms.  Then spread out to your backyard, your city, your state, your country, the planet, and finally your intergalactic zipcode (or whatever).  That is more or less how you want to imagine God's infinity--God's infinity is the infinity that fills you and fills all of space and time to the nth and to the innermost degree.  Only, when you are multiplying pictures of God, you aren't making copies of God, you are just noting his presence, over and over again.

    But how do I get around the multiplicity aspect?  How can I imagine that the same Person holds all the carbon atoms from here to the center of the Milky Way, to the Andromeda Galaxy, and to all those places we don't have a name for yet? (And to the ones that we may never have names for).

    In order to handle the multiple times and places aspect, I do a slightly different and more complex act of the imagination.  First, I think of a little sphere.  Then I think of a cube, then I think of an object like a diamond that I can imagine has more facets on it.  One has 12 faces, another 24, 46, however many faces you like, but make the object more or less symmetrical.  Then I keep adding facets and complexity, until I have a little jewel in my mind that has as many facets as a golfball has dimples.  Phew--it's a light-refracting machine!  

    Now, this is the tricky part.  Look at this little jewel with your mind's eyes.  Know its form, its complexity, its beauty.  Then try this on for size: every single facet you see, or if you've got better spatial intelligence than me, every line of symmetry, represents how many ways you can divide your attention and still give it 100% of your attention.

     I'm sorry, did I say "you"? I meant God.  See, humans can't divide our attention and give it 100% at the same time.  For us, the multiplication and division doesn't work out.  You can never divide by something other than 1 and get the whole thing you started out with.  If I have 100% to give, and I divide it into two tasks, or three, or five, or 12, then you're looking at giving 50% or 33% or 20% or 8.3% to give per task.  Some of us try to handle multiple tasks and give each one of them 100%--which either means epic fail, epic burnout, or epic amounts of self-delusion.  (Take your pick, my favorite way to go is door number two.)  But God isn't like that--put as many tasks on his plate as you like, and he always has 100% to give them.  In that way, using the "big" definition of infinity, you can say that God is "infinitely present".  Remember the little golfball-like jewel--he has that many facets (and infinitely more) of 100% of himself to give to you and me, everyone else on the planet, and in the cosmos, not even the carbon atom escapes his eyes.  That's why Jesus said God kept his eye on even the sparrow . . . and it isn't a big deal for him to keep his eye on every sparrow.

    When I imagine that little golfball, I think of it as "dimensions of personhood or awareness", which you may or may not like very much.  What do I mean by that?  I mean, life as we know it, seems to be more or less divided up by how aware or non-aware things are.  Non-living matter is the least alert (as far as we know), then basic single-celled life, then fungus and plants, animals, and higher animals, and us, and then angels sitting on the highest end of the creaturely "awareness" chain of being.  Let's arbitrarily say humans are fully aware in three dimensions, and angels are even more fully aware in five dimensions.  In how many dimensions would you say God was aware?  Nine?  Ten?  One billion?  See, that's the problem.  Your brain might have a near-meltdown at the thought of one billion, but that's as close as we get to imagining the richness of God's personhood.  His life isn't like our life squared or cubed . . . we're talking about life raised to the infinite power . . . which is exactly why he has so much life, love, and presence to give away.  He has an infinite "amount", which is exactly why he can give it away infinitely.

    All right, that's finally all I have to say about this matter in as non-technical a way as I could come up with.  I really love the Christian concept of eternity as expressed by a lot of thinkers of what they call "classical theism", but I think it's pretty darn challenging.  Much of the fun of metaphysics for me is that metaphysics likes to talk about things that aren't our every-day experience, yet are completely conceptually coherent and potentially applicable.  (Granted, people argue about that last part).  I particularly love Thomas Aquinas and some of the midevals because they dared to think (contrary to modern-day popular opinion) that humans weren't the only creatures out there, they weren't the coolest joes in the neighborhood (angels were), and they weren't the brightest and best in the creaturely world either (again, angels).  They were also imaginatively engaged with their universe in a way the modern mind really has trouble with.  Part of our trouble with God is that we aren't trained to imagine him anymore--how God's ways might be different than our ways.  God's not just better than us morally, he's different in being.

   Hope that was at all helpful . . . if you feel like it, let me know which parts of this actually helped your imagination and what was unclear.  But if you do comment, make sure you slow down enough to actually imagine what I said and not just think about it.  These acts are different and the former takes deliberate effort.

A Different Kind of Fasting

I must say, I really love reading science-fiction and fantasy and I always have.  But I recently decided to fast from reading novels in order to "free up" some brain space to absorb more non-fiction.  The wonderful thing about fasting in general is that it brings clarity because you resist your deeply ingrained habit patterns.  And sometimes, the fast works so well that it breaks up some of the gluttonous mast that has been collecting in the little pockets of your soul that you forgot were there.  So, two weeks ago, I decided to fast from the normal kinds of fiction books that I read.
    It occurred to me that I was reading my books of choice, not because they were so good and deep and fulfilling, or even so vastly entertaining that I couldn't keep away from them.  On the contrary, novels, most of the time, function like junk food for me.  They aren't as much junk food as TV or movies are, but they are pretty close.  I realized that they weren't remotely challenging to me, and I wasn't really learning anything from them.  At best, they were comfort food, but who needs comfort food all the time?  Thus, I decided to make a little experiment and give up reading "my usual" sort of novels (normally run-of-the-mill science fiction and fantasy novels, interspersed with some better-than-average science fiction and fantasy) in favor of being purely engaged in academic non-fiction, devotional literature, or more demanding literary works.
   So far, I rather like the effects of my fast.  My one consistent superpower in life has been my ability to speed-read without really trying.  Thus, I can read about 100 pages an hour of undemanding prose--say a Harry Potter novel or maybe even a Mercedes Lackey novel.  But my attention span for non-fiction has never been quite so good.  I am limited to a paltry 30-35 pages an hour for a very demanding book like Personal Knowledge (Michael Polanyi) that I am still making my way through.  (At least, I think so, I have definitely documented my ravenous inhalation of fiction much more thoroughly than my more stately march through non-fiction.)  I can't tell yet if my rate of reading has increased, but I know that I've already finished The Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy), which I had worked on for months, and made short work of Mircea Eliade's Myth and Reality (and I firmly intend on reading everything that man has to say, peculiar Romanian genius that he was).  I also reread Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity yesterday, and got through one and a half books (read, chapters, for the uninitiated) of Plato's Republic--which I have been meaning to reread all year.  Oh, yes, and I am still working on that frustrating and beautiful book, Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill.  For me, this is really excellent.  I rarely plow through academic literature at this rate.
    But there's more here, I think, than merely shifting gears.  For years, fiction had been a great teacher to me.  Learning through stories is a natural way that humans learn, and a very natural way for me to learn.  Science-fiction has also been a real imaginative tutor for me.  Anything is possible, and I learned that lesson much more thoroughly from Star Trek or Orson Scott Card than I did from my science teachers at school.  But that has changed.  These days, what I read in Scientific American about current scientific research blows my mind far more than any work of science fiction.  What I learn from Polanyi or Lovejoy about ancient and modern cosmology spurs my imagination more than the average episode of Doctor Who.  In short, reality is every bit as enchanting and mysterious as the world of the imagination.  Imagination--and art in general--was always supposed to be a way to get at what was truly interesting about life itself, but for many people (for much of my life, myself included) that's simply isn't the case.  For many, the realm of science fiction isn't a gateway into a new way of thinking about our world--it is just a replacement for our world, because our world is uninteresting.
   It very possible to live as if our world is uninteresting.  To take what exists for granted--to live without curiosity, without wonder, without any sense of the art and magnificence of the contingent, without any attempt at real scientific discovery or real philosophical inquiry or reflection--this is to make light of the world and to reduce it to far less than it is and far less than it was intended to be.  I imagine most of us are guilty of at least one of these crimes, if not all of them, and that is why Socrates bothered to say that the unexamined life is not worth living.  That's not just a snooty intellectual saying trumpeting the superiority of the life of the mind.  It was Socrates' way of saying that the unexamined life doesn't mean anything to us, and therefore isn't really worth much.  You don't have to be an intellectual to want to have a soul that does something and is something worthwhile.
    Furthermore, the examined life is not first and foremost about intellectual virtue, although for those with academic gifts, it certainly contains intellectual virtue.  The examined life is about practical virtues--about the everyday work of the soul in each human person and in humankind collectively.  In other words, it is something accessible to everyone: everyone can think about what they have done in a day, what it means, what they are grateful for, what brought them life, what brought them death.  Recollection, reflection, and gratitude are not skills for the intellectually wealthy, they are skills for anyone who does not wish to be impoverished in the life of their soul.
    It took me a long time to really appreciate that this world is truly fascinating and wonderful and worth paying attention to.  I required the tools of academic life and the arts of imagination to discover that fact.  I doubt everyone needs that.  But everyone does need meaning, and sometimes we have to let go of things that we like in order to find things that are really good and fulfilling.  That's what I learned from fasting.  I like novels and worlds of fiction a lot.  But they usually don't feed me the way scientific and philosophical inquiry do.  And I need to give those novels up for a while to discover why I seem to have this deeper, more encompassing taste for something else.
 

Jesus and Zacchaeus

          He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He
          was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account
          of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature.  So he ran on ahead and climbed up
          into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way.  And when Jesus came to the
          place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your
          house today.”  So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully.  And when they saw it,
          they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”  And Zacchaeus
          stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have
          defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”  And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has
          come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to
          save the lost.”
The story of Zacchaeus is a story full of ironies, full of things one does not expect.  First we learn that Jesus is passing through Jericho, which gives us our first bit of textual irony.  In Jericho, the City of Palms, the city of desolation and curses about whom it was written,  "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho.  At the cost of his firstborn shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son shall he set up its gates.”  In the city of cursing, Jesus finds one whom others call a notorious sinner, and his house finds salvation.  Long ago, Rahab the harlot was such a one as this, and she found salvation for her house as well, though all others were destroyed.
    But Jesus goes to the cursed city on his way to Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of those who inherit the promise.  In Jericho, Jesus stops to restore a sinner to life and to bring salvation to his house, but in Jerusalem, despite the procession of joyful hosannas, he stops only to weep over the city, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”  In Jericho, the word of salvation is preached, in Jerusalem, a word of condemnation.
     Zacchaeus himself hardly looks like the model convert.  He seems to be unfaithful to the Jewish nation in every possible way.  He takes a Greek name though he lives in the heart of Palestine.  He is a tax collector, a Roman collaborator in the employ of the Empire.  He is chief of the tax collectors, and has become rich because of it--rich because he has unrighteously harvested from the labor of men less fortunate than himself.  Perhaps he has taken bread from the mouth of the poor, and one would be likely to think that the God of justice would reckon Zacchaeus his enemy.
    But, somehow, Zacchaeus really is the model convert.  His is the heart that both shows receptivity to the gospel, and the "fruits in keeping with repentance."  His is the good ground upon which the seed is sown, where that seed grows and blossoms into a true harvest of righteousness.  How can such a thing be, in the midst of such obvious sin?  Why is Zacchaeus' heart not irrevocably closed to the Lord?  Why does he greet Jesus with great joy where the Pharisees only envy and conspire to kill him?  Why is the tax collector more righteous than the Pharisee?
    Sin can do one of two things: it can break the heart or it can harden the heart.  Sometimes, in the Providence of God, God lets a sin go on and on in the human heart, not that the human heart be lost forever, but to break that heart, to humble that heart, to prepare that heart to receive grace and mercy and salvation.  As Jesus says, only those who are sick go to the doctor.  Sometimes it is only by sinning, or by being lost in a sin, that a human being comes to know she is lost and in need of healing and salvation.  It is hard to think too well of ourselves when our sins are very obvious, so the sin of greed might in fact be a kind of proof against the sin of pride.  Other times, of course, sin can be a hardening, a blindness that does not lead one to God.  But the tax collectors and prostitutes were public sinners--their sin was public, communal, universally condemned.  It is harder for them to be so proud as to not consider themselves in need of help, redemption, healing.
  Not so the Pharisee.  The Pharisee has spent his entire life in being instructed in the Law.  He has either learned to keep the parts of the Law that can be observed from a real zeal and a real moral strength, or else he has learned to fake it, or else he has learned a deeper form of humility: he has learned that it is impossible always to love one's neighbor as oneself and love God with everything one has.  Having failed, the Pharisee will find that true righteousness consists only in faith and repentance, not in perfectly keeping all the inward and outward works of the Law.  But how easy it is to be deceived!  And how tempting to protect and perhaps to promote one's reputation for holiness, for moral strength!  How easy to sidle past true Biblical righteousness into a real self-deception, into very dangerous pride, vanity, vain-glory, self-righteousness.  If the tax collector is going to think well of himself, he will probably glory in his ability to have power over someone else, but he isn't too likely to be securely deluded that he is a good person.  In this way, greed and graft can be less dangerous than pride and vanity.  He has the power of a rich man, but not the power of a rich man upon which society dotes its approval.  I am not sure that the prostitute has much to glory in, he or she will find it perhaps in a successful rebellion against society.
    Against, then, what we might imagine, Zacchaeus' heart is open, wide open to the chance of salvation.  He must have heard of Jesus before, must have wondered about him, wondered whether he would ever actually see him with his eyes.  So when he hears of the crowd and hears of Jesus' coming, he runs ahead to better see Jesus.  Running--an undignified pastime for a respectable man in the Ancient Near East, but Zacchaeus does not care about this at all.  If running isn't respectable, I imagine climbing a tree must be far more disreputable, but Zacchaeus is up and away.  He doesn't try to overpower the crowd, he doesn't posture or threaten or use his position as leverage to get ahead in seeing Jesus.  Rather, he employs his wits so he can just get a glimpse of the Lord.
   And then, curiously, he doesn't say a word.  He doesn't try to get Jesus' attention, he just watches.  Maybe he thinks Jesus won't notice--maybe he even hopes no one notices him up in that tree.  But then Jesus looks up to him and knows his heart.  He knows his heart and speaks words of impossible welcome and blessing: "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today."
   Why "hurry" and why "must"?  Why must Zacchaeus hurry and why must Jesus stay with him?  Salvation is the thing at stake and no time must be wasted: and Zacchaeus' response is perfect obedience.  Jesus says, "Hurry, and come down," and thus Zacchaeus' hurries and comes down joyfully receiving Jesus' word.  He is the perfect disciple who does not question his master's word, he only obeys and does so with joy.  "All of them," everyone, grumbles, everyone speaks against the Lord's visitation to this sinner.  No one speaks for Zacchaeus, not a one considers he might be a worthy man, that there might be some treasure for the Lord to harvest.
   But there is such a treasure.  This small man, this sinner, has his heart lit on fire by Jesus' taking notice of him.  God sees Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus knows he is known by God, and knows he is given a gift of the presence of God and the beginning of the kingdom, and he also knows what the proper response to all of this is.  Repentance.  Zacchaeus is a sinner, and the mean of his sin has helped him see his own need for salvation, and to see Jesus and his Gospel as the means and end of that salvation.  He sees his own sin, and takes on the character of his Lord instead.  In following the Lord of Jubilee, he restores not only what he has taken unrighteously, he also has mercy on the poor.  He sees in himself what the Pharisees do not see in themselves, and this sinner in the city of destruction finds salvation that they do not find.   For all that the Pharisees live in the city of kings and priests and that the Law and the Prophets are their inheritance, they do not see Jesus and they do not receive him with joy.
   The Son of Man is the Good Shepherd who seeks and saves the lost, who is perfectly able to restore sinners to repentance and amendment of life, to reconcile those sinners to God, and to give them a new life.  Part of the good news is believing that God is capable of restoring, in his own ways and in his own timing, absolutely anyone whom the Lord goes out to bring home.  Ours is the part to have faith in the Lord's goodness and hope for all to come to repentance and newness of life.  It is also our part to understand how small we are.  Not that human beings are insignificant: we aren't insignificant to God and that's the only measure of significance worth having.  But we are small--we don't have much strength or power or intelligence or goodness of our own.  The angels excel us in every way, and our sacred history starts with humans beings deceived and naive, fragile and mortal.  Our lives are gifts of grace that are in God's hands, not our own.  We are, like Zacchaeus, quite small.  But we are loved and we are imprinted with the image of God, which is a great dignity.  There is something to being mindful of what we lack and how we fall short as a protection against the greater evils of thinking we have no need of any help or saving.