ALL THINGS FLOW
Everything progresses from node to node, from note to note, from paragraph to paragraph, from above to below, always bound by the inevitable gravity of cause and effect. This, therefore that.
Q.E.D.
And because we know this, we trace it backwards, from where we are now to what once was, to what must have been, unless everything we know is only illusion. The mathemetician, the musician, the writer and the salmon returning to the place of its spawning--we are all bound in that inescapable flow. Or rather, not like the salmon at all, for we may never return to our beginning--only look back, and wonder.
For our reality is not merely IN flux, changing direction at will, but is itself Inevitable Flow, forever progressing, in one direction only, as inexorable as Time.
Or perhaps it IS Time, this fluidity which is our only reality.
It alone is common to us all, whether we marvel at the Great Matrix with the mathemeticians or revel in the Music of the Spheres. We know that all things flow down to us out of the ages, that we ride the wave of inevitability, that if there is order to our future, it perhaps lies in the patterns of the past.
But in this is our despair, for we also know that those patterns end, that every river has its source. We cannot conceive of the wellspring that birthed us, for All things Flow, and we know no other law.
Thus it is here that we stand utterly bewildered, faced with a choice that is no choice, that either reality is eternal and alone, as the ancients believed, or that it--that We--are not Real, that we are Finite, that we are trapped in a subordinate layer of causality, and that we cannot get out. In the shadows of the unplumbable past we see the Shade of our future. And we fear.
All things flow
But whence?
πάντα ῥεῖ
5 comments:
Is this a dogmatics forum?
P.S. Nice Attic syntax :)
You have obviously been deprived of A. A. Milne. My husband has had a Deep Thought.
Nice ruminations, Jared. I don't think we have to buy the Greek dichotomy--there must another, a different, Jewish way out.
Dad--I was sorta avoiding giving any pat answers. But you're right, those ones work just fine, as far as they go.
Nonetheless, if these "ruminations" are worthwhile at all, the worth is in the general universality of the observation. We know that things flow, that effect follows cause, etc. "Why did ____ happen?" is a question we're well accustomed to asking, and it's based on the assumption that indeed, all things flow. We know that it's true--we see it every day.
That at least is how I intended the rumination--simply as a reflection on a basic human "problem" which we have attempted to solve with religion or philosophy or even studious attempts to ignore the matter entirely. In some way, we must have some answer for the question Why we Are, lest we be forced to conclude that, perhaps, in some ultimate scheme, we Are Not, not Really, not in any sense that matters.
But I don't think it's necessarily a dichotomy, David--though I'm curious in what degree you consider it so, and why. And certainly Jewish (or at least Scriptural) language provides a nice answer. We know already that creation is sustained by God (Hebrews 1), that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17), etc. Later theological language even speaks of Perichoresis as the way in which we understand the Trinity to be united--a word initially meaning neighborhood (peri-chora), but used theologically to indicate the inter-penetration of the Divine Hypostases, and first articulated to me as the eternal flow of Divine Love between the Persons of the Trinity. The apparent presence of the root for re/w, while only superficial and not actually etymologically connected, is a worthwhile comparison to communicate the essential theological meaning.
Hence, we see the Godhead as a Fountainhead of the Eternal Flow of Divine Love, a flow which lies at the heart of creation, one which entered the creation in the person of Jesus Christ, who also revealed and reveals Himself to us within the flow of time. So the dichotomy doesn't ultimately trouble Christians.
It does, I think, indicate a certain problem for atheists and most scientists, however--simply because science is predicated on the same notion, that we can trace our way back to the "beginning" based on observable phenomena. But the scientific approach denies that there could be any true Beginning. Hence the foundational assumption of "pure" science (that is, materialistic science) is that matter is indeed eternal. Which goes even against what science has discovered--e.g., the Big Bang sure looks like a beginning of some sort, and science certainly can't go beyond it. But that something simply doesn't come from nothing is one of the most fundamentally obvious observations one can make.
So I call a foul on the materialists. We at least have an answer, one which includes a larger swath of the human experience than theirs. They deny that the question even has merit, or assert that matter is eternal, for which claim they have no proof.
So that's what I was getting at. :)
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