The Wild Tears Fall

We are finite beings.

This statement may be acknowledged by any given man to whom it is uttered, but is it truly imbibed by the hearer? Is its meaning held within his bosom, and does he nod his head in vigourous assent? Does his face cloud over, though frozen with Stoic fatalism, or does he fall to his knees crying out in agony? For some odd reason, such behaviour as described above is not considered strange in a dying man, yet it would be seen as bizarre in a man pondering the fact of death from afar.

Some, if they are of faith, may take this moment to console the pensive self-mourners with the assurance of life after death, since that ought to be consoling. Yet, these well-meaning souls have not absorbed the statement properly. It was not, 'we are mortal beings,' but 'we are finite beings.' As Tolkien said concerning the necessity of man's death in his literary works, it was a gift from Eru, the creator, not a bane or curse that man should die. The idea was that humanity was not made for immortality, because man himself is a certain quantity. No matter how much butter one has, it can always be scraped too thinly over too much bread. Man, being finite, does not have the capacity for the infinite.

The remains of this essay will likely be of no interest to those who believe man's very existence is finite and terminates at death. Indeed, if that is the case, there is no more to discuss. For those who on the other hand believe in infinity, the problem still requires resolution.

I still remember that aching moment twenty-one years ago now. A five year old girl was sitting in the back of the car, staring at her second younger sister in the baby carriage, while the first younger one sat up front. As her mother turned into the driveway of their home, the child glanced out the righthand window towards the tall hills beyond the railroad tracks, themselves invisible due to the intervening meadows and woods. If she did not perspire, she had that same preliminary sensation of nervous cold that precedes the sweat resulting from stress.

'Mommy, I'm scared of Heaven.'
'What? Rachel, it only makes sense to be scared of Hell.'
'Heaven is scary, too, because it doesn't end.'
'If it ended, you wouldn't exist.'

And so began an brief interchange that did not leave the child satisfied. It's a shame that she asked these questions so soon. Rather than resting with childlike trust on the goodness of the same God that had created cedar trees, the colour purple, the smell of vanilla, and the cooing of a mourning dove, all of which she loved so much, her morose mind sought things beyond its strength.

'One cannot conceive a thought without language.' Being inarticulate (especially when one does not even know the word 'inarticulate') can cause a great deal of suffering. Teaching English in foreign countries, I have seen children tear up with frustration over my not understanding their native language, especially when it is spoken quickly and emotionally. Trying to convey philosophical problems for one's parents to resolve before even knowing that philosophy exists also causes a great deal inner tribulation.

It was at the age of nineteen, when my famished mind was devouring St. Augustine's Confessions, that I found I had not been alone in my fears.

'Thank God! Someone else has been frightened of infinity,' I said after a seminar on the work.
'Oh yeah,' a fellow student said, 'I remember trying to tell someone once that I was scared of Heaven, and they thought I was crazy!'

So the Bishop of Hippo had shared the quandary. Two years later, the Angelic Doctor resolved the problem altogether with his definition of eternity:

Thus eternity is known from two sources: first, because what is eternal is interminable--that is, has no beginning nor end (that is, no term either way); secondly, because eternity has no succession, being simultaneously whole. (Summa Theologica: Prima Pars, Question X, Article i, emphasis mine)

How wonderful it is to breathe! To take air into one's lungs up to the count of four, hold that breath a moment, and breathe out as if one's manacles were falling from one's wrists, the scales from one's eyes. I was able to exhale such a breath when I saw that Heaven was not a horrifically tedious, infinite line, which would drag out my ragged soul, thinner and thinner, throughout eternity. It is not a perpetual succession of seconds, but one great second, even less than a second, it is one great 'now.'

To give an illustration to the visual learner: recall please that a line is that which has only length and no width. Is such a thing impossible in the physical world? Yes, but so are circles, triangles, and squares, and you can imagine those just fine. Now imagine a plane. In the diagram below, the line is lavender, and the plane green. The line is imperfect obviously, for if it were a true line, you could not see it at all.


Now, place a few lines within the plane.

There are three lines within this plane, and if you magnify it, you will see that there is plenty of green space in between the purple marks. Now since a true line has no width, it is impossible to place two side by side, and so it would be impossible to cover this plane with lines. Just so, if you tried to draw a circle by making equal lines from a certain point, you would probably never succeed in finishing it. The finer your pen, and hence the closer the pen would be to a true line, the less likely success would become. This is the problem of assuming what is two dimensional can be converted into the first dimension. The same absurdity arises when one tries to cram the eternal into the fourth dimension.

If Heaven were like a lush and verdant forest that had to be explored by one's moving through it, the expedition would likely end in madness. Our limited eyes would be forced to exploring one narrow line, one after the other, straining to catch everything of worth. We would never see the whole and certainly never come to an end. Yet, in Paradise, there is no time, only eternity. If one accepts that time is the measurement of motion according to the before and after there can be no before and after in the Hereafter. Rather than view a park by examining one blade of grass after another, line by line, Heaven is everywhere immediately open to us as. One need but remain still and glance about, taking in its splendour.

Such a conclusion would not have been possible without Divine Revelation, and even then, it took centuries for the truth to be put in such clear words by the Church's 'Dumb Ox.' Yet, the problem remains that even if we are not asked to move along the plane of Heaven in wearing lines, can a one dimensional creatue glance from side to side? Can four dimensional creatures like use begin to understand an existence beyond time?

The problem of taxing out nature beyond its strength has been resolved, but a new problem has arisen. How can we rise above our very natures into a higher existence? If one grants the soul's immortality, how can this question be resolved?

It was certainly beyond the strength of the world's greatest minds standing alone, specifically, Plato and Buddha.

While Socrates consoled his disciples with his magnificent certainty of life after death in the Phaedo, Socrates himself (or as written by his disciple) apparently feared the immortality of the spirit. He may have projected that after death, beauties and glories of enlightenment awaited the soul, a return to the star where the spirit had her birth.

Yet, as one takes in the whole of the dialogues, one discovers with some disappointment that there is no 'happily ever after.' The soul again descends into this world, drinks of the River Lethe, and is reborn on Earth, having forgotten all previous lives. While an impious soul descends into lower, animal forms of life, the pious is again exalted after death, but then the circle spins yet again.

Buddha essentially had the same idea. Whereas Socrates yearned to look on the Form of Love after death, Buddha desired not to love at all, but to achieve a space without air or breath. This would be the realm where no fire could burn, because there was no breeze to feed or fan it. However, Nirvana, like Plato's star, is not a final destination. After ascending the petals of the lotus flower, the spirit again tumbles down. Again it plummets into the muddy earth of the flesh. Round and round the wheel turns.

At first there is something very appealing about the theory of reincarnation. It soothes both our fear of death and of eternity. Being around ten years of age, I had come up with the theory that every once in a while in Heaven, one went to sleep for a time, and awoke having forgotten all that went before, thus refreshing existence anew. I see now that there is truly no difference between my little theory and that of the those just related.

Children cannot help being honest though. If their appetites do blind them occasionally, they remain brutally honest with themselves in solitude, for they have not yet mastered rationalizing. Even at ten I knew my theory was cheating. Just so with Plato and Siddhartha. They were two men reasonable enough to know that the soul was immaterial. They were broad enough in mind to propose that the immaterial can live without matter, and they were noble enough to believe that the best things awaited man beyond the grave. But there is a limit to man's greatness, even his greatness of mind.

The mightiest of spirits may scale the highest mountains, bracing their flesh against the cold, taking in stride the lack of air for the sake of breathing the purer, though rarer stuff, climbing higher and higher up the great peaks. They find themselves at ever more dizzying heights, taking in more thrilling views, and trekking up lonelier paths. Finally, as their nostrils bleed, the scarcity of air tires their lungs, and solitude becomes as stifling as a mob, they giddily scream that they have at last reached the top, shutting their eyes to the infinity of the mountain jutting into eternity. Down they giddily cartwheel back into the valley, taking shelter in the mundane, glad to have their mortal souls safe from the great, eternal Forms again.

Like Tolkien's hobbit hero, they say:

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Yet, as Bilbo was nodding by the fire in Rivendell, did he perhaps glimpse amongst the tongues of flames, the great peak of the Lonely Mountain, urging him to start out again?


The Problem of Infinity: We Seem Not to Be Made for It by Rachel Rudd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at foolishnessntears.blogspot.com.

Now Razias, one of the ancients of Jerusalem, was accused to Nicanor, a man that was a lover of the city, and of good report, who for his affection was called the father of the Jews. This man, for a long time, had held fast his purpose of keeping himself pure in the Jews' religion, and was ready to expose his body and life, that he might persevere therein. So Nicanor being willing to declare the hatred that he bore the Jews, sent five hundred soldiers to take him. For he thought by insnaring him to hurt the Jews very much. Now as the multitude sought to rush into his house, and to break open the door, and to set fire to it, when he was ready to be taken, he struck himself with his sword: Choosing to die nobly rather than to fall into the hands of the wicked, and to suffer abuses unbecoming his noble birth. But whereas through haste he missed of giving himself a sure wound, and the crowd was breaking into the doors, he ran boldly to the wall, and manfully threw himself down to the crowd: But they quickly making room for his fall, he came upon the midst of the neck. And as he had yet breath in him, being inflamed in mind he arose: and while his blood ran down with a great stream, and he was grievously wounded, he ran through the crowd: And standing upon a steep rock, when he was now almost without blood, grasping his bowels with both hands, he cast them upon the throng, calling upon the Lord of life and spirit, to restore these to him again: and so he departed this life.(II Machabees xiv: 37-46)

Razias, a soul twin to Cato’s, chose the act of death rather thanslavery. Aristotle proposed that man’s virtue consists in a Golden Mean between two ignoble extremes. He also said that in some cases a man must strive towards the opposite extremity to overcome the vice that has crippled his soul. A profligate man may have to practice what he sees as stinginess, and a cowardly man, apparent rashness, to find his way in the middle. It has been said by many that Cato veered away entirely from his principles in taking his own life, but it could be that his extreme measure was simply an attempt to maintain his middle ground.

Cato of Utica was a man devoted to the traditions of Rome so much so that he protested the removal of a pillar from one official hall and refused to don a tunic under his toga. These acts were despised by some as petty displays of excessive sentimentality, but they were an attempt to restrain the wild upheavals of a Rome that had been lately ravaged by Sulla and Marius, and later conspired against by Cataline. Cato employed exterior signs, as well as actions, to try to preserve the way of his ancestors. Whether this attitude was nobility or denial is a question unrelated to the present issue.

It is fashionable amongst some modern thinkers to suppose traditionalists to be slaves to the past, ergo, they are of an unoriginal and sheep-like mentality. The image of Cato, inspecting the keen edge of his sword and uttering, ‘Now, I am my own master,’ must at least be unsettling to the anti-Stoics.

Cato was no slave. He did not believe in bending his volition to Fate, but in uniting it with the highest Will. It might raise an eyebrow to see a man utterly independent of his peers, yet completely yielding to the mos maiorum, but it is still clearly rational. Such was his life; his death is not so simple.

At the end of his military campaign against Caesar, Cato was assured of defeat and even more assured that he would not lose his freedom. He did not forget to pity his comrades and the people of his city-fortress, Utica. Though he would plead no mercy for himself, Cato consented that an embassy should go to Caesar: ‘For if, I were willing to be saved by grace of Caesar, I ought to go to him in person and see him alone; but I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts. And he acts illegally in saving, as if their master, those over whom he has no right at all to be the lord. However, if it is thy wish, let us consider jointly how thou mayest obtain mercy for the three hundred.’ (Plutarch: The Life of Cato the Younger: 66:2)

A magnanimous man often shows mercy for others and none for himself, but the thread in Cato’s life twists again.

The night before Cato died, a paradox of the Stoics was raised: ‘The good man alone is free, and the bad are all slaves.’ Cato defended the tenet earnestly. Days before, he clearly expressed his kinship with the free, ‘good’ man:

(64) In reply to this, after praising their good will, Cato said that to secure their own safety they ought to send to Caesar with all speed, but they must make no prayer for him; 5 prayer belonged to the conquered, and the craving of grace to those who had done wrong; but for his part he had not only been unvanquished all his life, but was actually a victor now as far as he chose to be, and a conqueror of Caesar in all that was honourable and just; Caesar was the one who was vanquished and taken; for the hostile acts against his country which he had long denied, were now detected and proven. (Plutarch, ibid.)

This was the final confirmation for his friends that Cato intended suicide.

Given this intention, one is completely astonished on the man’s choice of reading: Plato’s Phaedo. True, it is a dialogue that comfortingly and brilliantly argues the immortality of man’s soul, and firmly states the fact that good man must ever be ready to die and die fearlessly. Many a man on the verge of death would choose to read it, yet, the writing denies man the privilege of choosing when to leave this world.

Cato reads the work thoroughly, though he angrily interrupts his study to have his sword restored to his room. One cannot argue that a man of Cato’s learning and deliberation missed this point by Socrates:

I believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs…And if one of your own possessions…took the liberty of putting himself out of the way, when you had given him no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could? (Plato: Phaedo).

One may say that Cato coughed up the part of the Phaedo that he did not like and swallow the sweetness of what he did. To do so, however, is to declare that Cato has abandoned reason in favour of personal preference. His reprimand to his son and friends contradicts this opinion:

(69)"I suppose," said he, "that ye also have decided to detain in life by force a man as old as I am, and to sit by him in silence and keep watch of him: or are ye come with the plea that it is neither shameful nor dreadful for Cato, when he has no other way of salvation, to await salvation at the hands of his enemy? 2 Why, then, do ye not speak persuasively and convert me to this doctrine, that we may cast away those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our very lives (Plutarch: ibid.)

So Cato still believed in reason and argument. He believed in the righteousness of his course, not just enough to plunge a sword into his bowels with an injured hand, but to rip his bowels out again after a medical attempt was made to save him. Surely, this is not waiting ‘until the hour when God Himself is pleased to release us.’ (Plato: ibid.)

Did Cato reject this work in the whole then? What of his old doctrines did he maintain? Dante Alighieri, who clearly differs with Plutarch, (e.g. their divergent appraisals of Cato’s usurious half-nephew) actually concurs with the historian in giving Cato the highest honour a member of the Roman Catholic Church could give to a pagan. The poet sets him above even the Hell of the naturally virtuous, and illumines Cato’s brow with the stars of Socrates’s Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.

‘Argument from authority is the weakest’, but one ought to pause a little at the opinion of great men. Dante’s and Plutarch’s praises are not infallible guides, yet they seemed untroubled by the paradox in Cato’s death. Plutarch does not mention Phaedo’s censure of suicide at all, though he does see fit to defend Cato’s decision in his Life of Marcus Brutus. Dante’s Church, however, unambiguously condemns it. Though allowances are to be made for those who never heard her warnings, it is odd that Dante should paint such a wretched end for suicides in general and not even see the need to vindicate his approbation of Cato.

One is forced back to the Phaedo to find the answer:

And if one of your own possessions…took the liberty of putting himself out of the way, when you had given him no intimation of your wish that he should die… (Plato: ibid.)

Is imminent slavery then such an intimation? Was it impossible to live the life of a virtuous man after being put under Caesar’s heel? Cato could not abide the injustice of Caesar’s victory and would not accept the forgiveness of one whom he saw in the wrong. Hanging on to the traditions he loved, he must have seen in them a dispensation for avoiding their orders.

And perhaps, like Razias, Cato thought his actions and his being, were insignificant next to the powers of Being beyond. He cast out his own bowels like the former and for the same reason—the shame he would have received at enemy hands. Perhaps, if Cato had also physically faced the foe and had not been too depleted to stand upright, he too would have called ‘upon the Lord of life and spirit, to restore these to him again.’



Cato the Younger: His Death and His Paradox by Rachel Rudd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at foolishnessntears.blogspot.com.

One then turns again in yearning to Plato’s intuition. If he does not understand being with the piercing clarity of Aristotle, his healthy agnosticism prevents the despair that may arise from the exacting attitude of the pupil’s system. As Socrates mildly raised his hands and refused to define anything that exists, he still believed there was such a Definition. Yet to him, this Definition was its own reality, not something dependent on man to cognize it.

Of course, with or without man five cows exist on a hill, even without a man to count five. Yet, Plato posited a living entity making that five to be what it was. Aristotle rejected the form of ‘five’, ‘horse’, or ‘beauty’, as it would require a further rationale to unite the Form with the thing participating in it. If Aristotle was correct in these particular instances, what would he say if one replied, ‘True, there is a Being above the things that are, and Its Existence makes them to be what they are.’?

Aristotle’s massive hand stamped the seal on how one must conduct clear-sighted introspection of this world; even Darwin and Galileo praised his method and said with enough evidence, it would always provide the accurate result. With Plato one learns the faith in reason necessary to follow Aristotle in his mapping of this world. Yet, one also prudently withholds judgment on the world that bore this present one, until its Ambassador comes forth Himself in the light of Divine Revelation.

There are ‘thoughtless patterns of thought’, but only the ‘Mind in wrought’ can say from whence they came.