Getting Lost in Our Infinite God

 

Astronaut Dr. David Bowman in 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Control is fun.  Starting at a young age, every one of us wants more of it over more aspects of our lives.  We begin to pick out our own clothes, decide what we want to eat, and, with our first tricycle, discover the thrill of plotting the course of our own journey.  The pangs of anxiety that come with increased control as we fret over more significant decisions like whether to ask someone out on a date or which university to choose are quickly quelled by the sheer fun of the myriad smaller acts of control that decorate our lives.  It's fun to customize our laptops with stickers and curate our own music lists online.  Sooner or later, however, we discover that the pressures of control are no longer outweighed by the joys, and the best that many hope for is to keep the pressures and joys in balance.  We play the stress of controlling our finances off against the pleasure of choosing where to go on vacation.  Yet there is something far better and far more freeing, but it requires a bit of imagination and getting lost.

The Imagination of God

God created human beings in His own image.  Jesus is the Imago Dei, the image of God in its fullness.  Part of what it means for us to be made in the image of this image-making God is that we, too, are gifted with great imaginations.  We think things up out of nothing and bring them into reality.  From Michelangelo's David to the internal combustion engine to Mozart's Requiem to the James Webb Space Telescope, we really are quite imaginative creatures, and it will take all the imagination we have to approach a certain truth about God.  He is infinite.

Aristotle says that there must be something that causes other things to move that is not itself moved by anything else, the unmoved mover (ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, Metaphysics 12.1072a).  Think of it this way.  You are grilling hot dogs around a nice campfire, but what caused there to be fire in that particular fire pit?  You struck match and put it under a log.  But where did the log come from?  It came from the tree that had stood nearby.  Where did the tree come from?  It came from a seed.  How did the seed get there?  A bird dropped it.  Where did the bird get it, and for that matter, where did the bird come from?  You see where this is going.  At some point the whole thing gets ridiculous and you have to think, "There has to be a stopping point somewhere," and that stopping point is what Aristotle called the unmoved mover.  Picking up from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas says this unmoved mover is God.  (Therefore it is necessary to come to some first mover that is moved by no other, and this everyone understands to be God.  Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum.  Summa Theologiae 1, Q2, A3)

Now kick back and just let your mind go.  What could it possibly be like, what could it possibly mean for something to exist that has no cause?  Let your mind drift.  Use a piece of art or perhaps something like the famous stargate scene in the classic film 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

"God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is" (CCC 213).  On the surface, that really doesn't make sense, but the liberating thing is that it doesn't have to.  As you begin to stretch your imagine to conceive of the inconceivable, an infinite being without beginning or end, you get lost in that notion.  You realize that you can't get your head around such a thing, much less control it, and in that moment you take your first taste of freedom.

Realizing Fatherhood

As the infomercials used to say, but wait!  There's more!  Despite having no beginning and no end, God is also personal, which is to say, He is a person.  No, He is not human, but what it means to be a human person comes from the personhood of God, and if that still sounds a bit too abstract, God is our Father.  What follows is something I journaled recently after pondering the identity of God.

When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and says, "I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," and then reveals his name as YHWH, "I Am," He is truly inviting us into an infinitely larger reality, identity, and relationship than the mud-hut-dwelling, dirt-scratching experience of life and family that we have known with our blood relatives.  What would life be like if we look up from our meagre existence and truly saw our Father and knew we were His?

You may think my description of earthly, familial relationships is harsh and inaccurate, but consider that the largest mansion and the smallest mobile home are essentially the same thing.  They are both boxes made of stuff from the earth in which people sleep and eat.  And just as we must scratch the dirt with hands or tools in order to draw anything of value from it for sustenance, so we often face hard, emotionally backbreaking challenges to interact with family members in order to bring forth the joys of familial life we all know are available.  

So, I'll ask again.  What would your life look like if you raised your eyes from the problems and hassles that beset you on a daily basis and became lost in the life of your infinite Father, the one who loves you beyond what you or I could ever define the word "love" to mean?

Little Green Men From Greece?

A search for space aliens and antiquity will take you into some of the stranger parts of the Internet, but is the idea of intelligent life on another planet merely a staple of modern science fiction?  As it turns out, humans have been giving this some thought for more than 2,500 years.

Philosophy and Science (Fiction)

Lactantius, c250-c325

While preparing for one of the most exciting units of study I will have ever entered into with a high school class (MUCH more on this here), I ran across a quotation from Lactantius, the early Christian author who was an advisor to the Roman emperor Constantine at the time of his conversion to Christianity.  A quick search for the Latin text at Documenta Catholica Omnia, one of the greatest text repositories on the Internet, turned up the quotation and a bit more.

Xenophanes...dixit, intra concavum lunae sinum esse aliam terram et ibi aliud genus hominum simili modo vivere quo nos in hac terra vivimus.  Fuisse Seneca inter Stoicos ait, qui deliberaret utrumne Soli quoque suos populos daret.  Sed, credo, calor deterrebat ne tantam multitudinem periculo committeret.  (Institutiones Divinae III.23)

Xenophanes said that there was another earth inside the hollow bosom of the moon and that there another race of humans lived in a similar manner as we we live on this earth.  Seneca said that among the Stoics was one who deliberated whether he should also attribute to the Sun its own peoples.  But, I believe, the heat deterred him lest he commit such a great number of people to danger.  (Divine Institutes, III.23, translation mine)

It is amusing how Lactantius dismisses the unnamed Stoic's idea of a population on the Sun by suggesting he didn't want even in theory to condemn a race of people to such burning heat, but pause to consider that someone was even thinking about this in the time of Seneca, which was the first century A.D.  Even more striking is that Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher who lived from about 570 to about 478 B.C. kicked around a notion of another planet full of human beings existing inside the moon more than two thousand, five hundred years ago.  Lactantius scornfully disregarded that idea as well, but what is striking to me is how imaginative these ancient thinkers were.

Research Rabbit Trails

One of the things I love about academic life, whether lived out principally in elementary and secondary schools or at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is the discovery that comes from research rabbit trails.  While preparing for a new unit in a second-year Latin, high school Latin class, I chanced upon a quotation in a footnote that caught my attention.  That quotation led me to the original text of a Latin author from the third-to-fourth centuries, which in turn revealed the amazing imagination of a man named Xenophanes, who lived two and a half millennia and half a world from my own time and place.  As I have said countless times in talks and in writing and as has formed my Twitter background for many years, education is a shared journey of discovery.

Imagination, Education, and Faith

Corpus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali, 1954

Imagine a square on a piece of paper.  Now, imagine stretching that square upward from the surface of the paper.  You would have a cube, right?  Try, if you can, to imagine expanding that cube into four spatial dimensions.  You can't really do it, because we our brains only think in three spatial dimensions (length, width, height), but if you could, you would be imagining a tesseract or a hypercube.  Dali painted one of his crucifixion works showing Christ on a hypercube.  Pretty imaginative, huh?

The Wonder of Imagination

In an age in which I can pull from my pocket a device that allows me both to see and hear a friend halfway around the world as we converse in real time, we may be losing our sense of amazement at imagination itself.  What was, not too many years ago, the province of science fiction is now mundane science.  We can certainly imagine amazing things, and we do on a regular basis, both in the design of products and in our entertainment, but then again, it is not that hard to do so.  We have split the atom and walked on the moon.  We have taken images of far-flung space and helped a 3,000 -year-old mummy speak.  Should it be surprising that we have imagined the Marvel universe onto the silver screen?  To see how amazing human imagination truly is, consider some of what we imagined when we didn't have technological marvels on every corner.

In Book IV of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid told the story of Venus and Mars.  It was an adulterous affair between the goddess of love and the god of war, and to get revenge, Vulcan, the husband of Venus and blacksmith of the gods, crafted a net of bronze in which to trap them.  Ovid wrote that the strands of the net lumina fallere possent.  They could deceive the human eye.  The net was so finely woven that it would move with the slightest touch and was unlike anything that a weaver or even a spider could spin.  Ovid, writing at the beginning of the first century A.D., imagined this adulterer's trap at a time when it could not have been produced in reality.  There were many excellent craftsman of that day, to be sure, but none that could have crafted what Ovid conceived in his mind.

Or take Lucian of Samosata, the second century A.D. satirist who wrote what some consider the first science fiction novel, A True Story, with its wild plot describing travel to the moon and interstellar war.  Lucian died sometime around 180 A.D., which is a long time before Neil Armstrong or Star Wars.  Such a tale from a time when there was no electricity or telescopes is, well, quite imaginative, and knowing the circumstances in which it was written, we likely experience a little wonder, if not jaw-dropping amazement, at the very act of Lucian's imagination.

The Necessity of Imagination

Imagination is a critical and foundational component of literacy, something I was discussing recently with a former student now at a major university preparing to become an English teacher.  As our Zoom conversation wound its way through many ideas, I recalled the story of one my of homeroom students years ago as he took our statewide assessment.  One part of the test asked the students to write to a prompt that said something like, "You and your class went on trip to a dairy farm.  Write about what happened on that trip."  This young man raised his hand, and when I went to his desk, quietly said, "I didn't go on that trip."  I replied that this was pretend, that he should imagine what it would have been like and to write about that.  He accepted the advice, and as I walked away, I noticed the ankle bracelet that this sophomore was required to wear while on house arrest.

Since he was in my homeroom, which only met once a week, I did not know him well, and I never learned all of his circumstances, but I was shaken deeply that day, and the ripples of that interaction are with me still.  I did not know what had warranted his house arrest, but I did know that he lacked a skill necessary for learning, imagination.  Whether that had anything to do with his legal trouble, I could not say, but it was heartbreaking to think that a high school sophomore did not recognize an imaginative assignment for what it was or, worse still, lacked the capacity to fulfill it.

The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929

Imagination is at the heart of metaphor, and it is possible to see all language as metaphoric.  When I look at an object sitting on my desk and tell a friend, "That is my stapler," I have made a comparison, a reference.  I have uttered the two syllable word "stapler," perhaps even written its five consonants and two vowels on a piece of paper, and have asked my friend to connect those sounds and letters with the object on my desk and think of them as the same.  It is, when you think about it, an extraordinary act of imagination to think that seven distinct shapes on a piece of paper are the same as a metal and plastic, rectangular device capable of puncturing an object with a slender bit of metal and then bending that metal so that what has been punctured by it cannot readily escape from it.  It takes even greater imagination to suppose that an act of exhalation and vocal cord-vibration is equivalent to that metal and plastic, rectangular device.  If such imagination is required for the identification of a simple office item, how much do we need to understand math or physics or poetry?

Imagination's Raw Materials

Much goes into the making of imagination, both in terms of the material by which imagination works and the working of that material into what we call imagination.  In a similar way, a painting is the product both of physical elements such as paint, brushes, and canvas, along with the training and practice and work of the painter.  What, then, are the materials and the working that go into the formation of imagination?  The answers, of course, far exceed what can be explored here, but there are some basics that can be considered.

Experience, along with the realization that things can be other than they are, is one of the key elements of imagination.  When once I have experienced a coffee cup and have come to understand that its shaped may be varied, I can imagine a cup that will ride without spilling in my car, and so is born the travel mug.  One of the best ways for me to expand rapidly my experience of the world is through reading.  My grandmother used to say that she could go anywhere in a book, and she was right.  Faster than in a Star Trek transporter, I can be whisked by a book to any place in the universe and at any point in history, and this is one of the reasons why reading is crucial, especially in early childhood.  Maryanne Wolf, whose background is in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, has written much about this, and the point is quite simple.  Children need to be read to when they are young and need as much experience with reading as they can get once they are able to read for themselves.  I will never forget when one of my students asked if I had read Seamus Heaney's then new translation of Beowulf.  When I said that I had not, he offered to bring it to me when his dad had finished reading it.  As excited as I was to see the new Beowulf, I was more struck by the comment about his father's reading habits.  Reading was clearly a part of this family's life, not only engaged in with and for the children, but by the adults as well, thus modeling the look of literacy for the younger members.

If reading is a source of experience, one of the necessary ingredients for imagination, how is that experience kneaded and worked into imagination itself?  In no small part this happens through imaginative play among children.  When my son was little, we ran around the backyard in endless re-enactments of the Trojan War.  He was always the victorious Achilles, and I the doomed Hector, and there can be no doubt that the imaginative play of his youth, which included adventures with toy knights and kingdoms built of Legos, shaped the imagination that he now uses as an industrial design major.  Whether it is retelling a story through a classroom play complete with cardboard props and costumes cobbled together from the rummage sale to drawing pictures of a favorite story in a notebook, this sort of creative and recreative work is essential for developing the skill of imagining.

Imagining God

St. Anselm (1033-1109) is famous for putting forth his ontological proof for the existence of God.  In Proslogion 2 he says that God is aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, that than which no greater can be imagined.  He is the very limit of our imagination because He is the source of our imagination, and it certainly takes imagination on our part even to attempt to get our minds around how John described the Incarnation in his gospel when he wrote that the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Our word "imagination" is derived from the Latin word imago, which we find in Colossians 1:15 where Jesus is described as the imago Dei, the image of God.  Just a few lines later in verse 19 we read that all the fullness of God dwelled in Him.  Once again, Jesus, Who is God, is the very limit of our imagination.  He is the fullness of God.  He is that than which no greater can be imagined.

Imagination is necessary not only for attempting to grasp theological concepts, but for the living out of our faith as well.  We live in the world of already-but-not-yet.  Christ is already victorious over all things, and yet we await His return and the renewal of all things.  This is why His description in Revelation 4:8 as the One Who was, Who is, and Who is to come, while seemingly illogical, makes sense, but it does take a stretching of our imagination to get there.  What does it mean, then, to live in such a reality?  We are everyday imagining new ways of doing just that.

Why We Read

Much more can be and has been written about imagination, but I want to close by revisiting the idea of reading.  Not only do books quickly broaden our experiences, the raw material of our imagination, but they allow us to see how others imagine.  For most of human history, people have learned skills through apprenticing, by seeing how others have done something, and this applies well to developing our imagination.  When we see how master authors, both of fiction and nonfiction, have imagined the tale they have to tell, we see yet another way for us to imagine our own tale, a way that we can follow or that will inspire us to imagine something new yet again.

Tools of the Trade

In A Primer for Philosophy & Education, Samuel Rocha links two fields of human endeavor that may, to the contemporary mind, have little to do with each other.  We all know what education is, right?  But philosophy, isn't that something for the uber-nerdy?  Don't you have to be some kind of, well, Plato to engage in philosophy?

As its Greek etymology shows, philosophy is nothing more, and nothing less, than the love of wisdom.  Because of this, Rocha encourages us that "Erudition is not necessary for original philosophy.  [Y]ou will not need encyclopedic stores of authors and titles of books you most likely haven't read.  You will need only a clear, curious mind and a heart that is passionate and wild enough to sustain and feed a lively, probing imagination.  (pp. 14, 15)

Thinking philosophically is the heart of the work required to master the craft ofeducation.  You do not need any tools beyond what Rocha has laid out, but allow me to offer a few additional words of advice.

Nurture your own childlike sense of wonder.  I have been engaged in the study of Latin and Classical Studies for thirty years, but I continue to be amazed at a turn of phrase in Ovid or Vergil.  My students ask questions that I have never considered, and suddenly I want to know, too.  A text I have read countless times takes on a new meaning and relevance because I am reading it this day with this group of people as opposed to yesterday with someone else.  Rocha observes, "The ordinary, when attended to closely and with care, is extraordinary all on its own -- and we are educated by it."  (p.16)

Ask provocative questions of your colleagues.  Ask them off-the-wall things.  Don't merely start discussions, provoke them.  See what happens.  I have been blessed to enjoy some of the most thoughtful colleagues where I teach.  I have had scintillating conversations during passing periods, at the copy machine, and in the hall after school with colleagues in the Social Studies, English, Science, and Math departments.

Don't let the details get you down.  I was a good student growing up, and getting my homework done was just a part of who I was.  I had a revelatory moment, though, as a freshman at Indiana University.  I was sitting in Prof. Betty Rose Nagle's class on Cicero and thinking, "I wish this class would end so I could get back to my room and work on an assignment for this class."  The absurdity hit me with a flash.  The assignment was meant to complement the class.  The class was the thing, not the assignment.  I was letting the details get in the way.  Your grading will get done.  Copies will get made for the quiz.  If there is a good, deep, philosophical discussion going on, jump in with both feet.  This is part of the work you must do to develop your craft.

At the end of the day, ask what it is your students really need from you.  Anyone can make cutouts and handouts and PowerPoint presentations.  What do they need that only you can offer?  You must discover this, and it can only be done through philosophical reflection and exploration, which, fortunately, is open to anyone with a curious mind, a passionate heart, and a probing imagination.