Jesus said about the Æon, the sacred realm, in an agraphon quoted in a little-known writing by John the Presbyter, “They who come in that (direction) will see. For these things are believable [only] to those who believe.” Here is my midrash on this agraphon, from THE WRITINGS OF JOHN -- Wittgenstein suggests logic can bring one to a new level of understanding, after which the ladder that gets one there is no longer of use. Here is how he concludes his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.) Thus are my propositions explanatory: one who understands me in the end knows them to be nonsensical when, by them – on them – above them, one has climbed above. (One must, so to speak, cast away the ladder once one has climbed upward by means of it.) But Jesus is saying in effect here that Wittgenstein is wrong: that logic is a ladder that has no secure echelon against which its upper end can be leaned. The higher we try to climb on the ladder, the more spectacular is our crash when the ladder tilts over and dashes us back down into the familiar ruts of thought. Even one rung up on the ladder and balance is lost. All we can do with the ladder of logic is plant one end in the ground of what we already know, restate it in different words, and pretend it is a newly discovered fact. “All cows are mammals, this is a cow, therefore this is a mammal.” Or, as Jesus’s statement here suggests, the only facts we can ever believe are those which we already believe. Our only choice, if we would climb upward into what we do not as yet know is to leap free from the ladder and out toward the stars – and that is the nature of faith. Jesus’s point was to be made again by Søren Kierkegaard many centuries later. Kierkegaard sought to escape this hall-of-mirrors nature of logical reasoning in which one always ends up at the starting point after Wittgenstein’s ladder has fallen down beneath us. His answer, often misunderstood as a “leap of faith” (he never uses that phrase) is to make a blind leap into faith. One way he puts it is thus: “Troen sker i et spring (Faith occurs in the leap).” And that brings us to the other side of Jesus’s statement: We can only believe if first we believe, we can only arrive at faith in God by starting out in faith: rational logic is fine so far as it goes, but it will never bring us to God. This is a restatement of the asymptotic principle. Using logic to push toward the Other, toward God, is like pushing toward the speed of light or absolute zero: the closer we get, the more energy is needed to continue to press forward, with the distance traversed toward that goal being ever smaller in inverse proportion to the amount of energy expended. Only poets, prophets, drunkards, and the insane for moments manage to leap the gap, but nobody truly knows how they do it, least of all they themselves, and nobody believes what they come back to tell us. Only God can bridge that gap for more than moments: we cannot get to God, but God can come to us and “make his home with us” – this is quite the point of all John’s writings – and enliven within us the divine image in which we were made. God comes to us, and it is for us to live according to the Logos, in perfect unity with God and all life. All human means for reaching this asymptotic goal are ineffective, but reason and logic are the least capable of all. It is impossible to invent a logical proof for the existence of God without logical holes in it (though Anselm came close), and if one ever were created, it would fail to convince anyone to believe in God, since faith is not a matter of reason. Therefore, those who try to persuade themselves or to proselytize others into accepting some spiritual dogma by means of logic will fail: the dogmas of all organized religions remain on this, the earthly, logic-bound side of the divide, and indeed to accept any dogma is to be chained to this world, rendered unable ever to leap into the everlasting arms of God. And those who realize correctly that logic will never get them to any spiritual reality and therefore on that basis decide there is no spiritual reality within reach of the ladder, calling themselves atheists or Gnostics, are also in their own way correct. Thus it is that the wise of this world tell us we would have to be crazy to leap away from that ladder, to fly into the unknown, toward the stars. Of course, their motives are suspect; they just want us to accept their offer to brainwash us into believing their invented dogma is the sacred truth, that their ladder will take us up to heaven, for by this means they can keep us docile and obedient. Still, they are correct to warn us – only the madmen, the drunkards, the visionaries, and the poets ever leap out and away into the infinity that surrounds that safe little ladder, and these courageous fools only soar cometlike for a moment before crashing in flames, and then, the few who survive the fall back to ordinary reality, they forever after try and fail to recapture that moment when they were a star themselves, burning among the constellations. As Sappho says in A Mirror Filled with Light, “They go out, like the stars that fall from the night sky, in a last brief blaze of meaningfulness.” But it is those still clinging tightly to the ladder whom we must pity the most, for they have no means to understand what it is like to fly free, let alone believe that they can at any time relinquish the security of the ladder to which they cling tightly, but rather for an instant and an eternity grasp the very stars themselves. This is what Jesus means here, and so much more that cannot be put into words.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:07:24 +0000
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