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Horizon City There’s a neat little article by Mark Goldblatt on reason’s relationship to the concept of infinity, and hence, to God; it is unfortunately given the idiot title “theology is dead” (the title is probably not the writer’s fault).  As with most modern writing, the best part is when he borrows the thoughts of a much older writer, in this case the fifteenth-century Nicholas of Cusa, the genius bishop of Brixen.  Nicholas was made a bishop by pope Nicholas V, who was if nothing else not hostile to learning.  It’s unlikely you’d find a Catholic bishop today who would define God, as Nicholas did, as “an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (what would this do to eucharistic theology?  I read Cusa tried to suppress pilgrimages to famed (and almost assuredly bogus) “bleeding hosts”).  Joseph Campbell was an admirer of Cusa, probably through Jung.  I know of him through Campbell and Jung; I have never seen a book of Cusa’s in the flesh.  Goldblatt paraphrases his arguments on the coincidentia oppositorum, a major theological concern of Campbell and Jung:

where can i buy Ivermectin Think of a circle, he said, and then think of a straight line. By definition, the circle is not a line, and the line is not a circle. Now suppose that you’re sitting on a sand beach, with a wood stick in your hand, about to draw the circumference of a circle that is exactly one foot in diameter. So you start at the bottom, and you curl upwards after only a moment—after all, the circle is only one foot in diameter. If you don’t start curling upwards soon enough, the circle will wind up too large. On the other hand, if the diameter of the circle you’re about to draw is 10 feet, your upward curl will be more gradual. It’s going to take longer. You’re going to have to stand up and walk the stick around the circumference of the circle. The larger the diameter of the circle you are about to draw, the slower your upward curl is going to be. To draw a circle with a 100 foot diameter, you’re going to have to drag the stick through the sand with an upward curl so gradual it will seem at first almost indiscernible.

Now think of an infinite circle, a circle whose diameter equals infinity. If the diameter of the circle is infinite, think what that would do to the circumference of the circle. If you try to draw an infinite circle in the sand, starting at the bottom, you’ll never even begin to curve upwards. For the moment you begin to curve upwards, you limit the diameter of the circle—you render it finite.

Except that if you never begin to curve upwards, but just go on and on, you’re drawing a straight line, not a circle. You will go on and on towards infinity in a straight line without ever curving upwards. That’s how Cusa came to the conclusion that an infinite circle is an infinite line. By definition, of course, a circle is not a line. But at infinity, a circle is what it is not. Only at the point of infinity, Cusa argues, are contradictories reconciled.

It was at the point of infinity that Cusa found God. God is the Coincidentia Oppositorum—the Coincidence of Opposites. He is where things become what they are not. “God is the absolute maximumness and absolute unity,” Cusa writes, “preceding and uniting things that are absolutely different and distant, for example, contradictories, between which there is no mean.” In other words, God is the point at which contradictions merge into identities, at which is and is not become one.

Goldblatt goes to some lengths to show that such contradictories – A is not A – are not allowable logically, and hence “theology is dead” – or more precisely “rational theology” is dead.  Considering that this article appeared in “Reason” magazine, I suppose he has to conclude that anything outside logic is impermissible.  It would have been slightly more productive to tease out what it means that our logic can be so easily stymied.  It is, on the one hand, a gift to theologians – “here human powers fail, and something else begins” – but, on the other hand, a reproof to rationalistic theologians, who do not properly recognize the truly transcendent nature of their subject matter.

But it is a remarkable fact of thought, that the infinite circle and the infinite line should be the same; or (in another example provided) that the more sides a polygon has, the more it resembles a circle, which has no sides.

And do we not see this everywhere?  The opposites are more united than we think.  You may have a discussion of how fragmented and atomistic our society is, with individuals living alone and solipsistically as never before – and also how connected and borg-like our society is, with communities linked together and people incapable of independence as never before.  One is tempted sometimes to think, “we are more isolated, and hence more connected, more free, and hence more enslaved, more intelligent, and hence stupider, than ever before.”  We need a container larger than reason for thoughts like this.