Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part VI

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, this time asking why people seem unable to see God in His creation. "Cæli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentum." Psalm 19:2

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that we clearly know God through His creation, so how is it that so many can't do just that?

In his imaginary account of “The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,” a tale as fantastical as anything Mr G.K. Chesterton has ever spun, we are shown a place so strange and inviting that the reader longs to go there at once and be bathed in its wondrous beauties. Only gradually, however, do we discover that this singular and amazing place turns out to be our very own planet Earth, whose myriad enchantments we have remained completely impervious to our entire lives. How can it be that, surrounded by such obvious splendours, we have quite failed to notice any of them? Are we entirely blind to beauty?

But isn’t that, come to think of it, the whole point of travel? To restore the human hunger for wonder, the natural appetite for which we have allowed to atrophy for want of exercise? We certainly don’t wish to travel merely to confirm what we already know. And, heaven knows, we don’t want to go poking about an alien land where the natives are so positively weird you’d swear you had mistakenly wandered onto the set of a sci-fi movie. Are we really looking to spend our holiday in a place populated by pod people? Is that the itinerary we had in mind when setting out? Wasn’t it enough just seeing them on TV in The Night of the Living Dead?

“I have often had a fancy,” Chesterton tells us on the very first page of Orthodoxy, that great barn burner of a book, “for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.” Such an enviable mistake to have made! “What could be more delightful,” he asks, “than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?” 

It is the question we all face, which is to find the world both fascinatingly foreign in its sheer otherness and yet reassuringly familiar in its everyday design. Both strange and sedate, in other words, terrible yet tame, utterly extraordinary and yet somehow perfectly ordinary. “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” To be astonished, even, at ourselves, admittedly the strangest mystery of all. 

Chesterton certainly thought so. “At the back of his brain,” as someone once said of him, “there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at his own existence.” Only in his case, it was never forgotten. Nor should any of us forget it, for there is no end to the marvels in which we find ourselves immersed. 

Isn’t this why we’ve been blessed to possess an imagination in the first place? “The function of the imagination,” Chesterton points out, “is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” Here is the challenge life throws up at every turn: how to arrest the attention in such a way that we are moved simply to stand still and stare, awestruck before the world God made. 

“What is this life if, full of care,” asks the poet W.H. Davies, “we have no time to stand and stare.” And at what are we being asked to stare, to behold? The Italian poet Cesare Pavese has described it perfectly. He calls it, “Poetry, that is, the cosmic dignity of the particular…born from the moments in which we lift up our heads and discover—with stupor—life.”

We are not here to hallucinate about a world that isn’t there but, rather, to receive with open arms the one that is, present to our senses because God, Giver of all good gifts, brought them into being in order freely to bestow them upon us. As if He had plucked us all by the sleeve in order to show us the stars. “Look up,” He tells us, “I’ve got something you really need to see!” Or if straining your neck upward into the starry heavens is a bit of a stretch, then just throw open the nearest window and see how, as the poet Richard Wilbur advises, “The morning air is all awash / with angels.”

Sure, they may appear plain as a potato, but if we just look at them, seeing them as God sees them—which is to say, shining like the sun—we might just see things as though it were the very first day of creation.

So, when the weight of ennui settles upon the soul, threatening to reduce a world rich and strange to the level of meaningless banality, one needs a certain salutary jolt to get the circuits up and running again. To open up the hood, as it were, and allow a gust of fresh air to cleanse the palate, which has grown sour and stale, robbing us of that zest for life that had first been instilled in us as infants. 

Without that sense of wonderment running through existence, the astonishment occasioned by mere existence—“the impossible things that are,” T.S. Eliot calls them—we cannot awaken to a sense of the sheer largess of a God whose prodigalities loom ever before us. “That dearest freshness deep down things,” of which the poet Hopkins speaks, will have escaped our attention altogether.

Might there be a limit, I wonder, to how many miracles the mind can handle in a given day? The poet Robert Hass evidently thinks so. “It must be a gift of evolution,” he writes, “that human beings can’t sustain wonder. We’d never have gotten up from our knees if we could.” 

But not Chesterton, who wished that all the marvels and miracles might, as he put it, “settle on me like flies.” “There are plenty of them,” he reflected, being as innocent and wide-eyed as a young child feasting upon a table teeming with sweets. Indeed, he possessed the “gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe itself.” So completely besotted was he with stupefaction before the fact that things actually do exist that it never occurred to him that reality was less than luminously beautiful, drenched with the light and the warmth of God Himself.

Again, the mere fact of existence was enough to set his heart on fire. “A child of seven,” he tells us, “is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.” By God’s grace, Chesterton would never for a moment refuse to open that door, having remained perpetually three years old.

So, too, and in her own peculiar and reclusive New England way, the poet Emily Dickinson, who regarded life as a thing “so startling that it left little time for any other preoccupation.” Imagine if life were lived at that pitch! An intensity of attention paid to each passing moment. And not out of one’s surplus but drawn from the very substance of our soul. And were any of us to cease to be startled, no longer willing to take the risk of entering fully upon life, what would happen to us? We would be dead, dead, dead…

St. Thomas Aquinas assures us that every existence as such is good, a courtesy he dares to extend even to the demons, insofar, that is, as they exist. However bent their wills upon wickedness, on committing all manner of malice and mischief, their being nevertheless subsists entirely upon God, who will forever remain the sole sustaining source of their existence. 

All that exists does so on sufferance, which is to say, from One who alone is; so that from the wellsprings of God’s own being, all other life must necessarily borrow. We are all beggars before the great banquet of being. And while the demons cannot undo creation, cannot finally defeat even the least exertions of the great I AM WHO AM, they remain free to rail against God with bitter defiance coupled with unending despair.

Here, then, is a fact, a datum of existence, first struck by St. Thomas, that appears to the mind as so startling, so over-the-top amazing, as to leave one almost breathless with astonishment. Which accounts for the following observation which he sets down in his great Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, that between the poet and the philosopher, the saint and the sage, there is this striking interface, this happy point of unity and commonality, which precisely turns on their mutual capacity for wonder, for being able to marvel and take delight. 

And the thing that finally moves them to marvel and take delight, whether in doing so they wax poetical or with the soberer passion of philosophy scarcely matters, is the absolutely stunning fact that while neither the world nor ourselves need be at all, nevertheless both the world and ourselves do exist. And so we are moved to praise God for so wondrous and gratuitous a blessing as being, the most obvious and agreeable manifestation of which is the gift of creation.