he was banishing himself, as he soon came to find to his own cost.
On the other hand, what may we say of Cordelia’s “Nothing”? Does it belong to the Western male-oriented tradition of Lear and Aristotle and the Schools? Or doesn’t it rather belong to the Eastern female-oriented tradition of Tao and Zen? Or may I not say, in the tradition of the Schools, “Addo tertium”, I add a third?
But how can there be a third in between the West and the East, in between Man and Woman, in between Being and Non-Being? Isn’t the very idea of a third impossible? Doesn’t it make nonsense of the Principle of Contradiction, even when that principle is denied?
Well, as the angel said, “With God all things are possible.” And as Edgar said, “The clearest gods make them honors of men’s impossibilities.” In other words, let us think not of what is or is not possible, but of what is actual.
After all (once again), in between the tradition of the West, in Europe, and the tradition of the East, in Asia, there is the tiny state of neither West nor East in Israel. Here the Israelites, subsequently known as the Jews, from the one tribe of Judah, were unique among the nations, or goyim, surrounding them. Here they were neither West nor East, but themselves alone. Looking back as they did to the one God who revealed himself to Moses, and looking forward as they did to the one Messiah as revealed by the prophets, they were themselves alone.
All too glibly we speak of the tradition of the West as Christian, and that of the East as Buddhist, with the Middle East as Muslim. But Christianity is neither of the West nor of the East but, like Israel out of which it came, itself alone. And it is in Christianity, in the Christian Bible, enshrined in both the Old and the New Testament, that we find two meanings of Nothing, with its capital letter, in the sense intended by Cordelia – as opposed to the Aristotelian sense intended by Lear.
Then, what do we find in the Old Testament, in the very beginning of the account of creation, but the creation by God of everything out of nothing? In the beginning we read of the Spirit moving over the face of the waters, where all was waste and void. And there we read of the Word uttered over the deep, “Let there be light!” And there was light, the light seen by the perceptive eyes of our fundamentalists. And there was the Big Bang heard by the sensitive ears of our scientists.
And what do we find in the New Testament, in the very beginning of the Gospel according to John, but the incarnation of the Word of God? For there we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and then, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” in the person of Jesus Christ.
This is what Paul in his letter to the Philippians calls “the self-emptying” (or kenosis ) of the Word, in making himself “Nothing” in order to recall us to “Being”. This is what he also says in his letter to the Romans, God “calls those things that are not as those that are”, in raising to the fullness of Being those that are falling into Non-Being.
On Creation
“From life’s dawn it is drawn down.” Thus it was, says Hopkins, even from the time of Cain and Abel. Once there are two of a kind, especially among human beings, one faces the fact of fraternal strife. As we also say, “So many minds, so many opinions.” Birds of a feather may flock together, but that is rarely true of human beings. In the human race, for all our scientific specification as homo sapiens, we seem to be driven not so much by a centripetal as by a centrifugal force, into what Jesus foresees as “wars and rumors of war”.
Among us, as Paul says, it is necessary for heresies to exist. What he means is that they can’t be helped. The more one tries to put them down, the more they flourish, like bad smells. Or rather, like daisies on a lawn, the more they are trodden under foot, the more densely they flower, making a white path on the green.
Thus in the early Church we have Athanasius against the Arians, Augustine against the Pelagians, Cyril against the Nestorians. Later, in Shakespeare’s time we have the Protestants against the Papists, the Calvinists against the Arminians, the Jesuits against the Dominicans and the Jansenists. And then there is the one Jesuit theologian Bellarmine against the one scientist Galileo.
Concerning such men and their opinions, TS Eliot makes the magisterial comment, “These men and those who opposed them and those whom they opposed accept the constitution of silence and are folded in a single party.” But what does he know? As the French say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The names may change with the men, but their opinions have a tendency to remain.
Of the above-mentioned names, it is surely that of Galileo which is still remembered in our day. And it is assumed that, if he is still remembered, he must be right and his opponent must be wrong. Yet it is wittily pointed out by Bellarmine’s biographer that of the two adversaries Bellarmine was the better scientist, and Galileo the better theologian. How so? Well, the former warned the latter that in science “truth” is invariably relative, not absolute, and the latter retorted that in the interpretation of Holy Scripture the sense of the human author has to be taken into account.
Anyhow, the controversy between them still remains in another form. It even recurs in the headlines of modern newspapers and magazines. It sounds like a rehash of the old controversy of science v. religion, going back to the age of Darwin and Huxley. Today’s Darwinists are represented by the vocal followers of the similar-sounding name of Dawkins, while the religionists, mostly American fundamentalists, are called Creationists. The former profess their faith in the Big Bang, and the latter in the creative Word of God, “Let there be light!” On both sides it is a question of faith.
Now, in face of this continuing dispute, what, I may be asked, is my position, or my considered opinion? Well, like Newman when faced with Darwin’s Origin of Species, I feel disposed to agree with both parties to the dispute.
On the one hand, the divine Word uttered in the beginning of the Book of Genesis, “Let there be light!” is my favorite word in the Bible. I like to see everything in the created universe, from the stars above to the flowers below, as echoes of this creative word. What I don’t like are the dark holes, to which modern scientists are devoting increasing attention, or the wars, which human beings are increasingly waging with each other with the assistance of modern scientists.
On the other hand, I also like to think of the created universe as beginning, if I may misuse the words of TS Eliot, with a Big Bang, not a little whimper. What the fundamentalists see in the Bible as an original light, the scientists hear as a result of their academic calculations as a Big Bang. But, apart from the difference in the senses of sight and sound, I find no opposition between the light and the bang. On the one hand, there is a Biblical imagination, and on the other, a scientific imagination.
All the same, there still remains the problem posed by the fundamentalists, or the creationists (as their opponents like to call them), to the scientists. What was there before the Big Bang? If there was nothing, how did something come out of nothing? After all, doesn’t Aristotle say, with his customary appeal to human reason, “Nothing will come of nothing”? And then, doesn’t Aristotle, as the forerunner of our scientists, not to mention Galileo, take the side of Lear? And don’t the creationists take the side of Cordelia? And doesn’t that mean they are also on the side of Shakespeare?
Thus for me it looks as if this modern controversy of science v. religion, or Dawkins v. creationism, boils down to that between Lear with his two false daughters and his one true daughter Cordelia, with whom he is reunited at the end. Then, in so far as I have to make a choice, I prefer to side with Cordelia, and behind her with Shakespeare, and behind him with the religious view of the universe, and behind that view with the divine utterance, “Let there be light!”
After all, the Big Bang espoused by our modern scientists is, it can’t be denied, a big noise. And in our modern world we have too much noise, or rather too many noises of varying descriptions, with all of them adding up to a cacophony which is all too like a chaos of conflicting opinions. On the other hand, there is something “so cool, so calm, so bright” in the simple command of God, “Let there be light!” It sounds so eminently reasonable in contrast to the “rational” calculations of our scientists. Though