When I was a young student in a Catholic elementary school, I remember actual theological discussions we had with the nuns. My interest in philosophy probably began there, although my intellectual passion at the time was astronomy. In one case, the sister (I can’t remember for sure which one) was trying to describe what Heaven would be like for those who died and went there. She described the supposedly supreme ecstasy of the Beatific Vision, but it was a sort of corollary of that vision that inspired me more, personally. You see, having a vision of God was not to be merely a visual experience for the blessed soul. It would involve the soul’s understanding God and His being in a much more profound way. She went on from there to perform a bit of theodicy and to give some assurance that the Church was not just a matter of mystery-mongering. There are many things we cannot understand in our fallen and restricted states, some profoundly important and others trivial. Why do bad things happen to seemingly innocent people? How can three distinct persons, at the some time, be one person? Is there a highest prime number? Sister admitted that these are mysteries to us now, but, if we manage to merit a divine reward, they will cease to be mysteries because our ability to understand will become enhanced and we will have access to all the information we need.
The idea that all questions would be answered in time was incredibly powerful to me. I guess it came out of a more basic desire to know coupled with a dim recognition of how very much I did not know. The idea of having all things explained was intoxicating to such a degree that I probably have never recovered from it. My childhood faith, such as it was, has waned and waxed, but I am left at the moment with no live hope of ever understand everything, or even of understanding a single thing in all its depth of detail and connection. I say that because I believe such understanding would take supernatural powers, such as completing an infinite task in a finite period of time. Even if I were equipped with such wonder-working powers, I would also have to undergo such profound transformations as an information processing being that I do not expect much of “me” would survive the transition. I am a radically finite, limited being. Promote “me” to something ethereal and unlimited, and the “me-ness” is lost. Sister, and the Church that stood behind her and which she was ably representing, to the extent they recognized a problem at all, had to contend that the finite, sin-prone, aspects are not of the soul’s true essence. They are adventitious dross to be cleansed away, leaving the pure True Self, pleasing to God. My current contention is that the finitude and limitedness are the whole show, the phenomenal self is the only self, and depictions of “true selves” are just that, depictions and not a flesh and blood reality like I am. Take away my specific characteristics, my limits, and you take me away too, leaving, at best, a bleached-out, featureless everyman, with nothing distinctive to mark out one individual from another.
Be all that as it may, a sort of “special case” of understanding a mystery comes to mind: seeing how it all comes out. As individuals, we almost always do not get to see the either the beginnings nor the endings of things. For many (most?) things we are born in the middle and die in the middle. I don’t think I’m all that unusual in craving understanding and the resolution that comes from finally seeing how something turns out. Almost all the stories we read or see depicted involve conflict followed by resolution. We, most of us, get upset by novelists or dramatists who end the story with plot elements left unresolved. We contrive events tied to specific dates in order to have an experience of definite resolution (weddings, graduations, sporting events, elections). We used to go to war, partly, to force definite resolutions of disputes, one way or the other. But, somehow, wars stopped working that way. After 1945, I see most wars producing no clear-cut or final resolution of the disputes that prompted them. Even the contrivances we make to set the stage for the experience of seeing how things come out do not really work, at least not for more than a moment, because things have the damnable quality of not standing still. Your team wins the championship, the bride is resplendently happy, whatever: time does not stop, and what was firmly resolved loses its firmness. Next season looms. The inevitable trials of actually living a married life begin. Short of death there is no final result, and even then, it’s only final for the one who dies. Assuming that death is death, no one gets to experience how things finally turn out because the only one who might is in no position to experience anything. What we want is an impossible thing, to see how things turn out in the end. It’s impossible because there is no end, but just a seamless process unfolding, one damn thing after another.
We have these images of final completion where events will be resolved or people will finally settle down to who they really are. That would require a stasis that is not available in the real world and that would probably be stultifying were we to approach it. Despite Sister Joseph’s hopeful assurance, I fear that such mysteries as how things will turn out will never be penetrated in any satisfying way for most of us, most of the time.
bgalbreath 