“‘All manner of things shall be well’; for He wills that we be aware that the least little thing shall not be forgotten.” –Julian of Norwich1
“But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God.” –G. K. Chesterton2
“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” –Henry Adams3
The great passage on memory is found in Augustine’s Confessions. Our memory gives us the assurance that we exist over time, something that makes us wonder if our existence belongs only to time, whether also a completeness hovers about it. We remember a heavy snow fall across from our grandmother’s house by the railroad tracks in Eagle Grove when we were about six. We, the same person, also recall the fright at looking back down the just climbed pyramid outside Mexico City when we were about forty-two. We wondered how the Aztecs ever managed to walk, heads up, down these sheer, deep steps, at least those who came down walking. It is not possible that any other person in the history of the world ever has had these two memories together in the same person in the same way, especially, with much embarrassment, recalling the need to crawl on one’s stomach to descend at all. The Aztecs did not put safety railings on their pyramids, nor do the Mexicans. The memory lasts, my memory.
“Therefore, I remember that I have remembered, just as, if I recall the fact that at this time I have been able to remember these things, it will be through the power of memory that I so recall it,” Augustine wrote in book ten of the Confessions. He added, “this same memory contains also the affections of my mind. It contains them not in the manner in which the mind itself experiences them at their time, but in another very different way…. For without being joyful I remember myself to have experienced joy, and without being sad I call to mind my past sadness; without fear I remember that of which I was once afraid….” We abide over time. Joy and sadness we recall. We put our experiences into a particular place. We do not forget them. Without fear, even with laughter, we recall being frightened of the downward incline from Teotihuacán. In retrospect, it looks differently, but we know we were there. Without fear, we remember that we were afraid to do what any Aztec apparently did every day.
Aristotle asks the perceptive question: “whether we would want our friends to be someone else, kings or gods?” He thinks not. The whole point of a friend is that he is not ourselves, that he is who he is. Our memory of past events sometimes can incite us to ask the same question of ourselves. Would we want to be someone else? Aristotle takes it for granted that the answer to this latter question, in every case, is “no.” We would not, on thinking it out, want to be someone else. The old spiritual masters used to tell us that we should be very cautious about wanting someone else’s life, about envying their wealth, beauty, intelligence, or condition. We do not know really what they have to cope with. It is wiser to stick with the lot we are given, not to pine for the one that someone else is given. When St. Paul was bemoaning his lot, which does not appear to have been easy, he was told, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Not even God wants us to be someone else other than who we are. As to what we are, we are not beings of our own making. The alternative to ourselves is not someone else, but nothing else.
Yet, now that he is in the news, we recall that it was said of Judas, on high authority, that it would have been better if he had not been born. This is tough doctrine. Must we conclude here that God somehow botched it, contradicted Himself? If it was in His power to be at the origin of even Judas, why let him be, foreknowing what he would do? The very same question can be asked of any of us, no doubt. Not a few people have betrayed their friends. The doctrine that “as long as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me” makes every life, when sorted out, a direct reflection of the relation of Christ to Judas. It also means that every life, including that of Judas, is full of unsuspected drama. If we could but see it, the ultimate choices take place in the great and in the small. The worth of every life contains its own drama.
We can wonder, with Henry Adams, whether our education “ruined” us. Did it so confuse us that we call what is wrong “right,” and what is right “wrong?” Education should teach us about what is. Or did it give us a mental world unrelated to what is? Those who wish to rehabilitate Judas, to “save” him, as it were, do not want to allow anyone born of woman not to be “saved,” whatever they do. They separate our being from our doing such that the latter does not affect the former. Yet in our human case, the whole purpose of existing is the possibility of our doing, of knowing and acting because of our being, a being which we did not give ourselves. The logic of saving Judas involves, in principle, the making him to be someone else who did not do what he did.
The saving of Judas is, consequently, the saving of everyone. If Judas is saved, all of us are saved. That position is only consoling if we think our acts do not matter. Theology exists behind our musings. Our view of God becomes, not that He desires everyone to be saved, but that He in fact saves everyone, whether anyone likes it or not. Yet, we still want to conclude, with scripture, both that it would have been better for a Judas not to be born and that it is good that he was born. Can we reconcile these apparently irreconcilable positions? Is the saving of Judas, and everyone, the only alternative to save God from being cruel in creating him in the first place? But if we save everyone, including Judas, what ultimately do we have to worry about? Indeed, what is the purpose of our existence since none of our deeds or thoughts likewise really matter? The defense of human dignity requires the defense of Judas’ choice to do what he did and, subsequently, to take the consequences for it.
Julian of Norwich, in a famous passage of her Shewings, tells us that “all will be well.” We are comforted by such a lovely passage. Indeed, it a doctrine of the faith, really. God is at peace. Nothing that we can do can change this. We do not have power over God. Yet, we perhaps underestimate God’s own will towards us. Julian also goes on to tell us that not the “least little thing” will be forgotten. Is this “not forgetting,” in her mind, designed to comfort us or unsettle us, or perhaps both? We assume that if it is God’s will that we be reminded that “not the least little thing will be forgotten,” we must conclude that our very knowledge of this affirmation is also intended for our benefit, that all will be well. But, in other terms, this is also the affirmation that omne ens est bonum, that every thing that is, is good, is worthy to be. We know that what is wrong, what is evil, exists in a world in which God is at peace and that every being is good. What is not good thus serves what is good.
Julian stated not merely that omne ens est bonum but that “all will be well,” almost as if not all things are well yet. We need not deny our experience that all is not immediately well. But why is all “not yet” well? Judas, to return to him, like everyone else, indeed like the “least little thing,” in his given being, is good. Was it possible for Judas not to have done what evidently he did? If he too is a free human being, as he is, it was possible. Here is the crux of the matter. Christ might have died by a tree falling upon him, or of having been bitten by a mad dog, or from malaria. However, He did die as the result of a public trial, the events of which were foretold. They included the betrayal of Judas. Judas’s sin in this treacherous act is said to be less than those who actually concocted and carried out the legal side of the capital punishment meted out. We are not particularly concerned with the guilt of the Roman soldiers who carried out the orders to fix Christ to the Cross. These men were not the direct causes of the heinousness of the act, which itself is said to be part of the divine plan for the redemption of all sins.
Christ actually called Judas “friend,” in the very process of His arrest. Finally, however, Judas threw the silver back to the officials who gave it to him. He hanged himself, not a pious act. We generally call this hanging not “repentance” but despair. Can we yet say that “all is well?” that a certain justice was carried out? Without the particular action of Judas, the drama of Christ’s death would have had different details, no doubt. Other devices for the same result were available to Christ’s accusers.
In what sense would it have been better for him, for Judas, not to have been born? For him “not” to have been born would mean that he would not exist at all. Speaking of himself alone, in comparison to his actual fate, nothingness would have been preferable. Why? Not because of the goodness that his own existing being implied. But all human beings must decide what their given existence shall be by their doing, by their acting according to the reality they are. Otherwise there is no reason for them to exist at all. The nothingness that is the alternative to Judas’ existence is the alternative that God had in the first place with regard to all being. He called into good existences that need not have existed, including the least little thing.
Man does not exist as an afterthought to the existence of the universe. The universe rather exists as an afterthought, or necessary presupposition, to man. Is this preposterous? Someone recently sent me a series of graphic illustrations about the comparative size of our planet to other bodies in the universe. We are larger than Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto. But we are considerably smaller than Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter, all of which are smaller than the Sun. However, the Sun in our galaxy, compared to other suns, is not particularly large. And our galaxy is no great shakes either. Indeed, when we come down to the really largest bodies in the universe, by comparison, we are but the tiniest speck, barely existing in size or prominence. Such reflections, as Pascal once said, “frighten” us. That is to say, they frighten us if we see them as “proofs” that neither we nor the cosmos have any importance or history that we can comprehend. But is smallness an argument for meaninglessness?
“Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it under the form of something infinitely small,” Simone Weil wrote.4 The principle enunciated here explains the Incarnation, an event that takes place in a very out-of-the-way place, on the very small planet in a solar system “lost in the cosmos,” to use Walker Percy’s phrase. The “least little thing shall not be forgotten.” Spirit is not limited by matter but limits it, makes it what it is. All things will be well.
Not to have been born at all participates in nothingness. From nothingness, nothing comes. It is good that things exist that can decide their destiny but not their being. The good of the universe includes finite beings who are not gods. The infinite spaces do not behold themselves. Some finite beings behold the spaces. The question is posed to them, “Are you glad that all this, which you did not make, exists?”
Memory is of what we have experienced. We are leery of those who “remember” what they did not know. The same Augustine who spoke so much of memory also bridged the gap that was caused by Plato in his proof for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. There, we recall, one of the evidences for the immortality of the soul was likewise based on memory. How did a soul know things if they were always changing? But it did know them. Therefore, it had to know them before it existed. It had to remember them, having seen them before this life. Knowledge was not a beholding of things encountered in life’s finite beginning. Rather, it is a constant return, constant reincarnation of the same soul into new bodies.
This solution had elements of truth, but it jeopardized the newness of the unique beginning of the life of a rational being. Knowing, in fact, was not initially remembering, but seeing, encountering the “least little things” and not forgetting them. The reason that they are not forgotten is that each tiny thing leads in its own way to all that is. It is ever connected with that which stands outside of nothingness.
Chesterton tells us that there is among us, in a very real sense, “the presence of the absence of God.” Simone Weil said pretty much the same thing: “God can be present in creation only under the form of absence.”5
“Negative theology” has long said that we know God by knowing what He is not. We know Him from the things that are. We remove their limitations in order to have some idea of what really is. Are these contrasts of presence and absence merely paradoxes? Is it even intelligible to the ordinary man to speak of a thing as present when it is absent, or absent when it is present?
If one has a parent who is dead and a parent who is alive, no doubt it would make sense to say that the presence of one’s living parent makes the absence of the other parent present to us. The friendship we have with someone recalls the friend, who may be absent. We want our friend to remain our friend even if he is absent. We do not want our preset friend to change into a god or a monarch.
God can be present in creation only after the manner of “absence.” If God were present in creation after the manner of His presence, we would not be particularly or directly concerned with a creation that pointed to Him. Or to put the matter conversely, it is precisely because God is not present in creation, because He is absent, that we can examine all those lovely things that do in fact exist. And when we encounter them in existence, one by one in their infinite variety, what is it we discover? We discover the presence of an absence.
The wonder of creation, to slightly change the wording, is that it does not ruin everyone concerned with it. But something within existence evidently makes us wonder about it. We think of what we know of Judas. We realize that the risk of failing what we are is possible to all of us. Some, many or few we do not know, do put themselves into a position wherein it would have been better had they, created good, not have been born. The reverse side of this same proposition, one that not even God can escape, is that the cosmos does not look at itself or know itself except through our human eyes and our minds. God finally, we are told in Genesis, sees that it is all very good.
We exist in order to see the very same thing, that what is, is good. And to do so, we must remember all the little things we know, the very little things. We must actually see that they are good, that “all manner of things shall we well.” It takes the presence of the universe to realize what is indeed absent.
And finally we remember why we are “restless.” It is not for its own sake that we are so, but for the sake of what is absent, to which all that is good that we do encounter points. If we could not ourselves freely reject all manner of things, we could not have them given to us. We could not in our turn praise them for what they are and for the absence which points to their actual presence, which we see before us.
“For without being joyful, I remember myself to have experienced joy,” Augustine wrote. What the presence of the joy, that we actually remember, also points to is the absence of a complete joy, to which it constantly points even in its being a limited joy. This is our remembered experience of the joys we know. We are finite beings, specks of existence, as it were, placed in the vast universe to behold it, to praise it because it is. Nothingness can no longer be an option to those who, being immortal, when offered a beauty, even their own, accept it only on their own terms.
Once the choice of creating the rational creature was made, that creature was offered everything, not nothing. His only alternative was, on rejecting everything, to choose himself. This alternative, evidently, some have in fact chosen. This is an alternative each of us could choose if we would.
We were never offered a paltry glory. “God can be present in creation,” to recall Simone Weil, “only in the form of absence.” God is present in creation keeping it in existence, since only God causes being, which He brings forth from nothingness. What Simone Weil referred to by absence was not nothingness. Rather she was aware of how the kinds of beings we are, beings ultimately made for the vision of God, can know God when we do not yet have that vision before us. We know it as absence. And only in this can we ultimately rejoice, that what is, is good, that the being we know, is not itself the cause of what is. Only on this basis can we be assured that nothing will be forgotten, that “all manner of things will be well.”
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