Christianity and Endings

The eighth of the Treatises of S. Caecilius Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (Google Books has John Henry Newman's 1839 translation) has some interesting stuff in it. As Rebecca West notes in her 1933 Life of Augustus, the point of this letter was to explain to he was wrong in supposing 'that the Christians' refusal to worship the gods was the reason for the wars and famines then vexing the world.' The letter starts with a hefty piece of chastisement of Cyprian's political powerful, Pagan reader:

The uproar of sacrilege and impiety which you are wont to raise against the one and the true God, I have heretofore, Demetrianus, passed over in contempt, thinking it more decent and better to put the scorn of silence upon a mistaken man's ignorance, than provoke a madman's frenzy by what I should say. Neither was I without authority of the divine instruction, herein, since it is written, "Speak not in the ears of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of they words". We are commanded also to keep what is holy within our own knowledge, and not to expose it to be trodden on by swine and dogs.

West thinks 'it must have taken a considerable degree of vitality for Cyprian to address in such terms an important representative of the government that not only has the power to put him to death but was ready to exercise it'. I'm not so sure whether this isn't a cannier piece of psychological teasing, an invitation to the Consul to come inside the tent rather than lurk outside with the swine and dogs. Anyhow, what's interesting is what follows. To quote West again: 'after much hearty thwacking of this sort he went on to propound a theory very strange to find in a man of naturally cheerful temperament and not ungratified ambitions:

You must in the first place learn (since you are ignorant of the divine teaching, and a stranger to the truth,) that the world is now reaching its old age, that it stands no longer in its pristine strength, no longer keeps its indwelling vigour and force. This though ourselves should speak it not, though we should draw no instructions of it from the holy Scriptures and the divine teaching, still the world itself declares it, and attests its own ruin in the tottering estate of tilings. The showers of winter fail us, for nourishing the seeds; the sun s heat in summer for ripening the corn; nor in springtide do the fields display their usual growth, and the trees of autumn are barren of their accustomed issue. Mountains disembowelled and ransacked yield a shortened store of marble layers ; the exhausted mines send up but a scanty wealth of silver and of gold; their impoverished veins day by day are narrowed and minished, while the husband man languishes in the fields, the sailor at sea, the soldier in the camp; honesty sinks in the mart, justice from the tribunal, love from friendships, skill from the arts, and discipline from conduct. Suppose you that the coherence of a thing that is decaying can continue in that strength, wherewith it flourished in its youthful and thriving season ? Needful is it that that must wax weak, which is now drawing near its end, and verges downward to the close. It is thus that the descending sun darts his rays with an obscured and impeded lustre, and that the moon, as her course declines, contracts her exhausted horns; thus that the tree once green and fertile puts on the graceless barrenness of the sere boughs in age, and the fountain which once poured out the large effluence of its overflowing veins, worn out by time, scarcely trickles with an insufficient moisture. It is a sentence passed upon the world, it is God s law, that as things rose so they should fall, as they waxed so should wane, the strong become weak, and the great become little; and weak and little when they are, then should they gain their end. [199-200]

I've quoted this at length, since it's good to get a flavour of how vehemently Cyprian bangs this particular drum.

I wonder if a fascination with endings isn't so tightly woven in with the very beginnings of Christianity that now it could never get unpicked, no matter how much the faith pays lipservice to the Christian message of radical newness and freshness coming into the world, or the Easter message that endings as such (like death) have been done away with now. It's a pretty radical heresy, it seems to me, to take that double-message and turn it on its head: to believe wholeheartedly that the world is clapped-out and dying, that the cosmos is so exhausted that its final extinction is just around the corner, that the importnat parts of the NT are not the gospels but the cartoon muddle and ennui of the Revelation of Saint John. And actually, I don't suppose 'heresy' can even be the right word for a belief that shapes the worldview of the majority of a given faith. The word for that, howevermuch it drinks from the cup of (what has always been officially attacked as one of the worst sins) despair -- is orthodoxy.

Boastle

What does the Bible say? Does it discourse upon the fragility of man? No -- it says: fish swallow us, but we come out alive. Giants assail us, but we come out alive. Death possesses us but we come out alive.

Drunk

Why do we get drunk? For the intoxication? Or the aftermath? Because the experience of intoxication itself, whilst pleasurable (I guess: I mean—yes?), is fundamentally banal. Whereas the experience of hangover, of post-drunken-excess guilt, has about it something more profound. It is by-and-large physically and psychologically disagreeable of course; but it carries within that temporary discomfort a mustard-seed of existential resonance. It says: I survived, which is to say: I can survive. I poisoned myself, but I have physically survived the trauma. I humiliated myself in public, but I have psychologically survived the shame. It’s addictive, that sense of survivability. No wonder we have a problem, as a society.

Presence

'Nothing says that the present reduces to presence' (Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative)

'Presence is not a quality or a property of the thing. Presence is the act by which the thing is put forward: prae-est. It is put forward or in front of its nature as a thing, and of everything which immerses this nature in the world of its connections: origins, relations, process, finalities and becomings. The nature of the thing is in its birth, as the word "nature" indicates, and in its unfurling within these relations. It can subsist only in this movement, and its permanence is in the passing. But presence is the act that subtracts a thing as it passes. In this way it subtracts the thing from its thingness, or it withdraws the thingness from the thing — that is, all the reality of the res — in the single foregrounding, in this single advancement. This advancement is that of the present. The present is not ahead in time, for that which is ahead in time in relation to a past, is immediately behind in relation to a future. Unless the contrary is true. But in either sense, the present in time is nothing: it is pure time, the pure present of time, and thus its pure presence, that is, the negativity of the passing. From "already no longer" to "not yet", is a passage without pause, a step not taken, neither disposed nor exposed, inexposable, only and ceaselessly deposing all things.' (Jean-Luc Nancy, 'The Technique of the Present')

Can't both be right. Talk of the prescence of the present only makes sense if the present contains the future in some nascent form? Impossible to tease the present out of the flow; but then again -- maybe we just don't have the right tools.

Pierce Ploughman

Part 19, shortened.

So when I woke up and I wrote it all down,
And dressed myself neatly in pants, shirt and gown;
And dashed off to mass to get myself shrived
Got there late and flustered and sleep-deprived
And fell asleep again, propped sitting in the pew
And dreamt the whole damn dream again, right through.

Durrell pastiche

Who says Lawrence Durrell was incapable of self-parody? This, from Zero and Asylum in the Snow (1946):

On Tuesday there will be a jewelled hush, an audit. The walks will be dressed in snow, the bushes incandescent with birds. Everything fallen into a divine abyss of lull, poem, zodiac, frost, butter. Perhaps today is the day, I do not know. I find it difficult to tell.

Spot on!

Space and time

Traditionally, there are four pillars of the debate. You might wish to say that Space and Time are each a thing, each of them a particular kind of thing in which other things, like bodies, are contained. That is what Newton thought. Or you might wish to say, following Aristotle, that space and time are attributes of things rather than things themselves (in the Physics Aristotle distinguishes between a thing and its topos, its place, the latter not being identical with the body, since a thing can change its place without changing its thinginess). Or, perhaps you’re minded to agree with Leibniz, and say that space and time are relations between things. Or, maybe you’re persuaded by Kant, and his argument that space and time are ideas our intuitions necessarily impose upon our sensations and thoughts—that they are forms of our sensibility and therefore transcendentally ideal. Kant believed that we can only talk about phenomena ‘being in’ space and time; not the ding-an-sich, the thing in itself. Einstein modifies Newton, arguing that space and time are actually aspects of the same thing (‘spacetime’) artificially divided by our perceptions. Heidegger disagreed, and held that time was different to space because—for instance—it is possible to go backward and forward in space, but not in time (I can go back to Canterbury; but I cannot go back to 1977. As if I would ever want to). Einsteinians might say: this happens to be true of me, and something similar happened to be true of Heidegger, but that these are particular not universal circumstances: that given the right equipment, which I happen not to possess, I could go back to 1977 – as if a man in 1700, considering that he personally could not travel at 100 mph, decided thereupon that ‘100mph’ was a radically different sort of thing to 5mph or 15 mph. Such a man would be an idiot.)

So, here comes Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time (2010). Here’s David Kaiser’s LRB summary of Penrose:

During the earliest moment of one aeon, the universe would be hot and dense, as our observable was right after the big bang. When temperatures are much greater than particles’ masses, particles behave as if they had essentially no mass at all: they zip around at nearly the speed of light, just as photons do. That’s critical, because the behaviour of massless particles involves no inherent reference scale—no baseline unit of length or time, no metre stick or calibration clock against which other measures might compare. As far as a photon is concerned time simply does not flow. A spacetime filled with massless particles would have no inherent scales by which to measure length or time. It would be governed, in other words, by conformal geometry: shapes and angles would have meaning, but overall distances would not. Remarkably, the end of an aeon might behave in much the same way. As the universe expands and cools after the beginning of a cycle, the ambient temperature would drop (looking, for observers within that epoch, just as our own big-bang universe does to us). Massive [I guess he means ‘massy’] particles like electrons, protons, hydrogen atoms and all the rest would gradually lose energy; they would no longer zip around as fast as massless photons do. In that regime, length and time and scale would emerge; the symmetries of conformal geometry would be suppressed. The universe would behave as ours does today. Pockets of dust would clump and, fuelled by the energy of gravitational collapse, ignite into the nuclear reactors we call stars. [LRB 17 Feb 2011, 36-37]

A couple of things follow from this, or seem to. One is that the idea that spacetime itself, not only things inside space time, is in motion—expanding and contracting, for instance, and for some of that time ‘moving’ faster than light. Another is that ‘length and time and scale’ belong to a different logic than do ‘shapes and angles’—which seems to us counterintuitive, but is no less true for all that.

So much for the behaviour of the universe after a few tens of billions of years. We know from supernova measurements and WMAP data that our universe will almost certainly never collapse back on itself but continue to expand for ever. So Penrose presses on: what will our universe look like after, say, ten-to-the-hundred years? By that late time nearly all of the extant matter would be likely to have fallen into black holes. Indeed swarms of black holes would have swallowed each other, forming supermassive black holes. But even black holes, it turns out, are not foolproof containers. Stephen Hawking demonstrated 35 years ago that black holes should radiate, slowly but surely emitting energy in the form of low-energy light.

I don’t get this, I’ll confess. I always thought Hawking Radiation was generated by particles at the event horizon being split into positive and negative, the former being emitted and the latter falling into the black hole. But if we posit a single supermassive black hole as the end of the material cosmos, what is there outside the black hole (as it were) to be split in this fashion and so radiate out? I’m missing something obvious here, I don’t doubt. Anyhow:

Black holes behave like cosmic rubbish compactors; swallowing up massive detritus and ever so slowly seeping energy back into the cosmos in the form of massless protons. The process might contribute inexorably, until the black holes themselves evaporate. A nearly empty universe would be left, containing virtually nothing but massless particles—a spacetime once again governed by conformal geometry.

Penrose’s argument is that this end-point can be ‘stitched’ onto the beginning point; that the metahistory of the cosmos entails a process of ‘falling into’ time for many billions of years, until time itself dissolves form the picture, and the whole thing can start again. I’d like to imagine a civilisation finding a way to thread matter precisely amongst a geometrically counterbalanced network of black holes, and effectively putting an end to this cycle. Unlikely, but possible, surely? I’m also struck by the idea that massy spacetime and massless space might exist in a superposition, a kind of spacetimespace. What happens at the moment of transition? Is it like the weirdness of water becoming ice (in which case, is there a 4⁰ greatest density equivalent?). Very intriguing.