Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XV

Part XV in a series.

Five centuries before the arrival of the One whose coming among us would change everything, there lived a wily old Greek by the name of Heraclitus, a philosopher so fixated on the idea of change that it became for him the one constant in a universe where nothing will ever be constant. “No man may step into the same river twice,” he famously said, “for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”    

“Nothing endures but change,” is another of his gnomic sayings that have come down to us. Or that when the sun comes up, which it predictably does each day, it will always be a new and different sun. Or, even more enigmatic, his insistence that nothing ever simply is but that all remains ever in a state of becoming.

Determined to state his case as persuasively as possible, Heraclitus pointed to the power of fire, seeing in its consuming destructiveness the most apt symbol for a world forever in flux. Even speech, he thought, will turn devouringly on those who practice it. Does it not dare to fix a content to what is forever changing?

In the circumstance, he said, to say nothing at all would be an improvement on saying anything. Never mind, of course, the unwitting irony of deploying speech for the purpose of urging its suppression. Thus do we read of a certain zealous disciple of Heraclitus correcting his master on the matter of not stepping into the same stream twice. “Oh, no,” he cried, “you cannot step into the same stream even once!”  

At all events, the most painfully obvious application of the sheer force and violence unleashed by fire was death, which comes to us all, including old Heraclitus who, along with nature’s detritus, is no longer with us. Even as I type this, it falls remorselessly away. What could be more leveling than the blinding finality of extinction?  That none of us gets out alive is surely the one change we will all be forced to have to face.

None of us is immune from that most basic and exigent of all facts: that being born always comes with an expiration date telling us we must also die. It is, to paraphrase a line from Hopkins, the blight we are born for, and so it is ourselves we mourn for. Death remains the one undeniably conclusive cancellation of all that we hope to acquire, which is to say, the comforting illusion of immortality.   

That fond wish, Heraclitus would tell us, is simply not within the reach of mere mortals. In order, therefore, to escape the limits of finite being, the inevitable coils of an existence bound by bios alone, one would need Zoe, the nearest gateway to which being an intervention from a Higher Power, which, alas, nature cannot provide. Or, put it this way: if life were a game of chess, then the first lesson to be learned is that you cannot win. That is because your opponent—death—never loses. Like the hooded and sinister figure in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, who stalks the medieval knight across a devastated landscape, he will sooner or later checkmate us all.

We are all bound for the dark, in other words, our brief candles snuffed out in the great sea of death. “Man hands on misery to man,” notes the poet Philip Larkin, most gloomily,  

It deepens, like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.  

He certainly took his own advice, leaving us a legacy only of bitterness, however lapidary the poems. Perhaps the poet W.H Auden spoke truly when he wrote:

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

If so, then he surely had Larkin in his sights when he set down his lament. Shakespeare probably said it best: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” The bright day will soon be done, leaving us all to go down with the sun—bound for that “undiscovered country,” he calls it, “from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Not even Lazarus, it seems, who, for all that he came back from that place, had really nothing to say regarding his short stay in the nether world. One imagines him sitting mutely at meals with his two sisters, Martha and Mary, each gently urging him to get on with his food. The poor man might as well have stayed dead. It is, after all, as the lugubrious Larkin would insist: “The sure extinction we travel to, / Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”

What else can contingency mean but that everything that exists, from the insects and plants here below to the starry heavens beyond, is doomed to die? Given enough time and nothing shall be left to survive the maw of death. It is the sad signature creation must wear. Every line of Aquinas on the subject reminds us of it. Anything that cannot account for its own existence, he will often tell us, that cannot locate its reason for being from within that being, remains necessarily and radically contingent. Nothing can give what it hasn’t got, and so “He who is”—which is to say, God—alone has the capacity to bring nothingness into being.   

Why do I exist? Why does anything exist? To answer the question you cannot look within, as if the principle of your being, your is-ing, were somehow an organ like any other—the liver or spleen, say—awaiting discovery and dissection by some swashbuckling scientist of the spirit. We cannot go on endlessly appealing to the contingent in order to explain it.

And thus are we constrained to arrive, finally, at a cause for why things are that is not itself caused. In other words, to identify a cause whose very essence is a pure Act of existing—indeed, whose essence is not to be this or that thing but simply “to be”—is at last to reach what Etienne Gilson has called “the ultima Thule of the metaphysical world,” the very limit of the mind’s journey to God, to the I AM WHO AM of Exodus 3.

“So, Mr. Henry James,” asked one of his admiring readers, “tell me what you think of life?” To which the master storyteller replied, “I think, Madam, it is a predicament which precedes death.” And when, not long after, he found himself about to die, he greeted his not unexpected Visitor with his usual courtesy: “So, here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

But it isn’t at all distinguished, is it? In point of fact, it is the most egalitarian experience of all. It gets to happen to everyone. Nor is it any sort of achievement, either, like climbing the Matterhorn or mounting another stair on the corporate ladder of success. It is, instead, a disintegration, a final, disastrous fall into the same abyss that will claim us all. Dying is really no big deal, as someone once said, “Living’s the trick.” And most of us don’t seem to manage that very well, do we?

Still, old Heraclitus was certainly on to something—that in the midst of life, to recall a haunting line from The Book of Common Prayer, arguably the finest ornament of Anglican piety, there is always death. “Flesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm,” writes Fr. Hopkins in a poem which, in giving Death his due, seems to concede the high ground to Heraclitus. And if our acknowledgment of that fact is to be honest, we may need no little courage in making the admission. Screwing one’s courage to the sticking point is never an easy thing—not if one has then to face, undismayed, the quite awful truth that, as Hopkins will put in words Heraclitus would himself approve: “world’s wildfire, leave but ash…”

Nature’s end is not a pretty sight; a state of everlasting entropy never is. And to the extent we are subject to nature, is our end as well. But there is more. There is a whole lot more, which is at the heart of the Good News Christ came to tell us five centuries following the death of Heraclitus—indeed, to show us in the last reaches of a death He freely chose to endure. Hopkins enshrines it beautifully in the last, decisive phrase of the poem, which ends on an utterly triumphant note. In fact, the title of the poem says it all: “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and on the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is,
Since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potshered,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Here is the long awaited Eucatastrophe, to use a lovely word coined by J.R.R. Tolkien, which means a sudden and altogether unforeseen turn in the relentless and unending tale of death and disaster—when, seemingly victorious, they are at once and most thoroughly vanquished by a love far greater than death. “The good catastrophe,” he calls it, “the sudden joyous ‘turn’…It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat. …Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

Why does it pierce the soul with a joy that makes one weep? Because, says Tolkien,

it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, so that your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back…that is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.

Poor old Heraclitus. He could not have known this, living five centuries before the coming of Christ, who would, I am certain, gladly have told him. Let us hope he knows now.