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< Back Ectaban David Cowles Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out. The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, city of patterned streets; again the vision:” – Ezra Pound, Canto V Is it possible to present a fully formed Eschatology in just four lines of verse? After all, great works like Revelation require half a thousand verses to tell their tale. But surprisingly, the answer is, “Yes!” And we’ll see that Ezra Pound has done it (above)…once we unpack all the allusions and references contained in those four lines. Ecbatan (‘Ecbatana’) is an ancient city on the Silk Road, located in modern-day Iran. It was the capital city of the Empire of the Medes. In Canto LXXIV, Pound refers to Ecbatan as “the city of Dioce,” the first ruler of the Medes. It is at least remotely possible that this is also the city that the authors of Genesis attributed to Cain and his sons when Cain became a ‘wanderer’ and ‘settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden’ and ‘became the founder of a city’. But what makes Ecbatan so important is not primarily its great age, nor its role in history and mythology; what makes Ecbatan important is its layout. It is the apex of City Planning. Ecbatan consists of seven concentric rings, demarcated by walls. Moving inward, each wall is higher than the next and each a different color. The penultimate wall is silver, the final wall gold, and within that wall, the palace. Inside these walls run those “patterned streets.” The seven rings of Ecbatan call to mind the seven rings of the then known solar system. In Canto LXXIV, the first of the so-called Pisan Cantos, Pound confirms that association when he sets forth in a single line his entire cosmo-political platform: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” Ezra Pound’s Cantos are at least ab initio modeled after the 100 cantos that form Dante’s Divine Comedy. To understand Pound’s project, it is essential to understand Dante’s. Unlike Pound, Dante is the hero of his own epic. His ‘odyssey’ begins “in the middle of the journey of our life…within a dark wood where the straightway was lost.” He is then conducted by a series of ‘guides’ through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally Heaven (Paradiso). Along the way, Dante encounters persons from early Renaissance Italy, the classical world, salvation history, and the Church. Their life stories supply the stuff of his epic. Pound, likewise, weaves cultural and historical events on an eschatological loom. But compared to Dante, Pound casts a much, much wider net. There is hardly a region of the globe or a period of history that does not contribute content to Pound’s epic. While Dante tells the story of ‘Earth as it is in Heaven,’ Pound tells the story of ‘Heaven as it is on Earth.’ For Dante, the seven rings of the solar system were patterned after the seven rings of Paradise; but Pound turns that relationship upside down…and inside out: Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! If Ecbatan is ‘Enoch,’ the city of Cain, that would make Cain the world’s first urban planner. But even if there is no such association, being the first ‘founder of a city’ makes Cain responsible for developing and introducing the technology that would ultimately have made Ecbatan possible. Either way, Ecbatan (like all cities) traces back to Cain. The theological implications of this are enormous. In Genesis, Cain is presented as committing the first great sin in historical time (i.e., post-Eden). How fitting then, from the perspective of Judeo-Christian eschatology, that Cain be responsible, directly or indirectly, for building a post-historical Eden, Ecbatan! Ecbatan is the Judeo-Christian message of salvation in a nutshell. God does not just passively forgive the sinner; God empowers the sinner to become a co-creator of Paradise. We partner with God in the redemption of the world, and we are led in this venture by Jesus, aka the Christ, our Redeemer. This is the essence of the theological virtue of hope: not only that our sins will be wiped away, but also that our lives will be redeemed. With Job, we affirm, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust…(and) I will see God.” (Job 19: 25 – 26) In this context, it is useful to compare Cantos to another great work of literature, the New Testament Book of Revelation. Paul tells us that only three things will last: faith, hope, and love. Literature is full of books about faith and love, but hope sometimes gets short-shrift. What it lacks in quantity, it makes up in quality; hope is the central theme of three of Western civilization’s greatest works: the Book of Revelation, The Divine Comedy, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The Judeo-Christian tradition (including Dante) understands God as “the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). Pound joins Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps Carl Jung, and a very few others in reversing that process. For these visionaries, the world in some sense ‘creates God;’ or, at least, there is a mutually creative relationship between the two! Ecbatan of the Cantos is Pound’s version of Dante’s Paradise. It is not a model for Paradise, it IS Paradise. There are no ‘models’ in Pound! The concept of a model necessarily introduces the notion of an ontological hierarchy (“the map is not the territory”). Pound rejects that idea categorically. In Cantos the mythological, the historical, the fictional, the experiential, the theological and the eschatological share a common ontological status. Anthropologists report that many aboriginal societies do not distinguish what happens in history from what happens in dreams or in spiritual experiences. (Read “Speaking Piraha” for reference.) Like Pound, they are ontological democrats! Of course, Ecbatan is Paradise seen from an eschatological perspective. Pity the lowly camel driver resting on the star-colored terraces of the Median capital, not understanding that he is living in Paradise; pity the frenzied investment banker racing across Manhattan in a cab, still not understanding. Christians are fond of saying, “Repent and hear the Good News!” Perhaps we might rephrase, “Read Pound and live the Good News!” Of course, Ecbatan is a once and future city, a once and future Paradise. Throughout Cantos, Pound rhymes the historical Ecbatan with other cities; for example, Wagadu, capital of the Ghanian Empire, four times rebuilt. The message is clear and consistent: Ecbatan is not just a place, it is a mission. Ultimately, we all share a common eschatological imperative, “To build the city of Dioce…” (Not ‘rebuild’ but ‘build!’) The city of Dioce (the Kingdom of Heaven) is only built once, for all time and eternity. Pound’s ‘Paradiso’ begins in earnest with the first Pisan Canto (Canto LXXIV). We now see Canto V (above) as the Cliff’s Notes version of Pound’s later cantos. Note that the map (Canto V) precedes the territory (Canto LXXIV & ff). But is it the case, stated above, that four lines from Canto V constitute a complete and fully developed eschatology? To make that case, we’ll need to unpack each line, beginning with: “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus.” Parmenides, the first Western philosopher to leave extant a significant body of work, presented reality under two aspects: the aspect of Truth (Aletheia) and the aspect of Appearance (Doxa). These two complementary, but mutually exclusive aspects are both required in order to build a viable model of reality. Aletheia is Parmenides’ Eschaton; Doxa, his history. Parmenides describes Aletheia as follows: “It is not divisible…but it is full of what is…it is not lacking but if it were, it would lack everything…It is completed from every direction like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere from the center equally matched…equal to itself from every direction.” The mini-Paradiso found in Canto V immediately links Pound to the philosophical tradition of Parmenides. Like Aletheia, Ecbatan is massive and symmetrical. Parmenides says that Aletheia lacks nothing because, if it lacked anything, it would lack everything. The same may be said of Ecbatan; above all else, it is complete! But while Aletheia is changeless, things according to the “way of appearance” (Doxa) “come to be and perish, be and not be, shift place and exchange bright color” (aka attributes). This behavior is at the root of all the dissonance and conflict in our everyday experience, but that conflict is the raw material of contrast, which is the source of all intensity. In the ‘Doxa fragments’ of On Nature, Parmenides dwells on the role that “naming” plays in shattering the homogeneity of ‘Truth’ into the seemingly endless variety of ‘Appearances.’ For example: “Thus, according to belief, these things were born and now are, and hereafter, having grown from this, they will come to an end. And for each of these did men establish a distinctive name.” Certain African and Australasian cultures believe that the process of naming (Namo) can actually make things come to be. Pound cites the story of “Wanjina” (Wondjina) whose father sewed up his mouth because he was ‘making too many things’. Parmenides would agree wholeheartedly. The “thrusting forth” of things that “come to be” (Fragment 11) is either caused by or chronicled by the development of the dictionary. The size of a dictionary is a good measure of the immersion of its readers in Doxa. Hence, thesaurus! Thesaurus is the antonym of dictionary. A dictionary records distinctions; a thesaurus, on the other hand, resolves those distinctions by finding common ground. On the one hand, dictionary smashes the crystal vase of Aletheia against the rocks of English Empiricism and American Pragmatism, reducing it to so many shards of glass (Doxa). Thesaurus, on the other hand, painstakingly matches those shards with one another until the vase is whole again (Aletheia). But the reconstructed vase is not quite the same as the original vase. While the shape and volume are still the same, and while the vase can still hold water, now you can see the outline of each and every shard that makes it up. The new vase is vastly more beautiful and interesting…and much, much more valuable; it is the product of negentropy. Reality requires both Aletheia and Doxa to optimize coherence and maximize intensity. Compare this with the creation narrative in Genesis. Words play an important role in God’s creative process: “Let there be light…God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’…God called the dome ‘sky’…God called the dry land ‘earth,’ and the basin of water he called ‘sea’.” Creation is the process of distinction; it is the living dictionary. Salvation reverses that process; it is a way of harmonizing apparent conflicts into mere contrasts. Salvation is the living thesaurus. “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out” In Paradise there is no time; everything is atemporal (eternal). When the clock ticks for the final time, it fades out and eternity begins. Ecbatan, city of patterned streets, is that ‘final tick;’ it is the membrane between history and eternity. The pattern of its streets and terraces replaces the historical flow of events. A vertical architecture replaces a horizontal flow. Ecbatan is proof that process is not dependent on time. When we speak of Ecbatan, we are not just talking about an historical city or some ‘kingdom (to) come;’ Ecbatan is what it is, what there is, all there is, now and forever. Process is bi-directional. On one axis, process is change (Heraclitus), growth, evolution; on the other, process is harmonization (Whitehead), pattern building. Today, we rely heavily on clocks to help us get where we’re supposed to be, when we were supposed to be there. But when I was growing up, kids didn’t always have ready access to clocks (or watches). No matter, you were still expected to be home on time. So, without thinking about it, we built our own clocks: the progress of the sun in the sky, the changing colors on the horizon, the ‘gas man’ (sic) lighting the streetlamps every afternoon, the corporeal sense of time passing. For all the hours we spent each week in church, we were nothing but a bunch of pagans. These organic clocks worked just as well as any Timex, often better. Through all this, it never occurred to us that time might be nothing other than the clocks (natural or man-made) that we use to measure it. We took it for granted that time was something objective, that it formed the background of all things, that events occur in time. In recent years, however, cosmologists have suggested that this might not be the case. Roger Penrose, for example, suggests that when we are no longer able to construct a ‘clock’ to measure time, time will cease to exist. Others have suggested that objective time is nothing other than an abstraction from the variable organic ‘durations’ of events superimposed on one another. Pound predates Penrose by decades. Yet, he uses Penrose’s imagery. When the last clock ticks its last tick, time folds into eternity. “The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan…” This evokes the image of Mary being touched by the Holy Spirit at the moment of Incarnation and of the Church as the “Bride of Christ”. Ecbatan is Mater Dei (mother of God); Ecbatan is Church. Ecbatan is the physical substructure of Paradise. Over and over again, Pound writes, “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel.” It must be physical and historical…it’s Mary’s womb, Christ’s Church, Ecbatan. While no Marxist, Pound wholeheartedly embraced materialism. “City of patterned streets; again, the vision:” The ‘vision’ Pound refers to is Dante’s vision in Canto XXXIII, the final canto, of his Paradiso: “O abounding grace by which I dared to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I spent all my sight upon it. In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light.” Dante rejects the Heraclitan model of continuous process. In Dante’s vision, all of the events, entities and aspects of the world are organized as “leaves.” Pound’s Cantos recapitulate Dante’s vision using Pound’s own seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove. Cantos consists entirely of such ‘leaves,’ ‘fused together’ into ‘a simple light.’ Rare among authors, Pound avoids the temptation to add personal commentary, emotional shading, ‘mere ideas,’ spin; instead, he literally lets the thing speak for itself (ipse loquitur). In the visual arts, the 19th century saw objects dissolve into impressions. Starting with Cezanne, progressing through the Cubists and culminating in Surrealism and Dada, the 20th century reversed that process. It focused on the thing itself, releasing the object from its utilitarian context and allowing it to tell its own story. Pound performed a parallel function in the literary arena. Ideally, to read the Cantos would be to have the ‘vision,’ Dante’s vision. Both Dante and Pound fixed their looks on the eternal light and saw that it contained that which is scattered in leaves; both Dante and Pound attempt to bind these leaves “by love in one volume…in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light”. Pound confirms: “I have tried to write Paradise.” (Canto CXX) To write Paradise, to ‘create’ light, to build the City of Dioce, that’s everyone’s highest calling. But it is the nature of the human condition that no one will ever succeed, at least not completely. It is for God alone to create light (fiat lux), to build Paradise, but that does not mean that we are not all called to do everything we can do in pursuit of that elusive goal. Like Cain, we contribute what we can to the Eschaton, and we humbly beg forgiveness for what we fail to do. In this context, Canto CXX is worth reproducing in its entirety: I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak That is Paradise Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. Illustration taken from Buckingham, J.S. (1829). Travels in Assyria, Media and Persia . Page 159. London. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Football Math David Cowles “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Introduction: Who doesn’t love football? Every autumn, every week, there are dozens of games, good games, on national television. Often, you have no allegiance to either team and, mercifully, for once, neither team is depending on your armchair cheering to tilt the outcome of the game in its favor. At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! No responsibilities. Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady. Incredible feats of strength and speed, paradigms of grit and determination, and coaching stratagems worthy of a chess master. What’s not to love! And then there’s the game itself, the ebb and flow, the score. Early score differentials (‘spreads’) are sometimes amplified as the game progresses, but just as often they are dampened, and in some cases, they are actually reversed. Football is a 21st century cultural phenom. In this age of social fragmentation, it’s just about the only thing we still have in common. Almost everyone speaks football. If baseball is our national pastime, football has become our national language and every fall weekend we celebrate our secular liturgy in the vernacular. A football game is all about the unfolding of patterns (every ‘play’ is really a pattern), and after watching dozens of games this season, it occurred to me that while there are numerous patterns inside each game, the games themselves might also form patterns. For example, can the scores of multiple games between various opponents tell us anything? Or do they just vary randomly? Do scores evolve arithmetically over the course of a game; or is there something else, something non-linear, at work? Football Math: To explore this, I looked at score differentials at the end of the first half and compared them with score differentials at the end of the same games. Easy-peasy, right? Well, no! In fact, solving the problem requires us to develop (or deploy) a whole new mathematics. A football game is an example of a discontinuous process. We deal with whole numbers only (no fractions). Plus, unlike most other sports (soccer, baseball, e.g.), those numbers do not increase iteratively. Say a team scores 5 times in the course of a game (5 runs, 5 goals, etc.). In most sports, that would result in a score of “5” for that team. Not in football. In ‘football math’ there are only 3 digits: 2, 3, and X where the value of X can be 6, 7, or 8. Crazy? Yes, but if you are a regular reader of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) and Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), you already know about civilizations that ‘play the game of life’ with number systems very different from the one you learned in grade school . In fact, we’ve studied one culture that has no numbers whatsoever . Other cultures have limited inventories of numbers (e.g., 1, 2, X where X refers to any collection of 3 or more items). Hot Link Compared to these societies, ‘football math’ gives us a lot to work with. Granted, we only have 3 digits (2, 3, X), but one of those digits (X) can represent any one of three different values (6, 7, or 8). So, in essence we have 5 digits (2, 3, 6, 7, 8), Plus, we can ‘add’ those digits together to generate higher, ‘secondary’ numbers. So far so good, but please, don’t get too comfortable! It turns out that the score of a football game is much like the result of a road race, according to Zeno . Zeno-math applies in universes, like football games, where quantity is not infinitely divisible. In our search for patterns, we need to look at an event (e.g., the game) from 3 perspectives: pre-game, game, and post-game. Pre-game began at Big Bang and won’t end before kick-off. (If you’re tailgating, you might want to take an Uber…and invest in a port-o-potty. 15 billion years equates to a lot of Budweiser.) Pre-game, the so-called ‘score’ is always 0 – 0, of course. But ‘0 – 0’ is just a short way of saying, ‘The game’s not afoot yet, my dear Watson’. 0 – 0 is not a score; it looks like a score but in fact it denotes the absence of a score. Rather, it’s a state of Being, i.e., pre-being. A whistle blows: the kick-off –finally, a play that could result in points. Seemingly, we’ve moved from pre-game to game…but in fact, we’ve merely transitioned from pre-game to potential-game, ‘being-in-waiting’, which is still a flavor of pre-being. Remember, for the purposes of this exercise, we are not concerned with a 60 yard rope, a one-handed snag, a blocked punt, or a pick-six. We are only tracking score and so far, we have no score. We say that the score is still 0 – 0 but again, that is just a convention. As we saw above, a score of 0 – 0 corresponds to the state of being we call ‘pre- game’. The ‘game’ begins when pre-game ends and pre-game ends when someone scores points. As Yogi Berra might have said, “We have no score until we have a score.” Now suppose the game ends in a 0 - 0 tie (after overtime): then for our purposes, there was no game. Disagree? Check out the standings. A team with a tie in its record is the same as a team that has played one less game. Eventually, sometimes mercifully, the final whistle blows, the stadium clock reads 00:00 and there are no flags on the field. The game is over. No further points can be scored…this week. Only now can we talk about a winner and a loser. The final score is not part of the game itself; it is part of the post-game. Let’s check the time. Pre-game began at Big Bang and post-game doesn’t end until Big Crunch (or Heat Death), so I recommend you head home as soon as the game ends. The Game: Blue scores: the game has begun. And Blue leads, right? Wrong! Blue does not lead. As long as there is still time left on the game clock, the game is still ‘statistically tied’. How come? After Blue scores, the scoreboard reads 2 – 0 or 3 – 0 or 6 – 0 or 7 – 0 or 8 – 0. But either team can score 8 points on any one play, and there is at least one play left. So, a lead of 8 points or fewer is actually no lead at all because it can be erased at any second so long as the ball is still in play (i.e., the game clock reads something other than 00:00). British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the process philosopher’, describes every event in the real world, the way we just described a football game. What we call pre-game, he calls ‘the actual world’; what we call post-game, he calls ‘objective immortality’. Every event (game) arises out of an actual world (pre-) and dissolves into an objective world (post-). Every football game begins at the end of pre-game and ends at the beginning of post-game. Assume there is an 8 point differential heading into the final play of the game. The final score will reflect a differential somewhere between 14 points and 0. (A Touchdown scored on the last play of a game can only be worth 6 points to the leading team.) In the language of statistics, e.g., political polling, we would say that the so-called ‘score’ at any point in the game has a margin of error of up to 8 points. Therefore, when the ball is still in play and Blue leads Red by 8 points, the game is statistically tied. The Search for Patterns: Ground rules in place (and hopefully agreed), we can now get back to our search for patterns; I examined the box scores of the 13 FBS games played during week #7 of the season in which at least one of the teams playing was ranked in the Top 25 (quality control). Of those 13 games, 5 ended with a differential of 8 points or less (one score), 6 ended with a differential of 16 points or less (two scores) and 2 games ended with a differential of more than 16 points (three scores or more). Now let’s look at the scores of those same games at the end of the first half. Hypothesis: On average, the differential in points at the end of the first half should be half of what it is at the end of the game. If so, 11 games (out of 13) should have been ‘statistically tied’ (point differential of 8 or less) at the half. Observation: The total number of points scored was roughly the same in both halves, as expected; but only 9 games were statistically tied at the half (vs. the 11 anticipated). This means that there is a centripetal force at work in a football game that offsets, at least in part, that ubiquitous centrifugal force we know as ‘time’ (or duration). In English, please? Ok, scores tighten, not absolutely but relative to time played. Confirmation: Unwittingly, Miami Dolphins head coach, Mike McDaniel, recently gave Football Math a big boost. In a 2022 game against the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo scored a touchdown at the end of the first half, making the halftime score 21 – 13. The announcer asked McDaniel for his reaction, which I paraphrase: “It doesn’t matter; it’s still a one score game.” In other words, the game is still within the 8 point margin of error, so it remains statistically tied. Hear what McDaniel had to say in his own words: https://youtu.be/7bTAjZ728eI Application: Can we learn something from this analysis that we can apply beyond the universe of football? A football game is an example of a single event with conflicting objectives. Like any system in a state of quantum coherence, it often manages that inherent conflict by delaying its ‘winner reveal party’ until after the last play of the game. While ‘there can only be one winner’, the game itself is shaped by both sides. Objectively speaking, it doesn’t matter which team wins; it’s a zero-sum game. Subjectively speaking, of course, it makes all the difference in the world; it’s an all or nothing proposition! Process is self-modifying. Things diverge less than expected, based on traditional arithmetic. Interaction favors convergence, not divergence. W. B. Yeats notwithstanding, things do not fall apart as rapidly as expected. Interactivity inserts another variable into the cosmic equation. Hope, even in the face of inexorable entropy - that’s the hidden meaning of football. Previous Next

“What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” < Back R U WYSIWYG? David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” We live in a crazy world. There’s no doubt about that! Mythology, theology, philosophy, and science are some of the different ways we model this world. The result? Libraries full of conflicting theories…and no indisputable answers. Perhaps we’re overthinking things. Let’s simplify matters: What you see is what you get! Right…or wrong? WYSIWYG has champions across all intellectual disciplines. All we ‘know’ is what we ‘see’ (or sense) so why not build our models based on that data alone? Realism, naïve or otherwise; Materialism, Marxist or otherwise; Positivism, Logical or otherwise, plus Pragmatism and Empiricism – all assume that what you see is what you get. On the other side of the question, we also have some serious contenders: Homeric mythology, Judeo-Christian theology, Eastern spirituality, and Existentialist philosophy, to name a few. If it is true, that what you see is what you get, then we live in a self-contained, ontologically democratic universe, a flat world in which everything (‘what you get’) can be explained in terms of everything else (‘what you see’). Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy! Proponents of this view believe that human experience, aided by the tools of reason (e.g. logic and mathematics), provides sufficient information for us to account, fully or approximately, for the world we live in. So, mission accomplished , right? Let’s call these folks our ‘WYSIWYGs’. Of course, they’ll admit, we do not have all the answers yet, but we are close enough that we are entitled to have confidence that our project can, at least in theory, be completed. Most WYSIWYGs believe that it is ultimately possible to construct models of reality that account for our world within a tolerable range of accuracy based solely on the data of human experience. But is that true? Can a model that relies solely on the data of experience ever give a complete account of that experience, or of experience per se , or of the world that supports such experience? Alternatively, do we need to resort to something outside the realm of direct experience to complete our model? Once we have understood the world to the best of our ability, may we not still ask: “Is this all there is?” “Hold on,” you say. “Nothing is nothing without experience.” And you are correct! (Thank you for reading Aletheia Today .) But based on that direct experience, we can infer that something outside the realm of direct experience is influencing the data we glean from that experience. We can’t directly describe what we can’t experience (it’s ‘ineffable’) but we can describe its contours, the way it templates experience. Crazy? Well, when was the last time you saw the singularity at the heart of a Black Hole? Have you ever heard a ‘Big Bang’? And don’t get me started about strings, dark matter, and the multiverse! We reason from what we know to what we don’t know, every day. Reality is like a jigsaw puzzle…with one piece missing. After several days of painstaking work, the puzzle is complete, and beautiful, but with a hole in it. From the hole, we can deduce virtually everything that can be known about our missing piece, but we still don’t have the piece itself. It is generally accepted today that all models, languages, symbolic systems have limitations, boundaries if you will. The question is whether there is anything beyond those boundaries that really matters. Blaise Pascal wrote, “Faith indeed tells us what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them…not contrary to them.” For Pascal, faith was necessary to complete the picture that the senses paint; for Pascal, faith was the missing piece. How do the differences between these competing views manifest in real life situations? Consider three practical examples: Neurobiologists have made great strides toward understanding the human brain and how it works. But many people feel that we are no closer than we ever were to explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. Certainly, we have theories about the physiological conditions necessary for conscious experience to occur, but have we accounted for the experience per se ? And if not, will we ever be able to do so? Similarly, astrophysicists have made great strides toward understanding the evolution of the universe. Indeed, we seem to have pushed the fog of ignorance all the way back to the first few seconds of time…and perhaps even beyond that, all the way to Big Bang itself. But is this enough? Have we accounted for the phenomenon of being itself? Have we truly answered the age-old question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Finally, quantum field theory has been called the most successful scientific theory of all time. It predicts phenomena with approximately perfect accuracy; it has never been convincingly falsified by any experiment. That said, do we really understand what is happening at the quantum level of reality? All quantum physicists are capable of making the same astoundingly accurate predictions; yet they use a myriad of different models to account for their results. The positivist’s answer to this dilemma is simply to deny the meaningfulness of the questions themselves: (1) Consciousness is physiology; (2) Cosmos is Being; (3) QFT is its predictions. This last point is what’s called the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’. According to Copenhagen , the accuracy of the predictions is all that matters. Models are meaningless. And yet, 90 years after Copenhagen, we’re still obsessed with our models! In Copenhagen, the scientific community shouted in unison, “Grow up!” And we did, for a while, but pretty soon we went back to building our models. The positivists’ solution is simple: meta-questions have no meaning. We have gone as far as we can go because there is nowhere else to go (Nietzsche). If you are still asking questions about consciousness or Being or the reality underlying quantum measurements, it is simply because you don’t understand those phenomena; if you did, you would understand that such questions are meaningless (Wittgenstein). But does saying make it so? Is our proclivity for formulating meta-questions evidence of our mental laziness…or testimony to our human spirit? According to French philosopher Albert Camus , the patron saint of the Absurd, it is human nature to seek unifying principles, even if such principles do not exist or are unavailable to us. Then we are Sisyphus, forever condemned to ask questions that have no answers or whose answers are beyond the grasp of gnosis . But are ‘not-knowing’ and ‘not-being’ one and the same thing? Is ‘absence of evidence’ ‘evidence of absence’? There are indeterminacies inherent in all conceptual systems (Gödel’s Incompleteness) and in all physical systems (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty). These limitations guarantee at least some separation between what can be and what we can know . At their best, anti-WYSIWYGs ground their position on what they ‘see’. For them, experience is a vector pointing toward a reality beyond perception and logic. For example, we ‘see’ things that we recognize as ‘beautiful’. We know they’re beautiful, but Aristotle notwithstanding, we can’t define Beauty, and we certainly can’t account for the presence of Beauty in our world. The same argument can be applied to Justice, Truth, and even Good itself. In a flat, self-contained, and ontologically democratic universe, there is no objective basis for valuing any one entity over any other. Existentialists might say that we are free to assign our own values to things…and they’d be right. But if those values are not rooted in something outside us, what difference do they make? Aren’t they just arbitrary projections of ‘taste’? I refrain from killing you, not because it is objectively wrong (Torah) but because the idea of killing any human being is distasteful to me. Any argument against arbitrariness must refer to something beyond the plane of ontological democracy. (Nietzsche) A world with values cannot be flat; it must be hierarchical, and hierarchy cannot function in a plane (unless you’re talking first class seating on an air plane ). In a flat world, how could the phenomenon of value claim aesthetic or ethical priority over anything else? Ludwig Wittgenstein: “No statement of facts can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value…all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level.” How often do we find Wittgenstein agreeing with Thomas Aquinas? Aquinas advanced 5 ‘proofs’ for the existence of God, but only one, the 4th, still interests philosophers: “The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings, there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But more and less are predicated of different things according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum…so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest…and this we call God.” Thomas may not have proven the existence of God, but he may have proven that what you get cannot be reduced to what you see. The existence of Value, if you believe in Value, challenges the underlying premise of WYSIWYG, namely that we live in a universe bereft of ontological gradations. The Latin hymn, Veni Sancte Spiritus sums it up: “ Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium ”, which roughly translates “without you (God) human beings are empty and everything is noxious”. So, are you WYSIWYG…or anti-WYSIWYG? Admit it, you’d love to be WYSIWYG…and so would I. We could be tenured professors together at an Ivy League university! If only we could convince ourselves… Going solely on what we see, we must accept a world that came to be accidentally, that evolves purposelessly, and that self-destructs inevitably. Suffering overwhelms joy (The Buddha). Islands of order, virtue, truth, and beauty are eroded by entropy, and everything is ultimately erased by time. The world comes from nothing and returns to nothing. All of cosmic history amounts to nothing more than the life span of a self-annihilating virtual particle pair. All the things we do in life amount to nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . Ugh! But on the other hand, abandoning WYSIWYG comes at a price. We must accept that we cannot adequately model the world based solely on experience. We must add elements to our model that we cannot ‘prove’, logically, mathematically, or scientifically. We are necessarily now with Pascal (above) in the realm of ‘faith’. So what might an anti-WYSIWYG model look like? Amazingly, the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, often called both the ‘father of western philosophy’ and the ‘father of western science’, provided us with just such a model. Qua scientist, Parmenides was a keen observer and used those observations to construct remarkably accurate models of myriad physical and astronomical phenomena. But, qua philosopher, he understood that the world itself could not be fully explained solely on the basis of such observations. For Parmenides, a world must have two faces or aspects, one seen, one unseeable. He called the former the Way of Appearance ( Doxa ) and the later the Way of Truth ( Aletheia ). Now the Way of Appearance is just what you’d expect: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color.” This is a world we recognize: discrete objects and events, coming to be, then passing away, moving through space, interacting with others, and exchanging qualities in the process. But the Way of Truth is something else again: “What is ungenerated and imperishable, whole, single-limbed, steadfast and complete…Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…Nor is it divisible, since it all alike is…it is full of what is…” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control. As we prepare to close the Book of Leviticus, the Torah’s pinnacle, we are left with a message of responsibility, consequences, and possibilities. God presents us with the benefits of making wise choices and the consequences of choosing poorly. Then the Torah provides for the funding of the sanctuary and its staff: our participation with monetary support, pledges of animals or homes. But when it pivots to pledges of land, the Torah shifts gears entirely. Land, you see, is ours to borrow and to use. But humans presume they can own land. In reality, the land makes its claim on us, and we can either open ourselves to its ground rules, or we risk a rootlessness that leaves us clinging when the next sandstorm swirls. We are, as the book reminds us, “resident strangers ( Leviticus 25:23 )” on earth. The Land precedes us and the land will bury us when we no longer need our bodies. We are dust, and we return to dust ( Genesis 3:19 ). On some deeper level of reality, it is all just dust, earth, soil. Judaism directs our attention to the centrality of earth through the regular rhythms of Shabbat (seven days) Shmita (seven years), and Jubilee (seven Shmita cycles). In this last parasha of Leviticus, we are told that when we think we are selling the land, we are actually letting someone else live on it or use it for a finite duration of time. At the next Jubilee year, the land reverts to its designated, original family of caretakers. Land is inalienable, and we are meant to be too. If one consecrates their land after the jubilee, the priest shall compute the price according to the years that are left until the jubilee year, and its assessment shall be so reduced. And if one who consecrated the land wishes to redeem it, they must add one-fifth to the sum at which it was assessed, and it shall pass back to them. But if they do not redeem the land, and the land is sold to another, it shall no longer be redeemable. When it is released in the jubilee, the land shall be holy to the Lord, as land proscribed; it becomes the priest’s holding ( Leviticus 27:18-21 ). There is a holiness inherent in the land, a quality not subject to human dominion and not vaporized by human standards of utility. It is that holy something extra that means were are residents visiting the land, and its only really owner is God, who is also holy, meaning beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Jubilee comes every 50 years to remind us that the worth of creation is beyond our evaluation and does not emerge from ways we find it beneficial. “Proclaim release to all the inhabitants of the land ( Leviticus 25:11 )” because it is in recognizing that worth and value spill beyond the constraints of practical utility or human benefit that we, too, are released. Our worth and value spill beyond how we can be used too. Published with permission and minimal edits from hazon.org. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Previous Next

< Back 1500 CE David Cowles Apr 3, 2025 “Machiavelli became the Godfather of a pretty unsavory crime family…to which we all now belong!” Historians love to shoehorn events into discrete periods of time they call ‘ages’: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modern, and of course, Post Modern, for example. As if everyone wakes up one morning and cries out in unison, “ Today a new age has dawned!” (Well, something like that did happen in my lifetime…if you’ll allow me to count as ‘one morning’ the decade between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (8/10/64), which ended one era of American history, and the Fall of Saigon (4/30/75), which began another. But abrupt changes are exceptions to the norm.) More often, one day bleeds into another, and another. Sure, things change over time, but not in unison and not in ways that permit precise demarcation. Of course, we can invent demarcations to our hearts content. I’ve done it! Perhaps I just did (above). But that doesn’t make those lines real. The year 1500 CE might be another, much neater, exception. A strong case can be made that 1500, give or take, marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Most historians would set that date much earlier, as early as 1300. They are eager to document the first green shoots of the Renaissance while I am just as eager to preserve the last sere leaves of the Middle Ages. We’re both wrong, of course. We’ve allowed our conflicting ideologies to influence our critical judgment. In fact, the Middle Ages had no end and the Renaissance no beginning. It’s all just history ! Even so, 1500 was a watershed. In fact, the entire last half of the 15th century was an especially volatile time, politically, culturally, and philosophically, in the cradle of the Renaissance, Florence – from the deaths of Fra Angelico (1455), the last great painter of the Middle Ages, and Cosmo de Medici (1464) to the proclamation of a Theocratic Republic by Fra Savonarola (1494) and his subsequent execution (March 1498). Two months later, Machiavelli, the great prophet of the Renaissance, became Secretary of the now secularized Florentine Republic (May 1498). Two years later (1500) Leonardo returned to Florence, kicking off the visual eruption we now know as ‘Renaissance Art’. Da Vinci was quickly followed by Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Raphael, Correggio, et al. But the greatest achievements of this fraught half century were not in politics or art but in philosophy. The last three great Medieval philosophers wrote, taught, and generally dominated intellectual life in Florence up to 1499. Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Fra Savonarola were friends and sometimes allies and they shared some common philosophical perspectives. Consistent with the Middle Ages, their philosophies were theocentric; but steeped in Classical culture, they drew ideas and illustrative material from a much wider spectrum of periods and cultures than most of their predecessors. But now fast forward to 1498. In March of that year, Savonarola, the last great philosopher-stateman of the Middle Ages, was executed by the citizens of his city. In May of that same year, Machiavelli, the first ‘great’ philosopher-statesman of the Renaissance assumed the position of Secretary of the Republic. In a period of less than 60 days, the entire orientation of Western ethics was turned upside down. Savonarola’s career marked the last gasp of ‘right for right’s sake’ morality. Instead, Machiavelli introduced Europe to ‘the ethics of instrumentality’, encapsulated in his famous meme, “The ends justify the means.” It is the nature of the historical process to veer ‘from one extreme to another’. If Savonarola went too far, the ‘ethical wasteland’ of the past 500 years seems a tad of an overreaction. Somewhat surprisingly, Machiavelli seems to have admired ‘the great Savonarola’, as he called him. ‘Seems’ because Machiavelli’s writing is often ironic, and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether his expressions of exuberant praise for various cultural figures are sincere or facetious. His only issue with the friar seems to be the latter’s failure to build a military force capable of defending his cultural revolution. Machiavelli, the anti-Gandhi, thought of ‘non-violent revolution’ as an oxymoron. That said, Machiavelli supported militarism only as necessary and only as a means to a better end. In 1508 he wrote a hilarious epic poem describing the chaotic and violent fortunes of the Italian city states from 1494 - 1508. His flair for the absurd presaged the styles of some 20th century authors, e.g. Ionesco and Beckett. The same ethical ambiguity clouded his political views. He understood that a Republic was the best form of government for Florence, but he believed a Republic could only succeed if it followed a period of tyranny. Freedom and Democracy could only prosper if they were imposed, harshly if necessary: You will be free, you will self-govern, whether you like it or not! Buoyed by the prospect of a coercive modern state, Machiavelli willingly built his utopia on a most fragile foundation: “…the people are by nature variable; to convince them of something is easy; to hold them to that conviction is hard. Therefore, a prophet must be ready, when they no longer believe, to make them believe by force.” He cites the careers of Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus in support of this thesis. We are a long way, historically and philosophically, from Locke, Mill and the founders of American democracy, but I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin's quip in response to a citizen asking, “What sort of government have you given us?” – A republic, if you can keep it! Wait, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, at my Marxist-Leninist day camp. A dictatorship (of the proletariat) must precede the withering away of the state and the ultimate triumph of pure communism. Some Marxists even out did Karl. George Sorel, Franz Fannon, and Uncle Joe (Stalin), for example, like Machiavelli, believed that violence was a necessary spiritual purgative if a revolution was to have any hope of lasting success. And where did they hear that? From the pens of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety ( aka the French Revolutionaries). However brilliant his mind and however benevolent his intent, Machiavelli became Godfather of a pretty unsavory crime family (not the Medici)…to which we all now belong! Image: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Detail of Allegory of Good Government, 1338, fresco, Gothic art, Sienese School, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Fondazione Musei Senesi. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back SETI “It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.” David Cowles Since I was 5 years old, it has scarcely occurred to me that we might be alone in the Universe. We live in a cosmos made up of billions of galaxies, each housing billions of stars. It is ludicrous to think that ‘life’ has occurred only on one rock in one solar system in one galaxy. When my children were young, we’d spend hours speculating on which moons of which outer planets were most likely to harbor life…and what that life might look like. And Mars? Of course, we’ll find life there; the only question is whether that life will be extant…or extinct. For 70 years, extraterrestrial life was a fixed star in my firmament, a premise in my logos . But that was then! Now don’t get me wrong, I still believe it is absolutely possible that we will discover incontrovertible evidence – perhaps before I finish this article - that life arose independently somewhere else in Universe. But I no longer take that for granted. From childhood through middle age, my belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life marked me as a bit of a kook. But over the last 15 years, the rapid discovery of ‘exo-earths’ and the apparent ubiquity of precursor organic compounds has moved public opinion sharply in my direction. Except I’m not there anymore. I’ve moved on. Here’s why: All life on Earth is a product of DNA, but that strange double helix appeared only once in Earth’s 4-billion-year history, and that was about 3.5 billion years ago. Every single life form on Earth today, every species, every cell is descended from that one DNA molecule. Incredible…but so what? Well, it took a mere ½ billion years for the first primitive DNA molecule to synthesize; in the 3.5 billion years since, not a single self-replicating molecule has formed independently anywhere on Earth. Why not? If the progression from organic compounds to self-replicating molecules is semi-automatic, why did it happen here only once? Our study of terrestrial life forms has shown one thing above all else – life is resilient! You can’t kill it, no matter how hard you try. Of course, you can easily kill a single organism with a tug on a trigger. But life itself? No way! Consider the evidence. A single DNA molecule is responsible for the 2 million ‘known species’ in Earth’s biosphere. (The total number of species may be as many as 10 million.) Even more significantly, life thrives virtually everywhere on Earth: arctic, tropic, water, land. Living organisms can breathe oxygen…or carbon dioxide…or methane. Some organisms, like the Water Bear , can apparently survive for long periods without access to any breathable gas. Freeze an organism for centuries and, under the right conditions, you may be able to revive it. Life – you just can’t kill it! So if life had emerged more than once on Earth, all forms would likely have survived…at least long enough to leave fossil records. So where are they? The Martian climate is not particularly hospitable to Earth-like life but, given their track record, there is no doubt in my mind that terrestrial life forms, once introduced onto Mars, would quickly adapt and survive indefinitely. So, one of three things must be true: (1) There is not now nor has there ever been any indigenous life on Mars, (2) there once was life on Mars, but now it’s extinct, or (3) there are living organisms on Mars today. We’ve ruled out #2. If #3, we should have found incontrovertible evidence by now. We have littered the Martian landscape with scientific debris. We even have a helicopter flying around in the ultra-thin atmosphere. So far, nothing. But #3 has an even bigger problem: While Universe may be stingy with life, it appears to be generous with intelligence. While life ‘evolved’ on Earth only once, ‘intelligence’ emerged independently on multiple occasions in multiple forms, among primates, avians, cephalopods, insects, trees, etc. Could it be that intelligence is ubiquitous and life unique? Sadly, this leaves us with #1: we won’t find any playmates on our ‘twin planet’. Beyond Mars, we’re actively searching the rest of the Universe; we’re broadcasting our EM messages into space…but no one is returning our calls. And apparently, nobody is trying to get in touch with us either. We have searched in the most likely spots: the Martian soil and the EM spectrum, and found nothing. So, I propose a new SETI paradigm: If life had evolved independently, on Earth or elsewhere, it would have survived and it would be intelligent. The galaxy-wide search for extinct microorganisms is doomed to failure. The most respected contrary argument is based on probability theory : “It is infinitesimally probable that life emerged once on Earth and nowhere else.” This argument is persuasive…but false! Suppose I pick a card out of some deck and the card I pick happens to be red. I might be tempted to assume that all the cards in the deck are red, and they very well may be. But maybe half are red. Or maybe none of the remaining cards is red. Perhaps every card in the deck is a different color. We have no idea! We have a single data point. We don’t know if the value of that data point is universal or unique. Without more information, all possible arrangements must be considered equally probable. We need at least one more data point to be able to reason probabilistically; but at the moment, we don’t have that 2 nd point. So, while it may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the Universe as it is on Earth, it may also turn out that we are utterly alone. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next

< Back Trees According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light. David Cowles According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light. In addition, trees form friendships and recognize both their parents and their offspring. Finally, trees practice charity. Stronger trees share water and nutrients with less well endowed neighbors. Through this process even stumps can live on for hundreds of years. As a result of these processes, each tree has the opportunity to “grow into the best tree it can be”. One is reminded of the U.S. Army’s recruiting slogan, “Be all that you can be” and the Hebrew concept of Shalom. The question, of course, is whether there is anything approaching consciousness involved in this symbiosis. The rate of signal dispersion is so slow by our standards that we probably wouldn’t recognize it if there was. Also, we could be looking at a different kind of consciousness, a collective consciousness for example. Share Previous Next

“…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” < Back Christology 101 David Cowles May 29, 2022 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. It forms the basis of a complete Theology and a complete Cosmology: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Can we peel back the leaves of this artichoke? What are the essential elements of Paul's Christology as reflected in Colossians and why is this Christological formulation so important in the development of Christian theology? First, the elements: He (Christ) is the (visible) image of the invisible God . God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. (He is) the first born of all creation . Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order). Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle, and order per se ( logos ). He is before all things . Christ is universal and eternal. Therefore, Christ is an element in every world from which novelty emerges. Christ conditions all things. All things were created in him, through him, and for him . Christ is the locus of whatever is (was or will be). Christ is the origin of whatever is (its efficient cause). Christ is the destiny of whatever is (its final cause). In him all things hold together Because all things (events) share a common origin and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; and because Christ is also the locus of all events, all things hold together in him. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead. Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order. Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order . Christ is the source of all order, and order per se , so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ. In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts. According to this Cosmology, without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night. There is no inherent reason why 'actual entities' should interact with one another, exhibit togetherness, mutually modify, or reconcile. Unlike 'birds of a feather,' things merely grouped together do not necessarily 'flock' together. Interactivity is needed and interactivity requires shared elements. But all things do hold together, and because they hold together, they do modify each other; and because they modify each other, they reconcile with one another, all through Christ, in Christ and for Christ. Christ, then, is the answer (the only answer?) to the ‘anti-isms’: solipsism, skepticism, nihilism. If A is an element of B and A is an element of C, then B and C are mutually interactive. Because they share an element in common (A), B and C are able to engage in a process of mutual modification and harmonization, ultimately leading to reconciliation: B and C reconcile via A. Christ (A) is an element of every entity…twice. Christ is the common origin and the common destiny, the Alpha and the Omega , of everything that is. That commonality constitutes the Solidarity of the World. But how? The origin and destiny of an event would be the same if the event were circular – if the event ended up restoring the status quo ante . In that case, however, the event in question could only be a virtual event , i.e. a ‘difference’ that makes no difference. According to Colossians , Christ is a real event and real events, by definition (Whitehead), make a difference; therefore real events cannot be circular. The World is a process of perpetual ‘advance’. You can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus). When an event is ‘circular’, it’s time factor (t) = 0. Therefore, it is not ‘real’ in spacetime; it’s a mathematical fiction. Like a line or a plane in geometry; it is a ‘virtual’ event. But this leaves us in a pickle: How can an event not be circular if its Alpha = its Omega ? The Christian doctrine of Incarnation provides a solution ( the solution?). Incarnation turns Being inside out. Destiny becomes origin and origin becomes destiny, yet they remain distinct. Think about a sock. You go to put it on. You try to push your foot through the mouth down to the toe. It won’t go. Someone is playing silly buggers; they’ve turned your sock inside out! The toe is where the mouth was and vice versa. The toe and the mouth have swapped places; yet they remain distinct. Also, a cacophony of protruding knots has replaced the lovely argyle patten you picked out in the shop. Now think about Kosmos . Incarnation turns the World inside out. The whole is its own quantum element. Bertrand Russell notwithstanding, this set ( Kosmos ) is an element of itself. The origin, locus, aim, and apex of the creative process enters that process directly…as an historical event. Of course, this ensures that Kosmos is non-linear and recursive; it modifies itself. Destiny ( Parousia ) is Origin (Nativity). Christ, the only begotten of the Father, not made, is the first of the living; Christ, resurrected, is the first-born of the dead. The first-born of the dead is the same, and not the same, as the first of the living. Christ is the overarching pattern of creation and salvation, outside of spacetime. Jesus reflects and reiterates, fractal like, that pattern in the historical life of a single human being. The child born in Bethlehem is the same, and not the same, as the man crucified outside Jerusalem 33 years later, who is the same and not the same as the one “through whom all things were made… (and who) is seated at the right hand of the Father.” ( Nicene Creed ) Every 'novel event' includes the Christ-event (Incarnation) as one of its elements, but the Christ-event is also the whole that includes all events. So every event, including the Christ-event, is part of the whole, but that whole is also a part of itself (Incarnation). Kosmos spirals! Necessary and/or Sufficient? Is Paul’s non-linear cosmology sufficient to account for the existence of a Kosmos like ours? We know that there is a Kosmos because we participate in it. Cogito, ergo est. The defining features of our World are Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity. Does Paul adequately account for the existence of a Kosmos defined by these key features? If a theory does indeed account for the phenomena in question, we say that it is sufficient . Sufficiency is the first test of any model. If it isn't sufficient, "Forget about it!" But the Holy Grail of model builders is not 'sufficiency' but 'necessity.' A model is necessary if it is the only model that can account for the phenomena in question. So, what can we say about the model presented in Colossians ? Is it sufficient? Can it account for Novelty, Intensity, Solidarity? Can it pass the easy test ? According to Colossians , all things were created in, through, and for Christ - Novelty ; in him all things hold together – Solidarity - and through him all things are reconciled – Intensity . So, yes, Colossians passes the easy test , the test of sufficiency; but what about the hard test , the test of necessity? Is it the case that only Paul’s model can account for a World characterized by Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity? Of course, I can create a different model using different words that is still sufficient , but would that new model be unique, or would it just be Colossians …re-dressed a la mode ? Put it another way, can I (or you, or anyone) come up with a model that is still sufficient to account for our target phenomena but that cannot be mapped onto the Colossians' model? If the answer is, "No," then the Colossians' model is necessary as well as sufficient, and the author of Colossians (Paul) may be said to have found the modelers' Holy Grail. So, have they? Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! 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< Back ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern Ph.D. A lawyer was recently exposed for using the artificially intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT, when the brief he submitted was discovered to be filled with precedents that do not exist. ChatGPT is capable of writing like us, incorporating the collective beliefs of humanity as they appear on the World Wide Web. The problem, of course, is that some of what is out there on the Net is not true, and ChatGPT is incapable of filtering out the false. The ability to mirror our linguistic capacity without our critical faculties is dangerous if we use it as the lawyer did, for matters of fact, but it is wonderful for other uses, specifically sparking spiritual insights. ChatGPT and its artificial brethren may make lousy lawyers, but they can be fantastic prophets. Traditionally, we conceive of reality as having three distinct levels. The objective domain is comprised of all the things of the world—tables, chairs, human bodies with complex eyes… all of the perceptible objects. Above the objective stands the metaphysical realm, consisting of that which lies beyond our ability to observe, including necessary entities like God. Below them both sits the subjective dimension, consisting of the lived inner experience of conscious beings like us. Philosophy and religion for centuries have been dogged by a persistent problem: if we are trapped in our minds, only having direct access to our inner thoughts and experiences, how do we know anything beyond our own thoughts? Couldn’t all of the objective and metaphysical entities just be figments of our imagination? Couldn’t we be nothing but brains in vats with false ideas pumped in by an evil demon? Can we know anything true about material reality and what supposedly resides beyond? American Pragmatism is the philosophical movement based on the central ideal that metaphysical truth is grossly overvalued. What matters is not what is necessarily true, but rather what has “cash value,” that is, what works in the world. Metaphysical truth is just so European. We Americans don’t care for the high-falutin’ abstract conceptual essences of things, but rather for the practical, the effective, the operational. We are in a world with things to do. Forget the abstruse, embrace the tools that actually get stuff done. So, when pragmatist William James looked at religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he eliminated the European concern for objective justification for religious belief and focused just on the experience itself. Get rid of the question about the validity of Aquinas’ and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God and start from the undeniable fact that people have spiritual experiences that shape their lives. The question James examines is not whether these experiences are true or false, but rather one of meaning—what are these experiences like and what are the effects they have on people’s lives. Some religious experiences occur in moments of quiet solitude: when praying, meditating, or at random times when we are unexpectedly struck by something we cannot explain. But some come from interactions with people we seek out exactly for their ability to help us experience them—spiritual guides like Hindu yogis, Jewish tzaddikim, Buddhist sages, Muslim hakims, Zoroastrian magi, and Christian prophets. They lead us to epiphanies, to spiritual awakening. These insights are not mere facts describing the world, but rather experiences of appreciation and realization. It is not that we leave knowing something we did not know before, but rather experience a shift in our perspective. We still see what we saw, but now we see it differently; we see it more clearly, we see it as more interconnected, we understand it at a deeper level. ChatGPT as an e-being, as a virtual intelligence, is the ultimate pragmatist. The essence of its artificial existence has severed all connection to the true and false because it does not live in the material world of chairs, tables, and beer mugs where truth resides. ChatGPT is caught in the Web. Its “truths” are the beliefs expressed on the wide-open internet, where anything can and is said. It cares not for the reality beyond its reality but is built to do one thing and one thing only: figure out how language is used to accomplish human tasks and perform them without humans being involved. Human students write essays, so go write an essay without the student needing to do the class readings. Human journalists write stories about events, so go write stories without humans having to research them themselves. Human lawyers write briefs, so go write them without human lawyers needing to do anything but bill their clients. But now, consider this one: human spiritual guides create sermons that lead other humans to have cherished insights about religious matters. Figure out what sorts of word combinations lead to generating understanding and create new combinations that will have this effect. If we see the purpose of our spiritual teachers as making us think in a way that generates wisdom and allows us to live more meaningful lives, that is something a chatbot could actually do quite well. They can see which sorts of passages have the most influence on us and create new versions. They can figure out how we are inspired and continually inspire us. This strikes us as cheap, as dirty, as mere spiritual manipulation. We prize the wise because we believe that their ability to stir our souls comes from the fact that they have a superior connection to the Divine. They provide penetrating astuteness because they have access to the truth that we lack. They are sagacious because they are holy. ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as. And thus, it can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal. It is like the false prophet, the huckster pretending to be sacred when they are, in fact, profane in order to profit from being thought a prophet. ChatGPT is built precisely to be this sort of fraud, to be a fake human whose work we can substitute for our own, pretending to have done the necessary labor so that we can get the reward without breaking an intellectual sweat. But that is the opposite of what happens when we use it as an e-prophet. When we read an inspirational passage from ChatGPT and are truly inspired, gain spiritual insight, see the world differently, then we have actually done the real work. Regardless of the source of the passage, we really are changed. In this case, unlike with the plagiarizing lawyer or student, it is the effect, not the cause, that is important. William James’ brilliant philosophical move, transferring talk of religious experience out of the realm of the metaphysical and into the purview of psychology, is transformational. Religion is no longer about truth or faith but about feeling and human-lived experience. If we adopt the pragmatic perspective that inspires that move, then the fact is that the origin of enlightenment, the source of our new wisdom, the cause of our ability to see the world in a deeper and more interconnected fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is that we are changed for the better, not how we came to be changed. And the one thing that artificial intelligence coupled with big data is good at is figuring out how to get humans to predictably react to words. It can figure out what sort of disinformation will get us to vote certain ways and what sorts of triggers will get us to buy certain products. Yes, we ought to be very concerned about these misuses. But that is because these are matters based on facts. But if we are talking about images that inspire awe, jokes that make us laugh, or in this case, inspirational passages that give us insight, then the case is completely different. When it comes to the cases of generating human emotions, what matters are the emotions. If James is correct in moving our understanding of the religious into the realm of the experiential, then we should welcome the rise of our new e-prophets. Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Gimbel has authored Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion & Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy ).” Dr. Stephen Stern is the.co-author with Dr. Steve Gimbel of Reclaiming the WIcked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and the author of The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22 , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Share Previous Next

Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. < Back Magesh Contributor Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Navigating Easter to Pentecost Choices that Lead to D eception The Trajectory of AI: Balancing Promise and Caution Mentoring for His Kingdom Credit Where Credit is Due The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music Drumming to Inner Peace

< Back Matriarchy and Mitochondria David Cowles Aug 7, 2025 “Going forward, you might want to tone down that male machismo, just a bit.” If there is a single underlying theme across American TV sitcoms, it may be the proverbial ‘Battle of the Sexes’, or as we might say today, ‘Gender Wars’. Who rules the American family…and by extension perhaps, the rest of society? Is it the ‘perpetually puffed up patriarch’ or his ‘mild mannered but manipulative better half’? Channel surf late night cable stations (the preferred leisure time activity of my fellow insomniacs and me) and you’ll get a graduate level education in gender politics. Typically, a blundering man is skillfully managed by a wily woman. As with Peacocks, the man is all feathers! “Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous/Almost at times, the Fool.” (Eliot) Or you might just put your clicker down and get to know your Mitochondria . These tiny organelles, found exclusively in the cytoplasm of animal cells, reinforce the social prominence of gender. Their rendition is less humorous than the sitcoms they inspire, but it delivers an intriguing and frankly inspiring model of social organization. Who knew that a bunch of degenerate bacteria had so much to do with our survival and timely death? Who knew they had so much to teach us? An article by Jennifer N.R. Smith, published in the June 2025 issue of Biology, literally blew the lid off. Let me summarize her relevant insights, using her own words whenever possible (quotation marks below indicate text from the article) and adding a few comments of my own along the way: “Biologist Lynn Margulis postulated in 1967 that mitochondria descend from a single bacterium that was engulfed by a larger ancestral cell about 1.5 billion years ago. Instead of consuming this tidbit, the larger cell let it continue living within: endosymbiosis .” The emergence of a eukaryotic cell (cell with a nucleus) was a watershed moment in the evolution of our terrestrial biosphere…and it may have happened only once. The eukaryotic cell is the basic building block of all complex multi-cellular organisms. The ‘evolutionary leap’ from prokaryotic bacteria (no nucleus) to eukaryotic slime molds (nucleus) was huge compared to the more modest step from sponges to homo sapiens . Wrap your head around that…if you can! So, if on balance you’ve had a good life, you owe a debt of gratitude to a single enterprising and compassionate cell that treated its prey with respect and offered partnership on generous terms. And if not, now you know who to blame (and it’s not mommy and daddy)! (Had the allied nations treated Germany half so well after World War I, the 2 nd World War and the slaughter of 6 million Jews might have been avoided.) The ‘prey’ became the nucleus of the cell, determining most of the cell’s characteristics, housing its precious DNA, and guiding much of its behavior. Perhaps the oldest fragment of philosophical writing in Europe comes from Anaximander (6 th century BCE). If I read it right (per Heidegger), it states that actual beings ‘emerge’ when and only when virtual beings ‘grant each other reck’, i.e. respect, consideration, etc. When I step back and allow you to be yourself and when at the same time, with no expectation of reciprocity, you do the same for me, we emerge from the fog of potentiality and become ‘who we are’ – and we are neither rock nor island, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. A similar insight is prominent in the New Testament and in the works of Martin Buber, drawing on his familiarity with Hasidic Judaism. Once the phenomenon of endosymbiosis was established, why stop with just a nucleus? Why not invite another cell to join the eukaryotic enterprise? And so a certain eukaryotic cell, a descendant of the primordial eukaryotic cell, spread its wings and absorbed another, entirely independent bacterium, et voila , Earth’s first mitochondrion! And again, it only happened once! Your body is made up almost entirely of eukaryotic cells, 30 trillion of them at any one time, each with anywhere from 100 to 1,000 mitochondria. So all animals have three unique ancestors in common: the eukaryotic cell that curated the first mitochondrion, the prokaryotic cell that curated the first nucleus, and the primordial DNA/RNA molecule that synthesized only once (on Earth). Mitochondria incessantly grant reck, to each other, to the cells that house them, and to the organisms formed by those cells! They are a tangible manifestation of Anaximander’s concept of ontogenesis . They knew 1.5 billion years ago lessons in cooperation that we’re struggling to learn today. So, let’s get to know our own mitochondria. Keeping to our theme, Matriarchy , it’s important to note that we inherit our mitochondrial DNA exclusively from our mothers. The nucleus needs a dad , but the contents of the cytoplasm are all mom . “Mitochondria (in human cells) have their own DNA, which consists of only 37 genes, compared with the thousands of genes in the spiraling chromosomes (DNA) inside the cell nucleus.” Mitochondria build and support community in two ways via two different media. First, they communicate; second, they share resources and respond to calls for help. They not only talk among themselves within a cell, they also talk with their mates across cell walls. They form Trotsky’s ideal International – members communicating with one another in local cadres and then with members of other cadres, ultimately forming a truly global, yet decentralized, communications network. No wonder the biological revolution on Earth was so successful! Intercellular communication is prerequisite for the evolution of multicellular organisms like your own tired self. Unlike contemporary millennials, communication plays an absolutely essential role in the social life of mitochondria: “Mitochondria communicate, both within their own cells and among other cells…Mitochondria from different parts of the body talk to one another, using hormones as their language…The mitochondrial collective operates as a mitochondrial information-processing system, or MIPS. “This bioenergetic state then leads to the production of secondary messenger molecules that are intelligible to the nucleus…The nucleus of your cells can read the environment through the MIPS that surrounds it…They reach out to one another to help their community to thrive and also to support one another in times of distress.” Unlike the familiar double-helix residing in the cell’s nucleus, mitochondrial DNA forms a ring typical of prokaryotic cells. “This ring of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is sheltered within two membranes. The outer shell, shaped like the skin of a sausage, encases the mitochondrion and selectively allows molecules to enter or exit. The inner membrane is made of densely packed proteins and has many folds, called cristae , which serve as a site for chemical reactions… “…Even when mitochondria looked unhealthy (overall), their cristae looked healthy at places where the mitochondria touched one another…The cristae line up…(they) formed parallel ribbons undulating across mitochondria. “Could mitochondrial junctions and aligned cristae operate like neuronal synapses with the resulting mitochondrial collective behaving essentially like an intracellular brain?” Today, we are breathlessly searching for consciousness beyond Homo Sapiens . Most of us are now willing to grant ‘most favored species’ status to certain other humanoids and primates and to some marine mammals. Many are willing to include certain species of birds, insects, and cephalopods in the big tent. But what about organisms that lack a traditional brain? How could such an organism be conscious? Ms. Smith suggests that networks of mitochondria could constitute an intra- cellular brain, or perhaps even an inter-cellular one! Mitochondria give a whole new meaning to phrases like ‘social consciousness’ and ‘distributed intelligence’. Imagine what our world would be like if we humans shared our brains with other members of our species? Or with members of other species? The Sci-fi potential is unlimited! Supporting this hypothesis is the realization that mitochondria use the same mechanism for communication as neurons in the human brain: microtubules. “Mitochondria send thin tubular structures out toward one another, like feelers that some solitary cells use to search for a more hospitable environment or a healthy fellow cell…” People whose mitochondria are unhealthy have more of these nanotunnels than usual. This suggests that these unhealthy mitochondria might be reaching out for help. “Healthy mitochondria can donate intact mtDNA to mutant mitochondria. In conditions of scarce energy supply, mitochondria fuse with one another into long strands to share mtDNA.” “Interestingly, brain mitochondria have receptors to sense both stress and sex hormones. So we have a population of mitochondria in the adrenal glands that signal directly, via the blood, to mitochondria in the brain. (They talk to each other through their isolating cell walls.) “…Mitochondria show all the features of social beings—a shared environment inside the cell or body, communication, formation of groups or types, synchronization of behavior, interdependence, and specialization in the tasks they perform. “Rather than having supplementary roles like those of battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell. Genes sit inert in the nucleus until energy and the right message come along to turn some of them on and some others off. Mitochondria provide these messages… “…Mitochondria not only are involved in integrating information but also give orders. They dictate whether the cell divides, differentiates or dies. Indeed, mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death. If the MIPS deems it necessary, it triggers programmed cell death…a form of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the organism.” Can the wisdom of the mitochondria inform our own debates re end of life care and euthanasia? On the one hand, mitochondria are all about the procreation and preservation of life: They care for the other mitochondria in their cell, as well as mitochondria in nearby cells. They share their healthy DNA with less well-endowed mates. They share energy resources with sick or starving compatriots. They form networks for processing and communicating information within multicellular organisms. They are chemical stash houses, supplying most of the energy that powers their host cells. On the other hand though, they know when to quit, when ‘enough’s enough’, No Mas! and Nature has empowered them to make that ‘life or death’ call for themselves, for their host cells, and for the uber-organism they support. They go ‘all in’ for life, but when the time comes, they do ‘go gentle into that good night’. (Thomas) Do we have something to learn here? We are as we are thanks to the mitochondria our moms passed on to us. Of course, their moms passed it on to them…all the way back to ‘Eve’. So going forward, you might want to tone down that male machismo , just a bit! Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party. 1974–79, Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, New York. Chicago’s iconic installation reclaims feminine legacy and power, much like mitochondria—passed exclusively through mothers—redefine our understanding of biological and social authority. 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< Back Middle Voice David Cowles “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” According to Benjamin Whorf, language is a record of how we see the world, and conversely, language conditions us to see the world in a particular way: a paradigmatic, if somewhat diabolical, example of non-linear, auto-reinforcing process. Take English, for example. When we speak, most of our verbs are either active or passive . We call that the “voice” of the verb. In an active/passive voiced language, we are always doing something to someone (or something) or someone (or something) is doing something to us: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it. The Lex Talionis (‘eye for an eye’), literally the law of retaliation , is the paradigmatic expression of such an active/passive world view. Scotty broke the vase: active voice. Scotty is called the ‘subject’ and my poor Ming is called the ‘object’ of his action. This construction first separates Scotty from what he’s done. In fact, Scotty’s action itself assumes the status of an object; it is something Scotty possesses: “ his action”. Scotty acted, and the vase ‘reacted’ (by shattering). The flow is in one direction: it’s a vector. Alternatively, the vase was broken by Scotty: passive voice. It’s the same event but this time seen from the point of view of the victim, my precious artifact. The vase is now the subject, but the action is still unidirectional, still a vector. In one sense, the active and passive voices are opposites; but in another sense, they are really the same thing. (How often that is true in our world!) They both describe the same event, in the same way, but just from opposite viewpoints. So we can say that English is an ‘active/passive voiced language’. Syntax speaks volumes about how we understand events, and, therefore, how we understand the world. An action, according to our grammar, is a vectored relationship between two unequal participants, a terribly minor, in not null, subset of all that goes on in our world. The world consists solely of events. If our preferred way of defining an event is in terms of a unidirectional relationship between unequal participants, then for us the world will consist primarily of such actions. This will be the logos we impose upon the world, and our language will reflect that logos . Of course, it works both ways. To a large extent, we learn about the world through language. Our language teaches us to see our world in terms of unequal, unidirectional relationships. Our language creates our logos, thereby defining our world for us. Putting it another way, we create our world in the image and likeness of our language. Does this language serve our purposes ? You bet it does! It’s hard to imagine a Golden Gate Bridge without it. Our language essentially reduces Being to a schematic. But does such a language actually meet our needs ? Not so much! In the real world, action is rarely, maybe never , entirely one directional. “I hit the nail” is actually an abstract simplification of a much more complex process. When my hammer connects with the nail head, the nail moves (hopefully) and the hammer recoils (predictably) sending vibrations down my arm…and that’s assuming I didn’t also hit my thumb in the process. Syntax unravels the unity of being and displays it like a collection of butterflies pinned to the wall of a natural history museum. The fact is that every real action acts on the so-called subject as well as on the so-called object. In the example of Scotty and the vase, that reality is somewhat trivial and can probably be safely ignored…that is, unless I accept Scotty’s explanation that the vase jumped off the shelf and attacked him, possibly the act of a neighborhood genie. And why not, the very same thing happened at Billy’s house just last week. It’s a pattern you see. Better call Ghostbusters ! But did you notice the real ‘ghost’ in this story? It’s Scotty’s language. He translated what might have been an accident into the intentional action of a genie. But what if we’re trying to model a chemical reaction, or worse, a quantum mechanical process, or even worse, some sort of ecological phenomenon? How do we describe these events using just active and passive verbs? We can’t. At best, we can approximate clumsily in simple situations. “Two hydrogen atoms each lend an electron to one oxygen atom; or an oxygen atom borrows an electron from each of two hydrogen atoms.” (Hint: it’s water!) When we get into more complex interactions, language breaks down completely, and we have to resort to diagrams (e.g. Feynman diagrams) or equations or shoulder shrugs. Now imagine the difficulty of modeling complex human interactions using just active and passive voice verbs! No wonder we’re always at war with one another. And our politics? Of course, we see the world in terms of “us” and “them”; of course, we see social change in terms of class warfare. It’s the Golden Rule after all: she who has the gold, rules. Nonetheless, most of us are resigned to this state of affairs. It’s just the way things are. How could it be otherwise? Easily! And the fact is, it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t necessarily always have to be this way. Many ancient languages had another voice which linguists call the Middle Voice . The middle voice is ideally suited to model situations where relationships are between equals and where action is reciprocal. Linguists disagree about the place of the middle voice in the evolution of language, but it is at least possible that the middle voice preceded both the active and passive voices. Modern linguists struggle to understand the middle voice. Conditioned by their own active/passive logoi , they want to understand this verb form as somewhere in between the active and passive poles. Hence, the term “middle voice”. In fact, the middle voice has nothing to do with its active/passive cousins. It is a completely different way of viewing the world. The middle voice verb form describes an action that impacts both subject and object simultaneously; or it describes a reciprocal relationship between two co-subjects who are also co-objects. That’s what process is; that’s what an event is. Anything else is just an abstraction. Analogy : If the active voice is the voice of the future and the passive voice the voice of the past, then the middle voice is the voice of the Present. Imagine what our world would look like if we viewed it in terms of reciprocal relations and omnidirectional events! Would that change the way the world is? Or would it just enable us to see it as it really is? Both. We’d see the world through a different filter, and in turn, we’d most likely act quite differently in such a world. How do we talk about love using active and passive verbs? The best we can come up with is something lame like, “Mary and Paul are in love with one another.” This turns love into a static state rather than a raging fire. The middle voice, on the other hand, is ready-made to describe the relationship between Mary and Paul in a way that does it justice. The active and passive voices describe the same event in the same way; they merely reverse the point of view. The middle voice defines that same event in an entirely different way. The active/passive voice sees the world from the outside; the middle voice sees the world from the inside: objectivity vs. subjectivity. Thus, we have two opposing world views: an active/passive view and a middle voice view. One sees the world in terms of will, struggle, domination, and power; the other sees the world in terms of mutuality. One is the syntax of war, the other of peace. One is the syntax of cause and effect, the other of evolution. One is the syntax of past and future, the other of the present. Unfortunately, however, most Western languages have lost the middle voice. Where the middle voice has been retained (e.g. Icelandic), it has been forced to co-exist with its active/passive cousins, and it no longer conveys the strong sense of reciprocity it once did. The poverty of an active/passive voiced language and the lack of a strong middle voice alternative is not just a linguistic problem; it’s a philosophical problem and ultimately a theological problem. One way to understand ‘the Christian project’ is as an attempt to reintroduce middle-voice consciousness to the world. Of course, I am not suggesting that the New Testament authors, much less Jesus himself, were budding linguists. Yet, they understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way folks viewed the world and, with incredible insight, they sought to change that view. When you view events and the actions that constitute them in terms of unequal, unidirectional power relations, it becomes easy to abuse or exploit your neighbor...and impossible to love her as yourself. Even today, certain sub-cultures will brand you a sucker or a wimp or a ‘goodie two shoes’ if you do not take advantage of the weaker folks in your orbit. “It’s just business!” Active/passive-voiced languages conflict with values like justice and kindness. It is difficult to inculcate an ethic of justice, reciprocity and love in folks who view the world according to the active/passive paradigm. In this sense, ‘bad language’ could be seen as humanity’s ‘original sin’: the second commandment is just an extension of the first. Christianity, especially in its early stages, sought to replace the active/passive world view with the world view that we are calling ‘middle voice consciousness’. In the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we read, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 12 centuries later, Francis of Assisi built on this insight: “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we do, we do to ourselves to the same degree and in the same way and at the same time as we do it to others. That goes for positive actions like forgiveness and negative actions like violence. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because in middle voice consciousness, your neighbor is yourself! Beginning with Leo XIII (1878 – 1903), modern Popes have railed against economic injustice, but they have done so from the middle voice perspective of universal love ( agape ) rather than class consciousness. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next