All things considered, there is much to be said for Being. It is what lies all round us. It isn’t to be sniffed at, but to be taken seriously. It is after all the object of science, and of metaphysics, too. It may be said that, if science deals with beings in the plural, metaphysics deals with Being in the singular, or ontology as being the word of Being. In either case, there is only, in Hamlet’s dilemma, “to be”, never “not to be”.
All things considered, we must add, there is much also to be said for Non-Being. There is much to be said for Nothing, if only as the source of so much inspiration. In so far as science is said to deal with beings, and metaphysics with Being, the object of poetry may be said to be Nothing.
“The poet’s eye,” says Shakespeare, ”in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy Nothing a local habitation and a name.” Indeed, if ever poet knew his trade, Shakespeare knew it.
Consequently, it may further be said of all the many things under the eye of heaven, that they are neither one thing nor the other, but composed of Being and Non-Being. In them all there is one element of All and another element of Nothing. And we deny or overlook the one or the other at our peril.
Here are, it may also be said, the twin objects of the much discussed Two Cultures, that of the sciences, on the one hand, and that of the humanities, on the other. In the not so distant past, up till the mid-nineteenth century, the former prevailed at most universities, but since then pride of place in the parlors has shifted to the sciences, and the humanities have been relegated to the kitchen with Cinderella. Nowadays, even the study of literature has to be scientific, objective, academic. And that means boring, stultifying, inducing somnolence.
Anyhow, quite apart from the prescribed study at universities, whether of the sciences or the humanities, I want to emphasize the things in the world around us, the things to which we attribute the quality of Being. What a wonderful thing they have, if only we would open our eyes to it! What a wonderful thing they are! “They are! They are!” I feel like jumping up and down and exclaiming with delight. “What a wonderful thing they are!”
“Look at the stars!” exclaims the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, like a little child. “Look, look up at the skies!” And let me add, “Look at the flowers on the earth! Look at the way they are imitating the stars in heaven above!” And then let me add the favorite word of Holy Scripture, “Behold! Behold and see!” And again, “Don’t shut your eyes! Open them and look on what is all around you!”
Now let me ask the question, “What do all these things have in common? What are they all? Yes, they are things, they are beings, or more simply, they are! Yes, they are, they are, they are!” And why, let me ask again, are they? Because, let me answer, God is. As God said to Moses on a certain occasion at a certain place in the desert, “I am.” And what do all created beings say in unison after him, one by one, “I am.”
That is, in short, what the Creator has deigned to share by his work of creation with all his creatures. He is, and they are. Such is the symphony of Nature, as all created things, each of them one by one, echo the divine name, “I am”. And when human beings join in the grand symphony of Nature, then with the addition of human voices to non-human instruments, Nature is raised to the supernatural level.
But there still remains the difference. They are all created beings. Man is also a created being. All told, however seemingly infinite their number, they never add up to the uncreated Being of God. Their Being remains inseparably, indelibly, inextricably composed with Nothing. They are all essentially composite, compound, and yet – if only they recognize it – they should be content to be so. He is above, and they are below, and it is good that this should always be so, and be recognized as so.
But wait a minute! All these created beings, how many they are! Human beings alone have just passed their seven billion mark. And what about all other beings, in all their multifarious forms of genera and species, extending over so many millennia into the all but infinite past? Yet they are just material beings we can see with our eyes, or with the assistance of microscopes and telescopes. But what about spiritual beings, concerning whom the prophet Daniel assures us that a thousand thousand ministered to the Ancient of Days, and a thousand times ten thousand stood before him?
So many, they bewilder us with their multitude. “Continuous as the stars that shine, and twinkle on the milky way, they stretch in never ending line”, across the centuries and the millennia, not just continuously but innumerably. How can we possibly count them?
But why do we want to count them? Can’t we be content with those comparatively few beings within our limited eyeshot and earshot? And then from the few we see and hear around us, we may well pursue them with our mind’s eyes and ears. And where the mind fails, we still have our imagination to fail before their infinity and eternity – or rather, before the infinity and eternity of Him Who Is.
Such is Being, refracted in so many billions and trillions of beings – as though in accordance with the divine motto, “The more, the merrier!” There is indeed no end to the divine discontent at the heart of Being, no limit to the divine disclosure of multiple beings. “For ever and ever. Amen”
On Annihilation
From the beginning to the end, from the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation, from the Creation to the Consummation, we come at length to Non-Being, Nothing, Annihilation.
Already in the Old Testament the prophets are speaking no longer of Creation. That is, like Clementine, “lost and gone forever” with the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and the murder of Abel by Cain in the outer wilderness of the world. Already, in the words of the prophet, the day of the Lord is imminent, “a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness,” in a word, a day that is more like night than what we mean by day.
Already, even in the account of Creation, when we read the first utterance of the Word, “Let there be light!” even out of the created light there emerges a darkness that was never created by God. Even out of the cosmos of whirling galaxies there emerges a series – if “series” it can be called – of dark holes, swallowing the stars. Even in the beginning there is found defect among the angels, and there is the eschatological war in heaven recorded in the other account of Revelation, when Lucifer and his rebelling angels fight against Michael and the good angels, and the former are hurled headlong down out of heaven into hell.
Subsequently, as sin has prevailed on the earth, from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from the successive patriarchs to the people of Israel, from Moses to Samuel and the other prophets, “from life’s dawn it is drawn down”, and a thick darkness descends on the people, as once it descended on the Egyptians. Then, as the memory of Creation passes away, and the people no longer thank God for his gifts, the foreshadowing of Annihilation looms on the horizon.
Yet the day of the Lord, foretold in such gloomy terms by the prophets, comes and goes, and all that is left is the cry of an infant – born in the stable of Bethlehem and laid in a manger, then abruptly snatched up by his mother and taken on a donkey to Egypt, then returning with his parents not to Bethlehem but to Nazareth, so that he may be named “Jesus of Nazareth”. So the prophets have been disproved. Or have they?
Still in the New Testament we have the eschatological sermon of Jesus himself on the end of Jerusalem, and the end of the world. And what Jesus says is echoed by the disciples who renew in their respective epistles the eschatological expectation of what will happen in the last days. What was the point, they must have wondered, in setting down their memories in writing, if the end was imminent? But then a time came when they could wait no longer, and first Matthew, then Mark, then Luke, and lastly John, penned their memoirs, which have come down to us after almost two millennia.
And now, in the twenty-first century, what remains for us? When will the promised end befall us? Will it befall us in our lifetime? Every day we open the newspapers, and every day we read of earthquakes and typhoons, floods