Letter #274: Chasing the Heavens

It's us who change.

Dad,

It was Socrates, in Plato’s Meno, who said that all learning is remembering, “for the soul has been born many times.” This Greek version of the concept is called anamnesis, but theories of reincarnation can be found all over the world. Typically, they come along with a cyclical theory of history. In Stoic philosophy, the universe is periodically burned up and restarted afresh in a process called ekpyrosis. Today some scientists propose that the universe will eventually contract back in on itself in a “Big Crunch,” and the loop of time will begin anew.

But this idea we’re getting at, that each generation rediscovers the truths of faith in new ways, is a distinctly Christian spin on things. True enough, “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” as Wordsworth wrote. The trajectories of our lives extend beyond our deaths and stretch back before our births; God knew us before he formed us in the womb. But there’s no rewinding the tape back to the beginning. History has a direction and an endpoint; it doesn’t just restart like a video game. Each new life opens a new chapter in the story.

I mentioned in my last letter that Dante was one of the first to put forward a systematic theory of how languages change, which is also a theory of how human societies develop. At first he thought that the process began after the Tower of Babel fell, and that one language—Hebrew—survived unchanged to preserve the truths of God. But in his magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, he revised his opinion. When Dante meets Adam in Paradise, he explains that change was a constant even in the generations before Babel.

From the moment history began, human customs and speech patterns started slipping out from under us. “For no effect of reason ever stays the same, because of human fancy, which renews itself in pursuit of heaven.” It’s a beautiful, sad thought. Our reason is always seguendo il cielo—“following heaven,” but also therefore “changing like the skies” as we are forced to develop new forms, new words, new images to serve as vessels for eternal truths. Earth has to shift to take in more and more of heaven’s permanence.

I think this is why it’s not enough just to settle on the truth of scripture and have done with it. There’s more truth in scripture than any one era can understand. As new information becomes available to us, it takes time to arrange that information into a new picture of eternal things.

Adam ends his speech with an image of the sun’s light traveling across the sky, day by day. I find this almost unbearably poignant. It wouldn’t be long before it came to seem more like the sun was standing still, and the earth was moving around it. And yet this shattering revelation would make Adam’s point more true, not less: the light that comes from heaven never moves. But new days kept dawning even as we found out how to interpret that fact in a new way. The light of heaven stays in place. It’s us who change.

Love,
Spencer