Man and Infinity.
It is the perennial honor of Sweden’s greatest philosopher, Christofer
Jacob Boström, to have satisfactorily explained the extremely difficult
and complicated question with which our last chapter concluded. He has
shown that man, exactly on the supposition that he is an eternal part
of God’s being, requires and must go through an evolution in time.
According to Boström, religious intuition has found the truth that man
is an eternal idea in God, a living member in His organism. But Boström
has also understood and considered the difference implied in thinking
of man as a member in God’s organism and in thinking of this member as
living its independent life. In the former case man possesses the same
qualities as God; in the latter, these qualities with corresponding
limitations.
For an illustration of how all limited beings are incorporated in an
absolute personality, Boström likes to fall back on the numerical system.
Spiritual beings form a series, as it were, of lower and higher entities,
where the latter contain the former pretty much as higher numbers
contain the smaller. Boström distinguishes between positive and negative
attributes, and means by the former those attributes without which the
being cannot be thought, and which it therefore in one sense contains.
So for instance in the number ten, all the previous numbers are positive
attributes because ten cannot be thought without them, which, however,
does not imply identity with either of the lower numbers. On the other
hand all the following numbers are negative attributes to the number ten
because this may well be thought without them. It contains them only if
it is considered as one point in the numerical system, in which case it
has them all as attributes. Thus, still referring to the number ten, this
may be considered complete within itself without considering the higher
numbers, whereas if we wish to comprehend it fully we must see it as a
link in the numerical system. Ten would not be the half of twenty without
the latter, and so on. The existence of the higher is after all required
for that of the lower as fully as the existence of the lower is necessary
to that of the higher.
Because each entity is higher according as it has a larger number of the
rest as its positive and a smaller number as its negative attributes, it
follows that the highest entity, or Deity, has no negative attributes but
only positive ones, which of course is the true meaning of the expression
that God is the most perfect being.
As a lower being is more perfectly defined when considered included in a
higher, this fact must be the reason why all finite, rational beings in
their evolution try to assert themselves in the higher beings, up to the
highest, by whom they finally obtain their full scope and in whom only
they live their complete life.
But if Boström had lived to study the modern cytology he would have found
a more adequate comparison within man’s organism, and one that perhaps
in several respects would have modified his conception of the world of
divine ideas.
God is related to man as man is, not to the cell, but to the lower units
of which the cell is composed. Between God and man there is at least one
other organism that we know of, namely humanity. But if we overlook this
and for simplicity’s sake imagine the relationship as that of man to cell
it should be evident from what has been previously said that man is and
must be something else to God than he is to himself.
To God he is what the cell is to man, a living part in His organism, and
in this capacity he possesses all the perfect qualities of that organism.
Living his independent life, man is in the same position as the cell
in his own being, when the cell is thought of as living the life it is
confined to by its less perfect organism.
Although limited to that life the cell may literally be said to be man’s
image—but an image of a very singular kind. The cell does not reproduce
man’s traits as does a photograph or a statue, but within its lower realm
it mirrors the fundamental qualities of the original on a very reduced
scale.
These limitations can not be conceived by the cell as such because
they are natural to it and belong to its entity. The cell is and must
feel itself as perfect in its realm as man in his. Only if the cell
could compare its conditions with man’s, these limitations would be
apparent to it, and such a comparison the cell really undertakes within
certain limits. Into each feeling of want enters a comparison between
the possessed and the desired. In the higher wants, then, that drive
the cells to upbuild man’s organism we have a manifestation of such a
comparing power of the cell. Experience shows that the cell may live
in a veritable natural state, but it is also, because of the presence
of the soul in its innermost being, capable of a high culture for the
development of which it receives constant impulses and stimulations from
the soul.
In the same sense man may be said to be the image of God. Living in the
world and the natural state, to which he is confined by his relatively
imperfect organism, man has the qualities of God with corresponding
limitations. But even in this state he feels the spirit of God present
in him because he is an original part of God’s own organism. In his
conscience and in his religious feeling man not only comprehends
distinctly the presence of God in his inner being but constantly
receives also impulses, incitements and inspirations to develop that
perfect life and heavenly kingdom, of which he is called by his high
origin and divine birth to become a citizen.
What the conscience and the religious feelings are to the will, the
logical laws of thinking are to the reason, and in the latter, man finds
God as immediately present as in the former. Indeed, logical laws are the
form in which God himself exists.
Because of God’s presence in the eternal laws of our thinking, man is
able to appraise himself and his condition with an absolute measure, and
can in this way obtain a certain knowledge of God’s world and of his
perfect qualities. He has only to abstract all wants and limitations
from such qualities as have a positive content, because lack of want is
perfectness. We shall now undertake such a valuation with respect to
man’s need of evolution here in time, which quality, as all the others,
can be explained and understood only through its connection with the
corresponding quality in the absolute being.
It is as natural to God to be without an origin and an evolution as it is
to man to have them, and we might therefore ask how man in this respect
can have anything in common with God, a condition which, as we remember,
was indispensable for any comparison whatever. To make this point clear
we may express ourselves in a more familiar way. We might speak of time
and existence in time, instead of origin and evolution, as the latter are
only forms of time.
Is there then a moment in time that has a corresponding meaning for God
and the limitations of which we must abstract in order to understand
God’s quality of being eternal? It is by analyzing the relation between
time and eternity that we hope to receive an answer to the question why
man must undergo an evolution in time.
The most conspicuous want in all that exists in time is its lack of
duration; everything has a beginning and an end. With this lack of
duration a corresponding lack of reality follows. The real is real, only
as long as it lasts or only in the present moment. Everything past has
ceased to exist and is therefore no longer real, and the future is unreal
because it has not entered the present.
The real in time is identical with the present, which therefore must be
the moment most like eternity and the limitations of which we have to
remove.
First of all, the present in time suffers the want of ceasing and
sinking back into the past, into unreality. We can overcome this only
by raising everything past from its grave, so to speak, and drawing it
simultaneously into the present. To the eternally present, nothing past,
ending or ceasing can exist.
On the other hand the present in time suffers the same want in the
opposite direction, inasmuch as everything future is excluded therefrom
and this future growing reality must therefore be drawn into the eternal.
Neither past nor future can exist to God; He lives life undividedly,
without limitations, and needs not, as man, plot out his existence in a
series of moments. Eternity then is not identical with unending time; it
is a different form of existence, related to time as the perfect to the
imperfect.
Difficult as it is to explain what eternity implies as the perfect form
of existence, it is no less difficult to comprehend the infinite wealth
of content that such a form includes. We will therefore give a few brief
suggestions in this direction.
How poor in content is everything present to man, and likewise how
defective and unsatisfactory is his whole life here in time. As a matter
of fact we can in each moment only think one thought, perform one act,
satisfy one want. We read a book and we are only conscious of one line
or one sentence at a time. We listen to a musical creation or admire
an exhibition of art, and we only hear a few harmonies, or see a few
details of one picture, more distinctly at the time, and so on. How much
richer would not our life be if we could think the book from beginning
to end at once, hear the harmony of the entire oratorio, now focus the
beauties in smallest details of the whole picture-gallery to one point.
It even dazzles our spiritual eye if we enlarge the range of such a rich
intuition to encompass not only our nearest environments but our whole
earth or possibly our entire solar system, and yet we have only taken one
step on a road that has no end. Our solar system is only an insignificant
point among those innumerable worlds that form the Milky Way, beyond
which the astronomers surmise the existence of other hosts of stars
without limit. If we now could share in life at every point in this
infinity of worlds, would then our conception of the content of eternity
be exact? By no means. We must include in this present moment everything
that has happened on these worlds since the dawn of time and similarly
all that will occur in the millenniums to come. Is the eternal measure
now full and overflowing? By no means. Above us and below us there are
beings to whom other universes exist as infinite in all directions as
our own. All these infinities of infinities must be drawn into eternity,
but then, surely, the measure must be full. By no means. We have all
this time moved within the realm of phenomena, that is to say, in the
finite world; all this is only a faint shadow of the wealth that eternity
contains. God lives in a light that no man hath seen nor yet can see.
In this light, in this perfectness, man is a part of the divine entity.
This life in God’s eternal consciousness is man’s primary and original
existence. Only in a secondary meaning is he a self-existent personality
and is then no more identical with God than the cell is with man.
Man as an entity for himself must have the natural limitations of the
part. Conceived by God man is eternal in the divine sense, but conceived
by himself man’s eternal life is clothed in the limitations we call time.
The eternal is a constant present without beginning or end, without
past or future. What is present to man must suffer these limitations;
in other words, man must be born, must go through an evolution, or what
is the same, become to himself what he has been eternally to God. In
this respect man’s relation to God may be compared to the relation of a
newborn child to its earthly father. To him the nature and scope of the
child is perfectly clear, but the child is unconscious of it and must
awaken to an understanding thereof, that is to say, must become to itself
what it already is to its father.
Living beings form a continuous series in the absolute organism. This
series is such that the higher beings form the conditions and supports
of the lower. This connection must be entirely reversed during evolution
itself, which naturally proceeds from the lower to the higher. In time
therefore the generation and development of the lower beings must precede
that of the higher. We have also seen that the evolution of the former
is identical with the upbuilding of the organisms of the latter, and
we understand now that the whole process _must_ essentially follow the
course which, as we have previously shown, it does in fact, actually take.
It is further the inherent idea of time that man’s eternal entity
cannot appear whole and undivided. He must plot it out along a series
of successive moments which make room for only one cell-generation at a
time. As the cell’s entity again has a less comprehensive content than
man’s, its lifetime must be correspondingly shorter.