Conversations With God
Part III: Existential Wonder
English is a verbose language. Our extensive literary tradition and our massive transfer of loan words from Latin and Greek and French, etc. mean that we can describe more things than perhaps any other language in history… and our global dominance means that new ideas and objects and activities are likely to be incorporated.
Some of those precise words are descriptions of very particular emotions or sensations. Schadenfreude, for example, (a modern German loanword from a language known for its precision) means delight or satisfaction at the misfortune of a malefactor or opponent. (Note: these definitions aren’t sourced from a dictionary and are purely my own recall and understanding but I have a pretty good grasp of word meanings and spellings). Eldritch means a feeling of otherworldly dread upon contact with some mysterious or alien presence.
There are many, many nuanced emotions for which we do not have words. One of them is the thrilling and almost physically pleasurable sense of wonder and intellectual stimulation upon contemplation of the vast spaces or energies of our universe or of the incredible ordered minutiae of material reality. I tentatively call this emotion existential wonder because I believe that a strong component of the feeling is the joy at the recognition of existence and the wonder (and curiosity) that you are a consciousness in this place and time, sitting atop a vast and opaque subconsciousness and ostensibly connected to a physical body.
I was originally going to make this third and final exploratory sketch of what God might mean to me a meditation on ‘order’. I began this brief and casual series after being pressed by a sober person who I esteem very highly to imagine my Higher Power in greater detail and to begin having a relationship with it. The analytical part of my mind dismisses such suggestions… but the analytical me also must accede to the fact that MY beliefs and decisions and impulses will lead to further diminution, and destruction. I’m willing to try his exercise, for months if need be. What would my Higher Power be? It would be a watcher, a judge, a creator, a counselor… not a friend or a father or a rescuer. I have little insight into why this is but the latter set of traits simply don’t feel compelling or seem to be roundly contradicted by my experience of Terran reality.
Order is certainly important to any conception of God because it is the foundation of creation, and consciousness, and life. The strongest argument for the existence of some universal spirit or creative force or entity surely must be the mathematical coherence of reality. How strange that material reality has these abstract principles underlying it all and that we are attuned to their effects AND (partly) capable of their explication. There’s a wonderful novel called Shantaram in which a man flees prison in Australia and ends up an international fugitive in Bombay. He falls in with the city’s organized crime network. Amidst its +700 pages (if I recall correctly) are the standing babas, a harrowing account of the Indian prison system during the despotic reign of Indira Gandhi, and a suspenseful love story, and dozens more characters and themes. It is certainly one of the greatest stories I have ever read. One of the senior figures in the latter half of the book (a crime boss but a philosophical and deeply curious Muslim) lays out his conception of morality: morality is ultimately concerned with the ordering of the universe: anything that leads to more order=morally good; anything that erodes it=bad. A physicist might aptly label this order’s opposite entropy. He explains why this is and I think it’s an interesting idea but not universally valid, and so wrong.
J.R.R Tolkien took a much different view in his vast work of historical religious fiction describing the creation and entire history of his legendarium, The Silmarillion. The book spans tens of thousands of chronological years and is told in the old epic/biblical style, with sequences of great events and reactions and lineages creating character and plot development and scant time spent on imagery or interior characterization or dialogue. It’s not a novel… it’s much closer to Beowulf. Anyway, the story begins with music:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony. And it came to pass that Iluvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Iluvatar and were silent.
In this telling the evil and discord of existence arises with Melkor, a kind of pantheon member god (collectively known as the Valar) serving the highest and original god, Eru (which I believe means “I am” in Tolkien’s elvish tongues). The destruction and suffering he births are later revealed to still be a part of Eru’s plan (song), which is vaster and more wonderful than anyone could comprehend. This revelation fills Melkor (“he who arises in might”) with envy and rage, and he becomes known as Morgoth (“dark enemy”). Melkor is the most powerful of the fictional pantheon in The Silmarillion and is also the most solitary. He spends eons in the voids of existence, seeking the flame imperishable (which is the embodied reality of Eru’s ability to create original living beings and minds) and there is some hint that the long isolation feeds his dark impulses. The interesting thing is that Melkor is the ‘god’ of order, and systems, and volcanoes, and machinery, and logic. Eventually he breaks into open rebellion against the rest of the Valar, and the inhabitants of the world (including elves), and Eru, and is eventually defeated and sequestered in a dark and impenetrable vault, chained until the erasure of all existence (and the ‘death’ of all of the Valar). His chief lieutenant is Sauron, the antagonist of Tolkien’s later The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Again, Sauron is a demigod of order and production. His focus reflects exactly that of the Greek god Hephaestus, the Hellenic deity of smiths and metallurgy and volcanos and crafts and sculpture and construction. Sauron’s insatiable lust for power is depicted as a kind of mania for order, and hatred of the independence and variety of other beings in the world.
“And he descended upon Arda in power and majesty greater than any other of the Valar, as a mountain that wades in the sea and has its head above the clouds and is clad in ice and crowned with smoke and fire; and the light of the eyes of Melkor was like a flame that withers with heat and pierces with a deadly cold…” (The Silmarillion)
I think that this conception of order (a temptation toward control and domination, and then perhaps malevolence) is just as apt as the idea that order is the ultimate expression of the divine. I don’t unquestioningly glorify the idea of order but our bodies and our brains are only possible in the physical plane when systems do an end-run around the second law of thermodynamics, by absorbing energy inputs. They do this for long enough and of sufficient quantity and particularity to create some tiny smudge of order in the quantum chaos that apparently roils all around us. Everything we know (particles, planets, storms, languages) are products of order, and so is everything that we’ve built.
So I absolutely think that my Higher Power instantiates order and that it is included in his essence. There’s no real emotional significance to that proposition, though. Indeed, when I contemplate the hidden inner-workings of our universe and its mathematical expressions or when I contemplate the order which buttresses all music, all stories, all technology I begin to feel that hint of existential wonder.
Existential wonder is the deepest connection to God that I have. I hope and expect that the last few moments of my mind’s operation is suffused with this feeling, and the memories of my family, and a deep and peaceful equanimity.
Until then… what incredible majesty surrounds us.