The modern world is based on number which means it is based on quantity and measurement. This is what lies behind two such apparently dissimilar things as computer technology and bureaucracy which are the foundation stones of our contemporary world and which are dragging it deep into the darkness of spiritual oppression.
A world of number is a world of control in which there is no freedom. It is a world without mystery which means it is a world without beauty whatever nonsense may be said by materialistic thinkers who refuse to accept the shallowness and the soul-destroying consequences of their thought. Numbers relate to the operation of the material world, and they obviously have their place in the structure of that world. They can provide a kind of knowledge about its outer functioning and reveal certain properties of material things. They can help to master, to a degree, the material world in terms of what it appears to be. But they cannot tell us anything about what lies behind it or its source or how the life and consciousness that appear in the material world come to be. In short, numbers can tell us about the form of things but they cannot tell us anything at all about what these things are in themselves.
If you rely on number and mathematics to tell you about the world, you kill the world. You reduce it to a machine and you reduce human beings to machines, dead things even if they move about and talk. The fact is that numbers only relate to the shape and pattern of living beings - and everything in the universe is a living being of one sort or another. They cannot describe or reveal anything about their inner life and essence, their true nature, their spiritual being, what they really are. The world of the mathematicians is not a false world but it only relates to externals and appearance. God may be a Geometer in terms of certain of his outer activities but in himself, in his spiritual being, and despite the fact that he is called a Trinity, he is a deep mystery that the quantitative science of mathematics cannot begin to understand. And we are too.
Today, the consequences of several hundred years of materialism, going back at least as far as the medieval nominalists who basically inverted the order of things putting form before being, are coming to a head. The inevitable end result will be a totalitarianism in which freedom is outlawed and control is everywhere because everything must be measured and counted. When you reduce life to numbers, as we have, the individual becomes just a number itself, a mere unit. Then it has no autonomy but must fit into the mathematical structures on which society is run. It is just a statistic and its personal integrity has gone. Unless we rediscover a spiritual vision this is what the future holds, if not for us then for our children and grandchildren.
12 comments:
I feel that the Trinity is not, primarily, numerical but relational. And that is part of why it is called a Mystery, and why the Father, Son & Holy Spirit can be called One God, 'I & the Father are One', etc.
Number is a secondary characteristic, and being predicated on stepping outside the phenomenon it describes, doesn't really exist. 'Two' people are not, primarily, a numerical phenomenon, but (a) being, and (another) being. Number is appropriate to descibe them because there is a phenomenon where shared characteristics (which make them relatable) meets each occurence of independent spirit (which makes them not a unity). (?)
'Form' is more difficult. It seems to a very large extent to be dependent on perception, for instance, from a point in space or time, or existing along a continuum with the senses that perceive it, and would change if any of these were altered, added to or reduced. It does seem to be expressive of spirit, though - forms in nature seem to communicate something of the inner spiritual reality they clothe...our creations, music, etc. 'speak' the spiritual impulse behind them.
Is 'matter' (and the things that affect it, 'waves', etc) merely a condition of spirit delineated by perception ? Which then is entrapped when the dual action of perception and the instantaneous conversion of experience into abstractions of habit (Barfield's 'idols'), numbers, etc
A friend who worked as a software engineer once told me that there is only one number: the number 1. This seemed to impress him deeply. As he was an atheist, I don't know what he made of it. I have thought about it in connection with the individual. If we look at the word "individual" we see it means undivided, not divisible into parts, one. Each of us in indivisible. There is one, and only one, of us. This suggests that we each have a unique role to play in the unfolding of creation. If we are interchangeable parts, however, our unique value is not only diminished, but negligible to non-existent. When I used to travel in my younger days, I was always torn between staying at a chain hotel/motel or taking a chance on a mom-and-pop operation of which I knew nothing. The same with restaurants. The advantage of the chain is that of a known quantity: there is little difference in a Holiday Inn, whether it is in Los Angeles or Poughkeepsie. But a privately owned and run establishment has the character of the individual proprietor. It is an adventure, an encounter with the mystery of personality, and it may be pleasant or unpleasant. It is, in either case, a connection with something real and irreducible. The chain brings you into an artificial world in which nothing seems quite real and everything happens on the surface - a polished surface, sleek and bland and safe. I think you are right and that we are all checked into the chain hotel now, where the staff and management are losing their perfunctory courtesy and an underlying malevolence is starting to show, for the courtesy had to root in reality, in personality. It was not individual.
Two interesting comments, thanks. You're right, edwin. It is all becoming a chain now.
The problem runs even deeper. It is the mindset of the decaying culture of the West that is the real rot.
Numbers were throughout ancient history infused with deeper meaning, vibrating with outer and inner meaning.
Sacred Geometry is the best analogy. Instead of mere rules of construction there was another Higher level that connected a construct to the individual and the surrounding universe.
The Pyramids around the world in Egypt, Asia, and South America are good examples, so too with Stonehenge.
You are right that numbers do have qualitative aspects because everything is suffused with spirit and we have totally lost sight of that aspect of them but even so they relate to the material world. Even sacred geometry only concerns the building of shape and structure, the outer world. As I said, God is a Geometer but only in his expression not in his essence.
So I do not deny number. It is a fact obviously. I only condemn the usurpation by matter of the rights of spirit.
I agree William. Numbers are a model of reality but the question is how well they match up. If one believes reality is personal, eg God is a person - as we Christians do - then numbers will always misrepresent real reality. The Greek-rooted traditions of Pythagoras and Plato and their modern descendents (including New Age and Perrenialists) have an abstract and quasi mathematical idea of deity, so they always overvalue maths and geometry, and deploy physics concepts like energies, vibrations and frequency.
Yes, exactly, recognition of the personal nature of reality is perhaps the only thing that can rescue us from this current predicament of control and dominance, soon to get worse, no doubt.
I have felt for a long time the God is not primarily a mathematician or mathematics is the ultimate reality as some physicists or mathematicians would have it. I feel this when I reflect on the nature of conscious being, in that there is no mathematical or mechanistic explanation for it and never will be despite all the philosophical sophistry to the contrary. It really is a miracle and a mystery. This knowledge is of course of a personal nature and therefore cannot be acknowledged by modern science, even though I feel I know it more than anything.
Trust your intuition. Science as it currently is is based on mathematics so has to shoehorn everything into that framework even though it clearly lacks proper explanatory power. Number only relates to the material world.
I think you make some very important points here. The spiritual world is untouchable by human symbols, be it words or numbers. There are many today who believe in simulation theories and multiple universes. All a consequence of this quantitative 'monism'. They are fully willing to believe that we live inside a simulation, but somehow cannot believe in God. This is what happens when you deny the transcendent.
Good point, Eric. A lot of people accept that God cannot be described by words but still think he somehow can be by numbers. It might be said that words are human but number is inherent in the universe but I would counter that the forms words take might be human but the fact of words is also inherent in the universe.
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