Heavenly families?

The epistle from St. Paul for yesterday's solemnity contains the following clauses that I've often heard:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named... (Eph 3:14-15)

But something struck me for the very first time yesterday. Apparently there are two different domains for families, heaven and earth. Earthly families we're all very familiar with. But what's a heavenly family?

Most likely it's not an earthly family whose members have made it to heaven. Such earthly families are already named on earth, not in heaven. Besides, Jesus communicates to us very clearly that such fleshly relationships don't have much weight in themselves in the world to come through the parable of the seven brothers who married one wife on their successive deaths (Mt 22:23-33, Mk 12:18-27, Lk 20:27-40). When we humans make it to heaven, we will be like angels, Jesus says, which begs the question: can angels have families? So the question remains: what is a heavenly family?

Coincidentally I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion and on the solemnity I turned to the "Valaquenta." The latter speaks of some of the Valar (the gods or highest angels), who are all created by Eru-Illuvatar (the One God) and effectively his children¹, as being siblings². What makes them siblings? Certainly it isn't parentage, since they are all equally created from the thought of Eru. Is there some other sort of grouping that's analogous to family relationships?

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Notes

1. Though of course not "Children of Illuvatar" (i.e., elves and men).

2. Námo and Irmo are said to be brothers, whose sister is Nienna. And Vána is younger sister to Yavanna.

Sean Carroll and Emergentism

With excitement a Catholic physicist friend pointed me to a recent paper by Sean Carroll Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space. Carroll, as you may know, is a prominent atheist. My friend says Carroll's paper shows he is turning toward a more realistic metaphysics, and singles out this paragraph:

Nothing in this perspective implies that we should think of spacetime or quantum fields as illusory. They are emergent, but none the less real for that. As mentioned, we may not be forced to invoke these concepts within our most fundamental picture, but the fact that they play a role in an emergent description is highly non-trivial. (Most Hamiltonians admit no local decomposition, most factorizations admit no classical limit, etc.) It is precisely this non-generic characteristic of the specific features of the world of our experience that makes it possible to contemplate uniquely defining them in terms of the austere ingredients of the deeper theory. They should therefore be thought of as equally real as tables and chairs.

I haven't read the paper, but for my part, I'm rather cautious about reading too much into Carroll's claims. Feser has a concise paragraph that captures my general reservations about emergentism:

Second, the Aristotelian resists the language of “emergence” because, despite its anti-reductionism, it gives the impression of conceding to the reductionist the thesis that the micro-level is ontologically fundamental or privileged. It is as if the emergentist allows that the macrolevel is problematic in a way that the micro-level is not, so that we should concede the reality of macro-level phenomena only to the extent that we can make sense of them somehow “emerging” from the micro-level. As I have said, the Aristotelian rejects any such privileging of the micro-level. From an Aristotelian point of view, modern emergentist arguments, though salutary, are at best only partial rediscoveries of the correct, hylemorphist account of nature.

I may be misreading the paragraph, but it doesn't sound like Carroll concedes much, or anything really. I think he would do well to read the introduction of A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World.

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Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 337-8.

Foundations of Mathematics

I watched this interesting 2017 PBS video "Crisis in the Foundation of Mathematics" today. I was struck by how in the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory of the foundations of mathematics, the existence of infinite series has to be defined as an axiom: it's not automatic that they exist.

Another thing that came to mind is the weird way that mathematicians try to formulate a foundation for their discipline, for example, in order to broaden the natural (counting) numbers into the integers (that is, to include the negative numbers), they define an integer as the difference between two natural numbers. What I don't understand is why they don't just define negative numbers as an abstraction that incorporates the "take away" operation (subtraction) into the number. Imaginary numbers would then be a kind of "half-way" take-away, what amounts to a ninety-degree rotation (half of 180°).

I say "I don't understand," but seriously: why should anyone expect me to understand? My training is in physics, not mathematics, after all.

Death to Self and Discernment

That outward circumstances play a part in the formation of a spiritual judgment may be seen by merely looking at the kind of circumstances that interior souls at one time or another have to face. It is easy enough to estimate the effect of these things upon their characters. Loss of material goods conduces to a man's discernment. With detachment from outward standards comes a greater reliance upon the significance of the inward.

Sickness conduces to discernment. There is nothing like a long illness to teach a man the difference between true and false compassion. If only from the sight of his own self-pity, he learns the value of entering into the pains of others.

Suffering of every kind—and especially the suffering of temptation—fosters the potentiality of discernment. Not only is the genuine need distinguished from the sham, but even in the need that is unjustified, that is brought upon itself, an element of sincerity can be discovered that demands an act of understanding.

Solitude ministers to discernment. Sometimes it is born in it. In fact, one wonders how a soul can come to possess the discerning spirit without the help of solitude and silence.

And, above all, in prayer: in the practice of unrelenting prayer, hours of it and carried on over the years, a soul chiefly learns to judge according to the spirit. Discernment is nothing other than this: the power to interpret God. How, short of the directly miraculous, can God's will be interpreted as it is capable of being interpreted apart from the light of prayer?

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Dom Hubert van Zeller, How to Find God ... and Discover Your True Self in the Process (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1998), 206.

Nature and Supernature

From David Schindler, I learned that "matter" and "form" are both relative terms. Now from Peter Kreeft, I learn that "natural" and "supernatural" are also relative terms:

The life of a human being, body and soul, material and spiritual, visible and invisible, is natural life, life that is natural to us. The word for natural life in Greek is bios. Zōē, in contrast, means supernatural life, more-than-natural life. Since different kinds of things have different natures, what is natural or supernatural is relative. Life is supernatural to rocks but natural to plants; sensation is supernatural to plants but natural to animals; reason is supernatural to animals but natural to us; God is supernatural to everything else but natural to Himself. He has a nature: He is good, not evil or indifferent; wise, not foolish; living, not dead, etc. This does not make Him finite, because each of His attributes is infinite. But they are positive attributes. He has a nature, a character.

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Peter Kreeft. "Three Philosophies of Life" in Doors in the Walls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2018), 7-25, at 20.

David L. Schindler, "The Problem of Mechanism" in Beyond Mechanism, ed. David L. Schindler (University Press of America, 1986), 1-12 at 3-4.

The coming of the Light

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us. (Lk 1:78)

Your time is known

Over the course of many years, I've been pondering the classic Doctor Who episode "Full Circle" (first aired in late 1980). You may recall it as the episode that inroduces the Doctor's companion Adric. I'll summarize the essential plot points, but will have to reveal a spoiler or two in the following paragraphs. So the fourth Doctor and his companion Romana end up in a parallel universe and land on a planet called Alzarius inhabited by a group of humanoids who have been working for generations on a grounded spaceship. It seems that their ship, the Starliner, crashed long ago and they have been repairing it for return travel to their home planet Terradon. A phenomenon called mistfall begins to occur and two groups of creatures begin to emerge. First, venemous spiders hatch from the river fruit, and then marsh creatures, which walk upright and rather look like the creature from the black lagoon, rise out of the river. The humans retreat to the ship, and the marsh creatures begin to attack the ship.

There are a couple interesting reveals/plots twists (spoilers begin). First, the Doctor announces to the human's leaders that the ship isn't being repaired, but simply maintained and that it could actually depart the planet at any time. They respond that their problem is that none of the "system files" left by their ancestors has instructions for how to pilot the ship. The second and last reveal is that it turns out that the spiders, marsh creatures, and humanoids have "the same DNA", so they're actually three subspecies of the same species. And the colonists have never been to Terradon, but are native to Alzarius; the story about the grounded ship was a convenient myth perpetuated by the leadership.

The titular "full circle" is complete when marsh creatures start to overrun the ship. It turns out that what's been happening for 40,000 generations is that the marsh creatures have been attacking the ship at mistfall (every 50 years or so?), killing the humans, and evolving to replace them.¹ But this time, the Doctor manages to repel the creatures and the ship ascends to the stars.

The basic situation contains inconsistencies that beg for resolution. For example, how was the ship first built? But let's ignore such questions for now. I found the story off-putting at first because I thought it was impugning the Garden in Genesis as one of those convenient myths. I haven't been able to watch the full episde in decades, so I forget why I thought that. Maybe it was the invocation of "evolution" to undermine a story about the past. But the deeper part that's begun to resonate with me after all these decades is the way the mythical past (not mythical in the sense of false, but mythic in the sense of bigger than ordinary life) was really a vision for and of the future.

There is a sense in which our destiny is written from the beginning of our lives, a sense one has of what the arc of one's life is going to be like. In a lot of ways my life has turned out unexpectedly. But in other ways, I probably should have expected all this weirdness. What I really need is courage—courage bolstered by the knowledge that the future is not completely unknown, but is part of the created whole that is my life, my being, which, though divided by time, persists through time. As Guardini writes,

[In this unknown region of the future] everyone must make the venture in the confidence that the future is not a chaos or a totally strange thing. Rather, his own character, the ordering power within him, will make a way so that it is really his own future into which he moves.

This also forms the natural basis for the message of Christ about the Providence which guards every man—the messge that the future, although unknown, is not strange, not hostile, but is arranged for him by God; that existence, although it extends far beyond our ken, is not a chaos, but ordered by God for him.

To believe this and live accordingly may be difficult for a person who is of a hesitant or timid disposition. But here the courage to live coincides with trust in the divine guidance.

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Notes

1. Technological progress and apocalyptic recurrence is vaguely reminiscent of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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Romano Guardini, Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1992), 102.