David Cowles
Oct 15, 2024
“The secret life of things is nothing less than the life of God.”
What is a ‘thing’? According to the Nicene Creed, God is the creator of “all things, visible and invisible” and according to the Gospel of John, it is through logos (Christ) that “all things come to be”. Therefore, the concept of ‘thing’ must include objects, events, quanta, waves, thoughts, emotions…quite literally everything that is! Whenever you can say “this” or “that”, “this not that” or “that not this”, you have identified a ‘thing’.
Now all things come to be by not being something else, for example, not being what is. Things come to be as negations of what is. Like a jet engine, they move forward by pushing back. Just as all children find their parents ‘wanting’, so every emerging thing judges what-is and finds it wanting.
Wanting what? Beauty, Truth, Justice…in other words, Value, the Good, Harmony…Peace. “Lord, we don’t need (want) another mountain.” (Jackie DeShannon) To whatever extent the primal values (above) are not manifest in my Actual World, a vacuum, a ‘lack’ (Sartre), exists that cries out to be filled.
It is its vision of what is coming to be that entices an emerging thing to negate what-is. In that sense, all things have a common origin, goal, purpose.
So the emergent thing is not what-is, and it is also not what is coming to be. “Neti, neti”, not-this, not-that. The emergent thing is poised between what is actual, but not yet ideal, and what is ideal, but not yet actual. It is the vocation of the emerging thing to bridge that gap, i.e. to make what is actual ideal and to make what is ideal actual. That is why (and how) things come to be in the first place. That is what things are.
If there were no vision, no lure, there would be no judgment, no lack, no negation and then there would quite literally be nothing. Nietzsche states it best: “…there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!”
Were that true, there would be nothing at all. Nietzsche didn’t realize it, but he was condemning the world to stasis, putting us on a road that could only lead to nihilism. Our pathological “common sense” view of the world is inclined to assign what-is to an irrevocably unchangeable “past” and what is coming to be to entirely uncertain and contingent “future”. But that model simply won’t work. Without a clear cut future to act as a lure, and a dynamic past to serve as a springboard, there is nothing to motivate or enable the emergence of any new ‘thing’.
There cannot be a naked Present. Whatever ‘present’ is it must include a past to be ameliorated and a future to be realized. Accordingly, there must be some sense in which what was still is and what is coming to be already exists; otherwise, whence the vision?
Every event has the same ultimate goal, but each event interprets that goal in the context of its Actual World, i.e. what-is for it. The emergent thing is how it is not what-is and how it is coming to be what is coming to be. How the emergent thing is different from what already is and from what is coming to be, how it bridges that gap, is what the emergent thing actually is. Not a noun, not a verb, but a process!
The emergent thing did not choose the world out of which it arose, nor did it invent the ultimate end toward which all things are tending. But it chose to bridge that gap, and it chose a specific way to bridge that gap; that’s what makes it unique, that’s what makes it free, that’s what makes it present, that’s what makes it consequential.
Free? How so if it is guided by a well-defined future? Free because it would be impossible to ‘choose’ anything other than that future. The future represents the Good to the present; every event is the process of choosing what is ‘good’ from the perspective of what is. That’s what an event is; anything other than that is not an event.
Our knee jerk reaction to this is to say, “An event cannot be considered free unless it is free not to choose what is ‘good’.” That seems like a well-formed sentence that would have to be true. But the opposite is the case. It’s ill formed and never true!
Every event transforms the antagonistic multiplicity of what-is into the harmonious unity of what is coming to be. Each emerging thing decides how to do it, decides freely with no constraint from what-is and no coercion from what is coming to be. This absolute freedom is what gives every thing its zest for being; it is what makes the creative advance fundamental.
So the emerging thing is both one thing and three things. It is a single, absolutely unique entity, but it is also what it is not (i.e. what is), what it is coming to be (i.e. what is not yet) and the way (i.e. how) it is both what it is not and what it is not yet. It is itself as the negation of what is, it is itself as the anticipation of what is coming to be, and it is itself as the process by which what-is is transformed into what is coming to be.
As not-what-is, the emerging thing consists entirely of values, the values that inspired its rejection of what-is in the first place. As what is coming to be, the emerging thing is entirely concrete. Its contribution to the future is specific. As how not-what-is comes to be what is coming be, the emerging thing is process.
Returning to the Nicene Creed, we now see that the ontological doctrine of Trinity does not just apply the structure of Divinity, but also to the structure of everything that is. Each thing is one, single entity with three distinct personae (persons). Each ‘person’ is the thing itself, whole and entire. And yet the thing itself would not be what it is, in fact it would not be at all, without the co-presence of all three ‘persons’. Trinity is fundamental to the nature of God and to the nature of every other entity, event, in any possible world.
So the secret life of things is nothing less than the life of God! To put it another way, everything participates in God’s Trinitarian nature. Of course, that is not to say that everything is God. Far from it! But everything is “God-like”; everything is Trinitarian, everything is made in God’s image and likeness.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com
ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023.
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