2024-10-05: God and Infinity
In Dante Alighieri's famous _Divine Comedy_, Dante travels first down into the nine circles of Hell until he reaches Satan, who is in the Ninth Circle, the very bottom of Hell and also the very center of the planet Earth. Dante then travels up out of Hell and reaches the surface of Earth, which is where _Inferno_, the first book of the trilogy, ends. In _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, Dante travels out into space, exploring what in the medieval cosmology were sometimes called the "Spheres." At the end of _Paradiso_, Dante reaches a vision of God as three rings that co-occupy the same space (representing the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
[115] In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,
and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
How scant is speech, too weak to frame my thoughts.
Compared to what I still recall my words are faint—
to call them little is to praise them much.
Eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
[125] knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself
and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!
That circling which, thus conceived,
appeared in you as light's reflection,
once my eyes had gazed on it a while, seemed,
within itself and in its very color,
to be painted with our likeness,
so that my sight was all absorbed in it.
Like the geometer who fully applies himself
to square the circle and, for all his thought,
[135] cannot discover the principle he lacks,
such was I at that strange new sight
I tried to see how the image fit the circle
and how it found its where in it.
But my wings had not sufficed for that
had not my mind been struck by a bolt
of lightning that granted what I asked.
Here my exalted vision lost its power.
But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving
with an even motion, were turning with
[145] the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.
Along the way from Hell up to Heaven, Dante realizes with the help of his guides that his geocentric concept of the universe is completely inside out—after all, Satan is not at all the center of the universe and by no means deserves that prestige. Instead, the whole universe in reality, viewed from the Divine perspective, is inside out, or perhaps right-side in; the Trinity is in fact the center of the universe, and Satan, in the bottom of Hell at the center of the planet Earth, is actually at the singular point furthest away from the true center; which, distorted by the limits of human perception, now seems to be an infinite distance away in any, or perhaps every direction.
In my own efforts to think and think rightly about God, I find a similar pattern appears in many contexts. I suspect this is a fluke of how difficult it is for a finite being to ponder infinity. For example, what begins seeming from one perspective to be an infinite, asymptotic approach closer and closer to a fixed point, slowing down as it crosses less and less of the fixed distance between itself and the target, can also be thought of as an ever-increasing acceleration further and further from the starting point, speeding up as it crosses more and more of the unbounded distance between itself and the target an infinite distance away. The point at the center turns out to have been at the limit of the outside edge, and what was infinitely far away in every direction turns out to be a single point at the very center. These are merely two different, imperfect mental models, mathematically inter-convertable with one another, but with extremely different intuitive valences.
I think this shape—or perhaps, this limitation of human thinking—characterizes the whole of Theology as a discipline (see my previous gemlog about the Soul of Theology). We want to draw ever closer and closer in our thinking and our concepts to God as he is; but as it turns out, we are progressing further and further, faster and faster into an infinite expanse full of reward along the way, never exhaustable and ever-increasing in satisfaction and joy.
References
2024-09-28: The Soul of Theology
Source