The Pageant
On the Divinity of Being
For reasons unknown, several friends have asked me of late about my perspective on spirituality. Might they suspect that the passing of my wife Elisa has prompted me to ponder these matters? Knowing that I philosophize about the deep questions of existence, do they feel that I might have insights to share? Do I give off an aura of spirituality? Is it something in the air, perhaps triggered by the seeming emergence of artificial intelligence?
Independently of these recent queries, I have indeed been thinking about spirituality for the last year or so. I’ve read or am reading books about the religious views of Spinoza (both his Ethics and Clare Carlisle’s book Spinoza’s Religion) and about the spiritual journey of Albert Einstein (who claimed to believe in Spinoza’s god). I’ve also been reading about ancient Greek religion as background to my forthcoming book on Aristotle, and I’ve been trying to integrate and interpret the scattered remarks about god and the divine to be found in Aristotle’s own works (which modern academics have shied away from discussing).
It was roughly fifty years ago that, at the age of nine, after period of fervent prayer to the personal god of the Christians, I concluded that such a god does not exist. Although I have not wavered in that conclusion, anyone who wonders as deeply as I do about the human condition must also wonder about spirituality; from time to time I’ve even written about it, starting with the very first post in my weblog (back-dated to 1989), quite occasional posts since then, and the stray essay.
With all that as a preamble, I offer the following thoughts, which due to the utmost complexity of the subject matter must necessarily be partial, vague, tentative, and provisional.
I think there is something divine about being.
Consider the sheer improbability of being alive. A humble example is a young Ponderosa Pine tree on my property in Colorado, which I suspect took root around the time that Elisa and I bought this land. There are 75 such trees on these five acres, which each year put forth perhaps a thousand or so pine cones, the female cones producing ovules and the male cones producing pollen that swirls around in green clouds every spring. Of the millions or more of potential ovule/pollen combinations, only a few germinate each year, even fewer actually sprout up, and of the few yearly sprouts I have observed that only this one tree has survived, in part because it grew up within the protection of a mountain mahogany bush (which I’ve cut back and replaced with wire mesh to protect it from the depredations of hungry deer).
I feel like saying to this little tree: congratulations, you have won the lottery of existence and have joined the great pageant of being!
The same could be said to the insects that creep on and under the pines, to the nuthatches and bluebirds that feed on the insects, to the squirrels that scurry over the branches and chomp on the cones, and to my dog Chance, who savors every moment and loves to chase the squirrels. What is the chance, Chance, that you should have come into being on this beautiful planet? And what is the chance that I, too, should have come into being, blessed not only with mere existence but with a form of consciousness that can be behold and ponder the great pageant of being? Of all the human beings that ever could have lived, I am a virtual impossibility, yet here I am.
So I say: it is wondrous and divine that there is something rather than nothing, that there is life in its infinite variety, that there are human beings to be conscious of existence and wonder about its meaning, that I am alive and conscious and wondering, and that of the ten billion or so people alive today I have ten or so dear friends with whom to share these thoughts and go through life together, making and sharing meaning as we proceed.
None of this requires a creator god. The pageant of being simply is. Is it eternal, or will it come to an end with the heat death of the universe? I know not and I care not, for I know the divinity of being and the wonder of living in the here and now.
