…ABSOLUTELY…

Stage 48 / Saturday 13 June / From Pamplona to Puente-la-Reina / 24 km

 

My thoughts yesterday on the denial one would like to have in dreaming about death have been calmed in arriving at the lovely old bridge on the river Arga, at Pamplona. In town, I bought a new pair of shoes … absolutely adapted to the path I foresee forthcoming in Spain: they are light, aerated, with a good non-slip sole … ideal, therefore! The friendly sales woman in the shop promised me that my old boots would be given to an recycling organization, which gave me a clearer conscience. But was she telling the truth?

 

Newly shod, I discover the very peaceful scenery: great fields of wheat below the bushy hilltops. Like the pilgrims who preceded me, I feel a desire for the absolute swelling in me. That comes no doubt from the beauty of the panoramas seen from the summit of the Sierra del Pardón. I move forward singing, toward the incomparable chapel of Eunate, built by the Templars.

 

The absolute, what is that exactly? This word comes up when discussing good and evil, and also truth in philosophy. In science, it comes up on the subject of void and temperature; in poetry, speaking of beauty and love; and finally in religion, speaking of the divine absolute of God. All these absolutes have in common the idea of something supreme and inaccessible, like the concept of infinity in mathematics. One moves toward the absolute without ever reaching it. But the fact of being able to speak of it allows simplifying things. It is the ideal of an idea, in a way, the end of the end of the end in a process of recurring thought.

 

The absolute allows simplifying: if I envisage God as absolute, that frees me from too much reflecting on it. And a bit like the Bedouin praying beside the wadi, I have only to fall prostrate and worship. Adoration is easy, but not so simple actually, for in adoring an absolute God, I can fall in the trap of adoring him as one adores an idol, and refusing to really think of His nature, and the relationship I might develop with Him. A bit like our desire to deny death, I risk denying myself the search for absolute truth. Because I will comfortably tell myself that if God is unattainable, what good does it do with my limitations to try and touch the limits that He-himself does not know?

 

And there we have God becoming unknowable, a good reason to invent on His behalf pretexts to lead my life, or that of others “in His name!” We see that, in an untenable way, in all the excesses of extremism today which put a part of the world in blood and flames: Syria, Libya, Nigeria, etc. What good does it do, then, to search for the origin of creation, and to understand its evolution, if the God one defines as absolute can neither be its genesis nor its future? So, Galileo, you were imprisoned because your heliocentric view (the sun at the center of the universe) was a heresy! And other protectors of an absolute God also exiled Averroes 450 years earlier. And they also ordered the burning of what this great Muslim thinker had written!

 

“Absolute is that whose existence does not depend on anything else,” there is something simultaneously both simple and complicated! For if it is thus that I define God, if He has “absolutely” no need for the human word in order to be true: there is automatically no human authority qualified to deal with this absolute! And because any existence implies accessibility, then this existence demands someone’s intervention to be revealed, and as a result it is no longer absolute. God in the absolute is unknowable and is the contrary of absolute nothing. But absolute nothing is a contradictory idea and one which self-destructs. Therefore, in the end, either God exists, or else He is absolute, but not both at the same time!

 

Unless, instead of talking about the existence of God, I speak of a Supreme Being, as the revolutionaries tried to do in 1789 in France. This was a clever way to put back in track something superior to the human and allowing to adorn it by an attribute of absolute. We know too well, alas, what sort of terror for the human – let’s say rather Terror with a capital T – this subtle maneuver led to! Because the thinking of each individual has nothing absolute about it, it is itself essentially relative, it only manifests itself eventually in difference, and difference can only lead to the worst excesses. Can I concede otherwise that if God exists, He is not in fact absolute? Or that the absolute is only a conceptual invention and corresponds to no reality whatsoever, not even that of God? “Oh, dilemma … deep dilemma … can I be led out of this fully unharmed? And all this leads me … into Puente la Reina!”