…A CREATOR GOD?

Camino 2015 / Stage 70 / Sunday 5 July / León

 

How good it is to have a Sunday rest in León! Even if it facing once again the brouhaha and unceasing movement of a city is truly an ordeal after the purifying calm of the Meseta! I covered 138 km last week, and this was the tenth week of my pilgrimage. In total, I’ve walked 1422 km since my departure, on average 20.3 km per day.

 

Today I visit the Saint Mary of León cathedral, which is one of the most beautiful in Christianity. I admire its immense stained-glass windows. What a beautiful moment of light after the obscure ocean of my thoughts this past week! Again yesterday, I tried to imagine a material Reverse Side as what would take place beneath the dark surface of the water. My “I” was completely immersed there, as if it had been necessary to dive in order to glimpse the fugitive particles of matter whose location was always uncertain. Today, as if returned to the Right Side, here is my spiritual self all bathed in light.

 

The multi-colored tones of the 125 huge windows of the pulchra Leonina (beautiful Lioness or Leoness), the nickname given to this gothic jewel, unceasingly give life to the brilliant rays of light, a real kaleidoscope on a grandiose scale. How was it possible to create such a visual symphony? Everywhere, pilgrims and visitors strolling in the main and side naves stop, sit down or even stretch out on the stone floor to appreciate these stars fallen from the sky through these gigantic stained-windows.

 

What a beautiful conclusion to the stage I’ve just covered since entering Castile!

 

“To walk, open to nothingness, ultimate source, informed by a creator God?” 

 

Itinerary from Itero del Castillo to León (10th week).

Itinerary from Itero del Castillo to León (10th week).

 

Yes, here I am again seized by the idea that I believed I had rendered obsolete and taboo, that of a creator God. For it is truly to the glory of God that this edifice was created! It is to His creation that certain stained-glass windows give homage! Our medieval artists were penetrated by this vision of a unique god from whom everything originates, this creator God who had put everything in place in six days, and who rested on the seventh. For them, He would have created everything out of nothing.

 

André Chouraqui begins his translation of the Bible thus, to describe the first day of the creation: “Ahead Elohîms created the skies and the earth, the earth was helter-skelter, a shadow on the faces of the abyss, but the breath of Elohîms glided on the faces of the waters. Elohîms announces: ‘A light shall be.’ And a light there is. Elohîms sees the light: how good! Elohîms separates the light from the darkness. Elohîms shouts to the light: ‘Day!’ To the darkness he had shouted: ‘Night!’ And there is an evening and there is a morning.” (Genesis 1:1-4)

 

And it is this light coming from a particular star, our sun, gigantic mass created out of nothing, that makes me wonder today, in its rainbow tones. If he truly exists, this Elohîms, this plural Hebrew divinity, he or she is truly very powerful: creating something out of nothing, from the helter-skelter! Was it therefore He Himself this nothing, this god Elohîms? Yes, either God is nothing or else He has not created starting from nothing. But if He had started creating, there indeed had to be something else from which to create, in which case that rejects His quality of creator God. He would have been, at best, only the transformer: I am in a real dead end! Like the dead end in which is found this ray of light whose dust oscillates endlessly in incessant movement from the surface of the stained-glass window up there, all the way to the stones on the floor, go, return, go, return!

 

One understands that in order to explain the inexplicable appearance of the world, the simple idea of a creator god simultaneously capable of both nothing and everything is convenient. And in assessing somewhat the complexity of the nature of the act of creation itself, “ex nihilo” (out of nothing) it is tempting to wish to raise a statue of Him, this creator God. But what face would best represent this creator God?

 

This act of creation makes Him pass from the timeless to the temporal, and if I return to the idea of “third included,” my ternary logic now allows me to accept, as cause of the creative act, God himself. He is capable, starting from the primordial and timeless indeterminism to make the seamless transition toward a determinist and temporal world! “Nothing” does not mean any more “ absolutely nothing”, but only “ nothing in time” (the period before creation), and this kind of nothing was the result of “something outside time” which cannot be other than God!

 

There is the inevitable stumbling block of traditional and medieval binary thinking, always coming up against the ultimate cause which by its very essence is outside the cause, and deciding to make it an act of faith. The ultimate cause being beyond the reach of human thinking (completely temporal, in any case until new orders!) one must indeed envisage that one cannot see the faces of the plural divinity, mysterious, timeless and decidedly “inescapable”: one will never be able to get around him or her!

 

Thus, I kick into touch [soccer expression, meaning quit] and leave this inefficient playground of the Aristotelian thought process from antiquity, or the Thomas Aquinas system of the middle-ages, in order to go and check out the Far East. I no longer want to seek why, in the beginning there was no origin. Instead I’m going to turn toward the how of primordial origin, I’m going back much before the “big bang.”

 

One response to this how must include the quantum scale where all seems to appear and disappear (like my dust motes in their sunbeam). It must also include the cosmic scale: there, massive eruptions of matter are constantly made in keeping with the expansion of the universe. There too, matter disappears all the time into “black holes.” These black holes (see illustration appearing in Juste assez d’astronomie [Just enough astronomy] by Joanne Baker - Dunod, 2011) were popularized in 1967 by the physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008). Wheeler uses this name of black hole to describe the wells of gravitation so intense that even light disappears into them! These are holes in the toile canvass of space-time, like basketball nets that never give back your ball! Even the photons of light coming too close never come out again!

  

 

Appearance, disappearance! On both sides, from the smallest to the largest, there is the possibility that the universe manifests itself in appearing on its own, here or there, “in-forming” little by little, and therefore giving itself form, in taking time to do it, and in continuing to do it in the long term! Thus, the word information could substitute itself for the Hebraic word Elohîms, for God the creator, while preserving his role as “Word” which is a synonym for him. Now, this word appears as the word logos [λόγος], in the first verses of John’s gospel which was originally transmitted in the Greek language.

 

Here is this text in the word for word version of André Chouraqui : “Ahead, him, the word and the word, him, for Elohîms, and the word, him, Elohîms. He the header for Elohîms. All becomes by him; outside him, nothing of what comes becomes. In him life – the life light of men.” (John 1:1-4)

 

My “me” is nourished by this life, by the light of the pulchra Leonina. Closing my eyes, I feel myself re-created in my sunbeam, the complete opposite of a black hole. I would like to roar with joy, like a lion!

 

 

 

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