Being

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the seventh of the great ideas — Being.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

We are walking the hundred and two great ideas in the order Mortimer Adler set them, and his map has brought us tonight to the largest and strangest of them all. Being. The idea underneath every other idea. Every other night in this series asks what something is — what an angel is, what an animal is, what beauty is. Tonight we ask what it is for anything to be at all. Why is there something rather than nothing; and what is the difference between the things that merely happen to be, and whatever it is that cannot help but be?

The tradition has two great openings on this question, and we will hear both. One is a burning bush. The other is a Greek poem. We begin at the bush.

Moses is keeping sheep in the desert when he turns aside to see why a bush burns and is not consumed. God speaks to him out of the bush, and sends him to Egypt, and Moses asks the question a philosopher would ask.

From the book of Exodus, in the King James Version:

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

He goes on:

And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

I AM THAT I AM. Asked for a name, God gives a verb. The name Jehovah — the LORD, in our English Bibles — is built on that verb, to be. Whatever else tonight's readings say, they will all be circling this: that at the bottom of everything that exists there is not a force or a process but a someone, whose name is that he is.

The psalmists took that name and prayed it. Two readings, both from the King James Version.

From the prayer of Moses in the book of Psalms:

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

And from another psalm, spoken of the heavens and the earth:

They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Hold on to that phrase — thou art the same. The Scriptures split everything that exists into two columns: the things that wear out like clothing, and the One who is the same. Everything else we read tonight is somebody working on that ledger.

Now to the Greeks, who came at the same question from the other side — not from a name revealed, but from the sheer pressure of thinking hard about the little word is.

The strangest and boldest of them was Parmenides. He wrote his philosophy as a poem: a young man is carried in a chariot to the gates of Night and Day, and a goddess takes his hand and tells him the truth about what is. What she tells him is that there are only two roads a mind can take.

From Parmenides, in Burnet's translation:

Come now, I will tell thee — and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away — the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be — that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not — that is impossible — nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

He goes on, and hear how far he pushes it:

One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In it are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what kind of origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase? I shall not let thee say nor think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not.

And the famous conclusion:

Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of.

Being is; not-being cannot even be thought. Nothing truly comes to be or passes away; change itself is an illusion of mortals. It is a magnificent overstatement, and the whole tradition after him is in some sense an attempt to keep what is true in it without saying anything that extreme. An old handbook of quotations remembers him in a single line — thought is twin-sister of existence — which is loose, but catches his deepest claim: that what can be thought and what can be are the same.

Plato inherited that pressure, and he found the middle way. There are things that truly are, and there are things that are always becoming — and the world we live in is the second kind.

From Plato, in Jowett's translation:

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created.

He goes on:

Was the heaven then or the world, whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name — was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.

The world becomes; therefore the world is caused; and the cause is a father and maker past finding out. A Greek philosopher, reasoning alone in the dark, gets that far — to a maker he cannot name.

Regular listeners will remember that a few weeks ago, on the night we took up art, we set a passage of Plato beside a passage of Dante, and promised to bring the pair back when Being came round. Here they are. Plato, wanting to show what truly is, reaches for a piece of furniture.

From Plato, in Jowett's translation:

Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say — for no one else can be the maker? — There is another which is the work of the carpenter? — And the work of the painter is a third?

Three beds: the bed that truly is, in the mind of God; the carpenter's copy; the painter's copy of the copy. Everything in this world, for Plato, sits somewhere on that ladder of being — more real the closer it stands to God. And Dante, hearing the same arithmetic, turns the fall into a family line.

From Dante, in Longfellow's translation:

Philosophy, he said, to him who heeds it, noteth, not only in one place alone, after what manner Nature takes her course from Intellect Divine, and from its art; and if thy Physics carefully thou notest, after not many pages shalt thou find, that this your art as far as possible follows, as the disciple doth the master; so that your art is, as it were, God's grandchild.

Being descends. From God, to the natures of things, to the works of our hands — not a series of shadows, but a lineage.

Aristotle, Plato's pupil, did something quieter and in the long run just as consequential: he made Being a subject you could study. The book in which he did it came to be called the Metaphysics, and near its center stands this sentence.

From Aristotle, in Ross's translation:

There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.

Being as being. Not being as living thing, which is biology; not being as number, which is mathematics; but what belongs to anything simply because it is. Every science cuts off a corner of what exists and studies that corner. Aristotle proposed a science of the whole cloth — and for two thousand years the schools taught it under his name.

The Stoics, for their part, looked at the river of becoming and made it a discipline of the soul. A Roman emperor, writing at night in his campaign tent:

From Marcus Aurelius:

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

That is a pagan reading Psalm-truth without the Psalm: everything around us waxes old like a garment. What the emperor lacked was the second column of the ledger — the One who is the same.

Augustine had both columns, and the page where they meet is one of the summits of the Confessions. He has been asking where God is, and what everything else is, and he tells us what he saw. Listen for the name from the bush — it is quoted directly, at the center of the passage.

From Augustine, in Pusey's translation:

And being thence admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my Guide: and able I was, for Thou wert become my Helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the Light Unchangeable. Not this ordinary light, which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind. Not such was this light, but other, yea, far other from these. He that knows the Truth, knows what that Light is; and he that knows It, knows eternity. Love knoweth it.

He goes on:

And I said, Is Truth therefore nothing because it is not diffused through space finite or infinite? And Thou criedst to me from afar: Yet verily, I AM that I AM. And I heard, as the heart heareth, nor had I room to doubt, and I should sooner doubt that I live than that Truth is not.

And then the sentence that gathers the whole night:

And I beheld the other things below Thee, and I perceived that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not, for they are, since they are from Thee, but are not, because they are not what Thou art. For that truly is which remains unchangeably. It is good then for me to hold fast unto God; for if I remain not in Him, I cannot in myself; but He remaining in Himself, reneweth all things.

They neither altogether are, nor altogether are not. There is the whole doctrine of created being in one clause. We are; but we are on loan. Only He truly is, who remains unchangeably — and Augustine hears that truth announced in the very words given at the bush.

The medieval schoolmen sharpened Augustine's clause into an exact doctrine. In everything that exists, they said, you can distinguish what a thing is from the fact that it is — its essence from its existence. A unicorn has an essence; it lacks the existence. You and I have both, but we hold them separately: what we are never explains that we are. In God alone, Aquinas argued, there is no seam between the two. Asked whether essence and existence are the same in God, he answers.

From Aquinas, in the Dominican Fathers' translation:

God is not only His own essence, but also His own existence. This may be shown in several ways. First, whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by the constituent principles of that essence, or by some exterior agent — as heat is caused in water by fire. Therefore, if the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing's existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause.

He goes on, with an image worth carrying to bed:

Just as that which has fire, but is not itself fire, is on fire by participation; so that which has existence but is not existence, is a being by participation. But God is His own essence; if, therefore, He is not His own existence He will be not essential, but participated being. He will not therefore be the first being — which is absurd. Therefore God is His own existence, and not merely His own essence.

Everything else is on fire by participation. The log burns with a fire that is not its own; you and I exist with an existence that is not our own. God does not have being. God is being — which is what the bush already said.

The Puritans preached the same doctrine to plain congregations, and nobody ever put it more plainly than Thomas Watson.

From Thomas Watson:

There are three kinds of beings. Such beings as had a beginning — and shall have an end. Such as all animate creatures — the animals, birds, fish — which at death are destroyed and return to dust. Their being ends with their life. Such beings as had a beginning — but shall have no end. Such as angels and the souls of men, which are eternal once they are brought into existence — they abide forever. And such as is without beginning — and without ending. This is proper only to God. He is from everlasting — to everlasting. This is God's title, a jewel of his crown. He is called the King eternal.

He goes on:

Jehovah is a word that properly sets forth God's eternity. It is a word so dreadful, that the Jews trembled to name or read it. Jehovah contains in it time past, present, and to come. No creature can write itself Alpha, that is only a flower of the crown of heaven.

And elsewhere, in a single stroke:

There is but one First Cause that has its Being of itself, and on which all other beings depend. As in the heavens, the first mover moves all the other orbs; so God gives life and motion to everything that exists. There can be but one God, because there is but one First Cause.

Then comes the modern turn, and it begins with a man alone by a stove, resolving to doubt everything he can possibly doubt — his senses, his reasonings, the very existence of the world — to see if anything at all survives.

From Descartes, in Veitch's translation:

I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

I think, therefore I am. Notice what has happened to our question. For every voice we have heard so far, being starts with God and descends to us. Descartes starts with himself — my own existence is the one certain thing, and God must be proved outward from there. It is the hinge on which the modern mind swung, and not everyone thought it an improvement. An old divine in the quotation books files this dry rejoinder.

From John Taylor:

I think, therefore, I am; that is, I who am, think; therefore I, who think, am. I being supposed to exist, do think, therefore this thinking proves that existence. Yet surely the perception of my own existence must be both as early and as evident as any other perception. Is it not absurd then to attempt to prove our own existence from any other medium, namely, from any of our operations?

You cannot prove you exist; you were never in a position to doubt it. Existence is not a conclusion. It is the thing you wake up in the middle of.

The poets, meanwhile, had their own way of weighing being — by asking what it would mean to lay it down. The most famous lines in English drama are a man setting existence itself on the scale.

From Shakespeare:

To be, or not to be: that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

To be, or not to be. Even the prince's despair concedes the great point of the night: being is the question — the one thing that cannot be gotten behind or taken for granted.

The commonplace books gather a whole page of voices on existence, and they are worth hearing in a row, the way the last century kept them — one thought to a line.

From Robert South: It is as easy to conceive that an Almighty Power might produce a thing out of nothing, and make that to exist which did not exist before, as to conceive the world to have had no beginning, but to have existed from eternity.

From Noah Webster: A Supreme Being and first cause of all other beings must have existed from eternity, for no being can have created himself.

From Cicero: There is, I know not how, in the minds of men, a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls.

From Abercrombie: There is, in the consciousness of every man, a deep impression of continued existence. The casuist may reason against it till he bewilder himself in his own sophistries; but a voice within gives the lie to his own speculations, and pleads with authority for a life which is to come.

From Steele: The date of human life is too short to recompense the cares which attend the most private condition; therefore it is, that our souls are made, as it were, too big for it; and extend themselves in the prospect of longer existence.

From Rousseau: To live is not merely to breathe, it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties, of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.

From Oliver Wendell Holmes: Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence.

And the handbook credits Augustine with the shortest of them all: This mortal life is the hope of an existence that is immortal.

One more idea from the old books before we turn home: the chain of being. For centuries the common mind pictured existence as a single great chain let down from God — angel above man, man above beast, beast above plant, plant above stone — every link full, nothing wasted, everything in its degree.

From Coleridge: In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of being, there is an effort, though scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate.

From Emerson: A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

And the handbooks even carry the thought east of Eden, crediting Zoroaster with this: this world is but a passage; it is necessary that thy son should succeed to thee, and that the chain of being should be possessed unbroken.

Wherever men have thought hard about existence, they have seen the same shape: a ladder, a lineage, a chain — and at the top of it, something that does not hang from anything.

In the last century, a plain writer of doctrine put the top of the chain into paragraphs that have hardly been bettered for sheer nerve. He is writing about what he calls the solitariness of God — what God's being was before there was anything else at all.

From A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God:

In the beginning, God. There was a time, if time it could be called, when God dwelt all alone. There was no heaven, where His glory is now particularly manifested. There was no earth to engage His attention. There were no angels to hymn His praises; no universe to be upheld by the word of His power. There was nothing, no one, but God; and that, not for a day, a year, or an age, but from everlasting. During a past eternity, God was alone: self-contained, self-sufficient, self-satisfied; in need of nothing. Had a universe, had angels, had human beings been necessary to Him in any way, they also had been called into existence from all eternity. The creating of them when He did, added nothing to God essentially.

He goes on:

Such an One is to be revered, worshipped, adored. He is solitary in His majesty, unique in His excellency, peerless in His perfections. He sustains all, but is Himself independent of all. He gives to all, but is enriched by none.

He sustains all, but is Himself independent of all. The philosophers' word for that is aseity — being of oneself. The Bible's word for it is simply the name: I AM.

And so we come back to the Scriptures, where the New Testament takes up everything the night has weighed. When Paul stood on Mars' hill in Athens — in the city of the philosophers, speaking to their heirs — this is what he told them about being.

From the Acts of the Apostles, in the King James Version:

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

In him we live, and move, and have our being. Not from him only, as a house stands from its builder long after the builder has gone home — in him, the way a song exists in the singing of it. Stop the singing and there is no song. Paul even quotes their own poets to say so, and grants the pagan page its half-light: we are his offspring.

Of Christ, the apostle writes elsewhere:

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

By him all things consist — hold together, stand together. And the Lord Jesus himself, disputing in the temple, reached back to the bush and took the name. The church has always heard in these words his own claim to the being that has no beginning; his hearers heard it too, and took up stones.

From the Gospel of John:

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Not before Abraham was, I was — before Abraham was, I am. Tense itself breaks against him. And the last book of the Bible gives the name its final form:

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

Which is, and which was, and which is to come. Watson told us no creature can write itself Alpha. One has.

So let the ledger stand as the night has written it. Everything you can see from where you sit — the lamp, the window, the hand holding the book — neither altogether is, nor altogether is not. It burns with borrowed fire. And beneath it all, holding it all, is the One whose essence is his existence, who was under no necessity to make anything, and made all things; whose name, given from a burning bush and taken up by his Son, is I AM.

We close with a hymn built on that name. An eighteenth-century Methodist preacher named Thomas Olivers heard the ancient Hebrew hymn of the divine attributes, the Yigdal, sung in a London synagogue, and turned it into English verse for the church. It has been sung to that synagogue melody ever since.

The God of Abraham Praise, by Thomas Olivers.

The God of Abraham praise, who reigns enthroned above; Ancient of everlasting days, and God of love; Jehovah, great I AM! by earth and heaven confessed; I bow and bless the sacred name forever blessed.

Formless, all lovely forms declare His loveliness; Holy, no holiness on earth can His express. Lo, He is Lord of all, creation speaks His praise, And everywhere, above, below, His will obeys.

The God of Abraham praise, whose all sufficient grace Shall guide me all my happy days, in all my ways. He calls a worm His friend, He calls Himself my God; And He shall save me to the end, through Jesus' blood.

The great I AM has sworn; I on this oath depend. I shall, on eagle wings upborne, to heaven ascend. I shall behold God's face; I shall God's power adore, And sing the wonders of God's grace forevermore.

The God who reigns on high the great archangels sing, And "Holy, holy, holy!" cry, "Almighty King! Who was, and is, the same, and evermore shall be: Jehovah, Lord, the great I AM, we worship Thee!"

The whole triumphant host give thanks to God on high; "Hail, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," they ever cry. Hail, Abraham's God, and mine! I join the heavenly lays: All might and majesty are Thine, and endless praise.

Good night.