Life Beyond the Cave
“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. 'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
There is a story Rumi told of a pond frog talking to an ocean frog. The pond frog proudly declares the glory of his pond. “Look, you can jump from side to side.” After a while, he asks the ocean frog, “what is it like where you are from?” The ocean frog attempts to explain. To a frog that's never left his pond, the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he's giving up: security, mastery of his world, recognition! The ocean frog just shakes his head. "I can't explain where I live, but someday I'll take you there."
In Transposition, CS Lewis illustrates the challenge of conveying the realities of the unseen in such a way that they are more visible and understood by someone with no experience of such wonders. He tells of a woman thrown in a dungeon. She bears a son who knows only the dungeon walls. She attempts to describe the world she has seen, the world she has known and experienced outside the walls. Her teaching is a sharing of hope for a world she longs for him too enjoy. But all he knows is world of pencil marks and lines; “He had no idea of the world which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition…” Like the boy, our ability to comprehend the reality of the heavenly world is limited by our imagination, knowledge and understanding.
Written in 517 BCE, Plato’s Republic told a similar allegory of the cave. It tells of prisoners chained in an underground cave who can only see the world behind them as shadows on the wall before them. They accept that the world of shadows is the real world. Upon release, they will have to shift to accepting that the shadows were merely an illusion. The outside world is almost intolerably bright and confusing, but it is the fullness of reality.
Similarly, Paul understood the Pharisee tradition to be the extent of what it meant to know God and be committed to Him. He discovered that he too was chained in a cave until his apocalypse on the road to Damascus. The word apocalypse in Greek refers to the idea of revelation, of peeling back. The brightness and sound of the previously unseen world suddenly became visible and booming. God was no longer reduced to tradition, to the lines of a two-dimensional rendering. The boy in the tower, the prisoners in the cave now grapple with a reality beyond their imagination. Paul was physically blinded but now able to perceive the fullness of God in Christ Jesus.
Paul’s tradition provided a limited perception of reality. Truth, like revelation, provides a more complete understanding. To comprehend a sculpture, you must walk all around it, look above it. A drawing’s flat dimensional plane requires less, but also provides less in this sense. Frank Wilczhek’s, A Beautiful Question, describes this idea as the of wisdom as complementarity. No one approach can provide answers to all the questions; “to do justice to reality, we must engage it from different perspectives (p 185).” Plato sought to harmonize Mind and Matter as a reconciliation of Real and Ideal. But he adopted Beauty over Truth, ambition over precision. His concepts formed the basis of metaphysics. The Real is less than the Ideal; beautiful theories are greater than observations. Complementarity, however, reconciles Beauty and Truth. “Is it not unnatural to separate our understanding into parts that we do not reconcile?” Plato’s pursuit would lead to the Renaissance- to perspective and accuracy in art. In fulfillment of The Republic’s aim, he would lead people out of the cave.
Quantam physics would emerge from projective geometry, such as that used in perspective construction in art, and offer terms useful to science, art, religion, and philosophy. Relativity informs us that we cannot see an object from two perspectives at once, yet all perspectives represent the same information, but differently coded. For example, I can describe one side of a coffee mug in one perspective, the coffee inside the mug from another, and both provide accurate (and potentially beautiful) information. Symmetry is the idea of “change without change.” Changing the description of a projection does not change with change of perspective. Invariance grounds us in the idea that certain features are definite from any perspective. What those features are- that is the critical question. Complementarity defines the limit of realizing only one perspective at a time. Finally, mutual exclusivity demands we choose a perspective. For example, when observing electrons, the mere act of observation changes it. So, in observing, we remove precision for ambition. The idea of probability becomes imperative.
Like the Plato’s cave, the Real of shadows reveals the Ideal of the world behind them. In projective geometry, “our ability to view the real world outside of the shadows of tradition is a scheme of looking toward the infinite using the dictates of Nature. The Artisan Himself guides our understanding through the construct of what is Real that we may bow before the Ideal- perhaps.”
When Moses met God in the cave on Mt Sinai, he longed to see the Artisan Himself. The experience, however, would be too overwhelming. God did show Himself to Moses in Exodus- as mercy and justice. (Consider how vastly different this is to the ways of Pharaoh.) This cave was like a portal into the Presence of the Ideal where heaven and earth overlap. Leaving this cave, Moses entered another, where the people were still prisoners. The light of God on Moses was intolerably bright and frightening. But he was committed to see them to freedom.
Jesus, “God with Us”, enters the world of shadows and begins peeling back the layers, slowly turning their heads. Moses gave them a covenant on Sinai, but they never faced the Ideal as Moses did. They were still content in the cave. Jesus upset those who were content with the parts etched in stone, parts that resembled the shadows. But, Jesus wanted much more for the prisoners. He came to set them free! Eventually Jesus would enter another cave, a tomb carved into a hill. Jesus again confused and overwhelmed those who encountered Him. He was both shadow and light, but He was recognized in story telling on the road to Emmaus and in service when preparing fish along the banks of the sea. Suddenly, the disciples were able to walk around the Presence of God and see Him more circumspectly, their eyes growing accustomed to the Light. This was the apocalypse!- the revelation of the Ideal and the Real, ambition and precision, Beauty and Truth.
What was the revelation of Paul, this apocalypse he wrote about as his purpose in Ephesians? It is the Ideal overwhelming the Real. It is Beauty reconciled with Truth. It is the realization of both unimaginable precision and ambition. The shadows he chased in his tradition, the shadows Christians chase in the veil of their understanding of Mosaic law, find their fullness in Jesus Christ, the Ideal world invading the Real world until they are reconciled. God enters the world, and in Him we glimpse the reality of life outside the cave- of the meek, the poor, the hungry, the thirsty finding what the shadows denied them. We find the reconciliation of Israel and Judea, Jew and Gentile,…all ethnic groups, all divisions, all barriers are constructs of relating to shadows. The Divine Ideal is centered on His Divine love: “to know the love of the Messiah that is beyond knowing.” Why beyond knowing? Because cave dwellers cannot comprehend beyond their limited acceptance: if all you see is law, you will not understand the embodied Presence of mercy and justice. Like Paul, all followers of Christ are rapt in this revelation. Like Paul, we should be blinded by the splendor of the Ideal and never lose sight of Jesus, who breathes His life into us and transforms the cave, empowering us to lead others into His heavenly reality. The world looks to us, who claim to have seen this Jesus, to write upon our hearts and theirs “blessed are the merciful…blessed are the peacemakers.” Too often, we etch laws in stone along the walls of the cave, one perspective, mutated by limited imagination, falling far short of Beauty and Truth, not desiring the fullness of God in Christ, but the facsimile handed to us on paper as we sit within a constricted cell.
To those of us content in this world, comfortable in our pond, the world as Jesus sees it is impossible. We have so much to lose- security, mastery of this world (certainty of its rules), and recognition (we know the lines) to gamble on the ocean He knows. He has shown us a brief visage, we have smelled the ocean breeze. However, He cannot just tell us about that of which we have no basis to comprehend. Jesus Himself must take us there. And, Jesus Himself brings the ocean to us such that it flows from us into this pond, overwhelming it with mercy. The Temple in Ezekiel is this: heaven and earth overlapping, with rivers of Life flowing out into a barren and desolate world to resoret abundance of Garden Life to God’s good world.
Jesus reveals His purpose and His person as He reads from Isaiah 61:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Paul responded to the revelation of Jesus by proclaiming the reconciliation of heaven and earth as the Kingdom that has come. It is the good news of mercy and justice. It freedom from all that chains us in the cave. It is incompressible light to those accustomed to darkness. It is the cancellation of all debt and the restoration of that which was from the beginning. The Light of the World has come, turn your head to see Him. He is not carved in the stone of the law, per se. He is the Life we cannot imagine, the Beauty we cannot behold, the Truth more precise than our limits.
