The Strange Creator
Let’s go back to the beginning—not our beginning but the beginning. It has been called a Jewish discovery that the world is created.1 “In the beginning,” the first book of the Bible begins, “God created . . .” Textually, it is not clear how to take that opening prepositional phrase. We might have an affirmation here that there was a beginning to things and that at that beginning God created. Alternatively, the text might be affirming not that there was a beginning but rather that at the root of all things (or the most essential thing to say about all things) is God, who created them.
We recall that Aristotle did not think the world was created and did think it was eternal both in past and future time. But once the notion of creation was in the air, philosophers started asking if the notion of infinite past time was a coherent, thinkable notion. Some, including notable medieval Islamic philosophers, thought the notion fundamentally incoherent.2 There cannot be past time, they thought, because if there were, it would have taken infinite time to get to the present day. And that would mean there was an actual infinity in time. Actual infinites, however, are impossible, for the following reason. We can have potential infinites: we can, for instance, always imagine living for another day, and then another, and then another, without end. Or (to take yours truly’s nightmare version) we can always imagine having more cats. But we cannot imagine having actually lived an infinite number of days (or living with an actually infinite number of cats).3 Similarly, we can imagine the US federal deficit increasing without bounds. It was a trillion dollars not that long ago, it is over fifteen trillion today, and possibly at some future time it will be more trillions than whatever number you would like to name. Nonetheless, the debt can never become actually infinite. No one, not even the government of the United States, can have an infinite debt. Actual infinities cannot exist.
So, the argument says, the world must have had a beginning. From this point, the argument goes on to say that it must have been created, and therefore God exists.
But Thomas Aquinas disagreed, interestingly so. He said that to have a beginning and to be created are different things. If we say the world is created, we need not also say it had a beginning. One might imagine this as a state of affairs in which, to put it roughly, “there was always a yesterday.” More precisely, we could say that at any time in the universe’s history, there could have been a predecessor time, that the universe always had a past. I think this is a philosophically coherent notion. It does not mean there has been actually an infinite number of past moments but only that no moment had no predecessor.
So there is philosophical disagreement. If we follow Aquinas’ thinking, two conclusions follow immediately. The first is that we are free to turn over the question of the universe’s beginning to whatever insights scientific inquiry might uncover. The current view, as I understand it, is that our universe did in fact have a beginning and it was about 13.8 billion years ago, and that our universe is expanding and will do so without end. But whether there was anything before that beginning some 13.8 billion years ago (the so-called big bang) is an unanswerable question. There might have been a previous universe that collapsed into the singularity that exploded in that big bang; if so, all information from it—every trace of its existence—would have been obliterated in the explosion that began our known universe. And furthermore, there might have been several, even uncountable, previous universes that expanded and recollapsed. Thus it seems that in principle, based upon contemporary scientific understanding, we cannot know whether the universe had a beginning. It might have, and it might have not.
But second, none of this undermines the doctrine of creation, for to create something means to give it existence. And to give existence is not necessarily to start but rather to hold in being exactly what exists for however long it exists. Which is to say, if it is a coherent notion to say “a universe without a beginning,” then God could have created “a universe without a beginning.” (The only reason God cannot create a square circle is that the words “a square circle” have no meaning—they are incoherent.)
The Jewish discovery of creation goes hand in hand with the discovery of the strangeness of God, for what is meant by “creation” is a radical distinction for which God is responsible: the distinction of creator and creation, a distinction that escapes all our attempts to specify it in language. This is why the Jewish religion forbids idol worship. Other religions of the ancient Near East worshiped the sun and the moon. Genesis 1:16, by contrast, insists that “the greater light” and “the lesser light” are creations of God (significantly, the text refrains from naming them). Sun and moon are demoted from quasi-divine status. They don’t even appear until the fourth day. Sun and moon, land and water, cockroaches and cockatiels, human beings and the things their hands make and the words their mouths utter and the ideas their minds form are all creatures, creations. None of them is divine, none of them is creator, none of them is to be worshiped.
To create, properly speaking, is not to manufacture. The human being is a maker, homo factor. We make things out of other things. A chair, say, is made out of wood; a melody, out of pitch and rhythm. But wood, sound waves, the pulsations of time—these are already there before we step in to do our making. By contrast, to create is to give existence to wood and pitch and pulsations—and indeed also to the people who work with them—to give them existence for as long as they exist, exactly as they exist.
Another way to get at this is to recognize that the creator is not a countable thing in the world. You never look around a room and say it contains four chairs, five hundred books, three persons, and also, by the way, the creator. Incidentally, this is why the creator is singular. You could have five hundred books (indeed, you could have five tons of books), you might even have two cats (although I’d rather just stick with the books, thank you very much), but you could not have two creators. To be plural is to be countable, and there is no sense in counting God.
To see this yet another way, if we take the universe with its tons of books and myriad cats and everything else and hold it together in our minds as one very big thing, we cannot then imagine that God is “outside” it as another thing. We might speak of the “great divide” that separates creator from creature, yet it is actually not a divide in any thing. “Creator” and “everything that exists” cannot be united as two things put together: “It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two.”4
But once we see the strangeness of God as creator, it is natural to think of him5 as distant. Aristotle’s prime mover, after all, is distant—and indifferent to the universe to boot. But the creator has no place, and therefore it does not make sense to say he is far away. Yes, God is not in the universe—he is not a thing among other things, a being among beings—yet neither is he outside the universe. He is strange!—the notions of “inside” and “outside” don’t apply to him. But this means that, awesomely, he is “closer” to us than anything else could be. God is your creator who holds you in being, gives you existence, makes you you, for however long you have your being. He is closer to you than any other person could be, more intimate than your next heartbeat.
This strangeness of God the creator would seem to make the problem of friendship with God even worse than it was for Aristotle (for whom already it was impossible). How could God the creator be the friend of a human being? How could any of us have a friend who is nothing in the universe? How could my friend be the source of my existence? How could a created being have any relationship at all with the creator, not to mention a relationship of friendship that seems to involve mutuality and equality? There are hints in the Scriptures that these problems will not prove insuperable, and in due course we will have to see whether any sense can be made of the notion of being a friend of God. For now, we merely underline the point that, unlike Aristotle’s prime mover, the creator is hardly ignorant of or indifferent to the world if the world is indeed a creation. God surely was not under any compulsion to create; yet once having made himself creator, he has tied himself to his creation as the continuing source of its being. Holding things in being, for as long as they have being, does seem to be some sort of relationship, even though it is unlike any other (for all other relationships are among creatures). This radical departure from Aristotle, this strange creator God, just might in the end be capable of friendship with human beings.
How to Make Friends (An Insight from Plato)
If God is the source of existence of all things (which is what we mean when we say he is the creator), then we can study those things on their own terms (without being immediately concerned about their relationship to God). In particular, we may understand human friendship as something created. God has given us a creation that has friendship in it; he holds the activities of friendship in existence just as he holds the friends themselves.
Ancient Greek wisdom has still more to teach us about friendship (even though it has no sense of God as creator). For a complementary view, I will turn from Aristotle to his teacher, Plato, who has a cunning illumination of how friendship is made. Plato was a master dialectician who wrote, for the most part and famously, dialogues, that is to say, conversations, searchings, pursuits. You can think of Plato’s dialogues as being explicitly what other truth-seeking writings are implicitly; Plato puts the back-and-forth of thought into the writing itself. This is of great importance for us, for although it is seldom remarked, it is plainly there for us to see: in nearly every dialogue, friendship is Plato’s implicit subject. The characters in the dialogues are (with some admitted exceptions) people who are trying to seek the truth—or should be! And to seek the truth in this manner presupposes a trust in the forthrightness and integrity of the others in the dialogue. That is to say, truth-seeking participants in a dialogue are people who could well be friends—people who, by that very process, might be already on the way to becoming friends.
The Platonic dialogue form displays human knowledge as a dynamic activity, a point that is made by Aristotle (e.g., that friendship is an activity as much as a state) but not illustrated and perhaps not sufficiently emphasized (and an essential point for those who would seek friendship). Here is the problem. Although human life is an activity, when we speak of Aristotle’s ideal “virtuous person,” we tend to omit activity from our mental picture of her, erroneously imagining someone who statically possesses human goodness. Thus when Plato constructs a written drama in thought in which people seek to know what is the case (about whatever they’re talking about) and how they should live, he presses upon us vividly the essentially dynamic character of human beings and human thinking. Human goodness, Plato shows us, is not something we can lock up and put in the bank; we might have it in some partial way, yet it remains something we must also continue to seek.
Plato has one short, often-overlooked dialogue whose explicit subject is friendship. This is the Lysis. When I was an undergraduate at St. John’s College, we spent many seminars on Plato’s “Great Books,” but the Lysis was not among them. It is reckoned a lesser dialogue; the classicist Edith Hamilton, for instance, opines that the Lysis is unsuccessful and that its importance lies not in its subject, friendship, but in its exemplification of the Socratic method. This conclusion misses the point. People may skip over the Lysis because it fails to achieve an understanding of friendship; indeed, at the end of the dialogue, having rejected every view he considered, Socrates admits defeat: “We have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend” (223b).6 But, as the philosopher Mark Vernon argues, to dismiss this dialogue in this manner is to overlook how it provides implicit teaching on what friends do and what they are about.7 To state it sharply, when we examine Socrates’ method, we are examining how friendship works. The Socratic method is a method of building friendship. Thus it would be no accident at all that a short, inconclusive dialogue on friendship would at the same time be an exemplary dialogue for the Socratic method, for that method is in fact about friendship.8
The Lysis opens with Socrates walking just outside the walls of Athens, where he falls in with some young men. The one who speaks to him, Hippothales, is in love with a juvenile, Lysis (we may think of Lysis as a young teenager, still under the care of a family governor). Socrates owns that although there is almost nothing he has knowledge about, he has “received from heaven the gift” of discernment about love (204c). We learn elsewhere that a heavenly oracle spurred Socrates to seek wisdom; to be a philosopher is to be someone who loves wisdom, the paradox being that if you love wisdom, you have a longing for it, and if you have a longing for it, that means you lack it (one does not long for something one already has). Just so, later in the Lysis, Socrates makes the surprising claim that “the good” (meaning people who have wisdom) cannot be “friends to wisdom [philosophers].” The wise are not philosophers! Philosophers are people who, while not evil, still lack the good—that is to say, wisdom (218b).9 Socrates, a friend of wisdom, knows about longing for wisdom—and therefore he knows about love. Behind all this, of course, is Plato showing us dynamism of human living and thinking.
The reader quickly sees that, by contrast to Socrates, Hippothales doesn’t know the first thing about love, and moreover, damningly, he lacks any particular knowledge about the object of his desire, Lysis. He is merely infatuated, and he carries on in such an embarrassingly imprudent way that he is all but certain not to obtain his object. Socrates, who knows something about love, offers to demonstrate “a specimen of what you ought to say” (206c).
They enter the palaestra (wrestling school). Socrates takes note of Lysis’ attractiveness, that he is “unmatched in face or form . . . not beautiful merely, but even of a noble mien” (207a). Lysis comes over to join Socrates, as do a number of others, including Lysis’ cousin and friend, Menexenus. Socrates speaks first to Menexenus, asking if the two of them dispute about who is older or better or more beautiful. When they laugh, Socrates says he won’t ask them who is wealthier, “for you are friends, are you not?” “Oh dear, yes!” they answer, and when Socrates notes that friends share their goods with each other, they agree (207c).
Shortly, Menexenus is summoned away, and Socrates turns his questioning to Lysis but along a new line. He brings Lysis to see that although his parents love him and thus want him to be happy, they constrain him as if he were a slave, not allowing him to do as he pleases. The questioning goes on for a few pages, leading finally to the awareness that it is when we have understanding (and are seen to have it) that people entrust things to us and we are “free ourselves in these matters” and also “lords over others,” but with those matters about which we have no insight, we will not be allowed to do as we please and “will be subject to others.” But if that is the case, asks Socrates, “Will anyone, then, count us his friends, will anyone love us in those matters in which we are of no use?” (210b–c). It is a devastating conclusion—Lysis agrees to it, but it means that his parents do not love him, and indeed it means that all love in the world is based on usefulness and that there is no difference between what is useful and what is good.
Here Socrates pauses in an aside to note something he didn’t say. It would have been a “blunder” to say it aloud, yet still he wants us to know, us who are hearing his report of this dialogue: “This is the way . . . you should talk to your favorite, humbling and checking, instead of puffing him up and pampering him” (210e). One might read this as simple expedient advice: speak this way if you want to make a love conquest. But, alternatively, it might be that Socrates is saying, instead of trying to make a love conquest, try to turn “your favorite” into your friend. And the way you make a friend is through honest interest in the good of the person who is in front of you, and that honest interest will take you to “humbling and checking” instead of dishonestly flattering him. If the Socratic “method” is to make an interlocutor see that he doesn’t know what he thought he knew, it is also to make him see that he has in you one who has his true good at heart—one who would be his friend.
When Menexenus returns, Socrates shares with him that from childhood he has preferred having friends to having good food or riches, even all the gold of the king. “On seeing, therefore, you and Lysis, I am lost in wonder, while I count you most happy, at your being able, at your years, to acquire this treasure with such readiness and ease—in that you, Menexenus, have gained so early and true a friend in Lysis, and he the same in you—while I, on the contrary, am so far from making the acquisition, that I do not even know how one man becomes the friend of another” (212a). This (slightly ironic) passage begins the latter half of the dialogue, in which Socrates ultimately gets them to realize that, though they think of themselves as friends, they no more know what friendship is than he does.
Finally, the dialogue ends, seemingly abruptly, as the governors of Menexenus and Lysis appear and take the boys away. Its inconclusiveness suggests that friendship is never wrapped up but is something human beings should continue seeking throughout their lives. I noted at the outset Socrates’ avowal of their failure “to discover what we mean by a friend.” He is saying they have failed as he is calling out to them as they leave. But his words imply something more complex than mere defeat: “Well, Lysis and Menexenus, we have made ourselves rather ridiculous today, I, an old man, and you children. For our hearers here will carry away the report that though we conceive ourselves to be friends with each other—you see I class myself with you . . .” And only at this point does Socrates assert they have not “been able to discover” the meaning of friendship. The dramatic truth must not be overlooked. In the very act of avowing a failure of discovery, at that moment the establishment of some ground for friendship is proclaimed. The three are embraced in a single action, one that outsiders may well judge “ridiculous”: “we . . . I, an old man, and you children.” Socrates puts himself together with them, across a vast age difference, and claims that they, all three, do think of themselves as “friends with each other” (223a). If they agree, then the course of the dialogue has somehow begun a friendship, and the end is a picture of beauty and hope that goes beyond the dialogue’s sober words of having fallen short.
The Socratic method is a friendship method. It originates in a mutual desire for the truth, which corresponds to Aristotle’s understanding of friendship in the primary sense as being about the good. Its parties must respect each other and not engage in flattery, even as Aristotle distinguishes real friendship from that which is about pleasure or utility. Friends are to make us better, and Socrates demonstrates that through the dynamism of dialectic. And while Aristotle said friends must be equals, Socrates shows that the equality in question is a willingness to seek the truth. Friendship does not demand equal experiences, or equal liberty (the boys are, after all, still under governors), or equal age.
When I read the Lysis, I wonder if what I need to do in order to develop friendships is to seek the truth boldly in honest conversation with others, even if they are vastly different from me in age or other matters. Indeed, in the process of writing this book, I often told people I was trying to understand friendship, and sometimes we just right then settled down to a long conversation about it. It is a wonder that precisely through such conversation one can start to become a friend, even while not knowing what friendship is! Friendship, it seems, truly is an activity; to be a friend is to do certain things.
This valuable insight is our gift from Plato.