Vignette: Disillusionment

Is it fruitless to search out what is truth and falsehood? To piece together the world into a coherent picture that accommodates the collective experiences of humanity into a comprehensible whole? No sooner does one come to terms with one conundrum that another appears. In the tiresome quest for understanding, each worldview iteration encompasses more and thus when each comes crashing down, even more purpose and motivation is taken with it, all bound together, all removed to be built anew. But building is expensive, time-consuming and tiring.

To believe in nothing is my negation. To be paralysed by doubt is still to be paralysed. But what can a finite mind do against an infinite universe, with more knowledge and revelation coming day by day to revolutionise? Growing tired of revolution, reassessment and longing for stability in this world, stability to security, security to comfort. Is all comfort an illusion? The product of an idle, unchallenged mind?

De Gloria Mundi

It's not often that games provoke reflection on a wider scale than the role of entertainment as a diversion in our lives, but Europa Universalis IV has provided quite a lot of munch on. 'All's fair in love and war', and now I am somewhat more acquainted with histories and causes the latter than I have been.

Of course, one cannot possibly hope to encapsulate all the intricacies of nations on anything processable by a domestic computer, even if Moore's law continues to push our limitations. EUIV however, does a much better job than most other games, notably the Civilisation series. Bringing in religion, geopolitics, dynastic struggles and colonisation, and revelling in the sheer inequality of it all.

When one begins a campaign, plans for aggrandisement and expansion help to drive the first hundred years or so of gameplay. You are put in the shoes of a ruler, and that drive to build something that will last, achieve domination and preeminence, becomes something relatable. 

Halfway through, if one plays aggressively, it is easy to become a virtual world power, maybe controlling the most trade, being a dominant land power, or unifying the lands of one culture group. The game suddenly loses steam, that drive to be the first gives way to a strange purposelessness. The player begins to wonder what was so appealing about achieving to begin with.

This sentiment of nihilistic disenchantment is exacerbated, when after thirty to forty hours of campaign time, everything ends abruptly in 1821. The game gives you a little pat on the back, and shows you the door. The sandbox gameplay has revealed how countries define their own goals based on their self interest, but in the end, when one considers all the circumstances, the entire exercise seems so futile, even detrimental. 

Thousands of lives were given to the service of the nationalistic dream, whether than dream was centred around the Valois or the Ming. Alliances are forged and broken when convenient with a perfunctory swiftness. Then as we know from history, European hegemony came crashing down, in a great destructive debacle where the flags of many empires flew for the last time over people who could no longer naively endorse the casus belli of their rulers. 

In that age is was easy to believe in the power and vision of a king, but events have conspired to deconstruct that lie. In its wake we came up with new reasons to fight, new causes to champion, new ideas to die for. The modern world has saturated itself with glories even more transient and fleeting than the legacy of the Habsburgs or Pax Britannia, and we buy into them because we need something to buy into, but Empire is so last century. I suppose it's time we turn to more eternal goals to strive for.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Sed Non Transit Gloria Dei

Hubris

I feel quite shaken by the level of uncertainty associated with knowledge that presents itself at a university level. After almost a semester in medicine, it has become apparent that while we write volumes on what we do know, my reference books are regularly admitting that certain mechanisms and various aetiologies of numerous conditions, esoteric and common, are rather opaque to us. There are even occasional inconsistencies between sources, which does nothing to assuage my fears that academia in general is in danger of building castles upon castles in the cloudy skies above the ivory tower.

It ought to be exciting, that we know so little, because it speaks of the possibilities out there, the research to be conducted, the potential applications and miracle cures that might present themselves upon the successful comprehension of various pathways.

Yet, it seems as though these vast unexplored regions of undiscovered knowledge have been cached in a collective wilful ignorance. Only a select few peer out over these shadowy realms and tremble at its inexhaustible expanse, the rest have come to believe that someone else always has the answers.

Perhaps it is a consequence of specialisation, coupled with the socha of modern life. Professionals want others to believe that they have all the answers, as part of earning the trust of the majority who entrust their information, assets and occasionally, their very lives to those who are likely complete strangers. Society interrogates their professionals with the question: 'You know what has to be done, right?'

Often, we can confidently answer that yes, we do know how we can help. This has unfortunately led to the perception that we have, collectively, got all the answers. That, in turn, has led to terribly high expectations and to the readiness at which we interpret mistakes as malevolent manipulation of some secret gnosis.

We want to believe that we know enough, for as the adage goes, knowledge is power. We would like to believe that we have more control over our fates than our less informed ancestors. In truth, we ought to know that we know little, that our knowledge base is vulnerable and often incomplete, and we plug ourselves into a global system that wants desperately to conceal the fragility of its foundations. How long will it be before the pride of our modernity is irrevocably shown to be a passing illusion? The sentiment of 'sic transit gloria mundi' will undoubtedly reverberate till kingdom come.

De Imagine Dei

This is going to be a fairly short article on my current understanding of what it means for God to have created us in His image.

To begin, this concept is based on the Word, and blended funnily enough, with a little bit of dimensional speculation from Flatland, by A. Square.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

- Genesis 1: 26-27 (ESV)

What is an image? In our most frequently encountered expression of images, they are two dimensional representations of something in three dimensions. By virtue of the fact that we see things from a limited perspective, we are able to represent something of three dimensions in a recognisable fashion, even through it has much less information than what the image claims to represent.

So an image is a snapshot of something complex from a limited perspective. It is a representation of something in a lower dimension that can only exist in a higher dimension. An image of a hypercube would be a cube, that of a cube, a square, and that of a square, a line, and a line, a point. Or not. 

Depending on the angle at which the image is taken, a cube can look like a hexagon or a rectangle. A scene can be viewed from a thousand perspectives. A building, whether le tour Eiffel or the Sydney opera house, have an near infinite number of possible vantage points by which they may be reduced to an image. Some may be more familiar than others, more or less conventional, close or distant.

If we are images of God, by this analysis, God must be more complex than we are. Our most distinguishing factor as human beings is that we are personal. We have the ability to form personal relationships with one another, and with God, in a way that the rest of natural creation cannot. What is a more complex version of personality? Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Trinity is only possible in what is somehow an additional personal or spiritual dimension, which we are unaware of in the same way that A. Square could not, at first, conceive of a sphere. In order for God to explain Himself to us, He has to reduce Himself into relatively comprehensible expressions. Most directly, by dipping Himself into our dimension as Jesus Christ. As how the sphere appears as a circle in Flatland to be able to communicate in a limited way with his prophet.

We are all made in God's image, yet we possess such diversity in our expression of that image. The analogy still holds, for a complex being like God cannot be captured in His entirety by a single image, a single human being. In His infinitude, all the billions of us who have ever existed still cannot fully capture all the ways that God can be imaged. And of course, while we may look like God when He is viewed from a certain angle, we cannot hope to be Him, any more than a picture of a pipe can be a pipe.

Vignette: Mare

Evening promenade ambulations were the always the most calming. The trees lined the right and the sand on the left. The sea reached out for the shore, pursuing and receding. How many people had looked out in just this way over the centuries? Caught up in an idle thought, the germ of a reflective cascade, the bud of a mental exercise through the high-vaulted halls of philosophy.

Perhaps it takes a certain disposition to appreciate this environment. A quieter, reflective temperament with a grandiose capacity for trying to comprehend the mysteries of this world. The sentiment charmed. It repelled any thoughts of loneliness, replacing it with a profound solidarity with all those who must once have stood here, in tranquil contemplation. It was an order, implicit, a gathering of kindred spirits who meet each other not in person, in speech and actions, but in prose or verse. The records of their hearts laid bare for another sensitive soul to imbibe, empathise with, and express in yet another flourish of creativity.

On more transcendent days, it seemed that the spirit of that quiescent community was closer to the sea, the land and the sky than to any other human organisation. How many regimes, triumphs and tragedies had this sea observed? Older, older still. How many births, deaths, frustrations and elations had been absorbed into the memory of the sea? Absorbed and absolved in the sublime depths that deny any attempt at exploration. Like the subconscious of the super-consciousness of humanity, which discovers a rare listener out of every few thousand individuals, who tries to give it a voice for the next explorer. 

The exclusivity of the organisation was a source of clandestine pride, but its reality could never be certain. Perhaps such perspective was all too common, disguised in innumerable variations, lenses and distortions into the full spectrum of superficial personalities. Or perhaps it was a phantasm, an ideal borne of a romantic hope of easing isolation, one too acutely felt by asocial individuals, read into the texts and expressions of others. 

At other times, the sea lost its symbolism, snapping back to a churning body of water, unconscious, unobservant and unfeeling. It reclaimed its position as a sublime force with mastery over a presumptuous humanity. It broke its mental alliance with a callous fickleness and left the observer stranded and alone. No longer a comfort, but a font of unease.

It would not do. The observer grants his own interpretation and voice to the voiceless, and Oceanus, for all his pretences, could be neither friend nor foe to the community that personified him with recall, and attempted to co-opt into their quest for questions and answers. It was a tool, a platform from which to explore realities beyond the physical, but only as much as a mind was willing to grant it metaphysical meaning by analogies and association.

A Reluctant Road

An ironic turn of events does reveal itself through the contents of my posts in recent months. When I started my creative oeuvre, it was intended to be a synthesis of all the knowledge I valued, and sensed that I wanted to include in a grand design. A world in my image, a playground of the mind, a canvas for the emotions, realm where I could create the creator and explore the implications of the rules I had set.

While writing, I researched, I thought, and my investigations began to take precedence over the actual opus itself. I had sought to reconcile multiple truths, and in that course, I found some beliefs were not worth maintaining. Veritas took precedence. Scriptio continued in ill disciplined streams.

That which I had determined to do changed. Now, the sub-creation became a vessel, centrum sapientiae scientiaeque. It had to embody the final understanding, it had to contain as much as it could possibly contain without being reality, for my perception of reality had grown to be far fuller than versatile shadow that dwelt within my soul.

I see now that I will be bound. Trapped between a journey of discovery and a process of expression, in a constant tension, I am strung. The magnum opus must concede to my own 'De Civitate Dei', 'Summa Theologiae' and 'Institutio Christianae Religionis'. Perhaps one edition will be insufficient.