“Ain Soph”
“Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.” — From ‘nothing’ nothing comes.
To make “Creation” a possibility, it is necessary to postulate the existence of a Creator. It is equally necessary to postulate this Creator as containing within Himself potentially everything that He can ever bring into existence. He must possess the power to create (i.e. Thought). He must posses the will to do so, and “Will” requires Motive, Purpose, Desire, behind it. He must possess also every quality that is to find expression in His work, as all creative work is necessarily self-expression. These basic truths are self-evident to rational human thought.
When we consider the vast universe of nature around us our, souls must be “dead” indeed if we do not question and speculate on the meaning of it all - its origin and purpose. As a matter of fact, man has speculated for ages on the “how” and “why” of his own being, and the universe around him. To some extent ancient man’s ideas have been preserved to us, more or less intelligibly, in “myths” and “traditions.” But when we study these, a curious thing strikes us, viz.: that they give evidence of quite a different kind of “thinking” from what we are now accustomed to. Instead of our deductive reasoning from observed facts, we find the “thought” of the’ ancients taking the form of dream-pictures and imaginings, which are often of great power and poetry, but which are not the work of the reasoning, observing mind. They come through the “subconscious mind”, the mind in which our dreams arise in sleep.
The deductive “conscious” mind of modem humanity had not in ancient days been developed. If it existed at all, it was only in a very embryonic state. The ancients knew nothing of our scientifically ordered “thought,” but, on the other hand, they were in far more direct contact with the Spiritual Cosmos. They “knew” the Spiritual World because they lived in it; they did not need to “reason out” its existence.
We, today, stand in quite a different relation to the Spiritual World. We live a thought-life that has become so materialised that many people even doubt the existence of a Spiritual World, or of a Spiritual Supreme Being at all. This is especially noticeable in Scientists, especially those who specialise in any one particular branch. (“See Dr. Alexis Carrel’s book, “Man, the Unknown,” published by Hamish Hamilton.) The very nature and method of their work wears grooves in their minds, which their thinking continually deepens, but does not overflow. This is why, of all interpreters of the Bible, the “Higher Critics” are the worst. It requires a very special self training and discipline to “run” the modern scientific mind and the intuitive spiritual mind “in double harness.” It can be done, and there is every probability that at no very distant time it will be done normally; but, in the meantime, what the ancients “knew” instinctively, we only accept so far as we can “reason it out” to our modern satisfaction from such “positive evidences” as are available to us. If we today wish to know anything about the “Beginning” we have to work back to it, step-by-step, deducing from our observations and researches the necessary and immediate causes of phenomena. By bringing our thought to bear on our observations, we gradually build up mental conceptions of the processes at work in the universe.These “conceptions” we call “laws of Nature.” They are at first tentative “suppositions,” but if we find that they appear to explain satisfactorily the phenomena around us consistently and continually, we accept them provisionally as “true,” and it use them as stepping stones to deeper and more complete knowledge. It is worth noting here that it is “thinking” that creates our knowledge. Apart from “thinking.” all the scientific observations ever made could not produce a “theory” or “deduce a law.” So even the most materialistically-minded of scientists really owes all his “results” to the Spiritual activity of Thought, whether he acknowledges a Spiritual World or not.
As already said, one does not find this process of thought in ancient times. The Bible and other “sacred” Scriptures claim, instead, to be the result of “Inspiration.” which just as means, in modern terms, that they were based on Spiritual impressions received by the subconscious intuitional mind. Men did not then consciously create their own thoughts. They “felt” that thoughts came to them from a spiritual source outside themselves. Their translations of these spiritual impressions into verbal expression could not fail to be “coloured” more or less — by their personal qualities of mind training or experience. Inspiration is not entirely dependent on the Inspirer. It depends also on the spiritual development of the medium who receives it. This “human” element accounts for much being attributed to God in early periods that no intelligent Christians of today could associate with the God of later revelation. As man has developed there has been a gradual raising of the idea of God.
But, before considering what inspired Scripture has to say respecting human origins, it would be useful to see how far Scientific investigation can go, and to what it leads us. It is unecessary to go into detail but merely to get a general idea of the results of scientific observation and deductive thought.
Modern Science has developed a number of specialised and separate lines of study through which to work: Astronomy for investigating the physical universe in outside space; Geology for unravelling the story of the physical earth; Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Electricity, etc., etc., dealing with the formation of material things. Then we have Biology for the study of forms of life, vegetable, animal or human; Botany for the study of the Vegetable Kingdom; Zoology for that of the Animal World, Archaeology, for the Study of Man. Anthropology-study etc., etc. These tend in the main to continually subdivide into endless specialised departments. In the early days of Science there was a certain synthesis of all the above mentioned branches of study into one general science, which ensured some unity of thought-activity, but gradually each branch developed into so wide a field of work in itself that it became enough and more than enough to demand all the time, labour and thought that any one man could give to it. For that reason every branch and sub-branch of Science tends to become completely independent of the others, so that scientists find themselves working in “water tight” compartments. This has curious results. For instance, in his recent book “A Guide to Modem Thought,” Professor Joad points out that Physicists, working in their special field in one direction, and Biologists in theirs in another, independently, at last find their deductions and conclusions so completely contradictory as to cancel one another out; so, obviously, something has gone wrong. Some element necessary to arrive at Truth is lacking. This means that Science is lacking something. What that is we may see later. In the meantime, all strictly scientific observations can be accepted as satisfactory documentary evidence to work on, but we can reserve judgement as to the correctness, or otherwise, of the deductions which Scientists may make from their observations.
Rudolph Steiner was a friend and great admirer of Haeckel, who he considered to he one of the greatest “scientific investigators,” but he added that Haeckel was “the worst possible interpreter of the significance of his own discoveries.” It is, unfortunately, true that not all scientists are philosophic nor all philosophers scientific.
One great general fact that appears to be deducible from scientific investigation of the universe, is that of a progressive development from simplicity to complexity, from low forms to is higher, from the universal to the infinitely individualised. This suggested to Darwin the idea of “Evolution,” and he tried to explain the “upward” development by his theories of “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest”: It is doubtful whether Darwin himself ever felt fully satisfied that those theories really solved the problems they were intended to solve, and he was honest and modest enough to refrain from making exaggerated claims for them. He offered them as his “opinions.” His successors, however, were less scrupulous. World thought at the time was passing through a particularly “materialistic” phase and to materialistic minds the “Evolution” idea offered a fascinating possibility of explaining away any Spiritual or Super-natural origin of the universe. The still unsolved difficulties and considerations which Darwin himself was more or less conscious of, they simply ignored. To them, the theories were so attractive that they felt they must be true, and apply universally; if there were gaps in the evidence, contradictions or apparent contradictions to be reconciled, or any other difficulties, they thought it could only be for lack of more complete evidence, and that would certainly be forthcoming in due time, and the “missing links” would certainly be found. They never seemed to have dreamed of questioning the real validity of the “suppositions” which they accepted as “Truth.” But we are perfectly justified in doing so. We can freely accept as fact the observed “order” — from the “simple to the complex” — from the universal to the infinitely individualised,” in all the Kingdoms of Nature. We can accept the picture given by Science of the growth of a Solar system, because the universe provides us with examples of solar systems in various stages of formation. In one place we can see a dimly-glowing gaseous mist; in another we can see the mist taking a spiral movement; in another the formation of a brighter nucleus of light, which in another stage is consolidated into a “Sun” which may perhaps have a planetary family like our own. So far we are dealing only with observations which anyone who has available the necessary instruments and the necessary mathematical, chemical or other knowledge, such that he can test and confirm for himself. But, when a scientist gets beyond his observations, he enters the realm of speculation, and speculation is not science. When he imagines that the universe originated in some “chance” spontaneous movement in the depth of space; that all the “laws” and “order” we can see at work in it were “self-produced” and so on — he ceases to be scientific, and soon finds himself lost in absurdities, impossibilities. and assumptions that are flatly contradictory to the very basic principles of science. One can ask endless questions to which he can give no answer.
One might ask: “How could motion, heat, matter, originate in the infinite stillness and cold of immaterial space? How could ‘heat’ condense itself into a fine mist, and the fine mist into flaming gas or incandescent matter?” Heat rarefies, expands, disperses; how can one attribute to it the properties of gravitational attraction, which depend on the existence of masses and weight of matter. There can be no such force at work in infinitely dispersed “ether.” To conceive of infinitely dispersed “Spirit matter” becoming concentrated in a certain place to form a “mass” of ever increasing density, and finally a material solid, obliges us to conceive of some power capable of overcoming the tendency of Nature to resist any disturbance of its normal balance.
Increase of density in one place must mean decreasing the density of what is outside the concentration, and natural law would at once be at work to restore the balance. So that the natural tendency in any universally-dispersed element would never be to concentrate but to resist concentration. Whence then the “masses” and the gravitational forces? If the problem of “matter” were solved, we could go on to ask how “life” could originate in an inorganic universe; or how could such things as thought, reason, art, science, or moral qualities originate in, or inhabit “matter” at all. The plain fact is that, as far as scientific investigation alone can go to explain it, the whole visible universe is a physical impossibility — and yet, it exists.
But to return to the Keynote of this chapter: No single item or element in the universe could come from anything but a direct, sufficient, and strictly relevant Cause. In the infinite “Nothingness” which preceded the manifest universe, there must have existed in potentiality *some causal entity or form that is by nature unknowable, and perhaps not readily distinguishable from Eternity. All that is, or ever was, or will be. It did not exist materially, therefore, it must have existed in Spiritual Being. That Spirit “Being” in whom lay the potentiality of All things was, by ancient Hebrew philosophy denominated “Ain Soph”: the as yet unmanifested and, therefore, the “UNKNOWN GOD.”
*[text: in potentiality. from Eternity.]
The ancient spiritual faculties enjoyed by man during the “intuitional” stage of his “consciousness and evolution” are not dead, but they are submerged in our present stage of development, beneath the activities of the reasoning mind, and our more materialistic thought and consciousness. This materialistic phase of our development was not really a “fall” to a lower state. But was absolutely necessary to the full development of true manhood and complete individual self-consciousness.
The reawakening of the spiritual faculties is already begun, and when men repossess them, they will not only “know” the spiritual world by subconscious intuition; they will also know it intelligently and understand it. And then, also, Science will walk hand in hand with the Ancient Wisdom — and “Faith” with “Knowledge.”