The 7 Desires of Halloween: #3 Mystery

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“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world. (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein)

Mysteries can be divided into two categories: natural and supernatural. 

Natural mysteries are that which can be known and understood materially: they follow the rules we understand the universe to operate by.  Just because they are comprehensible though, does not mean we understand them yet.  And this can lend them an air of the supernatural.

For instance, in Shelly’s Frankenstein, the means by which the monster is created follows natural laws.  Victor Frankenstein does not delve into books of the occult to provide the monster with an animating spirit, he studies anatomy and biology.  However, his refusal to provide us with the specifics due to fear of someone else repeating his experiment is a stroke of narrative genius.  It turns Frankenstein from a classical tragedy into a Halloween tragedy.  The secret of life remains a mystery.  And that is its appeal.  When it comes to storytelling, it is often more appealing not to know. 

As someone who believes God is a God of Truth, this bothers me somewhat. Shouldn’t knowledge always be preferable to not knowing.  Don’t human beings hunger for knowledge?  How can we also then hunger for mystery?

I think the seeming discrepancy here lies in the difference between knowledge and truth.  All knowledge must be true by definition.  It is possible to believe something that is false, but it is impossible to *know* something that is false.

(I tried really hard to find a citation for this epistemological assertion; I’m pretty sure its Augustine, but I couldn't find the quote I was looking for.  The citation for this image though is https://xkcd.com/285/ )

However, it is possible for something to be true without us knowing it.  After all, we are not God.  Even if every natural law were understood in its entirety by every human being, there would still be things we did not know.  Our brains are limited. 

Especially when you're trying to focus at work but you're really outlining blog articles in your head.

This brings us to supernatural mysteries.  They cannot be understood via natural laws.  The church uses mystery in a theological context for everything from the life of Christ to the nature of the Trinity.  Despite what it may sound like, this is not a theological cop-out.  An infinite God outside of space and time, not a being but BE-ING himself, must necessarily be uncontainable by the human mind.  (My theology might be a little off here, but you get the idea).

As the song Amazing Grace states that “when we’ve been there 10,000 years / bright shining as the sun / we’ve no less days, to sing God’s praise / then when we first begun.”  Similarly, if we are spending eternity with an infinite God, after 10,000 years (insomuch as time has any meaning in eternity) we will have no fewer things to learn about God too.

Thus we can resolve our desire for knowledge with our desire for mystery without sacrificing our desire for truth.  Both reflect the same desire: the desire for infinity.  We can learn and yet still desire for there to be more to learn.  To quote Brandon Sanderson, “There’s always another secret.”  And thank God for that.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

PS: The finite (if far from fully understood cosmos) is not enough to fill the infinite human drive for knowledge that can only be fulfilled by an infinite God.  If someone finds belief in God impossible, even hostile deities might be preferable to the closed system of a finite cosmos.

 I think this is one of the things that makes Lovecraft so appealing to modern geeks.  Anyone else as controversial as Lovecraft would long since have been purged from the conversation of urban progressives.  But Lovecraft still has a huge following despite himself.  Why?  Because he (and like-minded writers) infused pulp sci-fi with supernatural mysteries.  The Great Old Ones are incomprehensible to the human mind.  Just seeing the tiniest glimpse or reading about their true nature in a book drives Lovecraft’s narrators a little mad. 

However, unlike a Christian worldview, there is no God to keep them in check. In Lovecraft, the true nature of reality is entirely indifferent to man, but also incomprehensible.  This makes Lovecraft’s narrators are the “materialist magicians” predicted by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. And that brings us to our next essay.