Читать книгу Much Ado About Everything - Peter Milward - Страница 4

Nothing, I always think, is so inspiring as Nothing, especially when spelt, as it deserves, with a capital N. Then it looks like Nirvana. It also has a ringing sound, as in Nnnnothingggg! “Hark how merrily the morn, the Christmas bells are ringing!”

Way back in the West, where I once had my home, we had what is called a yen on Being. Everything had to be, never not to be. Everything had to conform to the principle of Parmenides, “That that is is.” That was mere monism. We exulted in that which we were proud to recall as the male-oriented tradition of the West.

But here and now I am in the East. Here and now I am no longer surrounded by Being, but by Non-Being, or simply Nothing. And this is a female-oriented tradition. It isn’t so much contradictory as complementary to the Being of the West. Rather, in contrast to the Being of the West, I find something fascinating in the Non-Being of the East. The two go together, as the hand to the glove, or the foot to the sock, or the hat to the head. It is what the medieval thinker aptly called “a coincidence of opposites”.

After all, monism belongs to eternity. Monism belongs to infinity. Monism exists above the separation of space and time, above this world. But in this world everything goes in pairs, like the animals going into Noah’s Ark. Here and now, if there is Being in the West, there is also Non-Being in the East. Here and now, there is also Nothing, spelt with a capital N, to distinguish it from mere “nothing”.

After all, in this world of space and time, even Nothing spelt with a capital N goes with another nothing spelt with a small n. Such was the “Nothing” of Cordelia, when she responded to her father’s question of “how much”. But such was not the “nothing” of Lear, when in response to his daughter he angrily said, “Nothing will come of nothing”.

After all, if I may be allowed to repeat the phrase a third time, Lear’s was a Western nothing. His was an Aristotelian nothing. His was merely the nothing of the Schools, a nothing which merely echoes the Aristotelian principle of “Nothing will come of nothing.” In his mind he might have been thinking of the Being of Western tradition, beyond which there is mere nothing. But it was a Being in his mind that led to non-being for his daughter – and for himself, considering that “Cordelia” = Coeur de Lear (the Heart of Lear). In banishing her, he was banishing himself, as he soon came to find to his own cost.

On the other hand, what may we say of Cordelia’s “Nothing”? Does it belong to the Western male-oriented tradition of Lear and Aristotle and the Schools? Or doesn’t it rather belong to the Eastern female-oriented tradition of Tao and Zen? Or may I not say, in the tradition of the Schools, “Addo tertium”, I add a third?

But how can there be a third in between the West and the East, in between Man and Woman, in between Being and Non-Being? Isn’t the very idea of a third impossible? Doesn’t it make nonsense of the Principle of Contradiction, even when that principle is denied?

Well, as the angel said, “With God all things are possible.” And as Edgar said, “The clearest gods make them honors of men’s impossibilities.” In other words, let us think not of what is or is not possible, but of what is actual.

After all (once again), in between the tradition of the West, in Europe, and the tradition of the East, in Asia, there is the tiny state of neither West nor East in Israel. Here the Israelites, subsequently known as the Jews, from the one tribe of Judah, were unique among the nations, or goyim, surrounding them. Here they were neither West nor East, but themselves alone. Looking back as they did to the one God who revealed himself to Moses, and looking forward as they did to the one Messiah as revealed by the prophets, they were themselves alone.

All too glibly we speak of the tradition of the West as Christian, and that of the East as Buddhist, with the Middle East as Muslim. But Christianity is neither of the West nor of the East but, like Israel out of which it came, itself alone. And it is in Christianity, in the Christian Bible, enshrined in both the Old and the New Testament, that we find two meanings of Nothing, with its capital letter, in the sense intended by Cordelia – as opposed to the Aristotelian sense intended by Lear.

Then, what do we find in the Old Testament, in the very beginning of the account of creation, but the creation by God of everything out of nothing? In the beginning we read of the Spirit moving over the face of the waters, where all was waste and void. And there we read of the Word uttered over the deep, “Let there be light!” And there was light, the light seen by the perceptive eyes of our fundamentalists. And there was the Big Bang heard by the sensitive ears of our scientists.

And what do we find in the New Testament, in the very beginning of the Gospel according to John, but the incarnation of the Word of God? For there we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and then, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” in the person of Jesus Christ.

This is what Paul in his letter to the Philippians calls “the self-emptying” (or kenosis ) of the Word, in making himself “Nothing” in order to recall us to “Being”. This is what he also says in his letter to the Romans, God “calls those things that are not as those that are”, in raising to the fullness of Being those that are falling into Non-Being.