John glared at her. “I can’t make you out, Aunt Rosa. You’re a priest, but you seem to put the subject matter of your own faith into the same box as wacko UFO stuff. I can’t tell what you really believe.”
She wasn’t fazed. “I didn’t have to check in my cerebral cortex at the door of the seminary, John. It’s possible to have a mind, to be able to think, and to have faith. And even if the premises of my religion, of all our religions, have been wrong, perhaps all our thinking about God has served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.”
“Even if they are our own future selves,” Shelley said, her voice small.
Rosa said now, “I believe that everything about this strange situation is summed up in the two key words Alia used in her pitch to Michael: Redemption, and Transcendence.”
Transcendence:what could it possibly mean?
Rosa said, “It’s a word that has various definitions in philosophy. But Kant’s notions have the ring of prophecy, I think. Transcendent: beyond the sphere of human knowledge or experience, above and independent of humanity, indeed independent of the material universe itself.”
Shelley said, “Alia told Michael she has been drawn into this Transcendence, that she has had some kind of direct experience of it. But when she comes out of it, she can only remember fragments.”
Like memories of a dream, she had said to me, fleeting, elusive, evapo-rating even as you turn the warmth of your attention on them. And we knew that everything Alia said to us had been translated, and vastly simplified.
Rosa said, “Yes. Through what Alia had to say to us we can only glimpse, barely, the vaster concepts of the Transcendence itself. But it’s all we have. From Alia’s hints it certainly sounds as if the Transcendence will have many of the attributes we traditionally ascribe to our gods. But it is arising from humanity; it has embarked on a journey whose final end, perhaps, isn’t clear even to it. And so it is an evolving god.”
She talked of a nineteenth-century German philosopher called Schelling, who had been responsible for the introduction into philosophy of “evolutionary metaphysics.” What if God can grow, can change? And if so, what must He change into?
John said, “I thought God is eternal, and hence unchanging, as measured by our petty notions of time. How can an eternal God evolve from anything into anything else?”
But old Schelling, it seemed, had had an answer to that. His God was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega state was in some sense contained within the Alpha. The only difference was in the expression of that potential. Rosa spoke of the unevolved God as deus implicitus, and His final state as deus explicitus; the two states were different expressions of the same identity. “Schelling imagined that the universe evolves along with its god. In its final state the cosmos will be fully realized, every potential fulfilled — and it will be at one with its god. It is as if God realizes His own true potential through the vast self-expression of the universe. Perhaps these ideas foreshadow the entelechy of the Transcendence Alia described to Michael…”
I was starting to get rolling-eye signals from Shelley.
“I don’t know if this is helping us any,” I said to Rosa.
She nodded. “Then consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Paleontologist, theologian, Catholic mystic.”
John grunted. “A regular Swiss army knife among wackos.”
Teilhard had imagined that the goal of mankind was to cover the Earth with a new layer of mind, of consciousness, which he called a noosphere. With time the coherence of the noosphere — the organization of a kind of psychic energy — would grow, the “planetization” of mind would proceed, until at last a new plateau of integration would be reached.
“A singularity,” Tom said. “The noosphere would emerge through a singularity.”
“He didn’t use that language,” Rosa said. “But, yes, that’s the idea. So de Chardin spoke of humans becoming gods. And there have been thinkers who have imagined a different sort of transcendence for mankind, a transcendence through an escape to the stars.”
She told us about a Russian tradition of thinking, dating back to a nineteenth-century thinker called Nikolai Fedorov. He had drawn on Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a “Cosmism,” which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe. Space travel was thus a necessary evolutionary step en route to our merging with the cosmos.
Fedorov’s thinking had fed into the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “father of astronautics.” Tsiolkovsky had tried to turn Fedorov’s cosmic theology into the precepts of an engineering program: all the way to godhood with hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors. These strange, deep ideas had actually translated themselves into imperatives for the real-world Soviet space program. To Americans space was a frontier, a place you went to explore, to colonize; to the Russians, space was a place you went to grow, as a spirit and a species.
Shelley started to argue with Rosa about some of the details.
Tom got out of his chair, poured himself a fresh glass of water from the dispenser at the back of the room, and came to stand by me.
I asked him, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Tsiolkovsky knew his thermodynamics better than Teilhard.”
“Yes. But maybe Teilhard was ahead of his time, too. He might have had some intuition of modern ideas of network theory, of complexity. Just as maybe all we have is intuitions of the kind of truths Alia knows — or will know…”
There was something compelling in all these old visions, I thought, these strange hybrids of theology and futurology and astronautics, of Christ and Marx and Darwin. Maybe they were products of their time, the struggles of thinkers born in an age dominated by religious thinking to cope with the great empirical shock of evolutionary theory, and the dreadful lesson of the geologists and astrophysicists that the universe was vast and indifferently old.
And maybe, just maybe, Rosa was right, that in all this muddled thinking done in the past we had discerned, dimly, the patterns of the future. Alia’s Transcendence sounded like nothing so much as a mixture of Teilhard’s noosphere and Tsiolkovsky’s Homo cosmicus, mankind projected into the stars, laced with a touch of Schelling’s evolving deity. “After all, if you aren’t aiming up, you’re heading down, for extinction. And if you do aim up, what limit is there but the sky itself — what limit but infinity?”
“Dad?” Tom sounded vaguely concerned.
I hadn’t realized I had said some of that out loud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He shrugged, turned away, and sat down. He was under control, his emotions unreadable. But I had drifted away from him. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him again.
John was interrogating Rosa. “All this antique fluff doesn’t matter a damn,” he said. “Let’s cut to the chase. We’re talking about what an advanced culture, an advanced superhuman mind, might want. What does this Transcendence want with Michael?”
Rosa said, “I believe that’s where Alia’s second key word comes in. Redemption. ”
John said, “Another oppressive old Christian concept.”
“It’s an old idea, certainly,” Rosa said. “But oppressive? That depends on the theologian you follow.”
In Christian theology mankind had become distanced from God by our primordial sin, the sin of Adam. “And so we need redemption,” Rosa said. “The goal of which is atonement — which means, literally, to make as one, to unite us once more with God. And that, some would say, was the purpose of the life of Jesus Christ.”