Sum Ergo Sum
On Descartes, the Mathematical Universe, and Gnosticism redux.
Nearly four hundred years ago, René Descartes wrote cogito ergo sum and quietly rewired the entire Western understanding of what it means to be human.
Long before simulation theory or the holographic universe, Descartes distilled being into the only thing he considered reliable: his own thoughts.
The Western Church went along with it for the most part, initiating its long, inexorable slide into full-blown Gnosticism. Even as Copernicus and Galileo were rejected for decades, Descartes, while he faced backlash, wasn’t subjected to the indignities and injustices his contemporaries experienced. The religious establishment was apparently more interested in policing the cosmos than examining its own inner life, and so Cartesianism quietly embedded itself into mainstream Western Christian thought, where it remains.
The Cartesian Inheritance
We absorbed Descartes almost without noticing. Interpreters had been misreading Paul as a dualist (thanks to a flattened understanding of passages like “away from the body and at home with the Lord” and “what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit”) for centuries before Cartesian metaphysics blessed the misreading as doctrine. Cogito ergo sum mapped so cleanly onto the Platonic tendencies embedded in the Augustinian worldview that no one noticed it violated Aristotle’s hylomorphism and, consequently, the Thomist project that ostensibly grounds all of Western theo-anthropology.
When my father was dying of glioblastoma, the hospice service gave me a copy of Gone From My Sight, by Barbara Karnes. Colloquially known as the “little blue book” of hospice, this book’s impact is hard to overstate. I read it quickly. It’s only a few pages long. And when I got to the end, I found myself reeling in disbelief at the utter callousness of the text’s regard for the human body.
...The physical body is empty. The owner is no longer in need of a heavy, nonfunctioning vehicle. They have entered a new city, a new life.
I remember my stomach turning as I read these words. It’s revolting now as I recall the moment. The hands that held me, the face I kissed, the voice and laughter and twinkling eyes—I am supposed to write his body off as ultimately disposable?
And yet, the default posture of Western Christianity, regardless of our supposed credal commitments, is the Gnostic fundamental: Soul good. Body bad.
I often think of my son Titus’s perfect little body. Lying in a grave. Disposed of and gone, never to return, in Karnes’s view. If that is the case, then the injustice of death is inconceivable and insurmountable, and indeed, we are utterly lost and without hope. If the resurrection is a lie, we are of all people most miserable.
The Same Road
If Descartes is intertwined with Western Christian thought, he is inextricable from Western secular thought. Everything written in the past four hundred years—from psychology to physics to philosophy—is either commentary or rebuttal to his central idea. For example, Donald Hoffman argues the cogito is an unreliable instrument to begin with: evolution built us for fitness, not truth. Max Tegmark goes further and dissolves the subject entirely. Not “I think therefore I am” but the equation instantiates. His Mathematical Universe Hypothesis says reality is not merely described by mathematics; reality is mathematics. Matter does not ultimately exist. Only structure. Pure abstract pattern.
And so Platonism finds its end. The Ideal doesn’t exist because it can’t. There’s only the pattern, the source, the ultimate and irrevocable merging of all things. It’s the same destination the Cartesian church has been walking toward the whole time. Start with thought as the ground of being, follow the road without interruption, and you end where the thinker disappears into the math. The soul that was too good for the body is too abstract for existence at all.
In other words, when the Cartesian dog catches the existential car, it turns out there was never a car and, in fact, there was never a dog either. There is only the false demiurgic world and the real world, which is so real you can’t actually experience it. It’s exactly the thing the Church has always rightly named as Gnosis and rejected.
The Moral Terminus
I hope that you’re getting very uncomfortable now. Because you should be feeling something at the back of your neck as you consider the implications of a universe that is pure abstraction. The problem with a mathematical structure is that it does not—cannot—suffer, or rejoice, or regret, or love, or fear. It cannot...anything. It’s pure impassibility. The equation has no valence. Nothing is “bad” or “wrong.” Just different.
But suffering does not announce itself as different. It announces itself as wrong. Grief announces itself as loss. Every lament is a moral claim, this should not be, and the mathematical universe voids that claim retroactively. If the person you lost was a structure that temporarily instantiated, the structure persists abstractly. Nothing was lost. Nothing is ever lost. There is only the cold, democratic tyranny of patterns. An unending parade of meaningless states, ad infinitum...
Camus named the terminus honestly: the only serious philosophical question is “Why not suicide?” Beckett staged it. Waiting for Godot, where Godot is conceptualized but never materializes. Vladimir and Estragon, so frustrated by the endless “almost” of Godot’s arrival, decide suicide might be preferable to interminable waiting. Camus’s own answer, to imagine Sisyphus happy, is heroic but insufficient. Willing yourself into meaning by sheer defiance is a posture, not a ground. Plato’s Ideal, Tegmark’s math, and Descartes’s cogito have no category for Camus’s defiance. In the end, there is nothing to defy and no one to do the defying.
In the film version of Jonathan Ames’s You Were Never Really Here, the main character, Joe, has a violent suicide fantasy, a waking dream, as he waits for Nina, the girl he was hired to rescue, who has just murdered her abuser, to join him for dinner. She snaps him back to reality with the words “It’s a beautiful day.”
But as a viewer, you’re not sure and can never be sure which is reality and which is the dream. It’s cogito once again taken to its logical conclusion. It’s no wonder that so many artworks, whether it’s Ames or Camus or Beckett, end an examination of the Cartesian frame by contemplating suicide. “I think therefore I am” ultimately elevates “I think” to the point where “I am” is obliterated.
Secular philosophy and the dualistic Western Church drive separate roads only to meet at the same dead end: a person who was never really there.
Sum Ergo Sum
God didn’t say “I think.” God said “I AM.”
Not cogito ergo sum but sum ergo sum. A tautology that also happens to be the oldest name for God. The name God gives Godself.
God’s self-disclosure is stubbornly uncerebral. The warm glow of the philosopher’s study is replaced by a burning bush in a wasteland somewhere in Midian. Not a chin-rubbing intellectual. A runaway prince of Egypt, a murderer turned shepherd in exile, a man, standing barefoot in the dust staring slack-jawed at some flaming vegetation.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I AM THAT I AM.
And the I AM of Genesis isn’t distant. I AM walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. I AM spares Cain after the world’s first murder. I AM calls Abram into the desert. I AM wrestles with Jacob at Peniel. I AM gives Moses a name he can call on.
Not an equation. Not a concept. A name.
Job and the Whirlwind
In a story set centuries before the burning bush, a man named Job suffered so completely that his name became synonymous with misery. And, contrary to the popular myth about “the patience of Job,” he didn’t suffer in silence.
Job spends roughly 37 chapters discussing his plight. With his wife. With his three stupid friends and an unhelpful interloper. Finally with God directly.
Yes. Directly.
Job spends the entire eponymous book dissecting the experience of suffering. Looking at it from every angle and building the case Job will ultimately bring before (and against) God. The central literary conceit of Job is that suffering is a legitimate complaint addressed to someone. And not in the “can I speak to the cosmic manager?” sense. In the sense that there is a sensible and conscious and addressable intelligence at the heart of the universe.
“Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind.”
A merely mathematical universe doesn’t have a God that answers from a whirlwind the way God does in Job’s story. Whirlwinds, it can do. The voice within? Not so much.
God shows up for Job. Not to explain the suffering, not to justify the machinery of the universe, but to be present to it. The whirlwind speech is not an answer; it is a presence. God does not solve Job. God inhabits the same wild, uncontrollable cosmos alongside him and refuses to leave.
An idea can’t do that. A concept dissolves in the face of immeasurable suffering. An equation doesn’t sit with you in the dark.
The Word Became Flesh
Christianity’s most distinctive and scandalous claim is the incarnation. God becoming human presupposes something about humanity and about God. And it starts with Genesis 1:27 and 2:7. The creation of humankind. In Genesis 1:27, the creation account is explicit that God makes humanity, male and female, in God’s own image. In 2:7, the second creation story says God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.”
Both of these accounts make it clear that humanity is compatible with God in a particular way the rest of the creation is not.
Human beings are unique within the cosmos for their ability to understand themselves in relation to the Creator. To desire God and be desired by God. Humanity is the only being in the universe that is aware of its own mortality. And, consequently, the vast majority of humanity is not okay with that.
The incarnation is only possible because of the preexisting compatibility God baked into the creation of humankind. In other words, before we needed saving, God had already embedded in the cosmos the means of our salvation. Perhaps this is in part what the New Testament writers mean when they claim Jesus is the lamb destined before the foundation of the world.
The prologue to John’s gospel is among the most evocative and beautiful examples of Christian literary achievement. In it, John describes the incarnation in the most loftily poetic and simultaneously vulgar terms available to him. The Logos, a word used to describe the epitome of truth and beauty, becomes sarx. Flesh. Meat.
The Incarnation of the Word of God is a rejection of all dualism, whether it’s Platonic or Cartesian or math. Embodiment is not incidental to existence; it is the mode. God affirms the goodness of embodied life by living one.
At the end of John’s poem, John rhapsodizes on the person Jesus is: he lived among us … full of grace and truth. Not full of information. Not as a perfectly balanced equation or a perfectly formed thought. But as the richest expression of grace. Truth with a face and a voice.
The Trap on the Other Side
The affirmation I just made has its own failure mode: not the dualism I have been criticizing, but the overcorrection against it, namely, Deism. If being is self-grounded as a moral and cosmic good, it’s tempting to imagine that life is its own foundation. That the spark of existence, once lit, sustains its own flame and only has to fight off whatever would put it out. Make that move and you have simply relocated the Cartesian pride.
The defining attribute of the cosmos is entropy. And just about everything in the history of science and philosophy is dedicated to undoing it. And the instinct is correct. Entropy is an enemy; it’s not the way things are supposed to be.
The sticking point is where we locate the solution to the problem of entropy. Gnosticism solves the problem by ignoring it. Let the physical world dissolve itself. It was never the point anyway. Deism proposes that, like any good timepiece made by a competent watchmaker, the universe can be serviced out of entropy. Neither of these approaches makes any allowance for a Creator who remains intimately involved with the creation. A Creator who is actively working to undo entropy at its root.
A creation that is truly alive is alive in the bosom of its Creator. It is held, every instant, contingently, by Another, and a life held like that has no room for entropy at all. The relentless drift toward disassembly is not the nature of the universe. The phthora (corruption) is an intruder, not the telos.
Paul gives the precise diagnosis. “Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin.” The reason the cosmos feels broken is because it is. It has been corrupted by sin and infected with death. Creation groans, Paul continues, awaiting its own redemption from the chaos that threatens every moment. Not because being made means being doomed, but because sin has broken things and they must be put right. Decay isn’t meant to be the default posture; and death isn’t a natural process, it’s an enemy destined for destruction.
The contrast between the biblical witness and our contemporary assumption is stark, and shows plainly how paltry dualism is at its core. If decay is constitutive of life, if dying is simply the cost of being alive, then redemption has nothing to redeem, and your choices are: Accept the dark, or engineer your way out of it. The tragic shrug or the technological upgrade. Surrender two ways.
New Creation Is Not an Upgrade
Humanity has accomplished amazing things throughout its history. The technological innovations of the past five decades dwarf anything our forebears could have imagined. Diseases are eradicated, food is plentiful, and human beings have even broken the confines of the terrestrial ball to play golf on the moon. Today, the promise of artificial intelligence is touted as a revolution that will transform medicine, science, work—nearly every aspect of life.
We’re tempted to assume that progress will only continue. That humanity will march on until we transcend our limits, shed the fragile body, and find true meaning in an existence freed from flesh. As is always the case, the temptation and the reality are worlds apart. And a cursory survey of how unevenly the benefits of technology are distributed throughout the world should give us pause. Food is plentiful, but not everywhere. Medicine is miraculous, for those who can afford it.
Silicon Valley promises us the ultimate salvation: self-improvement at scale. But it has yet to deliver. And as a species we’re at risk of building, as Pope Leo puts it, a new Tower of Babel.
As amazing as our collective technological achievements are, we should never mistake them for our ultimate hope.
The hope was never that we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of decay by our own ingenuity or our own stubborn vitality. It is that Jesus liberates us from sin and death. He returns creation to the bosom of its Creator and undoes the exigency of an existence marked by entropy. In him all things hold together. New creation is not the body deprecated and replaced by a better model, but the body raised—the same embodied, particular, breakable life, healed and then held past all breaking.