← Paper A1: Naming the Unnameable
Adam A2: Into the Drawer
Well, they did it. They went out and did it.
Did the dictionary definitions match? He could not say they didn’t. Was the mathematics correct? He could not say it wasn’t. He had sat down with the pencil sharpened and risen an hour later without a single mark to make against the mathematics — which had happened to him perhaps twice before in a long life of reading, and both times he had remembered the name on the paper for thirty years.
But it was not the paper he had been waiting for. There was no Gödel in it. No assault on the theorem, no clever way around it, not even the honest white flag he had half-wanted to see them raise. They had not gone at the foundation from inside the system at all. They had done something quieter, and — he could see it now — cleverer: they had set the names down beside the structures and let a man notice, on his own, that they fell on the same places. Naming. Concordance. And there, he saw, was his out.
Because a concordance is not a proof. Two columns can agree the whole way down and still be only two columns. They had proven nothing; they were circling the thing and calling the circle an argument. This paper was as incomplete as the last — but incomplete in a new direction. The first one had walked him to the water and admitted, to its credit, that it stopped there. This one wanted to carry him across without mentioning that they had left the ground. They wanted him to believe the Logos was a Person. And that he would not do. I can’t, he thought, setting the pencil down. I simply can’t.
The cogito was the cheap part. Not dishonest — he made himself be exact about it, because the distance between the two words was the whole matter — not dishonest, but cheap. They had taken I think, therefore I am, the one thing a man cannot doubt, and used it as a scaling datum, a fixed quantity to set everything else against. The gears turned; he granted that the gears turned. But it was a bridge a man had to cross on his own feet, and he had stood at that exact bank once before and declined, and he was not going to be walked over it now by a typed page with no return address. They had nowhere shown him that their personality meant anything. It was not what psychology meant by the word. It was not what anyone he respected meant by it. Why, he asked the quiet of the study, should he take instruction from a pair of cranks with obviously far too much time on their hands?
And yet.
The symmetry was there, and he had to admit it; he hated to and he did. The definitions lined up. The distinctions among the modes of the one God — the ground, the speaking Word, the indwelling life — answered, one to one, to distinctions the mathematics had been forced into on its own terms, with no theology anywhere in the room when it happened. That was not nothing. He gave them that. He had never once failed to give a true thing its due; it was the only loyalty he had never broken.
But — and it was the largest but of his entire long career of qualifying things — is Φ a person?
No. Of course not.
Truth is a thing one aims at. An ideal, standing at the far end of every honest sentence, drawing the work toward it and never once turning to look back. You do not pray to a limit. You do not get a letter from an asymptote. Φ was the most beautiful object he knew of, and it was an object, and a man who had spent sixty years refusing to mistake the elegant for the true was not about to begin, at eighty-three, on the word of a stranger.
There was one place he had got to bear down, and he had not expected it to be the place: section six, the procession of the Spirit. His old country — the ground he had been drilled on years before anyone showed him a Hamiltonian — and for one paragraph the old loyalty stirred. They had generated the Spirit from the inner product and the nuclear space together, both required, remove either and the topology does not arise; and then, in as many words, they had announced that the mathematics settled the old quarrel, and settled it for the Latins — Filioque, the Son a true co-principle, the West vindicated at last by a Sobolev norm. For half a second the Jesuit in him sat up to be pleased.
Then the physicist looked at the two inputs and saw they were not the same kind of thing. The inner product is the source — the norms are built out of it, and without it there is no norm to take. The nuclear space is merely the domain those norms are taken over: that through which, not that from which. Source and medium; a quo and per quem; and on their own construction the Son sat plainly on the side of the medium. Which is not the Filioque at all. It is the Greek per Filium — “through the Son” — the very reading the Latins spent four centuries refusing. They had had the asymmetry sitting in their own equations and walked straight past it, because they had wanted the other answer: they had arrived at the conclusion their creed already held and called the arriving a derivation. He marked it — the one mark he made all afternoon — NO: per quem, not a quo; cf. their own construction, supra. They have derived the opposite of what they claim — and bore down hard enough to score the sheet beneath. It would not, by itself, bring the building down. But it told him what kind of building it was, and whose thumb had been on it; and a man who lets his creed lean on the scale at the one place you can check him has told you the worth of his hand everywhere you cannot. He had let his own side go to catch them at it, and there was a cold pleasure in it he did not look at too closely.
He was satisfied. The seam he had been hunting since the first envelope was found at last, and it ran precisely here — between the structure and the Person — and it would not bear weight, and that was the end of it. He stopped, a little to his own surprise, expecting any further mail. He squared the pages, slid them into the desk drawer, and pushed it shut. Then he set the study back in order — von Neumann up off the arm of the chair, the Gelfand–Vilenkin volumes returned to their high shelf — and went to put the kettle on.
The third paper came some months later, on a Thursday, while he was out on his weekly round of errands. He had very nearly forgotten the exercise — the sight of it on the mat stopped him in the doorway with the groceries still in his arms: the same typed address, no return, the same ordinary postage. Thicker than the last. He sighed.
He sighed because he had to admit, standing there in his coat, that he had never quite stopped thinking about the other two. They had come at him from two directions — the structure from the one side, the names from the other — and between them they had walked him right up to the water and then not let him take a drop. He had the disagreeable sense of a man being hemmed in: triangulated by a correspondent he could not see, each paper another bearing taken on him out of the dark. And here, now, was the third vector.
He let it sit on the kitchen counter two days. He took his meals at the far end of the table and did not look at it, which is its own kind of looking. On the third morning he gave up the pretense, picked it up, sighed once more — at the envelope, and a little at himself — and started down the hall to the study.