Math is the answer to more than one question

Eventually, one arrives at the infinity that contains all other infinities. What surpasses all, Cantor wrote to a friend, was “the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.”

When I was a small child, I did not think about God so much as I felt him or her or them, however you care to frame it. Not infrequently, and especially when I was in the woods, I had a sense of there being an accompanying presence, of there being, that is, something immaterial behind everything. I know now but I didn’t then that this feeling is sufficiently common that it has a name: immanence. I never talked about it with anyone; I simply assumed that everyone felt the way that I did.

Immanence is a second cousin once removed to pantheism, of course, the notion that God is in everything, and closer to the Greeks than to Christian monotheism. Perhaps not surprisingly,

I was separated from this notion in Sunday school. There I was taught that God inhabited a book and the form of a singular man. It isn’t so much that I resisted these premises as that they didn’t stir anything within me. I didn’t connect them to the feelings that I had had alone in the woods. I gave up.

I am grateful to have a sense of mystery returned to me by mathematics. I am pleased to have been given, from an unexpected source, a reason both humbling and human to feel that there is more to life than I might believe there to be. And even if created by men and women, mathematics, as I read somewhere, is the longest continuous human thought, a circumstance that is itself worth regarding with awe. – NYT

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