Being and Number, Quality and Manifestation
Dear Readers, I apologize for the relative silence. Due to many responsibilities that have become nearly all consuming, I have not had much time for writing. That said, I will continue to write as I have time and space, and I want to assure you that this forum is by no means going silent. Ongoing meditation on various ideas compels me to engage in the struggle of articulating them in words. It is a call I cannot refuse, so with that in mind, know that reflections will appear here, however brief, as I have opportunity to express myself coherently!
In my younger years, math was my least favorite subject in school. I could grasp and apply basic mathematical concepts, but past a certain point, it devolved into a befuddling confusion of misunderstandings and obscurities.
Part of my struggle with mathematics was due to my natural inclinations. I was much more at home with a book of the poems of Emily Dickinson or the John Donne than I was with a manual of precalculus. Hungry as I was to perceive deeper layers of meaning, I simply couldn’t see the point of learning about inverse functions, derivatives, or irrational numbers. The pure abstraction of mathematics at once paralyzed and stultified me. There was no beauty or grace in such conceptual games, merely mental exhaustion.
Now, however, I have begun to perceive a deeper meaning to numbers that I once hungered for, and a new world has opened. For numbers are not pure abstractions, but rather symbols revealing the underlying patterns of reality.
Number and Being
Numbers are symbols of differentiation and manifestation. They are enumerations of different states of being and the relationships between them. Numbers, then, represent qualities of existence, and thus are more akin to qualitative archetypes than things or abstract mental concepts.
The Pythagoreans believed all was number, and this is both true and untrue. It is true in that Being manifests itself in ways that can be enumerated. It is untrue in that Being in itself is beyond all symbols that express it. With that in mind, let us briefly examine the qualitative symbolism of various numbers.
One is the totality of being—the all, the unmanifest. It is, in the terms of quantum physics, the field of all possibilities from which the discrete quanta of reality emerge and into which they re-merge. In traditional metaphysics, one is the symbol of unity undifferentiation, of God, the source of all that is and in whom we live and move and have our being, God who is simplicity itself without form or part. “A rice whose center is everywhere and who circumference is nowhere,” as the ancients said. And yet the One is unmanifest, unable to be known and encountered. For in an undifferentiated unity there is no one else to know or be known.
The Indian sage and teacher of nonduality, Sankara taught that Brahman is “without name and form,” and is ultimately unknowable. The 14th century Augustininan and mystic, John Von Ruysbroeck, maintained that "God is immeasurable and incomprehensible, unattainable and unfathomable.” The great Thomas Aquinas, when speaking of the knowledge of God, states that ultimately a finite intellect can never know God in himself:
But some come to knowledge of God by the incomprehensibility of the truth. For every truth which our intellect can contain is finite – for, as Augustine says, everything known is within the limits of the knower’s comprehension. Thus it must be that the first and highest truth, which is above every intellect, would be incomprehensible and without limits: that is, God.
So in Psalm 8 it says, your magnificence is lifted up above the heavens, that is, above every created intellect, angelic or human. And this is because, as the Apostle says, he dwells in inaccessible light (1 Tim 5:16). Isaiah says, I saw the Lord setting upon a thrown, high and lifted up. By lifted up he means, above all knowing of created intellects.
And John reminds us of this incomprehensibility when he says, No one has ever seen God.
-From the commentary on the prologue to John’s Gospel
Every Christian, too, who professes the Creed acknowledges the reality of the law of One, of Unity: Credo in Unum Deum, “I believe in One God.”
But God has not remained unmanifest, but has rather revealed himself. The One unfolded into Two and duality and multiplicity emerged. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Above and below, God and creation, light and darkness, earth and heaven, male and female. With this duality came relationship and with relationship brought the possibility of love. For the separation of duality brings with it a magnetic longing to return to unity again—a unity of two that become one again in love.
This separation and reunion produces a ternary, a Third. For this new state of reunion in love is distinct from the original state of unicity, for it is neither Unity nor Duality alone—it is a third state of being. This third state of being consists of lover, beloved, and the love that binds them in a unified state of consciousness and essence or being. This is the law of Three, the law of one and two united in a third. It is the law of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is the law of love, the law of the reconciliation of duality in a new unity.
Four is the number of fruitfulness and creativity, of Self Expression. For the Ternary is always fruitful, it unfolds still further in a creative impulse, in an every growing fractal of ongoing differentiation and reunion. Four then, is, in this sense the number of creativity, of loving unity desiring to express and expand itself in an exuberant overflow of love.
In Rublev’s Trinity, three Angelic beings sit around the table, with a shared cup of loving communion between them. The viewer of the icon stands in the place of the Fourth seat—the loving offspring of creative Trinitarian love.
Five is the number of the Human Being, the number of the world of Creation becoming conscious of itself. For the Human is the middle space between unconscious matter and the pure awareness of absolute Spirit. Five is also the number of the personality, of conscious relationship between beings and of the will expressing itself through the rose window of the soul. It is the number of the world streaming through the five senses and impressing on the soul the full spectrum of emotion from joy to sorrow.
To Be Continued
In part two we will explore the rest of the decad and its potential qualitative significance, as well as the relationship between number and form.