According to Aristotle, the nature of investigation and the proofs we assert depend upon the object. That is, we do not look for mathematical demonstration when the object of our study is not a mathematical object. It is even a reduction to dissolve a simple inanimate thing, like a quartz crystal, into a mathematical model, as useful as that reduction may be for certain practical purposes. That is because of the irreducible particularity of created being – that a crystal is not any crystal, but this one, both like all others and unlike, a unique manifestation of the crystalline essence. If the particularity or thisness of an inanimate object escapes us, then all the more must the particularity of personal being transcend any generalizing analysis. We are, as Hans Urs von Balthasar points out in The Truth of the World, far more than objects about whom true statements may be made. We are ourselves the receivers and the proclaimers of truth; and in no two persons is the same truth made manifest in the same way. Just as a moment of truth-receiving or truth-telling is unique and unrepeatable, since never again will a truth be shown in the world in quite the same way, so too the persons, the truth-bearers, are unique and irreplaceable. There is simply no way a general statement can capture the fullness of the moment when John, a student of mine, comes to the awareness that goodness is independent of opinion, even his own opinion; when he gathers into his own subjective being, in his intensely personal way, a truth whose roots extend deep into the mystery of being itself.
When I consider how my mind was spent, when I was young and full of foolish pride, on proving how all things were filled with numbers, the philosophical naivete of it all is now for me a most acute embarrassment. Mathematics, and the sciences that employ mathematical tools, bring us to a fine field of truth, and we should be grateful for that truth. Without it we could not live in the comfort that we have wrung from our domination of the natural world. We would be bound in our travels to the legs of horses, or the winds at sea. We could not fly. And yet – to quote that young philosopher Francis Marion Tarwater in Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Buzzards can fly.” A physicist can tell me how a winged object can stay in the air. But he cannot, insofar as he is a physicist alone or even a biologist alone and not also a man like all other men, tell me about the beauty or the nobility of the buzzard, much less about the beauty or nobility of Francis Marion Tarwater.
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