The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, November 12 2024
Professor Giulio Maspero (Professor of Systematic Theology and Dean of the Faculty of Theology, PUSC, Rome), as a member of the ROR Group’s Executive Board, held a seminar on November 12th 2024 at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge entitled ‘Gödel and the Cappadocians: Apophaticism and Incompleteness’. Bringing his experience as a theoretical physicist into dialogue with his background as a dogmatic theologian and scholar of the Fathers, Maspero asked whether it is possible to hypothesise a convergence between the Cappadocian Fathers and Gödel, the father of two theorems on incompleteness.
The starting point for Maspero is the difference between the epistemology of the early Christian thinkers and Greek metaphysical thought, a difference based on an infinite gap between God and the World. This approach breaks the identification between being and the intelligible dimension and opens up to negative theology, the only true path to progress in the knowledge of God. In this framework, central is the reflection on the relationship between eternity and time: how can one relate the eternal Father to the Son in time? In other words, is the Son in time or not? Eunomius, in the fourth century A.D., resolved the aporia by arguing that the Son was not eternal but began to be Son in time. This impasse led to a turning point in Cappadocian thought: apophaticism. We cannot claim to control what God does, but we can contemplate it and be surprised by the magnificent excess that is manifested in the real. In this renewed metaphysical vision, this excess can be thought of a posteriori and not a priori: it is possible to think of the ‘infinite gap’ between God and the world but not to overcome it, not to enclose it in finite concepts. The cognitive instrument par excellence in this sphere is analogy, conceived not in the Aristotelian sense as an a priori means of knowledge, but as a non-univocal relational method, which proceeds by knowing what is identical and what is different in God and the world or in God and man.
This new form of analogy also refers back to a gnoseological approach that is not semantic but syntactic, in which it detects the relationship between the elements of a composition with respect to their relative functions. With this open and relational lens, the theologian can look at the reality of God, in relation to Creation, while respecting the infinite gap mentioned above.
Even logical-mathematical systems must be ‘open’ in order to function. It is precisely at this level that Maspero identifies the point of convergence between apophaticism and the idea of incompleteness underlying Gödel’s theorems. From Galileo to Laplace and Poincaré, the success achieved by the sciences led their protagonists to consider them as a ‘yardstick’ for understanding everything, and with this essentially to a rejection of metaphysics.
Science and theology work with different methods but are converging on the idea of excess, on the idea that the coherence of an intellectual description can only be invoked when its representation remains relationally open.
