Arjun had written three books on divine certainty as a theological foundation. The argument, across all three, was this: God's certainty is the ground of all certainty. Our capacity for knowledge depends structurally on a knowing that is itself without doubt. What we call doubt is finite participation in an infinite questioning that is always already answered at the level of the divine. His third book had won a prize. He taught two seminars. He was well.
Six months ago, in September, on a Wednesday, he had been preparing his lecture notes and the thought arrived that he had been wrong about the direction of the argument.
Not wrong that God was. Wrong about which way the certainty ran.
He had argued that God's certainty grounded our uncertainty, that we doubted because we were finite, and that what we were doubting toward was an infinite knowing that held us. What if it was the reverse? What if God's uncertainty was what made our uncertainty possible, not a deficiency we shared with God, but a gift, something built into the structure of things because uncertainty was, for God, not a flaw but a form of being present to what is not yet finished?
He had sat with this for six months. He had not changed his syllabus. He had not told his colleagues. He had been re-reading everything he'd written, looking for where the argument could be saved, and finding instead that the argument did not need to be saved so much as reversed, turned inside out, the way you turn a glove.
He was seventy-one. He was not sure he had time to reverse it properly. The books were published. The prize was awarded. There were students who had built their own work on the foundation he had laid.
He was, he discovered, not as bothered by this as he expected to be. The foundation was not wrong. It was just smaller than he had thought. What it rested on was also a foundation, and that one went further down, and he did not know yet where it ended, or whether it ended, and this turned out to be interesting rather than frightening.
He opened his laptop. The lecture notes were where he'd left them. He made a small mark in the margin of the third paragraph, which is where the argument began, and then he sat back and looked at it for a while.