I’m going to swim out into deep waters in this post. Stand by with lifesavers.

Joseph Smith taught that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” Gnomic, and knowing the context doesn’t change that much. But he seems to mean that you can’t understand a reality without knowing its opposite. “The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.”

This sounds like advice for intellectual inquiry, but the revelations Joseph Smith received make the concept bigger than that.

It explains why there has to be suffering. Eve declares that without knowing suffering, one can’t know healing and the good. The Lord declares to Adam:

Thy children are conceived in sin,. . . and they taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good.

So the need for opposites is theodicy and the reason for mortal experience. But Lehi taught that it is also the base principle of reality. Without an opposite, nothing can exist:

For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.

No manhood without womanhood, no success without failure, no learning without ignorance, nothing deep without superficiality. This teaching gets down to the foundations.

One of the themes of this blog is the idea that eternity is not the endless succession of time like most Mormons think, but stepping outside time to integrate all time periods of one’s life into one ever-present whole. I came to the idea through wrestling with some problems related to identity, memory, and loss. But once I came to it I saw that it resonated with the scriptural data (see here, e.g.), dealt with the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will, reconciled libertarian free will with true certainty of God’s character, made promising make sense, and generally “fit.” I later discovered that the idea I had stumbled on was basically traditional Christian metaphysics.

Bruce Charleton has been wrestling with traditional Christian and Mormon metaphysics (a pair of his latest entries on that theme are here and here. I followed his wrestlings with considerable interest but without much illumination. That recently changed.

If Lehi is right–if Joseph Smith is right–does it not follow that time cannot exist without eternity? Similarly, that eternity–unchanging, perfect–cannot exist without its opposite in a world of time and change and imperfection? I think it does. Traditional Christian and Mormon metaphysics must both be true.

We are amphibious creatures, partly mortal, partly immortal, partly eternal, partly ever progressing, because we must be. It is the deepest law.