Sharp writers make fine distinctions and sharp readers find them. In a collection of his work entitled What Are People For? (1990), the Kentucky novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry, long a steward of both the land and traditional thought, opens his essay “God and Country” with this careful sentence: The subject of Christianity and ecology is endlessly, perhaps infinitely, fascinating. At a first quick reading we are apt to think that endlessly and infinitely are just synonyms, the latter simply duplicating the former to intensify the idea of always. But on a closer look, infinitely has been parenthesized and itself modified by perhaps, and so the writer has taken some trouble to isolate the idea of infinity. Good readers will ask why. Another thought has suggested itself to Berry. What subtle distinction did this intelligent writer wish to make between endlessly and infinitely?
When we’re reading or writing, it’s not enough to have a good dictionary at hand; we should also have in reach a respectable dictionary of synonyms, one that doesn’t just list words of generically similar meaning, but the kind which collects and explains the differences of words otherwise very close in signification. Works like The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms and the older Crabb’s English Synonyms, among a number of others, will build an entry of like words and then discriminate the shades of difference between them according to exact definition and context. Indeed, an older edition of the Merriam-Webster says just that on its title page: A Dictionary of Discriminated Synonyms with Antonyms and Analogies and Contrasted Words. That’s the gold we’re looking for.
So if we turn to Merriam-Webster and find the entry which includes the adjective endless (Berry is using the adverbial form), we learn that it properly refers “not only to things which continue in time, but also in extent,” and that in so referring, it “implies no known or apparent or determinable end.” So when Berry says that the subject of Christianity and ecology is endlessly fascinating, he means that thinking about the two constituents of the subject, one spiritual and the other natural, might very well go on indefinitely. Like an endless conveyor belt (the image is Merriam-Webster’s), the subject could continue—but it could also come to an end. This indefiniteness is what we commonly sense in the word endless.
The adjective infinite, however, makes a subtle addition to this enduring fascination. Unlike what is endless, what is infinite is by definition immeasurable, and implies “an incapacity for being estimated in extent, duration, or any conceivable respect.” Unlike an endless conveyor belt, which we could stop and thereby see the temporal extent of, the fascination present in considering together Christian spirituality and ecological science could very well also be called infinite, says Berry, because where they might part ways cannot even be imagined, so intrinsically, so in their very natures are they part of each other. It is true that both infinite and endless overlap in referring to the lack of a boundary, but endless refers to something continuing indefinitely in time, while what is infinite is not in time at all. God is infinite, not endless, because there is no temporal extent to what is absolute. The series of natural numbers is infinite, because the series ends nowhere, and nowhere cannot be measured.
The parenthetical idea, then, that suggested itself to Berry, the phrase he set off in commas, is the distinction between indefinite duration and immeasurable extent. The subject of Christianity and its relation to ecology will likely always hold our attention, he maintains; but if we believe that we could at some point exhaust the reach of a subject so interrelatedly rich in implication, we will perhaps be mistaken. An endless fascination can theoretically come to an end; an infinite fascination cannot. An intelligent distinction finely made by a thoughtful writer.
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