Gospel & Universe 🪐 The Priest’s Dilemma
The Golden Triangle
Les Anglais
Prior to entering the seminary, Jean-Luc spent four years in London — that brick counter-weight to the limestone city he called home. He made numerous journeys between London, Oxford and Cambridge, following the best professors and the most challenging courses. He was determined to deepen his grasp of the facts, some so hard and others so beautiful, that England had done so much to unearth.
Trust les anglais to come up with these, he thought to himself, as he delved into the writings of Roger and Francis Bacon, Newton, Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, Sir William Jones, James Hutton, John Stuart Mill, Hincks and Rawlinson, John Smith, Darwin, Francis Crick, etc.
Etcetera… At the end of four years, he wasn't so sure that France had invented the Modern world.
The English and the French had done so much to take the Medieval world to task — and with such playful intensity! Jean-Luc loved the riot of Rabelais and the controlled rebellion of Chaucer; he loved the refined contours of Michel de Montaigne and Thomas Browne — Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things — not to mention the mystical heights and depths of Milton and Pascal. He cherished all the chiseled beauties from La Fontaine to Baudelaire, from Shakespeare to Roethke. And yet he needed, if he wasn't to live in a fool's paradise, to understand more than poetry and literature. He needed to look squarely at the implications of things like evolution and DNA. He needed to confront the inconveniences of science — the ones that led from Copernicus and Newton to Lamarck and Darwin.
He needed to understand a vision of history that didn't go from alpha to omega, skipping the letters in between — pi, gamma, delta, and the unholy host of inconvenient symbols that didn’t fit into the Bible’s version of time and space.
A vision of history that wasn't polished into the tragic beauty of the Pietà.
🎚
During his years in England he tried to come to terms with what he called the double threat of England in the 1850s. He wrote these into his journal, which he called The Poetry of the Unknown.
Threat # 1
The first threat is of course the apple itself
SCIENCE
which slowly took shape in the forms of astronomy, the methodology of Francis Bacon,
Newton and the geology of James Hutton,
and which took definitive shape in 1859, in Darwin's Origin of Species,
with its Pandora's box of evolution.
What the Medieval world had kept covered was now fully re-born: the spirit of exploration,
come what may;
the spirit of Odysseus and Aristotle, insinuating itself into past layers of time
— the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic spirals of our DNA
the modern revolt of science now formulated in the movement from water to land,
from tail to hand.
Instead of myths about clay and blood, Darwin presented a single explanation
that came from a way of looking at the world,
a way that didn't change, and didn't rely on belief;
a perception that transcended the instrument of perception,
the human eyesight now magnified by glass, electron or spectrograph
from the depths of mitochondria to the spiral arm of our Milky Way,
the deep Unknown unveiling existence one way or another
by primates who still wonder at the stars.
Yet where, Jean-Luc wondered, was the soul in this intricate, ever-unfolding schemelessness of things? Where was even the first thing his fellow novices agreed upon: Creation?
Where was the finger that pulsed life into clay?
And without Alpha, what could Omega mean?
Threat # 2
The second threat is the almost simultaneous deciphering, by Hincks, Rawlinson, and Smith, of cuneiform. Jean-Luc called it l'écriture terrible.
Deciphered by the English in the mid 1850s, cuneiform revealed the first human writing on earth. It also revealed a specific story that predated the Bible by thousands of years. It was a story about an angry god, a man who was warned by a god, a deluge that destroyed all life on earth, an ark, a bird, a mountain, and a sacrifice. Cuneiform revealed legal codes and commandments, numbers — base 10 and base 60 — and phrases such as an eye for an eye. Mythic creatures such as the snake who steals life. Floods, jealous gods, legal codes, and fantastic happenings; these were nothing new. Cuneiform unveiled the sequence of civilizations out of which much of the Bible emerged. Yet of which the Bible says very little — and almost nothing complimentary.
🎚
Jean-Luc's worries about evolution and cuneiform subsided each time he got up from his desk and looked out the stain-glass window onto the green and purple flowers of the garden. He found refuge each time he kneeled down before his small altar, with its miniature painting of the Mother of God. Benedictus fructus ventris tui ...
Yet as he recited the ancient words he remembered that beneath them were other words. Words, scripts, layers. However deep the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, however powerful the visions of Dante and Fra Angelico, he couldn't ignore these other words.
What good was the Good News of the gospel if it ignored its roots in astronomy, geology, and history? How could it profess to be a gospel for all time if it ignored time itself? How can we know who we are if we refuse to know where we come from?
The Precambrian Crust
I know, and can't unknow, that beneath all the layers of human civilization lay the layers of geology and the vastness of outer space.
The layers that gave rise to the mountain ranges and the volcanos, and the cosmic spaces that formed the molten core and the shifting currents of the seas.
Beneath these lay the mathematics that keep the giant ellipses of the stars in place,
the gravitational constants of Sir Isaac Newton,
Fellow of the "Holy and Undivided Trinity" at Cambridge, England —
Cambrian, adj. — 1. of or pertaining to Wales — 2. of or pertaining to the earliest period of the Palaeozoic era — 3. of or pertaining to Cambridge University —
city of the universe, dedicated to the occult sciences of the microscope and microchip,
integral part of the Golden Triangle of universities
and one of the largest laboratories that specialize in the production
of intellectual heroin.
🎚
Next: Nineveh
Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs