Gospel & Universe 🎲 Almost Existential

Poor, Bare, Forked

Unaccommodated Man - Lear - Outing the Brief Candle - Uncertainties

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Unaccommodated Man

We may feel that we understand the world around us. We may even feel that we have control over our lives. Yet however much we need to believe these things, however much they may even be necessary to our survival — giving us meaning and the will to go on — I fear that this sense of understanding and control is at best a necessary illusion. Regardless of what we feel or think, this sense of understanding will toward the end of our lives be erased by physics and chemistry — that is, by things such as blood pressure and hormones, neurological degeneration and cellular decay.

Our sense of our own importance has also over the last 400 years been erased by an understanding of the stars. The more we chart the scope and composition of the universe, the more we find ourselves to be fragile, tiny earthlings who live for a micro-second in the cosmic day. Even within our short span of life this truth becomes evident to everyone. Out grandparents sink into senility, and then our parents, and then we can't quite recall our phone number. Unless we die suddenly in our sleep, or get hit by a bus because we thought the light was green when it was really red, we'll become less and less to ourselves. At ninety-five, we'll be lucky if we can hold a twenty-second conversation with a mosquito. There are of course exceptions to this scenario — people who retain their cognitive abilities past 100 — but these are rare exceptions.

While we hope that the glow of candles will light our way to dusty death, it's more likely that cancer cells and gravity will lower us, smoothly or shaking, to our final rest.

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Lear

The grown man becomes a baby,

the King a pauper,

the athlete a paraplegic.

We live in the glory, and at the mercy, of chemistry and physics.

Sooner or later, King Lear will rage on the barren heath,

will beg for scraps in the waste land,

and will be forced by life itself to tell trembling Edgar:

Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor,

bare, forked animal as thou art.

And yet we can’t stop ourselves from dreaming

that we understand,

that we grasp what's going on,

and that we control the storm, 

standing tall on our barren heaths. 

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Outing the Brief Candle

In many ways, the Christian Medieval view of the universe gave us an escape from all that lack of control. It assured us that there's a Plan even though we can't see it. Or, as Alexander Pope put it, "All Nature is but art unknown to thee / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see" (Essay on Man, 1734). In the religious and the non-religious, the idea still survives in the phrase, It was meant to be.

The Christians didn't of course come up with the idea that the universe has a meaning, but they put such a fine point on this meaning that the previous polytheistic systems seemed chaotic in comparison. The Christians capitalized Meaning, hallowed It in a single Book (The Bible), and argued that It had been incarnated in a single living Person (the Son of God), who was an exemplar for all of humanity.

By comparison, the cosmic meaning of the Classical gods was like the meaning of thunder. Meaning, such as it was, was the will of some far-off god who we couldn't know intimately and who generally didn't care whether we lived or died. This thundering god, whoever he was, wasn't about to share his secrets, or inscribe the ultimate Meaning of life in a single volume. Nor was he much of an antidote to our excruciating awareness of our fallible nature and our limited understanding. Instead, he engendered the type of despair Gloucester speaks of in King Lear when he says that We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys; they kill us for their sport.

Shakespeare stands at the end of the Medieval world and at the start of the Modern. Three centuries before Jean-Paul Sartre, he articulates the predicament of doubt and meaninglessness in a poetry so profound that it's hard to fathom he was also a poet of fancy and light. In a single word — perchance — Hamlet questions the inevitability of the afterlife:

                                               To die, to sleep-
To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1)

Just as Hamlet's grand perhaps anticipates the Modern Age's doubt about the afterlife, so Macbeth's metaphors of candle and stage anticipate the angst and despair of twentieth-century existentialism. Macbeth's soliloquy, spoken just after the death of his wife, is perhaps the grimmest expression of nihilism in the English language: 

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.                      (5.5)

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Uncertainties

During and after Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564-1616), belief systems were deeply affected by scientific discoveries. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, astronomy had already shown that we're not at the centre of the solar system, let alone the universe. Even though Copernicus had published his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, this was still a very hot topic in the 17th century: Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 and Galileo didn’t publish his highly contentious Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems until 1632. In the 18th and 19th centuries, geology proved that the earth was older than is chronicled in the Bible. Further discoveries in physics, medicine, transportation, ecology, etc. at once cemented and complicated the scientific explanation of who and what we are. 

Natural science wasn’t just putting into doubt, but also contradicting the notion that we're the special creation of a just, loving God. Following in the wake of Darwin, the various branches of biology and social science suggested that we're programmed by the probabilities and contingencies of things such as DNA, geography, history, language, and culture. Whatever sense intellectuals had that God was in control and that He had a clear Plan for humanity was slipping fast. While great advances were made in terms of democracy and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries — anesthesia, vaccines, telecommunications, etc. — science was also used to advance one of the oldest preoccupations of civilization, a preoccupation that started in the city states of Mesopotamia: WAR.

At the end of the First World War, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote a poem called "The Second Coming," which begins, Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. He adds, Surely the Second Coming is at hand. Less than 30 years later, fifty million people died in the Second World War. This was followed by a Cold War in which Russia and the U.S. could have destroyed (and could still destroy) all human life on Earth. While the old religious notion of an Apocalypse never materialized, humans created a scary facsimile.  

[From Wikipedia:] The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, which led J. Robert Oppenheimer to recall verses from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one "... "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

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In such a climate, it wasn't easy to maintain the notion that the individual had a free and meaningful soul and that God had a Grand Plan for humanity, from Alpha to Omega. The apple of knowledge was becoming more dangerous, more complex, and more real than the mythic tree from which it was supposed to have come.

All of this is well-known, and most people draw one of two conclusions from it: 1. humans are at once a wonderful and horrifying experiment of Nature, their very survival a function of the complex natural forces that shape them, or 2. humans are created by a divine Force which will monitor this experiment and will lead it to its appointed end. Agnostics don’t know which of these two conclusions to draw, so they refuse to choose. If anything, they make the choice to both resign themselves and commit themselves to participating in this cosmic play. They witness the world’s beauty and horror, and they wonder at its ambiguities, absurdities, contradictions, and paradoxes. Grudgingly or enthusiastically, they admit to being the playthings of Time.

An enthusiastic way of putting this was expressed about 2,000 years ago by Marcus Aurelius:

Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject. 

The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city. — (Meditations 10:14-15)

I would love to see the world from a great height, perhaps as I look out at the misty ruins of Macchu Picchu, or splash water over my head at the spring of the Ganges, at Gangotri. For now I’ll content myself with having travelled with my wife ten thousand feet up in the Argentinian Andes, west of Salta.

Standing on a mountain, you get an inkling of how far the world stretches. And even then, unless you’re standing on the peak of Everest, there’s always a peak higher up. Even then, standing on the peak of Everest, there’s always another galaxy higher up.

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Next: Between the Flippers

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