the music of what happens

In which the Universitiy's 2006 Zahm Lecturer climbs toward heaven.

By Chet Raymo

I first climbed Mount Brandon thirty-two years ago. I had come with my family to the west coast of Ireland for a year, and the mountain called — a great, black, boggy, cloud-capped hump rising from the sea, nearly cutting the Dingle peninsula in half — and I could not resist.

    I have now climbed the mountain perhaps a hundred times, by every practical path. Every footstep recalls the passage of Celtic warriors and Christian saints, soldiers of the English crown and the native Irish they drove into the hills, 19th-century rack-rent landlords and 20th-century revolutionaries. My own interest in the mountain is twofold: it is a landscape of great scientific interest, revealing in its crumpled strata and glacially-scarred features much of the geologic history of Ireland; it is also a landscape of great religious significance, one of Ireland’s holy mountains, a microcosm of Ireland’s Celtic soul. This is a place where 19th-century geologists debated the meaning of the twisted strata and helped unravel the surprising history of the ice ages; and this is a place where early medieval saints repaired to encounter their God. Two geographies — one physical, one spiritual — are interwoven on the mountain in ways, it seems to me, that have a particular relevance for our times. In particular, I have sought on the mountain a way of easing the tension that resounds in Western culture between empirical knowledge and traditional faith.

    Nearly two thousand years ago men and women who lived on the Celtic fringe of Europe grappled with this same tension and — for several extraordinary centuries — lived in a way that seamlessly celebrated both reason and mystery. Ireland was converted to Christianity, traditionally by Patrick, in the 5th century A.D. The Norse-men arrived in the 9th century and established colonies around the coast. The period between is sometimes called the Age of Saints and Scholars, and Ireland was then home to a culture — and a kind of Christianity — that was unique in the world. It was a culture and a faith intensely intellectual, yet fiercely attuned to ineffable intimations of nature, skeptical yet celebratory, grounded in the here-and-now and open to infinity. On Mount Brandon I found happy traces of that time, and ways to accommodate apparently contending demands of head and heart.

*

Christianity is by and large a faith of settled cities — of shoemakers, tax collectors, tally clerks, potters, tailors, weavers, bakers, professional soldiers, surveyors — a faith that could only have had its origin in the settled civilizations of the Near East, and only flourished in the temperate latitudes of the Mediterranean basin and within the political orbit of the Pax Romana. Unlike Celtic paganism, in which light and dark, order and chaos contend in the world with equal force, Christianity raises light and order to a position of supremacy; darkness and disorder are lesser forces, always with us to be sure, like a nattering toothache, but destined to yield to the Light of the World. The Christian deity is supremely aloof to the comings and goings of the Sun, sweating beasts and growing plants, sex and procreation. The God of orthodox Christianity only deigns to enter the world in the guise of his desexualized Son (consider the universal androgynous image), the offspring of a virgin, and then only temporarily. His message is clear: the world of nature is a base and fallen place, to be abandoned as soon as possible for the transcendent and immaterial advantages of heaven. All flesh is grass and its glory is like the wild flower’s; the grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.

    To be sure, prominent elements of Christian faith — incarnation, transubstantiation, resurrection of the body, the liturgical year and canonical hours — speak to the embeddedness of spirit in matter, perhaps more strongly in the Catholic than the Protestant tradition, but my own religious education turned one’s attention away from the world of the senses towards things ethereal and eternal. Our liturgical lives may have been wedded to bread and wine, fire and water, smoke and wax, but those elemental contingencies were understood to be mere stepping stones for our immortal souls on their way to the mysterious and immaterial Beatific Vision. The important thing was not the patterns of nature, but the interruptions of pattern, the miracles that were the signatures of God’s separateness from creation (not least, the singular miracle of Christian faith, Christ’s rising from the dead). Western culture’s long quest to weigh the respective claims of natural and supernatural, matter and spirit, tipped in the historical Christianity of my childhood towards supernatural and spirit in ways that (as I would later learn) do not sit comfortably with a modern scientific understanding of the world.

*

There is a poem that may give us a glimpse into the minds of the ancient Irish: the so-called Song of Amergin, sometimes called The Mystery, attributed to one of the Milesian princes who supposedly colonized Ireland several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Tradition has it that these are the first verses made in Ireland:

I am the wind on the sea.
I am the ocean wave.
I am the sound of the billows.
I am the seven-horned stag.
I am the hawk on the cliff.
I am the dewdrop in sunlight.
I am the fairest of flowers.
I am the raging boar.
I am the salmon in the deep pool.
I am the lake on the plain.
I am the meaning of the poem.
I am the point of the spear.
I am the god that makes fire in
the head.
Who levels the mountain?
Who speaks the age of the moon?
Who has been where the sun
sleeps?
Who, if not I?

I am the god that makes fire in the head. 

What makes the human species different from all other creatures is the fire in the head, the never-ceasing wonderment behind the eyes, the questions that fill the mind in the darkest hours of the night, the longing, the uncertainty, the perception of mystery. It is all there in the repertoire of the Celtic storyteller: the magical births, the youthful exploits, the wooings, the elopements, the adventures wrapped with miracles, the voyages in search of the Land of Delight, the heroic deaths and transformations. All animals and plants have sex, but only humans embellish the procreative act with romantic tales. All animals kill; only humans kill their own kind for honor or glory, or willingly surrender their lives for faith. The fire in the head, always burning. Every-where. In the sea, in the deep pool, on the plain, in the mountain fastness. Burning, burning.

*

It is absurd to say, as many moderns do, that religion is mere superstition. Religion is the natural human response to the inexplicable in nature, the fire in the head evoked by mystery; to extinguish the response is to extinguish the fire. But what sort of response is appropriate in our scientific times? What response is consistent with a modern sense of our common humanity? How can awe, reverence, and the perception of mystery coexist with skepticism and empiricism? How can we think metaphorically, as we must, without becoming prisoners of our metaphors? 

    I stand on the mountain and feel the mystery all around me, the fire burning on this wild, cloud-shrouded shoulder of the mountain. There is a tendency, certainly cultural, perhaps genetic, to fall to my knees, to speak praise, to give thanks — but in what words, and to whom? The Song of Amergin comes easily to my lips, especially in this place, but they are not my words, and do not reflect my world. My world is not the world of the salmon and the stag, but of the laptop computer and telescope. What I share with Amergin is a sense that the world is shot through with mystery in ways that even our sophisticated science cannot begin to comprehend. In the face of that mystery I feel compelled to speak, to pray; but cannot find words that feel comfortable on my tongue.

*

Saint Columbanus was not the only Christian of his time to emphasize the creation as the primary revelation, but in Irish Christianity the idea took hold, and resisted for some time the notion that the only reliable revelation is to be found in scripture or tradition mediated through the Church in Rome. By contrast, the early Irish texts suggest a God who is more fundamentally immanent in every part of the creation — in Sun, Moon, stars, wind and wave — even as the unutterable mystery of the universe confounds our understanding and perception. Saint Columbanus: “Who shall examine the secret depths of God? Who shall dare to treat of the eternal source of the universe? Who shall boast of knowing the infinite God, who fills all and surrounds all, who enters into all and passes beyond all, who occupies all and escapes all?” Those who wish to know God, he says, “must first review the natural world.” In the early Irish Christian understanding, exceptional events do not occur because of the interventions of a supernatural deity who temporarily suspends the ordinary course of things, but rather because of the divine potentialities inherent within nature itself. For the authors of the early Irish texts, a reluctance to believe in “the full extravagant strangeness of existence” was tantamount to blasphemy, says the scholar John Carey. Here was, and is, a defining question for Christianity, and indeed for Western civilization: Is the action of the Creator (however we might understand the agency by which the universe came to be and is sustained) manifested in miraculous intrusions of the transcendent — a wolf that talks with a priest, seed cursed by a bishop that does not grow — or in the extraordinary quality of ordinary events  — the rising and setting of the Sun, the call of the cuckoo, the rainbow, the aurora, the dew on the grass?

*

The early Irish Christian writer Augustinus Hibernicus, the “Irish Augustine,” author of On the Miracles of Holy Scriptures, a book which attempts to show that all of God’s works in the world must act in accordance with nature, not in opposition to it: “ ... We barely understand even in part all of the things which we possess. The surface of the earth on which we toil, by which we are nourished, kept alive and supported, appears plainly before our eyes; yet even so we do not know what holds it up. The sun is assigned to minister to us by day, but the course which it follows in the night is hidden from our knowledge. Who has the wit to understand the changes of the moon, waxing in fifteen days and waning in the same interval? We are allowed to behold the surges of the flowing sea, but are denied knowledge of the place to which it ebbs. We know and are mindful of the day of our own birth; but the day of our death, although it is certain that it will come, is unknown to us ... we know only in part, for as long as we are in this world.”

    It is an extraordinary passage, because what it says has been so rarely affirmed — by theologians or by scientists — and almost never before our own time. Throughout most of the Christian era, truth has been sought in Holy Scriptures — presumed to be divinely inspired — and these, being finite, can, in principle at least, be entirely known. Thus evolved a false sense of conviction, an arrogance of certainty. Of such assurance were derived the burning of heretics, holy wars, pogroms, religious imperialism, and all the other wretched excesses that have betrayed the Sermon on the Mount. But if, as Saint Columbanus confidently asserted, the primary rev-elation of the Creator is the creation, then it is inevitable that we shall see only through a glass darkly, and prophesy only in part. He wrote: “If then a man wishes to know the deepest ocean of divine understanding, let him first if he is able scan that visible sea, and the less he finds himself to understand of those creatures which lurk below the waves, the more let him realize that he can know less of the depths of the Creator.”

*

There is an old Irish story of the hero Fionn Mac Cumhail. Fionn asks his followers, “What is the finest music in the world?”  They suggest answers: the cuckoo calling from the hedge, the ring of a spear on a shield, the baying of a pack of hounds, the laughter of a gleeful girl. “All good music,” agrees Fionn. “But what is best?” they ask. Fionn answers: “The music of what happens.”

*

As Christianity took hold in northern Europe, a pervading question was what to do with the old gods, the deities of the druids, the fairy faiths. Two strategies were employed, according to John Carey: euhemerism and demonization. In the first, the gods of the pagans were held to be humans who lived long ago, and who came to be worshiped after their deaths because of some extraordinary quality of their lives; in other words, the gods were not divine at all, but confabulated mortals. In the second case, the gods of the pagans were held to be demons: supernatural beings, yes, but wholly negative in character. Neither device was employed in Ireland between the time of Patrick and the coming of the Vikings. The Irish, by contrast with the continent, held the old gods to be supernatural but not evil. To this end they imagined them as half-fallen angels, spiritual beings who did not join the rebellion of Lucifer, but who were nevertheless expelled from Paradise to earth, where they live in close harmony with nature. Another approach on the part of the Irish was to imagine the pagan gods as descendants of Adam who somehow escaped the corruption of the Fall. Either way, these immortal fairy folk were thought to exist in a state of grace, free from Original Sin. Both Irish strategies for saving the old gods were unorthodox, indeed heretical by continental standards, and were of course eventually submerged in conventional theology, but the fairy folk survived into modern times pretty much as the early Irish imagined them.

    All of this may seem embarrassingly artificial: a matter of the early Irish Christians trying to have their pagan cake and eat it too. By any modern standard of scientific thinking it all seems rather silly. But we are not required to judge an earlier age by modern standards. The essential point here is that for early Irish Christians, all of nature was enchanted  — the music of what happens.

*

The fairy people of druidic tradition no longer satisfy our rational needs. The pantheon of Greco-Roman gods have been sent packing too. The eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson [’97 hon.] says of the pagan gods: “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately fled first the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative.”  And he is right. The human mind cannot live without mystery. Reason alone will not satisfy. Science without awe is sterile. A life lived without praise and thanksgiving is a shabby sort of life indeed.

    So far, scientists have resisted any attempt to infuse their empirical enterprise with spiritual values. They are fearful, and rightly so, of diluting a successful truth-generating methodology with archaic “mysticism.” With creationists and New Agers storming the barricades of science, intent on bringing down the walls, who can blame scientists for jealously maintaining their aloof detachment from spirituality? Meanwhile, the majority of people recoil from the scientific story of the world, which they see as cold and forbidding, and instead seek comfort in an older, more human-centered cosmology — a cosmology of miracles and redemption by a loving (or just) personal God lodged outside of the creation who listens and responds to our prayers.

    What is the alternative? A New Story, as the Passionist priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry calls it — a spirituality in which God is revealed in and through the creation, as law and chaos, light and darkness, creator and destroyer, animating every aspect of the everyday world with mystery and meaning. A New Story in which we are close in spirit to the early Christian Irish of the Atlantic fringe.

*

All cultures, everywhere on Earth, have stories, passed down in sacred writings or tribal myths that answer the questions: Where did the world come from? What is our place in it? What is the source of order and dis-order? What will be the fate of the world and of ourselves? The human mind demands, requires, answers to these questions. The story cycles of the pre-Christian Irish, and of the pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland, supplied answers. The Bible and the Church Fathers supplied answers. And the scientific tradition has answers too.

    The scientific story is the product of thousands of years of human curiosity, observation, experimentation and creativity. It is an evolving story, not yet finished. Perhaps it will never be finished. It is a story that begins with an explosion from a seed of infinite energy. The seed expands and cools.  Particles form, then atoms of hydrogen and helium. Stars and galaxies coalesce from swirling gas. Stars burn and explode, forging heavy elements  — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen  — and hurling them into space. New stars are born, with planets made of heavy elements. On one planet near a typical star in a typical galaxy life appears in the form of microscopic self-replicating ensembles of atoms. Life evolves, over billions of years, resulting in ever more complex organisms. Continents move. Seas rise and fall. The ice advances and retreats. The atmosphere changes. Millions of species of life appear and become extinct. Others adapt, survive, and spill out progeny.  At last, consciousness appears. One of the millions of species on the planet looks into the night sky or the limitless sea and wonders what it means, feels the spark of love, tenderness and responsibility, makes up stories.

*

Although primarily an invention of Western culture, the New Story has become the story of all educated peoples throughout the world. There is no such thing as European science, Chinese science, Navajo science; scientists of all cultures, religions and political persuasions exchange ideas freely and apply the same criteria of verification and falsification. Like most children, I was taught that my story was the “true story,” and that all others were false, or at best sweet fairy tales. Sometimes our so-called “true” stories gave us permission to hurt those who lived by other stories. But in a world of international air travel, instant exchange of information, and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer afford to squabble over which of our many stories is true.

*

From the top of Mount Brandon the New Story unfolds all around me. In the crush of continents that heaved the mountains skyward. In the shaping of the hills by glaciers. In the tumbling atmosphere, stirred into motion by the spinning Earth. In the single-celled algae that grow in the well. In the vast bowl of the sea that draws our imagination westward, and in the water itself, cradle of life, forged in starry nebula, gathered by gravity with the body of the Earth. I am the meaning of the poem, sings Amergin. I am the god that makes fire in the head.

*

What does it mean to honor a God whose immanence takes precedence over his transcendence? How do we pray to a deity who eludes even the personal pronouns he, himself, and who, who absconds from the temples of our imagination and hides in the interstices of creation?

    There is a tradition of Christian prayer that is open to mystery and yet attuned to God’s immanence. The Trappist contemplative Thomas Merton describes it this way: “When
I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer ... Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” He might have added: the whirling galaxies are my prayer, the ceaselessly weaving DNA is my prayer, the folding of the mountains and the grinding glaciers are my prayer.

*

I was raised in a culture of prayer; it permeated every aspect of my young life. The school day began and ended with prayer. As an altar boy at our par-ish church, I served countless masses, benedictions, weddings, funerals. A not insignificant proportion of my youth was spent in church, listening to prayers, reciting prayers. Yet, looking back on my childhood, I wonder what it all meant. Most of the prayers I recited were formalistic; I might as well have been mumbling the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag or nursery rhymes. Many of the prayers were in Latin and therefore doubly inscrutable. Certainly there was nothing spontaneous or heartfelt about my prayers. The only prayers that were not formalistic were anxious petitions. In these earnest entreaties to a deity, I was not alone. A recent Newsweek poll found that 87 percent of Americans believe in a God who hears and answers prayers, and more than a quarter of Americans pray to such a God every day. For many people, the entire purpose of prayer is to invoke God’s intervention in the course of their daily lives, to adjust the tilt of the universe in their personal favor.

    I am now more interested in the kind of prayer that I found on the mountain. If we accept, with the early Irish saints, God’s immanence, then prayer becomes an expression of wonder, thanksgiving and praise, not to someone outside of the creation who could and might intervene to redirect the flow of events, but to the creative agency within the creation — a God whom we intuit through the mind and heart but who evades all definitions (including the convenient pronoun who).

*

A corollary of belief in the efficacy of petitionary prayer is the so-called problem of evil:  If God can redirect the flow of events in contravention of natural law, then why does a loving and just God allow bad things to happen to good people? One answer is hinted at in the Celtic notion of God’s immanence. I am the point of the spear, sang Amergin. He might have added, I am the wind that blows the ship upon the rocks, I am the wolf that carries the lamb from the fold, I am the pestilence that takes the child from the parent. The creation and the creator are all of a piece: light and darkness, happiness and sorrow, life and death. The creation is neither good nor evil, but Jesus and other great religious leaders have emphasized our freedom to act in ways that can nudge history towards the good. What Celtic pantheism advantageously received from Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed the entire message of the gospels: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In the broadest sense of this maxim we recognize a basis for moral action in the world and a concept of redemption in which our every action moves all of creation toward harmony.

Our quest for encounter with the Absolute goes arm in arm with our study of nature. The great Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin: “Let us go on and on endlessly increasing our perception of the hidden powers that slumber, and the infinitesimally tiny ones that swarm about us, and the immensities that escape us simply because they appear as a point,” he wrote, extolling the atomic and the galactic. Each discovery plunges us

a little deeper into the ground of all Mystery, he believed, leading us at last into contemplation of the ineffable, unspeakable deity who “through his Spirit stirs up into a ferment the mass of the universe.” Less and less, he said near the end of his life, did he discern a difference between research and adoration. If we are attentive enough, we will be led into encounter with the ineffable Spirit that stirs the universe into a ferment.

    I am the wind on the sea. I am the ocean wave. I am the sound of the billows. I am the hawk on the cliff. I am the dewdrop in sunlight. I am the lake on the plain. I am the meaning of the poem. I am the god that makes fire in the head.

Chet Raymo, author of twelve books, is a professor emeritus of physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, a school also elevated by the Congregation of Holy Cross. This essay is drawn from his lovely book Climbing Brandon, and Chet his own self will speak of science and spirituality in BC Aud on Thursday evening, September 21, free as air, bring your friends. Info: 503-943-7202.