First Parish Sermon Archive

“AN AWESOME AMBIGUITY”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On January 17, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

 

 

I heard an interview on National Public Radio with the prolific author Richard Holmes, who has written extensively about the Romantic poets of early nineteenth century England, Coleridge and Shelley in particular. He was discussing his latest book, which is also about that era and those same poets, but more so about the great scientists of the time, whose remarkable advances were a major focus of European culture, including those poets.

 

The book is called, The Age of Wonder. Having stared longingly at it in the window of the Concord Bookstore one day in December when my wife Carol and I were walking by, I ended up getting a copy for Christmas.

 

I knew from the interview, there was a sermon to be had. I grew up a Unitarian, and “wonder” was one of the big words in that religion, and it still is. We don’t talk much about redemption, justification, or sin, but when Unitarian Universalists most recently set down the sources that our tradition draws on, first on the list was, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and sustain life.”

 

One could say that that is just a crafty way of saying “God” without upsetting people who prefer not to use that word. But no, it is more than that: it is the whole universe that is wondrous, life itself is shot full of wonders. Which to a remarkable degree was the experience of people in England, as well as in France, Germany, and elsewhere, in the period Richard Holmes calls the age of wonder, the time of Romantic science, which he dates between “two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James Cook’s first round-the-world expedition … begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands … begun in 1831.” [xvi]

 

When the era opens, “science” is not even a word, and one can make a case that few had been closely observing nature, nor trying to learn its deeper truths directly. Truth was to be found in the church or in works of philosophy – which is what science was classed as initially — until people started looking for themselves, people who would by 1834 be called scientists. Holmes wonders “when people really did first begin to look at objects in nature carefully, for their own sake,” and argues that “the precise, even reverent contemplation of nature is clearly associated with the Romantics, and can be seen arriving in private journals and letters from the 1760s onwards.” [249n]

 

The term Romantic science may seem odd, and Holmes notes that “Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe that this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notice of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can do so still.” [xvi]

 

This period is also known as the second scientific revolution. Holmes says “It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in astronomy and chemistry…. [It brought] a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.”

 

So when the great chemist Humphry Davy decided that “All mental problems – including pain and unhappiness – might be cured by the chemistry of drugs and gases,” [255]  he personally undertook to try it out, and nearly killed himself breathing carbon dioxide. He persisted, though, and discovered that nitrous oxide, now known as laughing gas, had a jolly fine effect on the mind and he began taking it three or four times a day, and sharing the knowledge and the gas with friends and patients.

 

Ballooning had its dangers, too, which didn’t stop people from going up, for science or for fun. Talk about discovery, this is the first time people are able to leave the earth and see it from the sky. Eventually there was an accidental death, and then two French balloonists, attempting to cross the English Channel for the first time from that side, died when their balloon caught fire.

 

“The idea of the exploratory voyage, often alone and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.” Other notions common to it were what may be called the Newton syndrome, the idea of the scientist as a lonely, driven genius; and the Eureka moment, when that scientist suddenly hits upon a great discovery.

 

Holmes pays a lot of attention to three figures who tower over the times: the botanist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on his three-year voyage around the world, collecting specimens, including over a thousand plants new to English eyes,  and ingratiating himself with the natives during a long stay in Tahiti, about whom he wrote after his several trips there; the astronomer William Herschel, a German immigrant and professional musician who with his sister scanned the skies with extraordinary telescopes he made himself; and the chemist Humphry Davy, whom we have already met.

 

Banks went on as President of the Royal Society to nurture the scientific advances of the time. Herschel is a great tale, a man who laboriously, with great skill and patience, fashioned telescopes and was only discovered by the larger scientific community when come upon, outside his house in Bath, England, viewing the stars, by a local physician whose father was in the Royal Society. Herschel became hugely famous in time not only for his ever-larger telescopes but for discovering the planet, Uranus.

 

Humphry Davy comes along when chemistry was “becoming the Romantic science par excellence,” [244], replacing alchemy with experimentation. Up until then, the world was thought to consist of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. But in the 1780s it was discovered, using the newly-invented voltaic battery, that water was really composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Air wasn’t just air, it was (and still is) comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, and small amounts of other gases. The fact that we take oxygen from the air and exhale carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite, was determined by our own Joseph Priestly, who was among other things a Unitarian minister. Likewise, earth and fire were not so basic and simple.

 

Davy went on to many successes, most famously a lamp that could be used in mines that would not set off the kind of explosion that had been a terrible, deadly problem.

 

But the advances were more than interesting, clever, and often useful. Some transformed the way people understood the world. They were wonders. It was a wonder that Herschel spotted this tiny blur of a dot in the midst of all those stars, planets, and nothingness. But he did a lot of looking, he had a great telescope, and he knew that the dot was something unusual. Other people had seen it before, but thought it was a star. In fact it took a while before the scientific community conceded a new planet had been found, the first in over a thousand years.

 

And it was very far away. “Uranus became a symbol of the new, pioneering discoveries of Romantic science. An unfathomably larger universe was suddenly opening up, and this gradually transformed popular notions of the size and mystery of the world ‘beyond the heavens.’ Indeed, the very terms ‘world,’ ‘heaven’ and ‘universe;’ began to change their meanings.” [106]

 

Herschel went farther. As reported at the time, “Mr [sec] Herschel is of the opinion that the starry heaven is replete with … nebulae, and that each of them is a distinct and separate system…. The Milky Way he supposes to be that particular nebula in which our sun is placed….” And he had its shape figured out. He even surmised that the heavens were not “architecturally fixed by the creator, but appeared to be constantly changing and evolving…. The nebulae themselves [were] constantly forming new stars out of condensing gas, in a process of continuous creation. They were replacing stars which were lost.” [123]

 

He pretty much got it all right, except for an early paper he wrote about the people who lived on the moon.

 

And over in the world of chemistry, “The disappearance of the traditional world of the ‘four elements’ was revolutionary.” [247]

 

Science opened up a world of wonders to explore. Electricity was under investigation, and magnetism, and the study of clouds and weather patterns. And through it all, the sense of wonder and hope, for there was this sense that science was a force for goodness and progress.

 

“The Wonder of It All.” That was the working title of this sermon, sharing some of the excitement of these Romantics at encountering the world, a spirit I like to encourage in myself and others. Well, even then the title was “Nonetheless, The Wonder of It All,” but it ended with an exclamation point. The wonder of it all! The wonder of the world.

 

But as the week worked out, as the disaster in Haiti unfolded, I awoke one morning with the title I ended up using, “The Awesome Ambiguity.” Wonder and awe go hand in hand, awe being the larger of the two, the somber silence with which we view enormity. This is how many spoke of viewing the heavens, realizing their vastness, feeling not just the beauty but what they called the terror of it, feeling so small, so in awe.

 

There was ambiguity even in the scientific heyday of which Holmes writes, famously captured by Mary Shelley in her novel, Frankenstein. I have been wanting to preach on the book ever since I listened to it this fall. It is a much better book than the movies would lead you to believe. The differences are extreme, like the monster in the movies speaks in grunts and groans, while the monster in the novel – he never has a name – is the most articulate character, and his reasoning is deep. He is a profoundly tragic character, and it is a heart-breaking story as well as good tale of horror. It is about loneliness and not being accepted, and when the monster turns monstrous and is condemned by Frankenstein, the monster notes that he is who Frankenstein made him who he is, raising theological questions about God and free will.

 

But yes, the book is also about what everyone says, how science can get out of hand, and scientists be overcome with hubris. It was an optimistic age. Davy “showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might eventually liberate [hu]mankind from untold misery and suffering.” [371]

 

For those who don’t recall, as young, brilliant Victor Frankenstein himself said, “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of germination and life. Nay more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”  So he gathers up the necessary parts of the human body and – working alone, whatever the movies say about Igor – he brings life to a person he has put together.

 

This turns out to be a bad idea, and much ill comes of it. Let this be a warning.

 

The episode relates to a big issue of the day then, that of Vitalism, which wondered, “What is this … vivifying principle?” [316] Is it blood, or spirit, or God, or what? Maybe someone will figure it out and bring dead bodies to life. And somebody tried! There had been rumors that an Italian professor, Giovanni Aldini, had put on dazzling “re-animation exhibitions.” In 1803, “in London, surrounded by eager publicity, Aldini attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged….” [317]

 

There was some muscle activity, and, it was written, “Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances had not rendered this – inappropriate.” [317] Attempts were made using the bodies of other animals until public outcry led to their banning, “and Aldini was forced to leave the country….” [317]

 

There was also a wealthy eccentric who “spent most of his fortune on installing ‘an extensive philosophical apparatus’ with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms.” [420]

 

Mary Shelley may have had either man in mind when she undertook to tell her tale. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, helped. They both knew their science, as the matters I have been discussing captivated the general culture but especially the Romantic poets like Shelley himself and most of all Coleridge. So it was not science itself being chided, but its potential to get out of hand.

 

No one in 2010 does not know that science has wrought miracles and led to much human progress, and likewise caused much ill and devastation. Back then, the novelist Horace Walpole said of the ballooning mania, “Well! I hope these new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings of the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race – as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures.” [135]

 

It is a struggle we as a species will go on having, to try to amplify the benefits and control the destructiveness of our abundant talent.

 

But at least I hope we can avoid the charge that Thomas Carlyle made in 1829, when declaring the end of Romanticism and “the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery.’” [435] Science had gone from Newton’s “silent meditation” to a world of lab machinery. He concluded, “The progress of Science … is to destroy Wonder….”

 

I think wonder and the wonders it finds are still to be had from science, from life, the tragedies notwithstanding, nor even the machinery. (I think some of the lab equipment from back then is pretty wondrous.)

 

And that is where Holmes ends his history, and with his words I will close: “The old, rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” [469]           

 

May it be so.