Christian Voices in the Contempory World: at All Saints Ecclesall in Sheffield – Humble Science?

Gary Wilson, vicar of All Saints in celebratory mood.

If Lent is a traditionally a time for deprivation of comfort, hard discipline and resisting temptation then it must be a wise church, if a particularly determined one, that invites a ‘Faith and Wisdom in Science’ evening of talk and discussion as part of their Lent course. So it was that the vicar of All Saints, Ecclesall, Gary Wilton invited me to lead an evening for a lively, attentive and challenging group of about 170 as part of their Lent course ‘Christian Voices in the Contempory World’.  Perhaps approproately also, we spent a fair bit of time in the Book of Job, a story of anger, pain and penitance as well as the most profound ancient text I know that treats the relation between humankind and the material world around us.

Actually I had first met Gary in 2012 at a conference on dialogue between Science and Religion that he was arranging as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative in Brussells for CERN.  The Director of the great European particle physics facility, Rolf Heuer, had requested the three-day meeting, since repeated, as part of CERN’s responsible engagement with the global public.  That meeting, bringing scientists and theologicans, some believing some not (in both camps) and representing Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, was extremely interesting.  A fair bit of the material on different religions’ approach to science derives from pointers given to me at that meeting (in chapter 8 by the way).

The Sheffield evening was no less stimulating. After the talk, we covered two sets of three questions from the audience.  They both fitted together in interesting ways.  The first (summarised) set was:

1. How can lay people really engage with science in a meaningful way?
2. Can Narrative act as a way into science?
3. Do we not need scintists to show more humility?

I think that these belong together because one of the offputting things about science is the way that scientists tend to assume the role of unassailable expert when we communicate science.  It needs to be said much more often that scientists make mistakes over and over again – it is hard to re-imagine the world and find ways  of seeing into its deep working structure.  We get closer all the time, but the difficulties and the slip-ups ought both to keep us humble, and to remind us that we need all the help we can get.  I still believe that the musical analogy I use in Faith and Wisdom in Science has some value here.  Just as musicians need the many ways in which audiences give them feedback in performances, so scientists need to listen to the reception of their work.  We should not underestimate the intellectual ability of non-experts to think about and question science (this is continually done in the mind-numbingly slow and superficial presentation of science on television).

One way of doing this is indeed to work through the narrative of a science story.  I think that no-one has done this better than Bill Bryson in his A Short History of Nearly Everything.  The twists and turns, the disappointments and delights, the characters and the catastrophes of science are all there.  Underlying the book is also the desire, born in a lay person with no science background, to grasp at some idea of the deep human need to understand why the sky is blue.  But crucially it also drives at a knowledge of how we now understand such things.  I think  that more along the lines  of Bryson’s approach, together with an expectation that lay audiences can and will help scientists to think more imaginatively, and an emphasis and development of the poetry and play of science, may recover lost ground.  Humility is indeed a good place to start.

More from Ecclesall in the next post!

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What’s the Story? And why all the Theological Baggage? – Grilling the book at TORCH from all sides

The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) is currently running a series of events on Humanities and Science. At the intersection of this programme with their regular ‘Book at Lunchtime’ seminars, on February 11th an Oxford based panel of three disciplinary experts shone their critical torchlights on  Faith and Wisdom in Science.

Perspectives from English Literature (Prof. Sally Shuttleworth), History (Prof. John Christie) and Physics (Prof Ard Louis) proved a sharp and effective way to touch on critical aspects of the book. For all of them both positive responses and critical questions turned on the central theme of narrative. Should we, and how can we understand science itself and narrative? And as the book itself asks, where can we find and deploy a constructive cultural narrative for science that might unlock some of the current misrepresentations and political tangles around science and technology in the public forum? Louis referred to the ‘lament’ that science is not a cultural possession in the same way that art or music is, and urged the advantage of telling the messy story of real science practice. Christie sketched the obscured historical details within the stories of Galileo and Newton,

Galileo Galilei

and of the Biblical basis for Frances’ Bacon’s vision for modern science, which serve deconstruct the worn old myths about confrontation of science and religion. Shuttleworth welcomed the telling of the stories of science as questioning and creative, yet suffering the fate of almost always being wrong.

Faith and Wisdom in Science sets out to explore what resources Judeo-Christian theology can supply in constructing a social narrative for science – one that might describe both what science is for, and how it might be more widely enjoyed. It draws on history to claim that the project we now call ‘science’ is in continuity with older human activities by other names; ‘natural philosophy’ in the early modern period and in ancient times just ‘Wisdom’. The theology of science that emerges is ‘participatory reconciliation’, a hopeful engagement with the world that both lights it up and heals our relationship with it.

But is theology the only way to get there? Are we required to carry the heavy cultural baggage of Christian history of thought and structures? Shuttleworth recalled George Eliot’s misery at the dissection of the miraculous as she translated Strauss’ ‘Life of Jesus’ at the dawn of critical Biblical studies. Yet Eliot is able to conceive of a rich and luminous narrative for science in Middlemarch:

“…the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space.”

Eliot’s sources are T.H. Huxley, J.S. Mill and Auguste Comte, and of course her partner G.H Lewes,  They are by no means theological (Comte had even constructed a secular religion). Perhaps this is an example of an entirely secular route to science’s story? Yet her insight into science as a special sort of deep ‘seeing’ also emerges from the ancient wisdom of, for example, the Book of Job. In a parallel and contemporary book Seeing the World and Knowing God, Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes also calls on the material of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes to challenge the post-modern dissolution of subject and object. Participatory reconciliation emerges for both theologian and scientist motivated to draw on ancient wisdom for modern need. Was Eliot, and will all secular thinkers in the Western tradition be, in some way irrevocably connected to these ancient wellsprings of our thinking?

An aspect of the ‘baggage’ most desirable to drop, according to Shuttleworth, is the notion that scientists are a sort of priesthood. Surely this speaks to the worst suspicions of a mangled modern discourse of authority and power. Louis even suggested that the science/religion debate is really only a proxy for this larger and deeper one. Perhaps the first-temple notion of ‘servant priesthood’ is now too overlain with the strata of power-play to serve as a helpful metaphor for how we go about enacting the story of science.

But science needs to rediscover its story, and it is only by acknowledge that its narrative underpinnings must come from the humanities, that it is going to find it.

Newcastle Phil and Lit: Technology and Heidegger

This week the redoubtable Newcastle Philosophical and Literary society, in partnership with Newcastle College, extended a very warm and hospitable welcome to a Faith and a Wisdom discussion in their current series entitled ‘On the Edge’ (we were ‘On the Edge of Faith’).  It’s so heartening to see these highly civilised organisations dedicated to thinking, learning and discussion still flourishing in the heart of our great cities, selling out on a wet and cold February Thursday.

the question time was very impressive and also challenging.  We had managed to cover

Newcastle Phil and Lit library

a little science (Brownian motion of signalling proteins – an example of order out of chaos and a reflection on our human ability to see below the surface of nature), some science history (Grosseteste’s extraordinary cosmogony in his 1225 De Luce) and a decent look at the hymn to wisdom in Job 28 in the search for material in support of a deep narrative for science.

‘Might the apprentice conflict between science and religion stem from technology rather than science itself?’ Wondered one questioner. I think that the thrust here is that science itself is not inherently threatening, as it ‘lights up the world’ rather than ‘changes the world’.  Indeed, as John Hedley-Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor point out in theirs Gifford lectures ‘Reconstructing the Universe’, 18th and 19th century chemistry was especially challenging theologically as it was (at that time) far more than physics or biology, the science that changed the world.  And doing this touches the raw nerve of that deeply reactionary ‘playing at God and trespassing on sacred nature’ narrative that plays out even today as an underlying driver of debate around technology.  However, I don’t think that historically the role of technology over against science holds up as a catalyst of confrontation.  It was not developing technology that Draper and White invoked in their 19th century polemics that painted for the first time the backdrop of conflict on the stage of science and religion.

A second questioner challenged my reference to Heidegger as a philosopher incompatible with the Bible.  In fact I was also accused of mentioning only this one philosopher – grave omission indeed at a ‘lit and PHIL’.  But I checked that we had in fact also discussed Arendt and Aristotle during the evening, so I hope we made our quota.  Actually I had referred to him as another thinker who echoes the theme of ‘hiddenness’ of the world (in his Being and Time).  This is not of course to endorse all his thought, much of which has been accused as obscurantist. His membership of the Nazi party during the 1930s and the war years will also always be a stain on his reputation. However, there is no reason to ignore everything that such a serious thinker has said, in spite of his faults. Arendt herself drew heavily on his ideas in describing the alienation from nature in her ‘The Human Condition’.

Now I am of course realising that there is a connection between the two questions. Heidegger was a philosopher deeply concerned with how we live in a technological society.  But perhaps he lacked the roots of ancient wisdom that the book of Job mysteriously urges us towards in its reach towards today’s world from such very different times.

At Liverpool Hope University: a Theological Dichotomy

Yesterday was ‘Foundation Hour’ at Liverpool Hope University.  The Dean had invited me to talk on Faith and Wisdom in Science at this remarkable regular event for the institution.  Everything stops for Foundation Hour – no classes, no meetings.  Not that everyone actually comes… but almost everyone could come for a reflection based on Hope’s core values of faith, reconciliation and learning.

I cant bring to mind another foundation that embodies quite so explicitly the holding together of differences in a determined resolve to reconcile.  A double foundation of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, Liverpool Hope also derives its name from the street that rund between the two corresponding Cathedrals: Hope Street.

So a presentation on the theme of a long theological story for sciece that begins with the springs of Old Testament Wisdom literature and gathers momentum through the Biblical narratives of reconciliation found, unuorprisingly but delightfully, a welcoming landscape of prepared minds to flow along.  One question struck me as especially perspicacious, however, and also emblematic of a community that lives and breathes a scholarly life between two poles (to paraphrase by memory):

“To which of the two opposing traditions of Christian theology does your ‘theology of science’ belong – the more positive theology of mankind as mandated caretakers of creation, or the darker theological anthropology of fallen humankind in need of redemption?”

I thought this a wonderful question.  We, like Liverpool Hope, live between two poles all the time; between George Steiner’s Friday of despair and Sunday of Resurrection (his famous Easter metaphor in Real Presences), between the need of repentance and the need to celebrate, between the cognisance of our fallen nature and the knowledge that we are loved and healed.  So which route does a participatory and reconciliatory theology of science take us?

Well, like authentic Christian discipleship in any area, we need to hold both together.  The history of science teaches us that.  At the dawn of the modern era we have Kepler rejoicing in the calling to ‘think God’s thoughts after him’.  Such sentiment springs from the creation/ made in imagio Dei narrative, generating a strong and divinely-ordained mandate for humans to engage with creation while enjoying a perspective that becomes increasingly aligned to that of the Creator.  In contrast, Francis Bacon in Organum saw the Fall as reducing humankind’s knowledge of the creation to a pale shadow compared to the insight and wisdom once possessed by Adam.  For Bacon, the senses and the empiricle data that they allow us access to open a doorway back to a redeemed knowledge of creation, but only by grace and sheer hard labour!  Bacon writes very much in the ‘fall/redemtion’ mode as his primary narrative.  Holding both the status of being created in the image of God and standing in need of redemption and healing is the task of the scientist-theologian.

But more is true – as all authentic theology this too needs to emerge from and be rooted in expereince if it is to mean anything and if to advise, shope, transform practice.  Scientists, whether believing or not, will witness to first hand experience of these two parallel and tensioned narrative experiences.  So much of what we do feels like hard work to achieve very little.  I have just returned to my desk from a visit to the lab where is became clear that a long and arduous set of experiments has been beset by a strange problem that we have never seen before.  It will all need to be done again, but we have no guarantee that the experimental issue will not recur.  ‘By the sweat of your brow’.  But we also know those occasional moments of sheer gift when ideas just come, when an inpenetrable fog of puzzle clears, and we see how things are.  Science embodies both labour and grace.

Grounding a supporting narrative for science in the Old Testament wisdom tradition is helpful because it holds the two ways of living together in mutual support.  Wisdom is both a practical guide to working out a life lived ethically and well, and the personified creative force that in Proverbs 8 shapes the mountains with delight, and in Job 28 takes humans up in the divine ability to see the deep structures of the universe.

Islam, Christianity and Science: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

One of the questions I am often asked at Faith and Wisdom in Science discussions is along the lines of, ‘What do other religions say about such a theology of science?’.  Even if I have persuaded the questioner that the ‘conflict narrative’ is inapplicable to christianity and science, except by construction, the thought behind the question is often that other religions must percieve science as a sort of threat.  The religion most commonly suggested at this point is Islam.

I have just returned, by coincedence, from Paris, in a week marked by thoughts of Islam and conflict.  I was there as an external advisor to a French science committee of the CNRS (the main French national science funding body), but had the opportunity of witnessing at first hand the solidarity of the Parisiens in their determination that the atrocious gunning down of satirical journalists, a police officer, and shoppers in a Jewish supermarket should not escalate into violent community divisions.  It was an impressive and moving experience.

The juxtaposition of science, conflict and a religious response of reconciliation reminded me of the ‘homework’ I had set myself and others in the final chapter of Faith and Wisdom when I look at its consequences.  We found that science has a theological human purpose of participating together in reconciling humanity to the material world – and that far from being in confict with religion, it is that outworking of the story of God and creation that speaks of the relationship between humankind and nature.  One of the consequences of the ‘new geometry’ of faith and science is the hope for a new strand of dialogue between faith traditions themselves.  I found that in Islam (and in Judaism and more) wherever thinking was not hidebound into doctrinal power-structures, there was the same theological embracing of science rather than a flight from it.  The Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal has written of Koranic sayings that speak of human freedom to share in the task of creation – a very close idea to the participative relational theology of Biblical ‘Wisdom’ writings.

The 12th century Cordoban muslim philosopher Averroes

This should not surprise us if we reflect for a moment on the debt that the rise of medieval and early modern science owes to the scholarship and natural philosophy of the great Islamic thinkers Avicenna (Ibn-Sina, 980-1037), Averroes (Ibn-Rushd,1126-1198), Al-Kindi (801-873) and others, in the early medieval period.  The extraordinary early science advances made by the English 13th century polymath Robert Grosseteste, which we are uncovering in the Ordered Universe project at Durham, drew essentially on Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and other texts. Not only the Aristotelian emphasis on the observation of nature, but also the quest to deepen our understanding of nature beyond Aristotle, and a theological motivation for doing so, all re-energised European thinking via the Islamic tradition of Pesia, North Africa and Spain.  An instructive example occurs in the route from Aristotle’s linear, and physically unsupported, ordering of colours from black to white, and Grosseteste’s full three-dimensional colour space.  It was Averroes who, in his de sensu, motivated a theory of colour with a higher number of degrees of freedom by suggesting that colour arose from the double nature of material transparency and light itself.  In the 13th century we see Christian scholars reading Muslim commentators and scientists, themselves reflecting on Greek, pagan, authors – and making transformational progress in our  knowledge of nature and in the very direction of science.

A very influential thinker, transformational physicist and devout Muslim I might have referred to in the book is Nobel prizewinner

Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1979

Abdus Salam.  He drew not only his motivation to do science from his muslim faith, but also descibed how his experience of doing theoretical physics shed light on his reading of the Koran.  At one point in his  Nobel Prize address, Salam quoted the Koranic verse:

Thou seest not, in the creation of the All-merciful any imperfection, Return thy gaze, seest thou any fissure? Then Return thy gaze, again and again. Thy gaze, Comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.

 

He commented:

This, in effect, is the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze.

But he did not stop at that point.  He drew from this one of the other great lessons that also emerged in Faith and Wisdom:

I am saying this, not only to remind those here tonight of this, but also for those in the Third World, who feel they have lost out in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, for lack of opportunity and resource.

Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity. On this occasion, let me say this to those, whom God has given His Bounty. Let us strive to provide equal opportunities to all so that they can engage in the creation of Physics and science for the benefit of all mankind. This would exactly be in the spirit of Alfred Nobel and the ideals which permeated his life. Bless You!

This is still a future hope – that the deeply human need to reconcile our understandind with the material world – the endeavour we now call science – can be opened up to everyone.  In developed countries exclusion arises from inequitable or uninspiring education, from a media and press that stigmatise and isolate science.  Elsewhere there are still economic exclusions.  Sadly there is also damage done to the enjoyment of science everywhere in the world from a failure to understand that science is a theological gift and mandate, rather than a threat.  Both Christianity and Islam suffer from containing some within their communities who sustain the severe and damaging error of literalistic misunderstanding of scriptures.  In both cases the perverse doctrine of ‘young earth creationism’ denigrates science as well as doing violence to their own holy writings.  Yet that, too, though unwelcome, is a shared challenge.

At a time when reconciliation is as starkly urgent as at any we can recall, rediscovering science as God’s gift looks like a project that people of Abrahamic faith and beyond should embark on urgently.

Medieval Lessons for the Modern Science/Religion Debate

I have been asked to write a book chapter on this topic following a workshop in the Ordered Universe interdisciplinary series on medieval science. For some reason I thought that a summary might make a suitable Christmas blog post: it’s a season when we look back (a long way) into the past for strength and guidance in the here and now. 800 years back to the time of Robert Grosseteste does not seem so immense a leap right now.

A 14th century image of Robert Grosseteste as Bishop of Lincoln

Grosseteste (depicted adjacent) was a deeply scholarly man, a teacher to the Oxford Franciscans in the 1220s, and Bishop of Lincoln from 1235.  During the period from 1225 to 1235 (probably) he wrote a series of about a dozen works on scientific topics: light (De luce), colour (De colore), the rainbow (De iride – he was the first to identify refraction as the driving phenomenon of rainbows).  You can find out much more about Grosseteste and his scientific work at the ‘Ordered Universe’ blog linked above.  This is a project where we bring the skills of medieval scholars, latinists, historians, philosophers, theologians and active scientists today, all to bear on analysing these treatises, their texts, and the scientific logic within them.  It’s fascinating!

It’s also an important exercise for the themes of Faith and Wisdom in Science, because it evidences the theme of the book that science has a much longer history than we usually credit it with.  Perhaps, rather, the activity we now call ‘science’ is the name of the current chapter in a book of human engagement with nature that has many many previous chapters.  The 13th century was certainly an important one.  And not only because of the early science it contains, but also because of the theologically-derived underpinning purpose behind a human attempt to understand the physical world.  As I argue in the book, we just dont have a purpose for science today (apart possibly for a very narrow and instrumental economic one).  So mining more ancient wisdom, while not applicable immediately in our own age, is likley to be a fruitful exercise, and a fascinating one.

I think that there are five chief ways in which this 13^th century master, and his intellectual and theological milieu, can assist in escaping our current impasse. I have called these: (1) the disruption of damaging myths, (2) the long history of science, (3) a cultural narrative for science, (4) a unified vision and (5) a relational and incarnational metaphysics. We next discuss each thread in a little more detail.

 

1 Disruption of Damaging Myths

As has already been noted, a common meta-narrative of the history of science in both public media and (at the least) school education, is that nothing remotely resembling science existed before the early modern period (or the late 16^th century). According to this story, before Galileo and Newton any philosophy of the natural world was clouded with magic, alchemy, superstition, and – worse of all – the dogma of theology[1]. There are other sub-narratives that emerge – that the scientific method is entirely modern, that medieval thinkers’ chief goal was in any case to recapitulate the thoughts of the classical philosophers and not to move beyond them, that the medieval church repeatedly suppressed innovative thinking in general, and that ‘theology’ and ‘science’ were indistinguishable in the medieval world of scholasticism. Grosseteste’s scientific corpus serves as an immediate gust of fresh air to remove such flimsy cobwebs of reconstructed history.

The shortest of the scientific treatises, the De colore (on colour) is enough on its own to remove credence in such a fiction. As I and others had explored in depth elsewhere[2], the De colore represents a piece of work that a modern scientist would recognise as being in continuity with, though naturally distant from, questions posed and methods pursued today. Grosseteste does not allegorise or mystify colour; he does not accord any supernatural powers of transformation to it; he writes no explicitly theological material in his treatment at any point. On the contrary he treats colour as a perceived property of the natural world.

Color est lux incoporata in perspicuo – the opening line of the treatise – introduces the conjecture that colour is an emergent property of light and matter. He then identifies the different colours of objects as betraying the activity of different lights (characterised by the variation of two quantities of greatness – multa/pauca – and clarity – clara/obscura within materials characterised along a third dimension of purity – purum/impurum). There is to this day an unsolved problem in cognitive psychology of the apparent ordering, continuity and perceptive proximity of colours [3]. Grosseteste prepares the ground for an approach to this issue by creating an abstract theatre of colour space. He is also working in a highly mathematical way (though this has not always been recognised in the secondary literature on the De colore). The numbers of possible colours and their contingencies are calculated in terms of the combinatorics of his three bipolar qualities. Never explicit, but strikingly obvious to mathematically equipped readers of his and Aristotle’s theories of colour, is that in developing a three-dimensional colour space between the opposing poles of black and white, he is going far beyond the Philosopher.  Grosseteste insists that per experimentum (whether by thought or in action is beside the point here) one only reaches all possible colours by the variation of three independent quantities. The treatise does not represent a mere recapitulation of ancient thought, but goes far beyond it in imaginative theory as well as in mathematical complexity and observational relationship.

Within this short text of 400 Latin words we find, in this reading, a recognisably scientific approach to the mathematical modelling of an observed physical phenomenon. Naturally it is of its own time, not of ours – we now understand the origin of the three-dimensionality of colour to have its origins in the three types of photosensitive cone cells in the human retina, not directly in the properties of light or materials. But the core characteristic of science is not to be found in the answers it holds pro tem, but in the questions it poses, the way it goes about answering them and in the direction of intellectual travel. In this sense Grosseteste is in continuity with questions and methods in colour science today. If that were not true, it would be hard to explain why a team of scientists encountering this work in detail, and the related treatise on the rainbow, the De iride, were immediately inspired to create some new science. They recast the physical optics of the rainbow, and the perceptual framework of human colour vision, to show that even in contemporary terms, Grosseteste was correct in asserting that colour space can be both spanned and mapped by ‘the space of all possible rainbows’[5]. Remarkably, this analytic work, required originally to establish whether the colour space of the De colore was indeed equivalent to the perceptual space used today, led to the discovery of a new mapping for the space in which the coordinate system is inspired by the spectral characteristics of rainbows.

 

2. A long History of Science

A second aspect of our deconstruction of the ‘modern science’ myth requires some comment: it is one thing to show that Grosseteste and his contemporaries were working in a potential logical continuity with science today; to show that this is also an actual historical continuity with it is another. It may never be possible to retrace the full pattern of reception of his scientific corpus. These treatises, remarkable as they are, are not as widely referred to as the Hexaemeron and Psalm commentaries, for example. Yet nearly two generations after their probable first writing, Roger Bacon had grounds to acclaim Grosseteste as the greatest mathematical genius of the century. The conceptual continuity of his geometric optics and work on the rainbow, with those of Bacon, Theodoric of Freiburg, the Prague school of the 15^th century, and onwards to Newton’s own Optics, strongly suggests that historical transmission of his science accompanies the conceptual possibility.

But whatever the detail and extent of their later adoption and development, Grosseteste’s scientific works are testament to the longer continuity of a human intellectual story that we now call ‘science’, but which went by other names in earlier ages. It might better be termed ‘natural philosophy’ in the 18^th and 19^th centuries or even ‘natural wisdom’ in antiquity. A vital thread is that of a developing story – natural philosophers are consciously drawing from ideas of the past, but building on and correcting them. Our evolving understanding of nature has a history, with a more occluded past, a present mixture of partial understanding and of open questions, and a hoped-for future of clearer insight.

If the 13^th century is marked by the dawn of the first concepts in experimental method, then in Grosseteste it also represents a clear new departure in the ubiquitous application of mathematical thought to natural science. From our modern perspective, it is hard to imagine an intellectual milieu in which this would not seem natural. But that is because we do not share the same sharp dualism of the perfect and imperfect inherited philosophically from Plato and cosmologically from Aristotle. Grosseteste himself comments on the Posterior Analytics that we are able to do with mathematics that which God is able to do with physics – that is to deduce conclusions from axioms within a closed system. We do have access to the fundamental axioms of mathematics, but only the Creator has that access in regard to nature. Our task is to arrive at those axioms inductively from observations of their consequences. Such human predicament of incompleteness is a consequence of our dwelling in the sublunary world of imperfection. Now, while is it natural that (perfect) mathematics applies to the structure and motion of the (perfected) spheres above that of the moon, it is by no means clear that it will be as commensurate with the (imperfect) realm of the elements. To assay a mathematical analysis of sublunary nature is therefore not only a critical, but a bold, step. Yet it is one that Grosseteste takes in each of his scientific treatises. In spite of the unavailability of advanced algebraic notation of any kind, he is able to compute, for example, abstract vectors combinatorially in his three-dimensional colour space. Perhaps more impressive is the continuation of his discussion of colour in the De iride, in which he considers the conceptual space of all possible rainbows. Though not immediately apparent as such, this high degree of abstract and structured thinking is highly mathematical.  In re-thinking Aristotle in critical ways, and in advancing mathematical tools to conceptualise the structures that lie behind the superficial perception of phenomena such as colour, Grosseteste partakes in both the reception and advancement of a much longer story of science than typically frames discussions of religion and science today.

 

3. A Cultural Narrative for Science

Perhaps the most striking contrast between Grosseteste’s intellectual world and ours can be found in our differing teleology. Cultural narratives are able to generate purpose, or equally, to proclaim purposelessness. So, while he knows why he is exploring the natural world, and develops a strong sense of purpose in doing so, we have in our own time lost any such propelling meta-narrative. In late modernism a faint echo of a human reason that we do science remained, but only in an instrumental narrative of national economic prosperity. In a post-modern atmosphere of suspicion around all overarching stories, that too (possibly healthily) has withered.

There are both simple and more sophisticated strands within Grosseteste’s motivations to engage in natural science. On a delightfully childlike level, at one point in his commentaries on the Psalms, he reflects that, if the Bible chooses to convey truth to its readers through the illustrations of natural objects (trees, clouds, falling leaves etc.) then it behoves us to discover as much as we are able concerning them, simply in order that we might better understand the scriptures. An application of this very direct thinking appears in an explanatory note accompanying his edition of John Damascene’s De Fide Orthodoxa. Two chapters in the earliest manuscripts at his disposal concerned scientific topics that ostensibly had no contact with the theological substance of the work as a whole. Earlier editors had sometimes omitted them for that reason. But Grosseteste reinstates both, explaining that:

“These two chapters, namely the 24^th about seas and the 25^th about winds, are omitted in some Greek manuscripts; perhaps because they did not seem to contain a theological subject. But according to truly wise men, every notice of truth is useful in the explanation and understanding of theology.”

We see immediately the impressively connected philosophy of knowledge that drives his studies. Although he is perfectly able to distinguish theology and science (again, there was no age – certainly not the 13^th century – in which they were ‘indistinguishable’), he takes the two as mutually dependent in at least illustrative ways. He maintains a clear distinction between theological and scientific writing, but within an implicit and deep connectivity. So although we find no explicit theological introductions or conclusions to the scientific works, this is because their theological task speaks for itself. For an explanation of deeper connection between the silent theological framing of his natural philosophy, and the science itself, we need to turn to the philosophical works. In the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (of Aristotle) Grosseteste places a more sophisticated theological philosophy of science within the overarching Christian narrative of Creation, Fall and Redemption. Employing a Boethian metaphor for the effect of the Fall on the higher intellectual and spiritual powers (in descending hierarchy those of understanding, memory, imagination) as a ‘lulling to sleep’ by the weight of fallen flesh, he maintains that the lower faculties, including critically the senses, are less affected by fallen human nature than the higher. Human understanding (aspectus) is now inseparable from human emotion and loves (affectus); the inward turning of the latter now dulls the former. However, there is an avenue of hope that the once-fallen higher faculties might be re-awakened: engaging the affectus, through the still-operable lower senses, in the created external things of nature allows it to be met by a remainder (vestigium) of other, outer light. So a process of re-illumination can begin once more with the lowest faculties and successively re-enlighten the higher:

“Since sense perception, the weakest of all human powers, apprehending only corruptible individual things, survives, imagination stands, memory stands, and finally understanding, which is the noblest of human powers capable of apprehending the incorruptible, universal, first essences, stands!”

Human engagement with the external world through the senses, necessary because of our fallen nature, becomes a participation in the theological project of salvation. Furthermore, the reason that this is possible is because this relationship with the created world is also the nexus at which the human seeking is met by divine illumination. As a central example, the ‘physics of light’ grounded in the cosmogony of the De luce informs a ‘metaphysics of light’ as a vehicle to become a ‘theology of light’.  The teleological – purposeful –  employment of scientific investigation as an instrument of human participation in a reversal of the effects of sin in the fall, is an idea that itself reawakens in the early modern period, especially (but by no means exclusively) in Francis Bacon [4].

 

4. A Unified Vision

Reading Grosseteste from a scientific perspective excites resonances with a class of thinkers for whom a unified map of the world has the highest value. Einstein is perhaps the most celebrated modern example. The prime motivation for his Nobel Prizewinning work on the photoelectric effect was not a central attack on that problem – it is in any case a corollary to the paper [5] – but a desire to develop a thermodynamic account of light. Similarly, relativity arises, not from a direct analysis of time and motion, but from an attempt to overcome an uncomfortable incommensurability between late 19^th century electromagnetism and mechanics.

A similar passion for a single vision has already emerged in our examination of the De colore and De iride – taken together with the De luce these works replace a fragmented universe of coloured objects by a unified theory of the activity of light within body to generate the phenomenon of material extension that in turn produces the phenomenon of colour. Furthermore, the abstract geometry of colour itself works as a unifying mathematical framework in all of its occurrences, arising from the product of internal properties of materials and of light.

Perhaps more remarkable is the completely original unification that Grosseteste makes, at least by implication, in the De luce, of the superlunary and sublunary cosmic regions. For Aristotle, as we have seen, the universe contains two incommensurate and separate realms in which, for all time, both nature and physics are different. The imperfect spheres of the elements sustain vertical motion, mixing, disease, while above the moon all matter is perfect, crystalline and all motion circular. There is not even a temporal connection between the two regions, since this separation has been the case for all time. The cosmogony of the De luce is not only a remarkable application of Aristotelian physics taken in a critical vein to overthrow an Aristotelian cosmos without beginning, nor is it just an impressively clever theory of origins. It also demonstrates how the same creative force of light (in its two forms of lux and lumen) and its action of rarefaction and compression on matter, can give rise to both superlunary and sublunary regions within a single process of structure development, itself determined by a uniform set of properties. Grosseteste explains that the inward progression of lumen, together with its successive perfection of the spheres, is eventually weakened through distance from the firmament and through the work it needs to do in passing through all the underlying spheres. Below the orbit of the Moon, there is insufficient power within the field of lumen to form any further perfected spheres, so what materials remain – the elements – are compacted but left unperfected. Today we would term this process a ‘symmetry breaking’: the operations of a uniform physical process on a system that originally possesses a state of symmetry, breaks that symmetry by creating two regions in different states. A detailed computational study of the physics in De luce has confirmed that such a programme can be taken further than the text alone is able to, using tools unavailable before the invention of the calculus [6], but translating only Grosseteste’s own physics into the computational mathematics.

 

5. A Relational and Incarnational Metaphysics

There is another purpose evident in Grosseteste’s thought behind the re-engagement of the human mind with the inner structures of the cosmos, one that is independent from the post-lapsarian invitation to re-awaken fallen minds. This second strand is important to him, for one of his great theological questions concerns an alternative history – one in which there is no Fall from grace. In the De cessation legalium he asks famously An Deus esset homo etiam si non esset lapsus homo? The question of the incarnation in such an unfallen world has corollaries – in particular would we be doing ‘science’ in such a world? Is there, in other words, a motivation for natural philosophy that goes beyond the restoration of a mind once perceiving nature clearly, but now clouded and dulled? Although the text does not address this question directly, it points in very strong directions that parallel Grosseteste’s conclusion that there would indeed have been an incarnation of God in an unfallen world, and that his relationship with human and non-human creation maintains a directional narrative even without its disastrous first turn.

Grosseteste points out, once again driven by the primacy of his unifying principle of light, that the human body communicates with all corporeal natures (‘communicat in natura’) because of the way light is incorporated into all elements by its reflection from the heavenly bodies. All of the rational soul of humans, the sensitive souls of animals and the vegetative souls of plants share both the same indwelling of constitutive light, and the composition of the elements. He entertains a very early insight into the material way in which humankind is, literally, earthed into creation. An even more impressive account of such material connectedness across the cosmos is found towards the end of the De luce, and is worth quoting in full:

 

And it is clear that every higher body in respect of the luminosity begotten from it is the species and perfection of the following body. And just as unity is potentially every following number, so the first body by the multiplication of its luminosity is every following body. Earth, in contrast, is all higher bodies by the collection in it of the higher luminosities. Thus, the poets call it “Pan” (that is,“All”) and it is named Cybele as if cubele from the cube (that is, from solidity); because it is the most compressed and dense of all bodies, it is Cybele and mother of all the gods, for although all higher luminosities are brought together [in earth], they have not come forth in it through their operations, but it is possible that the luminosity of any celestial sphere you please be drawn out from earth into act and operation, and so from earth, as if from a kind of mother, any god will be procreated.

A modern version of this sentiment was made famous by the scientist and communicator Carl Sagan, drawing a material communication between human and cosmic materiality not from light, but from the atomic generative properties of stars:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star-stuff.”

For both writers there are real, material reasons that connect us to even the most distant objects in the universe. The difference is in the material detail: Grosseteste deduces them from the structuring properties of light, Sagan from the unique environments within the cores of stars, where alone heavy elements can be manufactured. In spite of the efforts of thinking such as this, almost poetic in the connective and emotive force of its idea, the deeply relational cultural context that it suggests for science has not taken root.

 

The Lessons

Transforming these themes into needful narratives for a healthy science today needs the refractive process of theology in context.  But there are living themes that do offer a healing path to the current troubled story of science. The long story of natural wisdom, a high expectation of human ability and responsibility, a balance of practical an intellectual wisdom, the enduring of difficulty, an accommodation with uncertainly, a celebration of the question, and the exercise of love – these are some of the lessons we can begin to draw from a deep engagement with medieval science. They are far from irrelevant to our time. Very much more than a fascinating period in the early history of science, the 13^th century and its thinkers, of whom Grosseteste is the prime example, speak with wisdom we urgently need to rediscover.

 

[1] R Numbers (ed) Galileo Goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion (2010) Harvard University Press

[2] Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Giles E.M. Gasper, Michael Huxtable, Tom C.B. McLeish, Cecilia Panti and Hannah Smithson, “Dimensions of Colour: Robert Grosseteste’s De Colore; Edition, Translation and Interdisciplinary Analysis, (2013) Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts

[3] Wuerger, SM , Maloney, LT and Krauskopf, J (1995) Vision Research, 35 827-835.

[4] Peter Harrison, (2007) The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge

[5] A. Einstein (1905) Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148.

[6] R G Bower et al., (2014) Proc Roy Soc A, 470, 20140025

Are ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’ conflicting world views?

Sergio Graziosi speaks for many when he articulates his bemusement that I continue in maintaining that the ‘conflict thesis’ represents a category error. He says that they are two ‘world views’ that cannot coexist.  But science is not, of itself, a ‘world view’. It is, as he rightly says, an evidence-based methodology by which the thinking and acting emergent blobs of person-forming matter called humans reconstruct and understand the material workings and structures of the universe.  The two competing world views are not ‘religion’ and ‘science’, they are ‘atheism’ and ‘theism’ – together with the multiple branchings of narrative that belong below both headings.

Whether one’s world view is theistic or atheistic (or agnostic) does not affect in broad terms what science is and how we do it.  In either case what we now call science is the current chapter in a long long human story of curiosity and exploration of the material world.  It is true that the information arising from science can inform one’s worldview.  An example of a change in the light of such evidence is philosopher Anthony Flew’s change from an atheist to theist worldview, largely in the light of new evidence from modern physics (and some latterly perceived weaknesses in arguments for atheism).

What science is not able to do is provide its own narrative of purpose. What I argue in Faith and Wisdom in Science is that we urgently need to discover a teleological story for science – what is it really for in human terms.  The commonly enshrined statements by governments, that we do science (and so fund it) purely for economic benefit just won’t do.  This is also why I want to situate science together with music, art, literature (only in the sense that these are all activities deeply at the heart of what it means to be human, not that they all provide evidence for worldviews in the same way, or that they share methodologies).

Theology is is one human activity very well suited to discussions of purpose – the ‘what are we here for’ sort of questions.  Such a discussion naturally feeds into choices about ethical decisions in science and technology.  Of course the outcomes of a discussion on what is science for, in the light of a thestic worldview, might well contradict those from an atheist one, but they cannot possibly contradict science itself, as Graziosi claims, as science doesn’t discuss its own purpose at all, any more than music discusses why we make music.

The question of consistency of natural law is, of course, an issue of faith in any world view.  Yes we believe as scientists that the laws of physics as far as we know them apply at all times and places, but they might not.  Evidence might grow, for example, that the gravitational constant, well.., isn’t.  In the early universe we know (we believe…) that ‘the laws of physics break down’ and we have no idea what replaces them at the Plank scale.  So there is plenty of precedent within science for a discussion of how ‘regular’ laws of physics are.  Nor, on the other hand, does a theistic worldview necessarily hang on a capricious deity that suspends law at will.  But there is, of course, a long history of discussion about the way that the very existence of comprehensible physical law points to the existence of a mind behind that law, and the universe itself.  Again, whether God changes the laws of physics in ‘miracles’ or not is a discussion within a theological community of different views. It is not an ‘incompatibility’ between science and religion.

Finally, it isn’t true to say that there are no methodological links between religion and science. My own approach to Christian belief, for example, has been a decision to explore the ‘hypothesis of living life in the light of God’ in the light of evidence. Of course there is no knock-down proof of either the existence, or the non-existence of God. But then not being able to prove things is a very familiar predicament for a scientist! This is not the time or place to expand on this approach to belief, but if I did I would identify three strands of evidence: (1) The connection of the Judeo-Christian story with the human experience of evil; (2) The historical events around Jesus; (3) The experience of transformation in quiet humble lives that I witness all the time. Note I am not saying that this is a scientific methodology, but that in following it I do not think that I am being inconsistent as a scientist in my approach to a wider framing of where persons, purpose, hurt, healing and hope come from.

The unsolvable tension: faith, science, or faith in evidence?

Here is a really clear articulation of one of the difficulties some people have with my view that the ‘conflict narrative’ for science and religion is a category error (but for subtle reasons not to do with non–overlapping magisteria). Answer to follow anon …

Writing my own user manual

A couple of weeks ago, a puzzling piece appeared on The Conversation: the title “Restoring science’s place in society will help us resolve the big debates” naturally caught my eye, and I started reading it expecting to find some hints on how to surpass the common attitude that grants the same weight to opinion and evidence. Reading it, however, quickly became puzzling and made me experience a sort of dissonance discomfort. As a result, I posted the link on Reddit, with a very short and critical disclaimer (further explained in a subsequent comment), and then tweeted my disappointment directly to The Conversation.
To my surprise, Tom McLeish, the author of the original article replied to my rather blunt tweet (it’s official, Twitter is fine for praise, but it really doesn’t work for criticism, constructive or not), and we engaged on a short and very civilised exchange

View original post 2,048 more words

Talking, and not talking, about God in ‘Faith and Wisdom in Science’

The best return on writing the book comes in the regular opportunities to discuss the ideas with all sorts of people – at public lectures, university seminars, church events, schools … I cant say I have a favourite.  And the best of all that is when it is time for questions.  There are always fresh ones (as well as some familiar but ever-interesting themes).

A recent and memorable evening was held at St Mary’s Primrose Hill in North London. A very warm welcome, wise chairing by host Revd Mark Wakefield (who has also blogged the event here), and a very mixed audience launched a long and fascinating discussion.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

One questioner wanted to know why ‘I had not mentioned God’ in my introduction.  Actually that wasn’t quite correct – we had looked at the central “Lord’s Answer” in the Book of Job, where Yahweh finally answers Job’s complaints with a surprising question-tour of the natural world. But the point was that we had talked about the ‘science and religion’ question a lot without much explicit talk of God.

A simple answer is that one can talk (and live) implicitly about God all the time without using ‘God-language’ – it’s also a deep answer.  The Apophatic tradition in Christian theology has a lot to say about not saying too much about God.  Associated at its root with the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (probably 6th century) who was quoted extensively by Thomas Aquinas, it develops the idea that the correct approach to an understanding of God is to affirm what he is not, rather than to attempt to say what he is.  God is beyond all referents that we can comprehend. Since Aquinas, a definition of ‘Theology’ that I have found most helpful is not, ‘the study of God’, but ‘the study of everything in the light of God’.  To suggest, as does St. John (1 Jn 5v1) that ‘God is light’ is to suggest that we should not look at him, but at everything by the light that he provides.

There is Biblical precedent for a ‘looking away from God’ too.  Throughout the Old Testament, as the ‘biblical library’ moves from Pentateuch through Wisdom to Prophecy, explicit references to ‘God’ by any of the Hebrew uses reduces.  Famously, there are no mentions of God at all in Esther or in the Song of Songs.  But these two books are full of the light on life that comes from the context of a covenant faith.

Science, too, is a human endeavour (like the racial politics of Esther or the celebration of erotic love of the Song) that doesn’t need explicit God-talk to progress, but which is enormously helped by recognising the covenant context.  As I argue in Faith and Wisdom in Science, it is just these theological resources that science needs to reconstruct a healthy social narrative for what it does.  To say that science is a deeply religious activity does not mean that we need to talk about God in the lab.

A Sermon on “The Search for Wisdom for Today” Job 28 and Colossians 1:15-23

I know that a few readers of the book and this blog put regular effort into both giving, and listening to talks/sermons in churches.  That forum is one of the key places where the strand of a new confidence in science urged on the church in Faith and Wisdom in Science can begin.  I had the good fortune last week to be invited to preach at the annual Commemoration of Benefactors Service at Durham Cathedral.  The occasion brings town, region, cathedral, schools and university together. Durham and its environs is well known both as an ancient seat of medieval scholarship and wisdom.  It is also known for coal-mining (active until a generation ago). So Job 28 seemed a good starting point.  Here it is in full:

The north view of the massive norman nave of Durham Cathedral seen from Palace Green.

It’s a wonderful privilege to be here, literally at the transept of our two intersecting and neighbouring communities of Cathedral and University. How humbling to meet in this shared space of study, contemplation and worship of unutterable beauty that we have jointly inherited from centuries of generous forbears.

I have in the past week taken two visitors from overseas around this place (I never let them leave Durham without a Cathedral tour, naturally), one from Greece, one from Mexico, and again it was they not I who voiced the impression of learning and wisdom seeming to permeate the stones and hang in the air from the centuries of scholarly and holy strata laid down by our predecessors. We have much wisdom to be thankful for.

It’s a good thing, because wisdom, or the urgent need for it, seems to have become a repeated theme in our time.  Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes has called it, ‘the cry for wisdom in late modern culture’. Less academically, I’ll admit to a fondness, before his passing, of Alastair Cook’s weekly radio broadcast ‘Letter from America’. One I recall vividly followed a vigorous debate in Senate and Congress over a possible military intervention in the Middle East. Cook recalled the reflections of an elderly Senator who confessed that it wasn’t so much the dominance of either hawks or doves that troubled him, but the lamentable shortage of owls.

From the perspective of the arts, TS Eliot cries out in the chorus of his play ‘The Rock’

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the Wisdom we have lost in Knowledge?

Where is the Knowledge we have lost in Information?

Even our friends at University College London have launched a university-wide research theme called ‘From Knowledge to Wisdom’ (I hope that at Durham, this drive lies within all our research themes!).

Well we stand between our two of oldest and wisest benefactors, Cuthbert – of whom a fellow monk records that they ‘drank from heavenly wisdom together’, and Bede – one of whose famous prayers addresses Christ as the ‘Fountain of all Wisdom’.

The tomb of the Venerable Bede in the west end Gallilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral

So let us, in their company, take a look at perhaps the deepest, most foundational, surprising – even humorous – passage on Wisdom in the whole of the Bible.

The 28^th chapter of Job sings with a new voice into the spiralling and tense arguments and accusations of this extraordinary book. Job, a rich and righteous man has lost family, wealth, heards, house and even his health. He sits, scraping his sores and tormented by his so-called friends. For their brittle religious world views can only explain his suffering by supposing it to be divine retribution for sins – and they choose to let him know it. He feels the injustice keenly and demands vindication, yet they become increasingly personal in their accusations. A terrible climax is reached in the previous chapter (27) – then comes this unexpected theme …

Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place where gold is refined.

Iron is taken from the soil, rock that will be poured out as copper.

An end is put to darkness, and to the furthest bound they seek the ore in gloom and deep darkness.

A foreign race cuts the shafts; forgotten by travellers, far away from humans they dangle and sway.

That earth from which food comes forth is underneath changed as if by fire.

What on earth is going on? Indeed, what under the earth is going on? The text takes us down a mine shaft! (This has to be a favourite Durham Bible passage). It muses on the special human ability to dig down and so see the Earth from beneath – the precious stones glinting in the miners’ lamplight, the seams of gold and silver. Not even the falcon’s sharp eye can perceive all this – the hidden sources of rivers.

The passage actually condenses a theme that runs right through the book alongside that of unjust suffering – it’s about the way we fashion our relationship with the physical world around us. It concerns where we go – ‘there is a path…’, what we see – ‘unseen be eye of falcon’, what we understand – ‘bringing to light what is hidden’ and what we do – ‘they split open channels in the rocks’.

Some translators have found this language so powerful that they have turned the subject of this deep seeing from humans to God. But as a scientist I see in this a fitting metaphor for what we do – there really is an astonishing human ability to explore nature from beneath its surface and to understand its workings.

It is only at this point that the hymn admits its true subject

But where is wisdom to be found? And where is the place of understanding?

Humans do not know the way to it; it is not found in the land of the living.

In a comical game of hide and seek we look for wisdom in all the land – no, not there – at the bottom of the sea – no, not here either. Perhaps significantly we follow the wisdom trail to the opulent markets of Cush and Ophir. Old Testament scholar Carol Newsome notes the measure of their wealth – five different words are used for gold in as many verses! But wisdom is not to be found in the marketplace.

Finally the writer ‘draws back the curtain’ and reveals why God knows the way to wisdom.

Divine wisdom begins with a new deep way of seeing – ‘He looked to the ends of the earth’

Divine wisdom is numerate – ‘to assign a weight to the wind, the waters by measure’

Divine wisdom finds ways of channelling nature’s forces, not suppressing them – ‘he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderbolt’

Divine wisdom participates in what Paul Fiddes has called ‘Seeing the World and knowing God’ – it becomes an invitation to us to follow in Wisdom’s way of living. Wisdom is not an object we could possess, nor an accumulation of precepts and aphorisms. It is a way of seeing into the world, a way of serving creation, a way of partnering with each other and with our Creator.

It is a bright vision, and one that sacred or secular communities badly need. But in the light of the shrill voices of intolerance growing once again, the contradiction between our almost limitless technology yet inability to manage its consequences, our media-fuelled world as empty of wisdom as this vision is full of it – in the light of all that is it not a hopeless one?

Our New Testament reading tells us why this is not so, how, when all around is dark, it is not hopeless – any more than, as it turned out, Job’s state was hopeless even at his own lowest point.

Here St. Paul writes to the early church in Collossae – using the same subject matter as in the Hymn to Wisdom, but transformed. Here are again all created things, here the visible and the hidden things both, here also the aching need to reconcile all that is broken in the world. But now, in the same transept that draws all these together, in the place that the Book of Job assigned to Wisdom, Paul sees Jesus.

And the reason that this gives him hope is not that the darkness and death that threaten never come, not that the task of living as part of a complex and troubled world is not painful, but that because of Christ’s entering all this, going through death but into the new life of the resurrection, hope turns from wistfulness into solid reality.

That is why Bede, who knows his astronomy in the eighth century so much better than most of us do today (he knew all about the wisdom of seeing deeply into creation by measure..), called Christ not only the fountain of wisdom but also the Morning Star. It isn’t because the planet Venus shines with an attractive and pure light, although it does. It is because it orbits the sun at a closer distance than the earth, so is never more than 45 degrees or so from it in the sky. So when Venus rises as a morning star, although at that point the sky is still as dark as at midnight, and there is no other sign in heaven or earth to show that day is coming, yet the one who gazes upon this one light, and through wisdom grasps its significance, knows that, against all other evidence, yet day is nonetheless almost at hand – they can hope for it, and act upon it, as solid reality

We finish with a prayer composed of Bede’s words:

O Christ our Morning Star, Splendour of Light Eternal

Fount of all wisdom and shining with the glory of the rainbow

Come and waken us from the greyness of our apathy

And renew in us your gift of hope. Amen