Astronomy and Angels

Do you ever long for the good old days, when the sun went around the Earth, and we were really the center of everything? Science keeps discovering new ways in which we are less and less significant, and the world more and more strange. Not many eras ago, if I were to quip, “They told us to get out of the galaxy before sundown – but they didn’t say which sun,” nobody would get the point. Now, we understand that it’s something more than a silly joke.

How to live in a world like this? One approach is not to take any of it too seriously. Even the astronomer, who spends his (or her) days (or nights) in realms almost inconceivably immense and remote – or the nuclear physicist, who studies the interior vastness of atomic particles – has to come home, take out the garbage, and tell the children bedtime stories. It’s as if there are two separate realities: the one we live in from day to day, and the one we know of, but can safely ignore (if we wish to retain our sanity).

Poets have struggled to express this almost irresoluble dichotomy. One of my favorite examples is by Francis Thompson, a British vagrant whose own mental (and physical) health was indeed often in question, and who died in 1907, just two years after Einstein published his first paper on Relativity. 

Thompson was deeply religious, and his poem “The Kingdom of God” strives to affirm that there is no real divide between the universe beyond us and the world within us. “O world unknowable, we know thee,” he starts by declaring. And the stanza that has haunted me since school days proclaims:

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! –
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

This does need a little explanation. Thompson imagines a universe full of “wheeling systems” like our own Solar System. To “darken,” in this context, can be understood as meaning to move obscurely. “The drift of pinions” means the beating of wings – that is, the wings of angels. And “our own clay-shuttered doors” is a poetic way of saying “our own bodies and lives.” (I still remember my English teacher thumping her chest as she read out that last line.) In other less-imaginative words, whatever we consider meaningful and holy is not “out there,” but “in here.”

So, everything that really matters is all around us, as much as it is anywhere else. That line about the “drift of pinions” reminds me of another quotation from the days when people still thought, at least figuratively, in terms of angels – one of the few lingering fragments of my college history studies. It is from a once-famous speech given in the British House of Commons by John Bright in 1855, when Britain was bogged down (as other countries have been in other conflicts) in the Crimean War. 

Bright was a leading opponent of that now long-forgotten war. He declaimed: “The Angel of Death is abroad in the land. You can almost hear the beating of his wings.” (That war, however – which did give us both “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Florence Nightingale – went on for another year. Later, Bright, when asked by one of his young children about the meaning of “Crimea” on a monument, is said to have answered, “A crime.” Recent events in that region have given those words new resonance.)

Today – thanks largely to the dubious progress of psychiatry – most of us think less of spiritual intervention in human affairs than of the power of drugs to penetrate our consciousness and shape the ways we see the world. But one potent and controversial pharmaceutical, Phencyclidine (PCP), first marketed in the 1950s, has long been known as “Angel Dust.” And, instead of the Angels of Heaven, some associations of mortals – including certain Allied aviators in both World Wars, and, more recently, a notorious California-based band of riotous motorcyclists – have proudly claimed kinship with the nether regions, by calling themselves “Hell’s Angels.”

All these perturbations of our previously placid world view help us sympathize with the reluctance of the Polish Renaissance astronomer, Copernicus, to publish his almost literally Earth-shaking book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. It is said that a copy of the first printing was placed in his hands in 1543, just before he died.

What a way to go!