Secular prophets

The writer Kathryn Schulz has a terrific book review in the Feb. 16-23 issue of The New Yorker, about a biography of the poet Alfred Tennyson.

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, by Richard Holmes, sets the poet’s life against the backdrop of the mid-Victorian explosion of new scientific discoveries—fossils, deep time, other galaxies, mass extinctions, the mutability of species—and how these overturned settled ideas of a static nature, a sovereign God, and humans positioned just a little lower than the angels.

Schulz notes in her review that some of Tennyson’s most celebrated poetry expresses not only private emotions, particularly grief (his “In Memoriam” mourns a treasured friend who died at an early age), but also broadens the lens to consider what human life means when it is yanked from its context in a stable, God-centered order. Schulz quotes this verse:

                  The hills are shadows, and they flow

                     From form to form, and nothing stands;

                     They melt like mist, the solid lands,

                  Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Resurrection and eternal life don’t make the same sense, nor hold out much comfort, in a world where everything is ephemeral.

Coincidentally, I’m also watching Ken Burns’s three-part PBS documentary on Henry David Thoreau. Born in 1817, Thoreau was a close contemporary of Tennyson (b. 1809). Burns’s telling draws attention to how Thoreau’s thinking also was shaped by science: by new discoveries in biology and botany, and also by the large-scale industrial damage to the forests, rivers, and coastlines of his Massachusetts home, thanks to technology derived from some of these same scientific discoveries.

For Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists, any belief system that permitted and abetted such exploitation of nature (and also of people; Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist) had to be false. Truth, beauty, and goodness were to be found not in received religion or in profit-driven, technology-facilitated capitalism but in nature itself. Nature is no longer to be feared or exploited, but respected as a source of wisdom that humans ought to heed. This was radical stuff at the time.

It seems to me that both these writers were secular prophets, so keenly attuned to the anxieties and preoccupations of their time, so alert to the social radar, so skilled at expressing and amplifying the inchoate thought-currents around them, articulating the dilemmas that the rest of us barely comprehend, that when we hear them speak, even today, we say, “Yes! Yes! I didn’t know how to put it into words, but that’s exactly it.”  

Does their prophecy follow the zeitgeist, or drive it? Or both? Whatever the case, we’re still debating these questions today. How much does nature influence our individual lives and our destiny as a species? What do we owe nature? What is it asking of us? How much control can or should we have over it? Is nature just matter in motion, or is there some unifying spirit behind the scene, something more “out there” or “in here”? Does the label “God” adequately describe this larger reality (if it’s there), and if not, what does?

Especially now, I’m seeing a lot of digging-in of heels by people who are convinced they have the one right answer. I’m talking about the militant religionists on the one end of the opinion spectrum and the militant atheists on the other, those whose fundamentalism exerts a magnetic valance at each pole, so that the spectrum bends like a horseshoe and the extremes bend around to meet and glare at each other.

As for the rest of us, ranged along the horseshoe’s legs and curve, I’m hearing and participating in a lot of fruitful discussion, a brave willingness to be open to the truths to be found in many ways of understanding nature and spirit. I’m finding that every cosmology has something to teach me.

I don’t read in Tennyson any conflict between nature and spirit, science and religion. He was a poet, not an ideologue. But I do sense in his poems a sweet generosity of vision. Consider his famous poem “Crossing the Bar:”

“Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea.

In this first stanza, the poet evokes nature in the tide, the sea, the sunset, suffusing the words with a serene resignation. The mention of a metaphorical Pilot in the last stanza lends a note of hope:

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place  

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face  

When I have cross’d the bar.

The poem gives me hope that there is space in our world for fruitful conversation about nature and spirit and where we humans fit with all of it.