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jimtzu
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« on: December 22, 2009, 01:01:42 PM » |
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i thought this was an interesting article....
James Carroll
The Boston Globe
Religion, science, and the solstice
By James Carroll
December 21, 2009
TODAY’S DARKNESS is tomorrow’s light. Contemplations of the winter solstice once opened into religion, which is why the cultic festivals of light define the secular space this week. “Here comes the sun,’’ as the Beatles told us, and they could have been singing of Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god whose celebration was preempted by Christmas, songs of a different Son. Sure enough, the days will get longer now. Does it matter that the sun, actually, is not “coming,’’ but that the earth, in its elliptical revolution, only adjusts the tilt in its rotation? Contemplations of the solstice opened equally into what we call science.
Religion and science occupy separate and opposed spheres, no? Not to our distant forebears, from whom all of our illumination festivals derive. They could not afford the facile dichotomy between the sacred and the profane that defines thinking since the Enlightenment, when people of the West sought to free themselves from the bane of superstition. For most of history, though, religion was not taken to be a flight from rationality, but a mode of it. Noting the intervals of nature that repeated themselves gave the ancients their liturgical cycles, but also the natural clock. The natural clock gave them measurement, and eventually the mechanical clock, from which ordered thought took off. The infinite universe and the abyss of individual consciousness both required attention, and the mind evolved to reach equally toward the macro and the micro, a bi-directional measuring that has brought us to where we are. The Hubble Telescope. Nanotech. The novels of James Joyce.
In the beginning, though, the winter cults by which the gods were worshipped were part of a generalized marking of the calendar that served the immediate purpose of survival. When humans had replaced opportunistic scavenging (“hunters and gatherers’’) with agriculture (planting and herding), close attention to the sun and other heavenly bodies became a necessity, since livestock take mating cues from the quality of light, and cycles of the harvest equally depend on celestial predictability. Knowing how the moon wanes and waxes, and where the sun is in relation to the horizon had become ways to fend off starvation. The creatures who honored the gods with light in winter were honoring their own ability to think.
Art, engineering, astronomy, physical exertion, social organization, and mysticism - such categories are rigidly distinct in our time, each a separate university “discipline,’’ different buildings, if not quads. Yet imagine how those skills came together, say, in the construction of New Grange, the man-made hill in Ireland that was assembled out of huge stones some 5,000 years ago. Defining a mound that probably served as a tomb, the small inner chamber has a narrow opening to the sky that was calibrated so precisely as to admit a needle of sunlight only at dawn on the winter solstice. The light, lasting minutes, illuminates delicately carved triple spirals that would, over millennia, be seen as triune symbols of male, female, child; birth, love, death; eventually of the Trinity, foreshadowing the Irish shamrock.
The megalith structure in Ireland was created by “primitives’’ whose lives were hemmed in by ghosts and goblins, predating perhaps even Druids, yet it was, in fact, a sophisticated scientific instrument, carefully scaled to register the event that happens again today. The landscape of Earth is likewise marked with such massive measuring devices, each of which comes into its own on the solstice, from Stonehenge in England to Aztec pyramids in Mexico. Right through the Middle Ages, religion and science were paired in the quest for such usable knowledge, with even European cathedrals aligned to serve as solar observatories. (See “The Sun in the Church’’ by J. L. Heilbrun.)
What prompted humans to imagine that religious impulses and the rational quest for insight are at war with each other? Once it became clear that the sun would “return’’ whether or not blessed candles were lit, why did the idea of prayer come to seem naive? When mystical wonder was walled off from measurable observation, science restricted its range, and religion anathematized critical thinking - disasters both. But the festivals this week, sparked by this morning’s dawn, call to mind the age-old spaciousness of informed imagination. Happily, it remains so. Knowledge is holy. Season’s greetings.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
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