What has Outer Space to do with Christ?
Here follows the written version of remarks delivered to the
Space in the Catholic Imagination Conference, held May 6, 2020, at St. John’s Seminary.
1. QUID COELUS CUM CHRISTO?
Upon a time in the Eighth Century, Alcuin of York in vexation wrote to the Bishop of Lindisfarne about the intrusion of secular epics of the hero Ingeld being sung in church.
He famously said Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? – What has Ingeld to do with Christ? — for the house was narrow and could not hold both.
In this generation, our bards no longer make epics about Ingeld, nor operas about Siegfried, but we do write space epics and space operas.
So, the question for our generation is parallel: Quid Coelus cum Christo? — what has Outer Space to do with Christ?
For it is commonplace today to propose that the Church is too narrow for her teachings to include the wide wonders of Outer Space, in particular, the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds.
2. IMPLICATIONS of the QUESTION
In the Christian scheme of things, the mortality of man, and his hope of immortality, spring from the specific acts of specific men; original sin springs from the Fallen Adam, and redemption from the Risen Christ.
Once we introduce other worlds into the Christian scheme, inhabited by rational animals like Man, what becomes of the acts of Adam, or of Christ?
How could a Man from Mars be infected by the original sin of Adam on Earth? Adam is not his father. Absent original sin, why would a Martian be mortal?
Christ is the only begotten Son of God, and no man comes to God save through Him. How then can salvation reach the rational creatures of Pluto or Proxima, Alpha Camelopardalis or M31 in Andromeda?
The magnitude of the cosmos renders it difficult to imagine that mankind was given dominion over all creation, and charged to subdue it.
It is even more difficult to imagine that Christians could have been given the great commission to spread the good news of salvation across all the constellations in the galaxy, all the galaxies in the local group, all the clusters in our supercluster, and all the superclusters in the cosmos, of which there are ten million visible in the night sky.
One of the larger of these is the Corona Borealis Supercluster, one billion lightyears away, and three hundred million lightyears wide, three times as large as the Virgo Cluster our galaxy inhabits.
Preaching the gospel to an intelligent hive-mind of methane-breathing worm things dwelling in the volcanic ocean trenches of some Ice Giant world of red star adrift in a Dwarf Galaxy amid the myriad galaxies lost in the Corona Borealis Supercluster would be a doubtful project indeed, considering the one billion year delay between any radio signal and response.
That is, of course, assuming our missionaries one day learn how to harness the output of a quasar, or perhaps a galaxy full of exploding supernovas, to power a radio beam able to reach so far.
To get an idea of scale, the ray of light carrying to our eyes now the image of Corona Borealis departed its source during the Mesoproterozoic Era — This was when the first supercontinent, Rodinia, newly lifted its bald and barren stones above the waves into an oxygen-free atmosphere; and, along her shallow coastlines, a strain of red algae had recently been granted the innovation of sexual reproduction.
The idea that those unfortunate worm things are condemned to hell if we do not get the message to them calls into question the justice of God.
3. ARGUMENT FROM MAGNITUDE
Such is the question and its implications. But before addressing it, let us discover what kind of question it is.
3.1 Not New
Whatever this question is, first, it is not new. The ancients knew the cosmos was large, and man insignificant, and speculated that manlike beings might dwell on the far side of the globe, or among planets and stars.
In the First Century BC, Cicero penned The Dream of Scipio, in which Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, in a vision meets his famous ancestor, Scipio Africanus, hero of the war with Carthage, amid the starry heavens.
The lordly ghost displays the earth underfoot as a small and dim spot. Scipio beholds that the Mediterranean — that great middle sea which Rome was so proud of entirely encircling with her conquests — is little more than that unnamed jungle pond mentioned by Herodotus where pygmies war with cranes.
The first mention in literature of occupants among the stars appears in Book III of Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in 1667. In this scene, Lucifer is winging toward earth, and sees the stars close at hand as he descends through them.
“… other worlds they seemed, or happy isles,
Like those Hesperian gardens famed of old,
Fortunate fields, and groves, and flowery vales,
Thrice happy isles; but who dwelt happy there
He staid not to inquire… “
3.2 Not Science
Second, this is not a scientific question.
Whatever theological doubt is provoked by the unimaginable size of the cosmos is not related to any change in the scientific model.
As a matter of historical fact, the model of the universe proposed by Copernicus, Kepler, Hubble and Lemaitre is simply and literally smaller than that proposed by Aristotle and Ptolemy.
The standard model of astronomy these days is proposing a starry universe roughly 15 billion lightyears in radius.
This puts the ratio of the size of the Earth to the sphere of the universe, very roughly, at one to one sextillion.
We also estimate the nearest star at four lightyears and change, which makes the ratio roughly one to one trillion.
But Ptolemy in his Almagest said that the ratio between the size of the Earth and the sphere of the fixes stars was as a point to the heavens, or, in other words, the ratio of zero to infinity.
So, the ancients, or at least some of them, thought the cosmos was larger than the current standard model does.
3.3 Not Philosophy
Nor is this a philosophical question.
If cast into a logical form, any argument expressing these astronomical doubts would betray its own absurdity at once: Bertrand Russel, for example, never cast as an argument the idea that the universe is so large that an all-powerful creator could not have created it, nor that an all-knowing creator cannot keep track of what he created in it.
Nor did he argue that the God who made Man from earth could not make a man from Mars.
What Mr. Russel did do, however, was pen a story called “The Theologian’s Nightmare” (from Fact and Fiction, 1961). In this fable, a pious man in a dream about the afterlife discovers, to his chagrin, that the Milky Way, to say nothing of our Solar System, is simply too small to come to the notice of Heaven.
Mark Twain pulled a similar sleight of hand in his satire called “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” in Harper’s Magazine, 1907.
These are stories, not arguments.
3.4 It is a Joke
Argumentation is meant to appeal to the reason; but storytelling is meant to appeal to the imagination.
The Theologian’s Nightmare is not meant to take the idea that God created so small a creature as Man and prove it to be logically absurd, but merely to take the idea and paint it as unimaginably absurd.
What kind of story is it? There are two answer to this. First, since the story is based on the wonders of science, it is a science fiction story.
Second, since the story is satire, it is a joke, like knocking the top hat off a toff to make him look the fool.
3.5 But I Am Not Laughing
But the joke falls flat for anyone who actually reads the ancients.
It is not because of egotism or self-satisfaction that the ancients placed the earth at the center of the solar system, but because that was the most elegant model of the universe fitting the observations known at the time, before the invention of the telescope.
In the Ptolemaic system described by Dante in his Divine Comedy, Earth was at the center only because the Aristotelian view of gravity holds that all heavy and gross things are pulled to the center.
In other words, Earth is where the fallen beings fall when they fall. And, in any case, mankind does not occupy the dead center of the gravity of the cosmos, Satan does.
The center of the universe is not a place of honor. Far from it. For Dante, Earth is the rubbish heap of the cosmos, where all the trash is sent to burn.
The joke of knocking the top hat of a toff does not work if the man has already doffed his hat in reverence and already bowed his head. You cannot humiliate the humble.
I would be remiss if I did not quote G.K. Chesterton, whose sharp wit rebutted Bertrand Russell ‘s dull joke, long before it was written.
In his 1908 masterwork ORTHODOXY, the Apostle of Common Sense quips, “It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.”
4. ARGUMENT FROM MARS
As with the question of magnitude, the question of nonhuman rational beings is not new.
4.1 Augustine and the Monsters
Saint Augustine, in Book 16, Chapter 8 of his CITY OF GOD speaks of the various monstrous races of one-eyed Arimaspians or one-foot-tall Pygmies or one-legged Sciapods Pliny and others said might dwell beyond India, or Ethiopia, or in the undiscovered regions of the Antipodes. The saint addresses the question of whether such monsters are human:
“… whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast.”
— the protoplast here meaning the first of the lineage of Adam.
Modern science has discovered, indeed, that the genetic trace of one single male ancestor is found in the DNA of all Homo sapiens currently alive on Earth. St. Augustine’s statement is literal and true.
But even were it not literal, it would still be true.
Suppose it were discovered that the various races of man, Japhetic, or Semitic, or Hamitic, or, for that matter, Lemurian, or Lilliputian, or Cimmerian, or Hyperborean, each sprang by a Darwinian descent from different groups of ape-men.
No man of Christendom would conclude that therefore men of each lineage must be ranked into different castes, enjoying unequal rights applied unequally, by virtue of their having been made in the images and likenesses of various superior and inferior gods, who make different moral codes for each.
Now in this passage, Saint Augustine enunciates what actually differentiates a creature make in the image and likeness of God from one who is not: namely, that he is a rational creature, regardless of “appearance in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature.”
Please note the doubts St Augustine here answers are not provoked by any real scientific facts concerning the Arimaspians, Abarimone, Sciapods, Blemmyes, Cynocephali, Phanesii, or any other real race of real men. He is answering doubts raised by a story, and, in this case, a traveler’s tale like those told by Odysseus about Cyclopes, or Gulliver about Brobdingnagians.
4.2 Saganism
In our case, the doubts we are answering spring from science fiction tales told by H.G. Wells, Arthur C Clarke, and Robert Heinlein but first and foremost by Carl Sagan.
I call Mr. Sagan the foremost because it is, alas, commonplace to find him and other alleged popularizers of science fact treating science fiction speculations about life on other planets in sober tones of perfect certainty.
For example, Mr. Sagan, in a January 1997 Scientific American article, proclaims, “There can be little doubt that civilizations more advanced than the Earth’s exist elsewhere in the universe.”
However little the doubt there can be, I share it.
Sagan goes on to say, “From our knowledge of the processes by which life arose here on the earth we know that similar processes must be fairly common throughout the universe.”
In reality, Carl Sagan knows no more about the process by which life spontaneously springs from non-life than did Aristotle, who said the worms, fireflies, and other insects arise from the morning dew. Mr. Sagan certainly does not know whether it is commonplace, or rare, or unique, or even possible at all.
The unspoken idea expressed here is that since life cannot have been created by God, it must have created itself by itself under its own power.
4.3 Drake Equation
The idea that since God did not create life nor breathe a rational soul into man, therefore the stars are abundantly full of intelligent life is a heresy we can call Saganism.
As a matter of logic, Saganism is simply a non-sequitur.
There is no logical contradiction to say that God commanded intelligent life to come into being by slow chemical, biochemical, and evolutionary processes.
Likewise, there is no contradiction of fact or logic in the hypothesis that life arose spontaneously and godlessly by a unique process that just so happened to reach this result on this world but on no other.
Saganism is sometimes backed by a trifle of nonsense called the Drake Equation, where is it proposed that, no matter how unlikely an event, such as the spontaneous generation of intelligent life, may be out of a given number of worlds, if we merely multiply the number of worlds under consideration by a large enough sample size, then the number of worlds where that event already took place becomes commonplace.
So, if only one world in a zillion has spontaneously developed intelligent life, out of ten zillion worlds, we should find ten with intelligent life on them.
The problem with this line of reasoning can be seen when we substitute some other event in the equation.
Let of suppose that the spread and triumph of the Catholic Church only happens once out of every zillion worlds. Then, out of a sample of a hundred zillion worlds, there should a one hundred space-popes eager for communion with the Holy Father on Earth.
Now, if it should be objected that a series of single, specific, and unrepeated events, such as the Covenant with Abraham, the Theophany of Moses, the Virgin Birth of Christ and the Conversion of Constantine, were the only things that allowed Catholicism to become a major religion on Earth, and that none of these events could be repeated elsewhere, it is sufficient to reply that the spontaneous generation of life from non-life, like the Conversion of Constantine, was also a single, specific, and unrepeated event.
In this case, we are dealing with three specific and unrepeated events: the rise of life from non-life; the rise of intelligent animals from brute animals; the creation of civilization from barbarism; and the creation of private property, rule of law, and technological civilization from pagan despotism.
The conditions and mechanisms leading through these transitions are either utterly unknown, or largely unknown, and always the subject of much dispute.
We have only one example of life, namely Earthly life; one example of intelligent life, namely, Homo sapiens; and only one example of an economically, politically and hence technically advanced civilization, namely Christendom after the Fall of Rome.
Of these events, only one, the rise of civilization from barbarism, is known to have the power to recur: in Mesopotamia, the Nile River, the Indus River, the Yellow River, the Central Andes, and in Mesoamerica. The others are unique.
Despite what you may have heard about Muslims in the Middle Ages or Chinese engineers with gunpowder and aircraft, these are not examples of what the scholastic system in the Middle Ages developed, namely, institutional, international, and self-correcting modern science.
Also, no civilization of the Near East nor Far East has the legal institutions or customs to maintain their technology without dependence on Christendom. America does not buy fighter-jets from Iraq or Iran, nor does she steal atomic bombs or computer technology from Soviets or Chinese.
Technical progress without legal and social institutions justifying and protecting freedom of thought is unlikely.
Freedom of thought based on a pagan, paynim, or secular hence fatalistic hence non-Christian view of the origin, nature, and destiny of man is a impossible.
Scientific civilization arising from paganism is a one-off, just as intelligence from brutes, or life from inanimate compounds. Such things may be inevitable, given time, or frequent, or infrequent, or unique. No mortal knows.
If we have only one example of an event, and no idea of what caused it, no conclusion about the rate of its recurrence, or even whether it can recur, is logically permissible.
The heresy of Saganism does not depend on logic for its appeal, but on the fact that the modern mind, having shed all belief in reports of saints and angels, elves and mermaids our ancestors took seriously, finds itself terribly alone, and is comforted by the idea that there are people in space, who, being highly scientific, will be people just like Carl Sagan, and also will not believe in God.
Saganism is a science fiction story. It is not to be answered by logic. One answers a story by telling a different story, and, or so we hope, one more truthful, virtuous, and beautiful.
4.4 A Space Odyssey
To answer the illogical doubts raised by Saganism, logic is not needed.
What is needed is a Traveler’s tale, like the Odyssey of Homer, but set in against the backdrop of space as understood by modern astronomy — a space odyssey, in other words — or a story like the Iliad telling of a war amid the stars, or perhaps a tale about man’s manifest destiny to subdue and fill the cosmos by means of a long trek to the stars.
What this Space Odyssey or Star Wars or Star Trek would be like if done by men hostile to the Christian worldview we know. It would be fundamentally untruthful.
A space monolith, not the Holy Spirit, would breathe a rational soul into the first man, and the new messiah would rise again after a confusing light show, not because he died to save man from sin, but because he traveled to Jupiter.
The son of the virgin would not be the promised messiah, but an evil space-knight with psychic powers.
God would be a computerized fraud to be tricked by a fearless space captain into destroying itself, if not shot outright by his science officer.
Nonetheless, elements of Christian teaching, as can be sometimes found in pagan writings, still gleam bright as gold amid the brass and tin.
What elements would the Christian story, when set against the backdrop of all the width of starry space, need to have, to be truthful?
First, the significance of Earth, as the birthplace of the Incarnate Christ, cannot be lost, even if, like Bethlehem now, it remains a forgotten backwater in a wide world, where Christians are persecuted and driven out.
The idea that many worlds have many Christs is a heresy of the Gnostics, called syncretism, and hence is popular among science fiction writers and neopagan witches alike.
It is, on the other hand, standard Christian belief, affirmed by many Fathers, that Christ was active before His incarnation, such as in His appearance to Moses in the form of a burning bush; and appearances after His ascension, either on the Road to Damascus or in modern Rwanda, are faithfully attested by history.
If Christ can appear to Saint John on Patmos, there is no reason He cannot visit Mars or Arcturus or Fomalhaut and appear in the flesh to Prince Malacandra the Eldil, Corpang of Threal, or D’Joan the underperson, not to mention Silk of Viron or Aenea of Hyperion.
Please note that the beings of other spheres may or may not be mortal. One might speculate that the animal life on Earth ages and dies because the beasts are under our authority and fell with us.
The rational animals of other worlds may or may not also have fallen. C.S. Lewis, in his excellent yet underrated Planetary Trilogy, posits that the worlds where unfallen beings dwell are Hesperian and thrice happy.
And, if they fell, their punishment may or may not be to return to the dust from which they came. If they came from dust. When the dark angels fell, they retained the immortality of their original, spiritual nature.
Also, rational creatures could be mortal without mortality being a punishment, particularly if there is easy and open fraternization between incarnate and disincarnate spirits. Both C.S. Lewis and Robert Heinlein have speculations along these lines in their rather different versions of Mars.
The example of the dark angels also reminds us that, in the Christian scheme, one need not necessarily be a Son of Adam to be a fallen being.
Can a rational animal be created who is not in the image and likeness of God?
For myself, I follow the answer of Saint Augustine in this. Even creatures with radically different physiognomies and psychologies to our own, if possessed of reason and therefore of a moral sense, are to be categorized as men, not animals.
The Ten Commandments surely apply to the degree reason and changed circumstances allow.
Perhaps a creature on a tide-locked world could not keep the Sabbath every seven days, because his sun never moves from noon, but set periods of rest given to his servants, and set periods of veneration set aside for the Lord are a matter of reason applying even to creatures with no need to sleep.
Creatures who reproduce asexually might have no problem with rules against adultery, since they would neither marry nor be given in marriage. But they would have customs concerning how to divide property and honors among the twin clones descended from one original, and the natural law would allow just from unjust laws and customs for handling such questions to be distinguished.
But what about creatures like Black Widow Spiders? Are they allowed to commit murder, if consuming one’s mate during the mating act is a needed and necessary part of the sexual reproduction? That question would turn on whether this was the mating habit of their version of Adam and Eve before their fall. A father who gives his life that his children may live is as admirable as the suicide is abominable.
What of creatures possessed of odd telepathic abilities to blend or merge their minds, or to form a group mind or hive mind – how is moral responsibility shared among them? How can each covet or avoid coveting what is his neighbors’ if each is one and the same as his neighbor?
Christian teaching rejects the Socratic notion that the soul is composed of parts, so the question here would turn on the relation of the individual to the group mind into which he merges himself. Even among men, who have only one body apiece, we have laws and customs dealing with nations and corporations and other collective entities.
What of creatures who can raise the dead? Is it a felony for them to kill others, or only a misdemeanor, like an act of false imprisonment?
Does the sea turtle of space, abandoned in the sand as an egg, have a duty to honor his father and mother?
Please note that, even if none of these questions has an obvious nor an easy answer, that outside the Christian scheme of things, it is not proper to conclude that they have no answer at all, and therefore moral laws have no divine lawgiver.
Simply saying “to each his own” or “when in Rome, do as the Romans” is not an answer to any moral questions, it is merely an expression of a desire to flee from moral questions.
In a universe without God, moral codes are manmade things, and therefore can be changed or abolished by man, so there is no arbiter to decide disputes, save strength alone.
There are some Saganists claiming the Christian scheme untrue because it is impossible that there be only one Christ, who happened to be incarnated on our world.
I am sure the shepherds outside Bethlehem might have said the same, had they been educated men, and therefore tempted to the folly of intellectual pride.
But whatever rational answer we Christians give as to why it pleased the Holy Spirit to visit one and only one Virgin Mary, whereas it was not the pleasure of God to create a second Mary of China, and a third Mary of the Aztecs, and so on, that same answer applies to the Mary of Mars and the Mary of Antares and the Mary Mother of God of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
And likewise, if one objects that there are millions of stars, too many for Christ to save, by the same logic, there are millions of Chinese, ergo too many for Christ to save.
Other Saganists say that there must be scientific utopias among the stars, and myriads of worlds of men, because otherwise it is an astronomical waste of space.
But, if no one made it, it cannot be a waste, and if God made it, we know not His purposes.
Perhaps we are the only world, and the original plan was for prelapsarian man to have the same powers that the Risen Christ, and many of his Saints, have from time to time manifested. A glorified body, in addition to being luminous in its beauty and agility, and invulnerable to disease and death, can levitate, bilocate, walk through walls and can travel tremendous distances in a twinkling. There are historical accounts of all these miracles. Would the speed of light be an insurmountable obstacle to the Risen Christ?
The Bible says it was not God’s original plan that man should die, but should live forever, be fertile and multiply. If ours is the only life-bearing world, it may be that the rest of the universe was originally meant for our children. No magnitude is so large that it cannot be filled with the children of an immortal race. No magnitude is so large that it can adequately express the infinite glory or infinite abundance of God.
If ours is not the only life bearing world, and not the only fallen world, but we are the one world where the secret of salvation was first revealed, it does indeed call into question the justice of God that we, who cannot travel or communicate past the speed of light, bear the great commission to save all those souls.
But, recall, that we are not discussing a scientific problem. We are discussing a science fiction story. That raises the question of where in the story are we? The prologue? The middle? Near the end?
If the part of the Story of Man concerned with the salvation of Men of Mars and of Proxima, of the Andromeda Galaxy, and of the Corona Borealis Supercluster, is supposed to take place now, so soon after the First Coming, and before even one of these men from other worlds have been discovered, indeed the Great Commission to baptize them seems absurd and unjust.
I am sure it seemed equally absurd and unjust to ask eleven men gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem to spread Christ’s good news to the undiscovered hemisphere of the Antipodes.
The Second Coming might be tomorrow, or it might be ten thousand times ten thousand years from now — Keep in mind, ye faithful, that the “days of the Early Church” may be our days now.
My point is, that if the part of the Story of Man concerned with the salvation of men on other worlds takes place after the Second Coming, and our glorified bodies can visit these far stars at the speed of thought, and speak in strange tongues, to make ourselves understood, we have a very long and time-consuming task ahead of us, and will face terrifying opposition. In other words, it would be an epic story.
That is certainly a better story to tell, and more truthful, than the absurdities of Sagan and Clarke and their tales of salvation by Space Monolith or Space Utopia.
5. CONCLUSION
Christianity does not glorify God’s merciful providence for man because of the greatness of man, but because of our smallness, meekness, and worthlessness.
To the Christian, it is supposed to come as a shock that God so loved the world as to send his Son to die for us. The shock is not that man is a creature perched farther up on the great ladder of creation than expected, but that the love of God reaches farther down.
If it makes Christian teaching seem absurd because we believe Earth was the sole planet on which Christ was born, this absurdity does not spring from any discovery of science or from any speculation of science fiction. The satirist points out that Earth is not the largest nor most central planet in the solar system, much less the Milky Way or Virgo Cluster.
If this is a shame embarrassing to Christians, it is a shame celebrated in all our hymns, rung from our Church steeples, spread with shed blood of missionaries and martyrs from pole to pole.
If you ask, why Milky Way? Why the Orion Arm? Why Sol? Why Earth? Then all I need do in reply is ask, why was Christ born in Judea, which was neither the largest nor most central province of the Empire? Why born among the Jews, a conquered race descended from Egyptian slaves?
And Christ was not even born in the magnificent temple built by Herod the Great, amid the shining gold of lamps and vessels. He was born in the crummy little village of Bethlehem, in a stinking stable, in a cave.
The findings of science and the speculations of science fiction are not too large for the Catholic Church to fit inside her walls, precisely because the only other options, paganism, atheism, or some admixture of nihilism and materialism, are indeed much narrower.
Pagan gods are frivolous, and atheist gods are mere mechanical systems of evolution and entropy without pity, point, or purpose.
I place no hope in evolution: without God, our future is one of Eloi and Morlocks.
Not only is the Christian scheme a sensible frame in which the discoveries of modern science and the speculations of modern science fiction can be fitted nicely, it is the only one that makes logical sense and satisfies right reason.
In reality, the Church extends from the militant Church on Earth to the suffering in Purgatory to the triumphant in heaven. In other words, the Church is actually larger than the whole material continuum of timespace and embraces it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
