An Unexpected Journal: Medieval Minds: Volume 3, #3

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Digital Edition

Credits

Managing Editor: Zak Schmoll

Cover Art: Virginia De La Lastra

Journal Mark:  Erika McMillan

Journal Design and Layout: Legacy Marketing

Editors: Carla Alvarez, Donald Catchings, Annie Crawford, Alison DeLong, Karise Gililland, Jason Monroe, Annie Nardone, Cherish Nelson, Josiah Peterson, Zak Schmoll, Rebekah Valerius

Contributors:  C.M. Alvarez, Donald W. Catchings, Jr., Annie Crawford, Alison DeLong, Karise Gililland, Sandra G. Hicks, Alex Markos, Korine Martinez, Jacqueline Medcalf, Seth Myers, Annie Nardone, Cherish Nelson, Holly Ordway, Ted Wright

All rights reserved.  This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Cosmos

Annie Crawford on Holy Wonder

Revolution! Copernicus did fling

Earth’s sphere into high orbit.

Luna laughed as Terra stumbled to conceive

Her own reeling, tethered traverse.

Neither up nor down, twin poles tip and taunt,

Horizons are lost and words echo naught.

Love no more moves her celestial spheres,

The airless void is Eve’s womb now.

Beyond Terra’s fragile veil, the sun’s golden

Bright rays inflame and ravage all.

Life clings to its chance outpost, marbled blue,

As cosmic dangers marshal round.

She is an orphaned beauty, the soul child

Of atoms, random profligate seed.

Voyager exposes Saturn’s icy rings

Stretched round their barren no-where world.

Hubble’s optic burst slaps home with cold dread

As the angelic host falls silent.

Alone.

Thou observed when first the stars sang for joy;

Quantum spark set the cosmos aflame.

Boundless wave in particulate presence;

Time unfolds from heaven’s One door.

All cosmos is the Lord’s unsparing gift.

Odds are lost and miracles return.

Galactic legions march the realm of space,

Now the infinite made extant.

Apollo’s glory! This star’s perfect blaze,

Logos light and love’s endless burn.

As Mary’s womb did eternal God enfold,

So earth’s small sphere His Body holds.

The Messenger reclaims his medium

and sets fine-tuned forms dancing again.

Our silvered moon keeps tilt and tide;

And gloves Sinai’s bright holy face. 

Signed world, rare Earth revolves to wonder.

All this for you, God made, was made, man.

LIKE SO MANY CHILDREN, I grew up feeling a sense of wonder as I gazed into the dark night sky. The unfathomable ‘otherness’ of the moon, the dazzling Milky Way, and the twinkling bright planets, right there naked before our very eyes, create a sense of both awe and longing. The stars and vast expanse of space are both so very real and yet so very unreal. To gaze upon the heavens and feel spiritual wonder is an utterly natural and fundamentally human experience.[1] Yet atheists such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins have endeavored to strip the heavens of any spiritual meaning. According to Sagan, We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies.[2] Sagan’s video series, Cosmos, boldly taught a generation to look up to the heavens and wonder not at the glory of God but at our own existential abandonment and ultimate meaninglessness. There is a war in the heavens.

In the poem Cosmos, I endeavor to expose this battle over cosmological meaning and provide the imaginative tools to win it. Using the structural framework of the Medieval cosmos, this poem progresses through the modern deconstruction of meaning in the universe to a chiastic turning point at which the poem then rebuilds layers of spiritual significance through a renewed understanding of cosmology. The poem’s sacramental conception of the heavens draws from both the Medieval imagination and new scientific data, such as quantum particles, the existence of galaxies, and the indeterminate nature of light.

I have chosen to use poetry as a medium for meditation on cosmological meaning in order to pry open cracks within the modern mind so that old ideas might seep in. Poetry forces the imagination to actively engage with the faculties of analytical understanding. The density of poetic imagery demands that the reader makes unfamiliar connections between symbols and ideas which wrestle open new possibilities for understanding and thereby prompts new interpretive lenses for old, dried-up facts. Cosmos ventures to take advantage of this potential in poetry in order to help modern readers reimagine the universe as a place of wonder and sacred meaning. 

Through the chiastic structure of Cosmos, the reader reverses history. The first half of the poem follows the modernist interpretation of the universe as the poem ascends from earth, through the Medieval layers of the heavens up to the edge of the known universe. Here at the edge of meaninglessness, the reader faces the stark psychological alienation that is the fruit of atheistic materialism. If Sagan is correct that the Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be, then we are orphaned souls, isolated minds, the freak accidents of an unknowing world.[3]

The psychological alienation of materialism expressed in the central word Alone provides the point of inversion from feigned meaninglessness to reintegration of physical reality and spiritual meaning. Only the transcendent God, dwelling in eternal Trinitarian unity, is capable of bearing the weight of such a word as Alone. He alone can provide the foundation for both the material reality of the cosmos as well as the spiritual reality of the human soul. His Being alone can allow the poem to reweave spiritual meaning into the material fabric of the universe.

The chiastic structure of the poem further conveys that the atheistic understanding of the universe promoted by Dawkins or Sagan is every bit as much of an imaginative construct as any other cosmological model. Commenting on the Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, Malcolm Guite notes that paradoxically, it is the human construction of a picture of the universe as supposedly dead, inert, and merely material that may turn out to be the vain or ‘false imagination’, the idol from which we need to be liberated in our search for truth.[4] In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis also argues that the Medieval cosmological model was not so much disproven by scientific facts as discarded by a change in imagination. Lewis contends that each model of the universe is influenced by the prevailing temper of mind... and reflects the prevalent psychology of [the] age.[5]

At the same moment that Copernicus’ heliocentrism required a reworking of the cosmological model, technological advancement was changing the imaginative landscape of Western civilization from one of ordained order to one of unfolding progress. A divinely ordered cosmos demands our creaturely submission, but an ever-changing, meaningless universe allows man to be his own meaning-maker. The Medieval model could have been adjusted to accommodate heliocentrism; a sun-centered solar system can still proclaim the glory of God. It is not the scientific facts that cause the forerunners of Tyson and Sagan to perceive the universe as just a a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star; this is their imaginative interpretation of facts.

The Westminster Catechism states that the purpose of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This truth provides the primary principle for interpreting the meaning of the material universe. God has created us to know Him and to live in joyful contemplation of his wondrous beauty.

Modern science has begun to clearly reveal that the cosmos is indeed well crafted to accomplish this purpose. In 1995, Guillermo Gonzales observed a brilliant solar eclipse in Neem Ka Thana, India. This eclipse became an epiphany for Gonzales. As he stared at the perfect fit between moon and sun, Gonzales said, It occurred to me—the best place in the solar system to view a solar eclipse is also the best place in the solar system to support complex life . . . The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discovery.[6] Gonzales’s work is part of an unfolding body of scientific evidence that reawakens real meaning within the material universe. As Gonzolas and co-author Jay Richards argue in The Privileged Planet, we are discovering that to be is to know; to exist is to be placed in a world intricately set up for the observation and the discovery of our Creator’s inexhaustible glory.

The infamy of Copernicus’ name accurately reflects the intensity of the cultural shift away from a Classical-Medieval world view to the Modern understanding of the world.  At the dawn of the third millennia anno Domini, we again stand at a cultural turning point. The wars of the last century have blunted our confidence in progress and we are plagued with as many social, economic, and political problems as ever. We are exhausted, disillusioned, alienated, and overwhelmed by our own technology. Simultaneously, astronomy and biology are again presenting us with vast new amounts of revolutionary data that must be interpreted and sorted into a fresh model of the universe. Cosmology has discovered the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life, and the fields of genetics and cellular biology have exposed the staggering complexity of life itself. The idea that the complex life flourishing on Earth could have just happened by meaningless chance becomes ever more intellectually untenable. On both the micro and the macro scale, we are rediscovering that science and poetry belong together, united by our holy wonder.

Memento Mori: A Reflection on The Ruin

Holly Ordway on the Question of Progress

One of the idols of the modern era is that of Progress: namely, the idea that our culture is inevitably becoming more enlightened, more knowledgeable, more sophisticated and advanced in every way, retaining the advances of previous generations and building upon them. It is a remarkably enduring idol, having survived, slightly battered but intact, the horrors of two World Wars and the catastrophic social changes of the late twentieth century. It is also a remarkably non-partisan idol; even when we disagree greatly on the direction of certain moral or cultural shifts, we assume that progress will continue in the realms of technology and industry – whether we like it or not.

But this confidence that we can always keep what we have gained and build on it is itself a modern view, and is by no means self-evidently true. Our ‘image’ of the way the world works is not the same thing as the reality. As C.S. Lewis observed with regard to the medieval cosmological model,

No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge.[7]

The elegiac poetry of the early medieval period in England offers a valuable window into a very different way of viewing the life-cycle of civilization. The Anglo-Saxon poets show, as Kevin Crossley-Holland has observed, a keen awareness that everything man-made will perish, and that there is no withstanding the passing years.[8] In a moment, we will turn to one specific elegy, The Ruin, which is particularly worth our attention; but first we should pause briefly for some historical context.

The British Isles were first settled in about 5,000 BC, by people who built the early stages of Stonehenge, had simple farms, and created mound tombs; later, Celtic peoples arrived from Europe around 750 BC and established a tribal culture. In the first century AD, the Romans invaded, settled into towns and forts, and set up commerce between Britain and Rome. After the early years of conflict and violence, the next several centuries were a time of assimilation in southern Britain, with intermarriage, the development of larger towns, and the diffusion of advanced Roman technology. The Roman baths were a marvel of public architecture, and domestic villas featured central heating, indoor plumbing, and beautiful mosaics.

Roman Britain was a cosmopolitan, technologically advanced culture – and it did not last. Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD; the Roman legions in Britain were called back, and never returned. Large-scale invasions of Britain by Germanic tribes followed, and Britain eventually was divided into seven kingdoms, with Saxon kings in the south and west and Angles in the east and north. Life in Angle-lond was centered in small farms and villages, with markedly reduced travel and far simpler, cruder architecture and technology.

The poem The Ruin dates from the eighth century, in the middle of the Anglo-Saxon period in the British Isles. What is most significant for our purposes is that inhabitants of England at this time were well aware of the cultural ‘high point’ that had been Roman Britain. From Hadrian’s Wall to the Roman roads, from the ruins of aqueducts and public baths to fragments of mosaics depicting exotic foods, the relics of a more cultured and technologically adept past were literal features of the landscape.

We can imagine our poet wandering through the ruins of a Roman villa, reflecting not just on the melancholy state of the buildings, but on the more subtle and devastating loss of knowledge represented by those crumbling hypocausts and broken water-pipes. The handiwork of past generations represented technological skill beyond the capacity of anyone in the present day. 

And so our poet – almost certainly a Christian, drawing upon the imagery of England’s pagan heroic past – reflects upon the scene, giving us the poem now called The Ruin. It exists in only one manuscript, the Exeter Book, and has been damaged by fire. Here is the poem in full; the ellipses indicate portions of the text that have been lost.

Wondrous is this masonry, broken by the Fates;

the fortifications have given way, the buildings raised by giants are crumbling.

The roofs have collapsed, the towers are in ruins,

The gates are broken, there is hoarfrost on the mortar,

The walls are rent and broken away, and have fallen,

undermined by age. The earth’s grasp holds the owners and builders,

the ruthless clutch of the grave, while a hundred generations

of mankind have passed away. Often this wall,

Red of hue and hoary with lichen, outlasted kingdom after kingdom,

remained standing under storms; the lofty arch has fallen.

. . .

Resolute in spirit he wondrously bound the walls with wire ties.

There were splendid palaces, and many halls with water flowing through them;

a wealth of gables towered aloft, loud was the clamour of the troops,

many were the mead-halls, full of the joys of life,

until all was shattered by mighty Fate.

The dead lay on all sides. Days of pestilence had come,

and all the warriors were carried off by death.

Their defences became waste places,

the city crumbled. The rebuilders fell;

the troops who should have repaired them lay dead on the earth.

And so these courts lie desolate, and the framework of the dome

with its red arches sheds its tiles. The ruin has fallen,

broken into a heap of stones, where of old many a warrior,

joyous hearted and radiant with gold,

shone resplendent in the harness of battle, proud and flushed with wine.

He gazed upon the treasure, the silver, the precious stones,

upon wealth, riches and pearls,

upon this splendid citadel of a broad domain.

There stood courts of stone, and a stream gushed forth in rippling floods of hot water.

The wall enfolded within its bright bosom the whole place

which contained the hot flood of the baths. That was convenient.

Then they let pour hot streams over gray stone. . . . [9]

The poet paints us a vivid picture of an impressive building fallen to pieces; in his phrase it is enta geweorc, giants’ handiwork.[10] We see later in the poem that he is well aware that the ruin was built by human beings, so this description of ‘giants’ is indicative of his respect for the achievements of those long-ago architects and builders. He offers praise for the skilled man who wondrously bound the walls with wire ties, a reference to a building technique, perhaps involving the now-lost Roman method for making a