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Politics of Ignorance · Jul 12, 10:28 PM
High water everywhere . . .
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five.
Judge says to the High Sheriff, “I want ‘im in dead or alive—
Either one, I don’t care.”
A cardinal of the Catholic Church, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, has declared that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is not compatible with Church teachings. My first reaction upon reading the churchman’s quasi-official statement was that the Catholics were on the verge of writing themselves out of the modern world. I’ve just been rereading Bertolt Brecht’s pungent little play, Galileo in preparation for teaching it in the fall. A decree against the teaching of Copernican cosmology has been published by the authorities. The Little Monk comes to Galileo Galilei:
Monk: I have studies physics, Mr. Galilei.
Galileo: That might help us if it allowed you to admit that two and two are four.
Monk: Mr. Galilei, I have spent four sleepless nights trying to reconcile the decree that I have read with the moons of Jupiter that I have seen. This morning I decided to come to see you after I had said mass.
Galileo: To tell me that Jupiter has no moons?
Monk: No, I found out that I think the decree a wise decree. It has shocked me into realizing that free research has its dangers. I have had to decide to give up astronomy. However, I felt the impulse to confide in you some of the motives which have impelled even a passionate physicist to abandon his work.
Galileo: Your motives are familiar to me.
Monk: You mean, of course, the special powers invested in certain commissions of the Holy Office? But there is something else. I would like to talk to you about my family.
[The Little Monk describes his peasant family & how they would lose their faith if the Copernican system caught hold.]
Monk: Can you understand that I read into the decree of the Holy Office a noble, motherly pity and a great goodness of the soul?
Galileo: (embarrassed) Hm, well, at least you have found out that it is not a question of the satellites of Jupiter, but of the peasants of the Campagna! And don’t try to break me down by the halo of beauty that radiates from old age. How does a pearl develop in an oyster? A jagged grain of sand makes its way into the oyster’s shell and makes its life unbearable. The oyster exudes slime to cover the grain of sand and the slime eventually hardens into a pearl. The oyster nearly dies in the process. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster.
Galileo portrays himself as an oyster in this scene, suggesting that it is not his will that proclaims the truth of the Copernican system, but reality—that persistent grain of sand. Darwin & Freud have both argued, following Galileo, that we should not wish the ignorance of the angels on humanity. The Little Monk in Brecht’s play argues for keeping the majority of humanity in a sort of intellectual childhood & that would seem to be the motive of the cardinal quoted above.
Note: Fred Clark, my favorite Christian, has a lovely series of posts on this subject.
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