A Year of Wonders

I have edited this blog so that it is now a more developed version of a recent contribution I made to the online journal Open Democracy, as part of a series of short reflections on 2011:


Maybe every generation believes that it lives in uniquely interesting and challenging times. The last year seems too to fit the description. European nations that have struggled for centuries to realise their visions of freedom are seeing them disappearing into the rubble of failed neo-liberalism, while nations in the middle east are just beginning that same epic struggle.


But while the political and economic rhetoric might change, there is nothing new about any of this. War and revolution, natural disasters, the rising and falling of nations, the inhumanity of the richest and the desperation of the poorest, do not mark us out as any different from the rest. However, there is one area in which we really are outstripping all previous generations, and that is in science and technology.

On 13 December 2011, the BBC2 television programme Newsnight devoted considerable time to a story about the Higgs Boson particle, which scientists think may have made an elusive appearance in experiments at the Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva. It was impossible not to feel a sense of amazement as images that could have been lifted from Terence Malick’s film The Tree of Life floated across the screen, with a voice-over by the programme's science editor, Susan Watts: "We don't really know why everything around us exists, why the universe has form, why objects have mass. The fundamental question about why we're here remains unanswered. But today's announcement could change all of that."

When scientists talk about multiverses, a new cosmology and the meaning of life, they tap into an insatiable source of wonder which is the very essence of our humanity, and we do not have to understand the science to experience a sense of awe about the cosmos of which we are a part. Indeed, today at the furthest frontiers of modern physics, scientists still resort to the same terminology which inspired the earliest Greek philosophers in their reflections on the universe. When Susan Watts talks about existence, form and mass, she could as easily be reading from a pre-Socratic fragment as from a 21st-century science script.

But there is an important difference. Those ancient philosophers stood at the very beginning of the western philosophical quest for God, and today popular science has decided to close down that quest by claiming to be on the brink of discovering the answer. This ideological framing is regrettable, because it allows scientific genius to be held hostage by scientific fundamentalism. The question of whether or not one has faith in a creator God isn't a scientific question, and Watts is wrong when she suggests that discovery of the Higgs Boson particle could answer "the fundamental question about why we're here".

The quest for the Higgs Boson particle has been described many times as the Holy Grail of modern science, but the Holy Grail is a mythical symbol of a quest into the thickets of mystery and longing which make us truly human. Simone Weil once wrote: "In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail...belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: 'What are you going through?'" The quest for the Holy Grail is a quest for hope and compassion in a wounded world, beyond all the cures and answers that science can offer. Science has a part to play in that quest, but only when it allows its knowledge to be tempered by wisdom and its genius to be the servant rather than the master of our humanity. To say that is not to diminish in any way the achievements of modern science - it is simply to ask scientists to acknowledge the human limits of what they do.


Watts posed the following question: "With each of us facing our daily troubles, and with the world of finance and politics in turmoil all around us, why should it matter whether we find the Higgs, whether neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, if there's some deeper symmetry under the surface or not?" Professor Sergio Bertolucci, Director of Research at CERN, replied that the "very tiny amount of our wealth" invested in such research is an investment in the future, because without "curiosity-driven research ... we are doomed".

That word, 'curiosity', is surely the fundamental enigma that science itself will never be able to answer, because science is a consequence of our human curiosity - and a consequence can't study its own cause. It is of the very essence of what it means to be human to experience that curiosity, and to refuse to settle for less than a satisfactory answer. If science ever does provide an answer that satisfies our curiosity, it will do so not by discovering the secrets of the cosmos but by finding some way to manipulate the human brain to eliminate curiosity altogether - and in so doing, it will eliminate our human nature and the condition that makes science possible.

The Higgs Boson is not a God particle. It cannot tell us why there is something rather than nothing, it cannot tell us how consciousness is possible, and it cannot explain the curiosity that makes us ask such questions in the first place. But it is a wonder all the same, and something that might indeed make the year 2011 different from all the rest. GK Chesterton once said that "The world will starve not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder." This has been a year of wonders, but it is wonder itself that makes us human.

Time for a women's reformation?

(When I first posted this, I described it as 'an extravagant polemical gush'. Several readers have persuaded me that I shouldn't be so apologetic, so I've deleted that description!)

With some admirable exceptions, the Catholic Church's leaders today are made up largely of authoritarians on the one hand and cowards and conformists on the other, and this has in no small measure contributed to the ongoing scandal of the sex abuse crisis. Cover-ups have been possible because the politics of the Vatican have been manipulated by a corrupted and collusive clique which has flourished in a culture of secrecy and  unaccountability. (See, for example, Robert Mickens' article in this week's Tablet.) This has resulted in a culture of bullying and fear, in which the most aggressive conservatives seek to tyrannise those who dare to question the church's current position on important issues, particularly around issues of sexuality, the role of women, and the form of the liturgy.

Few bishops seem willing to speak up in defence of the silent and increasingly alienated majority. Marginalised and remote from the corridors of power, they too may feel alienated and silenced - but if they can't take a stand, who can? While Mass attendance plummets, those who leave are unacknowledged and unmourned, so that the Church risks becoming a small, self-referential clique of those who smugly congratulate themselves for staying, and the failure of bishops and priests to challenge that attitude makes them part of the problem. That's why Hans Kung's open letter to the bishops, published last week in several languages, is like a hand grenade tossed into the crisis. He is scathing about the leadership of his former friend and erstwhile persecutor, Pope Benedict XVI, and he calls upon the bishops to take a stand on a wide range of contested issues in defiance of the Vatican.

In my recent article publised on Open Democracy, I pointed out how much more zealous the church's leaders have been in hunting down dissenting theologians than sex abusers. Even today, in the midst of the worst crisis in modern history, women's religious orders in America are undergoing a process of enquiry by Rome to weed out feminists and secularists. Where are our leaders who would stand up and defend us? Where are the voices of those who might speak out in favour of a healthy theological and ethical climate of debate and freedom of speech? Do our bishops and priests really have so little confidence in the truth of the faith they proclaim, that they think they have to protect it by colluding with Rome's regimes of silencing and control?

The last time corruption on this scale became such an issue in the Church, it resulted in the Reformation. But still, throughout all these transformations and changes, Christianity was and is a religion made for and by men. Of course women have played a role, sometimes a significant role, in influencing its development, but in its doctrines, structures of leadership and practices of faith, it is a religion designed to meet men's expectations on earth as in heaven, and to satisfy their spiritual and intellectual desires. Thus we have a God made in the image of man, a religious elite which, whether in strident evangelicalism or corrupted Catholicism, still asserts its narrow-minded control over human desire and sexuality, and a religious ethos which causes people to expend far more energy on abortion, feminism and homosexuality than on war, poverty and the structural violence upon which neo-liberal capitalism depends. Meanwhile, like volcanic dust gathering in the stratosphere, the growing disillusionment of women forms an invisible miasma which might yet ground our ecclesiastical high fliers. Most of the time, when one mentions the discontentment of women to priests and male theologians, the response is blank incomprehension or denial. Feminists are dismissed as an anachronistic little clique of leftovers from the 1970s, who ought to shut up or get out. They don't hear the truth, because they don't ask and they don't listen.

It's time for a women's reformation, and we'll bring that about not by leaving (they ignore us if we leave, and the church is ours as much as it is theirs), but by staying in and speaking out. For the last forty years, women biblical scholars and theologians have built up a vast body of scholarship which is still largely ignored by those in power. Week after week, Christian priests and ministers bumble on with their lacklustre homilies and sermons, oblivious and indifferent to the energy, zest and dynamism of so many theological voices which challenge and renew our readings of the Bible and Christian doctrine: women, postcolonial Christians, gay and lesbian theologians, environmentalists, pacifists - academic theology is teeming as never before with voices of difference and  newness of vision. But, when theologians do puncture public consciousness on a significant scale, it's weary old conservatism in radical orthodoxy guise that tends to get a hearing - Phillip Blond as religious advisor to the Tories, John Milbank as darling of the Vatican. Give us a break!

It might seem an odd time to experience a profound sense of hope, and yet that is what I feel. At last, cracks are appearing in the monolith. The bishops of England and Wales were quick to distance themselves from the suggestion by a senior member of the Vatican that the present crisis is attributable to homosexuality.

The shabby and shameful regime in Rome has lost its credibility and its authority. The Catholic Church is an astonishing historical, cultural and spiritual phenomenon - woven into the human story as no other religion or creed ever has been, extending across the globe and encompassing some of the greatest as well as the worst of human aspirations in our yearning and quest for God. Let's reclaim the church while the grip of these men is temporarily weakened. We need to speak out and keep speaking out, not in the name of an aggressive and hostile power struggle, but in order to ensure that the tyrannical minority is never again able to control the hearts and minds - not to mention the bodies - of the people of Christ.

Whew!