Astronomy for the Soul

'"The universe,' as St. Bonaventure was not the first to remind us, “is a ladder by which we ascend to God.' If that is so, then secularism is what happens when a society decides to dismantle the ladder.'

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Saint Paul said that no man would be excused from the knowledge of the true God, in that visible creation so clearly pointed to the invisible Creator.

“We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.” 
—Oscar Wilde

If you shut your eyes so that you never have to see the stars, refusing ever to stand enraptured beneath the heavens, you might as well be dead. In fact, you may already be dead, only the coroner hasn’t come round yet to confirm it. 

“There was a time when I gazed upon the stars with great wonder and amazement,” declared Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, a dystopian novel that has never gone out of print. “Now, late in life, I look up at the heavens in the same way in which I gaze upon the faded wall-paper in a railway station waiting room.”  

Now there’s an icebreaker. And, of course, for people who have never even seen a railway station, nearly all the passenger trains having disappeared, that, too, may be a source of wonder. More and more, it seems, we live in an age in which everything has become flat as a map. Nobody is looking up at the stars, either because they are indifferent to them or, owing to light pollution, they simply can’t see them. The modern world has a way of doing that to people. Almost as if, to recall Nietzsche’s prediction, someone had taken a sponge and wiped clean away the entire horizon. Or, as Marx would have it, everything solid melts into thin air.

No sense of awe or mystery can survive so sweeping a reductionism. Chesterton was spot-on when he said about the world that while it will not starve for want of wonders, it will most certainly starve for want of wonder. It is, alas, an impoverishment in which increasingly we now find ourselves. We have lost all sense of the hieratic, the sacred, what a wise old philosopher friend was wont to call “the poetry of the transcendent.” In short, we are witnessing the wholesale disenchantment of the world, a place where not only is the numinous not welcome, it is scarcely even recognizable.

How far we have fallen away from our ancestors, for whom the world was suffused with a sense of the sacred, positively drenched in the divine. It would never have occurred to the Greeks, for example, to ask about the place of the gods in the polis. “The gods are everywhere,” exclaimed Thales, the earliest of their philosophers, who, such was his fascination for the heavens, actually fell into a well while gazing upon them. We should all be so lucky. “The universe,” as St. Bonaventure was not the first to remind us, “is a ladder by which we ascend to God.” If that is so, then secularism is what happens when a society decides to dismantle the ladder.   

How on earth would the Magi have managed to find their way to Bethlehem without a star to guide them? It was certainly no ordinary light in the sky which drew them from a distant land to a place where the very Messiah of God was waiting to be born. “It was as though they had always been waiting for that star,” writes Pope Benedict XVI in a commentary on the nature of the desire which prompted the Magi to leave everything behind. “It was as if the journey had always been a part of their destiny, and was finally about to begin.” 

For what other reason did God give us desire if not to follow the star that finally leads us to Him? Isn’t that why the etymology of the two words is the same, i.e., sidera, which is Latin for the heavens? Or that sailors lost at sea will often chart their safe return by simply observing those same heavens?    

“The stars speak to secularized man,” Pope St. John Paul II noted in a homily on the feast of the Epiphany in 2002, “awakening in him the nostalgia of his condition as pilgrim in search of the truth with a deep desire for the absolute.”   

But do they still speak to us in that way? Are we not nowadays adrift on a sea where there are no stars, only the darkness above and beyond? And if there are hints of heavenly light, glints of glory breaking through the clouds to remind us of a world beyond the one we measure out like so many coffee spoons, how many of us are there on the lookout for them? 

We live in a closed world, a world untethered to the transcendent, in which “the buffered self” shapes all that we see and do. That is an apt phrase, coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor, who meant by the term an identity totally closed in upon itself, allowing no shaft of light beyond the borders of the self-centered self. Until the modern age, argues Taylor, there were no buffered souls, no horizons bound only by immediate sensory experience. People lived in a larger world, a world visited by angels and demons, a world into which God Himself might, at any moment, suddenly descend. 

The late Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, who dedicated his first book, God at the Ritz, to the founder of Communion and Liberation, Luigi Giussani, “who helped me see the Milky Way,” describes an encounter the latter had with a young couple making out in a car. “Hello,” he said, suddenly appearing in his cassock. “I hate to interrupt; I just have one question to ask you: What you’re doing now, what has it to do with the stars.”

At what moment, in other words, do we allow the stars, which aim to lure us on to God, permission to do their job—and thus draw us more easily into the ways of eternity? Can there ever be an I without a Thou, a finite self not in relation to an Infinite Other? 

In order, therefore, for commerce between the two to happen, to ease the exchange between the two realms, the unreal world of secularism—which has largely succeeded in driving a wedge between eternity and time, God and the self—will have to go. All those structures that conspire to keep God at bay, that impede our even having to think about Him, much less make provision for Him in our lives, will simply have to be dismantled.

A genuine astronomy of the soul requires no less.