Now, the third question of Clement is cosmology, of all things. The most primitive rock carvings in the world are what you will find in the glyphs if you go out to Lincoln Beach which used to have a marvelous collection. That used to be a sacred place with splendid displays. There's a cave out there, and, of course, it has been mercilessly looted. A big industrialist from New York came out and covered it and walked away with some very valuable things. Of course, there's a law from 1906 that you are not supposed to do that. Well, if you look at these carvings, what will you find? You will find glyphs, spirals, swastikas, sun wheels, quadrates. You'll find these throughout the whole world. They are cosmic signs. They have to do with revolutions of the heavens-the sun, the moon, the cycles of the year, etc. Not all of them, but they are plainly marked and they are found by the thousands.
If you want to go back to primitive societies, what about their rites and their dances? They are very impressive. The Hopi dance cycle will begin around March 15 this year. The snake dance is purely cosmic. The dancing is done by the antelope clan, and they form the cosmic spiral. They spiral around three times, and then when the dance is over, they unspiral. It's the winding up of the universe. The thing is very much aware not only of the elements-the rain, the clouds, and the earth (the snakes go back to the underworld)-but also of the stars in their courses. They are very important. In the kivas at particular rites they observe stars, especially Sirius, but they make special observations of the stars. The kivas are set up to align and to sight along certain stars. This is just one example; there are many. Throughout the world you find the great megalithic sites. A megalith is a big stone, and you find these giant stone monumental establishments.
I notice that even someone as conservative as I.E.S. Edwards, who was here last week, has come around and concurred on that. Remember he said in his lecture on the pyramids, "They didn't build these things for nothing." Well, they used to think they did build them for nothing-that it was just to display the vanity and power of the king and put the slaves to work. That isn't the idea at all anymore. Now Edwards realizes that it was all to take their bearings on the universe. It's a cosmic structure-all the angles and points.
They used to accuse people who went too far in that such as old Mr. Rutherford. We had him visit here a couple of years. They become absolute nuts on the subject of pyramidology, so other people shy off from it. You don't want to become identified with the lunatic fringe. You can carry it a long way. Nevertheless, the oldest monuments we have, everything we do, is based on our awareness of the cosmos, of the setting we are in. Edwards recommends Alexander Thom's work. Thom was a retired Scottish engineer. He started to take alignments and sights on megalithic monuments throughout Europe and England. These sites number thousands. He found that they do follow certain rules and have a certain standard measure, a megalithic yard. And they have alignments on stars and the moon, and have to do definitely with the equinoxes. They were aware of the procession of the equinoxes, of all things, which takes considerable scientific sophistication. These are borne out in hundreds of places. Well, even Professor Edwards has come around to that now.
But the point is that we've always been aware of this. This is what our temple is about. Of course, the temple is a place where you take your bearings on the universe. That's what the word temple means, a template put on a map. All of our temples are full of that, especially the Salt Lake Temple. We see the sun and the stars represented, and up at the west end you see the dipper pointing to the north star, around which all things revolve. The sun stones, the moon stones, the stars, the three degrees of glory: it is very cosmic in its structure. Of course, what is presented there is a cosmic drama of the creation and how things got going. It takes us in contact with the real cosmos. And a funny thing is that the most conservative Christian year, seen in the Anglican Church, is strictly based on solar and lunar festivals. The big Easter controversy, which was ferocious and raged for years, was should we judge Easter by the moon or by the sun alone, because the two don't cooperate very well, as you know. You have two different standards to go by. But we don't have the canonical year. We don't celebrate at a certain time-say the first new moon after the equinox or something. This is very important for them, and it has to do with the solstice. But we have all of this in the temple, as the ancients used to; it is taken care of there.
But in England and all those other countries, they are just following the very ancient practice that goes back to the earliest times. We have Archaeologia here, a big British journal of archaeology, that goes way back to the eighteenth century. We have over two hundred years of it here, showing their tremendous concern in England with these things. The church years (they deal with these) are simply continuations of the old prehistoric, megalithic rites that go back to the oldest time, on judging all your movements and putting everything into the cosmic scene. Everything is not just a setting, but it's a planetarium. It's a situation where things are happening, and you enter into it and cooperate and move along with things. You move with the traffic. They are very much aware of this.
There's a very good book, Ancient English Holy Week Ceremonial, by Henry John Feasey. He traces them all back to early customs; and, of course, we have the customs and folk tales, and things that have continued since. We have very early records. Classical writers visiting the country thousands of years ago described what they did there. We all know about Stonehenge and the like. We have our Facsimile No. 2 in the Pearl of Great Price which is a hologram. That's one of the best you could find, but we're not going to talk about that now. But then you also have science fiction which is our latest expression of this idea that to enter into the picture, to be part of it, the cosmos has to be in there.
Now it's a strange thing. They call it cosmism, and it is banned from religion today. You are not even supposed to mention it. This is an interesting thing because it used to be the whole show. And, of course, this is what the Pearl of Great Price restores with a vengeance. Is cosmology an inherent part of religion? This is the question that comes up. When revelation is denied, they talk about deliteralizing and dehistoricizing and de-eschatologizing, and demiracalizing and deapocalypticizing the elements of the Bible. That is you remove all the supernatural elements in the Bible if you want to find the real story-what the real kernel was. As we noted before, we're "above" that primitive nonsense. The early Christians may have believed in that; but, of course, we know better than that. We're scientific. And, as Neery says, if we've done all that, we've got rid of everything, we've de-eschatologized and the like (we don't really believe in a literal heaven) that means that cosmology will also have to go. But without cosmology in religion, an important ingredient is missing, one which the Pearl of Great Price restores actually. At all times the doctors of the Christians and the Jews had driven cosmology out with a fork, to cite Horace, but it always kept coming back. They could never leave it alone.
The issue of how far the real universe is to be involved in our religions has left the learned sitting on the fence. The problem behind much of the vagueness and difficulty of Hermetic and Gnostic literature is that, of course. The terrible questions would disappear at a stroke, as Lovejoy observes. Arthur Lovejoy wrote a book called The Great Chain of Being, and it has to do with what they believed about cosmology in the Middle Ages. They always believed in a multitude of worlds, and they always believed in the vastness of the universe. It's the modern world that got rid of it, strangely enough. The Great Chain of Being in which all things are related, was the most sensational philosophy book of its time at the beginning of the century. He says just forget the cosmos and then all your questions disappear at a stroke. Then all your answers disappear too-no questions, no answers, nothing to bother about. But this is why we took it up in the first place-to know, are there answers to these questions?
The favorite source of this cosmology in the Christian reason is from Plato's Timaeus, the Pseudo-Dionysius, (we won't go into these), and Genesis. After all, it's the physical creation; God created the earth. It was quite physical, whether you like it or not. They won't let us deny the real universe, and consequently (this is Lovejoy speaking) the language of acosmism (that is there is no cosmism in real religion; the negation of a cosmism) is never to be taken too seriously. Nobody really does. This is interesting because they talk about it all the time. One can't simply ignore the universe. As Van der Leeuw writes here, "There's a human inclination-general as well as Christian-to base the trust of one's salvation on the cosmic. Only when the human passion of a divine Savior has a cosmic background does salvation seem sufficiently assured. Without that cosmic background to underpin it, the idea of salvation is not sufficiently confirmed." If you leave that out, it's not strong enough. I knew Werner Jaeger, the great German classicist, very well. He was interested that I was a Mormon. He and his wife used to have me at their apartment, and we would talk a lot about these things.
In his classical work on the subject he says, as a good Lutheran, that the two do not belong together naturally; in fact, that cosmism and religion are absolute enemies. You can never mix them because one is spiritual and the other is physical. Here we go on that again. In his book Aristotle, he says it was Plato who converted astronomy (previously the essence of atheism) into the essence of theology. What a thing Plato did. Before Plato, astronomy was the essence of atheism, according to Jaeger.
Seagram's whiskey sponsored a TV program some years ago in which the leading scientists of the time (I mean the big wheels) such as Shapley, the astronomer; Kistiakowsky, the biologist; and Raymer, the geologist, all got together. The subject was life on other worlds. The whole theme of the series was that if there is life on other worlds, there cannot be a God. Christianity can't possibly be true. There can't be anything about salvation. You see, they were completely brought up on this idea that creation had to be from nothing or it was nothing at all. So if there was life on other worlds, it would discredit all religion. Well, that's a strange conclusion to come to, but Jaeger says that was the very essence of the thing before Plato. Astronomy denied religion. Well, it's just the opposite.
Kant says, "What is it which proves to me that there is a God? The divine law within me and the starry heavens above me." Aristotle looked at the stars moving in their majesty and said, "Now that proves there is a God." Other people look at the same stars moving in their majesty and say, "Now look, that proves there is no God. They get along perfectly well without God." In The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám we read:
That inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die
Look not to it for help
For it as impotently moves as you and I.
So you can take the very same evidence and prove absolute opposites from it. To one the starry heaven proves there's a God; to another it proves there isn't a God. Well, Jaeger says it was Plato. That's so typical of Professor Jaeger. At that time he was writing his great three-volume work on Greek education called Paideia. He brought certain elements in which were very Oriental. I said, "This is treated in the Old Testament, and have you gone into this and this particular source? There's a lot of interesting stuff there on the same subject." He said, no, he wouldn't touch it because if he started bringing that in-although it was perfectly relevant, he admitted-it would destroy the beautiful architectonic structure of the theory of education he had built up. That's a typical German professor. You abolish anything that doesn't fit into your structure and say, "Presto, there it is; that proves it's so." They do that again and again. They remove every passage from the Bible that refers to a physical God, and sure enough, the original Bible didn't say anything about it because they've taken out all those other passages. This is the way it looks. Jaeger says that. You've converted the essence of cosmology as the essence of atheism into the essence of theology.
This is Karl Kahn speaking, "If when Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle speak of heaven as a cosmos they do not have in mind the immediate spectacle of the night sky, still the celestial motions are the most conspicuous and most noble manifestation of what they do have in mind." In the Ps. 19 we read, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork."
According to Chaeremon, a very early recorder, astronomy was first and foremost among the studies of the Greek teachers, including Pythagoras. And it was all of Egyptian inspiration, according to the various sources here, Hesiod and the Milesian school of cosmology, etc. The majesty of the cosmos and the clearest evidence of divine order in things was not to be ignored. But if it was accepted, where did it fit into a purely spiritual, abstract, allegorical theology? For example, a Dutchman by the name of C. P. Van Andel recently collected all the Greek writings of Enoch, put them together, and compared them to find the original Enoch. There are many texts; and where they all agree, that's the original source. The thing that bothers him so much is that Enoch is so fond of astronomy. He's bringing it in all the time, and this man considers that corruption. It must be attributed to separate schools or a different cult entirely. But they go together logically enough.
Our friend R.H. Charles is disgusted that Enoch even mentions astronomy. He says there's nothing spiritual about that. He says it's the most crass physical science. It's hardly pure astronomy, incidentally. When the Lord says to Enoch, "I appointed Adam as a name from the four component parts-" the four elements that make up everything, you know. That's the name A D A M. "And I appointed him four special parts and four special stars, and I called his name Adam." The stars, the components, the elements of the body, the colors, the directions; everything goes together. It's all united into a single system.
Now we get this from both the books of Enoch and the books of Abraham (not just ours, but the newly discovered ones also). The special knowledge was passed to Seth and from him to Noah; hence, from Abraham to the Egyptians it was the secret of mathematics and astronomy, according to Jewish tradition, accepted by the doctors of the Middle Ages right down to Thomas Hood in modern times. Now this aspect of Judaism had a peculiar appeal to the early Christians. They liked this cosmos. It's only the moderns that have gotten rid of it. According to some Jewish scholars, that is why the Jewish doctors gave it up-because the Christians adopted it, and they didn't want to become too closely identified. Nicolas Sed wrote a lot in The Review of Jewish Studies (1964) and was one of their main scholars. This cosmological mystique of the Middle Ages, the baraitas, goes right back to the apocrypha of the first and second centuries. It was shared by the Jews and the Christians up to the fifth century, and then they dropped it like a hot potato and wouldn't have anything to do with it. Strange thing, isn't it? He says this impulse for cosmological speculation of the Palestine rabbis of the first three centuries absolutely dominates them and often traces it to Plato's Timaeus. They always trace this to Plato. You don't have to trace it to Plato. People always had cosmology in their religions here mediated by Philo, who was a Jewish Platonist, and the Gnostic writers, which produced a special Gnostic "rabbinic gnosis," we are told. Yet Van der Ploeg finds the same cosmological teachings of the Jews already in the Psalms and cites the Nineteenth Psalm, "the heavens declare the glory of God," and he says the Jews always had that in the early days.
Modern scholars shun the question of cosmology. It's poison. It only complicates theology, they say. It was one of the crimes of Joseph Smith to bring it in. They associate it with magic. Carl Schmidt, who at the turn of the century was the foremost authority on early Christian manuscripts, says, "It was cosmological speculative ideas which repelled the fathers of the church more than anything else. They detested them and fought them savagely tooth and nail. The fathers of the church of the fourth and fifth centuries would do anything to suppress that teaching, that the cosmos has anything to do with religion (isn't that strange?), because it's speculative. It is the main issue between them and the Gnostics," he says. "The Gnostics were guilty of turning purely religious objects into cosmic powers which gave the death blow to the eigentumlichkeit of the Christian religion." That is, the genius of Christianity was the abolition of cosmology, he says. There was no cosmos in religion, he claims. When anybody tried to introduce it or go back to the old Jewish teachings or the early Christian teachings, they were guilty of the cosmic heresy; they were guilty of being Gnostics, etc. Apparently, if the Christians taught anything that anybody else had ever taught, they were not original and, therefore, not to be taken seriously.
But I just thought last hour, there is this objection to cosmology; namely, that it could be a dangerous thing. This intimacy with the cosmos is likely to turn people's heads. This has happened, of course; we have stories of this. It can fill people with infinite vanity. People who study the cosmos are willing to accept the divine as long as they are it. Like Longinus: he is the great sublime that he depicts. Carl Sagan would be a good example of that. The symphony orchestra in the background, the heavenly light playing upon him as he gazes off into the vastness. Here is the ultimate achievement of creation, right here, and it has that effect. The great scientists of H.G. Wells, etc.
Faust is the classic instance of that. Faust is a disturbing story. He wanted to know. He had been teaching and had studied all subjects-philosophy, medicine. "I studied all these subjects. I'm an M.A., a Ph.D. and yet after this I don't know anything more than I did before. I'm as stupid as I ever was. What shall I do?" he says. He pulls his students around by the nose, he says, and he's not going to stand this any longer. "I'm trained to magic, but I don't have to tell my students a lot of things that I don't know. This is the object: that I can see all reality together, that I can grasp the whole cosmos and not just fiddle around with the definitions of philosophy, etc." These are the things that bothered Clement. Remember, the school men could only give him the stuff that Faust is utterly sick of. He's sick and disgusted with it. He says, "No dog would live longer like this." It was either suicide or he was going to commit himself to the higher powers to understand these things. And so he becomes the mysterious Dr. Faustus who sells his soul to the devil. He knows too much. You mustn't seek to know these things.
"Seek to know no more," as the witches tell Macbeth.
So this cosmology can turn your head. There's a story in the Apocalypse of Abraham about this. Well, in a number of early ascension stories when the hero, in this case Abraham, goes up and beholds the vastness of the heavens, he becomes dizzy. He has nothing under his feet; he thinks he is going to faint. He starts raving, etc. It's too much for him to behold. And we have several very early Christian stories where the Apostles ask to be shown Satan and his powers and the great gulf. The Lord advises them, "Don't ask to see that. It will do things to you." Is the payoff a wasted life? Faust gets nowhere until he repents and comes back to faith again, lives by faith. The angels say finally, "Don't give up, keep trying, keep striving. Don't let vanity carry you away and you can be saved." Not just on the Rhine, but throughout Europe he was a great myth. He was finally able to master all sorts of things. And the earlier Faust is Marlowe's Faust, the English Faust, a great play. They are both great dramas, as you know. At the end of Marlowe's Faust he says, "See how Christ's blood streams through the universe; one drop of it will save me! Oh, my Christ." He's looking at the Milky Way, and he gets carried off. But earlier he says, "There must be the idea of redemption behind this. It must have to do with the gospel plan somehow or other." Meanwhile, they go into all the various corners of ancient mythology to taste all the forbidden delights, etc., to learn the evils of this world. And they find that they are really not much as a payoff. It's a wasted life.
In 1969 I gave a talk on science fiction and the gospel, and it was just printed without my knowledge. I didn't know anybody had taped the darn thing. Needless to say, it is full of things that shouldn't be there. On page 13 here is the point: "Thus beginning with the great scientist of the early twentieth century of godlike knowledge and uprightness as its central character, science fiction soon discovered chinks in the armor and ended up in very short order with the sinister figure of the mad scientist, either making a Frankenstein monster he cannot control or deliberately perverting his knowledge for power. The mad scientist became the stock figure instead of the great scientist who passed away because he was altogether too fantastic anyway." There are some wonderful examples here of how they actually considered him. But let's go back to some real scientists.
This is by C.P. Snow who wrote novels about life among the scientists at Cambridge in England. And I.E.S. Edwards who was a Cambridge professor knew him very well. C.P. Snow was extremely unpopular and everybody hated his guts. That's why he wrote these novels which are rather vicious digs at life among the great scientists. Everybody is playing dirty tricks and stealing everybody else's data, etc. But this is quite enlightening, these passages about the great ones which we worshipped in my day when I was a teenager here.
Well, here's a quotation from J.M. Brewer, The Gostec and the Doshes. This is written in all seriousness. "Falishinski, the great scientist, smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in his infinite kindness of his vast mind there was room to overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak things that call themselves men." (I think of Carl Sagan there.) "A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces. To him human beings and their affairs do not loom very important." We have a sort of superman here. The nearest thing to him is the figure of Rutherford who discovered the structure of the atom in the 1920s, and that was sensational. This is what C. P. Snow says about this, "The tone of science at Cambridge in 1932 was the tone of Rutherford. Magniloquently boastful, creatively confident, generous, argumentative and full of hope-science and Rutherford were on top of the world. Worldly success, he loved every minute of it. Flattery, titles, the company of the high official world. He was superbly and magnificently vain as well as wise, and he enjoyed his own personality."
Now here if ever, says the guy here, is the great lovable scientist of science fiction. What more could one ask for than science at such a level? "He enjoyed a life of miraculous success," says Snow. But then something strange follows. "But I am sure that even late in life he felt stabs of sickening insecurity." Now this is strange, sickening insecurity in this of all men. And then Snow goes on to talk about the other great Cambridge scientists. "Does anyone really imagine that Bertrand Russell; G.H. Hardy, the great mathematician; Rutherford; Blackett; and the rest were bemused by cheerfulness as they faced their own individual state? In the crowd they were leaders, they were worshipped; but by themselves they believed with the same certainty that they believed in Rutherford's atom that they were going after this life into annihilation. Against this they had only to offer the nature of scientific activity."
That would keep up the fun for awhile. It's interesting while you are doing it, but it's complete success on its own terms. In itself it was a source of happiness, but it is whistling in the dark when they are alone. Then they know they are going into nothing. Have the fun while you can.
One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste-
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing-Oh, make haste!
Oh, make haste.
So cosmology isn't going to answer it. It's not going to take the place of religion, in other words. The Alexandrian-educated Origen, our old friend; we always come back to him. He's our favorite. He knows perfectly well that cosmology has no place in the abstract purity of the religions of the schools of Alexandria. But he says it was the teaching of the early church, and his loyalty is painfully divided in this as in so many other cases. Gregorius Thamaturgus tells us how Origen first taught him rhetoric. Then Origen taught him holy mathematics, incontrovertible geometry, and astronomy that sets up the ladder to the things of heaven. And this is what Origen taught when he was a teacher at Alexandria. Then he went to Palestine and got into a lot of trouble with the church because he wasn't orthodox. He was teaching the old Christianity and got all mixed up. They didn't like it anymore.
Notice the name Gregorius Thamaturgus-Gregorius, the wonder worker, because he had this knowledge of all sorts of scientific tricks.
Quoting Cornelius, "For Origen the seductive beauty of the universe existing from aeon to aeon as the genuses and species appear and disappear sanctifies matter itself as a means of containing order among the anarchy of the spirits." The order of creatures, species, higher and lower orders, speciation, taxonomy, etc. That to Origen was the structure of the universe, and it was part of God's plan in his early days. He gave it all up. His ambiguous position is clearly in his argument with Celsus who was against the church, and he is trying to answer it. "If the Lord says I am not of this world, there must be other worlds," he says. "Their nature is hard to explain if we would avoid falling into the idea of a universe that is incorporeal (that doesn't have any matter)." He says, "How do you explain it?" This is Origen speaking here. "Is the universe just a fantasy in my mind; is that all religion is?" he says. "This is a highly unsatisfactory conclusion," he says. Then in his great work on the first principles of the gospel, he says, "I just don't see how we are to explain it when the Savior is actually in one place and then another, or the Saints go hither, and some people come down from heaven. Now that calls for physical motion, but the philosophy won't allow it. God is everywhere; he can't move around. What are we going to do?" Well, he tosses up the sponge. He can't imagine what another world would be like. Philosophy has denied him the literalism of the early Saints and he has nowhere to turn. He says, "When finally by grace of God the Saints shall reach the celestial place, then they shall comprehend all the secrets of the stars. God will reveal to them the nature of the universe, but I will leave it there."
So he compromises. You can't get rid of it; God's going to tell us about it later on. Well, he never got to be a doctor of the church. He never got to be a saint, although he was the greatest by far of all their theologians, because he taught these things. He wasn't holy enough. His own training breaks through at the end of the passage when he plugs for perfect knowledge. He says, "Purged of all that is physical and corporeal." That's what he wants. He contradicts himself again. He recommends consulting Philo on the subject. Now Philo, the Jew of Alexandria, neoplatonized the Bible. He said, "You mustn't take these things literally." And Origen recommends going to the Jew Philo if you want a solution.
"As in his speculation on the creation, for Origen the process of history could have for him nothing but a symbolic meaning. As a result, it led Origen into insuperable difficulties in Christology," as Florovsky writes in a recent article. "His aberrations were, in fact, the birth pangs of the Christian mind," Florovsky wrote. They had to make up the values of what we call the Christian mind today. What is taught in all the churches today, except this one, is what emerged at this time. Origen represents the birth pangs. Should he plug for the cosmos, or should he say, as he does in the end here, that we must be purged of all that is physical and corporeal. That would include the resurrection, as you have seen already. "The Christian mind to be respectable has to give up cosmology," says Cornelius. He is in the position of those Stoics and Atomists with their anthropocosmologies-descriptions of the world in terms of man's functions, according to Baillet. And yet how ardently they both protested against being considered anthropocentric. They are, but they don't want to be taken that way. In the Hortensius Augustine tells us that his favorite study all his life has been astronomy, of all things. The reason he broke with the Manichaeans after nine years was that they neglected the study of astronomy. Now they couldn't be true Christians, he thought. They were a very old sect in Asia Minor. He joined them and was happy while he was there. But he said they didn't put enough emphasis on astronomy, so he left. In The City of God he gives us a typical Stoic, public school picture of the cosmos. But since astronomy could not save a soul, later on he has nothing but contempt for it. "What good is astronomy? It won't save you so forget it," he says. He finally settled for abstraction and rhetoric, as we have seen elsewhere. "The rhetoric he taught was vain, superstitious, and empty of everything," says Father Eggersdorfer.
Well, John Chrysostom tells us (he's the next one) that nothing good in the New Testament has any earthly physical reference (refers to anything physical). "Anytime you read anything in the New Testament that sounds as if it might be physical, interpret it spiritually," he says. "It's just an image, just an allegory, just a figure of speech. Never take anything in the New Testament physically." This doesn't leave you much, does it?
Fred Hoyle at the end of his first book The Astronomer says, "I defy anyone to write three meaningful sentences on any subject without some reference to the physical universe." That's quite a test, isn't it? You can't get away from the physical universe. Yet Chrysostom says, "Yes, you can very easily by denying that it is there at all, and if anything says it's there, just call it something else." He says here, "When we read that God is in heaven, we must not give literal interpretation to such a passage. He's no place." And we mentioned that Arnold Lunn cites Jerome as giving the idea of God sitting on a throne as an example of pure absurdity.
Stars do have claim on our respect, if you follow Chrysostom, for God created them for our exclusive use and delight. Their main use is to guide sailors at sea. That's why God made all the stars. Talk about being anthropocentric. That's about as far as you can go, isn't it?
Incidentally, the infantile ideas about the starry heavens-the idea popular in the Middle Ages that the stars were fourteen miles away, etc.-are not the products of infantile minds at all, but the result of the determined effort of the doctors of the church to ban serious cosmology from a place in theology. No wonder they had silly ideas as a result of that. They wanted it to be trivial and silly, even when they turned aside the terrible questions with one-liners. The famous one-liner of Luther, which comes from St. Augustine: "What was God doing before he created the earth? Making a hell for people who ask that question."
According to DeWulf who is the main authority, the big work, on Catholic medieval theology, the unanimous doctrine of the scholastics from the time of Abelard on was the individual alone is the true substance; hence, cosmological doctrines were very vague. Nature as such was commonly looked upon as being sui generis with an autonomous life so that theology had nothing to do with the cosmos. Up to the twelfth century there were those caught by the hesitation of St. Augustine between creationism and traducianism. Like Origen, he couldn't make up his mind. Creationism was everything created suddenly out of nothing, referring to preexistence too. Or was it all created at once. St. Aquinas has another way out. He says the spheres of the planets were regarded as being composed of a special sort of matter which was radically different from all terrestrial matter. Now, that's a neat solution. Yes, there is a physical universe there, but it has nothing to do whatsoever with terrestrial matter. They're not the same elements up there as down here. We are living on a unique and peculiar earth. You get that from Aristotle too.
Well, the twilight zone between cosmos and no cosmos was the playground of the Hermetics, and the Hermetic doctrines continued to force themselves, as Sieboldt says here, upon the minds of such thinkers as John Scotus Erigena, teaching the doctrine of the sun as a creative mediator in the developments of the cosmos. Well, with the Renaissance came renewal of astronomy, and religion found it objectionable. Ramus wanted to rid astronomy of the hypothesis of Aristotle and others by which the Middle Ages sought to reconcile the two.
John Calvin, who was the great voice in Protestantism along with Luther, said "No cosmos; get rid of it." This was right at the time of the Renaissance when these things were coming out and discoveries were being made. The prospect was broadening and the universe was being taken in. Very exciting times. For Calvin the answer was it's best not to speak of such things at all. It's unlawful for Paul to speak of them. He says what he's talking about is the cosmos there. That's in the Institutes Calvin has written here. "Since Paul, though he was carried to the third heaven, positively declared that it was not lawful for man to speak of the secrets which he had seen."
Hutchinson's Psychotheology seems to provide a coherent and meaningful universe in which traditional God was still the center and the circumference. And there is that new book of Alexander Von Koyre on this particular subject-how the theologians and the scientists handled this in medieval and modern times right down to the nineteenth century. There is a work from 1968, a number of people writing together, Reconciliations of Christology with the Cosmic World. Today, they are coming around again. We saw that in the case of all the others. The early church taught it; the doctors rejected it. Christianity doesn't teach it now. Joseph Smith comes along with it, and they give him a bad time. Then they start adopting it. That's what Von Humbolt said, always three stages. First they mock it, then they persecute it, and then they say, "Well, we knew it all along." There's the same thing now. Lots of churches have adopted the most objectionable things in the teachings of Joseph Smith. The first thing was revelation. The big three: revelation, restoration, and the dispensations. I mentioned before that I was at a meeting October before last in Washington, D.C. with Jews and Christians talking about the temple. Those were the three words that were kicked around the whole time, the big three.
And fifteen or twenty years before that, any one of those would have been absolute heresy. The greatest crime of Joseph Smith was speaking of revelation and restoration rather than reformation. And the idea of dispensationism is just as obnoxious as cosmism. They hated that, but they have come around to it now.
The way is opened when Whitehead declares, "Cosmology is philosophy and not science because it is the endeavor to understand in terms of the completely general the metaphorical nature of things." Karl Popper now comes out and says, "Cosmology is religion, and religion is cosmology." If you're studying, you want to know what it's all about and that's cosmology because cosmology is going to include everything-not only other worlds, but what's on them to the slightest detail. So there's your religion. You don't separate them anymore. It's because of its supernatural implications that the theory of Helmholtz, Kelvin, and Arrhenius that life reached the earth through space was rejected by the Positivists. It drew science and religion dangerously close together, they said. The scientists wanted to keep them separated too. So when you get Helmholtz and Kelvin and the new mysterious forces of electricity and mesmerism, and Arrhenius, the idea that life reached the earth through space brings scientific creation and religious creation too close together. They thought that was dangerous. John Lear, who is the science editor for the Saturday Review, writes, "Man is a message from a star but it's not yet sure what it means."
So from the religious side also we learn that our heavenly rest is, of course, a state or condition, one that requires a place also. Just what kind of a place? "Does eschatological mean immaterial?" writes a Catholic priest in the Verbum Domini. "The idea of cosmic redemption necessarily brings the real cosmos into the picture, again in what sense?" Now this is in the official journal of the Vatican. And it says the cosmic redemption necessarily brings the real cosmos into the picture; again, in what sense? And so we get articles now on Pauline cosmic Christology and ecological crisis today. They mention Cosmos, the Lutheran writing; Eliade, The Prestige of the Cosmogonic Myth. No one has gone further to reconcile spirit and matter than Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit paleontologist, but even he leaves it up in the air as if the cosmos had to be sanitized or Christianized before we could accept it.
Modern Thomist writers ignore the views of Thomas on cosmology, declaring them to be not essential. That's a shaky excuse at best. This is a particular Jesuit writing. I was in a Latin seminar with H.R.W. Smith in Berkeley and all the other members of the seminar (there were at least a dozen of them) were either priests or nuns. Smith is an active Catholic. With all these Catholic schools around there and the subject being Latin inscriptions, they all flocked to this particular seminar. Someone would whisper, "Did you hear about Sister Eloise? They say she's a Thomist." Thomas Aquinas was the gospel, but it was as if being a Thomist had suddenly come to be a great scandal. Then Sister Eloise would pass around the cigarettes, and everybody would light up and have a good time. But here the idea is that the modern Thomists don't accept Thomas' views.
"One can embrace the truly wonderful Greco-Roman reverence for the wonders of the starry heavens," Hugo Rahner tells us here. You can do that and be a good Catholic now on the understanding that they are only a sign of what is happening on a higher level of reality between Christ and his church-a cosmos in itself which Origen has called the heaven of our heart. Thus we are back to Origen's solution and perplexities. "Christ gives light to all the spiritual stars, even as in our earthly light luna brings light to the stars. While to our enlightened minds the uniform motion of the stars suggests a machine, to most Greeks it suggests a god. The poor things had never seen a machine," says our friend R. E. Dodds.
Well, how do the Marxists stand on this? This is an interesting thing too. They talk about the cosmist heresy. The cosmists insist on the same separation. They must separate the universe from the cosmos because, of course, you see where they are. Actually it's dialectical materialism. There is only the material. To them religion is just opiate; that doesn't really exist at all, so you can't bring the two together. And yet they react as Darwin reacted speaking of the jungle. When he views the glory of nature, he is filled with the thrill of religious awe and he can't shake it. He just feels that there is something more there. This is a very common experience, and this has bothered the Russians a good deal because they are actually very spiritual people. Notice, religion has been their endurance with all the hells they've had to go through. But the Marxists will not let their cosmos be tarnished with religion any more than the Christian doctors would have their religion corrupted by the cosmos.
Then Rudolf Bultmann: "By his unsubstantiated conclusion that the cosmological texts found in Paul are of Gnostic influence, Bultmann did to Paul what the rabbis did to apocalyptic. He purged it of its world view." M.E. Dahl is writing here, "Jewish eschatology should be taken mythologically." They took it literally. How we take Paul's theology which does give the answer to those questions, he says, depends on whether we like it or we don't like the answer. It's all up to us how we take these things, he says. "We don't need religion to cast light on the nature of cosmos nor on anything else for that matter. A certain type of mentality there is that holds that science is of a limited power, that its ultimate foundation depends on faith." Of course, most scientists go along with that. But according to Reichenbach this finds no support in logic-the rise of scientific philosophy-that science is not founded on faith. Well, this gets into science and religion.
"What you see is not real." Milton was held to be a heretic in his angelology because his angels were too real. They certainly seem abstract and allegorical enough, don't they:
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant:
What is he describing-a dove, an angel, or something? Again, he appeals to "what in me is dark; enlighten what is low; raise and sustain." But they say his angels are too literal, so we can't accept Milton as doctrine. People have written many doctor's and master's theses on Milton and Mormonism.
"Even science fiction is forbidden to introduce any religious element," McKenna writes. "The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game. It is safe only if it is kept pure." You must keep them separate.
Incidentally, we mentioned the Sefer Yetsirah, the oldest Hebrew book, written supposedly by Abraham. As Epstein says, it's not concerned either with ethic or religion. Its entire concern is for the natural cosmos. The idea that the natural cosmos might be an object of religious concern doesn't seem to occur to him or to Carl Schmidt or R. H. Charles, or the rest. There is absolutely no place for it.
This has not been a sidetrack. It is right in the mainstream of the Pearl of Great Price, as you know, because cosmology is one of the very strong points. This is what immediately attracted Joseph Smith to the papyri. He said, "They are star charts; they're plans of the heavens." And they are indeed. So we are going to get lots more of that. Someday we will get around to the Pearl of Great Price, but it's all there. It's a small book, and you can read it anytime. Then you'll notice all these things are there. If you go into our theological library over here (and we have a big one), you will see that Joseph was different, and he has really given the world something it did not have. People don't know that. People have short memories, and we count on that. Ministers and priests don't study this stuff. They don't bother about it. They're concerned with their congregations, getting them out to meeting, getting their contributions. So this is a very important lesson on this cosmology business.
