Dread and alluring mystery

Originally published 25 July 2004

When I first vis­it­ed the cap­i­tal of Ire­land in 1972, Dublin was a gray, cheer­less city with beg­gars and lit­ter every­where. I could­n’t wait to get away.

I did­n’t know it then, but the lin­ger­ing spir­i­tu­al mias­ma that held the city in its bleak embrace had its ori­gin in the epis­co­pal palace at Drum­con­dra, where from 1940 to 1972 John Charles McQuaid, arch­bish­op of Dublin, ruled Catholic Ire­land with inflex­i­ble the­ol­o­gy and an iron fist.

Sci­en­tif­ic human­ism, sec­u­lar democ­ra­cy, and fem­i­nism were archevils of the mod­ern world, accord­ing to McQuaid. The only source of truth was Holy Moth­er Church. Jews and Protes­tants were lack­eys of the dev­il. And woe betide any Irish Catholic, lay or reli­gious, who got out of line; the ham­mer of ortho­doxy came down with swift and bru­tal force.

Even such pow­er­ful polit­i­cal lead­ers as Eamon de Valera cur­ried McQuaid’s favor.

Today, Dublin is a vibrant, sec­u­lar Euro­pean city, jammed with traf­fic and peo­ple, bas­kets of flow­ers on shopfronts, buskers mak­ing music on every cor­ner, side­walk cafes filled with laugh­ing peo­ple. The econ­o­my is boom­ing, the arts flour­ish, and sci­en­tif­ic research is mak­ing up for lost time.

When the dam of reli­gious oppres­sion broke in the 1980s, it was as if cen­turies of sup­pressed joy and cre­ativ­i­ty were released. The aya­tol­lah of Drum­con­dra is now lit­tle more than a drea­ry memory.

All this is on my mind because I have just read John Cooney’s mas­sive biog­ra­phy of McQuaid, The Ruler of Catholic Ireland.

I real­ize now how much the Irish Church of that time influ­enced my own child­hood, thou­sands of miles away.

My ear­ly edu­ca­tion was very much at the hands of priests and nuns of the Irish dias­po­ra who often shared McQuaid’s con­vic­tion that every­thing worth know­ing was laid out by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cen­tu­ry. The cos­mos described by Dante in the Divine Com­e­dy—heav­en, hell, pur­ga­to­ry, and all that — was more famil­iar to me than the uni­verse of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry astronomers.

But I was lucky to have a few extra­or­di­nary high-school teach­ers whose intel­lec­tu­al hori­zons were broad­er than those of the Church they served. Sis­ter Jane Fran­cis opened my eyes to math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence with her own joy­ful curios­i­ty. Sis­ter Domini­ca turned me on to lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture. But for the time being I held onto my child­hood reli­gion, even as I pur­sued my new love for sci­ence. Like many peo­ple, I divid­ed my mind into water­tight com­part­ments: faith and reason.

If I had to choose a moment when I real­ized com­part­men­tal­iza­tion was fraud­u­lent it would be in the fall of the aca­d­e­m­ic year 1968 – 69, while I was sup­port­ed by a Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion fel­low­ship to study the his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege in Lon­don. I was mar­ried with young chil­dren, and took up res­i­dence in a mews flat a short walk away from Lon­don’s Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um, Sci­ence Muse­um, and Geol­o­gy Museum.

An object on an upper floor of the Sci­ence Muse­um sparked my epiphany: the sil­vered, 72-inch diam­e­ter metal­lic mir­ror that for the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry was the cen­tral com­po­nent of what was then the largest tele­scope in the world.

The mir­ror had been the light-gath­er­ing ele­ment of the huge tele­scope con­struct­ed by Lord Rosse, William Par­sons, on his estate at Birr, in Ire­land, and with which he dis­cov­ered — among oth­er things — the spi­ral galax­ies. As I recall, the mir­ror was dis­played in a hor­i­zon­tal posi­tion, like a mag­i­cal pool of shin­ning quick­sil­ver into which one might look to find the secrets of the uni­verse, a con­ceit that may have been rein­forced by the mag­i­cal mir­rors and pools of fairy tales and fan­ta­sy fiction.

And in a sense the tele­scope mir­ror was exact­ly that. I had pre­vi­ous­ly seen illus­trat­ed in astron­o­my books Rosse’s famous sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy in the con­stel­la­tion Canes Venati­ci, and I had stud­ied enough astron­o­my to know that the Whirlpool Galaxy is just one of an uncount­able num­ber of spi­ral galax­ies, includ­ing our own Milky Way, that pop­u­late the universe.

The galax­ies I saw reflect­ed — in my mind’s eye — there in the shin­ing pool of the Birr mir­ror were indeed the mys­teri­um tremen­dum et fasci­nans (dread and allur­ing mys­tery) that is the foun­da­tion of all true reli­gious feel­ing. They sug­gest­ed a kind of faith that made no place for mag­ic, dis­em­bod­ied spir­it, super­nat­u­ral­ism, and miracles.

I knew then I could live hap­pi­ly with­out the McQuaid­i­an the­ol­o­gy of my youth, but not with­out science.