JOHN EDMONDSON 11 Hawthorne Ave, Louth, Lincolnshire LN11 OLD POSTSCRIPTS by Seafarer POSTICRIPTS Uncertainty caught up this summer with Michael Frayn’s superb play Copenhagen, which transferred in May from the National’s Cottesloe Theatre to the West End. In 1941 the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg (he of the “Uncertainty Principle”) secretly met the Danish “father of quantum mechanics” Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.
Heisenberg was in charge of Hitler’s atomic programme.
Denmark was occupied by Germany. Bohr was half-Jewish.
The two had been friends and collaborators Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg: before the war. pioneers of nonrealist physics?
What was this high-risk meeting all about?
Was Heisenberg spying on Bohr? Was he hoping to learn what progress the Allies were making in building an Abomb? Or was he (no Nazi sympathiser) trying to warn Bohr that Hitler was getting into the nuclear arms race? Or were his motives mixed? Did he not know himself what his motives were?
Were they as uncertain as his famous principle?
Frayn gives Bohr a marvellous speech in Act 2 which beautifully describes the dawn of scientific nonrealism in the twentieth century. Recalling their prewar collaborations, Bohr sees the new science as “putting man back at the centre of the universe” - not in the sense of glorifying our fallible species, but in recognising that, after Einstein’s relativity and the quantum revolution, matter and energy are not fixed and absolute but dependent on human consciousness and observation for their “reality”. the Renaissance, no sooner has man become, as Protagoras proclaimed him, the measure of all things, than we’re pushed aside again by the products of our own reasoning! We’re dwarfed again as physicists build the great new cathedrals for us to wonder at - the laws of classical mechanics that predate us from the beginning of eternity, that will survive us to eternity’s end, that exist whether we exist or not...” Then comes the revolution. “It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement - measurement, on which the whole possibility of science depends - measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It’s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from one particular viewpoint of a possible observer... There is no precisely determinable objective universe... The universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it.
Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head.” How much of that is Bohr the scientist and how much Frayn the artist I don’t know. But I’ve rarely heard postmodernhumanist science better expressed.
Nonrealist physics Ihe speech continues: “Not to ‘Lascaee. but we turned the world inside out!... Throughout history we keep finding ourselves displaced. We keep exiling ourselves to the periphery of things. First we turn ourselves into a mere adjunct of God’s unknowable purposes, tiny figures kneeling in the great cathedral of creation. And no sooner have we recovered ourselves in All in the mind N Wilson, in God’s Funeral (reviewed lsewhere in this issue), says something similar about the seismic shift from old realist to new nonrealist science (which rumbles on in our own day): “Science was the Victorian fundamentalism. Of course it found out things which were ‘really true’. But not enough scientists and not enough religious believers would seem to have absorbed the message of Kant - namely, that the human mind is not a camera. It does not take snapshots of some external thing called ‘reality’. The mind is a doer, not just a contemplator. This does not mean that there is no reality-in-itself to contemplate. It does not mean that there is no universe for science to explore, or no God for the soul to worship. But it does mean that the Science versus Religion match is usually conducted most loudly by people who would benefit from a few months spent reading a third discipline - philosophy.” Dream of the Paradise Garden l - admittedly a very big if - the organisers of this year’s BBC Proms had come to SoF and said “You choose a programme which will give us a suitable climax for this millennium and set us off on the right track for the next”, we could hardly have chosen better than Nicholas Kenyon and his team. All the big themes - what is life? what is transcendence? what is meaning? - are there: Mahler’s Resurrection and Third symphonies, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Four Last Songs, Poulenc’s Figure humaine, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and, in the opening concert, Michael Tippett’s visionary masterpiece The Mask of Time.
Tippett sang the song of the fractured, alienated, confused, pessimistic but never quite hopeless twentieth century. He never believed in gods, but never doubted divinity.
He was a secular humanist who knew that gods, goddesses and all the muses are not only legitimate but necessary symbols of human value, human aspiration, and human understanding of the universal, the eternal, and what we choose, rather helplessly and wholly inadequately, to call the transcendent.
And it all comes together in the Mask of Time.
Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Mask draws its imagery from anywhere and everywhere: the Bible, Shiva, I Ching, the movies, Greek mythology, alchemy, Shelley, Yeats, merde, bizzwazz, whizzing wings... It’s opening words are “All metaphor... all metaphor”. We experience “the creation of the world by music”, followed by “the wonder and the horror” of nature, and humanity’s efforts to find a balance between them.
In Tippett’s Paradise Garden, his Eden, the dragon is a friendly creature who, invited by Woman to sit down, decorously “poises himself” on the grass - and it is God who falls and withdraws, not man. (“But you may pray to me”, he condescends as he goes). In the seventh POSTSCRIPTS movement, alchemists try turning base metals to gold, and the medieval church makes equally bizarre attempts to turn chaos into form and meaning. The finale is wordless and wondrous, but “the singing will never be done”.
When we go on, as we do, about the need to reinvent and rework our mythologies, to recast them from 1st century into 21st century forms, here are our models of how to do it. Tippett knew how to sing a new song in a strange land. Humanity, he wrote (in his Third Symphony), must “spit his curses across the celestial face, though he be answered... with annihilation from the whirlwind”. We call it taking leave of God - for God’s sake.
Those who still take the view that Britain’s hawkish leadership was an exemplary expression of “ethical foreign policy” will be even more disturbed by the bishop’s report that “the UNHCR accused Britain of being the least generous of countries in offering assistance” to refugees. The full report is available from Church House Bookshop, 31 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BN for £1.40.
Tippett: suitably millennial Non-Bomber Harries y admiration for Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, took a bit of a knock when he so far belied his liberal reputation as to support his arch-conservative fellow Bishop of Chichester in booting Anthony Freeman out of his parish. When in April this year he went on Radio 4 to offer theological support for NATO’s bombing war, I was saddened but not ‘MB! surprised.
It was therefore an unexpected pleasure to read the report Inside Out - The Balkans Conflict, written by the bishop as chair of the C of E’s Board for Social Responsibility and presented to General Synod in July. Earlier attempts to square the bombing with just war theory have been quietly dropped.
Instead, the report acknowledges that there is a “legitimate fear” that “the sustainability of NATO’s settlement remains tenuous and susceptible to outside interference”.
More strikingly (and with my emphasis), “the scale of the human tragedy has created the perception that NATO’s actions precipitated rather than prevented the human catastrophe. It is clear that while Serbia was engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing prior to NATO’s military involvement in Kosovo, Milosovic used the conflict as cover for the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Albanian problem’.” This, of course, is what the critics of the bombing said from the start, when Clare Short-fuse bracketed them with the appeasers of Hitler.
Trials and tribulations he Synod which was invited by Richard Harries to repent of the failures of religion in the Balkans war also moved towards the establishment of new disciplinary measures for the clergy. While some speakers were at pains to emphasise that what they had in mind was simpler and fairer procedures for dealing with priests accused of “adultery, prostitution, paedophilia and scandalous behaviour”, others warned of the prospect of “heresy trials”. The Guardian suggested that the first to be called to the dock might be clergy members of the Sea of Faith.
Some of our most highly esteemed clergy members have pooh-poohed the idea, confident that nonrealism, far from being heretical, is a restatement of the orthodox position that God cannot be reduced to the reality of just another “thing”, an “object” which “exists” like any other object. I have no doubt they would defend themselves before a heresy court with the same vigour, integrity (and success) as Lloyd Geering did when the New Zealand Presbyterians put him on trial.
But assurances that no-one in their right mind would think of accusing SoF priests of heresy are surely optimistic.
Remember Anthony Freeman. As one opponent of the new measures told Synod, “It is naive to say it would be done only in exceptional circumstances.
If it was on the statute book, someone would want to use it”.
This raises difficult questions for the Network, which of course includes not only Anglicans but members of all the mainstream Christian churches, plus Humanists, atheists, agnostics, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans and others. Would SoF Anglicans in the dock be helped or hindered by SoF campaigning vigorously on their behalf? Would our moral support assist their cause or unwittingly light their funeral pyres?
Should we leave Anglican SoFers to fight their own battles within their own church, Catholics and Methodists ditto?
Or should we see their cause as our cause, and speak out together for religious faith as a wholly human creation? Which is the more principled course, which the more politic?
Not taking leave of God peaking of Methodists, what a shame (though hardly a surprise) that the church’s governing body, the Methodist Conference, has shied away from a proposal to drop “belief in God” as a prerequisite of church membership. Whether this was proposed as a desperate measure to put bums, even atheist bums, on pews, or in sensible recognition that “belief in God” is more problematical than the churches have hitherto supposed, I know not.
But the Conference voted not to take leave of God, giving the proposal rather less debating time than a parallel “RELIGION is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company.” Earl of Chesterfield (16941773) proposal to drop the ban on alchohol on church premises (which was also defeated, as members showed they didn’t give a Castlemaine XXXX for drinkers’ rights). So far as I know, that leaves the Quakers as the only “church” (if they will forgive the term) which does not insist on belief in God (because they deny all credal propositions) - though Quakers, too, can get into trouble for suggesting that all religious faith, even Quakerism, is a human creation...
First Communion, Sardinia Hello and Welcome... to our influx of new readers who responded to our ads on the Guardian “Editor’s magazine rack” page. The first, on July 2, placed us immediately above The Devil (“wicked fiction”); the second, on July 30, had us in uncomfortable proximity to Kindred Spirit (“New Age... psychic phenomena”). We described ourselves as a “quarterly review with postmodern religious-hiimanist perspective... No supernaturalist nonsense, no gaseous spirituality, no New Age rubbish. Just exploration and promotion of religion as a wholly human creation, like music and poetry: wonderful, awesome, daft, dangerous, provocative, inspiring...” Well, it obviously worked for some. We hope you enjoy our company, as we’ look forward to enjoying yours.
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