Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The stunning figure of Orion is rising in the southeast around 9pm this time of year. My children are eager to see Betelgeuse, the impressive star on the northeastern edge of the constellation, not least because of its amusing name. Alas: the trees are too dense around our home, and so Betelgeuse is really not visible until after 10. “Next month,” I keep telling them.

Even in the center of a great city like Atlanta, bathed in artificial light, the reddish hue of this giant is perceptible. My Field Guide to the Night Sky reports that Betelgeuse really is a monster: a “red supergiant” with a diameter comparable to the orbit of the planet Venus (or maybe larger than that: according to Wikipedia, its outer edges would extent to Jupiter; and then there is this comparison of volume: if our Sun were a beach ball, Betelgeuse would be a large stadium). The star is dying. In a thousand years or so, a few moments in the life a star, it will likely explode in a colossal supernova which, according to some astronomers, will achieve an apparent magnitude equal to a full moon. For several months, the holocaust of this star’s demise will be easily visible even during the day.

“Beetlejuice, Daddy! Let’s go look at Beetlejuice,” my children cry; and I am glad. A child, I figure, who lives in anticipation of seeing the stars, is a child still alive to wonder.

Read on.

To look upon the stars on a clear night, as your eyes make their gradual adjustment to the darkness and the little pinpricks of radiance emerge, is to be struck in a very graphic way by the astounding mystery of being. Out of darkness there is light. There is no necessity behind the existence of the stars, no matter what tangled sophistries our materialists will weave: they just are, and they might not have been. The bare truth is that not even the most subtle science can demonstrate causality: in strict logic in can only demonstrate sequence. Causality is in the mind of man. And I confess that often there is more that is sympathetic in the heady astrologist who sees vast and intricate earthly causality in the movement of the stars, than in the austere materialist who would, by his sterile rationalism, drive wonder from the child-stargazer by teaching a sham causality of Fate. It is all in the tremendous difference between saying “Betelgeuse is a red supergiant” and merely “Betelgeuse is.” The latter is outside the realm of science, and I would sooner trust the wild imagination of the child who tells me a great horned Beetle hid its crimson egg in the sky to protect it from the birds, than the portentous narrative of the materialist that amounts to nothing exploding into something.

I once awoke in early June from a vivid and disturbing, though instantly forgotten dream into that condition of dazed wakefulness which often lends itself to memorable mishaps. For some reason I wandered outside and looked up in the clear summer night. A wave of unforgettable emotion followed; awe, fright and alarm: for it was no longer June but nearer to November. Bright and prominent Vega had drifted up and across the sky; Arcturus was gone, along with Jupiter, which had for some weeks hung in the full radiance of opposition near the constellation Virgo; and the famed Big Dipper had plunged beneath the trees in the northwest. I was disconcerted and oppressed by these shocking changes; my mind reeled.

And then full wakefulness came, and it immediately dawned on me that dawn was near. Relief and not a little embarrassment followed; and, sheepishly, thankful that no one in the neighborhood was around to observe my fretting, I went back inside. Since then, however, I have often fancied that my original alarm might be the truer reaction: for alarming it is that a whole half-year would pass in a single night. In my state of half-sleep, I grasped the essential and shocking precariousness of existence. The Big Dipper, Ursa Major the Great Bear: he might plunge with his guardian Arcturus beneath the northern horizon — and never return. Jupiter might wander off into conjunction behind the sun, and then wander off into nonexistence. Orion the Hunter, and his shoulder Betelgeuse, might vanish forever.

We do not have access to causality in the physical world. That Betelgeuse rose last night around 9pm (invisible behind the clouds) does not, in strict logic, imply that it will rise again tonight. All the rationalism of our materialists cannot demolish, in the end, the surprise we feel, when we have our wonder intact, at the solid fact that things are. Causality is not discoverable in the world; it comes from the mind of man, which has been imprinted by the Mind of God. Seeing is not believing but rather the reverse. And the great enduring sanity of the Christian philosophy was aptly summarized in the wit of Chesterton, that most intuitive of Thomists who, having merely flipped through as mass of Aquinas authorities sat down and dictated what one of the greatest authorities called “without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas”: “If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, ‘To be or not to be — that is the question,’ then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, ‘To be — that is the answer.’”

Once acknowledge the mystery and miracle that things are, and a man can live like a man and not a morbid intellectual; he can play with his children under stars called beetles, and drink beer with reverence; he can contend for what is true, and laugh at what is not; he can be still and know that He is God — he Whose very Name is given to us, by the wonderful feebleness of the English language, in the phrase which in its ineffable abundance shatters the all sophistries of the materialists: I AM.