Fallen Star?
With the discovery of Earth’s bigger and older twin KEPLER-452b, and the publishing of the first Philae lander results from Comet 67P, frissons of excitement rippled across the land. Maybe there is life out there after all! And, if there is, what would the implications be for Planet Earth? It is a time for imagination, for a courageous trust in Creation. ‘We belong to a reality greater than our own’, writes Diarmuid O’Murchu MS, in his Evolutionary Faith ‘and it is now time to embrace the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the story of all life unfolds’.
For sure our current understanding of religion, particularly of Christianity, would be seriously challenged. Fr Thomas O’Meara OP in his wonderful little book Vast Universe, wrote that ‘the possibility of extra-terrestrial life becoming part of our world, whether in theory or reality, makes us think differently about who we are and about what it means to be intelligent. It implies new horizons for the future. New theologies await. Even a revelation believed to come from God would be expanded.’
Theologian Karl Rahner wrote, ‘Today the Christian is aware of living on a tiny planet that is part of a system of a particular sun which itself belongs to a galaxy with 300 million stars, and is many thousands of light years broad. In this cosmos of unimaginable size . . . (we believe that) the eternal Logos of God who drives forward these billions of galaxies became a human being on this small planet which is a speck of dust in the universe.’
We wonder what creation stories those other inhabited ‘specks of dust’ might have. Would they include a Fall? And if not would an incarnation still be central to their stories? God, of course, can be present on other planets in a million ways. Incarnation and redemption are not unique to Earth. Nor does the possibility of a different kind of incarnation to ours diminish the unique importance of our Christian story. We believe that the risen Christ, the cosmic Christ, has the supreme role of saving and completing the entire material universe. And we continue to wonder.
Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ wrote, ‘All that I can entertain is the possibility of a multi-aspect incarnation which would be realised on all the stars . . . ’ In her Christ in the Universe poet Alice Meynell imagines this ‘multi-aspect incarnation’. She pictures an extra-terrestrial gathering of the civilisations of countless constellations telling stories about their incarnations and eternities, listening to ‘a million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear’.
O, be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God whose stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show them a Man.
These reflections draw us into a deeper exploration of our own faith-story, and especially, the meaning of an Original Sin. Might we be the only inhabited star to have disappointed our Creator? From the beginning there have been theologians who, careful not to confuse myth with history, find no place, since the first ‘Flaring Forth’, for an actual historical Fall, a geographical Eden. Humanity, they say, is not defined by an original act of disobedience, condemned from the very start to a punitive exile.
Paradise was never lost, they hold. Incarnation is not about restoring it. Planned from the very beginning, it is about the healing, flourishing and perfecting of our human nature as it evolves, despite its ignorance, darkness, alienation and destructiveness, into its final destiny in the heart of God. The Fall account is a story about our daily disruption of the harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation due to what Pope Francis calls, in his Laudato Si’, ‘our presuming to take the place of God and our refusal to acknowledge our creaturely limitations’ (66).
Original sin is not the name of a primordial catastrophe: it expresses, as Fr Kevin Kelly puts it, ‘the dark underside of our graced humanity and our graced world.’ In Christianity in Evolution Jack Mahoney SJ critiques the theology of atonement that links the Fall with Incarnation. He believes that ‘it would be more theologically appropriate now to drop (the doctrine of original sin) as unnecessary and cumbersome baggage.’ Why? Because God’s first intention was never thrown off course.
Some leading theologians call for a radical revision of this flawed teaching, this blight on the blossoming of Catholicism. Apart from its implicit denial of the evolutionary process, the doctrine is generally understood to define our disobedient disposition, the flawed nature and origin of our human condition, the guilty way we stand before our Creator. But we are born in God’s image, not definitively shaped by sin from the beginning. Perhaps baptism is not so much about exorcising a past original sin from the baby’s soul as about preparing her innocent heart for encountering the waiting ‘sin of the world’ (St Paul).
We are not a fallen race. We never were. And this, of course, is a lost traditional insight. St Augustine wrote of the first creation as a carmen Dei, a divinely–inspired symphony of incarnate beauty. St Bonaventure saw our planet and its people distilling light as a ‘stained-glass window in the morning sun’. More recently Thomas Merton reminded us that we were created to be ‘manifestations of divine beauty’ in a world that is ‘absolutely transparent, and the divine is shining through it all the time’.
De Chardin was aware that the world stands at the threshold of a swiftly developing theology of creation together with a new cosmology. He believed that ‘our former planetary and anthropocentric focus must give way to a fuller consciousness of cosmic community’. And now, as astonishing discoveries and theories about our origin, evolution and destiny fill the media, a significant renewal in Catholic theology, spirituality and pastoral ministry must surely follow. Writing about ‘the fecundity and creative artistry of the Creator’ Zachary Hayes OFM, at the end of his A Window to the Divine asks a fundamental question, ‘How big a God do you believe in?’