Though Arthur was twenty years older than I, our relationship had grown into that of a father and son, with myself in the default position of spiritual father. Yet it had the disturbing quality of reversing itself unexpectedly. On occasion, after giving him spiritual direction, I would find myself talking of personal matters that I shared with no one else—unresolved abstractions, my worries about this or that—nothing very intimate or very pressing, but serious enough that I felt greatly benefited by his perspective on matters. We had become close.
I recall especially one of the last conversations we shared. We met by accident at the annual Thanksgiving Festival in the Fields of Praise outside Stella Maris. There must have been more than eighty thousand people there that day, a majority of whom lived in the city and others who had come in from nearby towns and villages. After the celebration Mass had been offered on the high dais by the sea, we hundreds of priests and five bishops went down into the crowds to join in the general merriment and to meet with friends and neighbors.
As a monastic, I did not expect to bump into anyone I knew well, since mine is mainly a cloistered life at St. Benedict’s, and Foundation City is far from Stella Maris and a good deal smaller. Most of my spiritual directees are in the north.
Wandering through the crowds of people, I simply enjoyed the atmosphere, buoyed by the contagious happiness all around me. The sky was cloudless, the temperature mild for late autumn. The waiting banquet tables ringing the field would soon be groaning under the weight of the coming feast. I received many kind greetings offered by strangers, and occasional requests to bless crucifixes and scapulars—and newborn babies (always a particular pleasure).
At one point, I lingered on the edge of a lovely spontaneous incident: About a dozen children had joined hands and were dancing in a circle, singing and laughing all the while. Some of them held small handbells, which they rang with contrapuntal abandon (they had brought them for the Gloria, but clearly they knew how to put them to other uses). People gathered around to watch, and for all of us, I sensed, it was an unexpected delight in a day full of delights.
More and more children ran out from the crowd and joined the dancers, singing too, though it seemed to me that there was among them no agreement on a particular melody or set of lyrics. Yet it worked somehow, the unplanned creation of radiant wholeness, balance, harmony. It was beautiful, and it touched me deeply.
I had just begun clapping my hands in time with the rhythm when someone, literally, bumped into me, and I staggered, going down on one knee to break my fall. I looked up and saw that it was Felix Arthur.
With a chuckle, he helped me to regain my feet.
“Father Abbot,” he declared as he dusted off my habit, “you are out of your orbit!”
“Felix,” I answered in the same tone, “you are out of yours!”
“A wandering planet am I”, he laughed. “My apologies.”
“None needed. How are you, Felix?”
“I’m very well, Anselm”, he said with a bit of a smile and a mildly furrowed brow. “Yes, I believe I am quite well, after all.”
“After all?”
He smiled again but offered no further elucidation.
“Would you care to sit with me?” I asked.
“Gladly!”
As we walked toward the park near the river’s mouth, he explained that he had a free hour before the banquet began, when he would join his wife, who had gone to fetch some of their clan who lived in Stella Maris. We sat down on a less crowded stretch of grass beneath a giant ficus tree from which most of the syrupy yellow fruit had already been harvested. We plucked a few remaining orbs from the lower branches and sucked at them without conversing, in a restful mood, listening to the surf on the nearby beach, watching the antics all about us. At one point, a group of young people came by, bearing trays full of glasses, and they offered us white-berry wine. Felix and I sipped and contented ourselves gazing out over the southern sea, at the brightly colored sailboats in the bay, across the river at the capital buildings.
“Spiritually, I mean, or hope”, he said cryptically.
“Pardon me, Felix?” I asked.
“I mean I’m ultimately quite well.”
“Ah, your ‘after all’ qualifier, which I last heard more than twenty minutes ago.”
He chuckled. “Of course, you are no mind-reader, Anselm. Forgive me. Bemused and befuddled am I.”
“No more than usual, it seems to me. Or is something specific on your mind?”
“Something specific is definitely on my mind. May I speak of it confidentially?”
“Of course.”
“I wish to posit a moral question.” I nodded for him to continue.
“What would you theologians say about someone who made a great thing, quite a marvelous thing, that could benefit mankind, though to what degree, and how, would be uncertain?”
“I would say that the maker of the thing was exercising his God-given gifts.”
“Granted. Now add to the equation a few additional factors.”
“Such as?”
“What if mankind was not ready for this thing? What if its sudden appearance had the potential for disrupting his understanding of himself and his natural powers?”
“It would depend on whether or not the disruption itself had moral or immoral content, I would say. Would the invention, for example, communicate a falsehood?”
“Not a lie as such. Nor be inherently a lie. Yet it would have the potential—remaining potential only at a certain early stage—to deform man’s sense of his place in the hierarchy of creatures.”
“You’re touching upon the realm of theological cosmology, Felix. A rather significant factor, one might call it.”
“I’m referring to a kind of power, you see”, he went on. “Power combined with speed. Possibly speeds approaching the velocities achieved by our ancestors who came from Earth.”
“And look what happened to them? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I suppose that’s part of it.”
“We would have to consider that a tool is morally neutral, wouldn’t we?”
“Is it?” he asked, peering at me intently.
“It would depend on the nature of the tool An explosive chemical compound like the one used to open fissures in our mines is intended entirely for good purposes. It is not inherently evil. Yet it might also be exploded by a malicious person here in our park, taking many human lives to death by unjust violence.”
“Speedily and with great force.”
“Therefore, to avoid this potential, should we return to picks and shovels when we dig for iron? A pick, after all, can end another’s life swiftly in a moment of madness.”
“I know these arguments”, Arthur said, with a hint of impatience. “I know where they lead, for I have wrestled with them over and again until my brain spins. Remove all tools, all potential for evil through such tools, and a man is still capable of picking up a rock and hitting his brother over the head with it. Perhaps the problem is better examined by asking where, precisely, are the limits—where the benefit of a tool, or an invention of any sort, overwhelms its user and makes of the man an instrument for its purpose.”
“The analogy is somewhat flawed. The tool has no will, no intelligence of its own. It is man who is ever the problem.”
“Yes”, he said quietly. “But what can we do with man?”
“Do with man? I cannot see that we are able to do anything with the human race that would prevent evil from rising within us—either individually or as a people.”
“I agree, Anselm. Truly, I understand what you’re implying. To attempt to control our nature by limiting freedom in order to prevent evil would be to exchange one form of evil for another.”
“Precisely.” I paused, wondering what was really bothering him, and where the discussion was leading to. “We have a functioning democracy, Felix, which has not failed us in two and a half centuries.”
“Say rather that we have not faile
d it. For democracy is only as good as its people are good.”
“Which is true of any form of government, don’t you think?”
He fell silent, looking doubtful.
“Leaving aside tyranny”, I added.
I pondered the fact that since the foundation there had been no war on this planet, nor had there been much place for sly, voracious politics. The member states of the Commonwealth were at peace with each other, united in common purpose. Nor had there been in their internal affairs any tribal skirmishes, so to speak, no petty battles between villages or regions.
“Consider that we have no armies on any of the continents,” I continued, “nor are there developed mechanisms in the social order that would reward the greedy or those who might lust for power.”
“We do have police”, he said with a frown.
“Of course, every hamlet and city has a few just men who help pull carts out of ditches and remind the young not to carouse late at night to the detriment of their neighbors’ sleep.”
“Or try to catch thieves.”
“Yes, there are thieves among us—and on occasion crimes of passion, such as that most rare and horrible thing, murder. And there is a jail-farm on every continent, though I’m sure you would agree that their residents are few in number.”
“I think you are too optimistic about human nature.”
I smiled. “I am a confessor, Felix. I know human souls.”
“Then you should admit that evil persists in us.”
“I do admit it. Moreover, I believe we must never forget it.”
“But you see my point, Anselm. Given the wrong circumstances, these impulses within us might grow and grow, might be acted upon by greater numbers of people. Then comes governmental reaction, control, suppression—fostering even worse evils.”
“That is always possible, without grace.”
He nodded absently at my obvious thought, and said, “I know as well as you do that the crucial thing is faith.”
“Yes, the revelation given from above and paid for by unspeakable suffering. The Crucifixion. . . . And do not forget the Resurrection.”
“I don’t”, he replied with a quick look.
Arthur turned his gaze to the sea and said nothing for a time. I knew that his great mind was churning over a dilemma that he was hesitant to tell me about, and that his great heart was involved too.
Finally he broke his line of private thought and faced me directly. “I have invented something that could propel the people of Regnum Pacis too far, too quickly for our minds, and maybe even our souls, to cope with. Power is enormously attractive when presented as an instrument for bringing about some good. But it is dangerous. And what I’m referring to is near-angelic power. Near-instantaneous knowledge and velocities that are presently unthinkable for us. Illusions of immortality, you see.”
“Something that would undermine our experience of natural limitations, you mean? And hence deform our sense of place in the holy cosmology?”
“Yes. Very much the kinds of things that our forefathers thought they had mastered—before the catastrophe.”
“Surely, Felix, you are not arguing for ignorance.”
“No, I’m asking myself where are the frontiers: Where does pursuit of knowledge become folly; and where should prudence prevail?”
“An excellent question. Indeed, an ennobling search. Yet the answer to this cannot be reached by equations and formulae.”
“I know. I’m just asking for your thoughts on the matter.”
“You called it a moral question. It strikes me rather as a prudential matter, a question of discerning the will of God.”
“And you’re a man of God. Give me some guidance on this, I beg you.”
It was now my turn to look out over the sea. Infinite it seemed, always beautiful, sometimes dangerous in its powers, sometimes serene; sometimes harming mankind, sometimes aiding us.
“I will pray for you, Felix. I will ask that you be given light on this question and that you will receive it and proceed in good conscience and good peace. Do not be anxious.”
He clapped me on the shoulder with his large old hand.
“Thank you,” he said. Then came another sigh, and I could see that he was still not at peace.
We both returned to gazing at the sea.
“Somewhere up there, above the equator, is a little anomaly in the sky”, he said quietly. “I think it is a ship. My heart tells me it is a ship. If I am right, it is a seed with so much encoded within it that if the seed be replanted on our world the errors of the past might well repeat themselves. Can we risk it?”
“Is not all choice a risk . . . an act of hope, a step made in trust? And is there not inherent in all right choice the belief that everything works to the good for those who love God?”
“How many love God, I wonder? In our world, most do, or very many, I should say. But what was the condition of the people who lived on Earth, the ones who sent the Kosmos on its voyage?”
“You know as well as I do what they were like. Would it have been better if they had stayed at home? Where would we be now if they had chosen not to cross the sea of the heavens to explore this planet?”
“I understand what you’re saying. I can see that the hand of the Creator was upon the venture. But why so much destruction, why all the carnage?”
“Man’s freedom, man’s choice. Both good and evil issue forth from within the human heart. It is the same in this world as it was in the world of our origin.”
“Earth”, said Felix with a scowl. “What a hellish place they made of it. And nearly made hell here too.”
Troubled, he lifted his eyes to the sky above us.
“Last week I was at McKie Observatory, and I looked at it through the new telescope. Just a pinprick of light orbiting around its sun. It’s still there, or was there 4.3 light-years ago. Why the silence? I ask myself. Where are they now? What happened? Maybe we’ll never know. But I can’t help wondering if the prophecies of Revelation have come to pass.”
“I often ponder this very question”, I said. “But here we are in the heaven in the heavens, after all. We came from those people, and, for good or for ill, we are a continuation of them. It seems to me that God has not yet finished with salvation history.”
“Silence, darkness, absence”, Felix went on in his most somber tone. “Did they destroy everything? Or was a remnant left?”
“There is so much we do not know. Is there still a Church somewhere on that sad, old planet, with brave and holy souls continuing to tell the true story against all odds?”
“Are there priests, bishops, even a pope?”
“There must be a successor to Peter still alive on Earth”, I said, surprised by my own intensity—and longing. “Perhaps we will one day reconnect with him or one of his successors. Until then, we can be thankful that Rome gave Bishop Nagakawa an indult to ordain priests and consecrate other bishops in the event that the expedition could not return.”
“And so we were given a second chance.”
“A new beginning.”
“Yes,” he sighed, “but how will it end?”
“Look at the horizon, Felix”, I said, pointing southward over the water. “Can you see it?”
“No, the day is very fair, but the haze obscures the arc of the planet.”
“Exactly. Yet it is there. Why do you think we are looking for it, now, at this very moment?”
“The sight is a beauty to behold. It consoles and beckons.”
“Yes, but there is more: Does not man look up into the infinite because he knows in the heart of his soul that this is not our permanent home? That he is more than he thinks he is?”
“I suppose you’re right. Yes, we know this instinctively—if know is the correct word. We are not bio-mechanisms. We are not clever, talking animals.”
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within us, though it is not yet realized in its fullness. The Kingdom is beyond us too, and it is for the eternal union that we long
.”
“The horizon shows us the way, you mean.”
“The infinite horizon and the horizon within you are one horizon.” Arthur glanced at me with some uncertainty.
“You will know”, I said at last. “Whatever your invention may be, the light will be given and you will know what to do.”
Three months after this conversation, he came by the abbey to see me. We had lunch together in the refectory with the brothers, and then we went off to my office for a quiet chat.
By then, it was no secret to anyone in the scientific community that he had invented a spectacular new kind of machine. But what it did exactly—rather, how it did it—was a secret known to none save its inventor.
“I received light, Father Abbot”, he began without any preamble, when the door was closed behind us. “I have prayed as I have never prayed before, and have arrived at a discernment, subjective though I may be.”
“The Lord knows very well our subjectivity”, I said. “He communicates with this in mind.”
“That is my hope.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I owe at least that much to you, my friend. It’s regarding the machine—the anti-gravity machine. No doubt you’ve heard about it.”
“The whole world has heard about it, Felix, but that is nothing new.”
“You remember when we last spoke together, the day by the sea when the children were dancing? I mentioned I had invented something, you recall.”
“I remember.”
“It is a device that adapts our simple form of electricity to the sophisticated circuitry and energy protocols of the anti-gravity machine we removed from the old shuttle.”
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Page 68