by Oren Harman
His scientific work now assumed an altogether different purpose. Suddenly the fact that not one of the great minds since Darwin had come up with the simple covariance equation but rather he, a complete outsider, had, became illuminated: George had been chosen. He would abandon all thoughts of revenge against Ferguson. “You may later hear of some consequences from my conversion,” he wrote to Anne, “since I evidently was converted in order to accomplish certain work, of which part should become widely known.” Meanwhile, however, he had other duties to tend to. Annamarie and Kathleen and her baby, Dom, were scheduled to arrive on August 16 and planning to stay for a month. George was frantic. He was planning to convert them. If only he could find C. S. Lewis’s “Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Unbelievers.”23
“Selection and Covariance” was published in Nature on August 1, hardly noticed by anyone. Hamilton, it seemed, was the only person in the world who understood its significance. He’d been sending George drafts of his spite paper to allow him to check the math. Their meeting of minds had been so astoundingly familiar, he thought, that there was almost an “intellectual redundancy” in each other’s presence. Like him George was a loner, Hamilton would later write to Edison; almost immediately he felt toward him “a very great kinship.” Besides his obvious intellect, George’s “rejection of compromise and his dauntless humour” were admirable. He was American (though the most “un-American American” Hamilton had met), well dressed, talkative, and clearly not a nature man. They were entirely different, Bill thought, and yet strangely almost identical.24
In July, Bill invited him over the weekend to the Berkshires, where he was living now with Christine, Romilda, and Godo near his sister Janet and her family.25 Walking through the woods with dogs and children running beside them, stumbling through brambles and brackets, their shoes covered in mud, George told him about his conversion. Clearly George’s soul was not in tune with quotidian human realities. Just like his own it was someplace else, inspired. But how had it ended up with Jesus? Years beforehand, Darwin had gotten a scare when he heard that Alfred Russel Wallace, his codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, had turned to spiritualism and was now advocating the intervention of extrahuman intelligences in the evolution of man. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,” he’d written to him. A nonbeliever, gentle but firm, Bill now tried to grasp the scope of the affair, sending out his own feelers like Darwin before him:
I read your ESP article with great enthusiasm. It is wonderfully clear and very cleverly composed…. No doubt my enthusiasm is partly based on the fact that I am hostile to ESP. Like you I find the phenomenon just too fickle and too “magic like” to fit comfortably into my picture of the world. I hope that your recent change of view about the “supernatural” hasn’t changed the basic attitude you took in that article. Acceptance of ESP and religion seems to me to imply belief in a God who was omnipotent to fool and mislead people as well as being rather cruel, and that is repulsive.26
But George’s conversion was only deepening. In fact, it had been strengthened by an unexpected discovery. Marie Lynch and her family were visiting London from America, and came by Little Titchfield on August 8 to say hello. Marie was the daughter of Caroline Doherety, a devout Irish Catholic who had worked as a maid in the home of the Price’s neighbors in Scarsdale back in the 1920s and remained a close family friend, even becoming godmother to Annamarie and Kathleen. In fact Caroline had been George’s first visitor the day he was born. Religious herself, her daughter Marie was thrilled by his conversion. But what would William Edison Price have thought, she wondered out loud jokingly, in an off hand comment. After all—he was a Jew.27
George was shocked. Could this be true? He wrote frantically to Caroline back in New York and received a positive reply. Mother certainly had succeeded in keeping it a secret! Suddenly a host of memories fell into place: how Alice spoke out against Jews but always added cryptically that there were “some very fine ones” how most of his closest friends in high school were “Hebrews” his anti-Semitic comments at the Chicago Co-Op coupled with his will to live and eat among its friends. Clearly George had always had a kind of strange, unexplained attraction to Jews; now, he understood, it had all been part of a plan. After all, “St. Paul tells us that God has by no means forgotten about the Jews and we can be sure that many are intended to become Christians.” To Al Somit, the person who would be most tickled by the news, he wrote, wisecracking as usual: “I have the honour (note how I’m picking up British spelling) to inform you that I am both a Christian and a Jew…. Didn’t you always sense, subconsciously, that I was too intelligent to be a Gentile? (I suppose what threw you off from guessing the secret was that you felt I was too handsome to be a Jew. But, you see, that came from my mother’s side).”28
Annamarie, Kathleen, and Dom were arriving that Sunday. George was not planning on telling his girls the family secret yet; it would just be too confusing. Nor was he going to let them in on his plan. But to Caroline Doherety he laid out the truth:
The Lord is sending them over here at this time to give me an opportunity to try to correct the harm I did them in discouraging them from religion, and help lead them back to Christ…they won’t realize for a while what I’m up to…. I’m planning a big birthday party for Kathy where most of the guests will be very advanced Christians but who don’t particularly look it to an outsider.29
And then they arrived. His conversion, the girls thought, was something of a joke, just another facet of their father’s rather lovable quirkiness. Amused, Kathleen spent the night of her twenty-first-birthday dinner party arguing about the (non) existence of God with Kenneth Demain and Mr. and Mrs. Anand, all new recruits to the C. S. Lewis Society.30 It hadn’t exactly gone according to the program, but overall George was pleased. The Lord’s plan was coming into effect. Everything would fall into place in time.
He’d already begun trying to convert other people: the theater manager who ran Oh! Calcutta! in the West End, and the greengrocer down the street, Mr. Angelou. Most of all, though, he had determined to convert prominent scientists; that would be the most effective way to combat atheism and spread the Gospel.31 He wanted to invite Hamilton to Kathy’s birthday party but ultimately decided against it; Bill’s father-in-law was a Lutheran minister, but Bill wasn’t yet ready to be in a group secretly assembled to sway George’s own family. No, Hamilton himself still needed to be won over. “My change of view about the supernatural,” George now replied to him as Wallace had to Darwin before him, “necessarily affected some of the views expressed in ‘Science and the Supernatural.’” Hamilton’s remark had been very perceptive, though the kind of “repulsive” violations of scientific law that happen in tricklike ESP experiments sounded to George “more like the work of the Devil than God.” Just as altruism required spite, it was impossible to construct Christianity without an “evil power.” For that reason, he explained,
I believe that ESP, if it occurs as Rhine and Soal have believed, involves the supernatural; and that the supernatural, if it occurs in the ways commonly understood, involves incorporeal intelligence(s). I think these are two possible alternatives to the consequences you suggest from belief both in ESP and religion.32
C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain and Miracles contained some interesting ideas bearing on these matters; why shouldn’t Bill have a read? After all, he had followed George’s covariance selection math “better than any one else I know,” so maybe he could also follow his theology. Hamilton was unaware of it, but George had chosen him as his prime target for conversion. Part of the Lord’s plan in “handing” him the covariance equation had been to help Hamilton see the light.
Back in New York City, Edison was deep into Iyengar yoga. “I suspect he is very far from Christ,” George wrote to Caroline Doherety, “and heading straight toward destruction.” Would she please pray for him? He was one of those who most needed it. Edison, for his part, remained characteristically st
aid. If Christ brought George happiness, so be it. Any attempts to convert him, however, would be useless. He recommended his brother a book on the lotus position instead.33
George’s Christianity was growing stronger all the while, and increasingly adopting a tone of its own.
Back at the end of 1968, at a public talk at the London Zoological Society, he’d met a fetching young woman with shoulder-length dark hair. They spoke a bit, she smiled, he took her number, they had lunch; finally he decided against seeing her again. But now, almost two years later, sipping his tea across from her with the knowledge that although not particularly religious she’d been born a Roman Catholic—in fact her father had been England’s leading lay Roman Catholic—George was convinced that Rosemarie was part of God’s design. After all, she had been born on Ascension Day, and he had been born to a Jewish father. Clearly this couldn’t have been a mere “coincidence.” Everyone but her, it seemed, was in on the plan. To Julia he wrote asking for copies of their divorce decree, and to Al and his instrument-maker friend, Ludwig Luft, he disclosed his agenda: George was going to marry Rosemarie.34
He took her out to a few more teas, and then he laid it on. “I urge you and beg you to pray for guidance even if the Devil tries to make you think it’s silly.” Rosemarie wasn’t amused. Her religious convictions were her own private affair, and George was insulting and presumptuous. “Be sober, be watchful,” he replied, ignoring her firm request that he not contact her again. “Your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Couldn’t Rosemarie see that if the Devil could mislead Saint Peter when he was in the presence of Christ then he could mislead anyone? They were meant for each other, and being able to see this was her test. It was the Devil who was keeping her away from him.35
The Devil, too, could explain little Dominique’s flu, back in California. It was He, after all, who had pointed Kathleen to the Women’s Lib Cooperative Baby Sitting Establishment, where, George was certain, “you automatically get a selection of anti-Christian women.” “Resist the Devil and he will flee from you,” he quoted from James, explaining to his part-baffled, part-amused daughters the real cause behind Dom’s fever. “Resist him!”36
He was sorry that he hadn’t told the girls the family secret about William Edison being a Jew when they were visiting him in London, but, again, this was not just some “coincidence.”
Dominique kept dragging me away from the table then, and since I had found him to be reliable in expressing or following God’s wishes, I suspected that this meant that God didn’t want me to tell you then. So after Dom had hauled me away from the table two or three times as I started to tell you, I asked the Lord to make Dom do it again if He didn’t want me to tell you, and promptly Dom hauled me away again.37
God was sending him messages, everywhere and always. Nothing in this world was without meaning, not even the tiniest, least significant detail.
In fact, the more he read the Bible, the more George found that he was seeing things that no one had seen before him. Generations of scholars, for example, in working out his ancestry, linked Jesus to King David via his father, Joseph. But Joseph had only been Jesus’ legal father, not his biological one. And the figures in the New Testament who had referred to him as “Son of David” had been some blind men, a Canaanite woman (not a Jew), and the same Jerusalem crowds who later shouted, “Release Barabbas! Crucify Jesus!” This was not without significance. For hadn’t Jesus himself warned against “blind guides” and “the blind leading the blind”? Clearly Scripture was hinting that what mattered was not Joseph’s but Mary’s ancestry, and with the help of hitherto unrecognized clues (the Bible stating three times that Rachel was buried on the way to Ephrat, among others), George was now able, Sherlock Holmes–like, to do what generation of exegetes had triumphantly failed to accomplish, linking the Virgin, and hence Jesus, to the Old Testament Joseph’s son Ephraim. Among other things He had revealed to him the true meaning of 666 as well—a piece of information he now offered the increasingly freaked-out Rosemarie as a “bribe” if she’d be willing to meet with him. Clearly God was showing George things He had shown no mortal before.38
Most important, he now believed, He had helped him to solve “one of the great puzzles of all time, which during 18 centuries has received the attention of many famous and brilliant men beginning with Tatian of Assyria about 170 A.D.” To Christians he offered it as the long-sought solution to the problem of the contradictions in the four Gospels, to Jews as a fascinating matter of ancient history, and to agnostics as an entertaining story of “puzzle-solving.” He’d cracked it sometime in January 1971, and had now committed it to a fifty-two-page treatise that he sought to publish in one of the Easter Sunday papers. Nearly two thousand years of tradition and practice notwithstanding, George Price had news for the world: The conventional Passion chronology was wrong.39
Not only were the eight days of Holy Week plus Easter actually twelve; not only had Jesus been crucified for a full twenty hours overnight instead of just six or seven; not only had early Christian groups mistakenly followed a lunar calendar, against the expressed dictate of Christ—the very date of Easter was entirely mistaken. In actuality it had almost certainly been April 13, A.D. 27. “Th is means that the date for Easter that is favored by the majority of your member Churches (the Sunday following the second Saturday in April),” George wrote to the director of the Commission and Department on Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches, “will exactly agree with the Apostolic date about half the time, and be fairly close to the Apostolic date in other years—and thus this change would be an enormous improvement over the present tradition of dating Easter by the moon.” In letters to countless clergymen and biblical and New Testament scholars, George had embarked on a mission. It made no difference that he was getting no positive feedback. Changing the date of Easter was the true will of God, for it followed the true meaning of the Gospels. The Devil would make everyone think it was blasphemy, but it simply had to be done.40
Once again he enlisted Hamilton to look over his theology; hadn’t he been the only one to “get” covariance, when all was said and done? “After reading your absolutely fascinating article on the chronology of the First Holy Week,” Hamilton replied, “…I thought I had better retaliate by sending you some Easter reading.” There were two stories by Chekhov, a book of poems by A. E. Housman, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. George’s chronology seemed convincing, but Hamilton was really no kind of judge.41
George was thankful, but had some reservations about Housman’s “Easter Hymn”:
Suppose we use the number “70” to represent typical earthly life. Measured on the same scale, future life counts as 0 if atheism or pseudo-Christianity is correct, or counts as infinity if the teachings of Jesus are correct. Thus we have two different ratios of the importance of this present life [compared to the future life]:
70/0 = or 70/ = 0
As you see, these two views are radically different. What Jesus repeatedly taught was the equation on the right [that present life is worthless when compared to the afterlife]…. Housman’s reasoning in that poem is in terms of the equation on the left [that present life is infinitely more important than the afterlife].42
No, a Christian who didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell was no true Christian at all. But even though enjoyment and success in earthly life were of no consequence, what man did during his fleeting time on earth was still of great importance. Life was an examination, set for man by God. Far from being a strike against Christianity as Hamilton had surely wished to hint, Vladimir’s hopeless confusion in Waiting for Godot over the events in the New Testament only went to show that figuring out what God meant in the Bible was another of His examinations. “If the Bible presented no difficulties,” George explained, “but revealed clearly a superhuman logic and intelligence…then much of the examination would be negated.”
What quality, above all, was God really testing for? Witho
ut a doubt it was agape, commonly translated as “love” or “charity.” But there were other qualities that could enable one to pass the examination. Abraham’s test when ordered to sacrifice his son, Isaac, had been a test of faith and obedience, rather than agape. And there was also meekness, the kind with which Moses had been blessed. George interpreted this to mean a kind of “intellectual receptiveness, approachableness, of being willing to accept evidence and listen to reason.” It was a good thing that there was more than one way to pass God’s examination, he wrote candidly to Hamilton, for “it doesn’t look as though I can pass purely on the basis of agape.” He was aware of his limitations: George was no kind of altruist. In obedience and intellectual openness, however, he was clearly proving his mettle.
Hamilton resisted. There was a story about an Irishman, he told George, who was asked whether he liked oysters and he replied, No, he didn’t like oysters and he was glad he didn’t like them because if he did he’d be eating them all the time when he hated the damned things. The message was clear: Hamilton was not about to embrace Jesus. “Is the story of the crossing of the Red Sea literal truth or myth?” he challenged George. “If it’s literal truth why should we respect Moses if he was just a puppet carrying out maneuvers to fore-shadow the crucifixion, and why respect Jesus for following a course that he was bound to follow anyway? A plot so elaborate would make life meaningless if we believed it—and ugly too.”43
“What difference does it make whether you approve of it or not?” George fired back. “Do you think that it is something that I wanted to believe in?” Just like C. S. Lewis, he had been forced to become a believer based on evidence. It had been a necessary scientific deduction, not a personal moral choice. Predictability and free will were not alternatives; George’s childhood had taught him that much: