During the autumn of 1952
thousands of scientists, engineers and nuclear warriors congregated at
the coral island of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. The bomb-makers,
with their sickening fondness for trivializing high tragedy, called their
creation Mike. We can, I suppose, be thankful that the P.R. men had not
been allowed to name it New Hope or Peace Maker. The thing was set up on
the islet of Elugaleb. When it was detonated on the morning of 1st November,
a fireball three and a half miles across lifted into the air and Elugaleb
disappeared below the sea...
Man's first artificial sun
rose above the Pacific, but it was not a star of peace. The Russians watched
their own sun rise within a year. So now two chosen people, each confident
that they were the children of light, confronted one another across the
globe with suns in their bandoliers.
Before the decade was out
earth had its man-made satellites and the face of the moon had been struck.
In this present year of A.D. 1962, three representatives of Homo sapiens
have already seen the sun shining in the black skies of interplanetary
space. The pace quickens.
Prometheus stole fire from
the gods, the fire which has so often been kindled as a symbol of the sun.
We have stolen the secret formula of the sun itself. The Titan defied Almighty
Zeus on behalf of mankind, and for his sacrilege had to suffer torments
from the talons of the eagle, bird of the sun. So he has been a hero for
all Apollonians, for the Greeks, for the men of the Renaissance, for ourselves.
Prometheus, yes, and Icarus, Phaeton and Faust as well. Is our modern Prometheus,
the total scientist, in his greater pride, his more reckless defiance of
the gods, about to lead us all to self-destruction? In our hundreds of
millions we mass on the face of the earth in helpless expectation of a
searing death more terrible than that spread by Phaeton when he found he
could not hold the horses of the sun.
In following the solar cycle
of this book, I have honoured those who worshipped the Sun God in his many
forms. Yet I have also honoured those scientists whose probing minds have
dispelled the simple divinity of the star. The members of the Holy Office
were right to be fearful of the ideas of Copernicus to see that they would
lead to the destruction of many of the old religious forms. They were wrong
as well as ridiculous trying to turn back the tide of science, of man's
efforts to comprehend the physical universe, for that pursuit is a part
of what is divine in humanity. We have to honour both the King of Heaven
and Prometheus.
The present peril and despair
of humanity show that we cannot live without religious meaning although
we may we do without religious institutions. (The time may come when even
those few who still follow them turn against priests who in gem-encrusted
copes and mitres, serve Him who taught poverty and humility, who betray
Him who taught love of one enemy by raising no murmur against a holocaust
of hate.) If we cannot find god in the world, we lose Him in ourselves
and become contemptible in our own eyes. We become mere statistics. For
this is the greatest evil coming from the unbalanced Apollonian mind. Science
has won power over the universe of matter by breaking down and down, by
numbering and measuring. So at last everything that cannot be broken down,
numbered and measured must be deemed not to exist. Science is uniting man
with the sun in a totality of energy and matter. That is communion at the
lowest level of being. But we have always been right to seek it also at
the highest.
The Sun of Intellect shining
fierce and alone overhead will make the whole globe a Golgotha. Forms of
religious expression, like art, are means towards harmonizing the dark
and light within each one of us--those terrible forces, potent as the atom,
that are driving us to destruction. We have to find this means of letting
light into the dark places, and darkness to temper the light. The late
Roman Empire gave birth to Christianity. Will our own world, which so poignantly
resembles it, have life and strength for another labour?
It seems that a new religion
must exalt the Sun of Life more successfully than Christianity has ever
succeeded in doing. It is some proof of our need that the man who has proclaimed
'a reverence for life' as his creed has come to be accepted as a saint
of the modern world. The morality of the new religion cannot be of the
prohibitive, life-denying kind which may, alas, only serve to strengthen
the inner forces of darkness, our sense of 'the enemy', but a no less strenuous
positive morality directed towards creative love in all its manifestations.
It must respect the chicken crying for life within the shell equally with
the light of thought within the skull. Akhenaten in his gardens by the
Nile had a vision of what might be, but it was too soon. If we cannot move
nearer to this vision now, it will be too late.
I have a hesitant conviction
that the young are already moving towards these new forms, infected though
they are with our own corruption. I often look at them with distaste and
with a great hope. They are stripped down to bare bones of truth and acceptance
which could soon be reclothed from head to foot. Many of the attitudes
which the older generations delight in censuring (because, like the Inquisition,
we are afraid) may well mark stumbling advances towards a better morality.
Meanwhile the sun shines upon
us all in turn, the black and the white, the peoples of the East and the
peoples of the West.
There is just a chance that it may awaken us to a Good Morning.