Star of wonder and beyond

From the Christmas star, humankind has been fascinated by astronomical possibilities.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Tarantula Nebula, by the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. After hair-raising maneuvers to unfurl its tennis-court-sized mirrors, it has been sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos since July of last year.

Christmas was a good day for the launch, given its astronomical connections. ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven’, the angels sang to the shepherds, ‘and peace to his people on Earth.’ Meanwhile, the wise men were above all diligent observers of the heavens. ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’, they ask, ‘For we observed his start at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’

Quite what that ‘star’ might mean there is open to debate. Comets have been popular with artists. Giotto painted one, for instance, in his Adoration of the Magi in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. It is almost certainly Halley’s Comet, which had appeared just a few years before, in October 1301. But why would anything in the heavens be interpreted as a birth in Judea? It would probably involve something in a constellation associated with the nation of the Hebrews. Pisces seems to be favoured, for some reason. A nova of some kind is one possibility: what would look like a temporary new star because, in fact, a previously invisible star was undergoing a spectacular death. Chinese records suggest a nova in 5 BC, which fits the likely date for for Christ’s birth of 7–2 BC.

The problem with both comets and novae is that they were more likely seen as harbingers of doom than good news. The better candidate for suggesting something joyful is a planetary conjunction, and there would have been a rather spectacular conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars at the right time. None of that, admittedly, explains what it means for the star then to have led the wise men. Coming up against that challenge, we might think that looking into the astronomical detail is the wrong way to approach the story. Nonetheless, Matthew had something in mind when he wrote about a start in his gospel, and it’s worthwhile to ask what that might have been.

It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

More recently, the Christmas story has intersected with astronomy in questions about how to think about Christian theology now that we are aware quite how big the universe is, especially if it may contain a great deal of other life. We don’t know whether that’s true, of course, but given we now know that planets common around stars, and there are billions of billions of stars in the universe, the probabilities seem to tilt towards other life, at least as I see it.

Suggestions surfaces from time to time that the world’s religions have arrived late to the party, when it comes to thinking about life beyond Earth. The astronomer and broadcaster Carl Sagan made that claim, for instance, in his best-selling book Pale Blue Dot. In fact, the earliest discussions of life beyond Earth I know about from Christian writers come from the mid-fifteenth century (and they stretch even further back in Judaism and Islam, to give two other examples). Christian writers have written on the subject ever since. If few gave us more than a paragraph here or a page there, that’s usually because the prospect of other life did not worry them enough to warrant more. They noted the prospect cheerfully, and moved on.

Until the twentieth century, the prospect of parallel Nativities on other planets was rarely in view. In a sense, it didn’t need to be. It’s a consistent Christian position to say that God joined his life to all creation in joining it to one species of rational animal on Earth, just as God joined his life to all humanity in being born in a stable, in a wayside town, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.

One erudite early exploration of multiple Incarnations comes in a poem from the 1920s by the Roman Catholic poet Alice Meynell, entitled ‘Christ in the Universe’. More recently, Meynell’s topic has become perhaps the central theme in thinking theologically about life beyond Earth. My own book (Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, 2023) looks at the prospect of life beyond Earth from the perspective of all of central topics in Christian doctrine (creation, sin, redemption, revelation, the Trinity, and so on), but the largest section is on Christmas and possible parallels. I am sympathetic to the idea that God would also unite himself to another natures, alongside the human nature he took up in Christ: not because I think that would be necessary, but because it might be fitting. It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

Hiding in plain sight in the Nativity stories is another key to Christian thinking about life beyond, namely the angels. It’s not that I think that angels are aliens, or that alien life is angelic. In fact, being a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas, I’m inclined to view angels as entirely immaterial, and so very much not examples of biological life. But angels are useful for thinking about other biological life beyond Earth nonetheless, because of what they mean for the Christian imagination. The angels show that there’s always been space in that imagination for rational creatures other than human beings. They show that Christianity has never imagined that we’re the sole object of God’s love, or even the most glorious of species.

The Christmas story has its cosmic elements: the star, glory in the highest heavens, and the angels, reminding us that wonderful though humanity is, it has no monopoly on rational life. My hunch, as much as my hunch matters, is that if there is other life then they too may see God face-to-face in their own Incarnation. Even if we find evidence of life beyond Earth, however, it’s not going give us much detail. The balance of gases in the atmosphere of a planet around another star might indicate life, but not much else about it. The prospects for interplanetary comparative religion are far off indeed. Alice Meynell had the right idea, when she recognised that one of the joys of the life of the world to come will be learning the stories of God’s dealings elsewhere:

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

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 myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Alice Meynell

The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.