6.4 Epoch 3
Cosmic Evolution
In trying to make a virtual pass through the Tapestry's mandorla into its dark cosmos, we have to deal with notions about the ultimate mysteries of humanity and the universe. In biblical terms we are at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, but the time scale of creation of planet Earth, as it is now scientifically established, is too vast for our comprehension in relation to the relatively minuscule solar cycles that we use to measure our earthly span, as individuals, nations, and even a species. During recent years, science has made staggering progress in mapping the universe. Cosmologists are no longer short of data. Fundamental laws of physics describe the structure of matter and the way planets and stars were formed after the explosion of a dense mass of 'quarks and gluons', 12 billion years ago. By applying these laws to information that is pouring in from telescopes of ever increasing power, it is now possible to extrapolate a sequence of events, from the present, back to within a second of the formation of the universe. This is the Big Bang theory, which says that the universe has been expanding since a single 'genesis event' was initiated. Cosmology is now concerned with answering the questions: 'How is the universe expanding?' and 'How was the space formed into which it is expanding?'
The purpose of cosmic evolution may be the emergence of some form of conscious relationship between a spiritual entity and particles of the material cosmos, the whole process working on space-time scales much different from our own. Science is not irreligious. It does not entail that there is no spiritual reality, no God, and no purpose in the cosmos. Many of the greatest scientists were strongly motivated by their religious beliefs. The sort of highly ordered and emergent universe that science discloses is compatible with, and almost overwhelmingly suggests, the existence of a creator of enormous wisdom and power. Religious myths depict the way in which that reality makes itself known in the material universe. Religious rituals establish appropriate responses to that reality. Religious symbols express its fundamental character.
Some religious thinkers take the view that modern science can help to clear away some elements of literalism, ignorance and myopia which still disfigure religion by providing a new and better understanding of the material universe. Spiritual notions extend this scientific world view through ideas that define a realm of spirit from which the material cosmos emerges, and to which it will return. Religion has an irreplaceable role to play in relating human life to that wider spiritual context. Our age offers the possibility of relating the scientific and religious perspectives in a mutually enriching way.
Taking Christianity as an example, from the beginning it attempted to present a cosmic vision of a spiritually ordered universe, whose purpose would be somehow completed by a future full knowledge and love of the creator. The myths of Christianity show:-
- how God ordered the universe and produced a conscious moral agency;
- how God expressed the essence of divine nature as self-     giving in the life of a particular human, Jesus;
- how God disclosed the ultimate goal of the universe in the resurrection of Jesus.
The cosmic vision of the first Christians was that the spirit, who was the creator of the cosmos, had acted in human history to initiate the liberation of human lives from pride and egoism, and their union with the divine essence of selfgiving. In other words, we are part of the whole cosmic process from the Big Bang, and have emerged as conscious agents who can consciously unite the material to God, its spiritual source and goal.
The Big Bang theory says nothing about what set the conditions for the expansion of the primary fireball in the first place. There is still room for the will of God as Creator, and a spiritual viewpoint that the universe is as it is, and we exist, because a Creator established the initial conditions of the subatomic 'seed' in the ultra-early universe to make it so. This 'argument from design' type of thinking has supported Christian reasoning about creation for at least two centuries. At this point we face a division amongst cosmologists as to whether Creation can ever be a legitimate problem of astrophysics.
Some believe that a cosmological God operating scientific levers is the only answer. To call cosmos out of chaos, and produce 'tapestry meditators', a beneficent God would first have to fine- tune at least six independent physical factors in order to allow a 'fertile' universe unfold. If any one factor were un-tuned there would be no stars.
Finally, there is the intriguing question about where, in our tiny planetary system circling an insignificant sun, does the feedback come from to keep we humans on a pre- ordained track in a God-driven cosmos. Religion flows, interacts between us and the cosmos, and the cosmos as a whole is as yet hyperscientific. However, its truths are not limited by any culture. There is yet no line of enquiry that could conceivably gather material evidence to implicate such a deity. To some scientists this is an admission that the question cannot be investigated by science, and it is therefore irrelevant.
The cosmos, and all life in it, will eventually cease to exist. But the Christian view has always been that the fulfilment of God's purpose lies beyond this space-time, even though it must be approached through it. God's goal for the cosmos is that everyone who has ever lived will have the opportunity to share in a trans-historical knowledge and love of God in a 'new creation'. From a Christian viewpoint, this Cosmos is the place where souls emerge in the material and temporal realm. Their ultimate fulfilment is in the eternal realm, which is the spiritual reality of God. This was the good news of the gospel, which should be clear without reference to a prior conviction about the reality of God. However, some churchmen, such asHugh Montefiore as Bishop of Birmingham, feel that it is now necessary to find God in the development and nature of the world from its origins. Having traced for himself this 'natural theology', through the formation of the atmosphere and the oceans, the emergence of life, the evolution of animal species and man, to global civilisation, Montefiore concludes that the creation of the world by a God, still concerned for humanity, is the most probable explanation of it.
Evolution of Meditation
The tapestry, in the vast time scale symbolised by its images and their visual planes, certainly has the power to place the viewer in communion with the time scale of evolution, and its extrapolation back through millions of light years, to the origins of the universe.
Apart from giving us the notional space to meditate on issues of cosmology and religion, Sutherland's images are not really expressive of this universe of atoms, primary chemicals, radiation energies and dark matter. It is his animal pictures of the tetramorph that take us into the space/time relationships of stars and their planets. In particular, his efforts to symbolise species behavioural characteristics through their particular forms, raise questions about the evolution of animal behaviour, and our own capacity for meditation. This problem was but a footnote to Darwin when he saw the future opening of fields of research into the origin of 'each mental power and capacity by gradation'. Most biologists are now able to appreciate that a meditation on a wall- hanging is an example of a human mental characteristic which has been handed down through natural selection.
With respect to the evolution of life on planet Earth, biologists are well on the way to demystifying the question of how atoms assembled themselves into living beings with behaviour patterns intricate enough to ponder their own origins. Like present day apes, our primate ancestors started with an ability to make tools and integrate them into social relationships which boosted survival. Our capacity to foresee the consequences of our actions evolved from this basic primate mental trick of being good at solving the 'how questions' of survival. Further evolution of frontal lobes in the brain improved our skills in predicting relationships between cause and effect. Scientific behaviour is a refinement of this ultimate method of solving how questions'. Questions about why the universe began, requires spiritual thought. This allows us to create beliefs in the existence of supernatural forces that do not require scientific proof to become credible, and are therefore helpful as aids to social survival. But is there anything in common between the mental processes we call 'scientific', and those we define as 'spiritual'?
There can be no doubt that behaviour patterns which reinforce communities, have a strong selection value in social animals. In our own species, the development of cultural cohesion through patriotic attitudes has been underscored consistently by banners, flags, medals and other commemorative paraphernalia, statues and a variety of monuments, buildings and dedicated spaces. Notional values about neighbourhood are also expressed personally, in many ways, through landscape paintings, poetry, patriotism, homesickness, and the vernacular creative work of all people serving a local need, who make everything from pictures to cathedrals, furniture to homes, jewellery to statues.
Each culture, or society, produces personal images and forms, which are unique and peculiar to itself. Even when similar images or forms are common to more than one culture or society, they almost invariably have different meanings or values attached to them. Personal images, such as Sutherland invented to depict his chosen natural habitat of the Pembrokeshire coast, constitute not only an embodiment of a society's attitudes, values and beliefs, but are also a major means by which values and beliefs are actually formed and realised. These individual and group notions have an important, and an as yet unexplored potential for identifying, and teaching, the crucial values of moral, aesthetic and humanistic concern. In particular, through a formal creative process of environmental appraisal similar to Sutherland's, they could be coupled to the design and application of neighbourhood values, to help root communities and counter the placelessness of people who have no spiritual reason for being anywhere.
As far as we can see, a desire to be in touch with great unseen powers has always been a feature of human settlement, and was often realised through attaching spiritual meaning to rocks and water. This is integral with the Christian belief that such divine channels for communication are opened by God, and that it is also His will that we should have mental powers to read divine messages of redemption in visual symbols, such as those created by Sutherland. However, to some evolutionary biologists, the gift to live symbolically was a useful piece of evolutionary cell biology, and came as part and parcel of brain mechanisms that allow us to predict the practical results of our actions. The debit side of this gift of natural selection was that we could also imagine, and worry about, the disastrous consequences of natural forces beyond our control. Therefore, the concept of God developed as an innate mental adaptation to allay fear in a hostile world, and was passed on through social evolution. Behavioural patterns we term 'appeasement' and 'reverence', were necessary to get a notional battery of supernatural powers on our side. In Darwinian terms, they may be viewed as a partial compensation for our lack of claws and muscle power. Thus, there was fixed early in the evolution of the human brain, a complementary survival package of 'spiritual thought' to be activated for our psychological protection in an uncontrollable world full of unpredictable dangers. Malevolent forces were to be seen everywhere in Sutherland-like paraphrases of gnarled trees and weathered rocks.
After the first anthropological stage of spirit worship, this social and cultural survival kit stabilised settled societies when religions adopted common ideals, standards, and fixed moral rules with their associated noble sentiments. In this biological sense, a present day belief that Revelation is literally true may be seen as the workings of a biological adaptation built into the brain's structure and chemistry. This 'spiritual centre' gives people belief in imagined supernatural powers so they feel part of a system that can control political forces which are really beyond their control in the everyday world. Like the Coventry tapestry, the Book of Revelation from which it was derived, is a cultural artefact resulting from the exercise of this kind of mental adaptability. Both are graphic and literary tools produced through the symbolising centre of artist and author. Their aim is to help us seek causes and explanations, and produce a mental action plan to be at the controls, and cope with day to day situations, and life after death, where science cannot provide answers. This aspect of what used to be termed scientific humanism says that it is we humans who create Gods, and not the other way around.
This was the thesis of Sir James George Frazer (1854- 1941) who assembled a vast collection of facts about fertility rites, human sacrifice and other symbols and practices from across the globe. His belief is that humankind progresses from magic, through religious belief, to scientific thought (7.002). Through his masterpiece, which appeared in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915, Frazer is regarded as one of the founders of modern anthropology.
Religions meet human needs and through a system of shared symbols which reinforce a long social memory. At one extreme this can bolster fundamentalism which is resistant to change. Nevertheless, from a Darwinian viewpoint it appears that religion has permanence because it is part of an evolved cultural adaptability. Its truths are not limited by any culture and the cultural adaptability of religion has been, and will be, the key to its survival; fundamentalism defies religion.
Development of spiritual thought
One God- many religions?
Michael Sadgrove, meditating on the greenness of the tapestry, was pointed towards the vast time scales of creation, and caused to ponder on Christ 'calling cosmos out of chaos'. He entered a realm of green spirituality, where the colour drew him into communion with trees, grasses and a God-intended oneness with nature, where he felt part of an organism greater than himself. The tapestry is described as a marvellous celebration of the 'mystery of evolution&ldots; summoning all the works of the Lord to praise him and magnify him for ever'. But it also stands in his mind as a silent rebuke to mankind for 'our relentless soiling of creation..' He was helped in this phase of his meditation by the tapestry becoming a metaphor for the intellectual weaving of ideas about the cultural development of green spirituality in the world of native Americans, the Celtic form of Christianity, and medieval mystical writers, exemplified by Hildegard of Bingen, and Mother Julian of Norwich.
Mass research and communication is responsible for this throwing together of ideas about nations and individuals, which a century ago could only be juxtaposed through difficult and time-consuming work by scholars in obscure libraries. Also, humankind has been mentally and physically catapulted onto a small world stage at the speeds of electrons and jet-propulsion. We are faced every day with the restlessness of minds impatient to learn of ways that differ from their own. Intolerance is a closer and more disruptive by- product of this spread and intermingling of peoples. For the first time in human history, nations, races and creeds are being asked to take one another seriously by the cross- cultural assimilation of human social values which are mostly derived from the worlds great living religions.
In all of the above contexts the Coventry tapestry may help transport people into the heart of the world's great living faiths to the point where they might see, and even feel, why, and how, they guide and motivate the lives of those who live by them. Here, Sutherland's ability to depict Christ within an object inspired by the shapes of leaves and eggs, is helpful in bringing forward the mysterious notional realism which is the centrepoise of all religions. The artist's only commentary on the world-wide communion of faiths is the small group of motives he took from Egyptian art- an art which was inseparable from the religious beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians. Nevertheless, these are powerful metaphorical cross-links and bindings. They are particularly evident in the yellow ribbons and bands which hold together the various elements of the tapestry, and give them a notional depth. Sutherland says he developed this unifying structure from seeing pictures bound by tape to coffined mummies. In their original context, mummy bindings were used to carry messages into the hereafter. These are metaphors for the ultimate binding of all spiritual notions to an eternal cosmos.
It is a big step to move from the tapestry to consider the question of the relation between religions. However, this was an issue built into the cathedral's master plan, and expressed physically in the space of its Chapel of Unity. Clearly, we will not find all religions saying the same things, although unity in certain respects is both striking and impressive. If one is aiming for unity there must be assumptions that all important truths cannot be found in one tradition, and that differences between faiths are but dialects in a single spiritual language that employs different words but expresses the same ideas. At this point we may return to Sutherland's task in composing the great tapestry, which was the bringing together of many stimuli through symbolism into a compact whole with a personal inner meaning.
Development of an ecological conscience
Humanists such as Julian Huxley have seen an apparent progress in cosmic evolution towards increasing consciousness and control. That is to say, we are part of a development from the unconscious simplicity of the 'Big Bang', with which our universe was created, to the conscious, diverse and complex carbon-based life-forms of the planet earth. Our unknown future carries the possibility of understanding and controlling the cosmos itself.
Attempts to provide biological explanations of consciousness are far from convincing, and are certainly not established by scientific study. In fact, the ultimate personal expressions of conciousness are through the arts. The author Henry Rider Haggard, for example, in his imaginings, kept returning to the possibility that the material universe does express a spiritual reality. In this he was influence by the mind-set of Ancient Egypt where the fruits of the land were fed through a kingly priesthood to support the cosmic system.
In this respect, Haggard was one of several Victorian polymaths, also exemplified by Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin. Their lives span a crucial period of world development when the findings of biological science first began to ruffle the waters of religious certainty. A Victorian knowledge system cannot avoid incorporating spiritual notions about nature which provided the 19th century drive and justification for social change. In particular, the Victorians found themselves caught within a Biblical world view of the origins and purposes of human existence. In this sense, religious belief was at the heart of all environmental problems, issues and controversies.
Haggard was a rural reformer, who wrote with personal experience about land conflicts in the colonies, and the drift of people from the land. His diary of 1898 is a vivid month by month account of the life of a progressive farmer involved with the social problems of village, county, and the national scene. His stories reveal the mind-match that is possible between individuals of different lands, usually through a potent atmosphere of intrigue, violence and romance. Kingsley was an urban reformer, very much concerned in his novels, lectures and tracts, with relieving the ills of the urban masses who had migrated from the countryside. He was a Darwinian and enthusiast of applied science. Ruskin was a powerful educator who, in his writing on social reform, deplored the crushing influence of industrialism on art, morality, and the natural world. He saw the 'land question' as a matter of rapid population growth.
John Ruskin's writings are what we would now describe as a cross-curricular attempt to encompass the notional, utilitarian, and academic ideas about how we should value and use natural resources. His personal synthesis of religion and natural resources exemplifies the unusual breadth and depth needed to clarify and deepen our values and actions to meet today's challenges of sustainable development. Ruskin's standpoint was to interpret God's plan for humanity, as set out in the Book of Genesis, in terms of the Creator giving Earth substance and form. God willed functions into natural resources so that they may be used by His people to fulfil their divine destiny. He embedded in nature a divine blueprint for a natural economy which organises the uses of nature for production in conjunction with a local political economy. The necessary materials and energy were provided, as physical and biological resources, through planetary and solar economies. The former produces episodes of mountain-building associated with Earth's molten core; the latter governs weather and climate. These flows of materials and energy were set in motion following God's 'command that the waters should be gathered', which produced the planet's land-sea interactions. At this point Ruskin, envisaged the Creator's blueprint being realised through the denudation of mountains by rainfall. Starting from this divine 'gathering of waters' the human natural economy was dependent on the God-given 'frailness of mountains'. He put it as follows:
The first, and the most important, reason for the frailness of mountains is "that successive soils might be supplied to the plains . . . and that men might be furnished with a material for their works of architecture and sculpture, at once soft enough to be subdued, and hard enough to be preserved; the second, that some sense of danger might always be connected with the most precipitous forms, and thus increase their sublimity; and the third, that a subject of perpetual interest might be opened to the human mind in observing the changes of form brought about by time on these monuments of creation".
This quotation may be taken as an example of Ruskin's philosophy that environmental features produce ideas, which are then confirmed by studying the features themselves. Ruskin's holistic knowledge system relates human spiritual values of the Bible to inbuilt attitudes to, and use of, the land, and its biological resources. He wrote to a friend-
"what do you think that a man- candidly and earnestly looking into his own heart, will find there. He will find I think- first- selfishness- an instinct of choosing his own good rather than anyone elses. & secondly- such a degree of sympathy and love of other animated creatures that he has pleasure in seeing them happy & would willingly part with some portion of his own good-  to secure theirs- not with all his own happiness- but with a portion of it, provided he could secure a larger portion to them. By yielding to all his sensual passions, he may in time blunt these feelings of benevolence- eradicate them- but the animal man, as born into the world, is, I believe, much as I describe, a creature preferring its own good to that of others where uncomfortable with it- but yet having delight in the good of others & and ready to make certain sacrifices to advance it"
Other Victorian thinkers tended to slot into this framework of links between human behaviour and the origins and destiny of nature. Kingsley and Haggard differed from Ruskin by giving more value to the processes and fruits of science, particularly as applied to industrialism. Rider Haggard was personally involved with the more efficient use of land for agricultural production and forestry, subjects on which Ruskin had little to say. All three made practical proposals for social change to improve the lot of artisans and their families. Charles Kingsley, was one of the first to articulate the science of ecology. He also probed into freshwater and marine biology, and was deeply involved with public health issues concerning the supply of clean water to disease-ridden towns and cities. 'The Water- Babies', which has achieved the status of a children's classic, presents environmentalism in its entirety. The narrative rests firmly in an overview of Nature's many worlds, and presents their respective scientific 'ologies' in an entertaining fashion. The setting is a quest for sustainable behaviour, and a future, characterised by restraint on consumption, kindness to others, and care for the ecosystems which support our global economies. Mrs Do- As- You-Would-Be- Done-By is the magical figure who delivers these messages of offers redemption. Today she could be described as the good-fairy of 'sustainable behaviour' helping to develop a collective 'ecological conscience'. In more recent times this theme was taken up by Henry Williamson who projected his imagination into the minds of otters and salmon in an effort to tie them into a human world, where deeply felt humane values were against cruelty to non-human creatures. His books 'Tarka the Otter' and Salar the Salmon' bring out the beauty and the harshness of river ecosystems in unsentimental stories about the day to day joys and tribulations of rare animals that were once common.