Francis Thompson, angels, and science

The angel of Gethsemane

My article for the Catholic Herald begins:

The Catholic mystic and poet Francis Thompson died of tuberculosis in 1907, and one of his best-known poems, ‘In No Strange Land’, was not published until the following year. It evokes the glory of God’s creation, which most of us cannot perceive, a theme we find in many Christian poets.

A key passage:

The older worldview is sometimes described as ‘enchanted’, and it is said that the spell was broken by the Scientific Revolution, which explained things that could not previously be explained except by reference to supernatural causes. The suggestion, essentially, is that, in the medieval worldview, natural events were ascribed to miraculous or magical causation through ignorance. This is a distortion of the facts, however. Medieval, and indeed ancient, astronomers described the movement of the stars and planets in great detail, and were able to predict conjunctions and eclipses; they were similarly well versed in other laws of nature. They distinguished the effects of these things from miracles, which are brought about directly by God and which go beyond the workings of these laws.

The medievals nevertheless saw the workings of nature in the context of God’s creation. This was reinforced by a number of features of medieval science (to use an anachronism), notably the way it looked for explanations in terms of agents (living or not), rather than, as modern scientists do, seeing the natural world as a succession of events, each causing the next. The agents which cause things, on the medieval view, are perfectly natural; but at the same time we can more easily take a personal view of them, and even invoke them, or their guardian angels, in prayer.

Read the whole thing.

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