President Rawlings, ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class--
I am heavily uninstructed in my duties to you this morning. Most of what I know I got from reading one article in the Cornell Review last February giving out the news that I had been appointed your Baccalaurate Speaker. The article, written by Mr. Christopher Marquis, gave the background of it all, which was that Professor Robert Johnson, Director of the Cornell United Religious Work, heard me do a public reading here at Cornell last fall.
I played the role of the late critic, Edmund Wilson, and spoke out lines from his correspondence with Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's lines to Edmund Wilson were spoken by Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir, and a very old personal friend -- it was he who asked me to do that exchange here at Cornell, a part of the week-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Nabokov's birth, which -- quick minds here will figure out -- was in 1899. Inasmuch as reading lines from Edmund Wilson's letters is wholly unrelated to anything I normally do, I have had to reconcile myself to the possibility that Professor Johnson was attracted to the idea of recommending me today only after experiencing me reading somebody else's words and thoughts.
Whatever the provenance, I do know from the Cornell Review that I was invited as an American Catholic, so to speak; acting out an equal-time tradition at Cornell, which in sequential years exposes the graduating class to passing thoughts of a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. We make cameo appearances in your education.
This is a coincidence, but worth recalling. Fifty years ago I was an undergraduate at Yale and was named the Catholic member of a three-man student committee, to officiate at a "Religion Week" at Yale. My job would be to introduce the Jewish guest speaker, who was Mr. Lewis Strauss, a protoge of President Herbert Hoover who had served under President Truman as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. I learned, some time after the invited speakers had come and gone, that my student Protestant counterpart had nominated as the Catholic speaker to be invited, Monsignor Fulton Sheen. What had -- most furtively -- happened was that that nomination was vetoed. Vetoed by the Protestant chaplain, who quietly remarked that the presence of Fulton Sheen would add an aggressive flavor to the Religion Week, given his reputation for making converts to his faith.
And it's true, Fulton Sheen did have something of that reputation. It is, for instance, somewhere recorded that one day late in the thirties he put in a telephone call to the iconolastic wit and critic, renowned curmudgeon Heywoud Broun. They had never met, so Broun said over the telephone, "What are you calling me about?"
Monsignor Sheen answered: "Your immortal soul."
Nobody had ever spoken to Heywoud Broun in quite that way. He was so astonished by the experience that, a few months later, he did some radical thinking, abandoned his agnosticism and became a Catholic. It is not, I am sobered by the reality, widely feared that, when I am finished speaking, the graduating class of Cornell 2000 will beat a path to Rome.
Besides which, Fulton Sheen had the advantage that he was a spellbinding presence, presiding back then over the weekly radio program, The Catholic Hour. Evidence of his powers to benumb was eloquently given one Sunday when the network announcer, at the close of the hour, solemnly informed the radio audience that the subject of Monsignor Sheen's next broadcast, the succeeding week, would be, "Thou hast cast bread upon the waters." "You are listening," the announcer signed off, "to the National Breadcasting Company."
The place of religion in higher education is a subject that interested me well before I met Vladimir Nabokov, or read Edmund Wilson. I wrote on the subject in my book, God and Man at Yale. There I ventured what was, really, nothing more than a simple sociological observation. I had just graduated, after spending four years on campus -- taking courses, observing academic propensities, formal and informal. My finding was that whatever one's feelings on the question, religion simply no longer had institutional standing at Yale.
My reading of the scene was considered, by official Yale, not only defamatory, but blind. The scholar who was President of Yale back then had said at his inaugural ceremony in 1936, "I call on all members of the faculty, as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous vitality and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism.
Whatever we concluded, about the power of the teachings of Christ, those teachings were hardly thought central, in 1950, except perhaps to students preparing for the ministry.
The vector of current academic thought has been, really, quite in another direction. The situation at Yale and, I'd suppose, here at Cornell -- as elsewhere -- is perfectly captured in the title of a recent book by George Marsden. He is a renowned Lutheran professor of history on the faculty of Notre Dame. His book is called, The Soul of the American University From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. It is a learned book, though no one with ears to the ground will be surprised by its findings. In the academic world, religion rides in the back of the bus.
Some will wonder --have wondered -- why, so to speak overnight, we arrived at Established Nonbelief. Fifty years ago academic freedom was especially celebrated as protecting scholars inclined to dissent from Establishmentarian religion -- or economics or politics.
But what was actually going on, I think, was the crystallization of a new conformity. What had been gestating in the first decades of the century had arrived fullborn by the time I was a senior at college -- established nonbelief, in the language of Professor Marsden. The new canon gives out the word -- mostly, but not always, in dulcet tones -- that religion is quite simply anachronized by our culture of science.
Professor David Hollinger of the University of California at Berkeley tells us in his book, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, that -- quite simply -- the secular perspective "won the cognitive battle." He rather taunts us on the point: "Christianity at the end of the twentieth century," he writes, " -- [that] Christian Century, prophesied [as such] the Protestant hegemonists at its start -- is less triumphant in the North Atlantic West than it was in 1500 or 1700 or 1900."
Notwithstanding this narrative, dispiriting to this baccalaureate speaker, we note at the same time religion's disinclination to perish by any sword: not physical, not archaeological, anthropological, biochemical, not historical, not, I'd vote, philosophical. Science rules, but religion as a pretender to the cognitive throne is not lifeless. Professor Hollinger is ready to acknowledge as much. " … Christianity's continuing adherents," he writes, continue to "include some of the most thoughtful and learned men and women in the world. " Indeed. But, he summarizes: "the secularist trend is nonetheless real, and the historians' obligation to understand it is no less compelling."
Understand it? How, one wonders, do historians go about "understanding" such a question? Are they to assume that science, having exhibited its credentials, can safely ignore the backbencher who asks how, exactly, have the relevant lessons of the Bible and its provenance been anachronized?
Science has its own shifts of mood and of direction, and is not generally oriented to categorical cognitive sweeps. Professor Hollinger, for instance, cites respectfully Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There Mr. Kuhn argues that science has always been something of a corporate enterprise. Scientists tend to pursue paths collectively agreed upon by what might be thought of as a "paradigm."
The extant scientific paradigm is satisfied that present research "covers the facts" on the creationist question. Research goes happily forward, making advances and exacting refinements within the compass of that paradigm, until the circle bobs its head in exasperation, because it won't fit into the square hole prepared for it. Efforts are then made to stretch the going paradigm; but finally a new one can be seen to be needed, as Professor Kuhn puts it, in order to "cover the new facts." The Newtonian paradigm had to change to make way for subatomic particles and high velocity physics. We had, then, a new "wing" on the Newtonian paradigm and a new vector for collective research.
I think it possible that a new paradigm will emerge. I wonder whether, in the new century, the anthropic idea will assert itself, not merely as acceptable, but even accomodationist, relieving science of such burdens as accounting for a prime mover.
The enduring question, of course, is which of two alternative explanations for human life is more plausible, that put forward by evolutionary materialism, or that which argues a superintending intelligence. At a conference of international scientists, met in Warsaw in 1973, Professor Brendan Carterrather timidly advanced a view of the evolved cosmos. What we know about the astrophysical narrative of our cosmos, he said, is that one day it did in fact begin, with what they call the Big Bang. And that multiple variables proceeded to play out in bizarre coordination with each other.
Why?
How so?
But hark, they serve only a single apparent purpose, namely to make possible human life. Professor Carter called this reunderstanding of cause and of order the anthropic principle.
I am benumbed by numbers, especially when shot at me on galactic scales. Even so, I am moved to outspoken wonder by some of the data going the rounds. What is the probability that a bullet randomly fired from the earth will hit a one-inch target at a distance of twenty billion light years? The answer, I'm told, is 10 to the 60th power.
Do we know how many atoms there are in the known universe?
Well, I know, because I've been told that scientists of accepted credentials give the answer as 10 to the 80th power.
Meanwhile, I learn that scientists consider any random event as unlikely as 10 to the 50th power as quite simply-impossible. That certainly would make daunting the old fantasy of the monkeys set loose in infinity with computers. To expect to see generated from them the passage from Macbeth that closes with, "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing" is remote. The chances of that happening can be put down, again I am instructed, at 10 to the 536th power.
Backward reels the mind, as the New Yorker writers would have put it, before they set aside their stylistic caricatures.
My mind turns to the great empirical demonstration in Christian history. It was, of course, the hand of Thomas fingering the cloven hand of Christ in order to validate his identity. That kind of raw epistemological confirmation is not available to contemporary petitioner. Still, one comes upon little substitutes, every now and then, intimations of empirical validation far far removed from scientific exactitude, but somehow enlivening of the faith. Three of these caught my eye, in preparing this address for you, one of them entirely my own. I pass them along, with your indulgence.
The first is a passage from the work of Paul Elmer More, the American philosopher. I first spotted it years ago. It continues to give me huge, fugitive glee. See what you think:
More was writing about Thomas Huxley, the lively, learned, evangelical Darwinian who had done so much so quickly to sow seeds of religious doubt at Oxford after the publication of Darwin's great book.
"In 1864," More wrote, "there was a Diocesan Conference at Oxford. There chanced at this time to be in the neighborhood a man who was neither priest nor scientist, a man given to absurd freaks of intellectual charlatanry, yet showing at times also such marvelous and sudden penetration into the heart of things as comes only to genius. It was Benjamin Disraeli.
"He lounged into the assembly in a black velvet shooting coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. And then, turning to the presiding officer, the same Bishop Wilberforce whom four years earlier Huxley had so crushingly rebuked, he uttered [an] enigmatic and unforgettable epigram: "What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my Lord, am on the side of the angels."
"The audience," wrote More, "not kindly disposed to the speaker, applauded the words as a jest; they were carried the next day over the whole land by the newspapers; they have often been repeated as an example of Disraeli's brilliant but empty wit.
"I suspect," Professor More finished, "that beneath their surface glitter, and hidden within their metaphor... these words contain a truth that shall some day break to pieces the new philosophy which Huxley spent his life so devotedly to establish."
A second haunting felicity that I terribly liked when I first saw it was done by Malcolm Muggeridge. He was addressing several hundred American editors at an annual convention. It was in the 1970s, when America wrestled with a monster abroad which had put MRV missiles on the Communist Manifesto, and contended at home, with a widespread demoralization that sprang from the psychological acedia of Woodstock, the military defeat in Vietnam and political corruption of Watergate. Malcolm Muggeridge, the urbane and learned wit, closed his address on the anxieties of modern America by wondering that we had not, in greater numbers -- with greater resolution -- taken bearings, and sought solace, from religious faith.
"I see it as one of the greatest ironies of this ironical time," he said, "that the Christian message should be withdrawn for consideration just when it is most desperately needed to save men's reason, if not their souls.
"It is as though" – I ask you to ponder, and to enjoy this wonderful metaphor – "it is as though a Salvation Army band, valiantly and patiently waiting through the long years for judgment day, should, when it comes at last, and the heavens do veritably begin to unfold like a scroll, throw away their instruments and flee in terror."
And, in closing, an intensely personal experience. I undertook, 25 years ago, to sail my boat across the Atlantic Ocean. You can perhaps imagine my excitement on hearing, soon before setting out, about the development of a computer program designed by the Hewlett Packard Company. The feature held out a magical helping hand for the ocean navigator coping with the arduous calculations required to bring down a sun sights and star sights day after day, night after night.
There were ancillary benefits.
When it came in the mail, a few weeks before I set sail, I closed the windows, disconnected the phone, and locked the door of my office. It was the size of a remote control unit for a television set. I inserted the metal strip, thinner than my fingernail, as instructed. It gave me an illuminated dashboard, and what I saw were the words, GREAT CIRCLE NAVIGATION SSTD 03A.
How far exactly would I be traveling, upon weighing anchor in Miami, on my sailboat bound for Gibraltar? I entered the latitude of Miami, and the longitude, respectively, of Miami and Gibraltar.
Then I depressed the appropriate key. Bank upon bank of red digital numbers went by in a chaotic frenzy. I don't know how many different numbers actually flashed on and off -- it would require a slow- motion camera to catch the tracery, and reduce it to legible figures; and there were split seconds of blackest void, as if the instrument were gagging on the difficulties of the assignment.
But although it seemed a very long time, in seven seconds there was sudden calm, and the numbers crystallized, like a tall, proud mountain after a prolonged series of geological explosions: 3831.46 miles, we'd have to sail. In which direction?
A great circle bearing is not lightly yielded, and there was once again commotion, this time, lasting twelve seconds. The course would be: 60 degrees 38 minutes.
All of that from the mind of man I pondered, having no idea of what was soon to come in the computer age, making my navigational program something on the order of tic tac toe.
It occurred to me, as I pondered their work, that what startled me had become child's play for Hewlett and Packard. As I made my way across the Atlantic, they were in their laboratories tackling challenges I would not know even how to frame.
Raising in my mind, back then, the question: What is it that strikes Hewlett and Packard as extra-ordinary, as out-of-this-world? Presumably, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. But then there is the problem. Perhaps in the world of Hewlett and Packard one takes refuge in skepticism -- maybe the loves and the fishes were never multiplied. Davie Hume is famous, among other things, for remarking that he would sooner believe that human testimony had erred, than that the laws of nature had been suspended.
It occurs to me on reflection that the operative word here, even allowing for the understated formulations of the British, is 'sooner'...
He would sooner believe. The word can suggest a preferred mode of belief, not one that must exclude the other.
My belief is in that alternative mode: in the order of the universe, the arching of the human spirit to otherwordly challenges, in the enduring mysteries of love and the bottomless depths of the Christian faith, a faith that these are the result of -- Central Planning; which took seven days, not seven seconds, to create a world exciting enough to nurture people who doubt its creator. That is the flirtatious side of God, to reach for a non-divine attribute. We are best off to laugh at its presumption, to reject infidelity, even as, after trying it out several times, I was able to laugh at the black nihilistic teasings of Hewlett and Packard, and know that the way would be lit for me to come home.
I am programmed to love God and to seek, however vainly, to obey him, and to trust that the course He laid out for me in this grand voyage through time and space and uncertainty, to infinity and transfiguration and final resolution, is as certainly charted as the toyland course that led me from Miami to the Rock of Gibraltar. With Malcolm Muggeridge I'll pursue the star of Bethlehem, however waywardly; and if I fail to reach it, I shall be guilty of every delinquency save that I ever doubted that it was there.
There is nothing of condescension, or opportunism, in my prayerful hope, here expressed, that vicissitudes to one side, your lives will be buoyed by grace and happiness. You will, I know, always be grateful for what this university has given you, and for the friendships born and nurtured here, and for the company of the scholars who have given you so very much.