Thursday 23 November 2023

Mersea Island

All pictures taken during my visit to Mersea island.



During a recent holiday on Mersea Island with the rest of the family the wife and I attended a Sunday service at the church of St Edmunds in West Mersea - see the picture above. The church is in the South of the Island a few yards from the coast. The island can only be accessed by a causeway subject to periodic tidal flooding. When one alights from the causeway at low tide St Edmunds is on the opposite side of an island which at the widest is about 7 km across.  Although Mersea island is not far from London these circumstances give St Edmunds that cut-off back-of-the-beyond atmosphere, an atmosphere which also pervades Happisburgh and Terice House in Cornwall.


St. Edmund's, Nave and Chancel


The fabric of the church displays evidence of a long history of change, structural improvisations and innovations. The north aisle is separated from the main nave by a colonnade of relatively spindly perpendicular columns; this aisle may well be a lean-too extension constructed post-black-death to accommodate an expanding population; add-on aisles, along with perpendicular replacement windows. are a feature of many rural churches.

St Edmund's disused pulpit


During the service the minister stood in front of the congregation with a lectern as might a minister in a non-conformist church. But in times past the priest would have occupied the old wooden pulpit displaced to one side, which like a sentry box guarded the chancel end of the church, the holy domain of the priesthood and the dispensation point of the holy sacraments. To non-conformists like myself the division between laity and clergy is alien. But that doesn't mean that it is without merit, especially given the feudal context of a largely illiterate and hard worked serf population. For them theology was built into the spatial configuration of the church, in its artwork and of course taught by the literate clergy. The latter was a dangerous undemocratic arrangement, but a lot more social, political and technical development was needed before this could be changed: One wonders if today's evangelical celebrity culture of so-called "anointed" patriarchs is any less dangerous.   

The downsides of the feudal priesthood are offset somewhat by the eloquent symbolism in the fabric & ritual found in these mediaeval churches. The communicant's attention is drawn to the centrality of Christ's sacrificial work, expressed by the positioning of the chancel where the tokens of Christ's sacrificial suffering are celebrated. The rituals in the chancel are assumed to be so holy that only an ordained priest can serve in that area. This practice does cut across the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9) but it is a far cry from the days of the pagan temples where an image of the divine represented by an idol stood in what is now the chancel. These idols would very likely depict figures of strength, power and glory; the very opposite of what we find in medieval churches which celebrate a self-humbling servant God and the vulnerability & martyrdom of his disciples like St Edmund. 

St Edmund's east-end-stained glass showing
Christ-child, Mary and cross-cultural worshippers



Behind the altar Cross at St Edmunds is the usual large colourful stained-glass window, in this case depicting Mary and her holy baby, the creator of all things (Col 1:15ff) contracted to the humble frame of an infant. This is the omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresence creator who in his desire to serve and save surpassed all conceivable limits of self-denial. Sacrificial self-denial is the central theme of Christianity, and the material fabric and rituals of these old churches attempt to convey this message; but one needs to know how to read it.

***

We also visited the church of St Peter and St Paul in West Mersea. This was another lesson in the  meekness of God.  A neat and attractive yew tree lined path leads to the north-door.....

Path leading to St Peter's and St Paul's

The entrance opens up on a clean and well-kept interior....

St Peter's and St Paul's nave and chancel.

Hanging over the entrance to the chancel is a large crucifix...

St Peter's and St Paul's crucifix

This image doesn't wallow in the awful bloody physical realities of crucifixion - if did it would be a distraction. But the pathos of the slumped body of Christ sufficiently conveys what it needs to convey; namely, the passion and compassion of a God who suffers for His creation. These verses in the book of Colossians tells us why....

 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

The entrance to the medieval equivalent of the holy of holies, the chancel, is guarded by this image of a suffering God: One should not enter the holy of holies from which the grace of communion is served without cognizance of the Crucifix and what it means. Once one has entered this sacred area one then looks up at the rich stained-glass window of the east-end and sees the glorified risen Christ, clothed in the sumptuous robes of The Only King worthy of the name. (See picture below and also Phil 2:1-11). All this proves that imagery is not necessarily idolatry: An image is idolatrous when it is the depository of a corrupt concept of God; take away the image and the distorted concept of God it represents remains and so does the idolatry. We all have a distorted image of God to a greater or lesser extent, and that's why pointing to Jesus short cuts the risks of the idolatry we are prone to promote; see Hebrews 1:1ff. There is nothing wrong in imagery per se, provided it points us to the express image of Jesus (John 1:18, 5:37, 14:9).

At St Edmunds the east-end-stained-glass depicted Jesus as a
helpless babe-in-arms, but at the east end of St Peter's and
 St Paul's we see a post-cross glorified risen Jesus. 

***

In these old churches we see part of the long process of the civilization of a barbaric humanity: Gone were the overbearing easily offended deities of paganism who jealously guarded their power, glory, status and reputation much as a human dictator (e.g. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin) might. Jesus turned these pagan values on their heads and showed us what Deity, Real Deity was about. The war-like pagans of the northwest miraculously started to celebrate vulnerability, naming their churches after Saints like St Edmund who were martyred for their divine King. Even the Vikings who killed St Edmund eventually Christianized and frequently named their churches after the martyred patron Saint of Sailors, St Clement.  It's a remarkable history, but let's be clear; there is still a very long way to go to complete the civilization of humanity, and both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships are forever waiting in the wings for an opportunity and remain a risk to civilization, and Christianity.   

***

Attending the traditional service in the medieval churches of the UK is like going back in time. For me this feeling of time travel was particularly strong during the service at St Edmunds as we read out the age-old liturgy from printed sheets. Medieval congregations would of course not have had printed sheets to read and wouldn't have been able to read them even if they had. In those distant times the laity would have had to recite the liturgy Sunday by Sunday from memory. This, along with the symbolism and imagery in the church, was the way to teach an illiterate peasant congregation about salvation. 

Medieval Christianity was highly authoritarian and top down, but ours is a world of dynamic continuity; the logic of society was such that it wasn't ready for a more politically participatory community. A culture of finite beings can't absorb everything at once but instead goes through a series of learning stages. For human beings the unfolding of revelation is the unfolding of time. Time exists because revelation is necessarily a sequenced affair. The division between laity and clergy is easily abused and was abused in medieval times. But it seems that a pre-renascence, pre-print, illiterate feudal society had little choice but to pass through this primitive stage of social & political development, not to mention the need for the technical developments which were to revolutionize society. 

Sunday 20 August 2023

Cosmopolitan Reading

 


I haven't heard that everyone is beating a path to see the sights in the City of Reading (Berkshire, UK), but we did a quick visit there recently and like all historic towns discovered that it has its points of great interest.

The town hall is a typical piece of over-the-top Victoriana, but a very interesting & imposing structure for that. (See picture above). The streets we walked down were of similar vintage but personally I find that the colorful modern shop fronts clash with the sober Victorian/Edwardian style of their upper stories, thus giving the contrasting retail ground floors a rather gaudy look.

The pictures below are from Norman and Romanesque Reading where a peaceful quietus reigns away from the street hustle and bustle and where the Abbey ruins contrast with the anonymous and soulless buildings of commerce.

But what struck me most about Reading was its cosmopolitan feel: People from just about all continents populated its streets. It is so cosmopolitan that I would say it's Babel in reverse, which is probably a good thing; provided people live and work together peacefully in a shared democratic environment where justice reigns.





Sunday 30 July 2023

Wollaton Hall, Nottingham


Wollaton Hall is the atmospheric context of a very interesting 
natural history display. I can recommend a visit. 


After my last post on the homely Elizabethan Trerice House in Cornwall I thought I'd post on the very contrasting stately home, Wollaton Hall, which is also Elizabethan, but by intention far from homely. It classifies as a "prodigy house", that is house which self-consciously wallows in its very contrived grandeur. Blickling Hall, where I worked for three very pleasant years, classified as a prodigy house. (See also Hatfield House, by the same architect). Stately homes in this category are intended to be awe inspiring rather than homely. If the sense of awe they generate comes at the price of mixing in a little fear and intimidation then so be it: The owners of these houses wanted their high status to be all too apparent regardless of any accompanying sense of discomfort these houses engender; if anything, a little fear enhances the feeling of awe & respect; ask any dictator. 

Wollaton Hall can be reached by a climbing the rise on which it is situated. As no doubt intended its profile dominates the surrounding landscape (see above). As one closes in on it the rich ornamentation of its facade becomes very striking: If that ornamentation looks ostentatious to the viewer, then it has probably achieved its purpose of manipulating the feelings of the visitor: The Hall shouts wealth and status at the expense of any negative feelings one might have about the mood it conveys.  It is not built to primarily make friends with the viewer, but at all costs to impress even if that evokes a sense of being over-awed. Rich and powerful people tread a very a precarious path that runs temptingly close to assuming demigod status. 


Just inside the entrance of the palace is a very lofty hall of equal grandeur: Its elaborate ceiling bosses are surrounded by gargoyles that peer down at the visitor giving the first inkling that this could be a spooky place; in fact, the Hall makes claim to being the haunt of several ghosts. 



The Hall is now a natural history museum, and it is atmospheric enough to serve well as the setting for one of those "A night in the museum" thrillers, where fearful exhibits start to stir in the darkness!


It was very appropriate then that we came on the day that a special exhibition had been laid on: In fact, we had come to the Hall to see this monster......

T-Rex lunges at his next victim!

... the real bones of a gigantic T-Rex. More than 65 million years ago these now fossilized bones were running around terrorizing the population of lesser dinosaurs. For a T-Rex to grow to these dimensions it must have cost the lives of many other dinosaurs; how many dinosaur hides had those wicked looking teeth sunk themselves into?  Like the original owners of Wollaton Hall he was at the top of his game; he was not called "Rex" for nothing!

It was easy to imagine T-Rex roaming the corridors and large rooms of Wollaton Hall (although doorways would pose a problem!). In terms of size human constructions have far exceeded dinosaurian scales and yet in comparison even these scales pale on the cosmic stage. Moreover, the immense tracts of cosmic time make the 165-million-year reign of "the grotesque saurians, the huge brutes of Jurassic times"* look to be very ephemeral. The apparently pointless long reign of saurian survival hangs over any curious theist as an enigma.

Like Wollaton Hall the cosmos is an awesome, spooky, even a frightening place, intimidating in its size & detail and yet paradoxically beautiful at the same time. It is no wonder the general populace are having trouble making anthropic sense of it all  Ways of cutting the gordian knot quickly are sought for: Some throw their hands up in disbelief, resorting to explanations of sheer chance and believe the cosmos has no anthropic significance. Cranky Christian popularist sects, unable to come to terms with cosmic dimensions, have cosified it with those incredible shrinking doctrines of young earthism (and even flat earthism) and sought assurance, security and above all certainty by running after authoritarian, presumptuous, delusional and even corrupt leaders who tell them what they want to hear.

As for me I find I can't be too hard on either atheist or the average cranky cult Christian: Both are understandable intellectual short-cuts given the tricky questions that are part of the human predicament; these are reactions which in my view are completely undeserving of the traditional hell.  So, it's over to you God; it's your problem not mine.  

Footnote:

*The Time Machine, The Epilogue, by H G Wells.

Relevant Link:

Friday 9 June 2023

Trerice House, Cornwall

The south front of Trerice house.

 It's been sometime since I've posted on a visit to a stately home: Those days seemed to have long-faded since I left my National Trust retirement job at Blickling hall in 2010. The cares of the world around me, about which I can do nothing but comment, have rather weighed on me recently!  It was therefore a balm at the beginning of May to visit the obscure National Trust property in Cornwall called "Trerice House".  It's really too small to do justice the name "Stately Home", but its unassuming size, obscurity and a location which is only accessed down narrow sunken Cornish roads, give it that "away from it all" atmosphere. Not surprisingly, then, my mind has often returned to our afternoon in the peaceful tranquility of Trerice house. 

The gardens and the west wing

The main south facing "E" shaped wing of the house was built in the 1570s, in Elizabethan times (Hence the "E" shape, apparently), but it was, in fact, an extension of an earlier and less grand manor house (and/or farmhouse) to the west of what is now the main building. After a succession of absentee landlords and a period of neglect the east side of the "E-wing" collapsed in the 1860s but was restored by the National Trust (thanks in part to the generosity of its tenant Mr. Jack Elton) after they bought the house in 1953.


The great hall

As one enters the property through the "screens passage" one finds a door on the left which gives entrance to a classic great-hall illuminated by a huge south facing window of 576 panes of glass, many of which are the original rippled glass. The plaster work on the ceiling is very fine and dates to the 1570s but has been restored in the 1840s giving it a very crisp and new appearance contrasting with the generally well used and aged appearance of the house as a whole. Over the years the house has been pulled around, extended and changed and a tour by an architectural archeologist while we were there pointed out all the anomalies that are evidence of the chops and changes of a property evolving to fit the demands of the day.

Unlike those much larger and grand stately houses Trerice felt like a real home. One reason for this may be because I live in a Victorian Terraced house whose layout, like Trerice, is on the line of lineal development of the time honored one room house of ancient times: In times gone by everyone lived in one-roomed huts & houses, or if one was of high status, they were big enough to be called "halls", a space where everything, from socializing, cooking and sleeping took place. Eventually rooms were added on to the main living space of the hall; kitchens, pantries and private rooms. As wealth increased the chimney came along splitting many halls into a parlor and dining room. My own Victorian terraced house still has this vestigial configuration with the parlor as the front room and the dinning room at the back, both rooms separated by outsized back-to-back chimney stacks that were once the main source of heating for the house. 

As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in part 7 of his Civilization series (Grandeur and Obedience) "I wonder if a single thought which has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room". Trerice house is small enough, homely enough and cozy enough to be a house that encourages thought especially on a dark winter night on the Cornish peninsular when the huge canopy of the night sky is studied with stars, the clouds of the Milky Way are shining and there is a bright fire in the grate.

The plaster work on the ceiling of the hall
 

Wednesday 12 October 2022

Happisburgh, Norfolk: More than 15 minutes of fame

All but one of the photographs published here are my own. 

The lighthouse

Apart being a quiet & peaceful corner of Norfolk and well known for its a striking barber's pole of a lighthouse I never thought that Happisburgh had more notability than that. Happisburgh's apparent calm obscurity and that sense of it being no-where-ville was actually one good reason for the wife and I to have a couple of nights there in a caravan as a get-away from it all. I had never visited Happisburgh before and to my shame thought that it lacked notability. Well, I was wrong. Happisburgh sprung some surprises and in terms of its significance it punches well above its weight. 

The well-maintained village sign

Arriving on the North Walsham Road at what looked to me to be the centre of Happisburgh we found it marked by a colourful village sign which makes cryptic allusions to Happisburgh's early history. At this point one also finds a crossroads: The road to the left runs up to the church which with its high tower has dimensions disproportionate to the tiny size of Happisburgh. The church was largely rebuilt in the 15th century in the perpendicular style and this rebuild was probably financed by the wool trade, a trade that made Norfolk a wealthy place to be. The road to right is the high street: It boasts one tiny shop and a school. The high street eventually leads on to Whipwell street which in tum runs into Whipwell Green where legend has it that a well existed. This well is at the centre of a macabre ghost story which I heard told as a youngster, but it was news to me that Happisburgh was the location of this alleged haunting.

The Hill House Inn

Straight ahead at the crossroad is a hill which runs up to the Hill House Inn and then on to a derelict caravan site that was cleared of caravans some years ago because of coastal erosion (In fact the site has moved inland to the site where we were spending our two nights). Whilst dinning in the half-timbered interior of the ancient Inn the landlord told us that the grade 2 listed Inn had been given twenty years before it fell into the sea. It was criminal, he said, that those losing their homes to the sea were expected to pay for their demolition costs before they littered the beach. 

When Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Canon Doyle visited this part of the world it inspired two of his stories: The North Norfolk legend of Black Shuck was behind the story of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and at the Hill House Inn where he was fond of staying an inspiration came for the story of "The Dancing Men".  The Eastern Daily Press  tells us: 

Lying in a quiet Norfolk coastal village just a stone's throw from the sea, The [Hill House Hotel] was the perfect retreat for a famous writer who wanted to work in solitude. His writing desk was placed at the window, facing a bowling green and the sea, and the author was left in peace, with a maidservant on call to attend to him when he needed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle liked the hotel so much that he became a regular visitor, and as well as providing peace and quiet, the Hill House also provided inspiration - in the form of a curious hand-written script formed by stickmen that the landlord's son had written in the guest book. Conan Doyle was so taken with the code that while staying there in May 1903 he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story called The Adventure of the Dancing Men, rated by aficionados of the great detective as one of the best.

Doyle captures the atmosphere of this part of Norfolk in The Dancing Men where he writes:

...there was much around us to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of today, while on every hand enormous square towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German ocean [The North Sea] appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected  from a grove of trees. "That's Ridling Thorpe Manor" said he.

Happisburgh church: One of those enormous square towered 
churches Canon Doyle speaks of.


The North Sea eats away at Happisburgh's cliffs

Doyle's reference to Ridling Thorpe Manor reminds me of Happisburgh Manor whose enormous thatched roof and chimneys we glimpsed poking over a line of trees. I don't think I've ever seen a mansion that large with a thatched roof; but then it is a Victorian fancy and belongs to the world of the Victorian imagination and a romantic take on all things medieval. With its lower half hidden behind the copse its builders would be proud to know that it looked the epitome of mystique and could well serve as the romantic setting for a haunting period piece. But at about 200m from the sea it seems to have become a hot potato. 

The under populated isolation which is North Norfolk would have been strong in Doyle's day: By the 19th century the wealth and importance of Norwich and Norfolk had diminished considerably since the halcyon days of the Middle Ages as city & county lost out to the big industrial cities of the North. Also, although transport & communication had improved by Doyle's time it was still not advanced enough to rid North Norfolk of that sense of disconnection which can be felt even today. In Victorian days it was very much a slow backwater and its folk perhaps therefore more open to accepting the paranormal. I am sure it's significant that Doyle, who was fascinated by the paranormal, placed his other Norfolk inspired story in the wilds of isolated Dartmoor. Wild and isolated countryside seems to stimulate the imagination and enhance a sense of the numinous: Fred Hoyle and the Brontes may be further evidence of this rule of thumb.

A small erosion valley opens up in the soft cliffs of Happisburgh. 

The inevitable carving away of the glacial till cliffs of Happisburgh is slowly removing it from the map of Norfolk. But ironically it this very process which has put Happisburgh on the world map of paleontological fame. For underlying the till is a basement rock which been uncovered to reveal early hominin footprints. At nearly a million years old these are the oldest hominin footprints outside Africa. See here for more: Happisburgh footprints - Wikipedia . This is so long ago that the owners of these footprints would have seen a very different night-sky to the one I saw when I went out to look at the stars on our second night. In comparison with these time scales, it feels as though Happisburgh church was built only yesterday.  

A more recent manifestation of the hominin group
 treads Happisburgh's basement rock.  

From its ghost stories & legends, through Canon Doyle's dancing men, to those enigmatic ancient footprints, Happisburgh has plenty to pique the interest of the student of mystery. Take for example those early hominins: What did they look like? What did they think of the world in which they found themselves? Did they have a purely bestial secular mind set and simply take it all as necessarily granted and gave no further thought to it?* Or did they look up at the stars and wonder and attempt to make anthropic sense of those cosmic contingencies by integrating the enigmatic facts of life with religion? Did they have rituals and ritual sites? All the paleontologists find are the bare necessities of adaptive survival like flint tools and butchered bones. The kind of sacred sites we find associated with the neolithic and later ages have not been found in the Paleolithic; such sites seem to be a function of the wealth surplus of farming communities, an example being, of course, the monumentally huge structure that is Happisburgh church.

An air of intrigue & mystery hangs over Happisburgh which whets the appetite of the curious as did those strange dancing men fascinate Sherlock Holmes. 

Relevant Link:

Famous Sherlock Holmes manuscript by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written at Hill House Hotel in Dereham set to fetch $500,000 at ... | North Norfolk News


Footnote

* This sentence is based on the fact that our science in essence only describes the inherent organization of our experiences: In this sense we are no further forward in our understanding than Paleolithic races whose difference to ourselves was that they didn't have available those very powerful and general descriptive organizing principles (e.g. the laws of physics) that we have today, or a sense of sight and sound greatly magnified by the artifacts of technology. But essentially those principles are a means of description which in the final analysis rely on a kernel of brute contingent fact at which point descriptive explanation hits a logical barrier and can go no further.  See here: Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Saturday 9 July 2022

Abington, Fred Hoyle and the Cosmic Perspective.


The oldest house in Abington, Cambrideshire. 

Recently I happened to be in Abington, Cambridgeshire, for a family reunion event. One of the activities provided by the hosts was a very interesting guided tour round the historic village. The village is stacked with old houses some of which are pre-Tudor, an example of which I've pictured above. This particular house, which boasts the resilience of wood frames, is the oldest in the village, perhaps 14th century, the century of the societal mold breaking disaster of the black death. The existence of so many old houses is product of an irony: Going back some years we would likely find that the inhabitants of Abington were by and large dirt poor rural workers. In fact, too poor to support an economy with the wealth to update the houses of Abington. The effect was to preserve what to our modern eyes are delightful & quaint rural cottages, so delightful that only the rich can now afford to buy them and maintain them: Hence the area is now the sedate backwater for the relatively well-heeled.

Like history in general the development of Abington is a microcosm of chaotic twists and turns with no grand plan to explain or rationalize its complex history or layout. As with most human settlements it evolved in a haphazard fashion; a dwelling here and a dwelling there built as the complex vicissitudes of daily life made themselves felt. For me, however, there was to be in interesting twist at the end of the tour.

***

As our guide was finishing off he made a passing comment that just round the corner from where we were assembled cosmologist Fred Hoyle had his home during his tenure at Cambridge university. This was a complete surprise: I'd been coming to Abington and visiting relatives here for 38 years and this was the first I'd heard of it. It was as big a surprise to me as finding Cromwell's house in the shadow of Ely Cathedral. After I expressed an interest one of the guides took me to see it; it was an elegant looking Georgian/Regency house:


The plaque on the front wall reads:



At the age of 58 and after 28 years Hoyle resigned from the faculty of Cambridge university in 1973 as a protest against university bureaucracy* and moved to the Lake District, not that far from his region of provenance. By all accounts Fred Hoyle was not an easy-going character and didn't suffer fools gladly. I suspect that he put much of his own personality and how he viewed himself in relation to those around him in the pugnacious character of John Fleming, the scientist in Hoyle's novel "A for Andromeda". Fleming, like Hoyle, was constantly picking arguments with those lesser intelligences around him. Only Fleming could read the writing on the Wall about the danger of an intruding cosmic intelligence that had taken on the form of a computer. I watched the 1961 BBC production of A For Andromeda and apart from having a crush on Julie Christie (at the age of nine!) and a fascination with the sinister sounding staccato pulses from the computer's speaker,** the only other strong memory I have is of a bad-tempered John Fleming curtly snapping his way through the series; Fleming, like Hoyle, believed he knew better than most, particularly the bureaucrats and politicians. We have to admit, of course, that Hoyle himself often did know better!

Hoyle's new environment in the Lake district is described by an Express reporter who visited him in 1981 and wrote an article in the Express titled "Spaceman Sir Fred still winning his Star Wars". I don't know about winning, but he was still fighting those wars, just like his alter ego Dr. Fleming. In the article we read this:

Fred Hoyle lives in almost perfect peace. His old stone farmhouse is just a few telescope lengths from the lip of Ullswater and from the panoramic windows of his study the Helvellyn Hills drift silently away against the sky, as though into space. Far away is where Professor Sir Fred Hoyle likes to be. Distance and seclusion, and perhaps even the double glazing which shuts out sounds no more disturbing than the singing of garden birds, have been his way of life for almost a decade. It is also symbolically shuts out the aggravating sound of the ribald laughter with which the academic establishment greets so many of his pronouncements. For more than 30 years Hoyle, who will be 66 this month, has been rocking the world with his theories......... "At the time people were laughing at me" he says peering at the hills with dark penetrating eyes.  (Geoffrey Levy, Express 16 June 1981)


As time progressed the objects of Hoyle's novel generating imagination became inextricably mixed with his science. In his 1983 book "The Intelligent Universe" (of which I have a copy), the "scientific" ideas he sketches out could be a plot to one of his novels. The book provides insight into the direction his thought was taking as he mulled over the meaning of life, the universe and everything during his rambles in the epic landscape of the Lake District where, unlike Abington, the sense of ancient geologic time is very real. The book is subtitled "A new view of creation and evolution" and tenders an original way of looking at the cosmic evolutionary dynamic. Hoyle was well known for his startling originality and this book is no exception. In fact the book has, to my mind, parallels with A for Andromeda. In "The Intelligent Universe" Fred Hoyle is effectively playing the part of a Dr. Fleming type figure, telling us what he thinks an alien cosmic intelligence, an intelligence which literally pervades our own cosmos, is up to. In fact chapter 9 is titled "What is Intelligence up to?". For Hoyle that Intelligence emanates from the unimaginably long eons of the eternity of time posited by his Steady State Theory of the Universe. This Intelligence has learnt how to fine tune the universe to suit its eternal propagation. This management of the universe takes place largely via the vectors of microorganisms which travel across space delivering the information in their genetic makeup. This propagation has parallels with the radio signal from deep space in A for Andromeda. This signal transmitted information about how to build a computer intelligence, an intelligence that ultimately was looking out for its own survival at the expense of humanity. In Hoyle's mind the cosmic Intelligence he tenders in "The Intelligent Universe" is God-like in that its causation can be transmitted from the future as well as the past and therefore it straddles all of infinite time. Therefore, for Hoyle this Intelligence is, as it were, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). But Hoyle's Intelligence is no transcendent Christian God: His is a pantheistic view where his proposed Intelligence is very much part of and trapped in the cosmos as it engages in an eternal struggle to subdue its own internal tendency toward chaos: So, the meaning of life for Hoyle is a kind of eternal Kaos Kampf. In Hoyle's worldview the cosmos has no real endgame but is forever struggling to maintain intelligent self-awareness and humanity is bound up with this struggle.

All this, of course, is very far removed from that peaceful country lane in Abington where one Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2022 I stumbled across the large cottage Fred Hoyle occupied for a couple of decades or more. For someone like Hoyle I imagine that the quiet lanes of Abington with their trimmed hedgerows and the gentle undulating countryside of Cambridgeshire felt nearly as claustrophobic and stultifying as Cambridge University's bureaucracy. When Hoyle eventually settled in the untamed landscape of the Lake District, not so far from the wild lands of Wuthering Heights, it connected much better with his mentality. In this dangerous far-seeing landscape eternity & the cosmic perspective are much more palpable than they are in the cozy lanes of Abington. As with the Bronte's I suspect the elemental landscape around him helped to inspire his creativity. As he aged Hoyle started to speculate on the meaning of life and what appears to be some kind of God-consciousness surfaced in his later years. He was trying to make anthropic sense of the universe, much like myself.  Moreover, like many others he was puzzled by the highly contingent anti-chance configurations & specifications of the cosmos and thought that this fact demanded explanation; on that score I'm with him. But being an atheistic science buff, he sought to keep his speculations as far as possible within the material universe he knew, and so as a kind of seat-of-the-pants project he wrote The Intelligent Universe.  

As I've already said the landscape, he was now in was dangerous and that proved to be the case for poor Fred. Hoyle's end was hastened when during one of his country hikes, he fell into a ravine near Shipley not far from where he was born. That wouldn't have happened if he lived out his retirement in Abington. But then perhaps neither would some of his off-the-wall ideas have happened.

Hoyle: Tough, pugnacious and cantankerous.



Footnotes

* ...according to the journalist Geoffrey Levy.

** The early computers had their program loops linked to loudspeakers as a crude way of helping to debug a program and detect the cause of software lock ups. On the BBC's A for Andromeda this auditory rendering of algorithmic looping was an eerie sound effect successfully conveying the mystique associated with the "thinking machines" of that era & also represented the sinister nature of the "thoughts" of the Andromeda computer that was intent on controlling Earth. But having worked on my Thinknet project I find algorithmic looping a far too primitive a notion for a real thinking machine.

NOTE:
This proved to be an interesting article in the Guardian:

Friday 6 August 2021

A Visit to the Isle of Ely Part III: Oliver Cromwell

My photograph of Oliver Cromwell's house in Ely

(See Part I here and Part II here)

Historians of the Seventeenth century will know that Oliver Cromwell's house, the one in which he lived and worked between 1636 and 1647, is within an arrow's flight of the huge monument to medieval Catholicism that is Ely cathedral.  Cromwell in many ways stood for everything that Ely Cathedral was not. The puritan Celia Fiennes was typical of  Cromwell's puritanical strain of thought:

When Celia Fiennes recorded her visit to Ely in 1698, she could remark, "this church has the most popish remains in its walls as any I have seen" (Ely Cathedral guide page 20)

As a mere dabbler in history I have to confess that I didn't know that Cromwell's house was so close to the Cathedral until I visited Ely in the warm September of 2020! But coming to this fact for the first time in my life meant that I was blown away by the surprising and hugely ironic juxtapositions of these two buildings, both monuments to two very disparate expressions of the faith. Cromwell so epitomized the austerity, the business-like practicality and lack of finesse & decorum that goes together with the resurgence of middle-class puritanical devotion of that day.  According to the Cathedral guide:

The puritans rejected all but the plainest forms of worship - in a letter to the Precentor, Cromwell described  the choir service as "so unedifying and offensive"  - and during the Commonwealth, Ely  ceased to function as a Cathedral. 

Cromwell's reaction to the Cathedral and its form of devotion is nothing but what you'd expect from him. 

Progressively, Cromwell had moved into a popularist position where he had gained the influence and authority to implement his brand of idealism:

Oliver who had undergone a religious conversion in his late twenties believed himself to be one of God's Chosen People or Elect. He was fiercely critical of High Churchmen, like Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely and of authority generally, defending the rights of the fenmen against  those who sought to drain their land without adequate compensation. The popularity and support that he won from those whose cause he defended earned him the name "Lord of the Fens". In 1640 Cromwell was elected MP for Cambridge and so became increasingly involved in national affairs.  (Guide to Cromwell's House page 2)

Here we see the beginnings of that common political phenomenon where a popularist rebel against established authority (who may otherwise have a just cause) eventually maneuvers themselves into a position of established authority without any sense of irony.  In fact after the 1642 civil war Cromwell became an absolute authority:

During the disturbances of the Civil  War in January 1644 Cromwell warned Mr Hitch, the Precentor of the Cathedral "Lest the souldiers in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the Reformation of the Cathedral Church, I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offensive....". Hitch ignored the warning so Cromwell saying that he was "a man under authority" ordered him to "leave off your fooling and come down"; Cromwell then drove out the congregation. In 1649 Parliament ordered an inquiry into the possible demolition of the Cathedral, which was in a decayed state, so that the sale of the materials might be applied to "the relief of the sick and maimed soldiers, widows and orphans". The Cathedral survived  only because the cost of demolition was estimated as greater in the value of the materials remaining. but was almost certainly closed for about seventeen years. (Guide to Cromwell's house page 5)

The take home lesson here (as if we didn't know already), is that fundamentalists and idealists have no mercy if it cuts across their ideology; ideology first, grace second, if at all. The architectural wonder of Ely Cathedral only survived because practicalities made it too expensive to demolish!  (Let's recall how ruthless the Taliban and Islamic state were toward the heritage of the past). Notice also the time honoured tension between the cost of the monumental and the cost of servicing the less fortunate.

For me Cromwell is a frustrating figure who missed his opportunities for true reform because of his uncompromising idealism; his obsessive anti-Catholic ideals drove an unbending sometimes merciless  agenda. It is axiomatic to idealists and fundamentalists of Cromwell's ilk that critics are assumed to have hidden and malign motives for disagreeing and therefore justifiably dealt with by coercion. Cromwell's self-belief meant that he could see no irony in his wielding absolute authority and in his willingness to use the threat of lethal force, a threat which he excused with the euphemism of "being under authority". He used that threat to drive out Ely's congregation and later squabbling parliamentarians. He became head of a joyless dictatorship that was consequently all too open to a reactionary return to the very things he opposed. But in spite of all that I believe Cromwell had the right idea at least in a theoretical sense; that is, of a parliamentary forum for the common people; but for him only those common people of sufficiently puritanical frame of mind, else he was liable to exercise his "authority". Like idealists the world over Cromwell didn't see that as a sinner he was as much part of the problem as the solution. If he had seen that he might have understood that there is little choice but to work with a morally and epistemically compromised humanity. He might have also understood that a squabbling often corrupt  parliament with a tendency toward selfishness was, as Walpole observed, the natural state of human affairs and must be wisely managed & regulated rather than engaged in a futile struggle to eradicate sin - only God can do that. 

But then the mitigation for Cromwell was that this was early days in the democratic experiment and I suppose a lack of understanding of what real democracy actually looks like in all its messy compromised & argumentative untidiness would have been beyond an idealist who faced the conundrum of all idealists: That is, as the French revolutionaries discovered, the full implementation of an ideology can only be achieved under totalitarian conditions; the very thing many idealists see themselves as rebelling against.  Underneath it, however, I believe Cromwell was not motivated by a desire to seek power and he refused the crown. He genuinely wanted power to be in the hands of the commoners, but at that stage in British history he really had no idea how to implement his vision among sinners and his fall back was his own sense of being right and his willingness to use diktat.  That a noisy contention is a necessary concomitant of true democracy just seemed wrong, wrong, wrong to a buttoned up puritan. I'm tempted to accuse him of being a block-head, but I'll refrain; it's easy to criticize Cromwell in hindsight. 

***

Move on 200 years into another age, the 19th century, and we find the romance of the gothic revival in full swing. The attitude profile had changed; at least in some quarters. The gothic purists found the abuse of the fabric of Ely Cathedral as equally offensive as Cromwell found the Cathedral services of his day: According the the Cathedral guide:

The architect and chief protagonist of the Gothic revival in England, A. W. N. Pugin, on walking into the Lady Chapel, is said to have burst into tears exclaiming, "O God, what has England done to deserve this". 

The Cathedral underwent restoration in the early Victorian period. These post-enlightenment people who were now well into the age of the mechanical, the industrial and the intellectual had acquired a taste for the mysticism of ritual and symbolEly Cathedral as a suitably atmospheric & monumental venue serving these tastes suited them down to the ground.

***

In Mat 7:13-14 we read:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."   

The ways to destruction are many, the ways to life very few; (that sounds like a consequence of disorder theory to my ears!). I would question whether sinners ever find that gate at all; rather it is found for them and revealed to them by a God of Grace.  

The path of human salvation goes through the narrow gate of the Cross, but the path to ultimate salvation (as Bunyan discovered) is a winding way, perhaps even a maze, as the complexities of Christian history testifies. Let me finish this post with these words taken from the Ely Cathedral guide as it comments on one of the millennium sculptures found in the Cathedral:

Adjacent to the labyrinth and complimenting its symbolism, is Jonathan Clarke's The way of Life [sculpture]. It is cast in aluminium with nine sections, each differently jointed. Like the journey of life, its path in irregular and unpredictable and as the journey is sometimes hard, sometimes joyful, so the surface texture and the colour also vary. Perhaps to give a human scale to the journey Jonathan Clarke placed a tiny human figure on the top arm of the cross. (See below)

To me it's also a metaphor for the journey of Christian history itself with its motely mix of heroes, sharp minds, successes, reverses, eccentrics, extremists, fundamentalists, cultists and woolly thinkers (They know who they are!)

Clarke's Way of Life sculpture

I'd call this the Maze of Life, with its dead-ends, opportunities, surprises and openings.