*Brian Thomas Swimme* # Progressive Summary An engaging book that tells the origin story of how Brian Swimme discovered Thomas Berry's ideas of a new cosmological story, and became his "Dante", the person who would engage a wider audience. # Definitions # Chapter Notes Swimme identifies 6 scientists who established the "time-development" nature (or evolutionary cosmology) of the universe: - Albert Einstein - his 16 partial differential equations are the theoretical core of evolutionary cosmology; but Einstein himself rejected the idea that the universe had a beginning - Alexander Friedman - in 1922, the Russian mathematician showed that Einstein's equations allowed for three different worlds, one of which was an expanding universe - Henrietta Leavitt - she figured out how to use the Cepheid stars to determine the distance of the Earth from the stars - Vesto Slipher - based on Leavitt's work, he was able to discover the cosmological redshift - Edwin Hubble - a decade later, he gathered conclusive data that galaxies were moving away from each other - Georges Lemaître - a Belgian cosmologist whose 1931 paper hypothesized a "primeval atom" that exploded and sent matter flying apart After Einstein and Lemaître visited Edwin Hubble at Mt Wilson, Einstein said, "Lemaître smashed my idea of a static universe with a hammer blow." --- When Brian Swimme finally went to New York to work with Thomas Berry, he wondered if he was up to the task of telling the new cosmic story. Berry, sensing his uncertainty, said: > "The new storytellers will not rise up from science per se. Science will guide the stories each step of the way by grounding us in our best empirical knowledge of the universe, but the foundation for the confidence necessary to become a storyteller is the universe itself. This pertains not just to storytelling but to all roles in society. We find our way into our destinies when we feel we are being commissioned by the whole of things, by life itself. I believe you know this. You've been touched by the universe, even to the point of throwing away your life in order to find your way. > > "You will deepen your resolve when you realize that moments such as ours have happened throughout human history. A tiny acorn gives rise to a huge oak that lives for centuries and then perishes, but not before scattering seeds for the next era. In terms of Western civilization, the transition similar to our own is the thirteenth century when the European Middle Ages were coming to their end. The transformation involved the whole of society and had a bloody dimension as can be seen by recalling the ongoing war between the Christians and the Muslims. We think of Western civilization as being primarily Christian, but after the fall of Rome, control of the Mediterranean was up in the air for centuries. Christian warriors pushed their way into the Near East. Muslim soldiers, after sweeping across Northern Africa, attacked from both the Iberian Peninsula in the west and the Balkan Peninsula in the east. More than once they made their way to the gates of Vienna. > > "It is important to remember that these were internecine wars. Both Christianity and Islam came from the same parents, Israel and Greece, and while Christianity brought together the faith of Israel and the mind of Greece in one way, Islam did the same in its own way. They were brothers fighting for control of the kingdom. > > "In the midst of this upheaval, the pope called Thomas Aquinas to Rome to deal with this threat at the theoretical level. Christian thinkers were at a disadvantage in confronting Islamic scholars in the sense that Europe had only recently discovered the thought of Aristotle. Aquinas's first act was to order fresh translations of all the Aristotelian texts. Drawing upon these and traditional Christian scholarship, he reinvented Christianity by incorporating Aristotle's comprehensive science and metaphysics. His Summa Theologiae provided medieval Europeans with a cosmic story powerful enough to hold the community together. It provided answers to life's recurrent questions. They knew who they were. They knew why they existed. They knew what was good and what was evil. > > "These orientations of Aquinas, at one time the sinews of Western civilization, lost their power when modern science entered history. This happened not just in Europe but throughout the planet, in every major civilization. The brilliant visions of Asia, Africa, and India were reduced to the category of mythological stories. For many, the two world wars were testament to the truth of Neitzche's observation that the Christian European God was dead. > > "Now we come to our time. Both the challenge and the threats of our moment are orders of magnitude greater than what Aquinas was dealing with. The situation is ambivalent in the extreme. Science gave birth to our technological power, which we are using to rob Earth of its vitality; but science has also discovered that the universe as a whole is developing, which as you know I regard as the primary revelation of our time, at the scale of a world religion. At risk now is not just Western civilization but the wildness and beauty of Earth itself. Our greatest hope is to meet this challenge by telling an integral, cosmological story, one that will guide us into a future flourishing with life." Other wise words from Berry: > "In your role as a teacher you will be tempted to think we can carry this through in our lifetimes, but that will not happen. The challenge is far greater than what can be accomplished by a single generation. You will also be tempted to divide the world into those who see the truth and those who do not. That too must be fought against. > > "Always bear in mind that not everyone has the freedom to refuse to participate with forces destroying the planet. And not everyone has friends who are on this journey with them. Remember these as well as other ways in which you have been showered with grace." Berry suggested that studying Dante would be the next step. > "As we have discussed already, our moment in history has a strong parallel with their situation in the late thirteenth century. St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae provided a new cosmology synthesizing Greek science with Christian faith. If not for Dante, this vision of Aquinas would have remained shut up in the scholastic Latin of the monasteries. Our situation is similar. Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, and Teilhard have constructed cosmological visions that present human and cosmic meaning within a developing universe. Unless we want to leave their work on a library shelf in the university, what we require is the cosmic narrative in the forms of film, music, art, and ritual. It needs to be told as an epic and brought into world literature. That's how it'll come alive on every continent and in every culture. These differentiated expressions of the universe's creativity will empower our species to reinvent itself." > "Our whole approach is based on this belief of our separation from the natural world. The belief that we are inside our brains, and from that perspective we can understand the things out there. This dualism was given its philosophical foundation by Rene Descartes and its operational method by Francis Bacon. It has led to spectacular knowledge of the universe. But it has come to its end. The irony is that its success has shown the falsehood of its enabling assumption. When scientists discovered cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution, they demolished the notion that we are ontologically separate. We are not separate from the universe. The universe and Earth *constructed* us." At a gathering at Riverdale Center, where he meets Mary Evelyn Tucker, Swimme explains why Berry is on to something when he says that this is a critical moment in human history, and why we only have this one chance to embrace cosmogenesis: > "The major creative events in the universe are one-time and irreversible. So for instance, the universe brought forth galaxies in only one era. In the era before, the density of matter in the universe was too high for the existence of galaxies. In the era after, the matter was too thinned out for galaxy construction. There has not been a single galaxy constructed since that time, thirteen billion years ago. But when the conditions were right, a window of creativity opened up and allowed a trillion galaxies to flutter in. > > "It's why I love Thomas's phrase, a time-developmental universe. The evolution of the universe is analogous to the development of a living entity, even an embryo. There is a sequence of these windows of creativity. The first window is for stabilizing the plasma into enduring matter, the second for constructing hydrogen and helium atoms, the third for the emergence of galaxies, and so on and so forth. It blows my mind to realize we live in something like a developing being with its own sense of creative unfolding. Although galaxies continue to collide and merge together, there was only one time when the universe could construct galaxies out of clouds of matter, just like there is only one time when a human embryo can create its eyes." Thomas Berry on the fall of Rome: > "As I often do when I come here. I was reflecting on his long years on the island of Patmos in the Mediterranean as he worked on his writings. He was the most significant precursor for Augustine's meditations on the fall of Rome. It is hard for us to fully appreciate just how deeply this destruction shocked the world. Rome had been free from attack for centuries; it was assumed to be utterly invincible. Then, in 476, the Visigoths penetrated Rome's walls and pillaged the city. One needs to bear in mind that this was not just another city, Rome was the political, spiritual, and commercial center of Western civilization. And now, after eight hundred years of protection from outside invasion, the entire eity was put to the torch. > > "Augustine brooded on this collapse from his perch on the shores of North Africa. Staring across the Mediterranean Sea, he wrote as if he could see the fires in the distance. He pondered the situation from multiple perspectives. What had caused this disaster? Was it the loss of faith in the Roman gods? Was it the rise of the Christian religion? The meaninglessness and despair of that time led many people to commit suicide. Life was seen as something pajpful and miserable, as something to be escaped from. His response was to write a new history of the universe using the time horizons and genealogies of the Bible. Though his City of God replaced Virgil's Aeneid as the fundamental story of the West as well as providing the foundation stone for the Christian Middle Ages, he himself saw none of this. For the rest of his life, Augustine witnessed only the ongoing collapse of the Roman civilization. > > "Our situation today is the same, except that the decimation of life we are witnessing is a thousand times worse than what Augustine dealt with. What is burning now is the Earth Community. The ilew story we need today will not come from any one individual like Augustine but from a great number of people, scientists, poets, musicians, storytellers, and more. None of us is the author of this story. The universe itself is telling us how it developed into the structures we see. Our role is to learn to listen to the story the universe is telling us. It is a stupendous story. It will alter the course of history, of this there is little doubt. What is required now is moving the story from mathematical journals to the vernacular." # Quotes # References