I am still thinking
about the film Arrival. It is a film that can engender thoughtfulness.
Even more so since the DVD arrived,
along with the short story it is based on, Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life. My thoughts include the nature of alienness,
the ‘otherliness’ of God, the
hubris of humankind, the wisdom of Alexander Pope and the words of a fellow Anglican priest, the Revd. Prof. John Polkinhorne (Cosmologist &
Theologian.) “At
present, too much theological thinking is very human-centred” .
As I said in my
original review Arrival does not take
the convenient/lazy science–fiction shortcut of aliens arriving on Earth already
speaking English. Imagine if they did. What dreadful language would they speak if
they had been listening to countless episodes of Sgt. Bilko, Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air and Fox News enroute. And why
would they speak English when a quarter
of humankind speaks Mandarin? Thousands
of hours of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao would
have been a much more consistent language
primer, but maybe not much more enlightening.
But Arrival goes down a road less
travelled. When the aliens arrive they want/need
to learn an earthly language and we need to learn theirs. No Babel Fish here.
I also praised the
very ‘alien-ness’ of the aliens. Most aliens in science–fiction are
essentially human, sometimes in their morphology but more often in their
psychology. There is nothing wrong with that. Good Science Fiction is rarely about the
future and the truly alien. It is more
concerned with examining the present
and being human through these engaging
fictional metaphors. ‘The proper study of Man is Man’ as
Alexander Pope wrote many years ago in his Essay
on Man: Second Epistle, and that is even more true – and urgent – in the 21st
century. We are now not only the
greatest threat to our own survival but also to the survival of countless other
species. In Humankind evolution has
reached a new phase, and it may not be functional.
However, I do admire
those writers who can imagine sentient beings who are utterly different to
ourselves. China Mieville has done it in
some of his novels (see Embassy Town
and Perdito Street Station) and so
has Ted Chiang in the source story of Arrival.
Both Mieville and Chiang imagine differences
that are not only physical – we have had
fictional beings that resemble gas clouds before now – but philosophical. Their
aliens think profoundly otherwise. I
admire both writers hugely for this.
Their aliens have something important to teach us about ourselves. And about God.
Imagine if you
were an 'Alien Being' approaching our planet.
Would you call it Earth? Most of it is Sea. The Sea is teeming
with life. It is much less polluted
than the land. Some of its inhabitants are vastly
intelligent. If that last thought gives
you pause, consider the work done of behalf of SETI and NASA by John C. Lilly
in the 1960’s. Tasked with exploring
how to communicate with aliens if ever contact was made Lilly experimented for
many years on dolphins in the Virgin Islands.
John Lilly was by human standards a genius – and also more than a bit
crazy - but eventually he came to the conclusion that
the dolphins could not only communicate in very complex ways with each other,
but they had also learnt English. The
dolphins had even worked out that our restricted human hearing range meant that
we could not hear them when they used high frequency sounds, so when trying to communicate with us they stopped using these frequencies. Lilly
eventually decided that they could understand English but we could not
understand Delphinese. Their language
was just to complex for us. He could not find a way to get their
permission to continue with the project
– in which they were, of course, captives, so he closed it down.
The idea of aliens arriving and talking to the dolphins
and whales in the sea rather than to us on 'Earth' occurred to Douglas Adams (what ideas didn’t?) but he understood
there wasn’t much of a story there to engage us humans - apart from a great title ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’. The
idea that we are not the superior beings on Earth does not appeal. It is not a road most of us want to travel, even in fiction. Some humans even believe that we are the ‘Crown of Creation’. If so, God help us all.
Which brings me to
the subject of God. Xenophon wrote millennia ago that ‘if horses have gods their gods will resemble
horses.’ As humans we not only
imagine fictional aliens as variations on the human, but our gods too - and God.
By ‘God’ I mean whatever it is that monotheists
worship. ‘In the beginning Man created God, and in his own image created He him’
we read on the sleeve of Jethro Tull’s LP Aqualung
back in the day. Not only man created God
in the human image but male, and not only male but Father.
I deeply regret the influence of Michelangelo’s
image of God in the Sistine Chapel. It
is so brilliant, so persuasive and I think so dangerous because it cements in
the minds of many the image of God as a strong old man in the sky. ‘Father’ writ very large. Oddly, I find that this is the God most
I find it interesting
and dispiriting that the Song of Songs is rarely read in our Churches. Although the word God never appears the book’s obvious metaphor is of God as
Lover, not Father. It seems that there
was a real struggle before the Song of
Songs was eventually included in the Hebrew Canon of Scripture, and I can see
why. Christians may find it even harder
to stomach the idea of God as Lover than Jews. The Book
of Hosea is similarly shocking in some ways. And we know how controversial it is to talk of
God as She.
So
even variations on the theme of God as (Super) Human are troubling for
many. As Pope wrote ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The
proper study of mankind is man’. God is not like us.
One of the reasons
I have chosen to be a Theist – and of course it is either an indoctrinated or a deliberate choice – is that I think we humans
need to believe in a Higher Power. We
are incredibly powerful creatures ourselves.
We have the power to imagine the Universe. In us the Universe is aware of itself. We have the brains and now the technology
to explore time and space right back to the creation of our Universe and into the
heart of whatever the Universe is made of at a sub-atomic quantum level. With
this power comes the potential – too often deliberately exploited - for appalling
destruction. Even the careless use of
our power wreaks ecological destruction on our environment and its
co-habitants.
So I think we need
to be answerable to ‘something higher’,
a power that encourages us to ‘reach higher than we can grasp’ as Robert Browning suggested.
But thinking that the Higher Power is essentially like us only encourages
our hubris. If we think that God is like us then we are
like God - and our dominant image of Godliness – at least in the West - is male and powerful. Of course it is helpfully corrective to see
God in the vulnerability of a new born child – as the cosmologist and
Anglican priest the Revd. Prof. John Polkinhorne has eloquently pointed out –
and in the creative nurturing tenderness of femalekind – as generations of
feminist theologians (of both sexes) have urged us. Vulnerability, creativity, nurturing and
tenderness are essential aspects of our common humanity and I want them to be
associated with Godliness.
But I still
believe there is something much more mysterious – and vastly different – about
the essential nature of God. By that I
mean the nature of Ultimate Reality. If
God is real then nothing can be more
real than God. If God is real then God
is Ultimate Reality. Or is it that we
can call ultimate reality ‘God’? If we
decide that love is of ultimate reality then as it says in John’s epistle, ‘God is
love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them’. (1 John chapter 4 verse 7.) Whether we agree with John or not to ‘live in God’ is still to become more closely aligned with the
real. I think that some modern aspects of spirituality
–religious and non-religious – are in deep accord with this. When some people talk about the Divine (and
the Divinity we share in) it seems to be more inclusive of the mysterious
and further away from the image of God
as Human/Male/Father. As the biblical
scholar and theologian Marcus Borg (might have) said ‘The Spirit of God is the water in which we live and move and have our
being. And we are largely made of water
ourselves.’ (I remember what I
heard, sitting at his feet one balmy night in Vancouver, but it might not be
exactly what he said!)
So holding on to
the utter alienness of God, while still reaching towards the divine within us seems to me to be what
worshipping (giving worth to) God is all about. Pretending that God is some Super-human
Being (or a Super-natural Being for that matter) seems to inflate ourselves, being anthropocentric and adopting a pagan comic book attitude rather than standing in awe of the
reality – The Reality – we cannot even guess at. It is the way of mystery. But as a disciple of Jesus I do believe that
we can become more human – not super-human but properly human – and more 'real'. He is my teacher,
my hope, my inspiration – you could say my salvation. He saves me from despair when I see how low
humankind can crawl. He points me
forward, and even though I do not know the destination I can see the
direction.
Tales such as The Story of Your Life and the film it
inspired remind me of how little we know – maybe how little we can know – but
encourage me to keep searching. Theology is an exploration.
If I may offer a few more words from John
Polkinhorne;
“Of course nobody would deny the importance of human beings for
theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about
is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years
of the history of the universe.”
And “Theologians have a great problem
because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is,
there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill.”
You can see why he interests me.
Bob
