Rocks of Ages (4 page)

Knowledge of the probabilities may have softened the blow, but an abstract understanding that half might die could hardly provide solace against the pain of losing a beloved individuality forever. Thus, our ancestors suffered—all of them, including kings and queens, industrial magnates and country squires, for wealth bought little respite when even the best doctors could do next to nothing.

The two greatest Victorian heroes in my profession of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, both blessed with more than adequate means and medical knowledge, lost their favorite children under the most painful of circumstances. Both men have served as the principal
bêtes noirs
of religious
revivalists and fundamentalists ever since—Darwin simply for developing evolutionary theory, Huxley for his more active “parson baiting.” (In a famous aphorism, Huxley said that he could never recall which side of the heart holds the mitral valve, named for a resemblance in shape to a bishop’s hat—until he remembered “that a bishop’s never in the right,” and he then always knew that the mitral valve connects the left auricle and ventricle of the heart.) For both men, the deaths coincided with an intense dialogue that confronted their losses with traditional Christian sources of solace—and both men rejected the conventional comfort in a moving and principled manner.

One might therefore suppose that both men became embittered by a perceived hypocrisy (or at least a false hope) offered by a hidebound doctrine. Did those tragic and senseless deaths lead Darwin and Huxley to become the forthright foes of religion that our cardboard histories often portray, and that the model of intrinsic warfare between science and theology would anticipate? In fact, nothing so simple occurred—as both men showed only the dignity of their stature, and the subtlety of their intellect. Huxley and Darwin did indeed lose any vestige of a lingering personal belief in an intrinsically just world, governed by a loving anthropomorphic deity. But the pain of their personal losses only sharpened their understanding of the differences
between science and religion, the respect due to both institutions when properly pursued in their respective magisteria, and the distinctions between questions that could be answered and those beyond our power to comprehend or even to formulate.

A familiar story proclaims that Darwin had planned a career as a “country parson” when he set sail on the
Beagle
voyage around the world, and eventually got sidetracked into another profession. But the common inference that Darwin’s discovery of evolution led him both to apostasy and to a biological career cannot be sustained. In truth, Darwin had never been personally committed to theology as a calling. As a young man, his religious views remained decidedly lukewarm and passively conventional, simply because he had never given the matter any extensive thought. His designs on a parsonage arose more from an absence of alternative plans than from any active belief or desire. I strongly suspect that, as the Reverend Charles, he would have treated his day job in a hallowed and traditional manner among clerical naturalists—as a sinecure with adequate salary and minimal duties, leaving him adequate time and opportunity to follow his true bliss: collecting and publishing books on beetles, and other subjects in natural history.

Thus, as Darwin approached midlife in the tranquillity of substantial means, an excellent professional reputation,
and a happy family in a country home, he had never struggled deeply with questions of personal religious belief, even though his evolutionary views had led him to question and abandon several traditional dogmas of his Anglican upbringing. But then, in a fateful interval between late 1850 and April 23, 1851, intellectual doubt and personal tragedy combined to change his world forever.

As Darwin finished several years of intense technical work on the taxonomy of barnacles, his precarious health also improved substantially, and he found himself with both time to read and tranquillity to contemplate. He decided, finally, to examine his own religious beliefs in a careful and systematic way. Darwin therefore turned to the work of a fascinating thinker, then all the rage, but unknown today, especially because his far more famous brother followed a different path and eclipsed him. The Newman brothers could not abide the inconsistencies that they detected in Anglican practice and belief. John Henry Newman created one of the biggest stirs in nineteenth-century British intellectual life by converting to Catholicism, and eventually becoming a cardinal. (Catholic students’ organizations on American campuses are usually called Newman Societies in his honor.)

Francis William Newman, the cardinal’s younger brother, graduated from Oxford with a higher degree
and more potential promise as a future don, but left this pillar of the intellectual establishment for an eventual job as professor of Latin at the upstart and unorthodox University College, London, because he would not subscribe (as law and tradition then required for Oxbridge dons) to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism. Newman then undertook a spiritual journey, through several popular books, to a position of intense religious belief, but based on rejection of dogmas and harsh traditional doctrines (particularly the idea of later reward or eternal punishment for earthly deeds)—all in favor of a system consistent with rational thought and the findings of modern science. With his usual intensity, Darwin studied all of Newman’s major works between 1850 and 1851, reaching similar conclusions about the vacuousness (and often the cruelty as well) of traditional dogmas, but finding no solace in Newman’s ideas about personal devotion, and therefore ending with skepticism toward all aspects of religious belief.

Darwin’s scrutiny of Newman’s works might not have affected his view of life so profoundly if his greatest personal tragedy had not unfolded at the same time. Darwin loved his eldest daughter, Annie, with a fierce tenderness inspired by a complex mixture of Annie’s own sweet disposition and her resemblance to Charles’s sister Susan, who had acted as a surrogate after the early death of Charles’s mother, and who had so tenderly
cared for Charles’s father to the day of his death, just two years before. But Annie had always been a sickly child.

In March of 1851, Annie became so ill that Charles and his wife, Emma, decided to send the ten-year-old girl to Dr. Gully’s clinic in Malvern, where Charles’s own health had been so dramatically improved by the doctor’s celebrated “water treatment.” Annie would have her sister and a nurse for support and comfort. Charles accompanied the entourage to Malvern and stayed for several days. (Emma, in the late stages of pregnancy, followed the customs of her time, and remained “confined” at the Darwin country home.)

Annie prospered at first, but soon became violently ill. Charles hurried to her bedside, and spent several days in agonizing torture, as Annie rallied to hope, sank into despair, and eventually died on April 23. Charles wrote to his brother Erasmus: “God knows we can neither see on any side a gleam of comfort.” A week later, he penned a private memoir on his sadness, and on Annie’s lost beauty of body and soul: “Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.”

Annie’s cruel death catalyzed all the doubts that Charles’s reading of Newman, and his deeper scrutiny of religion, had engendered. He had permanently lost all personal belief in a caring God, and would never
again seek solace in religion. He carefully avoided any direct statement in both his public and private writings, so we do not know his inner resolutions. I suspect that he accepted Huxley’s dictum about agnosticism as the only intellectually valid position, while privately embracing a strong (and, as he well knew, quite unprovable) suspicion of atheism, galvanized by Annie’s senseless death.

But if science and religion wage constant battle for the same turf, then Darwin should have become hostile and dismissive toward religion, and cynical about life in general. He should have wielded evolution as a bludgeon against false comfort and cruel deception in a world filled with the deaths of children and other heart-wrenching tragedies of no conceivable moral meaning. But Darwin took no such position. He grieved as deeply as any man ever has, and he worked his way through. He retained his zest for life and learning, and he rejoiced in the warmth and successes of his family. He lost personal comfort and belief in the conventional practice of religion, but he developed no desire to urge such a view upon others—for he understood the difference between factual questions with universal answers under the magisterium of science, and moral issues that each person must resolve for himself. He would fight fiercely for the truth of evolution’s factuality, but the causes of life’s history could not resolve
the riddles of life’s meaning. A knowledge of the medical causes of death could prevent future tragedies, but could never assuage the pain of immediate loss, or enlighten the general meaning of suffering.

We shall return to Darwin’s remarkable letter to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (who accepted natural selection and evolution, but urged Darwin to view such laws as instituted by God for a discernible purpose)—for I regard this document as the finest comment ever written on the proper relation of science and religion. But for now I cite his views of May 1860—nine years after Annie’s death, and six months after publication of the
Origin of Species
—on why the factuality of evolution cannot resolve religious questions of ultimate meaning:

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s brilliant and articulate younger colleague, and his “bulldog” in public support for evolution against all tides of social and religious orthodoxy, lost his favorite and firstborn son, three-year-old Noel, on September 15, 1860—just four months after Darwin’s letter to Gray, and a year after Huxley himself had read the
Origin of Species
and exclaimed in awed astonishment, mixed with a twinge of envy, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”

Darwin’s Annie had been a sickly child, and her death fulfilled an acknowledged probability that Charles and Emma had hoped, above any other conceivable prayer, to forestall. But Huxley’s rambunctious Noel had romped with his father before bedtime on Thursday, and then died on Saturday. “It was as if the boy had been inoculated with some septic poison,” Huxley wrote. Among the many friends who tried to console him in this wrenchingly sudden and maximal
grief, Huxley bared his soul in return only to the man he respected most highly and disagreed with most profoundly—the liberal clergyman Charles Kingsley, also an amateur naturalist of note, an evolutionist who saw no conflict between science and his ecclesiastical duties, and the popular author of
Westward Ho!
and
The Water Babies
.

Kingsley had reached out to his skeptical friend with a gentle suggestion that, in this hour of greatest conceivable need, Huxley might reexamine his doubts and find comfort in the Christian doctrine of eternal souls, and the attendant prospect that he would meet Noel again in a different life to come. In his letter, Kingsley acknowledges Huxley’s suffering as “something horrible, intolerable, like being burnt alive.” But we can find extended solace in earthly preparation for a heavenly meeting after bodily death. We must, Kingsley wrote, “make ourselves worthy for the reunion” during our sojourn on earth.

Huxley answered Kingsley in a letter of September 23, 1860, that should be required reading for all courses in English literature and philosophy. Great and passionate writing does not only appear in novels. As prose stylists, a few nineteenth-century scientists (Playfair, Lyell, and Huxley in particular) rank with the finest Victorian fiction writers. I wish I could quote this long letter in full, for I have never read a more moving or
incisive defense of personal intellectual honesty, whatever the allure of immediate and easy solace from comforts that one can neither truly believe nor justify by cogent argument.

Huxley begins by thanking Kingsley for his proffered comfort, expressed with complete sincerity and no sanctimoniousness. But Huxley explains, in a beautiful passage, that he cannot overthrow a personal philosophy, worked out over so many years and through so much intellectual struggle, for the immediate solace of a rejected central belief in the immortality of souls:

Huxley then epitomizes his arguments for skepticism about immortality: Why, first of all, should we grant eternity to complex humans and not to “lower” creatures who might benefit even more by such a blessing; and, second, why should we believe a doctrine mainly because we long so deeply for its validity?