Martian Angelus: A Thought Experiment

Those who first pray the Angelus on Mars will break new ground, for the Angelus is a geocentric prayer. Pondering those extraterrestrial worshipers makes for a thought experiment. When, where, and how will they pray? This inquiry reveals the place of mathematics in our approach to order: order in the things we sense, and order within the mind.

When

It is often said that the Angelus is prayed at 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. This description, given in a world of time zones, involves conventional numeral terms that were adopted for the convenience of train schedules. Noon in one place is not noon in another, one mile west, when noon is understood to refer to the sun. 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. are not the times when the sun rises and sets. The sun is the natural marker of our times; the numbers on our watches are faint derivatives.

Immense efforts, over centuries, aimed to bring naturally marked times within the scope of human control and production. A governing reason was navigation. Latitude, the distance north or south of the equator, is easy to determine; simply look at the sun at midday. The higher the midday sun, the nearer the observer is to the equator. Longitude, on the other hand, is not naturally signified. It is a convention, derived from Greenwich. Knowing longitude means knowing how much local noon differs from Greenwich noon. One must know what time it is in Greenwich, even when far from home.

The British Parliament, in the Longitude Act of 1714, offered a series of prizes for the invention of an accurate method to determine location east and west. Other governments also incentivized this search. Ultimately, the solution came in the form of an accurate clock. Such accuracy is hard-won. Some challenges, like friction, confront any clock. The shipborne clock faces additional difficulties: the vessel’s rocking motion, slight variations in gravitational acceleration at different points on earth, widely ranging temperatures in passing from one clime to another. 

The engineering puzzle of the 18th century, translated to the 20th, yields atomic clocks. These clocks provided a new way to think about seconds. A second originally came to us as a part of something bigger: a part of a minute, a part of an hour, a part of a day. When we define time from the tiniest motions instead of the largest, though, the second becomes the greater whole of which a tiny time—the resonant period of a cesium atom—is the part. There are roughly nine billion parts.

Our confidence in the regularity and orderliness of created things means that we trust the cesium atoms to vibrate on Mars as they do on Earth. There, however, they cannot signify hours in the same way. The Martian day lasts about forty minutes longer than Earth’s. Hours, up there, have two meanings; one comes from looking down at the watch, and the other from looking up at the sun. That was already true, though, even here.

In the hymn “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended,” John Ellerton observes that the death of one day is already, in that very moment, the birth of another, a day for someone else. “The voice of prayer,” he says, “is never silent,” and this is precisely because “earth rolls onward into light.” Our praise is unceasing because we pray according to our local times, according to the sun.

Whither

Ellerton’s hymn is often set to the tune called St. Clement. St. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, makes a solar observation of his own, explaining that prayers are made facing east to recall the light of truth that shines on those who were in darkness. Christians are an oriented people.

To orient oneself is to adopt a posture. That posture need not be a pose. The post-Copernican, post-Galilean, post-Newtonian, post-Einsteinian human can still turn, without any self-consciousness, ad orientem. That conversion is pre-modern but not anti-modern. Prayer towards the rising sun is a scientific act, an assent to the order revealed in the empirical and indisputable origin of our warmth and illumination.

The discoveries of new lands and new theories since Clement’s day have made theology topsy turvy. This is as it should be. Deeper order comes to us veiled in apparent disorder.

Oriented prayer is a way of responding to the world’s significance, to its legibility. If the cosmos seems illegible today, what is needed is not re-enchantment, but re-orientation. Nothing has been hollowed out, nothing has been voided, other than human attention. The signs are all still there, waiting to be seen and read.

Oriented prayer is a way of incarnating an order of sciences, a subordination of the lower and, correspondingly, a superordination of the higher. The sciences are out of order at present, both in individuals and institutions. The confusion comes both from below and from above.

A 1984 conference at the University of Notre Dame, titled “Beyond Mechanism,” explored physics generally, and more specifically, the work of David Bohm in relation to philosophy and theology. Frederick J. Crosson’s remarks on this occasion, titled “Man and the Meaning of the Whole,” include a warning that remains timely. After summing up the “vicissitudes of the relationship of science and religion,” observing compatibility, convergence, conflict, and opposition, Crosson writes: “While I am pleased at the nice things being said on both sides . . . I confess to a firm desire to remain at the distance of compatibility rather than the embrace of convergence.”^[1] One reason to maintain a guarded separation is that “scientific world views have succeeded each other in rather revolutionary fashion.”^[2] Aboard an unmoored vessel, one drifts.

In his introductory remarks to the conference proceedings, David L. Schindler states that “the mechanistic understanding of physis profoundly changes our understanding of immateriality.”^[3] The change includes the elimination of immanence from immateriality, the privatization and enclosure of the mind, and a concept of “activity” that is external and “forceful.” 

Boethius, in the beginning of his De Hebdomadibus, unites the observations of Crosson and Schindler. He does so through order. Boethius defines a communis animi conceptio, often translated as “common conception of the mind,” as a statement which is approved once it is heard. Communis animi conceptio would tend to become per se notum in later authors, including Thomas Aquinas.

Such common conceptions, Boethius says, are divided into two kinds. One kind is general, a statement that anyone can grasp as soon as it is enunciated. His example: equals taken from equals yield equal remainders. The second Boethian sense of communis animi conceptio is more restricted; he calls it doctorum, or “of the learned.” These latter conceptiones arise from the more general common conceptions but are not obvious to all, only to those who have engaged in appropriate prior study.

For the more restricted kind, the conceptions of the learned, Boethius offers the example that “incorporeal things are not in a place.” Clear speech about locations and bodies and other kinds of beings requires preparation. While the poet may plunge in medias res, Boethius indicates that the aspiring metaphysician should take another route.

Boethius’s insight addresses Crosson and Schindler simultaneously. Where Crosson wants to maintain separation and call it compatibility, Boethius indicates the possibility of going beyond mere distinction, for he speaks of an order. This sub-ordination of lower sciences then imposes a task on the super-ordinate ones; they must arise from the lower, and not merely alongside them. Accordingly, where Schindler is alert to the possible evacuation of immateriality through defective scientific practice, Boethius affirms that antecedent scientific practice, of the right kind, is the very means of securing an appropriate concept of the immaterial.[4]

“Science” is said in various ways. Crosson notes that physical theories have undergone contentious revolutions. Empirical science is not, however, all science. Mathematics is science, too, and beyond the drama. Boethius devoted himself to the transmission of mathematical knowledge, as antiquity was dying, until his own life was cut short.

How

Physical theories, and the cesium atoms they describe, grow old. All things wear out like garments and must be changed, as the Psalmist says. Plans are now being made to define seconds in a new way, using different atomic clocks with higher precision. These new clocks involve visible light.

The cesium atom, while it lasts, does not tick on its own. We observe the ticking, but we also drive it, using microwaves. This works because electromagnetic radiation interacts with the electrically charged parts of atoms.

Home microwaves and atomic clocks rely on resonance, the convergence of electromagnetic frequency and a tiny mechanism’s intrinsic periodicity. When the frequency and natural periodicity are incompatible, however, something different happens. The light is scattered.

Discord and disharmony yield diffusion and multiplicity. At first this would seem to signify something being lost, some original integrity. Pseudo-Dionysius redirects us: we can only be enlightened by the first divine ray when it is hidden within many sacred veils.^[5] Lord Rayleigh first explained the sunlight’s diffusion by our atmosphere. The shorter wavelengths, nearer to violet, change direction more dramatically, and the longer wavelengths, redder, turn less. At midday, therefore, we bow our heads to pray enwombed in a blue mantle.

We bow our heads and even kneel. We take, for a time, a lowly place. We have been taught that the lower place is not a shameful one. It is the place from which we are to begin.

One notion of place, a notion coming from Aristotle’s Physics, gave the Church a great deal of trouble. Today we must concede the utility of reference frames in which something other than the earth stands at the center. Whatever the current theory, though, we need not abandon our sense of standing at the bottom. We can always find our place by looking up.

St. Clement describes the Christian orientation of prayer; he also describes Christian gesture. The faithful lift their heads and raise their hands as they pray, carried upward by yearning for the heights. Even feet play a role. Clement’s phrase must be interpreted. One approach to the line, more mundane, takes it as “[we] set the feet in motion.”^[6] This interpretation sees liturgical ambulation at the close of a ceremony: a horizontal movement. Another translation interprets the phrase vertically, “[we] stand on tip-toe.”^[7] Such an action is not a current custom, but would not be out of place when people “winged with longing for better things” gather to worship.^[8]

The discoveries of new lands and new theories since Clement’s day have made theology topsy turvy. This is as it should be. Deeper order comes to us veiled in apparent disorder.

Up there on Mars, the light goes the wrong way. Dust in the atmosphere tends to scatter red light, so that the sky is reddish during the day. The same scattering means that at dawn and dusk the sun and neighboring heavens appear blue.

Genuflection is the custom here, in this place of azure skies. We take a form of lowliness to worship one who took the form of our lowliness. The gesture of adoration recalls the paradox that we ascend by descending.

On Mars, when the sun stands high above in a rusty firmament, the earth stands high above too. The earth is an inferior planet for the Martian, just as Mercury and Venus are for the terrestrial astronomer. Inferior planets remain close to the sun.

Universal gravitation gives genuflection universal significance. It is one choice, when praying the Angelus on Mars. Clement’s posture, tip-toe, is another option. The gesture recalls a different paradox: straining aloft, we reach towards home.