The Dynamo and The Virgin

In November 1900, just over one hundred years ago, the American historian and academic Henry Adams visited the Great Exposition in Paris, where he became enthralled by an exhibit of a dynamo, a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. Such an instrument could not fail to impress the pragmatic Adams. Born in New England, a descendent of the Puritans, he was an inheritor of the rationalist tradition which had translated itself so effortlessly from 18th century Europe and which had taken root on the American east coast, and blossomed into the intellectual Protestantism of which Boston-centred Unitarianism was such an influential and conspicuous branch. You would expect a man with such a background to be impressed by the dynamo.

But Adams’ tour of France was not confined to scientific exhibitions. He also visited the great cathedrals – Chartres and Notre Dame – at which he remembered, and no doubt quoted, the immortal phrase of his idol, the 18th century Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon: “I dared a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of superstition.” “One would have paid largely,” writes Adams’ biographer, “for a photograph of the fat little historian (Gibbon) on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his readers – perhaps himself – that he was darting a contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt, in fact, the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always feels before objects worthy of it.”

But Adams’ encounter with the Cathedrals did not provoke contempt. He realised that all the steam in the world could not build Chartres or Notre Dame; these “stately monuments of superstition” had not been created by the efficient machinery of the modern world, but by a power of another kind. Though he did not believe in the Virgin Mary as a divine being, he conceded that “symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural.” And he contrasted the image of the Virgin as a symbol of a tender, loving deity which had suffused the Middle Ages in Europe and which had produced these magnificent Gothic monuments, with the ruthless efficiency and the utter indifference of the dynamo, which symbolised a world-view of an altogether different order.

It is not difficult to guess how Adams would have responded, one hundred years later, to the contemporary identification of the human being with the machine that informs the present computer age, when the dynamo is itself little more than a quaint historical curio, and those divine qualities represented by the Virgin Mary have been pushed even farther into the background of our consciousness. In a world that we perceive as starting by itself and running by itself, we have lost the sense of a divine origin and an eternal destiny presented to us by our imagination and settled for a purely earth-bound view of ourselves as thinking apes, for whom imagination is generally equated with illusion. We live in a world of facts and bottom lines, which would have probably rocked even the common-sense realism of Henry Adams. When a fundamentalist group recently took over a school board in New Hampshire, their first declaration was that no teacher be allowed to use the word “imagination” in the classroom (Sins of the Spirit, Matthew Fox, page 296).

Dickens, would that thou wert living at this time! In the second chapter of Dickens’ Hard Times we are introduced to those two renowned educationalists, Mr Thomas Gradgrind, a class teacher, and Mr M’Choakumchild, a government officer, “a mighty man at cutting and drying”. Mr M’Choakumchild questions the children about carpets and wallpaper. “Now, let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?” The children, of course, think it would be rather nice to have pictures of horses on the walls and representations of flowers on the carpets, but this man, a man who dreams about the time “when commissioners should reign upon earth” thinks differently. “You are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste is only another name for Fact.” One little girl, Sissy Jupe, protests: “It wouldn’t hurt them, Sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither if you please, Sir. They would be pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant and I would fancy ….”

“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to this point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy……You are to be in all things regulated and governed…..by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether.”

The outer always reflects the inner. As we imagine, so do we build – or, as we don’t imagine, so do we build. Of this Dickens was painfully aware. The industrial landscape of the mid 1800s perfectly reflected the impoverished notions of what it meant to be a human being that were promulgated by the fact-based philosophy of men like Thomas Gradgrind. A human being was a machine, and his or her function was to serve the larger industrial machine from which all taint of fancy and imagination had been ruthlessly expunged. And these animated machine-cogs lived in towns and cities that were as cheerless and as ugly as the soul-denying philosophies which had served as their blueprints. Dickens satirised them as Coketown, “a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled…..It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” And when they built churches they built “pious warehouses of red brick”, which sometimes – but only in highly ornamental examples – had a bell in a birdcage on top.

William Blake, with a true prophet’s insight, had seen this coming fifty years before Dickens, and had attributed it, in no small measure, to the growing sense of the human being as a product, as a function, that had sprung from a lop-sided interpretation of the ideas of Newton and the Enlightenment thinkers in general, which had taken the magic out of human life and reduced us to measurable, predictable, and, therefore, disposable entities; ideas which were to be reinforced by Darwin, in the middle of the century, and which were to reach their ultimate expression, in the 19th century at least, in the dynamo that so intrigued Henry Adams.

In contrast, for William Blake, the primary reality – perhaps the only reality – was the imagination. The world exists in the imagination of God, and the Spirit of Christ is the spirit of the imagination, which is our only saviour. When he asks, “And did those feet in ancient times / Walk upon England’s pastures green?” he is not asking whether Jesus had actually set foot on English soil; he is asking, Was there ever a time when people lived by the power of the imagination? And his resolve to fight for the building of Jerusalem is a commitment to the construction of a new world in which the fact-obsessed philosophies of the Enlightenment would take second place to the rediscovered energies of the imagination which are the only possible means to human liberation and redemption.

The dynamo and all that it represents dominates our culture and our education system more than ever it did in the time of Blake or Dickens, but the Virgin will not leave us alone. This great feminine image of the aspiration and divinity of the human spirit visits us in numerous ways to remind us that we do not live on bread alone and that we are more than just eighty percent water and twenty percent carbon (or whatever the elements or the ratios are). I like to think that even the visions of the Virgin which have occurred throughout history and which are occurring now in Medjugore in Yugoslavia, far from being hoaxes, are projections of the collective human psyche, symptoms of our desperate and unacknowledged longing to re-assert the power of the poetic imagination within the stultifying prisons of our materialistic obsessions. St Bernadette in Lourdes in 1858 – almost contemporary with Darwin’s Origin of Species – and the children of Fatima in 1917 – right in the middle of the First World War – were the unwitting recipients of this great burst of psychic energy which protested against the cold, masculine inhumanity of the times and manifested itself in the western world’s timeless image of feminine grace and beauty.

But, should you find such things altogether too fanciful – and well you might being rational Unitarians – let me give you another example of the way in which the power of the imagination is making its protest against the sterile philosophies of consumerism and materialism.

“Where there is no vision,” says the Book of Proverbs, “the people perish” (Proverbs 29). Where there is no sense of wonder and mystery there can only be despair. Where the dynamo and the computer are presented, not just as legitimate instruments for our use, but as models for our understanding of ourselves and our world, the creative spirit, so long subdued, re-asserts itself. And when it cannot do it in productive ways it does it destructively using escape mechanisms such as drugs or alcohol. Alcoholism and drug abuse, which have reached epidemic proportions in the developed world, are not just symptoms of hedonism and recklessness which can be eliminated by tighter policing and heavier sentencing; they are endemic to a culture which has killed off every elf and every fairy and every angel; a culture which, in the words of Harry Potter, has turned us all into Muggles – non magical people with no sense of our own individuality or our own uniqueness.

Alcoholism and drug abuse are testimony to the failure of our schools which have been put at the service of mammon, and have stressed the importance of conformity and earning power at the expense of creativity; they are testimony to the failure of religion of all kinds – our own included – to stimulate and legitimise the imaginative faculties which are the very gateway to the divine; and they are testimony to the failure of society which promises us happiness if only we will increase our consumption of those very things that have already made us sad. Drugs and alcohol have taken over completely the role that Karl Marx believed they shared with religion: they are the counterfeit soul of a soulless world, and we will only overcome the problems that they pose, and the other, countless problems that we face, when we seek the soul again, when we put some magic back; when we turn our backs on our Gradgrind obsession with facts and measurement and uniformity, when the Virgin, and the enormous creative energy that she represents, returns to take her rightful place alongside the dynamo in our understanding of ourselves and of our world. It is only then that we will build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

Bill Darlison