Examining faith and science

In his seminal anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay,” editor Phillip Lopate introduces an essay on walking by Henry David Thoreau by telling us that the essay form itself “is akin to taking a mental stroll.” Thanks to its malleability, the essay allows a writer the freedom to saunter about, to take readers along on a sometimes meandering but always thoughtful journey.

In “Climbing Brandon,” Chet Raymo takes this model to heart as he examines the conflicts between religious faith and science while he wanders on Mt. Brandon in Ireland. As he considers the ground below him and the horizon and the beckoning of the sea crashing in front of him, he ponders those who walked the paths in centuries past and speculates on what they might have made of the tension between modern research and long-standing beliefs.

Mt. Brandon on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry in the southwest of Ireland is one of several holy mountains on the island, the trails of which are populated by both weekend hikers and religious pilgrims, many searching for a kind of transcendence. Raymo uses the mountain both as a structural device for his cogitations, taking us by the hand as he scrambles toward the summit, and as a metaphor for the conflict between a whole-hearted embrace of scientific study and the coexisting hunger for a sacred narrative. “The human mind cannot live without mystery,” he tells us. “Reason alone will not satisfy.”

As the author, a physics professor and writer on science and nature, gambols along the paths, the essays become a discursive mental stroll, drifting between facts of cultural Irish history and theories of geology as they pertain to the island. He chronicles the religious sea change that took place when St. Patrick converted the people there to Christianity and how the land’s ancient ties to paganism ensured that the brand of Christianity that took root did not fully forsake its pantheistic, nature-centered beliefs. Raymo considers glacial moraines, flora and fauna, the remains of stone circles, ancient dolmens, Irish legends and fairy folklore. Each chapter of the book is a stop along the way to the summit of Mt. Brandon and a chance to ruminate on these topics through the triple lenses of Irish cultural history, scientific findings and tales of religious belief.

Legend has it, for example, that St. Brendan, an Irish monk from the 6th century, discovered America by setting sail from the west of Ireland in an ox-hide boat. Mt. Brandon, some say, takes its name from this monk. For Raymo, Brendan becomes emblematic of the specifically nature-based form of Christianity that developed among many in Ireland. “Whatever the reason for the monks’ pious westerning,” Raymo writes, “hope and fear conspired to give their faith in eternal salvation a geographic referent. Whereas continental Christians looked for heaven in the sky above, the Irish cast their longing gaze at the sea horizon. Every wave that crashed upon the rockbound pediment of Mount Brandon roared a salvic promise that Brendan and his contemporaries were predisposed by learning and tradition to hear.”

The corollary to this shift from the vertical to the horizontal, he tells us, was an Irish concept of God that focused on immanence over transcendence, the idea that God is present in all creation and that one need only look to creation to find signs of the creator. The author discovers among the Irish Christians of Brendan’s era “a celebration of the here and now, a longing to pass across [the Atlantic], not upward but westward.” This historic Irish brand of faith was rooted in the physical world, and believers focused more on the majesty of life and the miracle of existence, as opposed to a belief in miracles that run counter to the laws of nature.

Ultimately, Raymo’s walks and meditative excursions bring him to the conclusion that he has become an ordinary pilgrim, relearning to pray. “I struggle to shed the shabby shawl of petitionary and formulaic prayer that I inherited as a child -- to reject the default syllables ‘Me, Lord, Me’ -- so that I might attend to things -- to swallows and auroras -- to the voice that whispers in all of creation, to the voice that is all of creation.”

Alas, readers don’t fully understand until the very end that the book is ultimately about his own spiritual search. Raymo regularly informs and edifies but seldom confides, thus removing much of the personal from the tale. Even as we enjoy the ambling, we’re not quite sure where he’s heading. By the conclusion of the book, to be certain, everything makes sense and Raymo has supplied the missing pieces. One wishes, though, for more of the personal early on so that the point of the journey doesn’t remain as fog-shrouded as the pinnacle of Mt. Brandon itself. It’s a small flaw in an otherwise intriguing journey into faith, Irish culture and the world of science.