God, Man and Apollo

By Mayo Mohs

In this time of Christmas

We celebrate the Eighth Day of Man...

Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek,

And wonder as we look among the stars

Did he know these?

--Ray Bradbury, from the cantata Christus Apollo

THE last of the moon men are back; the gantries are idle now, stark and skeletal against the Florida sky. On the moon there are flags from the earth, and on earth there are pieces of the moon. The Apollos have passed from the evening news into an assured place in history. They have opened a chestful of scientific riches that researchers will need years to assay fully. They have not solved the problems of the earth, nor were they meant to. But, as Bradbury suggests, they may have provoked man into asking anew some of the old questions about the heavens--and himself.

The missions were man's first raw personal confrontation with the universe beyond this planet, and because of that they were awesome. The awe wore off as the television cameras covered each methodical moment of successive flights, but the best of the images grew into a frieze of transcendence, chiseled on the edges of the mind like Wordsworth's intimations of immortality: the readings from Genesis as Apollo 8 spun toward its rendezvous with the dark side of the moon; the "giant leap for mankind" as Neil Armstrong set his booted foot into the moon dust; the vision of the earth from space, a milky sapphire hanging alone and fragile in the blackness; and then Apollo 17 --a pillar of fire cutting up into the night, spreading a carpet of orange clouds and the sound of thunder behind.

That last image may have been as much theatrical effect as spiritual experience; as the first nighttime launching, Apollo 17 was a triumph of spectacle. It was also the last manifestation of a wonder of the world, and to see it depart was like taking the last voyage on the Queen Mary or hearing the farewell concert of Toscanini.

Is there more? Is there some stirring of human imagination that goes beyond the gee-whiz of the spectator or the sentiment of the nostalgia buff? One need go no farther than the astronauts themselves for the answer. "I am not the same man," Rusty Schweickart says. "None of us are." The Apollo veterans have become poets, seers, preachers, all of them evangelists for the privileged vision from space that Edgar Mitchell calls "instant global consciousness." It is no coincidence that the ecologists' concept of Spaceship Earth has become a commonplace in the years of Apollo.

Philosopher William Irwin Thompson, who perceives a growing sense of myth and mysticism in today's technological society (TIME, Aug. 21), mused over the astronauts' "conversions" as he watched the ascent of Apollo 17. In space, Thompson says, the astronauts felt "their consciousness being transformed to behold God making all things new. Perhaps this transformation of consciousness is the strongest argument in favor of manned space flight. Had we merely sent out efficient instruments of measurement...the machines would literally encircle man. Now that we have sent out man, we have affirmed that technology is still only part of the culture-America has taken one giant step toward humanizing its technology."

In a sense, argues Thompson, the astronauts underwent a kind of temporal redemption, much like the one envisioned 34 years ago in C.S. Lewis' theological space fantasy Out of the Silent Planet. In Lewis' novel, the earth is the devil's territory and the prison of fallen man, quarantined by the powers and dominations of the divine milieu around it. But those who escape the silent planet can recover their cosmic orientation.

Another dimension of that orientation is sketched by Religion Scholar Jacob Needleman, author of The New Religions and, like Thompson, a cartographer of the revival of mysticism. Men lost a certain humility, Needleman says, when they abandoned the medieval idea of geocentrism--the belief that the earth is surrounded by ever widening spheres of planets, stars and finally God. Copernicus and Galileo dislodged the earth from the astronomical center of the universe, but Needleman argues that geocentrism "was never intended only as an astronomical theory. It was meant to communicate that human existence is but a tiny part in a vast hierarchy of conscious energies. Man could share in the full reach of these energies only by first surrendering his petty illusions of autonomy."

In Needleman's view, the optimism of modern science created instead a kind of psychological geocentrism, which misled man into believing that he could understand all reality at an ordinary level of consciousness. Earth was no longer to be at the center of the universe, but man's ego was. Now this attitude, too, has been dislodged by the wars and other depredations of the present century. The new surge of wonder that is at least partly the work of the Apollos provides men with an opportunity to recapture at last a true sense of their place in the universe.

The surge has come from many more sources than the space program. Though the Stanley Kubrick-Arthur C. Clarke spectacle 2001 was packing in aficionados at movie theaters months before Apollo 8, the film gained a prophetic impact after man reached the moon. Even among the scientific community, such astonishing celestial phenomena as supernovae and "black holes" have become a subject for metaphysical conjecture. Harvard Astronomer Charles A. Whitney, writing in his 1971 book The Discovery of Our Galaxy, suggests that black holes might be "the passageways to another universe," a possibility that throws him back on the language of religion. "When I discuss such subjects with my friends and family," Whitney writes, "I feel as though I were trying to convince them of the existence of God." Western religions themselves are seeking a renewed sense of cosmic purpose by exploring their rich but long-neglected traditions of mysticism and contemplation.

Not all of the religious overtones of the Apollos are full of awe and new found humility. "Space travel says you can live forever," exulted Ray Bradbury after the moon landing of 1969. "Now we are able to transport our seed to other worlds. We can be sure that this miraculous gift of life goes on forever." Nor is that a blasphemous hope, Bradbury insisted: "We are the material of the universe coming alive. We are God re-creating himself." William Thompson had similar thoughts at the liftoff of Apollo 17. "You threw away anxiety," he wrote later, "and leapt up with the sheer joy of knowing that men were turning the tables on the heavens and riding that comet out of the earth...One could write on the rocket as the anonymous stonemasons did on medieval cathedrals: Adam made me."

In President Nixon's message marking the completion of the Apollo 1 7 mission last week, those proud visions seemed to be recast as a kind of Manifest Destiny for the space age. Asked Nixon: "Can we look at the record of 24 men sent to circle the moon or to stand on it, and 24 men returned to earth alive and well, and not see God's hand in it?" (Did the President forget the three astronauts who died on an Apollo launching pad or the four Russians killed in their space program?) The fault in such a pronouncement lies in its assumption that the conquest of space is such an unalloyed good that God would deign to grant it some special protection. If motives were taken into account -- especially the bald chauvinism that motivated so many who voted for Apollo appropriations -- divine wrath rather than benevolence might have attended the project.

"Let us recognize," Novelist Norman Mailer told an assemblage of scientists and fellow authors who were observing Apollo 17's blastoff, "that we are performing that one act that was considered most sacrilegious by the early Jehovah -- we are trying to become Gods." Gods? Perhaps -- if we see space as only one more territory to subdue, one more realm to compete for, one more vastness to pollute. But Mailer's accusation need not hold true if man stands on the threshold of the universe with the becoming humility of a stranger at an unfamiliar door. Such a stranger might appreciate the immense potential that the open universe spreads before him to learn and to grow, to expand his mind and spirit in profound new ways. That potential alone urges man to continue the search -- not to wait, as some insist, until he can first set his own world completely in order. For just as the New World reshaped the old Europe, man's meeting with the universe may help to reshape and renew the tired Earth. .Mayo Mohs

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