Lent with R S Thomas: “The opposite of poetry is not prose but science.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that R S THomas was a Luddite, a hater of technology and the mechanisation of life. The machine is manufactured, and Thomas was deeply fearful of what "man" "makes" in factories, what machines do to the land and to the human soul. Many of his poems are negative about science, ambivalent about technology, fearful and mistrusting of human knowledge applied for the purposes of mastering nature by machinery and mechanisation rather than serving creation by care and stewardship. He had lived through the years of war, of the tractor replacing the horse, the combine harvester devouring fields in half a day that would have taken men a week with scythes, twine, forks and sheaves, and further days of toil at the threshing mill.

His deeper fears focused on human applications of physics, the creation of the atomic bomb, the deploying as threat of nuclear weapons capable of destroying human life and earth as a viable home. Picking mushrooms reminded him of the mushroom cloud, and the white domes of early warning systems. The laboratory was a place where power and domination were exercised over matter, so that the same power could be exercised over other people, peoples and nations. Like George MacLeod, Thomas had no hesitation in seeing the splitting of the atom, and nuclear fission, harnessed to military ends, as blasphemy, the turning of the fundaments of life to the ends of mass death.

The opposite of poetry is not prose, says Thomas quoting Coleridge, it's science. Jesus was a poet, he argued, implying much that we are left to ponder. "Jesus was a poet, and would have teased the scientists, as he teased Nathanael". Nathanael was the disciple sitting under the fig tree, whether thinking, praying, waiting. But the allusion to Nathanael and his waiting under the tree is Thomas's entry point for one of his ironic and apologetic critiques of the scientific enterprise, the technological mentality, the mechanistic worldview. His quarrel wasn't with science, but with science as dominance, technology as efficiency, lust for knowledge unrestrained by humility. His late poem on the theme of science as both wrong question and wrong answer shows he is not an obscurantist opposed to science, discovery and learning. The poem considers the futility of science as an explanation of ultimate concerns (he was a well read fan of Tillich). Science and technology are not of themselves a sufficient basis for human flourishing, or even as guarantors of a human future.

I have waited for him
              under the tree of science
and he has not come:

            and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
            there is no guile

I have put my hand in my pocket
                for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
                it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
                on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.

                     And where do I go
                 from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
                 laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
                 there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
                 prove to them that they were wrong.

"I have put a cross…" At the centre of Christian faith is a truth beyond the powers of science to explain or even explore. The cross is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world; how can the answers be right if all the working and working out are based from the start on false premises, incomplete data, and skewed purposes. The cross is also a symbol of all that is right, at least insofar as the Cross is God's way of confronting the self destructive impulses that go back to the beginning when under another tree, the knowledge of good and evil was filched from God.

This is a poem that absolutely requires biblical literacy to be able to hear the potent theological and biblical sub-texts. As a Lenten poem it could be a call for us to adopt a far less sanguine view of human technological ingenuity, as in its rapid advances it outstrips our moral maturity and wisdom. And in place of intellectual hubris, a Cross, that symbol of the marker that something is so wrong in the conclusion, that the questions and answers require deeper and better thought.