Pandaemonium (14 page)

At this, Tullian raises a hand both to stay the General’s defence of him and to indicate that he would speak for himself.

Steinmeyer already looks like he’s not listening; or at least that he wishes to convey that he won’t be. He stops short of putting his fingers in his ears and singing ‘lalalala’, but the intention is equally clear. Tullian responds by directing his words unavoidably towards him.

‘I can only apologise to you, Professor, for intrusions and encumbrances that must seem as insulting as they do frustrating. If it’s any consolation, I am, in fact, frequently embarrassed by the respective positions we find ourselves in. I am as awed and as respectful as anyone of your abilities and achievements, and I wish, I sincerely wish that I had nothing to offer here but my admiration. I am a greater student of physics than you might assume: I read your paper on superstrings and the unification of forces back in 1994, and followed your publications until you dropped off the radar. Having discovered what you are working on and encountered you here in the flesh, it would therefore have been my considerable honour to defer to your expertise - were it not that
I do know, exactly, what you have brought forth
. It is not a distinction I relish, but the truth is that I am the expert in the field your work has brought all of us into, and the body of knowledge I draw upon is not only thousands of years older than yours, but thousands of years older than even the church I represent.’

Tullian looks into Steinmeyer’s eyes and sees a weary kind of scorn, the arrogant certainty that he had nothing to learn from parties he perceived to be at worst, enemies, and at best, obstacles. It’s easy for him to recognise, as it’s like looking through a mirror in time and seeing his own face reflected. Tullian had been just as arrogantly dismissive once too, before he came to learn that he couldn’t afford to be. His task and his talent lay in reaching out to people, understanding them so that he could make them understand him. The tiny fragments that helped you piece together the greater truths could often be hidden in the least likely places, therefore there was nothing you could confidently overlook.

If only Steinmeyer knew how similar they both were, how much they had in common, and the extent to which they were striving towards the same truth. Like the physicist, Tullian had also dropped off the radar just as his star seemed on the rise, fading from view to undertake work that the outside world might never learn about. Having once been tipped to become one of the most pre-eminent churchmen in North America, he had been called to the Vatican in the late 1980s and promptly vanished from public life, never returning to an American diocese.

In truth, when he was summoned to the Vatican in 1988 and told he was being replaced as Bishop of Watercross, he feared it was a means of rebuke, especially when he discovered his new assignment.

A science graduate who had been pegged a moderniser and - whisper it - a liberal, he had occasionally piqued the dismay of traditionalists by giving voice to his embarrassment at the more primitive superstitions that attended the Church in some of its less culturally developed outposts. Most senior clergy he had spoken to shared his opinion that the veneration of tacky statues, particularly in Latin countries, didn’t reflect well upon the Church at large, not least because it was uncomfortably close to idolatry, but there seemed an unspoken rule that voicing this to the laity was somehow disloyal. Doing so earned him a degree of suspicion in certain quarters, which was partly his intention, because it was a debate that he wanted the Church to have. Unfortunately, having such a debate was regarded as providing a spectacle for the entertainment of the Church’s enemies, and thus he garnered no takers until he upped the stakes by publicly admitting to a general scepticism over Marian apparitions. He did not say outright that he didn’t believe in them, but he did express that he considered it significant that the recipients of these visitations, and those of poltergeist, tended to be pubescent girls, undergoing a confusing and emotionally unstable time in their lives. (Contrary to some reports, it was not he who also drew the comparison between Lourdes and Fatima and the Salem witch trials: that was an academic who appeared on a discussion panel with him at a seminar held, as fate would have it,
in
Salem; but nonetheless, Tullian’s failure to contradict him was noted.)

The ensuing correspondence in American Catholic journals was joined by no less a figure than Archbishop Francis O’Hara of Chicago, speaking as a representative of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church body responsible for appraising the veracity of such miraculous visions. The Archbishop accused Tullian of ‘grudging awe and wonder’, of ‘forgetting that God does not owe man any proof’, and signed off by telling him that ‘conditional faith is not faith at all’.

Tullian did not grudge awe nor wonder, and his faith in neither God nor the Church itself was conditional. It was absolute. To quote Father Benedict Groeschel, a priest with a doctorate in psychology from Columbia: ‘True belief is a decision. It’s also a gift. Accept the gift and you will make the decision.’

One didn’t have faith
in
Christianity: faith
was
Christianity. O’Hara was correct: faith was absolute or it was nothing at all. Belief was both its own justification and its own reward. Thus it was embarrassing to suggest that God should be handing down vulgar trinkets in the form of mystical signs or miraculous interventions, and for His church to be offering theological bread and circuses. Equally, the practice of science and the quest for knowledge, for facts, was not a search for reasons to believe.
Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe
: John 20:29.

If you needed to feel wonder, wasn’t Jesus enough? If you wished to thrill with awe at the presence of God, wasn’t His creation enough? This world, this universe? Tullian loved science - physics in particular - not because it offered proof, but because when you already had faith, then in science lay a deeper appreciation of both the hand and the mind of God.

There was a fashion for offering cosmological reasons to suggest that the insignificance of our tiny planet vanishingly reduced the likelihood of a divine purpose behind our existence here. This argument could be distilled down to: ‘Space is much bigger than we thought it was a few centuries back, so the smaller we get in the big picture, the less likely it is that there’s a God.’

In fact - and these most certainly were facts - the sheer unlikelihood of us being here at all, on this tiny little sphere, orbiting a minuscule star, in a minor planetary system two thirds of the way out from the centre of just one of a hundred billion galaxies, demonstrated entirely the opposite.

There was life on Earth because it was situated just the right distance from the sun in what was known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of the solar system: not too hot and not too cold, protected from asteroids by the gravity of Jupiter, and orbited by a moon just large enough to stabilise the planet’s climate for the hundreds of millions of years necessary for DNA to develop. Our solar system itself was in the Goldilocks zone of the galaxy: far enough from the radiation field spewing from the vast black hole at its heart; close enough to the centre to allow the higher elements to form.

All of this, coupled with the infinitesimally precise fine-tuning of the laws of cosmological and subatomic physics that allowed the universe to exist at all, was a source of awe and wonder at God’s glory that dazzlingly outshone every other miracle, never mind every tacky Third World shrine.

All of this Tullian expressed in an impassioned and heartfelt letter to the archbishop that humbly sought to correct his misapprehensions, and though it succeeded in doing so, it unwittingly altered the course of his own fate.

Less than a year later, he received his summons - to come to Rome and work for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

He interpreted it initially as a chastisement. He had always feared that his stance on Marian apparitions would come back to bite him. However, in an organisation as Byzantine as the Church, you never knew whose path you might have crossed, nor even the agenda you had become a part of. Thus such a reassignment could be a punishment intended to rein in an upstart, but just as easily it could be a lesson handed down by a senior figure who nonetheless agreed with you, but still thought you needed to learn greater humility. This would never be made explicit, however, as the lesson of the latter often required the belief that one was undergoing the former.

To this end, he was given several months of bureaucratic busywork: immersing him in the finest details of the Congregation’s undertakings, methodology, reports and even expense procedures, until debates, seminars, science journals and his beloved Watercross Cathedral back in Massachusetts all became a sepia-tinted memory as he began to believe he had been banished to some kind of ecclesiastical gulag. Then, one stifling August afternoon, Archbishop O’Hara appeared unannounced, handed him return flight tickets to Paraguay, and finally revealed to him the real reason he had been called to the Congregation.

‘
One is coming who is mightier than I
,’ O’Hara said. ‘
He will thoroughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire
.’

Tullian was to become the primary filter through which all reported miracles, visions and apparitions had to pass before further consideration by the CDF. His remit, as the Congregation’s Chief Scientific Adviser, was to investigate objectively but sensitively, then compile reports on his findings, which would be passed on for further consideration - or not, as the case frequently turned out.

He flew back and forth across the world, investigating weeping and even bleeding statues, glowing paintings, spontaneously occurring images of Jesus and (more frequently) the Virgin. He spoke to sometimes sincere, sometimes frightened, sometimes confused, sometimes conspicuously attention-seeking witnesses. He uncovered frauds and cranks, disclosing inventive uses of chemistry to effect miracles involving paintings and statuary, and on several occasions ensured that certain ‘visionaries’ subsequently received the medical and psychiatric help of which they were in genuine need. He exposed the human hands behind most of the ‘spontaneously occurring’ images, learned how frequently the outline shape of the Madonna and Child resulted when two conjoined branches were removed from a tree, and discovered just how subjective one’s interpretation of any image could be once the beholder had decided what they
wanted
to see within it.

Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean that these investigations ended with his report. His findings were sometimes ‘taken under advisement’ and a second investigator dispatched, to look into the matter further ‘with a fresh pair of eyes’. The first time this happened, leading ultimately to the verification of a vision in Chile, he entertained the unworthy notion that part of the reason he had been appointed was that it added authenticity if the CDF could say that its most sceptical scientific investigator had examined the case (omitting, of course, what the sceptical scientific investigator’s report actually said). However, this cynical thought failed to factor in the question of who, in that case, he thought the CDF were trying to convince. Though his sequestration had been revealed as an instance of head-hunting rather than punishment, he came to understand that humbly gaining a new perspective upon the realm of miracles and their perception within the Church was, perhaps purposely, part of the result.

Naturally, it often came down to politics or other such sensitivities: a localised boost to religious devotion could be both timely and expedient in a world increasingly beset by secular influences. The Church had many enemies, and Tullian came to accept that there were greater evils than an overzealous local priest exciting his parishioners’ fervour with an old statue and some creative use of phosphorus. Sometimes, however, people simply needed hope. Even if the shot in the arm was synthetic, the hope it gave was not itself false. Sometimes, belief in something false was like a temporary bridge to support pilgrims on the journey towards greater, true faith.

And very occasionally, he did encounter something that defied explanation and that made him tremble in recognition of a power greater than man’s. Unfortunately, as he was to discover, that power would not always be a higher one.

By 1999, his continuing interest in physics had led him on to the emerging attempts to reconcile the Newtonian with quantum mechanics, most promisingly in the form of string theory, with its implications for the existence of six higher dimensions, albeit that these were imagined to be curled up smaller than an atom. Within this burgeoning field, the concept of membrane, or M theory, if true, had implications that were as exciting as they were disturbing; and in theological terms, had implications more profound than science had posed since Darwin.

In M theory, there were not ten but eleven dimensions, or ‘branes’, and rather than being minute, it was suggested that some of them might be infinite in extent. One hypothesis for the creation of the universe was that these higher branes were in an eternal process of stretching and contracting, moving between energy states, with their collisions giving rise to new universes. There was a sophomoric atheistic argument regarding the vastness of the universe and its abundance of space supposedly making it absurd that Heaven and Hell might be accommodated somewhere else altogether. Tullian could imagine its proponents rejoicing at the notion of infinite new universes being created between the branes, when in truth this hypothesis only served to illustrate the plausibility of higher and lower realms existing in completely separate dimensions to our own. It was hardly a new concept to those of faith. What really excited Tullian about the membrane hypothesis was that it finally got past Einstein’s necessity for a beginning of time - of time itself being created, like space and matter, in the big bang, with no such concept as time preceding it. M theory, while not fully implying a world without beginning as well as a world without end, did at least suggest the 13.7 billion years of our universe could be a mere blink in God’s eye.