The instinct toward mercy: what Hopkins has to teach Darwin.

This summer marks the eightieth anniversary of the famous (or, depending on one's viewpoint, infamous) "Monkey Trial," a landmark courtroom struggle whose legacy continues to roil American politics and public life. When the trial began in Dayton, Tennessee, on July 10,1925, spectators jostled each other not so much to glimpse John Scopes, the high-school biology teacher charged with violating a recently enacted ban on the teaching of evolution, as the celebrated combatants: Clarence Darrow, the renowned defense attorney, who represented Scopes; and William Jennings Bryan, the former "Boy Orator of the Platte" and three-time presidential candidate, who had joined the prosecution.

Scopes's arraignment had been orchestrated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was eager to overthrow the ban as well as provoke the kind of widespread media attention that would hold up the anti-evolutionists to national--indeed, international--ridicule. The ACLU proved more successful at the latter than the former. The trial ended in a $100 fine being imposed on Scopes that, although eventually reversed on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court, left the ban intact. It also resulted in a cause celebre regarded by some as on a par with Galileo's trial in the struggle of scientific truth against religious obscurantism, a version of history given theatrical expression in the 1955 hit play (and later successful movie), Inherit the Wind.

For a time, it seemed that the anti-evolutionists had been dealt a mortal blow. Scientists in general and opponents of fundamentalism in particular delighted in the skill with which Darrow took apart Bryan's testimony as a supposed expert on the literal truth of the Bible. (The New York Times hailed it as "the most amazing court scene in Anglo-Saxon history.") Though the judge decided against Scopes, the cause Bryan upheld was buried beneath an avalanche of ridicule that seemingly relegated it to the ash heap of history, a judgment punctuated by his death several days after.

Eight decades later, the denouement of that judicial drama is no longer so certain. Once written off as regional eccentricity, fundamentalism has proved itself as resilient as the Boston Red Sox, defying those who said fate and history had conspired to frustrate its aspirations perpetually. In fact, in the same season that the Red Sox wrested the World Series crown after an eighty-six-year hiatus, fundamentalism played a prominent role in the reelection of President George W. Bush. He promised supporters in 2000 that he would "make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said creationism has been a part of our history and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed."

Obviously more than a dispute about a single scientific theory, the argument over Darwinism is a contest about how to view existence. As Commonweal's founding editor Michael Williams wrote in his eyewitness account of the trial ("Summing-Up at Dayton," August 5, 1925): "A score of collateral questions surround or trail after the central one. Is man a mere accident in an accidental universe? Is he a mere chemical cell in a vast agglomeration of chemical cells .... Has he no real will, no true individuality, no true responsibility, no eternal future?"

Those metaphysical questions still shadow the current battle over the teaching of evolution in the schools. Rev. Terry Fox, pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, recently told the Washington Post that the struggle over evolution is "the essential front in America's culture war." According to Fox, "If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die," an analysis that echoed a preacher outside the Scopes trial who reportedly claimed that "if this monkey business is allowed to stand, Christianity will fall."

Ironies abound in this controversy. William Jennings Bryan opposed Darwinism not only on grounds of biblical literalism but because he saw evolution as the basis of eugenics and the attempt to eliminate "the unfit"--the poor, the handicapped, and the powerless. Those who attack evolution today often back an agenda that in its worship of free markets, free trade, and globalization supports an economic form of "survival of the fittest," a phrase Herbert Spenser coined and Darwin endorsed. On the liberal side, for all his impassioned defense of unpopular causes and defendants, Darrow was a champion of the eugenic program of compulsory sterilization endorsed by the Supreme Court in 1927 and promoted in A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, the very biology textbook Scopes used in class, which posited that to continue to allow the birth of the mentally and physically handicapped would be "not only unfair but criminal."

Today, while still espousing social justice and solidarity, there's a sizable faction of liberals who exhibit a growing faith in a neoeugenicist ethic that rests on a belief in the power of science to engineer the next stages of human evolution, weeding out diseases of mind and body and reaching for lives of physical and mental health previously unimaginable. In the words of Dr. Sherwin Nuland: "This is genuinely terrifying stuff. Not since the first half of the twentieth century have prominent thinkers been so starry-eyed at the thought of controlling the future of our species, or at least that privileged portion of it that will have the financial, cultural, and other wherewithal to take advantage of the offer being presented."

According to hardcore sociobiologists, all human behavior reflects evolutionary adaptations that have been translated into our genetic structure. Thus there's a selfish gene, and a cooperative gene, on and on, a gene for every attitude from altruism to xenophobia, each in some way related to our struggle for survival. The concept of an emotion unrelated to self-interest, of an impulse to mercy that overrides notions of utility or fitness, is hard to place in this scientific equation. Darwin himself, while he believed charity and mercy had a social value in human relationships, could find no basis for them in nature. The utter lack of mercy, he wrote, would be "about the blackest fact in natural history," were it not for the truth that natural selection and species survival necessitate the ruthless and relentless destruction of individuals.

It's hard to argue with fundamentalists' perception of Darwinism's corrosive effects on the moral sanctions that respect and protect the individual human person. But their response is to uphold Bryan's untenable defense of the Bible as a work of science while offering a view of the human future every bit as merciless as Darwin's, with sinners and nonbelievers wiped out in a catastrophe of the kind that rendered dinosaurs extinct. Despite a growing compatibility with fundamentalists on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage, the Catholic Church--once burned, twice shy--hasn't repeated the fiasco with Galileo by anathematizing the scientific validity of Darwinism. (As a matter of fact, John Scopes, the biology teacher turned Darwinian martyr, later converted to Catholicism.)

In the main, Catholics are resigned to Darwinism and all it says about the brute realities of existence yet, simultaneously, cling to St. Francis's benign view of nature, its violence more aberration than rule, a loving God hovering over it. The prevailing Catholic view seems to seek shelter in a fuzzier, less assertive version of so-called intelligent design, a syncretic blend of evolution and creationism that preserves a role for the deity--but a deity who appears to be more cold-blooded engineer than compassionate father, placing at the center of existence a mechanism run by tooth-and-claw cruelty and species obliteration.

There is, though, a more direct, unequivocal Catholic answer to Darwinism, written in the same decade as The Descent of Man (1871), which confronts rather than elides the challenge to believers to reconcile their notion of an all-compassionate God with a merciless universe. For well over a century, Catholics have had in their literary canon The Wreck of the Deutschland, Gerard Manly Hopkins's brilliant and eloquent poem-cum-credo, a tour de force of linguistic invention as well as a bold assertion of the radical nature of the Incarnation.

Ironically, like Darwin, Hopkins was a former Anglican divinity student. A decade after his conversion to Catholicism and subsequent entry into the Jesuits, Hopkins penned his imaginative masterpiece, taking head-on the faith-draining, hope-breaking implications of a jungle-like universe. In the high summer of Victorian England, the Anglican clergy was rife with amateur naturalists who looked at creation as reflecting the order, stability, and good sense that a hierarchical God imposed on it. Darwin rejected that model of nature, and so did Hopkins.

The context of Hopkins's poem is a tribute to five German nuns driven into exile by Bismarck's anti-Catholic legislation, who drowned when their ship--the Deutschland--was wrecked off the coast of Wales in 1875. Today, after a century that included two world wars that killed more than 60 million people, the mass murder of European Jews, the gulags of Soviet Russia, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, and various other persecutions and state-sponsored programs of collective homicide, Hopkins's concern for five nuns may seem quaint, even trivial.

But in language as strong, original, and rich as any in the English tongue, Hopkins forces us to face the nasty and inevitable end we all face:

  ... flame / Fang, or flood goes Death on drum ...
  Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though flower the same,
  Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
  The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

Hopkins doesn't sugarcoat the shipwreck, instead putting front and center the murderous capacity of the world to destroy fragile human beings:

  ... the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
  Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
  Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-snivelled snow
  Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

Men and women die senselessly. Children perish before their parents' eyes. Prayers for a miraculous delivery go unanswered. The innocent are destroyed along with the sinful:

  They fought with God's cold--
  And they could not and fell to the deck
  (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
  With the sea-romp over the wreck.
  Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
  The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check ...

Herein is the postmodern consciousness as it sees the human predicament: alone amid an accidental universe, ether without end, stars dying and being born in a random, ultimately purposeless process of following out the cosmic consequences of the Big Bang. Hopkins doesn't end there, though. The very power of his language--language, as Flannery O'Connor described it, "heightened and unlike itself'--the momentum it builds, the way it causes the mind to move past the single meaning of words, and beyond what is on the page, is every bit as magical as the work of that other contemporary of Darwin's, Lewis Carroll.

The truth, Hopkins said, is found not by looking away from nature but by looking deeper, by following belief with imagination, by seeking God not apart from pain, doubt, despair, death, but in the midst of it, riding "time like riding a river." Sin and holiness meet here, in Hopkins's poetic vision, not in a single eschaton, but in the existence of each person, in introspection that doesn't end in egotism but allows us to sense the limitless reach of the Incarnation:

  The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;
  Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;
  Ground of being, and granite of it: past all
  Grasp God, throned behind
  Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides ...

For Hopkins, this sovereignty, though often terrifying as death always is, teaches the human heart not so much to seek God's mercy as submit to it:

  Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
  Man's malice, with wrecking and storm.
  ... With an anvil-ding
  And with fire in him forge thy will
  Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
  Through him, melt him but master him still ...
  Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
  Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

In the poem, Hopkins uses the word mercy five times: "Five! the finding and sake / And cipher of suffering Christ," he tells us. This is neither a cipher to be decoded nor a mystery to be solved, but a truth that can only be denied or accepted. In Hopkins's poem, the whole Catholic faith springs from this acceptance, this reconciliation of worldliness and holiness embodied in the Incarnation and consummated on the cross that makes us givers and receivers of mercy, both.

The Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel imagined a "metaphysic of hope" by which Christians' belief in the eternal significance of every human life is a bulwark against a Malthusian ethic of reproductive profligacy that robs the individual of any meaning other than furthering the survival of the species. Anticipating Marcel, and the mass destruction of human life carried out in the name of eugenic perfection, ethnic purity, and the economic millennium, Hopkins imagines in The Wreck of the Deutschland what might be called a "metaphysic of mercy."

In Hopkins's telling, the shipwreck is neither an act of divine retribution against a godless crew nor a small but revealing glimpse of nature's pitiless contempt for single lives. Hopkins poses this question:

  Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
  Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy
    not reeve even them in?

Several stanzas later, he answers with this vision of a God who acts

  With a mercy that outrides
  The all of water, an ark
  For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
  Lower than death and the dark;
  A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
  The-last-breath penitent spirits--the uttermost mark
  Our passion-plunged giant risen,
  The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in
    the storm of his strides.

Almost twenty years ago, in his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy wrote, "It crossed my mind that people at war have the same need of each other. What would a passionate liberal or conservative do without the other?" The politico-cultural war Walker Percy referred to--the same war that drew Darrow and Byran to their courtroom confrontation in the summer of 1925--rages on more bitterly than ever, to where polar views of religious right and secular left not only frame much of the argument over belief, morality, and public policy, but put into sharpest relief the enduring relevance of Hopkins's view of divine mercy.

The instinct toward mercy, which Darwin couldn't find in nature, is for Hopkins the purpose of Christ's presence among us, the essence of his human manifestation; and the lashings of storms and man-made savagery should cause us not to turn away or find God absent or see his intent as revenge or retribution, but seek him amid the chaos, the pain, this God who goes "lower than death and the dark," to "the uttermost mark," to the farthest depths, "with a mercy that outrides the all of water" to gather in each and every one of us, fit, unfit, and in between.

At Calvary Cemetery

The gardener directs:
"Go up here a little piece,
you'll see Jesus
his hand up like this.
Turn left."
If I see Jesus
his hand up like this,
I'll move right
to the middle of the road,
play the odds, suck up
for kingdom come.

My father lies
in two plots
if you believe
the stones. Mother moved
his bones wanting no part
of "those Currans."
When her turn came,
no one erased his name.

I'll lie down
with three cousins,
last of the indentured
Irish slaves who gave
up their mansions
for this modest space.
Almost a century spans
their days and deaths.
"Nothing there by now,"
the cemetery director
says. "One body.
You'll fit easily."
Small comfort.

--Anne Curran

Peter Quinn is the author of Banished Children of Eve. His new novel, Hour of the Cat, has just been published by Overlook.