A familiar story proclaims that Darwin had planned a career as a “country parson” when he set sail on the Beagle voyage around the world, and eventually got sidetracked into another profession. But the common inference that Darwin’s discovery of evolution led him both to apostasy and to a biological career cannot be sustained. In truth, Darwin had never been personally committed to theology as a calling. As a young man, his religious views remained decidedly lukewarm and passively conventional, simply because he had never given the matter any extensive thought. His designs on a parsonage arose more from an absence of alternative plans than from any active belief or desire. I strongly suspect that, as the Reverend Charles, he would have treated his day job in a hallowed and traditional manner among clerical naturalists—as a sinecure with adequate salary and minimal duties, leaving him adequate time and opportunity to follow his true bliss: collecting and publishing books on beetles, and other subjects in natural history.
Thus, as Darwin approached midlife in the tranquillity of substantial means, an excellent professional reputation, and a happy family in a country home, he had never struggled deeply with questions of personal religious belief, even though his evolutionary views had led him to question and abandon several traditional dogmas of his Anglican upbringing. But then, in a fateful interval between late 1850 and April 23, 1851, intellectual doubt and personal tragedy combined to change his world forever.
As Darwin finished several years of intense technical work on the taxonomy of barnacles, his precarious health also improved substantially, and he found himself with both time to read and tranquillity to contemplate. He decided, finally, to examine his own religious beliefs in a careful and systematic way. Darwin therefore turned to the work of a fascinating thinker, then all the rage, but unknown today, especially because his far more famous brother followed a different path and eclipsed him. The Newman brothers could not abide the inconsistencies that they detected in Anglican practice and belief. John Henry Newman created one of the biggest stirs in nineteenth-century British intellectual life by converting to Catholicism, and eventually becoming a cardinal. (Catholic students’ organizations on American campuses are usually called Newman Societies in his honor.)
Francis William Newman, the cardinal’s younger brother, graduated from Oxford with a higher degree and more potential promise as a future don, but left this pillar of the intellectual establishment for an eventual job as professor of Latin at the upstart and unorthodox University College, London, because he would not subscribe (as law and tradition then required for Oxbridge dons) to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism. Newman then undertook a spiritual journey, through several popular books, to a position of intense religious belief, but based on rejection of dogmas and harsh traditional doctrines (particularly the idea of later reward or eternal punishment for earthly deeds)—all in favor of a system consistent with rational thought and the findings of modern science. With his usual intensity, Darwin studied all of Newman’s major works between 1850 and 1851, reaching similar conclusions about the vacuousness (and often the cruelty as well) of traditional dogmas, but finding no solace in Newman’s ideas about personal devotion, and therefore ending with skepticism toward all aspects of religious belief.
Darwin’s scrutiny of Newman’s works might not have affected his view of life so profoundly if his greatest personal tragedy had not unfolded at the same time. Darwin loved his eldest daughter, Annie, with a fierce tenderness inspired by a complex mixture of Annie’s own sweet disposition and her resemblance to Charles’s sister Susan, who had acted as a surrogate after the early death of Charles’s mother, and who had so tenderly cared for Charles’s father to the day of his death, just two years before. But Annie had always been a sickly child.
In March of 1851, Annie became so ill that Charles and his wife, Emma, decided to send the ten-year-old girl to Dr. Gully’s clinic in Malvern, where Charles’s own health had been so dramatically improved by the doctor’s celebrated “water treatment.” Annie would have her sister and a nurse for support and comfort. Charles accompanied the entourage to Malvern and stayed for several days. (Emma, in the late stages of pregnancy, followed the customs of her time, and remained “confined” at the Darwin country home.)
Annie prospered at first, but soon became violently ill. Charles hurried to her bedside, and spent several days in agonizing torture, as Annie rallied to hope, sank into despair, and eventually died on April 23. Charles wrote to his brother Erasmus: “God knows we can neither see on any side a gleam of comfort.” A week later, he penned a private memoir on his sadness, and on Annie’s lost beauty of body and soul: “Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.”
Annie’s cruel death catalyzed all the doubts that Charles’s reading of Newman, and his deeper scrutiny of religion, had engendered. He had permanently lost all personal belief in a caring God, and would never again seek solace in religion. He carefully avoided any direct statement in both his public and private writings, so we do not know his inner resolutions. I suspect that he accepted Huxley’s dictum about agnosticism as the only intellectually valid position, while privately embracing a strong (and, as he well knew, quite unprovable) suspicion of atheism, galvanized by Annie’s senseless death.
But if science and religion wage constant battle for the same turf, then Darwin should have become hostile and dismissive toward religion, and cynical about life in general. He should have wielded evolution as a bludgeon against false comfort and cruel deception in a world filled with the deaths of children and other heart-wrenching tragedies of no conceivable moral meaning. But Darwin took no such position. He grieved as deeply as any man ever has, and he worked his way through. He retained his zest for life and learning, and he rejoiced in the warmth and successes of his family. He lost personal comfort and belief in the conventional practice of religion, but he developed no desire to urge such a view upon others—for he understood the difference between factual questions with universal answers under the magisterium of science, and moral issues that each person must resolve for himself. He would fight fiercely for the truth of evolution’s factuality, but the causes of life’s history could not resolve the riddles of life’s meaning. A knowledge of the medical causes of death could prevent future tragedies, but could never assuage the pain of immediate loss, or enlighten the general meaning of suffering.
We shall return to Darwin’s remarkable letter to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (who accepted natural selection and evolution, but urged Darwin to view such laws as instituted by God for a discernible purpose)—for I regard this document as the finest comment ever written on the proper relation of science and religion. But for now I cite his views of May 1860—nine years after Annie’s death, and six months after publication of the Origin of Species—on why the factuality of evolution cannot resolve religious questions of ultimate meaning:
With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world … On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.
Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s brilliant and articulate younger colleague, and his “bulldog” in public support for evolution against all tides of social and religious orthodoxy, lost his favorite and firstborn son, three-year-old Noel, on September 15, 1860—just four months after Darwin’s letter to Gray, and a year after
Huxley himself had read the Origin of Species and exclaimed in awed astonishment, mixed with a twinge of envy, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
Darwin’s Annie had been a sickly child, and her death fulfilled an acknowledged probability that Charles and Emma had hoped, above any other conceivable prayer, to forestall. But Huxley’s rambunctious Noel had romped with his father before bedtime on Thursday, and then died on Saturday. “It was as if the boy had been inoculated with some septic poison,” Huxley wrote. Among the many friends who tried to console him in this wrenchingly sudden and maximal grief, Huxley bared his soul in return only to the man he respected most highly and disagreed with most profoundly—the liberal clergyman Charles Kingsley, also an amateur naturalist of note, an evolutionist who saw no conflict between science and his ecclesiastical duties, and the popular author of Westward Ho! and The Water Babies.
Kingsley had reached out to his skeptical friend with a gentle suggestion that, in this hour of greatest conceivable need, Huxley might reexamine his doubts and find comfort in the Christian doctrine of eternal souls, and the attendant prospect that he would meet Noel again in a different life to come. In his letter, Kingsley acknowledges Huxley’s suffering as “something horrible, intolerable, like being burnt alive.” But we can find extended solace in earthly preparation for a heavenly meeting after bodily death. We must, Kingsley wrote, “make ourselves worthy for the reunion” during our sojourn on earth.
Huxley answered Kingsley in a letter of September 23, 1860, that should be required reading for all courses in English literature and philosophy. Great and passionate writing does not only appear in novels. As prose stylists, a few nineteenth-century scientists (Playfair, Lyell, and Huxley in particular) rank with the finest Victorian fiction writers. I wish I could quote this long letter in full, for I have never read a more moving or incisive defense of personal intellectual honesty, whatever the allure of immediate and easy solace from comforts that one can neither truly believe nor justify by cogent argument.
Huxley begins by thanking Kingsley for his proffered comfort, expressed with complete sincerity and no sanctimoniousness. But Huxley explains, in a beautiful passage, that he cannot overthrow a personal philosophy, worked out over so many years and through so much intellectual struggle, for the immediate solace of a rejected central belief in the immortality of souls:
My Dear Kingsley—I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife’s account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits … My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them from their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them—and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
Huxley then epitomizes his arguments for skepticism about immortality: Why, first of all, should we grant eternity to complex humans and not to “lower” creatures who might benefit even more by such a blessing; and, second, why should we believe a doctrine mainly because we long so deeply for its validity?
Nor does the infinite difference between myself and the animals alter the case. I do not know whether the animals persist after they disappear or not. I do not even know whether the infinite difference between us and them may not be compensated by their persistence and my cessation after apparent death, just as the humble bulb of an annual lives, while the glorious flowers it has put forth die away.
Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without an end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind—that my own highest aspirations even—lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
Huxley then states his reasons for embracing science as his guide in factual questions. In the “standard quote” from this letter, the lines found in every Bartlett’s ever published, Huxley writes:
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
These statements might be—and usually have been—taken as a manifesto for the standard model of warfare between science and religion, and as a classical defense for science, even in the hour of greatest spiritual need. But this wonderful letter, read in extenso, takes an opposite position, akin to Darwin’s at the death of Annie. Huxley does reject the soul’s immortality as a personal comfort in his grief—for all the reasons cited above. But he forcefully recognizes the major principle of NOMA in stating that such a religious idea cannot be subject to scientific proof: “I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.” Then, in terms strikingly similar to Darwin’s metaphor about dogs and the mind of Newton (see this page), Huxley locates this subject beyond the magisterium of science, and in the domain of personal decision, because we cannot even imagine a rational test: “in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth.”
Then, in a concluding passage that still brings tears to my eyes, Huxley summarizes a personal case for NOMA by stating the three non-overlapping aspects of personal integrity—religion for morality, science for factuality, and love for sanctity—that have anchored his own life and given it meaning. He begins by quoting the philosophical work of his friend Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, or The Tailor Reclothed), and ends with the celebrated line of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, stating why he will not renounce his religious convictions: “God help me, I cannot do otherwise.” Has any “atheist” ever presented a better case for the role of true religion (as a ground for moral contemplation, rather than a set of dogmas accepted without questioning)?
Sartor Resartus led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition. Thirdly, love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature, and impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility.
If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct forever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.
And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, “Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders.”
As a coda to this chapter, a symbolic story about Darwin’s funeral, and Huxley’s role in switching the intended place of burial, serves as a fitting symbol and illustration of NOMA, the potential harmony through difference of science and religion, both properly conceived and limited. Darwin wished to be buried in the local churchyard of his adopted village in
Downe, where he had done the requisite good deeds for a man of wealth and social standing—including service as a magistrate, proper donations to the local church to support programs for the poor, and establishment of his own charities, including a recreational hall with books and games for workingmen, but no alcohol. But a few of Darwin’s well-placed friends, spearheaded by Huxley, lobbied the proper ecclesiastical and parliamentary authorities to secure a public burial in Westminster Abbey, where Darwin lies today, literally at the feet of Isaac Newton.
As a perpetual publicist for the good name of science, Huxley must have relished the prospect that a freethinker who had so discombobulated the most hallowed traditions of Western thought could now lie with kings and conquerors in the most sacred British spot of both political and ecclesiastical authority. But let us be a bit more charitable and grant—even to the combative Huxley, but certainly to the clerics and MPs who made the burial possible—a motivation prompted by a spirit of reconciliation, and by the strong and positive symbol represented by a revolutionary man of science, and at least an agnostic in personal belief, lying in the holiest of Christian holies because he had not feared to seek knowledge and understood that whatever he found could not confute a genuine sense of religion.
Mr. Bridge, the organist of Westminster, composed a funeral anthem for Darwin’s interment (a perfectly serviceable piece of music, which I have actively enjoyed under another hat as a choral singer). Bridge chose one of the great biblical wisdom texts, and I cannot imagine a more appropriate set of verses, both for Darwin’s ultimate celebration, and for NOMA’s theme that a full life—that is, a wise life—requires study and resolution within several magisteria of our complex lives and mentalities.