Soul Force

Darwin and Lincoln

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

February 15, 2009

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.[1]

So begins Walt Whitman’s tribute to Abraham Lincoln, whose martyrdom ensured in many ways his unique place in our nation’s history. He was a legend during his own lifetime, too, of course, partly self-created. Here’s an account of a bit of the legend from a lecture on Lincoln by Bram Stoker, best known for his novel Dracula:

His face was a dark brownish colour partially from constant exposure to weather. His hair was black, his eyes were grey. He had a coarse mouth with large yellow teeth. A story was told by him of himself:

‘In the days when I used to be "on the circuit" I was accosted in the cars by a stranger who said: "Excuse me, sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you". "How is that?" I asked, considerably astonished. The stranger took a jack-knife from his pocket. "This knife", he said, "was placed in my hands several years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found the ugliest man on earth. I have carried it from that time to this and now, thank heavens, I need search no more. My task is done".

A man who knew him and often heard him speak described him thus to me [continues Stoker]:

‘He was the ugliest man I ever saw, but when he began to speak his face became transformed and what a face it was then, it seemed somehow lit from within, as if his very soul was shining through. In such moments he seemed inspired and looked almost beautiful in his strength'.[2]

You probably have your own memories of how your impressions of Lincoln came to be formed – stories of Honest Abe the rail splitter from the frontier who was so smart he could out-talk and out-lawyer the more polished city-slickers; stories of how he learned to read by candlelight in a humble log cabin and practiced his sums in the dirt on the floor or on a shovel; the tragedy of his loss of his true love Ann Rutledge to one of the diseases of the frontier for which there was then no cure; tales of his extraordinary ambition; his craggy face, more lined as each year of the Civil War went by and more and more died; his courage in freeing the slaves of the South in the Emancipation Proclamation; and always his words, repeated over and over, his wonderful oratory, “Four score and seven years ago.” Perhaps you or your children had a set of Lincoln Logs, as my brother and I did, and could embody the memory of Lincoln in simple log cabins, built and rebuilt, simple or adorned, calling to mind simpler days on the frontier and in their very name the man whose name was attached to them as though naming a whole era and place of our history as a nation.

There is a risk in remembering Lincoln of developing a tinted lens through which to recall him, in part because of his looming presence in the story of our country that we all learn from earliest childhood, in part because of the truly enormous shadow he casts over the shape of our history since his time. We may in admiring him forget that he was also the president who presided over the bloodiest war in our nation’s history, a war in which over 600,000 Americans died, more even than died in World War II – a number which constituted 2% of the nation’s population. This was war of a new sort, not a war of professional soldiers and aristocrats but of the whole nation, a war which introduced the scorched earth practices of Sherman’s March through Georgia as a way of defeating not just the army but the whole people of the South. There were more casualties in this war than in any war in the world until the Twentieth Century, and Lincoln was responsible for its execution as well.

Lincoln was no soft man or words without deeds to back them up. He was the hardest of men, relentless in his commitment to the Union and the rule of law, determined that nothing could tear apart the nation founded on our constitutional compact. We remember him because he ultimately freed the Southern slaves during the course of the war – though not those of the Border States which remained in the Union – and because he held the United States together as one nation, indissoluble. He opened the way for a new birth of freedom, freedom for all human beings, black or white, formerly slave or formerly free, rich or poor. The promise of that new birth of freedom for African Americans was not fully delivered for a century and more, when the Civil Rights movement finally challenged and overthrew the legal structures that created separate and unequal facilities; the election of an African American as president is another milestone in that long journey toward true equality, and it is fitting that it should have occurred just now, two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, whose courage and strength showed the way to this moment and still farther into our future.

While Lincoln’s memory is not perhaps as hallowed in the South as in other parts of the country, and while lingering resentments may remain to this day of the utter destruction wrought in Georgia by Sherman’s March to the Sea, we don’t speak of “Lincolnism” as an ideology or belief system, and there aren’t among us anti-Lincolnists. No so for the other baby boy born the same morning as Lincoln on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Darwin. His work is sometimes treated as an ideology or the equivalent of a religious belief, and we do speak still of Darwinism, his theory of evolution by natural selection, and of what are considered alternative views of the origins of life on earth, creationism or intelligent design.

Darwin’s life is not, of course, the stuff of American mythology. His family, unlike Lincoln’s, was well-off and provided him with the resources to make choices about how he would live his life as well as providing the means for him to engage in the extended study of nature which resulted in the publication of his bombshell book, The Origin of Species in 1859, just one year before Lincoln was elected president.

Darwin’s paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been an English Unitarian, a follower of Joseph Priestley, writer, scientist and Unitarian minister, who is best remembered now for his discovery of oxygen. After the French Revolution, a backlash set in against those who, like Priestley and his followers, had supported democracy in France. Priestley’s home was burned by a mob and his laboratory was destroyed in 1791; and he ultimately accepted the invitation of Benjamin Franklin to come to the United States, where he founded one of the first Unitarian churches in this country just outside of Philadelphia. Darwin’s maternal grandfather Josiah Wedgewood founded the Wedgewood pottery works. Charles was thus raised as a Unitarian; a memorial plaque in the Unitarian church in Shrewsbury notes of Charles Darwin, “In early life, a member and a constant worshipper in this church.”[3]

Darwin was still trying to determine his life path when he got the assignment to join the crew of the H.M.S. Beagle on a botanical mission that led to the Galapagos Islands and his remarkably detailed observations about tiny variations in finches and many other creatures, observations that ultimately led him to develop his theory of evolution by natural selection. Although he had worked out many of the basic ideas of his theory within a few years after his return from that five-year voyage, he withheld publication for twenty years because he knew that it would create a firestorm of criticism and he wanted to ensure that the case he made was completely persuasive and founded on an incontestable foundation of fact before he shared it with the world; he was also concerned because his beloved wife Emma, herself deeply religious, could not bring herself to believe that the world and life as we know it could have come into being without the guidance of a creator.

This was, perhaps, the most difficult problem Darwin faced as he developed the evidence for his theory: meaning and purpose was very hard to find in the processes he was observing in nature. As Adam Gopnik puts it:

… Darwin did understand clearly, and began to brood at length on, what he eventually called the “wedge” of death, the reality that his new theory implied that death and suffering and pain were, from some point of view, creative but not justified. It wasn’t that suffering was for your own good, or for the good of the species; suffering just was. Death was the thing that weeded out life. The process might have a history, but it didn’t seem to have a point.[4]

Darwin continued his observations relentlessly over the next twenty years and they all continued to make clearer and clearer that his initial insights were correct; that changes occurred in species and between species as a result of changes in the natural world, and that natural selection was the mechanism which drove the whole. Death was simply part of the mechanism by which the process worked its will. As he worked through his theory, he gave full credit to what arguments would be raised by those who would object to the theory, and his articulation of those arguments is better than they might have made themselves. Above all, he wanted to get at the truth of the matter more than he wanted to be right about it. As a result of the care he took in framing his argument, his theory was very quickly accepted among his peers and is today one of the best established theories in the history of science. Indeed, we experience its actions in our own health as we suffer year after year from flu viruses which mutate and evolve in such a way as to escape the immunity we have built up within ourselves as well as the vaccines our best scientists can develop.

How, then, is there still opposition, and such strident opposition, to the theory of evolution by natural selection? It is because, I would argue, natural selection seems to drain the natural world of meaning and purpose, and without that we feel as though our own lives are drained of meaning and purpose. The theory leaves us to make our own meaning of our lives, to make choices not dictated for us by faith or tradition, and the burden that task imposes can easily come to seem overwhelming. And yet it is and always has been our task to shape our own lives, to face the reality of death, even the death of our children, as both Darwin and Lincoln suffered, and suffered horribly. Still we go on, even in the face of overwhelming sorrow, still we continue to find purposes greater than what we have lost; this is and always has been the task of living. Here’s a summary of the meaning of the lives of these two great men from Adam Gopnik:

… Darwin and Lincoln both saw something more, and darker, than the strength of good speech and open-ended ideas. They learned that death was all around and all-powerful. They learned it firsthand through the deaths of those they loved, and they learned it just as cruelly, if at a greater distance, from those who died in war or in the struggle for existence. Lincoln's compassion for the soldiers he knew he had led to an early death was real and immediate; it's one of the things that make us admire him. But Darwin's compassion for even the simple creatures who died horribly in nature was real, too; the caterpillar eaten away from inside by the ichneumon wasp's larvae genuinely made him doubt that any good deity could oversee the world. Death was the one fact whose force could not be argued out, only accepted. It couldn't be explained persuasively in terms of due process. It couldn't be brought down to earth by the most painstaking of descriptions. It called them both to seek some form of transcendence, some meaning beyond the human cycle of breathing and eating and dying, even while resisting the supernatural meanings of faith.

Their constant sense of the presence of death helps explain why they both came to a new, almost mystical sense of the power of time—time the explanatory force, the justifying force that gives meaning to life by asking us to think in the very long term. Unable to see life "vertically" in terms of the verdict of heaven, they came to see it "horizontally" in terms of the judgment of time. Deaths at Cold Harbor or in the struggle for existence made some sort of sense in history, beyond individual imagination but within human imagination.

Darwin and Lincoln were makers and witnesses of the great change that, for good or ill, marks modern times: the slow emergence from a culture of faith and fear to one of observation and argument, and from a belief in the judgment of divinity to a belief in the verdicts of history and time. First, the change from soul to mind as the engine of existence, and then from angels to ages as the overseers of life. For good or ill, that is what we mostly mean by "modernity," and by the special conditions of modern times. Just as Lincoln looking at history could seem to make sense of the horror of war, Darwin, considering the deep time of evolution, could give some shape to the senseless wedge of death. This emergence, of course, is still seen by many as a terrible descent: the loss of the certainty of a single set of sure values. Yet their pain and problem is ours. Our beliefs are still likely to be touched by either Lincoln's agonized intuitive spirituality, his private religion, or by Darwin's calm domestic stoicism, his quiet doubt.

This faith in deep time gave each of them a different, and modern, spiritual turn. The American [Lincoln] begins in aggressive freethinking and atheism so severe that it has been largely read out of the record and crosses, through the Civil War, toward some kind of private belief in providential fate and destiny, in many ways Jewish, or at least Old Testament, in tone. The Englishman begins in the inward-turning faith of the English church and clergy, for which his whole early life was designed, passes through quiet doubt, and ends in open atheism, which, with typical tact, he refers to only as uncertainty. He ended as a kind of classical Stoic. Lincoln became an American Job; Darwin, an English Marcus Aurelius. These two tracks cross in the sky above their time (and show, at crucial moments, a similar pang of acute doubt brought on by seeing children die too soon). Lincoln and Darwin take opposing trajectories toward two very near places, and rare is the modern person who hasn't, at some time or other, visited both: private mysticism touched by public secularism, shining inward faith in tension with scientific skepticism.[5]

“Shining inward faith;” may we find the ways to nourish that faith in ourselves against all the odds before us, taking as exemplars those such as Lincoln and Darwin who devoted themselves so thoroughly to freedom, and to truth.

Amen.