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Can you catch the eye
of the beautiful Pleiades sisters?
Or distract Orion from his hunt?
Can you get Venus to look your way?
Or get the Great Bear and her cubs to come out to play?
Do you know the first thing
about the sky’s constellations?

I’m speechless in awe ...
Words fail me!

        The Book of Job in the Bible

Highbury Astronomy Page

It was in the summer of 1609 that Galileo Galilei built his first telescope.  He was 45 years old.

Once he was sure it was working properly he decided to go public and so it was that on 25th August 1609 he and a group of dignitaries from Venice went out into the dark evening and looked up into the night sky through his new telescope.  What they saw amazed them.

And the rest, as they say, is history!

Sadly, part of that history brings the church into disrepute.

That’s a story that has been told many times and through 2009 will no doubt be told many times more.

It is not, however, the whole story.

Fascination with this new-fangled astronomical aid spread like wild fire through Europe.  Indeed, there were others in different parts of Europe using their own newly invented telescopes too.

The kind of lenses the earliest telescopes used had been in production since 1350.  The first person to go public with a telescope was a spectacle maker from West Germany, Hans Lipperhey (1570-1619).  Writing in a letter dated 25th September 1608 he described the device he had invented that made things look larger:  ““All things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby, by looking through glasses which he claims to be a new invention.”  [This account is taken from the International Year of Astronomy Presentation, Who actually invented the telescope?]  He went on to seek a patent for his invention the next month but his application was turned down.

A rival claim to be the inventor of the telescope was made by Saccharias Janssen: but there is no evidence that he actually produced a telescope before 1600.

And then there was Thomas  Harriot (1560 - 1621).  An Englishman he had sailed with Walter Raleigh as a map-maker, and had been implicated in the Gunpowder plot.  A mathematician and astronomer he was  Professor at Oxford University.  In 1995 one scholar, Van Helden, claimed that he had sketched the moon through a telescope on 26th July 2009.

He went on to produce increasingly strong telescopes over the next few years.

What’s fascinating is that over in Cambridge at this time George Herbert (1593 - 1633) was studying.  He went on to teach for a period at Cambridge, becoming the University’s public orator.

Knowing that his mother had accompanied some of his brothers to Oxford while they were studying at the University there, it is quite likely that George Herbert knew of Thomas Harriott.

His poetry reflects a fascination for Astronomy.  A devout Christian who went on to take Holy Orders and finished his life as Rector of Bemorton Church near Salisbury Cathedral, he seems not to see a conflict between such science and religion.  Instead, he sees that his faith is concerned with a different set of questions, that are no less important because scientists do not address them.  Speaking of scientists as philosophers he refers to them with respect and awe.  One feels he would have known the people he is speaking of.  But he goes on to suggest that faith asks different, and some would say even more questions:  This is from The Agony.

    Philsophers have measured mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n and traced fountains:
    But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them:  Sin and Love.

A similar train of thought is followed in Vanity (1).

                       The fleet Astonomer can bore,
And thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind:
He views their stations, walks from door to door,
                       Surveys, as if he had design’d
To make a purchase there: he sees their dances,
                       And knoweth long before
Both their full-ey’d aspects, and secret glances.

Is this written by someone who not only has met Astronomers, but has also been fascinated to look through a telescope?  One of the astronomical features the very earliest telescopes revealed was that the Milky Way was made up of countless individual faint stars.

Is it too fanciful to suggest that it was the sight of the Milky Way through a telescope that prompted him to refer to the Milky Way in his wonderful sonnet on prayer?

Prayer cannot be defined.  All you can do is to heap up as many images of prayer as you can find to capture something of all it is.
That’s what George Herbert does, prayer sustains, it can be full of anger, it is fall of awe and wonder.  To capture that awe and wonder he turns to the heavens above ...

Prayer ...
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
     Church-bells beyond the starts heard, the soul’s blood
     The land of spices; something understood.

It is as he comes to the end of his remarkable collection of poems, only published posthumously, called ‘The Church’, that he makes a statement that not only gives the basis for his understanding that every part of life must be dedicated to God, but also his conviction that God is in every part of life.

It is his poem ‘The Elixir’ those two thoughts are coupled in the first verse.

Teach me, my God and King,
  In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
  To do it as for thee:

In the third stanza Ann Pasternak Slater who edited the Complete English Works of George Herbert for Everyman in 1995, suggests that his reference to ‘glass’ is a reference to Paul’s reference to seeking through a glass darkly in 1 Corinthians 13.    The Companion to Hymns and Psalms (Methodist Publishing House, 1988), has a much more intriguing suggestion to make.

Might not the ‘glass’ he refers to be a new telescope?  The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the word ‘glass’ was first used of  ‘A telescope or other instrument for distant vision’ in 1613-16  by W.B. BROWNE Brit. Past. II. i, As a man..Taketh a glasse prospective good and true, By which things most remote are full in view.

That suggestion makes much better sense.  Imagine George Herbert seeing a telescope made for the first time.  It is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.  He looks at it.  He walks around it.  He admires it.  But it is only when he looks through it that he espies the heavens!  What a thrill!  Something he had never experienced before.

        A man that looks on glass,
        On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
       And then the heaven espy.

The poem has become a popular hymn that encourages people of Christian faith to do everything for God.

Couple it with the invention of the Telescope and the wonder and awe one has gazing at the heavens through such an instrument, and it has something else to say about the relationship between science and religion.

God is not some mechanical clock-maker as some later deists were to suggest.  A notion of God knocked on its head by Darwin and the theory of evolution.

As a Christian I take a leaf out of George Herbert’s book.  I stand in awe and wonder as I gaze at the heavens whether it’s through a telescope, binoculars or just the naked eye!  I see God in all things.

God is in at the beginning, in at the big bang!

God is in all the processes that follow on from that.

God is in life itself.

God is being itself, the ground of all our being.

I do not believe in God as a clock-maker.  I do not believe in God as an Intelligent Designer.  I believe that the God of Creation is there in all of Creation.  At each stage in the expansion of the universe, God is there.  At each stage in the evolution of life God is there.  Were there another set of equations, God would be there.  Had evolution gone another way, God would still have been there.  As it happens evolution has gone the way it has and God is there.  He is here with us.  At each stage in the evolution of life God is there. To echo Romans 8:39 there is nothing in all of creation that can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

T
Teach me, my God and King,
  In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
  To do it as for thee:

  Not rudely, as a beast,
  To run into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
  And give it his perfection.

  A man that looks on glass,
  On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
  And then the heaven espy.

   

   All may of thee partake:
  Nothing can be so mean,
Which with this tincture (for thy sake)
  Will not grow bright and clean.

   A servant with this clause
  Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
  Makes that and th’action fine.

  This is the famous stone
  That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
   Cannot for less be told.