Image: credit Michael Polkinghorne
John Polkinghorne, physicist, priest, Fellow of the Royal Society and Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion, will be 90 on 16 October. Patrick Miles recently interviewed him by Skype in his care home.
Patrick Miles: Our warmest congratulations, John, on your approaching birthday. Do you have any special reflections on the occasion?
John Polkinghorne: I think the best thing is to have a father who makes it to ninety, as mine did. Heredity!
PM: Shortly after you entered a care home, it was locked down. This must have been difficult for you, wasn’t it?
JP: Well, I’m here because these disabilities accumulated and I couldn’t live outside of a care home. That’s why I’m glad to be here, where the people look after me very well. I was entirely in favour of the lockdown, but obviously it has had consequences, and the most irritating for me is that my friends can’t drop in on me, have a little chat… That is something that I miss very much.
PM: And presumably during these seven months you have not been able to take communion?
JP: No, that’s been a real deprivation for me. The communicating side is an important part of my spiritual life. I believe that church services play a very important part in most people’s Christian life. You know, despite their appearances most people need a communal development. My family is allowed to visit me once a week and I was talking the other day to my son who is an accountant. He’s locked in at home and he is competent with communications, so he can carry on with his job perfectly straightforwardly, but he really misses having the company of his colleagues. I think we all need that kind of company. And it’s true of the religious side too. I mean, there are people with a special calling, hermits, who live a solitary life; but most of us are not like that and I think not being able to have a form of Christian gathering is a desperate loss. We need each other and we need God. If we read the New Testament, they are always gathering together, and that’s a very important part of it.
PM: The church has been doing amazing social work during the pandemic…
JP: Yes. I mean my local church here every Sunday have sent me readings and prayers that would be used in church that day, so that I can incorporate them into my individual worship, churches have been very active with food banks, delivering hot meals and other services in the community. But there are some things about a communal gathering that are important.
PM: An agnostic said to me recently that she felt the pandemic had depressed millions of people because they could see no ‘justification’ for it and viruses are so impersonal and powerful that they make life look meaningless.
JP: Well it’s the whole problem of bad things happening to good people. It’s a very serious problem. I find very helpful something that Darwin’s Christian friend Charles Kingsley wrote to him after he had read On The Origin of Species. He said that what Darwin really showed is that if God had wanted he could have created a ready made world with a snap of his fingers, but he’d chosen to do something cleverer and better than that, bringing into being a creation so charged with potentiality that it can be left to explore that potentiality and make itself. I think that’s a very very very helpful thought. And if God’s world is like that, you have to accept the consequences, one of which is that you can’t just take terror out of things.
PM: But viruses seem to have only bad potentiality!
JP: I don’t know enough biology to explain exactly what we need viruses for, but my biological colleagues assure me we do, so let me give you a physics example that I’m more at home with. Earthquakes cause terrible suffering. What are they? The surface of the earth is layers and the innermost layer is a series of plates. When one of those plates slips earthquakes happen, often with these terrible human consequences. So you might say: ‘Don’t bother about having plates, just have a solid shell underneath the surface and…no earthquakes!’ But equally, there would be no people, no life even. The reason being that there are certain chemicals that are only made in the vast, hot interior of the Earth, they permeate through little chinks between the layers, some of them get to the surface, and it’s only thanks to them that you and I, and in fact every living thing, become possible. So if you shut that interior of the Earth in completely tightly, there would be no earthquakes, but no life. When you have these very complicated, beautifully interacting systems like plate movements or viruses, you have to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
PM: You still read an enormous amount, I know. What kind of reading do you enjoy most, and what kind do you find most comforting at this challenging time?
JP: Reading and praying are my two main activities now. The first thing I read every day is the daily office from the Prayer Book. That has prayers, and praises, and a whole variety of things. It’s not very extensive, it takes me perhaps not much more than twenty minutes to read, but it’s a staple. It gives me hope and assurance. We will come through this pandemic, but obviously it will not be a costless experience. Hope is a justified reliance on the goodness of God, really. After the daily office, I just read what I’m interested in – mostly classic novels. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are my two favourite authors. Unfortunately, a black blank in my life is that I cannot listen to music because of my hearing difficulties. I miss music, but there we go.
PM: I’m sure you have continued in lockdown to think about the issues that have engaged you all your life. If you had the opportunity to write another book, what would it be about?
JP: That’s a good question. I love writing. Trying to find the words to express the thoughts that are in my mind. And as you know, I’ve written a lot of books both scientific and theological. Usually – in the past – when I finished one book I knew what I wanted to write about next. But I don’t at the moment. I can’t go on forever. So I think I have to rest my case with the opportunities I’ve been given and that I’m very grateful to have had. I have to be satisfied with what I have written.
PM: Thank you John. I was planning to ask a Russian Orthodox choir to come and sing you a Mnogoletie, a hymn for long life…
JP: That would be a real experience, Patrick, but I don’t know if it would fit smoothly into the lockdown regulations!
PM: Indeed. But we all wish you a very happy birthday, and many more of them.
John Polkinghorne was awarded the 2002 Templeton Prize for ‘exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension’ and has written over thirty books, of which his latest is What Can We Hope For? Dialogues about the future.
© John Polkinghorne & Patrick Miles, 2020
With thanks to Jim Miles for recording and transcribing
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Patrick and John:
Contemplating the adventure of 90 from the relative security of mere 80, one feels a mixture of admiration and trepidation. Admiration for the personal journey, trepidation at the unexpected accidents that will impinge upon it. ‘If man could look into the book of fate…,’ etc. Just as well we can’t.
But talking of books, I was struck by what John says – or does not say – about his reading (once the office is done). Novels: Jane Austen and Dickens. Writers, one has to say, whose spiritual side is at best recessed; unadventurous in that dimension, unexploratory. Is this to take a break from more speculative matters, to keep one’s feet on the fictional ground? One can understand such an impulse.
But: no poetry? We have heard from many sources during the current predicament that people have derived immense comfort from reading (and writing) poetry. One of the reasons for this may be that poetry can fight free of narrative obligation (what Virginia Woolf complained of, almost comically: ‘the intolerable business…of getting from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner’) and settle instead into reflection, reassessment, looking for the facets of meaning in events rather than jostling the events themselves. The Covid virus is an event, imposes an unfolding narrative in human affairs. Powerless (almost) in the face of this, we need to make what sense we can, and derive what consolation we can, of and from the circumstances. And perhaps the free rein of poetic discourse is more suited to this than the patient prose of the novel, on its daily rounds.
Another fine Comment, Damian, thank you very much…but I had quite FORGOTTEN that 80. Yes, I think John probably does read Austen, Dickens and others to ‘keep one’s feet on the ground’, or as he would put it maintain ‘street cred’ compared with some clerics. He’s read a far wider range of English classic novels than I have, and must have read the Austen canon, for instance, five or six times. He doesn’t mention that he also reads very recent books that people bring him, plus scientific and theological journals, and The Times every day. He has brought with him to the care home his standing bookcase of favourite reading, which includes The Karamazov Brothers and The Oxford Book of English Verse. I’ll try to ask him how much poetry he now reads, but you mustn’t forget that he reads psalms every day as part of the office, and they are some of the world’s greatest poetry, wouldn’t you agree? I should add that your own poem, ‘Lockdown’ in the Spectator of 23 May, is the best example I’ve seen of poetry’s ‘consolation in the face of virus’.