Veni Veni Emmanuel

Why Only Christ Can Break the Dark Night

“Nativity” 1597 (oil on canvas) / F. Barocci

Isaac Asimov, of all people, hit upon the ultimate question that can be asked of the universe. As a scientist – a science populariser, at any rate – Asimov was clear-headed about how future history pans out, what awaits us at the end of the cosmic road. Namely, the heat death of all things, and darkness unending. When all the stars have burned out, and the universe has stretched out into infinite thinness, and all subatomic particles have evaporated in asymptotic decay. Asimov asked: how can we, squatting in the long dark in the dim glow of the last nuclear torch, reverse entropy? Thus goes the premise of “The Last Question”. But to say any more would be to spoil the story.

What interests me is not Asimov’s answer, clever and delightful though it is, but the dread that lurks beneath the asking. For is not entropy but death writ large – the cosmic waxen mask of something we meet daily in the flesh? Daily, say I, but of course it is not so. No. Would that it were. Would that we could meet it and walk away. We cannot. There is no pencilling it in; or if we do so, nothing comes after. The finality that attends death, whether by violence, misfortune, or the quiet attrition of years, is immovable. And relentless is its march. Memories dim, cells degrade, muscles wither, until one day comes the final falling-off, the loss irretrievable. Nothing we can do can bar it. Veganism, temperance, surgeries, vitamin injections, or having only beef tallow to drink – all our arts can contrive to add maybe another score to the threescore and ten ordained for us.

Is this not unjust? Is this not sickening? To have the gift of life, and yet to be torn from it. I find the imposition evil. To be sure, not too many will confess to agreeing with me. Some feign stoical nonchalance. Some claw for pleasure – sex or drugs or money or power, as though death bypasses the sybaritic senator. Others make a play of it – rebirth, transmigration, entries in the karmic ledger. Still others claim that death is a part of life, a seasonal molting. All keep their monthly medical appointments. No-one can convince me that I am wrong. Death is, at its blackstone heart, a deprivation.