If science and religion cannot coexist,
Then the Big Bang presents quite an ironic twist.
Discovered not by an atheistic beast,
But by Georges Lemaître, a Jesuit Priest.
Georges Lemaître (Photo Credit: Maksim)
Discover more from The Poetry of Science
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki [1809-1849] wrote between 1843/4-1846? a mystical prose poem entitled “Genesis from the Spirit” published in 1871. If we reduce the mystical parts of the poem to a minimum and leave only the purely « objective » parts, we arrive at his poetic description of the “Big Bang” :
“…The Spirit… turned one point… of invisible space into a flash of Magnetic-Attractive Forces. And these turned into electric and lightning bolds – And they warmed up in the Spirit… You, Lord, forced him… to flash with destructive fire… You turned the Spirit… into a ball of fire and hung him on the abysses… And here… a circle spirits… he grabbed one handful of globes and swirled them around like a fiery rainbow… “
This is how poetic intuition could anticipate the scientific discoveries…
(see :
https://www.salon24.pl/u/edalward/1334289,big-bang-according-to-the-19th-century-polish-poet-j-slowacki )
Thanks Edward, this is a great example! 🙂
This is all the more interesting since probably these two cosmogonies of Poe and Słowacki have (to a certain extent) a common inspiration – namely another cosmogony, that of Adam Mickiewicz [1798 – 1855], professor at the Collège de France in Paris between 1840 and 1844. The latter presented it in his famous improvisation which took place on Christmas Day 1827 in Saint Petersburg (one of the “fathers” of the Big Bang, the famous scientist Alexandre Friedmann was born there), see :
https://www.salon24.pl/u/edalward/1334289,big-bang-according-to-the-19th-century-polish-poet-j-slowacki
Thus, the analogy between Poe’s “Eureka” and Słowacki’s “The Genesis of the Spirit” which still intrigues today is no longer so mysterious…