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New York: Image, 2014; $25.00 hc; 304 pages
Would You Baptize? is a work of nonfiction, neither science fiction nor directly about science fiction. Nevertheless, its topic and approach will, I think, make it interesting to many sf readers. The theme of the book is “what it’s like when science encounters faith on friendly, mutually respectful terms” (1). The book is aimed at a broader audience than Catholics or even religious believers in general, and for illustration it frequently makes use of sf stories and movies.
Guy Consolmagno is a knowledgeable sf reader and fan, a frequent attender of sf conventions, and sometimes a panelist or presenter there. He is also a planetary astronomer employed by the Vatican Observatory and is a Jesuit brother. His coauthor, Paul Mueller, is a historian and philosopher of science and a Jesuit priest, with, as far as I know, no particular connection to sf. Although not a natural scientist per se (he does have bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science), Mueller is also attached to the Vatican Observatory as a researcher in history and philosophy of science. Both authors are Americans who divide their time between the Observatory’s facilities in Rome and those in Arizona.
The most sfnal question discussed in the book is the one used for the volume’s title, which comes last in the volume and thus may be seen by the coauthors as a sort of climax. The other topics range from the profound to the fairly trivial (the latter used as entry wedges to weightier themes). Rather than stemming from any deep organizing principle, the topics evidently reflect genuine questions that are frequently put to Vatican astronomers. Besides the culminating ET dialogue, the others discussed are (in order) the beginning of the universe, the demotion of Pluto, the Galileo affair, the Star of Bethlehem, and the end of the universe. I can think of sf stories that have revolved around all but one of those questions—if someone has written a work of science fiction featuring Pluto’s demotion, I have missed it. Even in Pluto’s case, the demotion and the astronomical facts prompting it certainly made obsolete a vast number of sf stories involving either Pluto specifically or the “nine planets” as a group. Moreover, the authors frequently draw on works of science fiction (written and filmed) for verbal illustrations throughout.
Like a large fraction of works on astronomy or philosophy (or both) from antiquity into the nineteenth century and a smaller proportion even since then, Would You Baptize? consists of a series of dialogues. Each dialogue takes place in a described setting (five in real locations plus one in Douglas Adams’s “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”). The interlocutors are versions of Consolmagno and Mueller themselves, although the coauthors admit they each sometimes wrote the lines for the other character. Below, when I ascribe statements within the book to Consolmagno or Mueller, strictly speaking I am referring to the characters in the dialogue.
Even though the title question is the last one dealt with in the book, I begin with it here, both because it holds the highest degree of sfnal interest and because I think it illustrates in acute form some problematic aspects of the book as a whole. Consolmagno says he has been asked about baptizing hypothetical extraterrestrials on a number of occasions. The instance he actually cites is the time when he and Pope Benedict happened to be in Birmingham, England, at the same time, for different reasons. British reporters were trying to extract from Consolmagno a story on how the Pope was suppressing science when in fact Benedict was doing no such thing. Finally, in frustration, the reporters sought sensationalism in another quarter by asking the baptism question, which in self-defense Consolmagno blew off with the reply “Only if she asks!” (250). The story is amusing, but I think it likely that the other people who had asked Consolmagno the question meant it more seriously than the jackals of the British press had, and I think they, and we, deserve either a clear answer or a clear explanation of why Consolmagno was not providing one. Of course, as he explains within the chapter, Consolmagno is a religious brother, not a priest or a deacon, and therefore he would not normally be doing any baptizing anyhow (like any layperson, even a non-Christian, in Catholic teaching he could licitly baptize in case of “necessity,” which usually means imminent danger of death, if someone requested it). But his coauthor Mueller is a priest, and anyhow, of course the real question is whether in Catholic eyes it would be appropriate to baptize a hypothetical extraterrestrial who had requested it—and perhaps by extension whether Catholics should proselytize to extraterrestrials, if and when we find any.
The coauthors do a lot of hemming and hawing. The meandering course of their dialogue reminded me a lot of a panel at an sf convention, specifically one where the moderator is making little effort to keep the discussion on the assigned topic, and instead the panelists are casting about for some interesting alternative to talk about. Often a convention panel takes this tack because the moderator and panelists think that the topic assigned by the program committee is unworkable. But there is no program committee to blame here—presumably the public asked the Vatican astronomers more than six frequent questions, and the responsibility for including this one in the book in preference to others falls on the coauthors. Both coauthors caution that, although they have taken courses in theology, they are not theologians. (Mueller does have a master’s in sacred theology along with ones in physics, philosophy, and divinity, and a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science.) Perhaps the authors are trying to answer the question in a way that will stay close to their own fields of expertise, despite the fact that the question is (at least for now) largely a speculative theological one. Alternatively, possibly they are mostly using the question as bait to lure the reader into a broader discussion of issues such as proselytization in general and extraterrestrials in general. Or possibly, after having committed themselves to the publisher on including the question, they simply discovered themselves bored by the whole central issue. Consolmagno notes (255), “There’s nothing on this topic that ... hasn’t already been discussed, ad nauseam, for hundreds of years.” They might have wandered off the main topic onto others where they thought they could contribute more originally.
This dialogue snakes along, several times touching on the actual question of baptizing aliens only to wander off again. Subtopics of the dialogue in the chapter include: (1) How successfully intercultural Consolmagno found Los Angeles in the brief time he lived there—“a place where no one is an alien, and everyone is welcome” (252). (Mueller begs to differ.) (2) A disclaimer by Mueller that “I’ll be ready and willing to baptize an extraterrestrial if and when the Church decides it’s OK to do so” (253), plus a caution that neither coauthor is a “trained academic theologian” and their speculations should not be taken as authoritative Catholic teaching. (3) For the benefit of the lunatic fringe, a disclaimer by Consolmagno as a Vatican astronomer that he has no evidence that extraterrestrials exist and that he cannot imagine that anyone could successfully keep such evidence secret. (4) A brief account of the general history of speculation about extraterrestrials, with nonfiction book recommendations. (5) A review of mentions in the Bible of nonhuman intelligent beings such as angels, Nephilim, and unspecified “holy ones,” and of mentions in classical literature of daemons and “planetary intelligences.” (6) The question of whether our modern society cherishes a desire to have aliens show up and solve our problems., with particular reference to the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. (7) A denunciation of forced baptisms such as regrettably sometimes happened in the past, an issue that hopefully never would arise with extraterrestrials. (8) Historical controversies about who could be baptized: Gentiles? Antipodeans posited to exist on the other side of Earth’s supposed equatorial Death Zone? Native Americans? (9) The Jesuit missionary policy of “inculturation” (attempting to adapt Christianity to the local culture without changing its substance) and its successes and failures. (10) Practical problems in communicating with any discovered extraterrestrials, illustrated in part by the example of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. (11) The odds that a well-disposed extraterrestrial could detect an underlying unity in Christianity, given how alien the practices of some Christians can seem to other Christians, or even of some Catholics to other Catholics. (12) Reciprocity: Might a given alien already be living in the “Kingdom of God”? What if the alien offered to baptize Mueller? (13) An analysis of why Consolmagno thought the reporters in Birmingham were giving him a trick question. Comparison by Mueller to Jesus’s analogous responses to trick questions. (14) The implausibility at least within modern culture of believing that Earth is anyplace special, supported by quotes from Carl Sagan and Douglas Adams. (15) The fallacy of believing that the problems that science can address are the only problems that matter. (16) The advancement by Mueller of the scheme of Teilhard de Chardin but modified by rejection of the latter’s belief in teleological, non-Darwinian biological evolution and in the centrality of the human race, leaving a notion that multiple intelligence races throughout the universe and perhaps even somehow the material universe itself, are all progressing toward a closer, loving unity with God. (I gather that some of the Catholic Julian May’s science-fantasy novels, which I have not read, propose something similar, although Mueller does not mention May.) (17) A reminder by Mueller that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus depicts people as being judged on the basis of what they did for their fellows, not on their theological orthodoxy. “It is not our place to decide whether ET can be a citizen of the Kingdom of God. It is our place to treat ET like the least one of Christ’s brothers and sisters.” Agreement by Consolmagno: “By an interesting coincidence we are both residents of planet Earth and, thus, share a lot of DNA, but ... that’s irrelevant to the more interesting and important fact that we also share the same attribute of self awareness.” (284–85) All of which, it seems to me, is very well in its way but does not address the question under consideration. (18) Discussion of how intelligence seems of its nature to demand interaction among various individuals within a social unit and how, by extension, one might expect interaction among various intelligent species. And there the chapter ends!!
To the extent that the baptism question gets an answer at all, it is only from Mueller at point 2, where he says that he would be willing to baptize an extraterrestrial if and when the Church allows him to do so. We get no systematic discussion of what, besides a proper disposition on the part of a candidate alien, the Church would want to know before giving such permission or of why the issue of baptizing an extraterrestrial would be different from that of baptizing a human. This treatment seems to me to verge on false advertising, not only for the chapter but for the book itself, since the volume takes its title from the chapter. What we are left with is a meandering discussion (granted, discursiveness is an acceptable tactic in a dialogue format), that touches on multiple fairly interesting topics, but that (less acceptably) never answers the posited question and never even directly explains why it is left unanswered. I am left feeling frustrated. On the other hand, since the chapter title and book title seemed to the authors to be a good idea in light of the actual contents, and since they were not talked out of it by their advance readers or their editors, I am forced to wonder if my own reaction is idiosyncratic. Perhaps other readers will be more interested in the journey than in its failure to arrive at the announced destination.
After I had written the above, I happened upon an article in my undergraduate alumni magazine, a profile of Mueller, my fellow alumnus (for his doctorate). The piece was presumably arranged by the coauthors in order to publicize Would You Baptize? The article quotes Mueller regarding the questions presented in the book, “They’re questions where the premise is not right. We try to back off the questions and premises and shift to a better and deeper question.” This may be the coauthors’ intention, but they never clearly explain that within the book, and even in retrospect I cannot see that the coauthors apply the principle in any systematic fashion.
If you were wondering, as far as I can see (as a non-theologian but someone who has read on the topic), a non-flippant answer to the baptism question would have been to state that, as far as present thinking goes, baptism is intimately connected with God’s Incarnation as a human being. God saved humans by becoming human and living and dying as a human. The default expectation, therefore, would be that each alien race (assuming they exist) has its own salvation history. Conceivably, some might never have become alienated from God (not have “fallen”) as in C.S. Lewis’s science-fantasy Space Trilogy, or in Ray Bradbury’s sf story “The Fire Balloons.” Some might have fallen and been redeemed by Incarnations within their own species, or have been reconciled with God by some different means entirely or might still be awaiting some form of reconciliation, just as homo sapiens had waited for all the (at least) tens of thousands of years between the dawning of self-awareness and the coming of Christ. Given the size and age of even the visible universe, it seems highly unlikely that the vast majority of intelligent species would even so much as know of God’s Incarnation as a human. In principle, that Incarnation might still have some sort of metaphysical, universal, redemptive effect, but this would differ oddly from what is seen as the normal path of salvation among humans. Moreover, extraterrestrials aside, the Church has long taught that the angels had their own test and thus have a relationship with God not directly related to our own. There is thus a precedent for multiple salvation histories.
On the other hand, a rebuttal might argue that the Catholic Church teaches that human non-Christians can be saved through Christ (see for instance, the 1994 Vatican catechism, paragraph 1281, and the fuller explanation in the 1985 catechism of the German Bishops’ Conference, 188–89), so it is probable that even today the majority of human souls are saved not through the “normal” path of baptism (even counting baptisms by all Christian denominations since Catholics consider almost all of those baptisms to be valid), but by a more indirect “metaphysical” route. But assuming that intelligent life is distributed fairly evenly across the universe, even a metaphysical, cosmic salvation through God’s Incarnation on Earth would place humans in an implausibly privileged position. Individual salvation histories for each intelligent species, therefore, seem overwhelmingly more probable, at least given present knowledge.
As an intermediate position, it is conceivable that God may have intended humans to have some sort of special kinship with a few extraterrestrial species that coincide with us in time and are relatively nearby in space, and God conceivably might intend that some extraterrestrials should join humans within one visible church. This is (by implication) the situation depicted in, say, the Catholic Michael F. Flynn’s Eifelheim and, with a lighter touch, in the agnostic Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade. In both the Flynn and the Anderson works, Catholic priests baptize extraterrestrials for what seem to them to be good and sufficient reasons, without being able to consult the Vatican. Before the Church recognized the validity of such baptisms of extraterrestrials, it would have to resolve a number of theological difficulties. One is that, at least officially (undoubtedly some individual theologians would be more liberal), the Catholic Church currently upholds the interpretation that, whether or not there were ever a literal Adam and Eve, something happened soon after humans attained self-awareness to estrange the human race from God, and the effects of this estrangement have been passed down to us by descent. (See, for instance, the Vatican catechism, paragraphs 390 and 404.) The Council of Trent specifically held that this “original sin” was transmitted “through propagation, not through imitation” (quoted in the German catechism, 111). It is this specific fall that God’s Incarnation as a human is said to heal.
As a side note, we can observe that, by contrast, it might be theologically easier to include as humans not extraterrestrials but now-extinct Terran hominid species, at least those that had attained self-awareness. Perhaps even future human-engineered AIs or uplifted animals could in a wider sense be said to be part of the human family (that is, Tridentine “propagation” might mean something broader than genetic descent). In Walter Miller’s “Conditionally Human,” a Catholic priest speculates that an uplifted chimp has her own salvation history (“Hasn’t picked an apple yet” 56), but by contrast some of the Episcopalian Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople are Christians (adherents of the “Old Strong Religion”).
On the alternative of separate salvation histories for each species, one might then go on to speculate about interactions between humans and aliens who have their own valid Revelations. Zenna Henderson’s science-fantasy People stories show the Revelation to the People on their planet of origin, Home, as being so congruent with Terran Christianity that the People resettled on Earth seem perfectly comfortable in moving back and forth between (vaguely American Protestant) Christianity and their own religion. However, Poul Anderson’s “The Problem of Pain” describes a situation where Catholics think they may have found a valid alien Revelation, only to be disappointed upon realizing that the view of the nature of God among the aliens seems to be incompatible with Christianity. Given the fact that, in the Catholic interpretation, the human race got along for most of its existence (the time before the rise of Judaism) without any very specific Revelation, it would not be surprising to encounter alien races in the same state as pre-Judaic humans. What should Catholics do about alien races that showed no sign of having their own Revelation? Advise them to keep waiting? Preach to them a generalized monotheism but counsel them to look within their own species for further enlightenment? Decide that, contrary to previous assumptions, Christianity had a special obligation toward such beings? Would it make any difference that other proselytizing Terran religions would seem to have less problem in accepting aliens so that, in the event of Catholic inaction, the stellar neighborhood might end up full of other kinds of adherents to Terran religions? Buddhism already accepts that humans can be reincarnated as nonhumans and in that form they can strive to improve their understanding and intentions, ultimately leading to escape from the Wheel of Rebirth. The Koran, in the Surah “al-Jinn,” teaches that its revelation applies to both humans and jinn and that some jinn upon hearing it have already submitted and become Muslims. In both the Buddhist and Islamic cases, extension to extraterrestrial intelligent lifeforms would not seem to be much of a stretch.
Moreover, whatever the Catholic Church decided about baptism, it is all but inevitable that, if some extraterrestrials expressed a desire to be baptized, one or more other Christian denominations would be happy to oblige. For that matter, Catholicism itself teaches that anyone, even a non-Christian, can baptize in case of necessity, so if other options were closed to them, aliens might start baptizing each other (validly if such a baptism was inherently valid, invalidly otherwise). It is perhaps instructive that in Poul Anderson’s main future history, in the early-set “The Problem of Pain,” the Roman Catholic Church expects each intelligent species to have its own Revelation. Later on in the van Rijn stories, we find an alien Buddhist and eventually in Dominic Flandry’s time in The Game of Empire, we encounter Father Axor, another alien from the same species as the Buddhist, who is a priest of the “Jerusalem Catholic Church,” whatever exactly that might be. But even Father Axor himself recognizes that, given the vastness of time and space, it may well be the case that some other extraterrestrials have had their own Incarnations and by implication separate salvation histories.
Fairly drastic reinterpretations would have to be made to conclude that any biologically unrelated alien species was also redeemed by God’s becoming human rather than having its own separate salvation history. Such reinterpretations would be very unlikely to come unless and until the question arises in the concrete form of actual aliens seeking baptism.
The above is how I would have attempted to answer the baptism question (okay, for purposes of a book addressed to a general audience, I would have made fewer sfnal allusions). Most of my speculations can be found earlier in the most recent century or so of what Consolmagno calls the hundreds of years of discussion ad nauseam, and some of it can with effort be pieced together from Consolmagno and Mueller’s own chapter, but it is not presented there in any organized fashion. Even if the coauthors thought that the question was superficial or otherwise wrong-headed, they could have given a straight answer in less than 1500 words as I just did, before spending the rest of the chapter on “better and deeper questions.”
Fortunately, in most of the other chapters, the problem of focus, although similar in nature, is not so acute. Despite considerable meandering, the authors do come closer to answering the posed questions.
In the Star of Bethlehem chapter, the coauthors could have quickly shifted to “a better and deeper question” by noting that either the star was a miraculous pointer rather than an astronomical phenomenon in the modern sense, or the story about it was an instructive fiction not meant to be taken literally. After all, how could a physical, celestial object indicate to the Magi the precise place where infant Jesus was living (Matthew 2:9)? “Place” seems to mean the exact dwelling, since in the preceding verse, Herod had already told them to look in the small village of Bethlehem, which narrowed down the location pretty thoroughly. The coauthors do make the point, but they also discuss at some length not theologically deeper points but various theories about astronomical phenomena that might lie behind the account one way or another. If the Biblical account is essentially true, Matthew might have gotten some details wrong or have deliberately glossed over technical, astronomical points of no interest to lay people—the coauthors repeatedly note that Catholics are not Biblical literalists. Alternatively, if it is a pious story important only for the religious lessons it teaches, there could still have been a real astronomical event that inspired it. Contrary to the idea presented in Clarke’s famous “The Star” (which the coauthors cite by name), the hypothetical phenomenon was likely not a supernova, since a naked-eye supernova observed two thousand years ago would have left traces still detectable today. Italians strongly favor the comet theory, to the extent that a comet with a curling tail is the popular symbol of Christmas there, like Santa and his reindeer in the U.S. The coauthors, however, assert that in antiquity comets were universally understood to presage disaster, so the Magi would not have interpreted one as heralding the birth of a king deserving special honors. (I am not entirely convinced here: although the interpretation of comets as bad omens may have been widespread in the ancient world, the Wikipedia article on the Star of Bethlehem quotes the early Christian theologian Origen as associating comets merely with “important events,” not necessarily with negative ones. Granted, Origen lived nearly two centuries after Jesus.) Having rejected supernovas and comets, Consolmagno and Mueller incline toward some sort of planetary conjunction of significance only to a trained astrologer, and they review a number of possibilities. They meander quite a bit along the way and end with no firm conclusions, but they do address the actual question in a more satisfactory manner than with the baptism question. The chapters on the beginning of the universe, the Galileo affair, and the end of the universe pursue analogous strategies.
The issue of the redefinition of Pluto’s status represents something of an exception to the general structure of the chapters since Pluto’s demotion has nothing obvious to do with religion at all. I do not suppose that Vatican astronomers get asked about it by laypeople any more often than do other astronomers. By contrast, their fellow professionals might turn to them since it turns out that, because of quirks of international politics plus the Vatican City State’s legal status as a nation, Consolmagno and another Vatican astronomer stood in good positions within the International Astronomical Union to observe the controversy and to play modest parts in it. The perspective on the decision process is a bit different than in other accounts I have read but is consistent with them. Consolmagno quotes (65) a long passage from Have Space Suit, Will Travel on the conditions on Pluto as Heinlein imagined them when writing in 1957 (the book was published the following year). Since that time, astronomers had determined that Pluto has no atmosphere and possesses far less mass than originally thought. Supposed perturbations in Neptune’s orbit originally thought to be caused by Pluto turned out to be errors in observation and analysis. Astronomers realized that Pluto was in reality barely larger than the largest asteroid, and other bodies of comparable size were being discovered in the far reaches of the Solar System. After much dispute about how to handle the situation, the IAU reduced Pluto to “dwarf planet” status, grouping it with Ceres in the Asteroid Belt, with several objects in the Kuiper Belt, and with many more future candidates thought to be out there beyond Neptune’s orbit.
In order to apply the purely secular affair to the theme of their book, the coauthors draw parallels. Mueller compares the shock of the change from what everyone born after 1930 had known all their lives to the way things were after the switchover in the Western-rite mass from Latin to vernacular languages following Vatican II (63). Mueller also compares (103) the IAU’s efforts to come up with a definition of “planet” that would be comprehensible by the general public, even at the sacrifice of a bit of accuracy, to the concept of “accommodation” in Biblical studies. The latter is the principle that the Scriptures stated things in ways that would be comprehensible to their original audience such as by taking appearances at face value (the Sun rises) or by using approximate or figurative language. I think this comparison is a bit of a stretch, as the accommodation in the planet definition is trivial in comparison to that used in the Bible. Mueller could have arrived at his more valid follow-on point by other routes. The latter point is that commonplaces that “everyone knows” become embedded in culture such as in the idea of the “nine planets” or in the name of Mickey Mouse’s dog, and that the public does not easily let go of such commonplaces even when there is good reason to do so, as was shown by the howls of protest at Pluto’s demotion. Mueller anticipates the following chapter on the Galileo affair by pointing out (104) that Copernican cosmology removed the Sun’s status as a planet (which at the time meant a celestial object that moved in the sky in contrast to the motionless “fixed stars”) and conferred planetary status on Earth and that it is not surprising that this transition went down considerably less smoothly than Pluto’s demotion since it concerned a commonplace embedded in culture since time immemorial.
All in all, Would You Baptize is good but not great. It contains interesting discussion and provides much food for thought and many suggestions for further reading, but to some degree it undermines itself by not being the FAQ volume that it presents itself as and by not even clearly explaining why it cannot or should not be that volume. On the other hand, the coauthors are not working in a crowded field. Perhaps there ought to be an even better book in the niche that they have chosen, but I am reasonably sure there is not one. Most people seriously interested in science fiction would find themselves repaid for the time it takes to read this volume.
Patrick McGuire is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
Works Cited
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1994. (Anonymous translation of the 1994 Latin edition published in Vatican City; the English version was simultaneously published by various other publishers, but the paragraph numbering should hold constant across editions.)
German Bishops’ Conference. The Church’s Confession of Faith: A Catholic Catechism for Adults (1985). Translated by Stephen Wentwood Arndt. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987.
Miller, Walter M. Jr. “Conditionally Human” (1952) Conditionally Human. New York: Ballantine Books, 1962.
Recchie, Benjamin. “Following the Stars.” The University of Chicago Alumni Magazine 107:2 (November-December 2014).
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