I was recently asked to participate in an art event sponsored by the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. The event was organized around an epic prose poem “Eureka” written by Poe in 1848. This was written shortly before his death. Although most people have never heard of it, Poe seemed to consider it to be his greatest work His goal was nothing less than a survey of the entire universe, in his words, “I mean to designate the utmost conceivable expanse of space, with all things, spiritual and material, that can he imagined to exist within the compass of that expanse.”
Much of this work describes the physical universe and the scientific thought that illuminates our understanding of it. However, he also in the first line dedicates the effort, “to those who feel rather than to those who think.” Poe is an artist who can get away with such contradictions.
Much of this poem has wording that is quite reverent in a religious sense but he was explicit that this meant nothing supernatural. He believed in one initial act of volition that is similar to the cosmic Big Bang with no intervention after that act. He felt that beyond that there was nothing that could be known concerning God other than the laws of the universe. Quoting Poe:
“’In the beginning’ we can admit -- indeed we can comprehend -- but one First Cause -- the truly ultimate Principle -- the Volition of God.”
“…I now assert -- that an intuition altogether irresistible, although inexpressible, forces me to the conclusion that what God originally created -- that that Matter which, by dint of his Volition, he first made from his Spirit, or from Nihility, Could have been nothing but Matter in its utmost conceivable state of -- what? -- of Simplicity?”
“Of this Godhead, in itself, he alone is not imbecile -- he alone is not impious who propounds -- nothing.”
“That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt. By the former we imply merely the laws of the latter. But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future -- with Him all being Now -- do we not insult him in supposing his laws so contrived as not to provide for every possible contingency?”
Obviously Poe was a Deist or pantheist. In this he was similar to Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Paine and numerous other luminaries of the early United States who believed in one creative act followed with a clockwork universe adhering to physical law without any “divine” intervention.
Poe included some assumptions from the existing body of science in his time. Among those were that there existed a “non-luminous” “vast central sun” equal in mass to “100 million of such suns as ours.” We now know that our galaxy has at its center a large black hole, Sagittarius A*, equal to about 3.8 million solar masses. He included an estimate of the time for us to revolve around this large central object of our galaxy, “The period of our own, indeed, has been stated -- 117 millions of years.” This is astonishingly close to the 226 million years that we now calculate for our solar system and rather different than the roughly 6,000 year history of the world that many in his time believed for religious reasons.
Poe was condemned for his “heresy” in his time. However, we can remember him as one more person in the distinguished history of American freethought.
Copyright Donald Wharton 2005
This essay was originally published in June 2005 edition of WASHline, the newsletter of the Washington Area Secular Humanists, web site www.wash.org.
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