Blessed Are The Meek, For They Shall Inherit Nothing - The Political Epiphany Of A Brilliant Woman

Pembroke Arthur had been a good Catholic all her life.  She had made her First Communion, was confirmed, knew the Catechism backwards and forwards, and had even considered a religious vocation.  She was the favorite of Sister Mary Joseph who had seen a spiritual light shining in the young girl and who took it upon her self to shepherd that gift and offer it to God. 

Sister Mary Joseph had become more than just a spiritual advisor.  She was a friend and a soulmate.  The two young women were often seen together on the grounds of the church, walking in a nearby park, or having tea in the rectory.  Pastor Phillips had encouraged the friendship, for it was not every day that someone from his parish expressed an interest in the religious life.

Tongues, however, began to wag among the parishioners of St. Maurice - the women were spending entirely too much time together, and such intimacy, regardless of of its spiritual character, was a dangerous thing within the context of celibacy. 

There may or may not have been anything to the rumors, but when Pembroke went away to school, Sister Mary Joseph was disconsolate and was seen praying before the statue of Our Lady at all hours.  The devout took this as a sign of devotion and hopeful prayer.  The skeptical knew that Sister's heart had been broken. 

 

Pembroke was sorry to leave home and the warm embraces of her confidante, but moved on quickly to secular academic life.  She became the Poet Laureate of Miss Peabody's, a proper girls' school in the Berkshires, and was a published author by the time she graduated.  A polymath, the young woman was equally talented in mathematics and music, and won the prestigious Fallon Award to MIT where she would pursue her interest in number theory and play first cello in the school orchestra, a seat which virtually guaranteed her a place in the Boston Symphony. 

Despite the many secular distractions of her academic career she never lost her spiritual way, attended mass regularly, and prayed for guidance.  She had always been particularly moved by Christ's beatitudes which seemed to her to be even more important than the Ten Commandments.  They seemed to be at the very heart of civil order, governance, and a considerate society.  Jesus recognized the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers; and mourned for those persecuted - what could be more consistent with the progressive doctrines of compassionate inclusion, pacifism, and concern for the marginalized?

Yet, as she moved through her career in both music and mathematics, she found something unsettling about the beatitudes and their reserved, almost fairy-like goodness. When compared to the almost celestial logic of higher mathematics, its precision, its discipline, and its centrality to all things, these homilies seemed dreamy, treacly affairs of little meaning and less salience.  Consistent with her desire for a more muscular religion - a demanding, intractable one like Islam or the brutal doings of the God of the Old Testament - she increasingly dismissed what she saw as the flaccid, amorphous beliefs of her liberal classmates.

 

Newton and Bach were her gods, perfectly aligned and commensurate, models of intellectual precision and masterful insight.  There was such a thing as intellectual purity in the world, intellect unbothered by treacly notions of good, only the bars and equations of genius. 

The politics which so consumed the MIT and Harvard campuses during her stay in Cambridge were, as the English philosopher Edmund Carpenter once noted, 'a dance of chicanery', a tormented sorcery of 'the unenabled'. He, well before Pembroke or any of her likeminded colleagues, understood that such revelry was no more than emotional tomfoolery.  The universe was not a place for the faint of heart or the whimsical. 

Life had its givens, said Carpenter, and none of them favored the righteously inclined. War was the most human of activities, for it was an expression of human nature on the largest scale.  Human nature was innate, immutable, and undeniable; and although not pretty assured the survival of the species. 

Pembroke, with her highly attuned musical ear, winced at the discordance, the dissonance of the airy, idealistic, Utopian notions she heard around her.  Rooted in mathematical rigor, and a student of history, she not only disagreed with the nostrums bandied about, but hated them.  They were nonsensical. 

Her post-graduate education and internship at the Boston Symphony only consolidated her thinking - an intellectual cosmology which was hard and fast, unequivocal, and settled; and it was only when she moved to Washington, invited by the administration to join a select team at Los Alamos National Laboratories and pursue her interest in abstract mathematics, did the final piece of her intellectual puzzle fit.  She would be working on the same august path of Feynman, Bohr, Einstein, and Oppenheimer.  She would not be building another bomb, but would go much farther, for her work would approach infinity. 

She was working in the national interest as these scientists had been.  The universal, immutable principles of mathematics and physics, the ineluctable quality of human nature, and the expression of indomitable human will would be one. 'Blessed are the meek' was a thing of the past. 

Her faith did not go the way of the beatitudes, for there was something equally universal about religion, some ineffable, unexplainable, unverifiable, bus immanent piece that somehow accounted for everything.  It was just this sugary adaptation of such universal power which had at first tempted her but then put her off entirely.  Let God be, she said. 

All this, of course, was at the heart and soul of conservatism, a political philosophy never given to febrile assumptions and hopeful caveats.  One which looked at immutability with equanimity; at the inevitable rerun of history at its bloodiest without turning away; at the amorality, the pure randomness of existence without despair.  

Pembroke was reminded of Athanasius, an early Church historian, who among a cadre of brilliant theoretical philosophers understood the sophisticated brilliance of the Trinity.  He knew that whatever religious implications of that idea there might be, it was its sheer intellectual, logical, unfathomable genius that resonated. 

 

If there were ever a modern pantheon recalling the brilliance of the Early Church fathers, she would be in it.