Clarke’s The Star: The Manifest and the Latent
Famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps best known for his work 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he also authored many other works of literature, novel and otherwise.
Written in 1967, Clarke’s short story The Star explores what space travel would be like for a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and astrophysicist a thousand years in our future. It is a first-person narrative written like a diary entry. It establishes a melancholy tone right off the bat as the Jesuit scientist explores his crisis of faith, attempting to reconcile the destruction he sees exploring the ruins of a civilization whose star went supernova and the goodness and glory of God. At the end, the struggle is explained in full as the speaker reveals that this supernova had been the star of Bethlehem that marked the birth of Jesus (Clarke 4). By looking at this work in conjunction with St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, at least two different meanings can be gleaned from this work: a manifest, surface level story about the struggle of a Jesuit priest to understand an all knowing, all loving God’s plan and an underlying discussion about the existence of morality and the goodness of humanity.
Born in 1225, Thomas Aquinas was a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher famous for several different works, but most prominently the Summa Theologica which was “designed to organize systematically and to explicate all of Christian theology and philosophy,” (Aquinas 179). His exploration of multiple ways to interpret sacred scripture, called biblical exegesis, has remained relevant in literary theory today.
The tenth article of the Summa Theologica responded to the objection that scripture could not have multiple meanings by saying, “nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by scripture in its literal sense” (Aquinas 183). Thus, he explains there are multiple levels: literal or historical and tropological or moral among
others, which all point to the literal truth (Aquinas 179). In Clarke’s short story The Star, the literal, manifest content is that of a Jesuit astrophysicist fighting to maintain belief in the goodness of God amidst tragedy.
By the end of the first three sentences of The Star, the unnamed Jesuit astrophysicist, who from here on shall be referred to simply as the Jesuit, is amidst a crisis of faith on his spaceship: “Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled” (Clarke 1). At the most basic, textual level, it can already be seen that the Jesuit is not grappling with faith in the existence of a god, but belief in the goodness of the Christian God. It does not take long for the Jesuit to yet again reference his faith when he quotes the motto of his order, “Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam,” which in Latin means “For the Greater Glory of God” (Clarke 2). He is secure in his belief that God is real. However, his faith in God’s goodness has been challenged.
In the beginning of this short work, Clarke utilizes positive, often dramatic, words to reference the supernova left behind that the science vessel went to investigate. The Jesuit states, “When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the Galaxy” (Clarke 2). Similar language is used in the surrounding paragraphs. They are the reminiscences of the Jesuit before he learned the truth of the supernova they were investigating; the supernova that wiped out a beautiful civilization was in fact the star that heralded the birth of Jesus, his savior (Clarke 4).
The bits by the Jesuit after this discovery use words such as “shrunken miser” and “passing fires … seared its rocks” (Clarke 2). This is a much heavier and more dismal view by the Jesuit as seen in the word choices by Clarke. In the final paragraph, the reader finally learns what the Jesuit had learned which caused his crisis of faith of the goodness of God. “Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” (Clarke 4).
Literary scholar Patricia Ferrara writes, “the Jesuit leaves [the question of newfound estrangement from nature] unresolved because he sees a comfortingly subjective nature as emotionally irreconcilable to morality, requiring a cold-hearted acceptance of man’s right to primacy in the universe,” (156). I would argue that the final quote referenced in the previous paragraph, in which the Jesuit struggles to justify God’s use of the supernova to become the star of Bethlehem, in fact contradicts Ferrara’s finding.
It is not that the Jesuit accepts man’s right to primacy in the universe. In fact, the Jesuit has not yet reached an understanding he is comfortable with: “… there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached that point at last,” (Clarke 4). Instead, though the Jesuit believes deeply in the existence of his creator and sees no conflict between faith and science, he does not have an explanation on the goodness of God in relation to his findings. The author, however, layers latent meaning into the text that could suggest there is more going on.
Where the Jesuit grappled with God’s morality, the text also grapples with the existence of morality in humanity. One example of this is the Jesuit’s description of the actions and demeanor of his fellow scientists aboard his vessel. He describes one of them, Dr. Chandler, as being a “notorious atheist” (Clarke 1). Moments later Clarke gives Chandler a bit of dialogue
about the universe. “But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me,” Chandler says, about the existence of a god. But the Jesuit is unperturbed at this point. When he has found the wreckage of the civilization, however, Clarke again uses these other scientists to explore the question of whether morality exists at all: I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God. (Clarke 4)
While the Jesuit continues in the next few sentences to protest the lack of the existence of a God, Clarke’s placement of this statement by the scientists so close to the closing words of the story, especially amidst the Jesuit’s own crisis of faith, says otherwise. This is especially true when examining some of the other language used throughout.
When describing the surviving artifacts of the long-dead civilization, Clarke continuously puts down humanity while lifting up the beauty of the aliens. “Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate,” the Jesuit says (Clarke 3). The beautiful treasures left behind paint a picturesque image of the civilization, that of enlightenment, plenty, and bountiful joy. Innocence that humanity lacks amidst these glories is also implied. “They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs,” (Clarke 3).
Contrasted with this are the Jesuit and his crew which are “three thousand light years from the Vatican,” and thus are capable of intragalactic travel. The Jesuit, and Clarke through
him, poses the question, “Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?” (Clarke 3). Clarke doesn’t seem to have a very favorable view of humanity.
On the last page, the one which sticks most firmly in the mind of the reader, he goes even further. “It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?” (Clarke 4). Here the Jesuit’s surface level crisis of faith in an all-loving God mirrors the crisis many have at believing in a singular moral and meaningful life in general. The reader must go a step beyond the text to understand that more is at stake than the Jesuit’s faith, and Clarke’s use of the science fiction genre mixed with Christian theology is a perfect vehicle for this.
Sixteenth century critic Sir Philip Sidney writes in his work The Defense of Poesy, that poetry succeeds in what both the historian and the philosopher attempt, and yet does it better than either, because it manages to reach the public. “But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs; the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher,” (Sidney 263). As an author of science fiction, Clarke is doing the same. The Star is a genre piece, designed to be read by the masses. And yet even so, he is teaching more than one deep moral truth. Ferrara reiterates this in her essay: “It could be argued that “The Star” is important because it presents Clarke’s idea of God, and much attention has focused on this … However, the story presents no definite image of God, but rather a challenge to the morality of viewing God and the universe as man-centered … Other critics interpret the work variously,” (157).
In that way, Thomas Aquinas’ assertion that there is both a surface level understanding to a story and a deeper level of understanding in the author’s text is made true. The Jesuit states
towards the end, “They could have taught us so much: why were they destroyed?” (Clarke 4).
Clarke himself is getting across a philosophical teaching just by writing these words. However, the concept of needing to teach a moral lesson with the latent content, as Aquinas claimed in the Summa Theologica about scripture, is not true in The Star
When recorded by the Jesuit aboard a spaceship, the story is about a civilization destroyed by an all-knowing God to become the Star of Bethlehem which “blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn,” to herald the coming of his son into the world (Clarke 4). When read by an increasingly relativist readership in the 21st century, the idea that God purposefully caused that supernova, killing the civilization, is easily rejected because many people do not even believe in a god. Regardless, those final lines manage to merge both the philosophical and the historical, reaching through boundaries as Sidney said only poetry could. It seeks to teach something beyond the textual surface about futility, and sadness, and perhaps even what humanity should become that it has not yet reached. “Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” (Clarke 4).
Works Cited
Aquinas. “Excerpts from Summa Theologica.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch and et al., Norton, 2010, pp. 177-184.
Clarke, Arthur C. “The Star.” The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. Signet/NAL, 1974. https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf.
PDF file
Ferrara, Patricia. “‘Nature’s Priest’: Establishing Literary Criteria for Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Star.’” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 148–158. MLA International Bibliography via EBSCOhost, doi:10.3828/extr.1987.28.2.148.
Sidney, Sir Philip. “In Defense of Poesy.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch and et al., Norton, 2010, pp. 251-263.