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God after Einstein
This page intentionally left blank
 God after
Einstein
What’s Really Going
On in the Universe?

John F. Haught

New Haven & London

 Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2022 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business,
or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office)
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Set in Bulmer type by Newgen North America, Austin, Texas.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944045

isbn 978-0-300-25119-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Evelyn
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

introduction 1

one
God 6

two
Eternity 18

three
Time 34

four
Mystery 49

five
Meaning 63

six
Origins 80

seven
Life 95

eight
Thought 113

vii
viii Contents

nine
Freedom 129

ten
Faith 144

eleven
Hope 155

twelve
Compassion 171

thirteen
Caring for Nature 184

c o n c l u s i o n 196

Notes 203
Index 225
 Acknowledgments

i w a n t t o t h a n k m y f r i e n d and colleague Charles A.

O’Connor III for reading early versions of the manuscript and, as always,
for making many helpful comments. I am indebted also to my wife, Evelyn,
and my sister Elaine for their indispensable advice. Thanks to Jennifer
Banks and Abbie Storch at Yale University Press for their skillful manage-
ment of the publication process. Finally, special thanks to Mary Pasti for
her careful corrections and exceptionally fine editing talents. It has been a
great pleasure working with her in completing this book.

ix
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God after Einstein
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

w h e n w e l o o k a t a n o b j e c t , it has a background, and the

background makes a difference in how we see the object. For example, when
we study a painting in a museum, it has a solemnity it would not have if it
were hanging in a basement or a garage. Our awareness of the background
is only tacit, but it makes a difference in how we see the object.
Throughout most of Western history the background of human life,
thought, and worship has been a stationary universe. From one age to the
next people lived, mated, worked, suffered, prayed, and died against a cos-
mic background perceived as motionless. The heavens seemed to rotate in
a perfect circle around the earth, and planets wandered around a bit, but
the celestial canopy stayed mostly the same while the earth loitered pas-
sively in its assigned place. When people thought about meaning, virtue,
suffering, death, and God, they took for granted the dependable profile of
a fixed universe.
But four centuries ago, thanks to science, the old frame began to
splinter, and the cosmos started to stir. Over the past two hundred years
the formerly motionless universe burst into the foreground and began to
command our focal attention. The earth turned out to have a history, and
life sprang from a fount too deep in time to fathom. During the past cen-
tury, again thanks to science, a previously unnoticed 13.8 billion-year-old
cosmic story spilled forth, carrying everything along with it.
What does the new scientific cosmic story mean for our understand-
ing of God? The present book is a response to this question. Theologi-
cal awareness has for centuries been woven into pictures of an immobile
universe. Who can deny that even today the sensibilities of most religious
people, and not just Christians, are most at home with a prescientific
understanding of the natural world? Theology has moved only slowly and

1
2 Introduction

often reluctantly away from the ancient images of a static universe in which
our faith-traditions came to birth. Even though many Christians, including
popes, have conceded the correctness of evolutionary biology and scientific
cosmology, our spiritual lives remain fastened to an ideal of timelessness
stamped into our souls long before the coming of modern science. I believe
the religious instincts of most people, including the scientifically educated,
remain mostly out of sync with our new narrative of the natural world.
No doubt, scientific ideas have had at least some influence on mod-
ern theology. After Galileo and Newton, for example, theologians began
thinking of God along the lines of a supernatural mechanic who physically
determines the course of cosmic events for all eternity. Evolutionary biol-
ogy, however, made it increasingly difficult to detect signs of special divine
creativity and providential design amid all the meanderings of life, evolu-
tion, and human history. So, in its search for a more secure setting, theol-
ogy went looking for God in the scientifically inaccessible interior lives of
human subjects. Christian spirituality still remains focused less on what
is going on in the universe than on the hidden drama of working out one’s
personal salvation in the presence of a deity disconnected from time and
history. Even today the lure of timelessness allows the faith of millions to
remain otherworldly and privatized, untouched by the long passage of cos-
mic time.
With few exceptions, the full reality of time has yet to be taken seri-
ously by experts in spirituality. A feeling for deep cosmic time is also virtu-
ally absent from academic theology and suburban homilies. In this book,
however, I seek an understanding of God commensurate with the new un-
derstanding of nature and time that recent cosmology—the scientific study
of the universe as a whole—has introduced into the world of thought. After
Einstein’s revelations, a fundamental question for theology is What is really
going on in the universe?
I love the natural sciences and have never thought of them as contra-
dicting my religious beliefs. My awareness of scientific discoveries, how-
ever, has made a difference in how I have come to think about God. What,
then, do I mean when I recite the Nicene Creed with my fellow Christians
today? Can I hold on to an ancient, prescientific confession of faith while
Introduction 3

fully embracing contemporary scientific understanding? How, for exam-

ple, can I reconcile my belief in God with evolutionary biology, especially
since the latter has led so many other science-lovers to atheism?1
I have addressed the question of evolution and faith in previous books,
especially God after Darwin.2 Here, though, I want to widen my earlier
inquiries by asking what God means after Albert Einstein (1879–1955). I
have come to believe that theology may rightly address the troublesome
questions about God and evolution only if it first takes into account the uni-
verse that science began unveiling in the early twentieth century. The story
of life, we can now see, is part of an immensely longer and more nuanced
history of nature than Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and his early followers
knew about. The question of what’s going on in the story of life is now sub-
sidiary to the question of what’s going on in the story of the universe.
Most scientists and theologians have so far failed to look at evolution-
ary biology in terms of its wider cosmic setting. Yet both the journey of life
and the religious pilgrimages of humans look new once we tie them back
into the larger story of the physical universe. While Einstein was develop-
ing ideas on relativity, he was not yet aware that the cosmos he was sketch-
ing mathematically is undergoing a long birth-process. He needed the help
of other scientists, such as Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), Edwin Hubble
(1889–1955), and George Gamow (1904–1968), to start laying out in more
detail the new story to which his calculations were pointing. Nevertheless,
since it is especially his science of relativity that forms the underpinnings of
our new story of the universe, I am titling this book God after Einstein.3
The following chapters differ from previous reflections on Einstein
and God.4 Most of the literature on this topic so far has focused on three
questions arising from Einstein’s scientific work. First, does Big Bang cos-
mology entail the existence of God? It was Einstein’s general theory of
relativity that laid out the main theoretical foundations of the view that the
universe began with a Big Bang. Does this theory give scientific plausibility
to biblical accounts of an initial creation of the world by God?5 A second
question, one that I find more distracting than promising, arises from Ein-
stein’s notion of time-dilation. Relativity predicts that time slows down or
speeds up relative to the curvature of gravitational fields. Since relativity
4 Introduction

allows for time in one gravitational setting to pass faster or slower than in
others, can we now fall back on the elasticity of time’s passage to line up
the biblical week of creation in the book of Genesis with the immensely
longer sequence of stages depicted in contemporary scientific cosmology?
Does relativity allow in principle that billions of years to us humans may be
only “one day” for God, so that Genesis may now be read as scientifically
factual?6 Closely related to the second question is the third: What does the
nonsimultaneity of special relativity—that there is no universally standard
“now”—mean for how and when God gets to know what is going on in
the cosmos?7 A lot of theological speculation has surrounded these three
questions, but in my opinion they are almost trivial when compared to other
themes associated with Einstein that I will be visiting in these pages. More
often than not, the three questions just mentioned, especially the second,
presuppose questionable, often literalist, styles of biblical interpretation.
Theology, I believe, can do better than this.
The point of theology, as I understand it, is to explore the “reasons
for our hope” (1 Peter 3:15). After Einstein, theology cannot avoid asking
whether the scientific discovery that the cosmos is a long story with inter-
esting outcomes may in some way give us new reasons for hope— or per-
haps just the opposite. In 1916, Einstein had not yet fully understood that
his impressive theory of gravity was in principle overthrowing every an-
cient, medieval, and modern idea of an immobile universe. He did not yet
realize that his general theory of relativity was bringing to light an immense
and still-unfinished cosmic story now estimated to be around 13.8 billion
years old.
Although Einstein did not intend to do so, he has given theology a
whole new point of view from which to ask about meaning, truth, and God.
So far, both contemporary intellectual culture and traditional Christian
theology have found little, if any, significance, much less reasons for hope,
in the long journey that nature has been on in its temporal coming-to-be.
In these pages, however, I shall be arguing—with one eye on Einstein’s sci-
ence and another on his personal opinions about religion—that what has
been going on in the universe is nothing less than a great awakening and
that this awakening, if we examine it carefully, comes with good reasons for
Introduction 5

hope. Not least among these reasons is that the universe has recently given
rise to inquiring minds, such as the one with which you will be examining
and criticizing these pages.
Although I am a lay Christian (Roman Catholic) theologian, I am
writing not only for my fellow believers but also for anyone who wonders
whether there are good reasons for hope and whether science after Einstein
has anything to contribute to that nearly universal question. This book,
then, is a contribution to the more general contemporary conversation on
the relationship of science to religion. Even though my starting point is that
of a Christian, my inquiry intersects significantly with questions that arise
from many other quarters as well. I trust that my invitation to have Einstein
accompany me at least part of the way in the following investigations will
also draw the attention, if not always the consent, of scientists, philoso-
phers, and other admirers of the great physicist.
 o ne

God

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must

have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God.
—Albert Einstein
The main source of the present day conflicts between the spheres
of religion and science lies in the concept of a personal God.
—Albert Einstein
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven
and earth, of all things, visible and invisible.
—Nicene Creed

o u r u n i v e r s e i s s t i l l c o m i n g into being. The most impor-

tant discovery scientists have made during the past two centuries, in my
opinion, is that the cosmos is a story still being told. Research in geology,
biology, chemistry, physics, and astrophysics shows that our universe has
been on a long journey, one that apparently is far from over. But where
is it going? Does the journey have a goal? What is really going on in the
universe?
And what about God? What can ancient ideas of a divine creator pos-
sibly mean if the physical world has an unpredictable future? Given our
new scientific understanding of a world in process, what do divine creativ-
ity, providence, and redemption mean? Do they have any meaning at all? Is
it reasonable for scientists and those who accept scientific truths to believe
in a personal God or “look forward to . . . the life of the world to come”?1
Above all, what does it mean for our understanding of God that the uni-
verse is still aborning and that it has shown itself to be a drama of gradual

6
God 7

awakening? And what should we be doing with our lives here and now if
the universe is still a work in progress?
Albert Einstein had provocative thoughts not only about the universe
but also about God and other topics of theological interest. My focus in this
book is on the idea of God after Einstein, but since Einstein’s science also
changes our understanding of everything else, I want to engage with him
on the related notions of eternity, time, mystery, meaning, cosmic origins,
life, mind, freedom, faith, hope, and love—and even on what his science
means for contemporary ecological concerns. I will also have occasion to
comment on the problem of evil in Einstein’s universe.
Early in the twentieth century the great physicist published his fa-
mous “field equations” dealing with the universe and the implications of
gravity. His mathematics suggested that the universe is not the same from
age to age. At first, Einstein did not believe what his own figures were tell-
ing him, but ever since 1916, when he published his general theory of rela-
tivity, cosmologists have demonstrated that nature is an ongoing epic, with
new and surprising outcomes popping up and breaking out for billions of
years. Until quite recently we could not have guessed that the universe has
been on such a long, wild adventure, and we had no idea that in all prob-
ability it will undergo future changes far beyond the ones that have already
come to pass. Surely other surprises await.
Aware now that the universe is still being born, science has given the-
ology a fertile new framework for thinking about the meaning of everything,
including faith in God. It matters not only to science but also to theology
that the natural world, after giving rise to life and mind, still seems far from
finished. Nature—the term comes from the Latin word for “birth”—is just
barely emerging from the dark womb of its obscure past to an unpredict-
able future. The picture of nature as waking up from a long sleep calls for a
new understanding of nature’s God.
This book, I have already warned you, is a work of theology. Gen-
erally speaking, theology is the quest for reasons to hope in spite of the
threats of meaninglessness, suffering, and death. Christian theology, which
is my own point of departure, is systematic reflection on the meaning and
8 God

truth of faith in the God whom Christians identify as the “Father” of Jesus
of Nazareth. It is this God, not a faceless prime mover or efficient cause,
that Christians officially believe to be both the creator of all things and the
imperishable liberator of all finite beings from the fate of nothingness. In
this book I want to ask what the God of Jesus means to us if we think in
depth about the Big Bang universe whose general outlines sprang from the
mind of Einstein.
So far, theologians have paid only halfhearted attention to the scien-
tific news, arriving with Einstein, that the universe is still being born. To
be sure, many of them agree that life has evolved and that the universe has
had a long history, but a large majority have yet to reflect earnestly on what
the new cosmic story means for our spiritual lives. Most Christian thought
has settled on religious ideas that fit more comfortably into prescientific
pictures of the world.
I am interested here in what the idea of God may mean to Christians
after Einstein. Most of what I have to say in these pages, however, should be
of interest to Jews and Muslims as well. For that matter, what I have to say
here may mean something new to anyone who wonders about the religious
meaning of the new scientific cosmic story. Instead of “no God,” as scien-
tific skeptics propose, we may now look into the universe after Einstein
for a “new God.” This God will still be one who creates, heals, and offers
reasons for hope, as the Abrahamic traditions have taught. But theology
after Einstein will now have to undergo an unprecedented self-revision by
proportioning its sense of God to the vast cosmic horizons that science has
recently brought into view.2
Scientifically educated people nowadays often suspect that the physi-
cal universe has outgrown all of our inherited images of a deity. For many
sincere thinkers the ancestral portraits of God no longer evoke the senti-
ment of worship. To satisfy their native spiritual longings, they slip their
souls inside the vast cosmos itself rather than bow down before the ancient
gods. For them, nature is big enough.
But is it really? What if the universe is waking up to something in-
finitely larger and deeper than itself ? In producing the human species,
the cosmos has given birth to the kind of awakening we call thought, and
God 9

thought has given rise to increasingly new questions, including What is the
meaning of it all? After Einstein, theology, of all disciplines, cannot help
being interested in the question of what is going on in the universe. Sci-
ence has now given theology the opportunity to think fresh thoughts about
religion and God. Einstein’s universe also calls for new thoughts about eter-
nity, time, meaning, and other themes of interest to the world’s religious
traditions. Other disciplines provide ways to think about these topics too,
of course, and I have no wish to deny their importance. But science af-
ter Einstein has given us a whole new understanding of the universe. We
now have the opportunity for a cosmological perspective on all religious
phenomena. Here my focus is on the question of what Christian thoughts
about God might look like if we connect them to the new scientific story of
a still-awakening universe.

Religion and God

People who believe in God belong to the wide world of religion. We may
understand religion, generally speaking, as the human awakening to inde-
structible rightness. As religions evolved, they increasingly featured a sense
that beyond, within, and deeper than our immediate experience there exists
something imperishably right. Religion is a basic confidence that beyond
the wrongness of suffering, perishing, moral evil, and death lies an elusive
but enduring rightness. Religion is trust— or faith—that this mysterious
rightness is more persistent, more important, more real, and more healing
than anything given in immediate experience. Awakening to indestructible
rightness is an adventure that humans share with no other species of life.3
Religion first emerged on Earth, at least vaguely, with reflective self-
consciousness and the capacity for symbolism. Religious aspiration was
already stirring in the most elementary human capacity to distinguish
rightness from wrongness. During the course of human history the sense of
indestructible rightness became more and more explicit. Starting around
800 BCE, a few sensitive religious innovators, at separate places on our
planet, almost simultaneously began distinguishing, more deliberately than
ever before, between the wrongness of suffering, moral evil, and death, on
10 God

the one hand, and an imperishable transcendent order of liberating right-

ness, on the other. The point of authentic human existence, their religions
agreed, was to attune one’s life and actions to an imperishable rightness—
later identified in Christian theology as God and in Christian philosophy
as infinite being, meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty.4
Here I am using the encompassing term “rightness” not in a narrowly
moral sense but as a stand-in for the whole slate of incorruptible values
that serve as human ideals. Our religious ancestors gave culturally specific
names to the elusive rightness that was calling them to live truthfully, grate-
fully, humbly, peacefully, and compassionately. For example, Buddhism in
India and later in China aspired to right wisdom, right action, and right
mindfulness. Buddhists did not talk about God, but they had names such
as dharma for indestructible rightness. In China, Laozi called it the dao.
In India, religious sages referred to it as brahman. In Greek culture, Plato
called it the Good, and Epicurus named it logos. In Israel, the prophets as-
sociated indestructible rightness (Yahweh) with justice (tzedek, tzedekah,
mishpat). The right way to live, they preached, is “to do justice, and to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”5 Later, Jesus of Nazareth
discovered his own religious identity in the company of the great prophetic
preachers of justice. For him the rightness sought by his ancestors was
now arriving anew in the Kingdom of God. Through the power of God’s
“spirit” a new epoch of justice and compassion was now dawning, a reign
of rightness that would have no end.
Jesus’s and Einstein’s Jewish ancestors had developed their sense of
transcendent rightness from long traditions of storytelling: stories about
the call of Abraham to move his family into a new future; the Exodus from
Egypt under the leadership of Moses; the Hebrew people’s struggle for lib-
eration from slavery, genocide, and insignificance; the nation’s pilgrimage
to a land overflowing with new possibilities; the establishment of God’s
covenant; Israel’s mission to be a light for all the nations; the sending out of
God’s spirit to renew the face of the earth; the powerful words of prophets
urging their people to remain hospitable to strangers, to be faithful to their
God, to work for justice, and never give up hope. By telling and retelling
stories about these events and encouragements, a new ideal of rightness
God 11

came to birth in Israel, one that is unique among the world’s many religious
traditions: Israelite religion came to associate indestructible rightness with
the capacity to make and keep promises. In doing so, it opened up a new
future for the people and gave to their religion a hope-filled interest in the
dimension of what is not-yet. The motif of God’s not-yet-ness will be of
great interest to us throughout these pages.
In the Bible what is indestructible is God’s promise, on which all of
reality is believed to rest everlastingly. The universe is shaped not so much
by a principle of fairness as by a limitless font of fidelity, care, mercy, and
superabundant generosity. The “word” of God is a word of promise. God
(Yahweh or Elohim) is the name the Israelites gave to the one who makes
and keeps promises, who will always be faithful, and who expects uncondi-
tional trust. God is the liberator whose word opens up a new future even in
the face of what seem to be dead ends. The sense of promise gives people
reasons to hope. The “right” kind of religious life, accordingly, begins with
trust that God’s promises will be fulfilled. Christians, too, are committed to
living within the horizon of promise and to keep seeking reasons for hope.6
They associate their understanding of God, however, not only with the
Israelite hope but also with the generous, just, faithful, promising, and lib-
erating deity that Jesus of Nazareth referred to as his Father.
Christianity’s belief in God is one instance of the perennial human
longing to link our fragile existence to a rightness that is immune to per-
ishing. Faith in God reflects a widely shared human conviction that only
a connection to what is indestructible can relieve our anxiety about death
and give permanent meaning to our lives. This is why the Abrahamic tra-
ditions have protected at all costs the notion of divine everlastingness. Yet
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all profess, in different ways, that their
imperishable God has somehow intersected with the perishable world of
time. For Christians, God has even “become flesh.” The entrance of God
into time is the main reason for their hope.
If God remained altogether outside time, then suffering, anxiety, and
death would remain unhealed. But if God gets tied too closely to time and
transience, will not rightness itself become subject to the threat of non-
being? Can divine rightness be transcendent and indestructible, on the
12 God

one hand, but also caring enough to merge intimately with time, on the
other? Whatever its relation to time, the question of whether time is real
is central to theological inquiry. If, as many scientists still assume, time is
not real, then the Christian belief that God is “incarnate” in time cannot be
of much consolation or consequence. But if time is real and God has come
into time, as Christians believe, how can God be indestructible? By wres-
tling with Einstein’s understanding of time and eternity I believe a deeper
understanding of both God and time may emerge, one that gives a promis-
ing direction to our quest for reasons to hope.
Let us experiment, therefore, with the thought that the indestructible
rightness to which faith points is healing and liberating, not because God
is outside of time or saves us from time, but because—in a way that I shall
gradually develop—God is somehow not-yet. It is because God is not-yet
that there is always room for hope. It is because God is not-yet that the
passage of time is not a threat but the carrying out of a promise. Thinking
about God as not-yet may sound strange. For Christians, after all, “God is,
was, and ever shall be.” Everything is encircled presently by divine care.
The world is in God’s hands. Let us seek God’s face. God is everywhere.
God is both alpha and omega.
Yes, but after Einstein, God is less alpha than omega.7 God is less
“up above” and more “up ahead.” If God were pure presence, there would
be no room for a future to come or a promise to be fulfilled. If time is real
and if the world is to have a future, divine presence must now in some way
be restrained in order to make room for time and creation. Religious peo-
ple usually want God to be an eternal presence, however, because time is
terrifying. Popular piety has led people to look for ways of escaping the
rushing waters of time and the relentless perishing of moments. Believers
and theologians have preferred a God who is an “eternal now” rather than
a “yet-to-come.” In tune with ancient Platonic thought, their minds and
imaginations have associated God with a haven of timelessness where per-
manence quietly calms their fears and saves them from the uncertainties of
living in time and history.
Through the many centuries that have passed since the death of
Jesus, Christians, more often than not, have tried to keep the indestructible
God 13

rightness they associate with this man from getting tied too closely to the
corrosiveness of time that made it possible for him to suffer and die. Their
quest for timelessness has led them to locate God in an “eternal present,”
immune to temporal passage. Apart from a timeless God, everything is
eventually lost, or so they have assumed.
Yet Christian theologians have never felt completely comfortable
separating eternity so sharply from time. The doctrine of the Trinity—that
God is not just Father but also Son and Holy Spirit— expresses the early
Christian longing to preserve both the eternity and the temporality of God.
According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus was murdered in time by crucifixion,
but he remains everlastingly “consubstantial” (one in being) with “God the
Father.” Christians believe, then, that in the man Jesus indestructible right-
ness has come into time, but in such a way that the passage of time cannot
vanquish it. This belief requires, however, a special understanding of the
meaning of eternity and the meaning of time. In the following two chapters
I will reflect on these meanings in conversation with Einstein.
Christians believe that in Jesus the wrongness of death and evil is de-
feated forever, not by God’s abolishing time, but by God’s making time in-
ternal to the divine life. In Christianity the image of a forsaken, condemned,
and executed man is stamped forever onto its sense of indestructible right-
ness. When Christians claim that Jesus is the Son of God and that the Son
has existed “before all ages,” they are claiming that what is indestructibly
right is self-emptying love. They trust that selfless love is what creates “the
heavens and the earth.” Instead of pulling the created world safely away
from time, however, infinite love receives the temporal world, in all its am-
biguity, into itself. In Christian understanding, God has conquered wrong-
ness not by negating time but by gathering every moment of time’s passage
into the divine life—where nothing is lost.8
This is not how religious people have usually thought about inde-
structible rightness. As theologian John Macquarrie writes: “That God
should come into history, that he should come in humility, helplessness and
poverty—this contradicted everything . . . that people had believed about
the gods. It was the end of the power of deities, the Marduks, the Jupiters
. . . yes, and even of Yahweh, to the extent that he had been misconstrued
14 God

on the same model.”9 The belief that God internalizes what happens in
irreversible time cannot be thought of as marginal to Christianity’s under-
standing of indestructible rightness. The idea of such a vulnerable God,
however, finds no comfortable place in the history of religious conscious-
ness, including that of Jews, Muslims—and even most Christians.
The God of Christian faith is one who, instead of being a governor,
dominator, or dictator, undergoes a kenosis (that is, a pouring out) of infi-
nite divine love into the temporal world, as manifested in the self-surrender
of Jesus on the cross. Christian theology, therefore, is obliged not only to
acknowledge but also to highlight the divine kenosis, referred to by a recent
pope as “a grand and mysterious truth for the human mind, which finds it
inconceivable that suffering and death can express a love which gives itself
and seeks nothing in return.”10 This kenotic image of God also transforms
the whole notion of divine power. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann re-
marks that the God of Christian faith “is not recognized by his power and
glory in the world and in the history of the world, but through his helpless-
ness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.” Moltmann adds
that “the gods of the power and riches of the world and world history then
belong on the other side of the cross, for it was in their name that Jesus was
crucified. The God of freedom, the human God, no longer has godlike rul-
ers as his political representatives.”11
The kenosis of God is the ultimate reason why time is real and God
is not-yet. Divine presence is humbly withheld to make room for time and
hence the opportunity for something other than God to come into being.
Ultimately it is because God is not-yet that there is room for time and the
coming of a new future. When I talk about God in this book, then, I am
thinking of the strange deity who identifies fully with the self-emptying,
crucified Christ and, by extension, with the struggling and suffering of all
of life—the God who embraces and conquers transience by bringing all of
time, not to a finish, but to a fulfillment. While I want to take into account
as far as possible the experience of other religious traditions, I am obliged
to start with the scandalous Christian belief that God is vulnerable and de-
fenseless love. I cannot casually pass over the fundamental Christian belief
God 15

that God has chosen to be identified with a crucified man who was fully
subject to the terrifying irreversibility of time.12
Christian theologians have found it hard to understand how divinity
can be indestructible if God, having become incarnate in Christ, undergoes
suffering and death in time. For if God becomes fully incarnate in time,
how can God be indestructible? And how can divine indestructibility be
right—that is, truly healing—if it fails to share fully in the passage of time
and, along with it, life’s struggling, suffering, and perishing?
The question of time—and hence the need to bring in Einstein’s
ideas—is of vital importance to theology as well as cosmology. Early Chris-
tians wrestled with the question of God and time by asking what it means
to call Jesus the Son of God. How can indestructible goodness be identified
with a crucified outlaw? they wondered. One way of resolving the para-
dox was to dissolve time into eternity. Some early Christian theologians
attempted to save the everlastingness of God by assuming that Jesus was
merely adopted as God’s Son and was not truly divine. Accordingly, when
Jesus was crucified, he was existing in time, but his timeless divinity alleg-
edly remained undisturbed. God, in this kind of theology, did not enter
into time after all. Another faction of early Christians agreed that Jesus is
divine but that he only seems to have come into the realm of time, perish-
ing, and death. Here again, God does not really suffer but instead remains
timelessly unaffected by change of any sort.
A venerated early Christian writer, Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202), ob-
jected to both of these early attempts to keep God separate from time. He
wrote: “By no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and
immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortal-
ity. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, un-
less, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also
are?”13 Likewise, the Nicene Creed, the fourth-century official codification
of Christian beliefs, decidedly rejects attempts to separate God from our
human experience of diminishment, perishing, and death in time. Jesus,
the Creed insists, really lived in time and died an ignominious death in
time. Yet, throughout, he remained “one in being” with God the Father.14
16 God

The unfading horizon of the not-yet, it seems, is what keeps cosmic

time from being an illusion. And it is faith’s openness to the not-yet that
encourages us humans to live fully within time. Indeed, from a theological
point of view, it is the coming of the future—the always newly arriving not-
yet—rather than an imagined push from the past or a “fall” from eternity,
that accounts ultimately for the reality of time and the reasonableness of
hope. I will develop this (quite biblical) point more fully as we move into
subsequent topics.15
It was Einstein, I want to emphasize here, who demonstrated that the
cosmos can never again be separated from time. Einstein, however, failed
to notice the dramatic implications of linking time and matter together.
Time remained for him a dimension of his geometric understanding of
nature rather than an irreversible narrative flow from past to future. Past,
present, and future were for Einstein geometric facets of a single space-
time universe. As we shall see later, it was his deeply religious love of eter-
nity that persuaded him to absorb time—present, past, and future—into a
standing present (nunc stans). Other scientists helped refine his geometry,
but Einstein balked at the idea that cosmic time is irreversible and therefore
that the universe can be understood as a long and still-unfinished story. He
eventually changed his mind, but only reluctantly.
So we shall have to go beyond Einstein’s personal understanding of
time and eternity. We shall look for divine transcendence not so much in an
eternal present as in an inexhaustible future that is still coming and hence
not yet fully present. We shall look for God not just “back there” or “up
there” but mostly “up ahead”— on the horizon of the not-yet. Indestructible
rightness, in that case, takes the flux of time and whatever happens in time
into itself endlessly and irreversibly. God is not outside of time, but instead
God is the Absolute Future to which the universe is now awakening.16
Einstein was not prepared to accept the irreversible passage of time
as objectively real. He thought our sense of duration was a subjective il-
lusion having little to do with the nature of the universe itself. Not all cos-
mologists agree. An emerging cosmological opinion now gives new realism
to our sense of the passage of time. The physicist Lee Smolin, for example,
says that he has come to believe that “the deepest secret of the universe is
God 17

that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.”17 Once
we acknowledge, in contrast to Einstein, that time is an irreversible passage
of moments, the synthesis of matter and time allows us to realize at last that
the universe is a story rather than a solid, static, and purely geometric state.
This adjustment provides the opportunity for a theological revision of our
sense of divine transcendence as well. After Einstein, the cosmos is not
merely spatial but spatiotemporal. If the world were merely spatial, then
God’s transcendence would mean that in some sense God is “not-here.”
But since the world is a temporal passage, to say that God transcends the
world must mean that in some sense God is not-yet. And if God is not-yet,
there is still room for hope.

Summary
Matter, Einstein discovered, is inseparable from time. For Einstein, how-
ever, our sense of the passage of time is an illusion. But what if time is a
real, irreversible series of moments? Then time is a courier of stories; and
the essence of stories, as we shall see, is to carry meaning. After Einstein,
the universe looks like a story, but does that story have a meaning? Does it
offer reasons for hope? In this book I attempt to answer these questions by
engaging with Einstein on questions about God, eternity, time, and other
important topics.
Christians’ belief in God is part of the perennial human longing to
link our fragile existence to a rightness immune to perishing. Faith in God
reflects a common human conviction that only a connection to what is inde-
structible can relieve our anxiety about death and give permanent meaning
to our lives. This is why the Abrahamic traditions have passionately pro-
tected the notion of divine everlastingness. Yet, as Christianity emphasizes,
indestructible rightness has come into time irreversibly. If God remained
altogether outside of time, then the world—with its perpetual perishing,
suffering, and anxiety—would remain unhealed and without hope. But if
God comes into time, and time flows into God, everything changes.
 tw o

Eternity

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the

lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns
himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
—Albert Einstein
My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of
a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world. In
common terms, one can describe it as “pantheistic” (Spinoza).
—Albert Einstein
. . . and his kingdom will have no end.
—Nicene Creed

a l b e r t e i n s t e i n l o v e d e t e r n i t y more than time. Through-

out his life he failed to see time going anywhere or leading to anything truly
new. Time was a dimension of his spacetime universe, but for Einstein time
was not a stream of moments moving from a fixed past to a new future. Per-
haps his greatest contribution to science was to show that time is part of the
fabric of nature, inseparable from matter itself. But time, he thought, is simply
a geometric dimension of the cosmos, not an irreversible passage. The uni-
verse, to his mind, was not a directional current moving from past to future
but a stationary “block” with no real distinction between past, present, and
future. In his famous disputes with the French philosopher Henri Bergson,
Einstein even insisted that our typical sense of time as an irreversible process
is a “subjective” illusion. Time exists, he agreed, but it does not flow.1
Most of us find the idea of unflowing time hard to accept. A funda-
mental human experience is the one-way passage of time, the fixity of the
past, and the prospect of eventually perishing in the future. For Einstein,

18
Eternity 19

however, time was not going anywhere. It may seem that we are being trans-
ported by time irreversibly from past to future, he allowed, but this im-
pression is an imaginative fiction. Even today many physicists agree with
Einstein. They endorse the notion of a cosmos in which time’s passage is
collapsed by mathematics into a timeless present indistinguishable from
past or future. We live, they say, in a four-dimensional spacetime universe,
but time (the fourth dimension) is not adding up to anything truly new.
This denial that time is a real transition from past to future has made it
hard, if not impossible, for Einstein and other scientists to understand the
cosmos overall as a story of gradual awakening.
Fortunately, not all scientists agree with Einstein on this point. They
are happy to embrace Einstein’s discovery of the inseparability of time and
matter, but they consider our commonsense experience of time’s irrevers-
ibility to be an essential aspect of cosmic reality, by no means an illusion. In
this book I follow the latter interpretation, but not for theological reasons.
Theology, after all, cannot be a source of scientific information, nor can it
adjudicate scientific disputes. I accept the objective reality of irreversible
time because not to do so leads, as we shall see, to intellectual incoherence.
The denial of irreversible time, I believe, is one of many ways to escape
the anxiety of perishing. So Einstein’s block universe is a new version of
an ancient time-denying approach to nature that has snuck down the ages,
misshaping philosophy, science, and Christian theology along the way.
How the suppression of time’s passage has affected science, philosophy,
and theology is a central topic in these pages.
Even after the publication of his works on special and general relativ-
ity (1905–1916), Einstein’s thoughts about time stayed much the same as
before. And yet, by building time into his concept of nature, he unwittingly
opened up a new future for the universe. It is Einstein’s theory of gravity,
as set forth in his general theory of relativity, that provides the mathemati-
cal infrastructure of Big Bang cosmology and of our present sense of the
cosmos as a still-unfinished story. And it is Einstein’s calculations, carefully
interpreted, that, contrary to his own preferences, have set the universe free
to be a drama, one whose secret meaning now lies hidden, not in eternity,
but in the not-yet of irreversible time.
20 Eternity

I refer to the post-Einsteinian universe as unfinished. I am not sug-

gesting that the cosmos is headed toward a predetermined ending but only
that the cosmic process is still under way and the future still open. In his
youth Einstein had taken the world to be eternal and unchanging. In tacit
obedience to his favorite philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), he as-
sumed that nature has been around forever and that the laws governing
it must be equally eternal. Like Spinoza, Einstein was convinced that the
world’s future, no less than its present and past, has been fixed forever.
Although he never claimed to have a scholarly grasp of Spinoza’s thought,
he shared the philosopher’s belief that the universe is both unbegotten and
eternal. By wrapping the cosmos in the classic theological apparel of time-
lessness and necessity, he took it for granted that nature is all there is, that
matter has existed forever, that the laws governing the cosmos are irrevo-
cable, and that the universe simply has to exist.
Einstein was never able to accept the idea of a God who creates the
world freely out of sheer goodness and who allows for its transformation
in time. I believe that Einstein’s love of eternity explains why he was dis-
turbed at the prospect of a universe that undergoes major changes. Even
after other mathematicians had corrected his equations, and after working
astronomers had produced evidence of an expanding universe, Einstein
did not abandon his affection for eternity. While his scientific work was
reconnecting the cosmos to time, he remained personally enchanted with
timelessness. He wanted nature to be eternal, and this longing, in part at
least, is why he could make no place for a beneficent personal God who can
make the world new.
Throughout his lifetime, whenever he spoke of God, as he did on
more than one occasion, Einstein was not thinking of a responsive prin-
ciple of love, fidelity, promise, and redemption distinct from the world,
as the Abrahamic traditions have taught. He was expressing his reverence
for the eternal mystery of a universe whose outer face conceals an unseen
intelligence beneath it all. He relished and reverenced the mysterious fact
that the universe is comprehensible, and that was enough, he thought, to
qualify him as a religious person.
Eternity 21

In writing or speaking about God, Einstein had in mind not an inter-

ested “Father almighty” but the mysterious rational orderliness of nature
that makes scientific inquiry possible. Nor did he hesitate to give the name
“faith” to his trust in nature’s remarkable intelligibility.2 If you look into
the secrets of nature, he said, you will find beneath its surface “something
subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.” True faith consists of “veneration of
this force beyond anything that we can comprehend.” And so, Einstein
concluded, “to that extent I am, in point of fact religious.”3
Einstein’s faith was a “cosmic religious feeling” for the timeless mys-
tery of intelligibility underlying all appearances.4 This feeling was essential
to launching and sustaining the whole scientific enterprise. Faith was not
“belief without evidence,” as many scientific skeptics understand it, but a
firm trust in the world’s underlying comprehensibility.5 Science, Einstein
insisted, cannot get off the ground without faith of this sort. Carrying out a
scientific research project requires a basic human confidence that the vis-
ible universe is the outward manifestation of a mostly invisible comprehen-
sibility. We cannot say why the universe is comprehensible, so we need to
take it on faith. Our minds do not create the universe’s intelligibility but are
instead obedient recipients of it. We can only marvel that the cosmos was
already intelligible long before human minds came along to greet it.
Einstein saw something eternal, almost divine, about the comprehen-
sibility that lies beneath appearances, so he would hardly have called him-
self godless. He believed in what he called Spinoza’s God. Spinoza, how-
ever, had identified God, not with the liberating and responsive God of
the Bible that his Jewish ancestors had worshipped, but with the universe
itself. “God” and “nature,” he had taught, are two words for the same total-
ity. Identifying nature with God is known as pantheism, and Spinoza is its
chief modern representative. Composed of two Greek roots, “pantheism”
means that all (pan) is God (theos). So God is nature and nature is God.
“My views” Einstein admitted, “are near those of Spinoza.”6 Einstein may
not have been a strict pantheist, but like Spinoza, he denied the existence
of any deity who exists independently of nature. Nature is all there is, but it
has a face that makes it look divine.
22 Eternity

The Appeal of Pantheism

Early Christianity, as the Nicene Creed illustrates, uncompromisingly re-
jected pantheism and by implication all other forms of time-denying natu-
ralism. Christian faith insists that God is not nature but instead nature’s
creative ground and final destiny. Both Jewish and Christian teachings have
officially rejected Spinoza’s beliefs as inherently atheistic, but pantheism
is religiously attractive to its adherents. It is appealing because it is heal-
ing. In one swift movement of the mind, pantheism absorbs nature, time,
and human history into eternity. It links our fractured world so tightly to
timelessness that wrongness is dissolved at once in the balm of nature’s
indestructible rightness.
Pantheism, like countless other forms of religion, expresses a passion-
ate human longing to tie our perishable lives and the rest of the temporal
world to an imperishable perfection. No less than other devoutly religious
people, Spinoza had struggled to find courage in the face of fate, suffering,
meaninglessness, and death. The most efficient way to satisfy this longing,
he discovered, was to steep the cosmos so thoroughly in the sea of eternity
that time was virtually dissolved. Einstein also thirsted for something like a
pantheistic form of religious consolation. To understand his special attrac-
tion to Spinoza—and why he was not eager to accept irreversible time—it
is helpful to remind ourselves just how restorative pantheistic piety can be
to those who are unusually sensitive to time’s corrosiveness. When a close
friend of his died, Einstein wrote: “Now he has departed a little ahead of
me from this quaint world. This means nothing. For us faithful physicists,
the separation between past, present, and future has only the meaning of an
illusion, though a persistent one.”7
Pantheism, however, pays a price for eternalizing the cosmos. First, it
snatches time up into eternity without giving the universe the opportunity
to become something. Devoid of a sense of the not-yet, pantheism robs the
cosmos of any real future and, in doing so, gives no cumulative significance
to the passage of time. Thus, it casts doubt upon the unique, unrepeatable
value of every moment in natural and human history. Second, by imprison-
ing our still-emerging universe in the stiff armor of eternal necessity, pan-
Eternity 23

theism cannot allow the cosmos to be an adventurous drama of awakening.

Third, pantheism’s ideal of indestructible rightness is not self-sacrificing
love but an obdurate protectionism that keeps the world from ever becom-
ing new. And fourth, pantheism is willing to sacrifice human freedom on
the altar of nature’s predictability.
To Einstein the price seemed right. Although he was not a card-
carrying pantheist, he treasured the idea that in principle whatever happens
in nature is fully predictable, including human activity. Einstein’s famous
dictum that “God does not play dice with the universe” implied for him
that the laws of nature are inviolable, that the cosmos is virtually finished,
and that humans, as part of the natural world, are not really free.8

Impatience
If we look at pantheism today in the light of an irreversibly temporal uni-
verse, it gives the impression of being an extreme instance of religious im-
patience. While biblical religion makes a virtue of waiting for God, the true
pantheist has no reason to wait for anything. Everything real has already
happened— eternally. Pantheism is seductive and soothing because it joins
our lives and minds to eternity without having them sail through the nar-
rows of irreversible time. By immersing the cosmos immediately in the sol-
vent of eternity, pantheism makes everything that happens in nature and
history—and in our own lives—inevitable.
Such a worldview can be very appealing if time seems to be an enemy
rather than a supportive friend. The belief that everything that happens in
the universe happens by necessity may also be attractive to scientists, since
science relies on predictability. The almost irresistible lure of predictability
shows up today in the guise of scientific determinism. This is the belief that
inviolable natural laws have, from the start, fastened down everything that
is going to happen in the universe. Determinism, though now suspect even
to many physicists, is enticing because of its anxiety-reducing promise to
expel all uncertainty from the sphere of true being.
Scientific determinists usually adopt the worldview known as materi-
alism, the belief that lifeless matter is all that really exists. Materialists deny
24 Eternity

not only that freedom is real but also that a personal, responsive deity ex-
ists. The two denials go together. Both Spinoza and Einstein, nonetheless,
would have found themselves ill-suited to the company of contemporary
atheistic materialists. Each of these great thinkers had a profoundly reli-
gious feeling for eternity. Devotion to the theme of indestructibility perme-
ates their thoughts from top to bottom. Unfortunately, their ideas of God—
or nature—have the quality of rigorous causal necessity characteristic of
modernity’s well-crafted clocks and other machines. God for Spinoza was
free only in the sense that divinity is its own cause, and to the pantheist this
means that nature, since nature is God, is its own cause. But apart from
the primary act of self-creation, whatever happens in nature, happens by
necessity, according to Spinoza. In principle, everything is settled forever.
Einstein, similarly, was convinced that determinism was inseparable from
his four-dimensional spacetime universe. No room existed for true novelty,
chance, or freedom— or for irreversible time. So, he thought, there could
be no inherently unpredictable future. Timelessness alone was real, which
ruled out the possibility that nature was still open to what is truly new.
Einstein’s fixation on eternity, like Spinoza’s, was profoundly reli-
gious. Yet his own science of relativity, as it has been examined and inter-
preted by cosmologists ever since 1915, casts serious doubt on the idea of
an eternal and necessary universe. Relativity provides the theoretical foun-
dations of Big Bang cosmology, according to which the universe has existed
for a finite amount of time rather than forever.9 If relativity is right, and if
time is both real and finite, the universe cannot be eternal and necessary. It
is temporal through and through. It has a contingent beginning and an un-
certain destiny. Its itinerary has already proven to be one of unpredictable
twists and turns. Nature is not a machine but an awakening.
Science now shows that the universe is still coming into being.
The most precious emergent outcomes of cosmic history so far—life and
mind— could not have been predicted by a deterministic analysis of the
early universe. Rather, they are developments in a cosmic awakening with
no fixed end in sight. Awakening to what? This is a way of asking the main
question for theology after Einstein. To find out what our unfinished uni-
verse is all about we have to tune into what is not-yet. We cannot be too
Eternity 25

impatient when trying to determine where the cosmos is going or whether

it has a fixed destiny. We cannot expect an unfinished universe to be fully
intelligible here and now. We need to be patient and wait.
Spinoza provides the most sophisticated philosophical argument
modern thought has yet made for the futility of waiting. He differs most
from his biblical ancestors by identifying the physical universe with eter-
nity and necessity, traits that theology traditionally associated with a time-
less God. In effect, Spinoza denies that there is real temporal movement
in nature. His pantheism is heir, at least indirectly, to the ancient Platonic
insistence on the timelessness of God. Accordingly, if with Spinoza we
identify nature with God, nature must be eternal and necessary. Not only
would God thereby be immune to any real contact with time but so would
the universe.
But is the universe eternal and necessary? Spinoza’s way of think-
ing, as I have suggested, satisfied Einstein’s religious sensibilities, which
helps to explain why the great physicist was not prepared to accept the
universe as an irreversible temporal passage. Even after friendly critics
pointed out to him that his spacetime cosmos need not have been the same
forever, Einstein clung as long as he could to his belief that the physical
universe was eternal and necessary despite locally changing appearances.
He even tinkered with his equations to make them fit his personal— one
might say religious—preference for a static cosmos. In the face of expert
objections, Einstein went looking for a place in his complex set of numbers
for a “cosmological constant,” a mathematical fudge-factor that would keep
the universe from changing in any significant way. After being shown the
mounting new astronomical evidence of an expanding universe, he had to
change his mind, of course, but he seems never to have fully abandoned his
Spinozist predilection for timelessness.10
When, in 1921, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked Einstein about
the religious significance of his theory of relativity, the physicist replied
curtly that there was none, unaware that his preference for a static universe
was itself already theologically loaded.11 The archbishop’s question was
not silly. The theological implications of Einstein’s scientific cosmology
are profound. Revolutions in science always affect our ideas about God
26 Eternity

whether or not we believe God exists. During the early modern period,
for example, when philosophers of nature started picturing nature as a ma-
chine, theologians assumed, almost unconsciously at first, that God must
be something like a mechanic, watchmaker, or “intelligent designer,” a du-
bious association that contributed much to the rise of modern atheism.12
After Charles Darwin had cast doubt on the belief that living organ-
isms are the product of direct divine engineering, the idea of a designing
deity became increasingly unbelievable. A mere half-century before Ein-
stein became famous, Darwin had already demonstrated that the specific
features and endless varieties of life on Earth are the product not of eternal
necessity but of an unpredictable historical process. The recipe for biologi-
cal evolution, Darwin theorized, consists of three ingredients: first, acciden-
tal variations in natural history and in the inheritance of biological forms;
second, the impersonal filter of natural selection, the “law” that discards all
organisms that cannot adapt and survive long enough to reproduce; and,
third, an enormous passage of time during which the combination of ac-
cidental changes and blind natural selection is given sufficient opportunity
to bring about all the diversity of life on Earth in a gradual way. Life, then, is
not the predictable product of timeless necessity but the outcome of an in-
terweaving of contingency, regularity, and irreversible time. It so happens
that contingency, lawful regularity, and the passage of time are also three
essential elements in the makeup of any story. The story of life, therefore,
because it has all three ingredients, is an ongoing production for whose
specific outcomes we shall always have to wait.
Darwin’s own Christian faith slipped away from him as time and con-
tingency supplanted eternity and necessity in his thoughts about nature
and God. Indeed, as a result of Darwin’s new story of life, many educated
people to this day seldom think about God at all. After Einstein, how-
ever, we may have new thoughts about God and eternity because we are
compelled to think new thoughts about time and the natural world. We
now know that nature is not eternally fixed and frozen. Never again may
we plausibly fit the adjective “timeless” to the cosmos as pantheism does
and as Einstein earnestly longed to do. Nature is a temporal process that
has continued to bring forth surprising new results as time travels on. The
Eternity 27

universe is a display of neither engineering elegance nor a totally blind and

aimless drift. It is an unfinished drama, by which I mean a suspenseful nar-
rative that may carry a meaning for which we shall have to wait. We ap-
proach dramas, after all, not in search of mathematical intelligibility but in
search of narrative coherence. Things are going on in the universe whose
intelligibility can become apparent, but only if we give them time to unfold
and then tell stories about them.
Both the evolution of life and the brief history of humanity on Earth
now show up as unprecedented new chapters in a cosmic drama of awak-
ening. The drama is much older, vaster, and more interesting than we
had ever guessed before the twentieth century. Consequently, instead of
obsessing about whether life manifests “intelligent design,” it is now pos-
sible—and I believe theologically more fruitful—to ask whether anything
of lasting importance is going on in the long cosmic drama. In God after
Darwin (1999) and subsequent writings on theology and evolution, I have
expressed my sympathy with Darwin’s doubts about a designer-deity.13
The most important theological implication of Darwin’s discoveries, I have
argued, is that life has a dramatic quality that, for all we know, carries a
momentous meaning deep down, far beneath the surface samplings taken
by the biological sciences. Likewise, beneath the soundings of astrophysics
lies an adventure of awakening that stretches throughout the pilgrimage
of matter in irreversible time. Einstein’s greatest contribution to theology,
in that case, is to have drafted the outlines of a universe whose intelligible
format is not just geometric but, as we shall see, also dramatic.

Stars and Story

That there is a real connection between the heavens above and human life
here below was an almost universal assumption of prescientific thought.
Most people assumed that both the good and the evil things that happened
to them were tied to the stars in a hidden way. The term “dis-aster” (liter-
ally, bad star, or ill-starred) reflects the ancient assumption that personal
fortune or misfortune cannot be divorced from the alignment or misalign-
ment of astronomical bodies. In the European world, looking to the stars
Another random document with
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 A general-in-chief unable to decide at the beginning of a
campaign in what part of his department his services were most
needed was sure to be taught the required lesson by the enemy.
Even after these warnings Dearborn made no haste. Another week
passed before he announced, July 21, his intended departure for
Albany the next day, but without an army. “Such is the opposition in
this State as to render it doubtful whether much will be done to effect
in raising any kind of troops.” The two months he passed in Boston
were thrown away; the enlistments were so few as to promise
nothing, and the governor of Massachusetts barely condescended to
acknowledge without obeying his request for militia to defend the
coast.
July 26, one week after Hull had written that all his success
depended on the movements at Niagara, Dearborn reached Albany
and found there some twelve hundred men not yet organized or
equipped. He found also a letter, dated July 20, from the Secretary of
War, showing that the Government had begun to feel the danger of
its position.[250] “I have been in daily expectation of hearing from
General Hull, who probably arrived in Detroit on the 8th inst.” In fact
Hull arrived in Detroit July 5, and crossed into Canada July 12; but
when the secretary wrote, July 20, he had not yet heard of either
event. “You will make such arrangements with Governor Tompkins,”
continued Eustis, “as will place the militia detached by him for
Niagara and other posts on the lakes under your control; and there
should be a communication, and if practicable a co-operation,
throughout the whole frontier.”
The secretary as early as June 24 authorized Hull to invade
Canada West, and his delay in waiting till July 20 before sending
similar orders to the general commanding the force at Niagara was
surprising; but if Eustis’s letter seemed singular, Dearborn’s answer
passed belief. For the first time General Dearborn then asked a
question in regard to his own campaign,—a question so
extraordinary that every critic found it an enigma: “Who is to have
command of the operations in Upper Canada? I take it for granted
that my command does not extend to that distant quarter.”[251]
 July 26, when Hull had been already a fortnight on British soil, a
week after he wrote that his success depended on co-operation from
Niagara, the only force at Niagara consisted of a few New York
militia, not co-operating with Hull or under the control of any United
States officer, while the major-general of the Department took it for
granted that Niagara was not included in his command. The
Government therefore expected General Hull, with a force which it
knew did not at the outset exceed two thousand effectives, to march
two hundred miles, constructing a road as he went; to garrison
Detroit; to guard at least sixty miles of road under the enemy’s guns;
to face a force in the field equal to his own, and another savage
force of unknown numbers in his rear; to sweep the Canadian
peninsula of British troops; to capture the fortress at Malden and the
British fleet on Lake Erie,—and to do all this without the aid of a man
or a boat between Sandusky and Quebec.
 CHAPTER XV.
General Hull, two days after entering Canada, called a council
of war, which decided against storming Malden and advised delay.
Their reasons were sufficiently strong. After allowing for the sick-list
and garrison-duty, the four regiments could hardly supply more than
three hundred men each for active service, besides the Michigan
militia, on whom no one felt willing to depend. Hull afterward affirmed
that he had not a thousand effectives; the highest number given in
evidence two years later by Major Jesup was the vague estimate of
sixteen or eighteen hundred men. Probably the utmost exertion
could not have brought fifteen hundred effectives to the Canadian
shore. The British force opposed to them was not to be despised.
Colonel St. George commanding at Malden had with him two
hundred men of the Forty-first British line, fifty men of the Royal
Newfoundland regiment, and thirty men of the Royal Artillery.[252]
Besides these two hundred and eighty veteran troops with their
officers, he had July 12 about six hundred Canadian militia and two
hundred and thirty Indians.[253] The militia deserted rapidly; but after
allowing for the desertions, the garrison at Malden, including Indians,
numbered nearly nine hundred men. The British had also the
advantage of position, and of a fleet whose guns covered and
supported their left. They were alarmed and cautious, but though
they exaggerated Hull’s force they meant to meet him in front of their
fortress.[254] Hull’s troops would have shown superiority to other
American forces engaged in the campaign of 1812 had they won a
victory.
 MAP
OF

Detroit River
and
ADJACENT COUNTRY,
From an Original Drawing
by a British Eng’r.
Struthers & Co., Engr’s and Pr’s, N.Y.
Philadelphia: Published by JOHN MELISH, Chestnut Street, 26 August, 1813.

The Ohio militia, although their officers acquiesced in the opinion

of the council of war, were very unwilling to lose their advantage. If
nothing was to be gained by attack, everything was likely to be lost
by delay. Detachments scoured the country, meeting at first little
resistance, one detachment even crossing the Canard River, flanking
and driving away the guard at the bridge; but the army was not ready
to support the unforeseen success, and the bridge was abandoned.
Probably this moment was the last when an assault could have been
made with a chance of success. July 19 and 24 strong detachments
were driven back with loss, and the outlook became suddenly
threatening.
Hull tried to persuade himself that he could take Malden by siege.
July 22 he wrote to Eustis that he was pressing the preparation of
siege guns:[255]—
“I find that entirely new carriages must be built for the 24-pounders
and mortars. It will require at least two weeks to make the necessary
preparations. It is in the power of this army to take Malden by storm,
but it would be attended in my opinion with too great a sacrifice under
the present circumstances.... If Malden was in our possession, I could
march this army to Niagara or York (Toronto) in a very short time.”
This was Hull’s last expression of confidence or hope.
Thenceforward every day brought him fatal news. His army lost
respect for him in consequence of his failure to attack Malden; the
British strengthened the defences of Malden, and August 8 received
sixty fresh men of the Forty-first under Colonel Proctor from Niagara;
[256] but worse than mutiny or British reinforcement, news from the
Northwest of the most disastrous character reached Hull at a
moment when his hopes of taking Malden had already faded. August
3 the garrison of Michillimackinaw arrived at Detroit as prisoners-of-
war on parole, announcing that Mackinaw had capitulated July 17 to
a force of British and savages, and that Hull must prepare to receive
the attack of a horde of Indians coming from the Northwest to fall
upon Detroit in the rear.
Hull called another council of war August 5, which,
notwithstanding this news, decided to attack Malden August 8, when
the heavy artillery should be ready; but while they were debating this
decision, a party of Indians under Tecumthe crossing the river routed
a detachment of Findlay’s Ohio regiment on their way to protect a
train of supplies coming from Ohio. The army mail-bags fell into
British hands. Hull then realized that his line of communication
between Detroit and the Maumee River was in danger, if not closed.
On the heels of this disaster he received, August 7, letters from
Niagara announcing the passage of British reinforcements up Lake
Ontario to Lake Erie and Malden. Thus he was called to meet in his
front an intrenched force nearly equal to his own, while at least a
thousand Indian warriors were descending on his flank from Lake
Huron, and in the rear his line of communication and supply could be
restored only by detaching half his army for the purpose.
Hull decided at once to recross the river, and succeeded in
effecting this movement on the night of August 8 without interference
from the enemy; but his position at Detroit was only one degree
better than it had been at Sandwich. He wished to abandon Detroit
and retreat behind the Maumee, and August 9 proposed the
measure to some of his principal officers. Colonel Cass replied that if
this were done every man of the Ohio militia would refuse to obey,
and would desert their general;[257] that the army would fall to pieces
if ordered to retreat. Hull considered that this report obliged him to
remain where he was.
This was the situation at Detroit August 9,—a date prominent in
the story; but Hull’s true position could be understood only after
learning what had been done in Canada since the declaration of war.
The difficulties of Canada were even greater than those of the
United States. Upper Canada, extending from Detroit River to the
Ottawa within forty miles of Montreal, contained not more than eighty
thousand persons. The political capital was York, afterward Toronto,
on Lake Ontario. The civil and military command of this vast territory
was in the hands of Brigadier-General Isaac Brock, a native of
Guernsey, forty-two years old, who had been colonel of the Forty-
ninth regiment of the British line, and had served since 1802 in
Canada. The appointment of Brock in October, 1811, to the chief
command at the point of greatest danger was for the British a piece
of good fortune, or good judgment, more rare than could have been
appreciated at the time, even though Dearborn, Hull, Winchester,
Wilkinson, Sir George Prevost himself, and Colonel Proctor were
examples of the common standard. Brock was not only a man of
unusual powers, but his powers were also in their prime. Neither
physical nor mental fatigue such as followed his rivals’ exertions
paralyzed his plans. No scruples about bloodshed stopped him
midway to victory. He stood alone in his superiority as a soldier. Yet
his civil difficulties were as great as his military, for he had to deal
with a people better disposed toward his enemies than toward
himself; and he succeeded in both careers.
Under Brock’s direction, during the preceding winter vessels had
been armed on Lake Erie, and Malden had been strengthened by
every means in his power. These precautions gave him from the
outset the command of the lake, which in itself was almost
equivalent to the command of Detroit. Of regular troops he had but
few. The entire regular force in both Canadas at the outbreak of the
war numbered six thousand three hundred and sixty rank and file, or
about seven thousand men including officers. More than five
thousand of these were stationed in Lower Canada. To protect the
St. Lawrence, the Niagara, and the Detroit, Brock had only fourteen
hundred and seventy-three rank and file, or including his own
regiment,—the Forty-ninth, then at Montreal,—two thousand one
hundred and thirty-seven men at the utmost.[258]
When the news of war reached him, not knowing where to expect
the first blow, Brock waited, moving between Niagara and Toronto,
until Hull’s passage of the Detroit River, July 12, marked the point of
danger and startled the province almost out of its dependence on
England. Sir George Prevost, the governor-general, reported with
much mortification the effect of Hull’s movement on Upper Canada:
“Immediately upon the invasion of the province,” wrote Sir George,
August 17,[259] “and upon the issuing of the proclamation by General
Hull, which I have the honor of herewith transmitting, it was plainly
perceived by General Brock that little reliance could be placed upon
the militia, and as little dependence upon the active exertions of any
considerable proportion of the population of the country, unless he
was vested with full power to repress the disaffected spirit which was
daily beginning to show itself, and to restrain and punish the disorders
which threatened to dissolve the whole militia force which he had
assembled. He therefore called together the provincial legislature on
July 27 in the hope that they would adopt prompt and efficient
measures for strengthening the hands of the Government at a period
of such danger and difficulty.... In these reasonable expectations I am
sorry to say General Brock has been miserably disappointed; and a
lukewarm and temporizing spirit, evidently dictated either by the
apprehension or the wish that the enemy might soon be in complete
possession of the country, having prevented the Assembly from
adopting any of the measures proposed to them, they were prorogued
on the 5th instant.”
Brock himself wrote to Lord Liverpool a similar account of his
trials:—
“The invasion of the western district by General Hull,” he wrote
August 29,[260] “was productive of very unfavorable sensations
among a large portion of the population, and so completely were their
minds subdued that the Norfolk militia when ordered to march
peremptorily refused. The state of the country required prompt and
vigorous measures. The majority of the House of Assembly was
likewise seized with the same apprehensions, and may be justly
accused of studying more to avoid by their proceedings incurring the
indignation of the enemy than the honest fulfilment of their duty.... I
cannot hide from your Lordship that I considered my situation at that
time extremely perilous. Not only among the militia was evinced a
disposition to submit tamely, five hundred in the western district
having deserted their ranks, but likewise the Indians of the Six
Nations, who are placed in the heart of the country on the Grand
River, positively refused, with the exception of a few individuals, taking
up arms. They audaciously announced their intention after the return
of some of their chiefs from General Hull to remain neutral, as if they
 wished to impose upon the Government the belief that it was possible
they could sit quietly in the midst of war. This unexpected conduct of
the Indians deterred many good men from leaving their families and
joining the militia; they became more apprehensive of the internal than
of the external enemy, and would willingly have compromised with the
one to secure themselves from the other.”
Brock’s energy counterbalanced every American advantage.
Although he had but about fifteen hundred regular troops in his
province, and was expected to remain on the defensive, the moment
war was declared, June 26, he sent to Amherstburg all the force he
could control, and ordered the commandant of the British post at the
island of St. Joseph on Lake Huron to seize the American fort at
Michillimackinaw. When Hull issued his proclamation of July 12,
Brock replied by a proclamation of July 22. To Hull’s threat that no
quarter should be given to soldiers fighting by the side of Indians,
Brock responded by “the certain assurance of retaliation;” and he
justified the employment of his Indian allies by arguments which
would have been more conclusive had he ventured to reveal his
desperate situation. In truth the American complaint that the British
employed Indians in war meant nothing to Brock, whose loss of his
province by neglect of any resource at his command might properly
have been punished by the utmost penalty his Government could
inflict.
Brock’s proclamation partly restored confidence. When his
legislature showed backwardness in supporting him he peremptorily
dismissed them, August 5, after they had been only a week in
session, and the same day he left York for Burlington Bay and Lake
Erie. Before quitting Lake Ontario he could not fail to inquire what
was the American force at Niagara and what it was doing. Every one
in the neighborhood must have told him that on the American side
five or six hundred militia-men, commanded by no general officer,
were engaged in patrolling thirty-six miles of river front; that they
were undisciplined, ill-clothed, without tents, shoes, pay, or
ammunition, and ready to retreat at any sign of attack.[261] Secure at
that point, Brock hurried toward Malden. He had ordered
reinforcements to collect at Long Point on Lake Erie; and August 8,
while Hull was withdrawing his army from Sandwich to Detroit, Brock
passed Long Point, taking up three hundred men whom he found
there, and coasted night and day to the Detroit River.
Meanwhile, at Washington, Eustis sent letter after letter to
Dearborn, pressing for a movement from Niagara. July 26 he
repeated the order of July 20.[262] August 1 he wrote, enclosing
Hull’s despatch of July 19: “You will make a diversion in his favor at
Niagara and at Kingston as soon as may be practicable, and by such
operations as may be within your control.”
Dearborn awoke August 3 to the consciousness of not having
done all that man could do. He began arrangements for sending a
thousand militia to Niagara, and requested Major-General Stephen
Van Rensselaer of the New York State militia to take command there
in person. In a letter of August 7 to the Secretary of War, he showed
sense both of his mistakes and of their results:[263]—
“It is said that a detachment [of British troops] has been sent from
Niagara by land to Detroit; if so, I should presume before they can
march two hundred and fifty miles General Hull will receive notice of
their approach, and in season to cut them off before they reach Fort
Malden. It is reported that no ordnance or ammunition have reached
Niagara this season, and that there is great deficiency of these
articles. Not having considered any part of the borders of Upper
Canada as within the command intended for me, I have received no
reports or returns from that quarter, and did not until since my last
arrival at this place give any orders to the commanding officers of the
respective posts on that frontier.”
The consequences of such incapacity showed themselves
without an instant’s delay. While Dearborn was writing from Albany,
August 7, General Brock, as has been told, passed from Lake
Ontario to Lake Erie; and the next morning, when Brock reached his
detachment at Long Point, Hull evacuated Sandwich and retired to
Detroit. Had he fallen back on the Maumee or even to Urbana or
Dayton, he would have done only what Wellington had done more
than once in circumstances hardly more serious, and what Napoleon
was about to do three months afterward in leaving Moscow.
Desperate as Hull’s position was, Dearborn succeeded within
four-and-twenty hours by an extraordinary chance in almost
extricating him, without being conscious that his action more than his
neglect affected Hull’s prospects. This chance was due to the
reluctance of the British government to accept the war. Immediately
after the repeal of the Orders in Council the new Ministry of Lord
Liverpool ordered their minister, Foster, to conclude an armistice in
case hostilities had begun, and requested their governor-general to
avoid all extraordinary preparations. These orders given in good faith
by the British government were exceeded by Sir George Prevost,
who had every reason to wish for peace. Although he could not
make an armistice without leaving General Hull in possession of his
conquests in Upper Canada, which might be extensive, Prevost sent
his adjutant-general, Colonel Baynes, to Albany to ask a cessation of
hostilities, and the same day, August 2, wrote to General Brock
warning him of the proposed step.[264] Colonel Baynes reached
headquarters at Albany August 9, and obtained from Dearborn an
agreement that his troops, including those at Niagara, should act
only on the defensive until further orders from Washington:—
“I consider the agreement as favorable at this period,” wrote
Dearborn to Eustis, “for we could not act offensively except at Detroit
for some time, and there it will not probably have any effect on
General Hull or his movements.”[265]
What effect the armistice would have on Hull might be a matter
for prolonged and serious doubt, but that it should have no effect at
all would have occurred to no ordinary commander. Dearborn had
been urgently ordered, August 1, to support Hull by a vigorous
offensive at Niagara, yet August 9 he agreed with the British general
to act only on the defensive at Niagara. Detroit was not under
Dearborn’s command, and therefore was not included in the
armistice; but Dearborn stipulated that the arrangement should
include Hull if he wished it. Orders were sent to Niagara August 9,
directing the commanding officers “to confine their respective
operations to defensive measures,” and with these orders Dearborn
wrote to Hull proposing a concurrence in the armistice. Had Brock
moved less quickly, or had the British government sent its
instructions a week earlier, the armistice might have saved Detroit.
The chance was narrow, for even an armistice unless greatly
prolonged would only have weakened Hull, especially as it could not
include Indians other than those actually in British service; but even
the slight chance was lost by the delay until August 9 in sending
advices to Niagara and Detroit, for Brock left Long Point August 8,
and was already within four days of Detroit when Dearborn wrote
from Albany. The last possibility of saving Hull was lost by the
inefficiency of American mail-service. The distance from Albany to
Buffalo was about three hundred miles. A letter written at Albany
August 9 should have reached Niagara by express August 13;
Dearborn’s letter to Hull arrived there only on the evening of August
17, and was forwarded by General Van Rensselaer the next
morning.[266] Even through the British lines it could hardly reach
Detroit before August 24.
Slowness such as this in the face of an enemy like Brock, who
knew the value of time, left Hull small chance of escape. Brock with
his little army of three hundred men leaving Long Point August 8
coasted the shore of the lake, and sailing at night reached Malden
late in the evening of August 13, fully eight days in advance of the
armistice.
Meanwhile Hull was besieged at Detroit. Immediately after
returning there, August 8, he sent nearly half his force—a picked
body of six hundred men, including the Fourth U. S. Regiment—to
restore his communications with Ohio. Toward afternoon of the next
day, when this detachment reached the Indian village of Maguaga
fourteen miles south of Detroit, it came upon the British force
consisting of about one hundred and fifty regulars of the Forty-first
Regiment, with forty or fifty militia and Tecumthe’s little band of
twenty-five Indians,—about two hundred and fifty men, all told.[267]
After a sharp engagement the British force was routed and took to its
boats, with a loss of thirteen men or more, while the Indians
disappeared in the woods. For some unsatisfactory reason the
detachment did not then march to the river Raisin to act as convoy
for the supplies, and nothing but honor was acquired by the victory.
“It is a painful consideration,” reported Hull,[268] “that the blood of
seventy-five gallant men could only open the communication as far
as the points of their bayonets extended.” On receiving a report of
the battle Hull at first inclined to order the detachment to the Raisin,
but the condition of the weather and the roads changed his mind,
and August 10 he recalled the detachment to Detroit.
The next four days were thrown away by the Americans. August
13 the British began to establish a battery on the Canadian side of
the river to bombard Detroit. Within the American lines the army was
in secret mutiny. Hull’s vacillations and evident alarm disorganized
his force. The Ohio colonels were ready to remove him from his
command, which they offered to Lieutenant-Colonel Miller of the U.
S. Fourth Regiment; but Colonel Miller declined this manner of
promotion, and Hull retained control. August 12 the three colonels
united in a letter to the governor of Ohio, warning him that the
existence of the army depended on the immediate despatch of at
least two thousand men to keep open the line of communication.
“Our supplies must come from our State; this country does not
furnish them.” A postscript added that even a capitulation was talked
of by the commander-in-chief.[269] In truth Hull, who like most
commanders-in-chief saw more of the situation than was seen by his
subordinates, made no concealment of his feelings. Moody,
abstracted, wavering in his decisions, and conscious of the low
respect in which he was held by his troops, he shut himself up and
brooded over his desperate situation.
Desperate the situation seemed to be; yet a good general would
still have saved Detroit for some weeks, if not altogether. Hull knew
that he must soon be starved into surrender;[270] but though already
short of supplies he might by vigorous preparations and by rigid
economy have maintained himself a month, and he had always the
chance of a successful battle. His effective force, by his own
showing, still exceeded a thousand men to defend the fort; his
supplies of ammunition were sufficient;[271] and even if surrender
were inevitable, after the mortifications he had suffered and those he
foresaw, he would naturally have welcomed a chance of dying in
battle. Perhaps he might have chosen this end, for he had once
been a brave soldier; but the thought of his daughter and the women
and children of the settlement left to the mercy of Indians overcame
him. He shrank from it with evident horror, exaggerating the numbers
and brooding over the “greedy violence” of the bands, “numerous
beyond any former example,” who were descending from the
Northwest.[272] Doubtless his fears were well-founded, but a general-
in-chief whose mind was paralyzed by such thoughts could not
measure himself with Isaac Brock.
On the evening of August 14 Hull made one more effort. He
ordered two of the Ohio colonels, McArthur and Cass, to select the
best men from their regiments, and to open if possible a circuitous
route of fifty miles through the woods to the river Raisin. The
operation was difficult, fatiguing, and dangerous; but the supplies so
long detained at the Raisin, thirty-five miles away by the direct road,
must be had at any cost, and the two Ohio colonels aware of the
necessity promptly undertook the service. Their regiments in May
contained nominally about five hundred men each, all told. Two
months of severe labor with occasional fighting and much sickness
had probably reduced the number of effectives about one half. The
report of Colonel Miller of the U. S. Fourth Regiment in regard to the
condition of his command showed this proportion of effectives,[273]
and the Fourth Regiment was probably in better health than the
militia. The two Ohio regiments of McArthur and Cass numbered
perhaps six or seven hundred effective men, and from these the two
colonels selected three hundred and fifty, probably the best. By
night-time they were already beyond the river Rouge, and the next
evening, August 15, were stopped by a swamp less than half way to
the river Raisin.
After their departure on the night of August 14 Hull learned that
Brock had reached Malden the night before with heavy
reinforcements. According to Hull’s later story, he immediately sent
orders to McArthur and Cass to return to Detroit, giving the reasons
for doing so;[274] in fact he did not send till the afternoon of the next
day,[275] and the orders reached the detachment four-and-twenty
miles distant only at sunset August 15. So it happened that on the
early morning of August 16 Hull was guarding the fort and town of
Detroit with about two hundred and fifty effective men of the Fourth
Regiment, about seven hundred men of the Ohio militia, and such of
the Michigan militia and Ohio volunteers as may have been present,
—all told, about a thousand effectives. Hull estimated his force as
not exceeding eight hundred men;[276] Major Jesup, the acting
adjutant-general, reported it as one thousand and sixty, including the
Michigan militia.[277] If the sickness and loss of strength at Detroit
were in proportion to the waste that soon afterward astonished the
generals at Niagara, Hull’s estimate was perhaps near the truth.
Meanwhile Brock acted with rapidity and decision. After reaching
Malden late at night August 13, he held a council the next day, said
to have been attended by a thousand Indian warriors.[278]
“Among the Indians whom I found at Amherstburg,” he reported to
Lord Liverpool,[279] “and who had arrived from distant parts of the
country, I found some extraordinary characters. He who attracted
most my attention was a Shawnee chief, Tecumset, brother to the
Prophet, who for the last two years has carried on contrary to our
remonstrances an active warfare against the United States. A more
sagacious or more gallant warrior does not, I believe, exist. He was
the admiration of every one who conversed with him.”
Brock consumed one day in making his arrangements with them,
and decided to move his army immediately across the Detroit River
and throw it against the fort.
“Some say that nothing could be more desperate than the
measure,”[280] he wrote soon afterward; “but I answer that the state of
the province admits only of desperate remedies. I got possession of
the letters my antagonist addressed to the Secretary of War, and also
the sentiments which hundreds of his army uttered to their friends.
Confidence in their general was gone, and evident despondency
prevailed throughout. I crossed the river contrary to the opinion of
Colonel Proctor, etc. It is therefore no wonder that envy should
attribute to good fortune what, in justice to my own discernment, I
must say proceeded from a cool calculation of the pours and contres.”
Probably Brock received then Sir George Prevost’s letter of
August 2 warning him of the intended armistice, for Hull repeatedly
and earnestly asserted that Brock spoke to him of the armistice
August 16; and although twelve days was a short time for an express
to pass between Montreal and Malden, yet it might have been
accomplished at the speed of about fifty miles a day. If Brock had
reason to expect an armistice, the wish to secure for his province the
certainty of future safety must have added a motive for hot haste.
At noon August 15 Brock sent a summons of surrender across
the river to Hull. “The force at my disposal,” he wrote, “authorizes me
to require of you the surrender of Detroit. It is far from my inclination
to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the
numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my
troops will be beyond my control the moment the contest
commences.” The threat of massacre or Indian captivity struck Hull’s
most sensitive chord. After some delay he replied, refusing to
surrender, and then sent orders recalling McArthur’s detachment; but
the more he thought of his situation the more certain he became that
the last chance of escape had vanished. In a few days or weeks
want of provisions would oblige him to capitulate, and the bloodshed
that would intervene could serve no possible purpose. Brock’s
movements increased the general’s weakness. As soon as Hull’s
reply reached the British lines, two British armed vessels—the
“Queen Charlotte” of seventeen guns and the “Hunter” of ten guns—
moved up the river near Sandwich, while a battery of guns and
mortars opened fire from the Canadian shore and continued firing
irregularly all night on the town and fort. The fire was returned, but
no energetic measures were taken to prepare either for an assault or
a siege.
During the night Tecumthe and six hundred Indians crossed the
river some two miles below and filled the woods, cutting
communication between McArthur’s detachment and the fort. A little
before daylight of August 16 Brock himself, with three hundred and
thirty regulars and four hundred militia, crossed the river carrying
with them three 6-pound and two 3-pound guns. He had intended to
take up a strong position and force Hull to attack it; but learning from
his Indians that McArthur’s detachment, reported as five hundred
strong, was only a few miles in his rear he resolved on an assault,
and moved in close column within three quarters of a mile of the
American 24-pound guns. Had Hull prayed that the British might
deliver themselves into his hands, his prayers could not have been
better answered. Even under trial for his life, he never ventured to
express a distinct belief that Brock’s assault could have succeeded;
and in case of failure the small British force must have retreated at
least a mile and a half under the fire of the fort’s heavy guns,
followed by a force equal to their own, and attacked in flank and rear
by McArthur’s detachment, which was within hearing of the battle
and marching directly toward it.
“Nothing but the boldness of the enterprise could have insured its
success,” said Richardson, one of Brock’s volunteers.[281] “When
within a mile and a half of the rising ground commanding the approach
to the town we distinctly saw two long, heavy guns, afterward proved
to be 24-pounders, planted in the road, and around them the gunners
with their fuses burning. At each moment we expected that they would
be fired, ... and fearful in such case must have been the havoc; for
moving as we were by the main road, with the river close upon our
right flank and a chain of alternate houses and close fences on our
left, there was not the slightest possibility of deploying. In this manner
and with our eyes riveted on the guns, which became at each moment
more visible, we silently advanced until within about three quarters of
a mile of the formidable battery, when General Brock, having found at
this point a position favorable for the formation of the columns of
assault, caused the whole to be wheeled to the left through an open
field and orchard leading to a house about three hundred yards off the
road, which he selected as his headquarters. In this position we were
covered.”
All this time Hull was in extreme distress. The cannon-shot from
the enemy’s batteries across the river were falling in the fort.
Uncertain what to do, the General sat on an old tent on the ground
with his back against the rampart. “He apparently unconsciously
filled his mouth with tobacco, putting in quid after quid more than he
generally did; the spittle colored with tobacco-juice ran from his
mouth on his neckcloth, beard, cravat, and vest.”[282] He seemed
preoccupied, his voice trembled, he was greatly agitated, anxious,
and fatigued. Knowing that sooner or later the fort must fall, and
dreading massacre for the women and children; anxious for the
safety of McArthur and Cass, and treated with undisguised contempt
by the militia officers,—he hesitated, took no measure to impede the
enemy’s advance, and at last sent a flag across the river to
negotiate. A cannon-ball from the enemy’s batteries killed four men
in the fort; two companies of the Michigan militia deserted,—their
behavior threatening to leave the town exposed to the Indians,—and
from that moment Hull determined to surrender on the best terms he
could get.
As Brock, after placing his troops under cover, ascended the
brow of the rising ground to reconnoitre the fort, a white flag
advanced from the battery before him, and within an hour the British
troops, to their own undisguised astonishment, found themselves in
possession of the fortress. The capitulation included McArthur’s
detachment and the small force covering the supplies at the river
Raisin. The army, already mutinous, submitted with what philosophy
it could command to the necessity it could not escape.
On the same day at the same hour Fort Dearborn at Chicago was
in flames. The Government provided neither for the defence nor for
the safe withdrawal of the little garrison, but Hull had sent an order to
evacuate the fort if practicable. In the process of evacuation, August
15, the garrison was attacked and massacred by an overwhelming
body of Indians. The next morning the fort was burned, and with it
the last vestige of American authority on the western lakes
disappeared. Thenceforward the line of the Wabash and the
Maumee became the military boundary of the United States in the
Northwest, and the country felt painful doubt whether even that line
could be defended.