“If life has no standing as mystery or miracle or gift, then what signifies the difference between it and death?”
                                                                                                                  —Wendell Berry

The evening of December 29 settled clear and cold, and my family was out in it, skiing on an Appalachian mountainside. As my wife and I rode the chairlift, the merest sliver of a young moon floated above the tree line, its thin crescent embracing the dark remainder (“the old moon in the new moon’s arms”), glowing like a cinder in the gathering night. (Leonardo da Vinci named this eerie phenomenon the lumen cinereum in a text now known as the Codex Leicester and correctly attributed the ashy glow of the moon’s unlit side to sunlight reflected off the earth and then back to us.)

Above and to the left of the moon shone Venus, dressed as the evening star in brilliant white. Below and to the right, hard against the horizon where the sun had just set, hid two more planets—Mercury and Jupiter—less showy than Venus, but just as entrancing. The four heavenly bodies—five if you count the already hidden sun—formed a line to define the ecliptic, the visual plane in the night sky through which sun, moon and planets appear to make their journeys.

It took some minutes for my mind to understand what I was seeing, but dawning comprehension made me tremble. The Navajo use the same word, hozho, for beauty—wholeness, harmony and balance—and in that moment, I understood. I’ve known hozho before: sunrise in the Grand Tetons, entering the old Franciscan church at Laguna Pueblo, a rainbow after a Grand Canyon summer downpour. Such moments transfix me. Despite my inner excitement, I find myself unable to turn away, not knowing when the vision will pass.

But ski lifts don’t stop for middle-aged men in fugue states, and I was soon disgorged on the mountaintop and forced to turn, at last, to the matter at hand: negotiating the slope. Yet I often paused at the end of runs to cast long gazes westward as the cosmic dancers moved below the horizon.

Around me, skiers rushed to chairlifts or on to the lodge. I imagined them every bit as oblivious to my hozhoni moment as Mrs. Shortley, in Flannery O’Connor’s story, “The Displaced Person,” was to a peacock’s tail inches from her face, “full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed with green.” Having fun with Mrs. Shortley, O’Connor continues, “She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn’t notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree. She was having an inner vision instead….” That last sentence jarred me back to my senses.

I was, in fact, in the grip of an inner delusion, fancying myself smarter, more perceptive than those around me. Among those fellow skiers were, no doubt, viewers every bit as appreciative as I, and even my awareness of what I was seeing was surely not unique. There were likely others who saw and understood much more than I.

Thinking back on that moment, two nearly contradictory observations come to mind. First, my ability to name what I saw neither rendered me special nor what I saw more beautiful. The gift and mystery of that night were independent of names and explanations.

Second, my act of naming flavored the beauty I apprehended. What’s more, the precious little I know of astronomy and the distances and complex geometries involved did nothing to diminish they mystery before me but only enlarged and deepened it.

I’ve never been much taken by the supposed “war” between religion and science, a trope made explicit in the nineteenth century but implicit in much Enlightenment rhetoric. I’ve long understood science and religion as rowing in the same boat, and I’ve more recently come to appreciate life not as a series of problems to be mastered but a unified mystery to contemplate. Science and theology diminish themselves by denying this.

Like steel and stone, these sibling ways sharpen rather than dull when properly engaged. What I’ve learned of science helps me interrogate theological assertions like the Divine Image or the Fall. Alternately, convictions regarding the goodness of Creation critique the long scar descending from Francis Bacon’s “Knowledge is Power,” through Richard Dawkins’s “our brains…are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.”

Bacon might be forgiven for not anticipating what planetary ruin ensues from “putting Nature to the rack,” but Dawkins has no such excuse. To the extent human activity is warming the globe, the efficient cause is carbon-derived power, not Christian prayer. Similarly, to imagine the manipulative scientific consciousness which produced the South Pole’s ozone hole and the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone will soon permit humanity to “be fruitful… and replenish the earth” is an illusion every bit as dangerous—and more immediately so—than the fanaticism Dawkins accused theists of.

Science and religion, like every human endeavor, unleash myriad unanticipated consequences precisely because each is a way of knowing within a much larger ground of unknowing. What I know—what any of us knows—is, in every sense, precious little. Boats of human knowledge drift in oceans of mystery, and those who fancy otherwise soon scuttle their craft, sometimes to their own harm, but invariably to the harm of others and Creation.

We do well to guard the treasure of what we know—through science and faith—with care. We do far better to acknowledge that, compared to the gift of inexhaustible mystery, the sum of our knowledge is paltry indeed.