SEVENTY years ago, within the winter of 1953, Robert Oppenheimer — the daddy of the world’s first atomic bomb — arrived in London to deliver the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures. The invitation recognised his international standing as considered one of the world’s pre-eminent scientists. Less publicised was the range of his pursuits outside the laboratory: his serious study of oriental religions; philosophical inquiry; a love of literature; and the writing of poetry. Asked, late in life, by a Christian magazine, to call the ten books that had most inspired him, his list included the Bhagavad Gita, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
As the Reith Lectures — under the general title of “Science and the Common Understanding” — progressed, Oppenheimer surprised his listeners. After reprising the achievements of Newton, Rutherford, and Bohr, and the wave-particle duality at the guts of quantum mechanics, he went on to handle the character of human consciousness, the human community, and the “underlying profundities of the earth and our lives”.
His commitment to the common good owed much to the rigorous ethical framework of his adolescence. Born in 1904 into an affluent German-Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York, he was raised in a culture that prized the “high endeavours” of artistic beauty in all its forms, science, and public service. For his parents, the notion of duty — derived largely from their somewhat idiosyncratic reading of Kant’s famous moral law — amounted to a spiritual obligation.
It also reflected their determined desire to “bring out the spiritual personality” of their gifted, if somewhat gauche, son, who found other schoolchildren difficult and intimidated them together with his knowledge. “Ask me a matter in Latin, and I’ll answer you in Greek,” he once challenged a classmate.
The legacy of this upbringing was twofold: on the one hand, a person with astonishing reserves of intellect and energy; on the opposite, a sophisticated, introspective genius, driven by a deep sense of public duty and a love of his country which, in a time of war, would confront him with seemingly inconceivable moral decisions. After Hiroshima and the unimaginable destruction that led to the deaths of greater than 80,000 people, Oppenheimer was never quite sure whether he was the saviour or destroyer of an imperilled world.
ALTHOUGH he professed himself “heavy with misgiving“, at no point did he ever concede that it had been fallacious to construct the bomb. He knew that the Nazis were already constructing their very own, and ultimately, in his view, it was the US President and his closest advisers who took the choice to drop it.
In the aftermath, he acknowledged that he had “blood on his hands”, and spoke often of his dismay on the escalation of the arms race that, he had believed, mistakenly, his scientific research would end. Asked greater than once in public whether he would do it again — that’s, take part in the making of atomic weapons — he replied unequivocally “Yes.”
His sin, he believed, was not the human devastation that followed his ground-breaking work, but, fairly, the sin of pride: of pondering that he and the gifted team of good young physicists which he had assembled “knew what was good for man”. It left an indelible mark on lots of them — in Oppenheimer, a deep sense of pathos and tragedy as he contemplated the human condition.
In his final years, before his death from cancer in 1967, on the age of 62, Oppenheimer was invited to handle an audience on the National Book Awards in New York. The surprising title of his presentation was “The Added Cubit“ — an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, during which Jesus urges his listeners to withstand useless worry and trust in God: “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” (Matthew 6.27)
Oppenheimer took issue with Christ’s gentle admonition, insisting that we should take thought and not place our trust in fate, leaders, and even divine windfall: “By taking considered our often grim responsibility, by knowing something of our profound and omnipresent imperfection . . . we may even find our strategy to put an end to the orgy, the killing and the brutality that’s war.”
A yr later, at one other public gathering, Oppenheimer enjoined his audience that “Most of all we should always attempt to be experts within the worst about ourselves: we should always not be astonished to seek out some evil there, that we discover so readily abroad in others.” He spoke as a person aware of his mortality and his personal failings, yet one who often seemed a mystery to himself.
An in depth friend once described him as “a person put together of many shiny shining splinters”: a telling statement, but not all of the splinters shone. Oppenheimer did have a real eager for friendship and affection, but he lacked the flexibility to form close ties with other people. His private papers — running to 296 boxes of letters, drafts, and manuscripts — reveal little or no of a private or intimate nature concerning his family or his wider circle.
Some years after his death, his daughter, Toni, took her own life at home. His son, Peter, worked as a carpenter, and distanced himself from anything concerning his famous father.
IN FACING his strengths and weaknesses, Oppenheimer spoke for all who value personal integrity and the necessity to face the deeper, more daunting truths about ourselves. He echoes the summons of Advent to heed again the traditional story of the fabled garden in Genesis, where human pride and self-assertion have consequences that will be redeemed only by a Saviour. And, in his insistence on the duty of hard thought concerning war and the specter of nuclear exchanges — which dwarf the Armageddon of the closing chapters of Revelation which inform this serious season — he reminds us of our religious obligation to be “co-workers with God” (1 Corinthians 3.9).
To paraphrase St Augustine, “God is not going to save us without us.” The fate and possible destruction of the earth is actually the business of the God of affection — however it is ours, too. Advent bids us wake from our slumbers.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
