Hiroshima and the King of Tyre Author(s): Curtis Hart Source: Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 471-476 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512962 . Accessed: 26/09/2013 18:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Religion and Health. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 139.184.30.136 on Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:59:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Hiroshima and the King of TyreAuthor(s): Curtis HartSource: Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 471-476Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512962 .
Accessed: 26/09/2013 18:59
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Religion andHealth.
http://www.jstor.org
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Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 2006 (? 2006) DOI: 10.1007/sl0943-006-9056-3
Hiroshima and the King of Tyre
CURTIS HART
ABSTRACT: This paper?originally a sermon?addresses issues involved with nuclear idolatry from a biblical perspective. It utilizes psychological understanding and historical narrative as a
context for theological reflection. It thus places depth psychological insight in service of social
ethics. It was delivered at the Church of the Epiphany, Manhattan, New York, on August 14,2005.
KEY WORDS: Hiroshima; nuclear idolatry; J. Robert Oppenheimer; atomic bomb.
Text: Ezekiel 28: 1, 2, 11-19
August 6th, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic
bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The events which precipitated that day are still
studied and debated among historians, statesmen, scholars, and ethicists. The
impact of the use of the bomb will be forever felt within the human commu
nity. Together the development of atomic weapons and the Holocaust comprise the most significant moral legacy of the World War II era. We must struggle
with the issues arising from this legacy even if we cannot "solve" them, for our
survival may well depend on how we debate and come to grips with these realities. In our tradition, it is always crucial to look to our scriptural heritage as a source of enlightenment on issues which engage the spiritual heart and center of our existence. For our purpose, let us listen to the words of the
prophet, Ezekiel, who in his era engaged dynamics of power, blindness, and
self-absorption that are relevant to our modern era and to the meaning of the
development and use of weapons of mass destruction in particular:
Moreover the word of the Lord came to me: Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord God: "You were the signet of
perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God...
The Rev. Curtis Hart, M.Div, is Director of Pastoral Care and Education, and Lecturer in Public
Health, Medicine,and Psychiatry, Division of Medical Ethics, at the Weill Cornell Center of New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Correspondence to Curtis Hart, New York
Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Center, 525 East 68th Street, Box 167 New York, NY, 10021, USA, e-mail: [email protected]
471 ? 2006 Blanton-Peale Institute
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On the day that you were created they were prepared. With an anointed guardian cherub I placed you, You were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were
created, till iniquity was found in you...
So I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, your heart was proud because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor...
Here the prophet warns the King of Tyre regarding his blindness and pride. Ezekiel's proclamation is in fact a variant on the Eden story in Genesis where
humankind disobeys God, and loses, through the sin of pride, its place of favor
in God's eyes. In Ezekiel's version, the kingdom of Tyre is like Eden in its
perfection. But then the king's behavior tarnishes his reputation through
profane acts; though "blameless in your ways .*.. iniquity was found in you". The king is an idolator. He comes to be like a god in his self-created world. The
prophet reminds him, "yet you are but a man and no god". By profaning the
bountiful gifts of God, the king has given up his birthright. He is forced into exile. His pride blinds him and undoes him.
Your heart was proud because of your beauty;You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
The king, Ezekiel tells us, loses his judgment, sense of balance, proportion and perspective about who he is in relationship to God because of the seduc
tion of power implicit within his prideful delusions, self-serving notions, and
abundant self-interest.
The prominent themes of the prophet's lamentation?pride, arrogance,
idolatry, seduction?are indeed relevant to an understanding of the psycho
logical and moral issues surrounding the building and dropping of the atomic
bomb. To understand how these dynamics function in the case of the devel
opment of the bomb and its use, it will be necessary for me to take some
chances, to use short-hand as well as to employ some shortcuts. What is
important to me is that the issues are joined and that we are left with reasons
to encounter at some depth the reality of those events and to see how our
biblical heritage can guide us in grappling with material most of us would like
to avoid.
Let us back up and consider what it took for the United States to get to the
place where it did to make the decision to use the bomb in the first place. There was a fear from the mid-1930's onward that as atomic fission (the splitting of
the atom) became possible, the energy released in a chain reaction in fis
sionable material could be utilized in the making of powerful weapons. By
1938, there was a not unrealistic fear that the Germans, by virtue of their
access to the uranium mines of Czechoslovakia and their scientific and tech
nological prowess, could produce such a weapon. So alarmed were scientists in
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America, including ?migr?s many of whom were Jews, that one of them, Leo
Szilard, prompted Albert Einstein to write President Roosevelt in 1939 to alert
him regarding this matter. This and a number of political and scientific
developments led over time to the formation of the Manhattan Project in 1942
almost a year after Pearl Harbor. The Manhattan Project to build the bomb
required the best efforts of hundreds of our best minds, millions of dollars and
the greatest of secrecy. Like most war efforts of that time, there was an
urgency that overrode careful reflection and judgment as to what was being built and how it might be used until near the very of the Project. On July 16,
1945, a test of a bomb took place in Alamagordo, New Mexico at a site ironi
cally named "Trinity." "The Gadget," as the bomb was euphemistically called, worked beyond all possible calculations. Its explosion brought forth provoca tive responses. The physicist, I.I. Rabi, described the first detonation of such a
bomb this way:
We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. Those ten
seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced. Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think
anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds. Finally it was over, diminishing, and we looked toward the place where the bomb had been; there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it
went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked
menacing. It seemed to come toward one.
A new thing had just been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature.(from Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York, 1987, p. 672).
His colleague, the physicist Robert Segre, saw it like this:
The most striking impression was that of an overwhelmingly bright light... I was
flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable
brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore ... I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible, (from Rhodes, p. 673)
Note in these descriptions the sense of abundant lurid fascination that
mesmerizes by its very magnitude ("it was a version that was seen with more
than the eye"?Rabi, "flabbergasted by the spectacle"?Segre). This event
evokes awe, fear, pride, and even identification with its power and beauty.
Responses like these are seen justifiably as problematic though altogether human and comprehensible. Let us presume that these images evoke
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conscious and unconscious reactions which are in some ways universal. These
responses, from my reading, are not atypical of other such encounters with
nuclear weapons. They are fascinating, powerful, beautiful, mysterious,
grandiose, and seductive. Once having produced and possessing such power, how could one not fail to feel prideful and omnipotent? What if one was in
volved in a struggle where the enemy (in this case, the Japanese) had been
demonized into sadists and vermin as the propaganda of that day indicates
and who thus needed to be destroyed. Moreover, a perilous invasion of the
home islands was being planned, so why not use it? The Japanese had indeed
done terrible things to warrant this reaction. The Rape of Nanking in China in
1937, the Death March out of Bataan in the Philippines in 1942, and, as we
have later learned, the use of biological weapons against the Chinese are three
prominent examples of their atrocities. Power, however, is the thing.
Omnipotent power and its seductive and majestic quality overrode and
undercut other considerations. Additionally, this power could be used not just as a bargaining tool with the Japanese to get them to surrender but as a
diplomatic weapon with the Russians as well. Some historians, in fact, view
the use of the bomb not only as the "last shots" of World War II but also as the
opening salvos of the arms race and the Cold War fired from our side.
Complete mastery has its negatives as well as its positives. It also had its
moral consequences. Let us not think there were not any debates about
dropping the bomb; there were. Let us not think there were no misgivings
presented or alternatives offered. There were such misgivings on the part of
both statesmen and scientists. One of the architects of the bomb, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, who was the civilian head of the Manhattan Project, saw the
bomb test and recalled to himself this piece of Hindu Scripture from the
Bhagavad Gita:
I am become death, shatterer of worlds.
Later, when shown some of the first films of the destruction at Hiroshima,
Oppenheimer said something to the effect, "Now we have all known sin."
Numbers of others who saw those images shared his sentiments at the time
and later.
The scientists, statesmen, diplomats, and military leaders, those most
responsible, those most talented, had acted and thought in the best ways available to them and had decided the way they did for the best of reasons.
They had also become like the King of Tyre in Ezekiel's Lamentation:
Your heart was proud because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom for the
sake of your splendor.
Their grim decision to use the bomb, from a biblical perspective, had ush
ered scientists, politicians, and military leaders out of an Edenic paradise of
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"dreaming innocence" (Paul Tillich) to a place of "fallenness" where they had
to live with their decision and cope with its consequences. Somewhere in this
seductive process of "creating power" could something have been done? The
question to me is not so much should we or should we not have developed or
used the bomb though such questions require ongoing exploration at many levels. The question is rather what can we learn on the level of meaning from
these personalities and events in which beauty, power, death, and the "shat
tering of worlds" came together. In them we see our ambivalence toward
nuclear weapons which are at once a source of power, strength, and protection and which cause us, on an unconscious level, to be enthralled by their beauty and power, even as they are the potential source of ultimate destruction.
Where do we or our leaders fall prey to illusions and delusions similar to those
of the leaders of 1942-1945?
- We have no choice but to develop and figure out how to best use these
weapons. -
They are here; we might as well take advantage of them as (1) a tool for
political leverage or (2) a deterrent to war - Their creation is an act of supreme and magnificent human effort - We have a birthright to be first, strongest and best.
It should be emphasized that these ideas in modified form may indeed be
applicable to all those who since or currently have engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction.
It is the height of arrogance to make such a weapon and then by identifi
cation with it become "God" but that is what I believe happened. Ezekiel offers
us this judgment:
Because your heart is proud, and you have said, "I am a god, I sit in the seat of the
gods, in the heart of the seas." Yet you are a man and no god.
The question remains: Can we resist the powerful pull of nuclear idolatry? The issues of seduction, idolatry, and power confront us in our own history as
they do in scriptures in the Hebrew prophets and in Jesus' confrontation with
the Sanh?drin. The dynamic is the same. In the confrontation with the
"principalities and powers" (St. Paul), where Jesus, the prophets, and we
encounter another power: the providence of God which does not forget, does not abandon, nurtures, renders judgment, and finally redeems. And through obedience to and reliance upon the providence of God we have an additional
profound ethical obligation to make certain that nuclear power is used for
benign purposes and creative ends.
All of us who know the prophet speaks to us understand this. All of us who
have been seduced by power in any of its malignant guises?money, sex, social
status, political influence, moral self-righteousness?know that to make or
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