"God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself; -- only in Thee I have all"

Julian of Norwich, REVELATION: Chapter V

In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving.

I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding.

Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, — I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

The Ecstasy of St. Theresa

In her words:

It pleased our Lord that I should see the following vision a number of times. I saw an angel near me, on the left side, in bodily form. This I am not wont to see, save very rarely.... In this vision it pleased the Lord that I should see it thus. He was not tall, but short, marvellously beautiful, with a face which shone as though he were one of the highest of the angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call Seraphim.... I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire. This I thought that he thrust several times into my heart, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew out the spear he seemed to be drawing them with it, leaving me all on fire with a wondrous love for God. The pain was so great that it caused me to utter several moans; and yet so exceeding sweet is this greatest of pains that it is impossible to desire to be rid of it, or for the soul to be content with less than God.

Here's Bernini's rendition of the event:


And some interesting anecdotes:

While the visions are today the most famous part of her spiritual experience, she considered them inferior to the quiet sense of union with God that she was to achieve later in life. The visions were disorienting and an embarrassment, although she did her best to hide them from her sisters. They were also dangerous. It was not unusual for visionaries to wind up at the stake. Teresa's autobiography was already being examined by the Inquisition for signs of heresy; and as a woman and the descendant of Jews, she was especially suspect. Increasingly, those around Teresa tried to disassociate themselves from her. At the same time, Teresa felt drawn to a more strict life of poverty and self-denial.

In 1562 she began a reform of the Carmelite order (later known as the "Discalced" or barefoot, Carmelites) with a small convent, St. Joseph's, in Avila. Here she lived for four years; "the most restful years of my life". The convent had no endowment and subsisted on alms. One day Teresa went into a trance while holding a frying pan with a little oil in it, which worried her sisters. They weren't concerned about the trance, which they were used to, but were afraid that she might spill the oil. It was all they had. Here she wrote a treatise, The Way of Perfection, as a guide to the monastic life. Her cell did not have a table or chair so she wrote kneeling on the floor at a ledge under a window, with no re-reading or editing.

She was a great friend of St. John of the Cross, and they together attempted to reform the Carmelite Order, of which they both were members.

Songs of the Soul II

A much better translation of John of the Cross' Songs of the Soul - again by Mirabai Starr:

On a dark night,
Inflamed by love-longing -
O exquisite risk! -
Undetected I slipped away.
My house, at last, grown still.

Secure in the darkness,
I climbed the secret ladder in disguise -
O exquisite risk! -
Concealed by the darkness.
My house, at last, grown still.

That sweet night: a secret.
Nobody saw me;
I did not see a thing.
No other light, no other guide
Than the one burning in my heart.

This light led the way
More clearly than the risen sun
To where he was waiting for me
- The one I knew so intimately -
In a place where no one could find us.

O night, that guided me!
O night, sweeter than sunrise!
O night, that joined lover with Beloved!
Lover transformed in Beloved!

Upon my blossoming breast,
Which I cultivated just for him,
He drifted into sleep,
And while I caressed him,
A cedar breeze touched the air.

Wind blew down from the tower,
Parting the locks of his hair.
With his gentle hand
He wounded my neck
And all my senses were suspended.

I lost myself. Forgot myself.
I lay my face against the Beloved's face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind.
Abandoning my cares
Among the lilies, forgotten.

It's amazing how different each translation is, and what a huge difference it can make in the reading of the poem....

A ray of darkness

From Mirabai Starr's most excellent, poetic, and sensual translation of St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul. This is from Chapter 2, "Night of the Spirit." Chapter 1 is called "Night of Sense"; the seeking soul must pass through each to attain union with God - the purification first of the senses and then of the spirit.

The dark night of the spirit is an inflowing of God into the soul. It purges her of imperfections: natural and spiritual. Contemplatives call it "infused contemplation" or "mystical theology." This is where God transmits his secret teachings to the soul and instructs her in the perfection of love. She does not have to do a thing, nor will she understand a thing. Infused contemplation is the wisdom of the loving God. It both purges and illumines the soul, making her ready for the union of love. The same loving wisdom that purifies and enlightens the blessed spirits on other planes of existence, purges and illumines the earthly soul, now.

But here is the doubt: Why is this divine light, which illumines and purges the soul of ignorance, called here the "dark night"?

Divine wisdom is not only night and darkness to the soul but also terror and suffering. Its height transcends the natural reach of the soul and so it looks like darkness to her. Her own insignificance and impurity also cause her to experience the light of God as painful and oppressive. The Philosopher suggests that the clearer and more manifest are divine things in themselves, the darker and more hidden they are to the natural eyes of the soul. The brighter the light, the more blinding it is to the owl. The more directly we gaze at the sun, the more it darkens our visual faculty, depriving it and overwhelming it, because of its inherent weakness.

And so, when divine light strikes the soul that is not yet fully illumined, it causes spiritual darkness to drop over her, transcending her limitations, impoverishing and darkening her natural intelligence. St. Dionysus and other mystics call infused contemplation a "ray of darkness." The power of the discursive mind is conquered by this great supernatural light.

David says that "near to God and surrounding him are darkness and clouds." It's not that this is actually so but that it seems that way to the feeble intellect which is blinded by such radiance and cannot rise to meet it. "Through the great splendor of his presence," says David, "clouds passed," that is, between God and our own understanding. When God sends forth from himself the illuminating ray of secret wisdom to the soul not yet fully transformed, her mind is enveloped by darkness.

Fasting

The Lenten fast has been a very good and I hope important experience for me. (I have to admit that right after the Primates' meeting, I abandoned it for a few days, when I went into a period of "who cares?" hopelessness; but I've come back to it again. I'm glad about that, because the most solemn period of Lent is approaching.)

I haven't had any other problems keeping the fast, though; I've eaten one smallish meal each day, and other food that in total added up to less than that meal. No meat, and no sweets - except on Sundays, when I can eat a little more also. Today, like all Fridays in Lent, I kept a strict fast: only one meal - no food at all for 24 hours, from last evening after dinner to this. I just ate a small piece of soda bread, and it tasted so sweet and delicious. You gain a definite appreciation for these things you almost never think about here in the wealthy West.

I hadn't realized that I'm normally almost never hungry; that I'm almost always satisfied in a physical sense. It really does make you think much more about people who don't have enough to eat on a daily basis. It's concretely changed my outlook in that way - and it's made me remember at all times that it's Lent, too. It does, as I read earlier this year, "disrupt and disturb the secular order." I really do think fasting (and other disciplines, but this is an obvious one, and something everybody can do) is important for this reason; I'm supposed to be living a religious life, and that should involve disruption and discomfort.

"The Call of the Cross" is a Lenten devotional publication from Episcopal Relief and Development. Today's reading is this:

Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. - Mark 9:41

When we turn on a faucet, we expect to get clean water. In the developing world, only 50 percent of children have access to clean drinking water. Dirty, unsafe water is responsible for killing millions of children in our world every year. When Jesus said, "Anyone who gives a cup of water...." he was affirming a central truth in scripture. Anyone who does even the smallest act of kindness will find that God honors and values that act of kindness.

I don't know really what an ordinary person can do about this problem, except to give money to try to fix it, and to talk about it like this. I have to remember, always, that people are suffering - especially when I'm lucky enough not to be.

Today's Epistle Reading

Or part of it, at least. It's Romans 8: 37-39 (NRSV), with the verse numbers removed. James Alison notes rightly that often it's better to read Scripture straight, so to speak, to get the original sense of it. It's Paul at his mystical and poetic best, again:

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Luminous, wonderful

Holy Spirit,
Giving life to all life,
Moving all creatures,
Root of all things,
Washing them clean,
Wiping out their mistakes,
Healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
Luminous, wonderful,
Awakening the heart from its ancient sleep.

~ Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)


(I am so grateful for these people - Hildegard and St. John of the Cross, and others. I find it incredibly difficult to deal with the intense anger and resentment that I feel right now towards the Church, and towards other Christians - while at the same time feeling unable to sever my relationship with the Christian faith. I am so completely conflicted and so confounded. And hurt, also, it has to be said.

But when I read these things I am peaceful again. There are and always have been very spiritual people in the Church, all the while it goes through these spasms and paroxysms of power and money and status. Right now, I need rest and the solace of the mystical; I need to feel close to God again - something I've been finding more and more difficult over the past year, as I've made myself crazy with fighting over "the issue."

Thanks be to God for the deep sanity of contemplation. And for a way to talk about it, via weblogs and the internet - which is also, ironically, the main source of all the pain. Well, that's life on earth, isn't it?)

Oh, night more lovely than the dawn

From Urban Dharma: The Los Angeles Buddhist Catholic Dialogue, a review of an edition of St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul:

As the last rites were read to him on his deathbed at the age of 49, John of the Cross, the 16th century poet, mystic, priest and monk, interrupted. Please, he begged, read me "The Song of Solomon."

That such a sensual, luscious poem to love would be the last words John wished to hear is a bittersweet commentary on his life. He was a member of Teresa of Avila's Discalced Carmelite Order--the Barefoot Carmelites--and Teresa's beloved, passionate friend. His finest and most famous poem, "Songs of the Soul," combines the best of each of his vocations. He and Teresa were committed to the reform of the Carmelites, and both of them were caught in the chaos of the Inquisition in Spain.

At 25, John was captured and imprisoned in a closet in a monastery by a community of monks who upheld a Vatican faction's dim view of Teresa's reforms. He was starved and flogged. After nine months of captivity, he escaped by lowering himself out of his cell with a rope made of strips of cloth. He got himself to a Discalced convent and wept as he heard the nuns reciting the Angelus. He wrote "Songs of the Soul" in a state of gratitude and ecstasy.

Reformation is not an easy thing, it appears; something for me to keep in mind. "The Angelus" bell at the convent is rung three times during the day, three times three times each, at 6 a.m., at noon, and at 6 p.m. All recite it privately rather than in chapel together; the bells are beautiful, like the faint sweet voice of the angel Gabriel calling from some other realm, an echo of God's presence both here and in the world to come.

The poem, "Songs of the Soul", which "describes a night in which a soul escapes from her house to join her lover, her creator, in a night of risk, ecstasy and passion" - a dark night in which the soul meets her Beloved:

1.
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings — oh, happy chance! —
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

2.
In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised — oh, happy chance! —
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

3.
In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

4.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me —
A place where none appeared.

5.
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!

6.
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

7.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

8.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

I went to mass today; I wanted to taste that sweetness again. I heard more during the sermon about "unity," and gritted my teeth, and promised I would do what the Beloved requires. I do not know what that is.

"What do you believe that you cannot prove?"

A very intriguing question from my favorite online magazine, Edge.

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

Among the thinkers asked this question are Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Marc Hauser, Margaret Wertheim, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, Ray Kurzweil, and Michael Shermer.

Edge asks a different question at the beginning of every year. Some examples: "What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?"; "What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?"; "What Questions Have Disappeared?".

Check 'em out, and the regular articles, too, which run the gamut from Physics to Biology to Psychology to Culture. It's a great resource.

Unio Mystica in Montreal

Nuns Brains Probed for God

The Carmelite nuns live a life of silent prayer, separated from the modern world by the high stone wall that surrounds their monastery in an industrial part of Montreal. Except for medical care, they rarely leave their sanctuary. But that changed late last month, when they began to make periodic visits to, of all places, a science lab.

The sisters arrive at the neuro-science laboratory in the University of Montreal's psychology department two at a time, wearing habits sewn from thick, dark cloth, high white collars and veils that frame their faces and flow down their backs. On their feet are sensible brown laceups that appear to have never seen the outdoors before.

They come to take part in an experiment that will probe a mystical and very private part of their lives. Sister Diane, the monastery's prioress, and Sister Teresa admit to being nervous as they peer curiously into a dark chamber about the size of a walk-in closet and equipped with an old barber's chair.

It is here that they have agreed to try to relive unio mystica, a religious experience so intense that Christians profess to sense their Lord as a physical presence. The nuns hope to help Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard uncover just what happens in their brains when they feel the hand of God.

My favorite part of this article is the following section:

When the analysis of all three experiments is done, he hopes to have a clear biological picture of an experience that mystifies even those who have lived it. Ultimately, he would like to know enough about how it works to be able to offer the same experience to anybody seeking spiritual growth.

Sister Diane says she is certain that Dr. Beauregard will discover a biological basis for the Carmelites' spiritual experience, one she says is shared by all human beings. God equipped people with the brains they need for a spiritual life, she insists. "Our body has a spiritual component. To be a human being is to be a spiritual being. I'm convinced this will show in the results."

Sister Diane is possessed of a deep and lovely faith! Some people find the idea of a "biological basis for the Carmelites' spiritual experience" threatening, with the implication that "it's all in our heads." Sister Diane, on the other hand, believes that this is a gift from God Himself. Beautiful.

And I like the part about "offering the same experience to anybody seeking spiritual growth." I wonder what that will actually mean, though; an electrical zap to the brain when somebody's got a jones for God? That would seem to take the journey away, and everything one might learn from it. The effort counts for something, after all. If I hadn't gone through the pain of getting sober - if they had just zapped me when I needed to get my mind in order - I wouldn't have learned how to pray. I wouldn't have learned how to meditate and order my own mind. I wouldn't have learned all the things I learned (often the very hardest way), and God wouldn't have been able to "instruct my heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions."

It would have been a flat experience, in other words, one without depth. Pain is the price of admission to a new life, it says in the 7th Step. In every case, it adds.

Meditation May Bolster Brain Activity

Buddhist Meditation May Produce Lasting Changes in the Brain

Nov. 10, 2004 -- Meditation may not only produce a calming effect, but new research suggests that the practice of Buddhist meditation may produce lasting changes in the brain.

Researchers found that monks who spent many years in Buddhist meditation training show significantly greater brain activity in areas associated with learning and happiness than those who have never practiced meditation.

The results suggest that long-term mental training, such as Buddhist meditation, may prompt both short and long-term changes in brain activity and function.

In the study, which appears in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers compared the brain activity of eight long-time Buddhist monks and 10 healthy students.

The average age of the monks was 49, and each had undergone mental training in meditation for 10,000 to 50,000 hours over the course of 15 to 40 years.

The students' average age was 21. They had no prior experience in meditation and received one week of meditative training before the start of the study.

Both groups were asked to practice compassionate meditation, which does not require concentration on specific things. Instead, the participants are instructed to generate a feeling of love and compassion without drawing attention to a particular object.

Researchers measured brain activity before, during, and after meditation using electroencephalograms.

They found striking differences between the two groups in a type of brain activity called gamma wave activity, which is involved in mental processes including attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception.

The Buddhist monks had a higher level of this sort of gamma wave activity before they began meditation, and this difference increased dramatically during meditation. In fact, researchers say the extremely high levels of gamma wave activity are the highest ever reported.

The monks also had more activity in areas associated with positive emotions, such as happiness.

Researchers say the fact that the monks had higher levels of this type of brain activity before meditation began suggests that long-term practice of Buddhist or other forms of meditation may alter the brain.

"A Masterly Instrument"

From Evelyn Underhill's 1936 book, Worship, in the chapter titled "Liturgy a Work of Art":

A certain restraint, a sense of style, is characteristic of all good liturgical action; for it exists to express the common worship of the family, not the fervour of the individual soul. Therefore the individual who prays from within the liturgy has to sacrifice something of his own will and feeling to the corporate movement; must submit to the ritual discipline, and lose his own prayer in that of the fellowship, if he is to "understand by dancing that which is being done." But on the other hand, there are great compensations. If his religious preferences and enthusiasms are checked, and subordinated to "liturgical good manners," his reserves are respected too. The Christian liturgy, as Guardini has said, is "a masterly instrument which has made it possible for us to express our inner life in all its fullness and depth, without divulging our secrets . . . we can pour out our hearts, and still feel that nothing has been dragged to light which should remain hidden."

I'm very interested in the idea that the Liturgy is "a masterly instrument which has made it possible for us to express our inner life in all its fullness and depth, without divulging our secrets . . . we can pour out our hearts, and still feel that nothing has been dragged to light which should remain hidden." I think this is why the liturgical churches have produced such great art, and the non-liturgical sects haven't, for the most part; the shepherding of secrets and the "reserve" of emotion (and the discipline involved) make it possible to "pour out our hearts" into art.

Reminiscent of Flaubert's admonition to "Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work."

Another interesting thread in the "emotion/religion" linkage. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to research, myself; another was de Caussade's "God instructs the heart; not by ideas but through pains and contradictions." These are such fascinating topics for research projects, I think! We've come to a place where science has become so powerful that it is forgetting the importance of simple human wisdom. Wisdom requires a "big picture" view, though; this is what is disappearing. Science is particularizing everything, even itself. There are no generalists anymore, because scientific disciplines have become too deep and too technical for one person to understand a great deal in a broad way.

The "big picture" isn't possible in science anymore, and the vast amount of information around now is making it difficult to see the large view in any area. But we need to connect with wisdom from the past, and then write our own, in continuation. This is why the Bible is important, still. And so is The Illiad and The Odyssey, and Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Meantime, I'll try to find if there's any existing research on either of these topics and will publish it. Religion and its connection to art via emotion and psychology is one of the very most interesting topics to me in the world.

Worship

From Evelyn Underhill's Worship, 1936:

The painted cave of those prehistoric worshippers of an unknown God who were "simple-minded enough to give of their best to the supra-sensible powers," the Pagan temple, the Christian cathedral, are all expressions of the same fundamental human need to incoporate, make visible, the spirit of worship; to lavish skill, labour, and wealth on this most apparently "useless" of all the activities of man. So, too, the ritual chant, with its accompaniment of ceremonial movement and manual acts, is found to exert a stablizing influence at every level of his religious life. And when this costly and explicit embodiment is lacking, or is rejected where once possessed, and the Godward life of the community is not given some sensible and institutional expression within the social complex, worship seldom develops its full richness and power. It remains thin, abstract, and notional: a tendency, an attitude, a general aspiration, moving alongside human life, rather than in it.

It is true that worship, when thus embodied, loses - or seems to lose - something of its purity; but only then can it take up and use man's various powers and capacities, turning the whole creature towards the Eternal, and thus entering the texture of his natural as well as his supernatural life. Certainly, it is here that we encounter the greatest of the dangers that accompany its long history; the danger that form will smother spriit, ritual action take the place of spontaneous prayer, the outward and visible sign obscure the inward grace. But the risk is one which man is bound to take. He is not "pure" spirit, and is not capable of "pure" spiritual acts. Even though in his worship he moves out towards absolutes, and in and through that worship absolutes are revealed to his soul, it is at his own peril that leaves the world of sense behind, in his approach to the God Who created and informs it. This humbling truth must govern all his responses to Reality.

Here's some ritual chant: "the Service of Compline as chanted by the choir of St. Joseph of Arimathea Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California."

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

A review of Harold Bloom's new book of the same title.

Where shall wisdom be found? Harold Bloom finds it in the same place as the question -- the Book of Job -- as well as in Ecclesiastes and the writings of Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, St. Augustine and in the Gospel of Thomas. Bloom's new book, which compares and contrasts what he calls the "wisdom writing" in these varied works, "rises out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends." He tells us, "Since childhood, I have been comforted by Talmudic wisdom," and he cites wisdom writing that helped him rally when he "was ill, depressed, or weary." He also says, "We most of us know that wisdom immediately goes out the door when we are in crisis" and that he has "not found that wisdom literature is a comfort."

These claims may seem inconsistent, but inconsistency does not trouble him. His section on Emerson approvingly quotes that writer's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and alludes to Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes." Such familiar sayings contrast with a central delight of Bloom's book -- its inclusion of wonderful aphorisms likely to be new to many readers. One of my favorites is the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus's "Psychoanalysis is itself that disease of which it purports to be the cure," although my delight had dimmed by the time I encountered Bloom's third repetition of this remark.

As the foregoing suggests, Bloom's book is inconsistent (or multitudinous) in quality as well as in attitude. Often his fervent discussion yields shimmering insights. Consider his treatment of what he calls the "Nietzschean" position that what makes one poem more memorable than another "must be that the memorable poem, the poem that has more meaning, or starts more meaning going, is the poem that gives (or commemorates) more pain." Bloom comments, "Strong poetry is difficult, and its memorability is the consequence of a difficult pleasure, and a difficult enough pleasure is a kind of pain."

I've just finished writing elsewhere that the Church - and by this I refer to all of the ancient religious traditions - is the only place (aside from university history and classics departments) still deeply in touch with the distant human past. I believe these enduring writings are an important repository of human experience - of the life of the human being qua human being on earth - and will become more and more important as the world goes more and more techno. It will be necessary to have a baseline of experience from which to draw conclusions about the essence of human nature - or at least about the manner in which human nature evolves, if it does (and I believe it does, in fact).

Also, the Church is one of the few places still thinking (hopefully, but definitely not in every case) about "the spiritual life," and about "meaning" in those particular terms. It's always been my opinion that writers and artists also deal primiarly in the spiritual, but you don't seem to see, in art, these days, a drawing together of the various threads of experience and meaning into a large coherent whole; instead, the focus seems to be on shining light on the particular, and almost for its own sake, now that the "universal" is out of favor. Religion still insists, in its seeking of God, that human experience is universal - for if not, how could religious principles be applied?

Deus ex machina

The urban world may look quite different in the not-too-distant future:

Nanotechnology alone offers exciting and disquieting possibilities. Originally proposed by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman forty years ago, nanotech manipulates individual atoms and molecules to build things—anything, in fact. Experts anticipate that within the next few decades, large-scale objects, including buildings, could be fabricated using microscopic robots called assemblers, which would join to make a cybernetic glue, able to assume any shape and size. Such an instrument would eliminate traditional constraints of design and construction. Standard, irreducible components, such as the 2 X 4, the brick, steel shapes, nails and screws, will be replaced by microscopic parts. Form, texture, color, and strength would be defined at the cellular level. Orthogonal geometry, demanded for efficiency by standard frame construction, could disappear altogether.

This is not science fiction; nanoscience is quickly becoming reality. In the last year or two, IBM researchers have fashioned a computer circuit from a single carbon molecule, and Cornell scientists have built a microbe-sized motor, the first nanoscale machine. Eric Drexler, who coined the word "nanotechnology" in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation, expects dramatic benefits for design, manufacturing, electronics, medicine, and every other human endeavor. Everything we make will become better, faster, stronger, smaller, and cheaper. For architects, nanoconstruction could finally accommodate the restless search for new forms, allowing varieties never before achieved or even imagined. We will be able to construct anything we envision through a virtual wave of the wand. Buildings may be conceived and executed through computer programming by entering only a few parameters and requirements. How big is it? What does it feel like? BANG! Instant architecture.

But this assumes that designers will control the process. Nanotech’s opponents see it as an untamable force, because its potential for self-replication could get out of hand. Picture trillions upon trillions of invisible mechanical pests filling the environment and utterly consuming the earth. Assuming we can avoid catastrophe, an important question is whether architecture will require architects. Will expertise become unnecessary when anyone could punch her desires into a keyboard and produce her dream home? Moreover, a building may not necessitate anyone at all to summon it into existence. Spontaneous assembly could allow nanobots to go on auto-pilot. While Feynman saw nanoscience as arranging atoms "the way we want them," in actuality they could develop unpredictably, in ways we may or may not want.

Here's Bill Joy's original piece about nanotechnology, "Why the future doesn’t need us," referred to in the above article.