Mont Saint Michel explained

 I’m reading Augusto Del Noce’s ‘The Problem of Atheism’ at the moment. One of his essays distinguishes between natural atheism and irreligion. The one is the old timey involvement with the god question as though it were a serious issue that needed to be resolved  and required careful consideration; the other is the ‘what’, ‘yawn’, ‘is that still going, is it a thing’.  The latter eye roll is the triumph of empiricism.  

O.K. you know all this so why am I bringing it up? We got on Sky recently. My excuse for this is that the ash trees have grown so tall and so ivied that signal from the satellite is impaired most of the year. So Sky. Tonight we were flicking through the program list and spotted a documentary on Mont Saint Michel. That could be interesting. It was as an example of the dismal worship of science. Nothing much was mentioned of the religious origins of the world heritage site merely that there was a legend of the founder Bishop  being touched on the head (or in) by St.Michael in a dream causing a hole to appear in his skull. Sure enough in a reliquary a skull was found with just such a hole. Then we had an expert in this curious condition explain it to us as a result of a cyst. This was accompanied by 3D graphics. Then there was the age of the bricks which are examined for magnetic orientation pinpointing the time of laying within ten years. More explaining coated in the white alb of science, graphics winding through the compass of reality.  

There was no mention of the fact that Mont Saint Michel was a Benedictine foundation given to them by Edward the Confessor or that after a couple of centuries of absence they returned in 1968 or that they were replaced by the Monastic Fraterneties of Jerusalem in 2000. Maybe they could have used a few graphics from a Knights Templar movie for that. Nothing but the design of the sluice gates that keep the island from being silted up and losing its unique isolation from the mainland. An engineering marvel, awesome hydraulics, cams opening and closing.

 Its possible to know everything and understand nothing.

Maybe I’ll fire up the chain saw.