Natural Lightning Rods, Part I
Copper being copper allowing trees to be 'more tree'.
I was visiting a friend in St. Louis this weekend, and we had the chance to visit the Missouri Botanical Garden. On the handful acres of land, there are two "champion trees", the largest of their species in the state (Missouri), the nation (US), or the world. One of these trees, a white basswood, is the largest of its species in the state of Missouri and once was the largest in the nation.
(Photo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an article about a 2020 lightning strike.)
As I was looking up at the tree - it was large, though close to the trunk you lose a sense of scale - a friend pointed out a cable visible on the left side of the tree: "It's a lightning rod." I took a look over at the cable, moving a little in the light, post-rainstorm breeze. The cable itself appeared to me as industrial, electrical, scientific, but considering the cable on the side of the tree resulted in a significantly more natural sense, as if it belonged there.
It's not often something artificial appears this natural. It is even rarer for something dealing with modern sciences1, like electricity, chemistry, industrialization, engineering, psychology, and sociology, to appear this natural and just. What made this lightning rod appear beautiful, fitting, and just?
It wasn't as if the artificial was mimicking the natural, like the lightning rod was some metallic vine, living “symbiotically” within the tree. The Chihuly glass in some of the ponds had this effect - initially appearing natural until you notice it is glass, and then you can appreciate the handiwork of the craftsman knowing organic forms well enough to appear natural for an instant. The lightning rod was working as a lightning rod, electrically, industrially. In its placement, it wasn't cleverly mimicking the natural.
It wasn't the shaping of the natural into an artificial, like wood boxes— or the boxwoods that formed a living wall around the nearby garden. That is present in any artificial thing, as the natural always precedes the artificial.
The phrase that came to my mind in trying to describe this relationship was that the lightning rod was allowing the tree "to become more like itself" in a very pure and integral way.
Trees are, notably, tall and strong. I think of the symbol of the cedars of Lebanon in the Psalms, or the huge timbers for Notre Dame Cathedral. In the Eucharistic hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas, "O Salutaris Hostia," the word robur in "da robur, fer auxilum" means "strength" in context, but in other places it would more directly mean "timber" or "hardwood" or "oak." We come to understand God's strength in relation to a tree's strength.
Allowing the tree to be taller and stronger - by being more resistant to lightning strikes - allows the tree to become more like itself. This becoming-more-like-itself has scents of fulfillment and perfection: it has the same sense as "the glory of God is human beings fully alive" or "I have come that they might have life and have it to the full." The point of the lightning rod was the perfection of the tree, and the more the lightning rod was a lightning rod, in all its industrial, metallic, electrical glory, the more the tree could be a tree.
I have mixed feelings about describing "modern" technology in one broad brush, but I think there's something to it if you look at it in a historical sense. Guardini's final letter in Letters From Lake Como seems to have this attitude. They are not intrinsically unified, but contingently unified.