‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?’
T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
None of them cared to speak about it. There were some things that could never be spoken of.
That’s what the great Arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton told journalist Harold Begbie, speaking about the perilous last leg of his 1914-1917 Antarctic expedition. After the wreck of his beloved Endurance, Shackleton had set out with two other men on an epic journey to seek help from a distant whaling station. By the time they reached their goal, the clean-cut captain was unrecognizable behind wildly thick beard and hair.
How had they done it? Sheer grit and guts is the obvious answer. But in his memoir, Shackleton would allude to a mysterious something else, something all three men had felt, but could hardly verbalize. For those thirty-six grueling hours of marching across the South Georgia mountains and glaciers, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”
The story became the stuff of legend. T. S. Eliot took some poetic license with it for the bit of “The Wasteland” I quote above. The story of incognito Jesus and his disciples on the road to Emmaus might also have been percolating in Eliot’s mind. And, of course, there is the iconic “fourth man” story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three young Hebrew captives flung into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to an idol of their Babylonian captors’ king. When the king looks inside to see how they’re coming along, he is shocked to find not three men in the fire, but four. He calls the young men to come out, and they do, unscathed. From that moment on, he pledges himself to the God who saved them.
Over time, many more explorers as well as ordinary people in dire straits reported an experience like Shackleton's. Eliot’s “third man” phrase passed into psychological literature as the “third man factor.” A book-length contemporary study by John Geiger interviews everyone from wilderness wanderers to disaster survivors like Ron DiFrancesco, who felt “something” lead him out of the South Tower on 9/11 just before it collapsed. Geiger says that while the “spiritual or religious” explanation conveniently presents itself, there are more scientific ways to parse the phenomenon.
I’ve been inspired to read up on all this just now thanks to Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, both evolutionary biologists who make long podcasts discussing religion, science, and current affairs. Bret has spent a few years participating in various conversations among public intellectuals about the rise and fall of the New Atheists. He brings his own ev bio spin to the question of where their aggressive “missionary atheism” went wrong, what might take its place, and to what extent religion can or can’t play a role in the next chapter of our collective human drama. As you might guess, Bret is Jewish by birth, but he’s not devout, and he’s often made the case that going back to straightforward Judeo-Christian religion (let alone Islam) would mean going back to “outdated code,” evolutionarily speaking. Of course, the code was there for a reason, if you think about it like a Darwinian. It wouldn’t have survived this long if it conferred no evolutionary benefits. Our collective problem as a species, according to Bret, is that the code is now yielding diminishing returns. Where exactly that leaves us is something he’s still working out.
Bret and Heather’s latest episode, poignantly titled “Never Alone,” uses the third man factor as a hook for this much bigger conversation about the appropriate place for faith and useful fiction. Bret’s own coinage for “useful fiction” is “literally false but metaphorically true.” This category is broad enough to include everything from the popular misunderstanding of follow-through in tennis (sort of true but sort of mistaken, yet helpful) to things like the third man factor (a subjective hallucination of something not objectively real, yet sometimes lifesaving). In order for these things to have their beneficial effect, people must believe they’re not just a fiction, not just subjective. So it’s been, historically, with the major world religions. So it still is, for the people who still believe them.
But what if you don’t? What if you don’t believe in angels?
I do, though I can’t say I’ve ever met one. Nor do I automatically believe everyone who says he’s seen one, though I don’t automatically disbelieve either. Sometimes these stories sound more like an encounter with a human Good Samaritan. Recently, a couple of friends have shared stories with me that seem to plausibly fall in this category. Still, odd details remain.
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