Picard, Augustine, Q, and God

Editors Note: Left Thumb actually wrote about three sentences in this one. It's not much, but it's a start. Of course, at the same time, he demanded that we changed all of the "I"s into "We"s, and that the post be credited to both of us. Three sentences and he thinks it becomes "we." I haven't seen this blatant of a credit-snatch since that time I talked to that British guy and he claimed that England played a role in WWII. Shameless.

Tapestry is not only one of the great Next Generation episodes, it is one of the great science-fiction stories. The premise is not outlandish or particularly original, but it is a compelling tale of the Fall, grace, redemption, and the great irony of mankind’s relationship to the Almighty. Not bad for 45 minutes.
For those who don’t recall the episode, Captain Picard is dying. After a plasma-something-or-other hits him in the chest, his artificial heart gives out, and Picard meets his maker—or, in this case, the next best thing. He meets Q. After an amusing conversation, Q drags from Picard a sense of regret at some of the things Johnny-Boy did in his youth. See, it turns out that even slightly stuffy Shakespearean sixty-somethings can have a past that is... colorful. As much as we’d like to envision boyish Picard curled up by the fire reading King Lear at the family estate in the Pyrenees, this was far from the reality. Jean-Luc apparently has some regrets, and that’s not counting the hair situation. Among these regrets was a gratuitous bar fight, in which he was stabbed and lost his real heart. Thirty years later, absent that altercation, Picard would have survived the plasma-something-or-other. Picard decries his youth as one full of arrogance and very little sense. Q decides to send Picard back in time to right the wrongs.

Picard does so, avoiding the fight while alienating his friends. Yet his life turns out quite a bit different this time. Instead of command of the Enterprise, Lieutenant Picard finds himself stuck in a rote scientific role, more becoming of a young pup than a grizzled Starfleet veteran. When Jean-Luc asks Riker and Troi about his career, they bluntly relate all of his failings to him: he never set himself apart, he never took any risks, he never did anything. He wasn’t command material, he was “…punctual.” As Jean-Luc sums it up to Q a moment later: that man is devoid of passion and imagination. And I would rather die the man I was than live life out like that. Q gives JLP another chance; this time the future Captain of the Enterprise takes no prisoners, the bar fight ensues, and the knife goes through his chest. Yet he wakes up, barely alive, on the Enterprise, apparently with a functioning artificial heart.

As we re-tell the story, we can’t possibly convey the awesomeness of the episode. Patrick Stewart was born for this type of story, and John de Lancie is, of course, perfect as Q—mischievous and a little sadistic but with a core of goodness you can’t deny. The story itself explains so much about Picard, that we think it is hard to remember at the end that we didn’t already know all of this about Picard.* It feels more like a friend retelling a story than a script dreamed up by a TNG writer.

But for now, we’ll leave out the general accolades and focus on how universal of a story this is—and how much it tells us about us. It hearkens back to all the great Saints. All the great Saints did stupid things in their youth. Paul killed people, Francis went off to war, Peter denied Jesus for crying out loud. But in particular it’s reminiscent of Saint Augustine, who went through a veritable theological bar fight in his youth, falling into agnosticism and Manichaeism before flourishing as one of the greatest theologians, philosophers and defenders that the Church has ever known. Somewhat fittingly, Augustine is one of the Big Two along with Aquinas, much like Picard is one of the Big Two along with Kirk. (For more on this parallel, be on the watch for Left Thumb’s upcoming book Summa Trekkologiae: An Introduction to Star Trek and Scholasticism.)**

Imagine, though, Saint Augustine, without his early experiences. Without personal experience, how could he have written the Confessions? How could he have poured forth the deeply personal yet universally applicable truths that he did, regarding original sin, free will, the grace of God, and so forth? He wouldn’t have; he couldn’t have. In the same way, Captain Picard, without having come close to death, and without having become so aware of the preciousness of each moment, how could he have led others into battle or commanded the starship which has been affectionately referred to as a Flying Fortress of Goodness, Bringing Happiness Wherever She Goes? Of course, he couldn’t. The most happiness he could legitimately hope to bring to others would be if he stood in the park and handed children free Happy Meals. (But given Picard’s feelings towards children, this seems unlikely. And slightly creepy. But we digress.)

Going one step further, Augustine and Picard seem to mirror human history. On Easter, we sing “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which has won for us so Great a Redeemer.” Now, this concept is a great mystery not only to us, but to the Church in general. How it is that God brought, out of our disobedience, greater good than imaginable is beyond our capacity to understand. But He did. Before the Fall, humans were created in God’s Image, of course, but after Jesus, God is one of us; this is the most stunning thing there is in the cosmos, anywhere. Nothing else even comes close. Through God’s condescension, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and our participation in the Eucharist, we become united with the Almighty in a way that even the angels do not know.

Augustine himself (conveniently enough) talks about how we fell from grace because our minds were turned from the eternal to the finite. Yet, oddly enough, it was our finitude that saved us—had we been pure spirit, as the angels, our sin would have been eternal as well, brooking no savior, and leaving us in perdition with Lucifer and his ilk. Of course, the irony is that had we not been temporal beings, perhaps we would never have drifted from the eternal. Yet because we were, God used our weakness to bring forth an Act so mighty that our temporal faults were taken on by His Son, and we are able to join the eternal in a way we never could have before.

We might not be articulating it well, but the point we’re trying to get across is nuts. Through our fault, through our limited nature, and through our weakness, God worked a miracle that gave us more than we had in the Garden of Eden.

Of course, none of this is to say that we should sin that grace might abound. But it is salvation history, and it resembles the personal history of so many (all?) of the Saints that one has to think God likes this story.

One of the great parts of Tapestry is that nowhere does Picard deny the fact that he made mistakes in his youth. Even at the end, Picard is a 56-year-old, seasoned, responsible captain who would no longer get into a bar fight with a Nausicaan. His youth was full of mistakes and he knows it. But to go back and wipe them out is to wipe out a lot of who he was.
Without this particular mistake, Picard never experiences real suffering, never comes to the conclusion that certain things are worth dying for, and that living is more important than just staying alive, and all those clichés which we repeat to ourselves but have trouble actually believing.*** That Picard could never lead an away team, could never face down Romulans, argue with Klingons, survive the Borg, and save the galaxy from multitudinous and multifarious dangers.

A Saint Augustine who had never known the pit of despair and lack of God that comes in the wilderness could never have so brilliantly and genuinely defended the Church against that wilderness. A Saint Augustine who had not known such suffering would not have had the same impetus to keep others from falling into that pit of despair.

Picard, in the alternate Tapestry reality, still makes mistakes, of course. He fools around with one of his best friends, basically ruining their relationship for all time. This is what makes the whole point: we are going to make mistakes. The question is, are we going to make mistakes in the pursuit of greatness, or in an attempt to avoid dying to self? In the lowest circle of Hell, nothing moves, save the wings of Satan, freezing all below. To get there, all we have to do is nothing.

If we aim High, we can’t help but reach God. We will falter and we will fail, and we might even get a knife stuck through us, but that very suffering draws us closer to God than we previously thought possible. That’s what Jesus did for mankind, that’s how Augustine became Saint Augustine, and that’s how Jean-Luc Picard became Captain of the Enterprise.


~Two Thumbs Sideways~




*And yes, you picayune, pointy-eared perfectionists, we know that his artificial heart and the bar fight is mentioned before, in “Samaritan Snare”. But the point remains. The full story is only unveiled here and it feels like we always knew.

**Note: No, do not be on the watch for this book. Let’s face it, LT can’t even get a stinking blog post on the web. A multi-volume tractate on the similarities of Starfleet command structure and Thomistic metaphysics? Talk about a one-way trip to Development Gehenna. Maybe he'll meet the Carthusians there.

***Although a large part of our culture today pretty much denies that there are things worth dying for. This is unfortunate. At the very least, deep space exploration and the invention of a blueberry pie/cookie dough extravaganza are worth dying for.