Charles Agustus Lindbergh
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”Some men tell us there is no God, or that God is a puny creature shut up in churches and creeds! I need no scientific analysis or theological arguments to show me the reality of the bigness of my God when I look at this!”
Charles Augustus Lindbergh is most famous for being the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. However, he also developed the first perfusion pump with Dr. Alexis Carrel. The pump allowed doctors to perform heart surgery on patients because the pump could bring blood to the body's organs while the doctors opreated on the heart. Charles also began reflect on his life, while he was flying across the ocean, and he became a philospher. He published the book Of Flight and Life in 1948 on philosophy. In it he discusses his approaches to three challenges of faith: athiesm, science, and consumerism.
During his trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, he began to think differently about the existence of a god. In his Autiobiography of Values, he says that at age four, he thought of church as “unpleasant and unnecessary.” During his flight however, he wrote in his journal:
“It’s hard to be an agnostic up here in the Spirit of St. Louis. If one dies, all this goes on existing in a plan so perfectly balances, so wonderfully simple, so incredibly complex that it’s far beyond our comprehension-worlds and moons revolving; planets orbiting on suns; suns flung with apparent recklessness through space. There’s the infinite magnitude of the universe; there’s the infinite detail of its matter- the outer star, the inner atom. And man conscious of it all- a worldly audience to what if not to God?"
Many people doubted that Lindbergh would land in Paris, but he was very commited to his cause and he had great self-dedication. One example of this was that Lindbergh got terrible grades until the army told him that he needed to pass some classes before he flew for them. So Charles studied hard and finished first in his class. During the flight across the Atlantic, he reported seeing ghostlike figures on his wings.
“If you commit yourself to something fully, unseen forces come to your aid.”
Over the years, Lindbergh changed his view of science. When he developed the perfusion pump in 1938, his wife's sister needed bypass surgery and she was going to die because while the doctors operated on her heart, the rest of her body would not get the blood that it needed. Charles saw it as an engineering problem, and Lindbergh, a mostly self-educated man from fields of Minnesota, searched for a scientist that could help him. He found Allexis Carrel, who agreed to help him on the project. Together, they developed the perfusion pump which allowed the first bypass surgeries to happen. For their efforts, the two were placed on the cover of Time Magazine.
“As I lost confidence in the Bible, I gained confidence in science…. To me in youth, science was more important than either man or God. The one I took for granted; the other was too intangible for me to understand…. Like most modern youth, I worshiped science.”
Charles changed from the idea of trying to make people live forever to trying to live a better life while he was here. He came to believe that science and religion were a challenge to faith in God.
“I came to the conclusion that life’s greatest values do not lie in results to be obtained through biological mechanics. The longer I live, the more limited I believe rationality to be. I have found that the irrational gives man insight he cannot otherwise attain.”
" We must discard the materialistic philosophy that the end justifies the means. Means and ends are inseperable."
Lindbergh's wife, Anne, said that he was directed inward rather than outward. This was certainly true. He reflected often on life and he never wanted to be honored for his work. When a friend asked asked him to attend the fourtieth anniversary party of his flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh said that he'd rather just have have a drink with the friend as two old pilots.
Lindbergh had a few close friends who certainly contributed to his philosophy. Two of his closest friends were Alexis Carrel and Jim Newton. Alexis Carrel was fascinated with Lindbergh's thoughfulness from the first time he met him while developing the perfusion pump. Carrel and Lindbergh often discussed philosophy together. Carrel taught Lindbergh that "the quality of life is more important than life itself,” an idea which seems to resemble Socrates' idea that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Lindbergh took this advice and began reflecting on the way he was living his life. He was asked once about the short life expectancy of pilots, and he responded:
"“I would rather live ten years of adventure than fourty years of boredom."
Jim Newton was a businessman, who was involved with the Oxford Group, a precursor to Moral Re-Armament. He was first turned on to the group in college, but remained with the organization for much of his life. He shared with Lindbergh many of the ideas that the group had such as, “There’s enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”