For anyone who is just joining in, beginning last weekend I have been going through a long passage from Hans Kung's On Being A Christian dealing with the famous question of evil, or pain, or suffering, depending on which aspect of that is being focused on. You can access the previous posts from the sidebar.
Continuing where I left off:
In face of the overwhelming reality of suffering in the history of mankind and in the individual human life, for suffering, doubting, despairing man there is still an alternative to the rebellion, for instance, of an Ivan Karamazov against this world of God which he found unacceptable or to the revolt of an Albert Camus, who points like Dostoevsky to the suffering of the innocent creature. Instead of rising up defiantly against the power of the gods, like emancipated, autonomous Prometheus, or constantly rolling the rock up the mountain and seeing it roll down again, like Sisyphus, he can adopt the attitude of Job. Despite all the suffering of this world, he can place an absolute, unshakable trust in the incomprehensible God. Even for Job this had nothing to do with resignation and passivity. Certainly it is possible to say that we cannot believe in God when we see the immense suffering of the world. But can this not be reversed. It is only if there is a God that we can look at all at this immense suffering in the world. It is only in trusting faith in the incomprehensible, always greater God that man can stride in justifiable hope through that broad, deep river; conscious of the fact that a hand is stretched out to him across the dark gulf of suffering and evil.
I will break in here to point out something again, that the atheist alternatives to dealing with evil, pain and suffering, don't really deal with it at all, they sidestep it or in the political forms of it, they seek to use the suffering of those who suffer as a means of gaining power for the gang bosses who inevitably end up rising in power in any materialist scheme of governance. As we are finding in the United States, as Christianity turns to post-Christianity, that can happen in a nominal republic which gives up something as obvious as valuing the truth over lies in the mass media as part of the process of secularization under "no establishment".
The heroic figures of Soviet and Chinese Communism might suffer and struggle, even to the point of martyrdom, allegedly for the purpose of creating a better life for their loved ones or, in that most phonied up and cheap of substitutes for religion, patriotism, for their "country" but in reality everything they do by doing that benefits the dictator class. As the surviving members of the Bolshevik movement in the Stalinist USSR discovered, part of that struggle eventuated in their liquidation through the show trials widely approved of by Western intellectuals, though there were a few dissenters. Their pain, suffering, the evil they suffer and cause only ends up serving the evil that will create more pain and suffering for the intended beneficiaries of their martyrdom.
Needless to say, those who, struggled, suffered pain, risked martyrdom to bring Communism to the Soviet states didn't solve those issues we're looking into by their suffering. They didn't go a millimetre forward in dispelling pain or suffering or evil they benefited the atheist-materialist-scientistic dictatorship which brought unprecedented suffering to all but the upper elites of those atheist paradises. Indeed, it was in the atheist paradises that the most terrible mass murder and oppression not only happened but was intentionally committed. The Soviet Union, other Marxist states so much admired by so many Western intellectuals, most of them atheists, many of them university teachers, journalists, authors, poets, a few composers, some scientists, some of whom wrote their propaganda using the "question of evil" against religion in the west even as the lauded and supported the Soviet and later atheist regimes. Most ironic of the supporters of Soviet Communism were the unionists who did since one of the earliest things done as the Communists gained control was the abolition of real trade unions.
On the other side of the broad, deep river of struggle for the atheist Marxist isn't a hand stretched out to lift him out but a hand about to dump an anvil into his. Atheism always does that in the end.
The mention of Camus in this paragraph is particularly apt because he is a very good example of the ineffectiveness that comes of trying to treat these problems while rejecting God and ending up as an intellectual of absurdism who favors the absurdist political futility of anarchism. Camus is an especially frustrating intellectual because he has, sometimes, a moral core that I don't find in those most often associated with him, Sartre, especially. But, rejecting the moral confidence that faith in God can give, he seems to me to always be ineffective. All that writing and if anything has ever come of it, I'd like to know what it was. I especially get the mention of Sisyphus about and by Camus because that could be a very good symbol of that kind of intellectual activity. Activity, calling it an effort would seem to be granting it more direction than I see in it. Great writer but I can't say I respect his thinking except here and there.
I think to get beyond the kind of maze that modern thought inevitably leads you into you have no choice except to make a choice, you can't rely on some objective automatic algorithm that is going to do it for you, to make that choice for you, if you want to maintain the fictitious separation of the two, it can't come as "knowledge" it has to come from the choice to believe. It takes real work, the choice to believe and maintain belief, it isn't like learning your arithmetic facts. As pain is a profoundly personal and individual experience, the way out of it has to be through a profound and individual choice by the person.*
Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation? But this question too can be reversed. Is God really so aloof from all suffering - as we imagine in our human way and assume in all our protests - as philosophers in particular think he is? Does not the very suffering and death of Jesus make God appear in a different light?
For Job all that had become clear was the incomprehensibility of the God who delivers men from suffering. Man is to place his believing trust i this incomprehensibility, even if he understands nothing and has to die anyway; an attitude which is so difficult to maintain in concrete suffering and which - to judge from the written records - found little support even in Israel. But in Jesus' suffering and death has there not been revealed by the incomprehensible God a definitive delivery from suffering which goes beyond all the incomprehensibility of God and which transforms suffering and death to life and to the fulfillment of longing? Does this not make possible a faith understanding reality in a very different way, even though this understanding faith always remains faith? The fact of the suffering of every man cannot be canceled even in the light of Jesus. Some remaining doubt is always possible. But from this standpoint the right attitude of man to suffering, the relative value and hidden meaning of suffering become clear.
Even Jesus did not explain suffering, but endured it as innocent in the sight of God, endured it however - unlike Job - to the bitter end. His story was different; real, not fictional. His end was different; not a "happy ending" not a restoration to a prosperous life. His suffering was different; the outcome of his life and definitive, up to death. In the light of Jesus' definitive Passion, his suffering and death, the passion of each and every man, the passion of mankind as a whole, could acquire a meaning which the story of Job - calling simply for absolute faith and trust - cannot convey.
What to believe is laid out for you but the choice to believe it is left up to you. You are totally free to do it or not, if you do not you cannot then blame what you rejected for the results your rejection got you. And you cannot, then, hold it against those who did choose it. But the choice has to be real, it can't only be the adoption of a word or the claim that you have gained a new status. There is a lot of profession of faith but a lot of that claim is betrayed by a life that demonstrates a lack of trust and a refusal to live the life required by that choice. I would say among the more convincing signs is that it would make the person who chooses this easier to live with, less willing to cause pain and suffering and to do evil. Few of us choose to go all the way with that, I certainly haven't yet. But imagine how awful I'd be if I wasn't trying.
Staying angry with God isn't going to get you much in the way of relief.
* That, of course, only is possible for someone who is old enough or mature enough or who is aware of that choice. Those who cant do those things suffer, sometimes unbearably. And it doesn't mean that even someone who makes that choice will never suffer pain, evil again in this life. I will address the last words of Jesus as he was dying later. It does, though, allow some understanding of both why it is necessary for us to not participate in creating pain, suffering and evil, something which absolutely no atheist ideology or philosophy gives, why it is necessary to perform, literally, all of the human commandments in The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel which command us to relieve the suffering of others and to understand that there is hope even for those for whom all of those have failed, completely in this life. Without that you can either be left with libertine cynicism and self-gain or if you are left in contact with the vestiges of a moral core, the resort to absurdism that Camus took. Neither of which work to lessen pain and evil. I doubt if Camus had lived he would have stuck with absurdism. He didn't stick with all that much in previous positions he took.
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