I will break in here to point out that this is not a romanticized view of pain as producing a superior personality, a superior character. It is no promotion of seeking pain as a fetish or a path to ennoblement or sainthood. It is a presentation as to some of the outcomes of suffering and pain. I don't think Hans Kung is judging the person for whom the shattering experience of this "extreme limit, the decisive question" of their identity leads to unbelief, a failure of belief.
I don't find anything judgmental in his statement of both options as a response to pain. I think the unbelief of someone who has reached it as a consequence of profound pain has to be respected. No one else could expect to be able to talk them out of it. The articulations, acting as later day Job's comforters, especially from someone who has not experienced the same kind of things, are not going to overturn their own conclusions based in their own experience.
In her book, Quest for the Living God, The Crucified God of Compassion, Elizabeth A. Johnson says:
I remember the day I took a train from Munich to the concentration camp at Dachau. The town of Dachau itself dates from the Middle Ages and lies only a few stops on the suburban line out of the big city. Having read extensively on the Holocaust I felt quasi-prepared for what I would encounter, although the impact of actually being in the presence of the bunkers and ovens was viscerally almost too powerful to bear. There was one unexpected moment, though, that stunned my thought. In the camp museum, amid the tools of torture and other paraphernalia, there hung a striped outfit worn by one inmate named Albert Mainslinger. Next to it were displayed two pieces of paper, documents filled out when he entered and left the camp. In 1939 his admission form listed his weight as 114kg (250 lbs) and, further down, his religion as Roman Catholic. In 1945 his discharge form, signed by the American administrator of the camp, contained different information. His weight was 41kg (90 lbs). On the line for religion was written Das Nichts, nothing. I stared, struck silent. Who can fathom the suffering - unjust imprisonment; years of slow starvation; morning, noon, and night trying to evade the terror meted out by the guards; unremitting hard labor in the cold and heat; people in agony all around; having no idea when this would ever end or if the next minute would bring his death. As his body withered so too did his soul, any trust in a good and gracious God evaporating away.
Herr Mainslinger was one of the lucky ones, insofar as he survived. Multiply his experience by three million other Gentiles who died in such places. And then focus specifically on the six million Jewish people who were systematically rounded up and barbarically killed in the camps simply because they were Jews. The force of this event's interruption to the religious project of speaking about God becomes clear. Theologians reflected that such evil is a surd, an irrational fore that cannot be made to fit meaningfully into a divine plan for the world. Even to try to make it fit would be to tame the evil, to dilute its terror, to give it, albeit unintentionally, a right to exist. Such attempts at realization drown out the voices of the victims. And to allow that this event is even part of an overall divine plan for the world would be to make God into a monster, no mater how much one talks about divine goodness and power. The "fissure" in the classical pattern of thought is so great that in questing for the living God some theologians began to change the question about suffering itself. The proper question is not why did god permit this to happen, or how can this be reconciled with divine governance of the world. Rather thinking o the far side of the break brought about by this experience, the proper question becomes the anguished question where is God, where is God now?
For good reason, Jewish religious thinkers have taken the lead in pursuing this question amid the shattering of faith's confidence. Taking different avenues of thought, various Jewish scholars have envisioned different answers. We do not know where God was. God was hidden, or silent or absent, or dead. God's face was turned away. God was there, suffering with the victims, weeping in their pain. Or most radically, the only rational way to think about God after Auschwitz is to admit that God does not exist. Whatever the theology, it leads to an ethical mandate; Never Again.
But "Never Again" never happened. The period between the end of WWII and now has never seen a letup in the slaughter. Looking for a listing of "agains" since the end of the Nazi death camps, there is no lack of documentation about the mass killing events. Wikipedia starts with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (half a million to 2.2 million estimated deaths) the partition of India and a long list of genocides which is hardly complete (it doesn't mention the up to 20 million some estimate died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and it leaves many other mass slaughters out. The 20th century was a century of genocides, many of the worst of them committed by entirely secular governments, some of the worst of those officially atheist, anti-religious dictatorships. Though the democracies, including the United States have sponsored or supported some of the worst of it, the very countries that conducted the war trials after WWII as well.
There is an enormous irony in that famous passage from Buchner's play, in that as a logical consequence of that claim, when asked what moral he drew from that, Payne says [in my very rough translation].
Mercier. Und die Moral?
And the moral of that?
Payne. Erst beweist ihr Gott aus der Moral und dann die Moral aus Gott! - Was wollt ihr denn mit eurer Moral?
First you prove God from morality and then morality from God! What do you want to do with morality?
Ich weiß nicht, ob es an und für sich was Böses oder was Gutes gibt, und habe deswegen doch nicht nötig, meine Handlungsweise zu ändern.
I don't know if there is something evil or good of itself, therefore I don't need to change my conduct.
Ich handle meiner Natur gemäß; was ihr angemessen, ist für mich gut und ich tue es, und was ihr zuwider, ist für mich bös und ich tue es nicht und verteidige mich dagegen, wenn es mir in den Weg kommt.
I do what it is in my nature to do, what is in that nature, is good for me and I do it, what is against that nature is evil for me and I don't do it and deflect it form me when it gets in my way.
Sie können, wie man so sagt, tugendhaft bleiben und sich gegen das sogenannte Laster wehren, ohne deswegen ihre Gegner verachten zu müssen, was ein gar trauriges Gefühl ist.
[more or less] You can maintain your personal integrity (do what comes naturally to you) and not bother other people who do what is in their nature, because that's bound to make you sad.
Which is, certainly something that is in line with a devotion to an 18th 19th early century libertarian notion of secular liberty.
The real Thomas Paine was attracted to violence, revolution (as was Buchner), which is why he almost got himself done in by his comrades during the French Revolution. Slated for execution, he was saved from the guillotine by merest chance a door being left open, hiding the chalked death mark - what some might call a miracle. He was, of course, an active part in that enlightenment revolution that sent so many tens of thousands to their deaths, including many for their religion. Though the lines are, of course, put in his mouth by a playwright who never knew him and who, perhaps, didn't understand the irony created by him using the real man to spout his ideas. In many cases their own explanations for what the did prove that the genocidalists, those who led it, the ones who carried it out were following their own nature. The Nazis considered their genocides to be them working out natural selection, their wars of imperial conquest, their gaining of "living space" in Poland and elsewhere, the working out of nature. Marxists explained their genocides in somewhat different ways, depending, as well, on explanations from the physical sciences extended theoretically.
I think one of the most important recent treatments of this topic is in the late James Cone's sermon which he gave in a number of forms, a number of times, The Cross And The Lynching Tree which I might go into, again. I have never encountered an atheist on this topic who can come near to the meaning he derives from pain and murder and genocidal oppression.
* Radio Drama - George Buchner - Danton's Death
It's 1794, and a new France is being born from the reign of terror that characterised the worst of the Revolution. Charismatic hedonist Danton, still tormented by his role in the killing of 1400 aristocrats in a single night, is losing his grip on power, and he is so tired. His political rival, the sober and focused Robespierre, is in the ascendant, and - with his efficient sidekick St Just - has power now over Danton's fate. But can Danton care enough to fight the terror that he himself set in motion?
Cast
Georges DANTON ..... Joseph Millson
Maximilien ROBESPIERRE ..... Khalid Abdalla
CAMILLE Desmoulins ..... Patrick Kennedy
MARION ..... Claire Harry
HERAULT-SECHELLES ..... Laurence Mitchell
HERRMAN ..... Adeel Akhtar
Thomas PAYNE ..... Sean Baker
LACROIX ..... David Seddon
LEGENDRE ..... Lloyd Thomas
JULIE ..... Leah Brotherhead
ST JUST ..... Iain Batchelor
LUCILLE ..... Sally Orrock
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole
NOTES
Georg Buchner died in 1837 at the age of 23, by which time he had had only one play published, and none produced. His small legacy of work, remaining unproduced for nearly sixty years after his death, has come to represent some of the most exciting and radical theatre writing in the European Theatre canon.
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