Certainly among the best poets in English that America has produced is the reclusive Emily Dickinson who, among other things posed the question of evil and a rather dim hope that the incomprehensible aspects of it will be revealed in the coming life.
I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?
I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?
I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?
If there is a better short presentation of the issues and the seeming fact that an answer doesn't appear to be had that will satisfy REASON that she is using to consider the questions, comparing that effort to balancing an equation, that such a rational and universally accepted answer, doesn't appear to be available, I'd like to know where that presentation is.
And, though she doesn't state it, she wants an effective answer - perhaps even one that will relive the anguish as well as doubts, something that seems to be secondary or absent in such ruminations and certainly is absent from the polemical use of the issue. Certainly in her other work Dickinson, flourishing in the middle of a dangerous century in which separation by death was a guaranteed common experience, practically makes separation by death the equivalent of hell, at least in human experience.
The attempted mixture of mathematical reasoning and faith in what was certainly a very Christian concept of heaven which reasoning is left empty, nothing more than a content free question at the end - the empty evacuation that is the core substance of anti-religious ideology - stands for me as a short version of what the 18th century Unitarianism of Priestley and Jefferson turns into, as well as all of the "enlightenment" effort to turn mathematical reasoning into the one and only and ultimately unsatisfying method of granting legitimacy to our thoughts about our experience.
I think it has that effect in real life because mathematics and science are inapt tools to deal with that most central and vital issue of human experience in its most acute forms, the forms that medicine cannot address, the decay that "the best Vitality cannot exceed". It is like using a hammer to try to manufacture carbon dioxide or isolate oxygen. Clearly after the long effort to try to use mathematics and the debased though more generally useful form of that which is science doesn't get you to an answer.
As I said, the experience of pain and evil is personal to every single animal who experiences, the most searingly personal experience even when it is the a second-hand experience of loss of a loved one. It is unreasonable to expect something that yields impersonal and universally acknowledged ideas, impersonal "truths" which are as cool as room temperature and devoid of emotional content, to be the one and only way to an answer to the question of suffering and evil. One of the greater dangers of science and mathematics is that it serves evil at least as well as it serves the good. The best that gives you is the useless question that Emily Dickinson realized is the result of that.
Emily Dickinson, somewhat isolated in her father's house except for her brief though excellent years of education at the Amherst Academy, was certainly heavily influenced by the transcendentalism that the Unitarianism in the eastern area of her state was devolving into. I'd say that she was one of the two best writers of that era though I'm not sure she would have considered herself to be part of any movement. She consulted one of the lesser figures of the movement for advice, got some bad advice and didn't follow it. She certainly was a better writer and clearer thinker than Emerson and less neurotic than Thoreau. Famously, she refused to be involved with the Calvinism that her family was steeped in and stopped going to church. Though I think the atheists laying claim to her could only be done if, as I suspect, they never read her poems or letters.
Her repeated question doesn't get an answer in the only framing that someone living in the light of the distant de-Calvinated Harvard of the middle 19th century would have thought was reliable because its answer depends on making a choice of what to believe on other grounds.
I can't say that my views of Unitarianism and other attempts to paste Christianity to mathematics and science have not suffered enormously in the past twenty years. That is matched by my increasing skepticism as to the status of the "enlightenment" and the romantic form of that which has dominated Western intellectualism since the 18th century. Oddly, the thing that did the most damage to my view of Unitarianism was listening to and thinking about what I heard presented when they had the Cambridge Forum on as a public radio show in Maine, straight from the heart of the Unitarian world in Cambridge.
If they hadn't managed to attach Universalism to it the Unitarian movement would probably have died out by now except as local efforts to maintain some of the beautiful churches which either were built as Unitarian churches or which devolved into them from Congregational or Presbyterian ones. It's sort of like the efforts to maintain the old Grange Halls as community activity centers when there aren't farmers or old folks left who want to keep the quasi-Masonic falderal going. Though there is some service-committee work that gets done by Unitarians sometimes, which is admirable but I don't think Unitarianism is going to do much of anything to solve the problem of evil. Just as I don't think you're ever going to reason your way out of it. You have to choose your way out of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment