Looking Forward To The Past

Gary Rosen's recent review of Susan Neiman's new book Moral Clarity is provocative reading, and surely makes a decent case that Ms. Neiman, who stands on the political left, has produced a work worthy of broad attention.

Mr. Rosen does not hesitate to explore Ms. Neiman's frustrations with the increasingly intellectual and cultural vapidity of her leftist peers vis-á-vis universal principles. One passage stands out:

Ms. Neiman points to many factors in the left's retreat from universal principles. The demise of socialism has played a role, as has despair over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. But the real source, she suggests, is a "conceptual collapse," a self-destructive descent into identity politics, postmodern theory and victimology. Her peers have become paralyzed, she writes, by the view that moral judgments are, ultimately, little more than "a hypocritical attempt to assert arbitrary power over those with whom you disagree."

Part of Ms. Neiman's prescribed antidote is a call to the Great Books catalog of western civilization (often touted by conservatives, like the late-Allan Bloom, as curative of many social ills). No doubt her proposal will raise the ire of multi-culturalists and feminists committed to radical egalitarianism, but I would assume she is more than capable of defending herself before such critics. The only "danger" in Ms. Neiman's idea is that she opens the door to the value of Tradition; such backward looking interests do not sit well with progressives committed solely to that which lies ahead. But tradition, and the intellectuals embedded therein, can be formidable pedagogues. That is scary to a lot of folks.

I am the first to admit that many of my conservative peers have also turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the so-called western canon. I have not completed it myself, though I was definitely trained in that canon's great tradition. There is much to learn; and many Americans are like many fundamentalists, as both the progressive patriot and the fundamentalist act with little regard to the storehouse of knowledge available in the literature and traditions of the past. Both types of zealots forget that many of the questions of today have been amply discussed by our forefathers, civil and religious. In many cases, answers and solutions have been given. The trend to deify our own era at the expense of other notable times is rooted in conceit and arrogance. And it is, at present, a perilous conceit.

Peace.

BG

©Bill Gnade 2008/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

The Pursuit Of Knowing: Thoughts On American "Ignorance" (Part 2)

"Never make promises you have no intention of keeping."

I see the finger wagging in my face. I hear the sternness of the voice. I feel my self-esteem sinking to new lows.

I admit I've not kept my promise to complete in a timely fashion a discussion I began about knowledge and ignorance in the United States. This is more the result of time constraints than it is of neglect, or even avoidance. I've been busy. Not that I offer this as excuse. It's offered as fact. Plain, simple.

In haste, let me complete what I set out to do. In my last essay (see above link) I noted that in an admittedly simplistic study of the opinions of more than a dozen Americans chosen from a variety of intellectual and social classes, I found that the majority opinion was that scholastic achievement was worthwhile for its eventual financial benefit to each student. Learning was preparation for earning.

This, of course, is suggestive that money justifies one's academic achievement: higher pay suggests higher aptitude. Such an idea reduces learning to pragmatics, where one learns in order to practice the art of meriting a high (or higher) financial status.

The bitter pill in all of this, as shown perhaps most clearly in my former students' resistance to learning at all, is that money is the accreditation of a person's role: it is assumed that one's salary like one's diploma is proven by grades, even pay grades. "Low" role, low pay; "high" role, high pay. The bitterness, though, comes not with the realization that this is bunk. It comes when we see those folks deemed apparently intellectually inferior -- think my students' idolized rock stars -- achieve great fiscal prosperity.

(That we also suck the life out of learning for more inspired purposes is part of the double-edged sword here. Many believe their great learning is purely for attaining wealth; when they don't achieve it, they surely do not call themselves stupid. Blame is often cast elsewhere, giving the lie to the "learning equals earning" philosophy. And then those who do achieve great wealth without the suitable intellectual credentials are chided for not earning their wealth for more noble, even cerebral, purposes. They are deemed dumb or called cheaters; their work is dismissed as tawdry or even low-brow.)

Indeed, when "dumb" folks do achieve great financial success, we get commentary like the essay which began our discussion here at Contratimes. For surely that is why country star Kellie Pickler is picked on: She is apparently too stupid to have justifiably earned her great wealth and notoriety. That Ms. Pickler is singled out is curious, especially when "great wealth" is almost ALWAYS a reason the media (yes, even the New York Times) seek the political and cultural opinions and thoughts of various folks. Media do not turn to Madonna or Oprah or Tereza Heinz-Kerry or Donald Trump because they are intellectuals, or even bright. Media turn to them because they are rich, and are thus assumed to be bright.

Unfortunately for those like Ms. Pickler, some in the media miss out on at least some of the grace extended to Madonna. Surely Susan Jacoby and Patricia Cohen have not sought her opinion on the state of education in America or the Bush administration's policies in Israel. Her success is probably in the wrong sort of place to win an interview: she's too countrified for the urbane.

My broader point throughout this whole discussion is that those who condescend to even consider the "stupid Americans" ignore two things. First, that technology, the product of the brightest and best applications of the human mind, has created a paradox: human intelligence creates artificial intelligence, thus permitting humans to become dumber. Memory is now digital memory; computation is done not in the head, but in RAM. Our intelligence has made us stupider, in a sense.

Second, what is ignored is the compartmentalization or specialization of knowledge. Like St. Paul's analogy of the body of Christ, the corporate body of culture and state is made up of various and necessary parts, each doing their various functions. Any state that was all brain, just like a person that was all brain, would not function. A culture that was only arms, or only feet, would end in a quick death. Diversity of knowledge is necessary in the body, as is specificity: Lungs and hearts and pancreas all need to know what is essential for them to function, but they NEED NOT KNOW what the other organs must know.

That is why we all bring our cars to mechanics for repair, and not to Ms. Cohen. We bring our bodies to doctors who are specialists, and we don't care if they know the capital of Turkey. I do not need a lawyer who understands specific gravity; I do not need a hair stylist who can toss out Latin phrases. The man who empties my neighbor's septic tank (mine is always fine) is doing a very necessary job; his work is not one whit enhanced if he knows the difference between a libretto and an aria. In a functioning society, knowledge is distributed according to need.

And that is an interesting point, I think. One can hardly think of a culture surviving or thriving on the strength of the generalist, that person who knows a lot about a lot, but not enough of any one thing to be an expert. Such a well-rounded individual may indeed make a great conversationalist, but beyond that, one can't really find much essential value in the generalist. Imagine a bodily organ that can do a little of everything; imagine a body consisting of only a bunch of generalized organs. Common sense tells us that such a body generally would die quite quickly, and would be a mediocre body at its most vital best. A healthy body NEEDS a diversity and hierarchy of knowledge.

THREATS TO LEARNING

I made mention (here) of the irony that certain liberal thinkers bemoan the demise of academic and intellectual excellence. The irony, of course, is rooted in the liberalism touted by many of America's critics: liberals are devoted to radical egalitarianism and radical individualism. That these two are more often than not in opposition hardly matters. What matters, ultimately, is first that everyone in the classroom (particularly) defines for him or herself what constitutes "achievement," "value," and "purpose;" and second, that everyone ends up at the same level. "Over-achievement" should be a vapid redundancy, but it isn't: over-achievers are indeed often if not always seen as oddities and aberrations to liberal conformity. The goal of education in many liberal minds is the equality of outcomes: every kid on every team gets a trophy.

Learning, then, becomes less about individual greatness and more about bland and comfortable conformity -- where no one gets hurt, where no one stands out. And where no one gets paid too much. No wonder Americans are (allegedly) dumb. They don't want to be envied; and, furthermore, liberal thinkers don't want anyone to envy.

WHY LEARN?

I once talked to a colleague about the reason for learning, and he recalled a teacher of his who inspired his students to learn by appealing to hedonism: You can seduce more women, you can enjoy more of life's Epicurean delights, if you master literature (so you can recite poetry), music (so you may serenade), mathematics and economics (so you can excel in managing large and seductive portfolios), athletics (so you can be heroic and fit), science (so you look progressive), and so on; all for the purposes of securing and maximizing pleasure.

No doubt this appears a better philosophy of learning than mere fiscal ambition or foolish equalizing. But surely it is not the sort of thing one might want to share in public.

This writer, if pressed, would answer that his personal learning is motivated not only by a need for financial security (nor do I believe it off limits to learn in order to get the most out of life), learning is ultimately about overcoming error and deception. It's about seeing what REALLY IS. It's about avoiding the damnation of ignorance, or even revolt. I learn in order to be a more able bodied and able minded person; I learn to improve the lot of others; but I learn mostly because I do not want to fall prey to deception. I learn because I want to be free.

Not that I've achieved clairvoyance. I probably don't see what REALLY IS. But I am trying. At least, I am learning to try.

(I will leave it that this hardly amounts to a philosophy worth sharing.)

Peace to you,

©Bill Gnade 2008/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Atheism On Negation In Tuscany

[Note: Since I attempted to be clever in this essay by using double-negatives, I ended up confusing myself and making a mistake. The mistake -- failing to create a double negative where needed -- has been corrected. If some of you read this and said, "What the-?", well, now you just have to say, "Huh?"]

I turned to the atheist next to me and asked if he ever thought in anything other than negation. He said he did not.

I've decided that an essay on atheism is all wrong. There are starting points that offend my pretensions, everyone being smarter than I. Irrespective of my ever-maturing idiocy, I've convinced myself that the starting point for a theist is always a positive - God. I've even noticed that the starting point for a theist is a positive predicate - God is. In contrast, the atheist is forever chained to negation; the atheist can only say that God is not, or that there is no God. The atheist cannot, however, tell you what is; there is no affirmation offered that is not mere subjective whim, mere preference or pet-interest.

But if the atheist is right, my theism is really the denial, the negation. Yet I protest that I do not know what it is I am negating: I assert there is something rather than nothing. I am not saying -- am I? -- that God is not non-existent, nor am I negating some principle common to atheism. Perhaps I must content myself with being a non-atheist, with atheism, of course, being some form of positive position. I can't deny then that my non-atheism is an abuse of the positive positions of atheism, those jolly positions I often hear described as bursting with "alacrity" and optimism and liberty. (Indeed, I really can't deny that I am thoroughly abusive of these notions.)

All this the wind tells me is so much nonsense. I hear squirrels chattering more sanity, even when cats wait nearby. The atheist cannot tell me what is but only what isn't. An atheist's negation of my affirmation of theism is a bit like zero telling 1 that multiplication is a fantasy. And it is fantasy, if you embrace nothing. But the atheist recoils at this, shouting, I don't embrace nothing! If one listens for but a moment one hears what the atheist so passionately and earnestly embraces -- beauty, truth, love, progress, posterity, science. In fact the atheist, being incredibly zealous for his ideals, won't take long to dispel the annoying rumors of nihilism preventing him from enjoying his favorite peace. But point out to him that his creed is filled with ideals that hold no objective compulsion -- that his ideals are unique to him and his subjectivity -- and you will hear more bluster than a creationist sacked by a gang of Darwinists. Then add to the punch the obvious -- that if all truth is subjective and theism is one of those subjectively held truths (in a godless world) -- it thus follows that one man's atheism is no advantage over another's theism. If there is nothing but negation and subjectivism; if there is nothing absolute, then what can an atheist say to that man who knows there is no God and yet to spite the very universe believes in God anyway, comforted and compelled in his theism by the atheist's primary convictions, e.g. all truth is subjective and headed for oblivion? Why should an atheist enamored of subjectivism care at all that there are Christians, or other subjective theists, in a world rushing toward the void? We all share the same fate -- annihilation. Then what could possibly induce an atheist to expend one moment decrying theism when nothing he can offer and nothing he believes can save anything?

How odd that the zeros should care so much.

But, as I said, I am the dope in this room. Outside the door? The waiting, crushing abyss.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Friday's ¶ Of The Day

Today's ¶ (paragraph) Of The Day comes from the inimitable and duly controversial Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in his New York Times OP-ED, "A Convenient Truth," wherein is discussed the medical prevention of a mentally-impaired child's normal physical development:

"Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?"

My only response is that Mr. Singer must not love cats or dogs.

I will stipulate that I am the only person on the planet who loves cats and dogs, fishers and fish, raccoons and rascally rabbits. I will freely confess that I have often stopped and removed roadkill from busy highways; I recently dragged a dead fisher (wrongly called a "fisher cat") out of the road. And I usually do so with some sort of prayer: I even used to perform a hasty ceremony, and, in a poem on the matter, I referred to myself as a "sort of priest for the tired."

What Mr. Singer fails to see is that I dignify life all around me every day: I manage and prune trees in my yard; I sow and manage flowers in my field (I am reintroducing wild lupine destroyed by a neighbor); I feed birds and squirrels. In short, I dignify those creatures that seem to care nothing at all about dignity. In fact, I grant a dying dog or bleeding bird more dignity than it gives itself, or it receives from its own pack or flock. The dead coyote I found frozen in last year's melting snow, its eyes plucked out by turkey vultures, received a blessing from me in silence deep in the uncomprehending forest. Its pack might have even returned and scavenged on its frozen limbs.

I also do something else: I assume that nature loves being so dignified.

But most importantly, what Mr. Singer fails to see is that the impulse for dignity comes from humans alone. Though a few species do seem to care about their dead (elephants come to mind), or their living (meerkats are crazily attentive to their young), or their dying (Emperor penquins seem to care), it is humans who ceremonialize birth, life, and death. We are a ceremonious, ritualistic bunch; we desire and even expect dignity all around us. From births and birthdays, from christenings to baptisms to bar mitzvahs, to wakes and funerals and anniverseries to holidays, we honor and celebrate milestones with alacrity, and like no other species. Thus, as a mere species in Mr. Singer's philosophical reflections, we humans merit dignity because we ask for it and we give it; and we do not give it to those species who do not seem to care for it all (like great white sharks and Komodo dragons). In short, NOT dignifying other species is in fact to dignify them, for we are giving them exactly what they give themselves.

I grant that I may be personally out of whack for softly praying over dead animals, but I believe in the Christian idea that my sins (though not mine alone) have caused widespread suffering throughout the biosphere: All of creation groans for the redemption of God's children.

This is why we deserve dignity, and this is why some of us, unlike Mr. Singer, attempt to dignify every living and dying thing around us: today, no doubt, I may even rescue a spider from the tub. The spider will not know I have been kind, nor do I know whether my kindness will result in my wife being bitten by that cool spider's mandibles later in the day. What I do know is that there is something different about me, and about every human on the planet, if I but take one minute to study any other creature walking the earth.

God bless the family in question whose daughter is so desperately sick. May mercy and gladness of heart fill their days, and may God's will be done.

Peace.

BG

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Ideas About Ideologues

I know more than a few people who often dismiss certain folks as "ideologues." It is almost said reflexively. At times it seems a curious habit. The disparagement is always done with great facility and, perhaps, felicity. And I never quite understand it. Definitions in some of the older dictionaries I own show that, first and foremost, an ideologue is an expert in ideology, which is defined as "the body of doctrine, myth, symbol, etc., of a social movement, institution, class, or large group." The secondary meaning is that of a person who deals with systems of ideas. And the tertiary meaning describes a person "who advocates a particular ideology." (The Random House College Dictionary, 1975).

Curiously, more recent definitions are rather blunt. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary is utterly matter of fact:

ideologue (noun): An advocate of a particular ideology, especially an official exponent of that ideology

And the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary gives us this definition for ideologue:

1 : an impractical idealist : THEORIST
2 : an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology

It is interesting to note how unnuanced these online definitions prove themselves to be. I wonder if this is the trend in computer age diction, where words become more rigid, lacking subtlety, posited in all their raw black-and-white glory. Computer users are, after all, in a hurry.

My observation -- provincial as it is -- about the word in question is that the man denouncing another chap as a "mere ideologue" is usually himself something of an ideologue. With that said, I, of course, admit that my comment lacks subtlety. I promise to make amends in a forthcoming essay on the topic.

For now, two things. First, I would love to hear what you think "ideologue" means: what does it connote and who does it denote? Second, I urge you to read one of my all-time favorite essays (fragmented as it is) by C. S. Lewis. After reading his capital essay, Bulverism, this morning, I am reminded -- again -- how careful I must be.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes -- All Rights Reserved.

The Existence Of God: A Letter To Christopher Hitchens

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

You are a man of tremendous talent. I am always amazed not only by your erudite prose (so precise and elegant), but also your wits. You remind me a bit of William F. Buckley Jr.; though he is loathed by many, he is surely not loathed for being dull-witted. You may not like the comparison with a man so thoroughly conservative. But surely you must agree that both of you possess mastery over language; surely you agree that such mastery is desirable in all thinking men and women and secretly envied by most. My envy is not one whit secret: your offhand comments are more substantive than my highest order cogitations. Most men struggle to express what you simply toss off parenthetically. Minds like yours assemble in one sentence what others destroy in whole paragraphs. I thank you for the inspiration.

But I am not always convinced you are as critical as you should be. While I respect that you might describe yourself as a self-interested libertine in a fight against Islamofascists intent on, at best, revoking your license; while I agree with the thrust of this fight and that much of Islam threatens our freedoms; I am not sure I agree with your suggestion that religion in general is a threat to human life and dignity. Your recent comments on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" -- indicative of your thoughts on religion in general -- strike me as passionately spoken and yet intellectually stunted. Permit me to refresh your memory. The reason (partly) for Mr. Matthews' interview with you and Jerry Brown, as you might recall, was the recent lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Holy Father made the unfortunate decision -- or so you averred -- to quote a crusading emperor's feelings regarding Islam's contributions to the world. You said:

"The fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel, who had said the Koran was wicked because it preached spreading faith by the sword. And I can‘t imagine who advised the pope to do this. The Muslim world is always saying, falsely, that it‘s being attacked by a Crusade, a Zionist conspiracy and all this nonsense. And now you have somebody invoking and reviving the idea of the Crusader period and talking as if only Islam has ever spread its faith by violence.…

"It shows secularism is our only friend. And what we‘re fighting for is the secular enlightenment against all forms of unreason and theocracy…"

What's quite clear in (all) your comments is that you admit Islam and Roman Catholicism are both claiming revelation; such revelations have led to bloodshed and tyrannous coercion: both faiths wield a weapon -- one a sword, another a scimitar. This, I would gather, simply expresses your belief. Am I wrong?

Even if I am fallible here, I am not fallible in describing your belief that secularism is the friend of all thinking humans. Of course, by secularism you must mean those systems of thought and order which are solely derived from unencumbered reason: you await a complete "enlightenment against all forms of unreason." If you're are at all credal, this, I bet, would be your creed.

Now it would not necessarily win me a single polemical point if I mentioned that the secular state of the Soviet Union, a state committed solely to reason and the mechanization of society according to reason's laws, was itself prone to wielding something like a sword. The Soviet sword, however, was a bit more like a hammer and a sickle, where thinking humans were either pounded into submission or sickled down like so many weeds. Furthermore, this reasonable state was heaped in philosophical idealism, in a religious historical determinism which believed such enlightenment was an inevitable fact of temporal forces: the proletariat would and must seize control of their fate. In short, even Soviet reasonableness was clouded by unreason. For it might be the case that to believe solely in the inevitable force of reason is to be as unreasonable as any religious clod in the street. And it might be the case that those, like you, who hold reason rather high, might be forgetting something.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

I hope, Mr. Hitchens, that you will not mind if I share with you an argument that came together in my mind during my sophomore year in college. You see, while I was studying The History of Philosophy, Part II, under the tutelage of my professor, Malcolm Reid, something Dr. Reid said about Immanuel Kant transformed my very soul. It was really a remark made in passing that was then shaped into a question by a classmate, Nathan Stoltzfus. The remark was about Kant's idea of a transcendental ego; the question was whether Kant had unwittingly proven God's existence. I will skip the part about the proof. But I can't skip what fascinated me to no end: the part about the very nature of knowing oneself.

I wonder if you will permit me the following. I wonder if you will accept these simple subject/object propositions: I see a tree; I observe a lemon; I touch this keyboard. For surely these simple propositions are as basic to empiricism and reason as one can find. You and I can even agree to criteria that will give us some reasonable certainty that I am in fact seeing, observing and touching these very things; that such things are indeed there to be seen and touched. But I wonder if you will permit me this proposition: I see I. Or, perhaps I can state it this way: I observe myself. What do you think? Is there a problem with this?

Forgive the didactic nature of my comments here; forgive that I should presume to teach you a thing about basic philosophy, about simple epistemology. But there is a gnawing problem here, one that gnaws at one's guts. And since you believe that religious faith is unreasonable in contrast to secularism, I am left believing that you cannot have possibly chewed on this problem long enough.

Let me pose the problem this way. Can you observe yourself? Of course, we hear people all the time say that they can and do observe themselves. They do not mean they observe themselves in a mirror or portrait; they mean that they observe their own minds with their own minds. They mean a type of mental mirror, a sort of self-reflection. But I ask you, if you can observe yourself, who is doing the observing? If you can examine yourself, who, or what, is doing the examining? Or are you a self observing yourself observing yourself? Can you even do that without reflecting, like so many parallel facing mirrors, ad infinitum?

Surely you see the conundrum. Though we can have things outside of ourselves be objects of our own consciousness, we are not able to make our own consciousness an object of itself. It is not possible for the subject to be its own object; it's not possible for the knower to simultaneously know himself. It is a bit like Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty: one can't measure the position or velocity of a particle without affecting either (and hence one can't be certain of either). Thus, we cannot prove to ourselves that we even have selves: it is not possible to make one's mind an object of scrutiny. How then does each of us even know we have a self?

We know this by extrapolation made in faith. It is faith, not certainty, that is at the bottom of our 'certainty.' I cannot prove to you I exist, because I cannot prove my own existence even to myself. I have to make a leap of faith that I exist, or that my existence and mind and thoughts correspond at all to the reality outside my very being. There is no one who is not faith-full. Faith is the very basis of human epistemology. You can be certain of it.

This, at least to me, is what I got out of Dr. Reid's simple remark about Kant's transcendental ego. And I believe this all proves that no one is free of being religious, or, in your words, unreasoned.

IS THIS FAIR?

I do not know if you really ever forgot, as I implied above, this fact of human consciousness forced on us by reality. I do not know if you have not thought all this through before and have some proper and compelling answer. But I will state that I cannot imagine anyone would not agree that faith inheres in all people; that even the possibility of having souls that can believe or doubt is akin to revelation. I recognize the concomitant anxiety this all portends, for if we all share this fact of faith, we are left a bit at sea: what revelation, if any, is the most truthful? After all, if we cannot prove our own selves to our selves, how can we prove -- or, more interestingly -- disprove, the existence of God?

The battle afoot, Mr. Hitchens, is not really a battle between civilizations or for civilization. Such a battle is superficial and a true distraction. To limit this battle to mere clashes of peoples is to descend into quagmire. What this battle is, is nothing more than the very battle of wisdom, of what is real, true, and actual; about the nature of knowledge and the very cosmos; about the essence of humanity and the nature of God. This is a battle between lies and truth, between heresy and orthodoxy, between Satan and God. It is a battle that has been raging since Eden. And it is all contained in God's first question to Adam and Eve after they fled that lost paradise: Where are you?

Where, oh, where are we indeed. The answer, obviously, cannot come from ourselves.

Peace to you, dear sir.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Christopher Hitchens, Clash of civilizations, God, Faith, Philosophy, Epistemology, Chris Matthews, Hardball, William F. Buckley

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part IV

[Part I of this series begins here.]

I've never known a person not touched by evil, pain, suffering. But I have known many people who have never known joy.

The other day, while I was sitting in a park photographing cedar waxwings (not my photo), an old salt-of-the-earth New Englander asked me a question. He had recently seen a bird, a black bird with red patches on its wings. "I have never seen one before. Do you know what it was?" I cheerfully told him that it was one of my favorites, the red-winged blackbird (not my photo either). I told him all I knew of the bird, and the old man continued on his way. But it was clear that the man, who surely seemed to have his wits about him, had never seen what is utterly a common bird in New England. Since the beginning of this essay (this morning) I have had several visit my feeders just outside the window, and they are always busy flitting about wetlands everywhere. They are remarkably obvious birds, extremely chatty, very active. It is hard to imagine that there are people around who have not seen one of them.

But then again, there are all kinds of things that surprise us, not least of which is that there are people who have never even been loved. This may be too hard for us to entertain even in the most detached, academic way. We do not know how such a fact could ever be possible. But reality is often too much for us, especially when that reality so thoroughly contradicts our experience: There are people who have not been loved for one second of their lives. How could this happen?

Perhaps there is some solace, and a small answer, in the pronouncement that God loves those who are unloved, or even unlovable. But it is not a very convincing sort of solace; we are not convinced that this is enough to restore someone who has never been loved to any sense of self worth. After an encounter with a very sad man on a city street (I was working as a photojournalist at the time), and after a very brief argument with an editor at the newspaper where I worked, I wrote the following poem:

In human interest

I submit the photoshopped images to the news queue
a disfigured head, gigantesque in its distortion
twisted grin his normal straight

brow like the elephant man’s

I pull them up to show you and you
give a face that has sales written all over it

I remember meeting this news feature
before you either saw him as news or
even as a feature:

He was sitting on a bench, where else?
on Main Street near Railroad Ave.
his head twice the size of most
fairground balloons

I wondered whether he had ever been touched

What’s your name? I asked.

Johhhhhnnnyyyy! he replied, Ya gaht aaany mmmonnney?

I emptied my pockets, a few bucks and I handed it to him.
At that instant a cab pulled up to the curb, and Johnny
jumped in. I laughed, but knew I’d be back for more.

I say, I wonder if anyone ever loved him.

You say, you’re too philosophical to be a
journalist.

I say, thank you. Really.

You walk away muttering about your circulation.

***

It seems like a loveless world. Darwin tells us, when we really think about it, that it is all about competition: there is no equality in Darwin's mean streets, there is no rest or peace or promise of uninterrupted comfort anywhere on the face of the earth. We balk at this, or we kick at the portents of atheism in so much Darwin-inspired, dread-saturated, post-modern emptiness. We wonder how a people who demand so much meaning out of life, who expect justice and love and joy, could have evolved from a primordial ooze that is utterly without meaning. How does the desire for purpose evolve from purposelessness; how does the want for love evolve from lovelessness?

Life does not seem fair: the child born with no face (as shown recently on TV); the newborn boy discarded in a garbage pail, now pushed from orphanage to orphanage; those families crammed into railroad cars heading toward gas chambers. I ask how it is that, if we've evolved from nothing, we then don't blame nothing for evil, or how we even see anything as evil at all. Why, if the radical evolutionists are right, why do we even care about suffering, or why would we blame God, if, indeed, there is no God at all? How did we get here, when our starting point was the void? It's as if we fundamentally defy as creatures the very physics of the universe, where it is a law that you can't get more energy out of a thing than what's in it. How is it that humans can demand, inspire or expect more meaning and love than the meaningless, loveless universe from whence they came can ever offer?

***

Did God create death camps? Did God create cigarettes, guns, nuclear bombs, chainsaws, alcohol, crystal meth? Is God responsible for polluted rivers, polluted air? Did He make us fly jets across the Atlantic, scarring the atmosphere; did He make us fly planes into skycrapers, skyscrapers that He built on fill in Lower Manhattan?

If there is a proof for the existence of God I might think it resides here, that humans blame Him for the things they created. One might also find an argument for the existence of God in His apparent absence: if I were God I might hide from humanity too. But there really is nothing hidden about God, as He is evident in every wingbeat of the red-winged blackbird. Heidegger's haunting question might even help us see God even where Heidegger could not: How is that there is anything here at all? What keeps everything from slipping into the abyss of non-being?

For some of us, the question might get us to begging, begging for a miracle. We want intervention (and we want it NOW!) not realizing that the very squirrels and birds and grasses and winds are divine signs. God is at work. Jesus may have impressed His disciples by walking on water. But the miracle is not in the walking, it is in the water; that there is any water at all. Raising the dead is miraculous, no doubt, but not anymore miraculous than that there was any person who lived in the first place. Sadly, we are too dulled, or too fearful, to live in the miraculous. We comfort ourselves in the presence of natural laws, oblivious, mostly, that the predictability of nature is often illusory and, more importantly, that the very laws themselves are miraculous. Breathing is really more of a miracle than Christ's resurrection. In fact, I believe He rose from the dead to prove that very thing, granting us life eternal so that we might breathe forevermore. But we hardly notice the miraculous in the commonplace until the wind is knocked out of us, or when we sense our last inhale will indeed be our very last.

***

We can ask where God is in the midst of suffering, as long as we are asking where we are in the midst of it, too. As we have seen, God has taken the blame for creation, for suffering, for evil; and He has taken the blame for things He did not even create. There should be joy in this news; we should receive this news with dancing and laughter and merriment. But we have even grown used to joy, I am afraid, even when it comes so rarely; good news is old news, and even joy seems tired, boring, predictable. We are too worldly to laugh, to dance in the freedom of forgiveness, to drink deep draughts of holy, redeemed merriment. Holiness, joy, redemption, forgiveness -- these are greeted with a big yawn by the all-knowing sophisticates we think we are. We snicker at the idea of a banquet with a Holy Family, because we know families, and they are all broken and disappointing. Laugh for a while, we say, but before long you'll be at each others' throats, just like so many holidays with our own too-often unholy families. Heaven? bliss? No thanks. That's for those who need such assurances.

***

The Christian message is simple regarding suffering, and it is painful. God loves both the murderer and the murdered, and He knows what it is to be both. He cannot stop being all-knowing, all-present, and thus is always both victim and victimizer. To intervene in world affairs in terms familiar to us, action figures that we think we are, would be for God to have to choose sides. But God is, until time has run out, on all sides: He is a Yankees and Red Sox fan; He roots for Manchester United as fervently as He roots for Arsenal. In short, He cheers on people, not ideologies, except the Gospel itself. He did not root for Hitlerism, but surely He adored Hitler. He did not root for Arafat's hatred, but surely He loved Arafat. He did not love the blood on King David's hands, but surely He loved the hands that were David's. The red-winged blackbird killed by a goshawk in my yard recently, killed right before my eyes, was no less loved by God than the goshawk that carried the dead bird away. After all, had God stopped the hawk from smashing that helpless blackbird into the side of my house, right next to me, would He not have had to bring the whole cosmos to a halt?

The Gospel of Christ declares this: That God loves you more than He loves His own life, and even His own joy. Better to be with you in hell than in heaven without you. Better to crucify the Creator than to stop Creation. Better to bring God to a screeching halt than the hawk in its deadly flight. Better to bring God to the grave than Hitler to annihilation.

Strange, though, how few people point out that Hitler was indeed stopped. No one seems to thank God for that, do they? Perhaps God did intervene -- perfectly, the only way Omniscience can. He KNOWS what He is doing, right? Otherwise, He can't be God. And if He is not God, we are indeed pitiable, and lost.

"Come unto me, all you who labor, and I will give you rest." It is always a good thing to remember that the very first miracle that Jesus performed was to make more wine. Sounds exactly like the sort of message one would expect of a God who cares, who pays attention.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil, The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part III: To Hell With Jesus

[I post this essay with trepidation. It is a long entry in this series on good and evil. But it is a necessary one. That is not where my fear lies. I am afraid that I have gone too far. (Part I of this series begins here.)]

This series began with Pope Benedict XVI praying at Auschwitz. It won't end there, not because I am interested in following the Holy Father to another scene, but because the issue of good and evil has no earthly terminus. We will be asking questions until answers are finally given.

In the February 6, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, in an article called "Forgiveness", author Timothy W. Ryback discusses the Pope's difficult past –– of growing up in Nazi Germany and serving in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi military. But in Ryback's piece one reads the following about then-professor Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) teaching at the University of Tübingen as a young man:

In 1966, when Ratzinger arrived in Tübingen, the university was a center of theological dispute. Students disrupted lectures with cries of "Verflucht sei Jesus!" ("To hell with Jesus!"). Protestant faculty members endorsed flyers denouncing the crucifix as "an expression of sadomasochistic glorification of suffering."

We have already spoken of both human indifference and human culpability regarding suffering and evil. I have argued that humanity is remarkably silent about horrors, except when it comes to horrors and God, and then humanity is quite boisterous about God's alleged weakness, moral turpitude, indifference, or even His non-existence. If there is a God, God is to blame; He's the one who must give account, He is the one who must be judged. God is the source of horrors.

***

I cannot think of a more complex religious image: the Vicar of Christ, the Pope of the Holy Catholic Church, a former Hitler youth and soldier in the Nazi cult, standing at Auschwitz. It is a stillpoint; it is the crux of the matter. Can a sinner be a saint? Are redemption and sanctification possible? Does God love the indifferent and brutal as much as He loves the compassionate and merciful? Does God love the abuser as much as he loves the abused? Are Hitler and Elie Wiesel (a famous Holocaust survivor) loved equally by God?

There is something essentially Christian about Benedict XVI standing within the gates of death. There is something essentially Christian about the very idea of redemption: St. Paul, the outstanding Jew who was a murderer, is the quintessence of the Christian message: all are saved who would be saved. God, as St. Paul says, takes the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; He is a God of gracious irony, proving that grace, love and mercy always trump the rules. My own earthly father taught me this: he taught me that he loved me more than he loved his rules, his reputation, his honor. I was more important than a statute, a commandment. The sheep is more important than the sheepfold; a hole in the fence did not mean that the fence was broken but that a sheep was lost, and in jeopardy. God cares for the lost, He pursues them; and He finds them in order to make them whole. This is what my father taught me, and it is essentially Christ's message to the world.

And yet there is a whole world of people who believe that rules are God; that a lost sheep deserves his or her plight; that the fence should just be fixed to keep only the good sheep in, and the bad sheep out.

Perhaps I am rambling, but I ramble over brambles and thorns to get to one important point, a point that might indeed save one sheep from a disasterous decision, and that point is this: To hell with Jesus indeed!

***

I have said it before and I will say it again: The Christian gospel has it all exactly right. Christianity is separated from all other religions by having, not the valley climb to the summit, but the summit tumble down to the valley. There is no Moses climbing to receive a Word from God in the Gospel story; there is no Muhammad receiving the very words of a radically transcendent God whose message is all about making men better men. The message of Christianity is about a God tumbling to Hell in order to make God a better God. I border on blasphemy, I know, but hear me out.

***

Years ago I was painting a school gymnasium with a college friend when a horse fly, a large nasty bloodthirsty fly with stinging jaws, landed on my friend's leg. My friend was quick to snatch it, and, in the course of looking at it, my friend asked me if the pest was "one of the nasty biting flies". I told him that it was indeed, and that it was cousin to the smaller though no less nasty deer fly. To my horror, my friend pulled the wings off the fly and tossed it to the ground. "Suffer!" he shouted. I quickly walked over and crushed the wingless fly beneath my foot.

Odd that such a moment should have become a defining moment in my life. Earlier that year I had a young man in my dorm (I was an RA for three years) whose father, an atheist, threw out a stiff challenge to the idea of original sin or original culpability. "Why should God be upset with me if I cannot help but be a sinner? I did not ask to be born. How then am I accountable?" It is a great challenge, and I was stumped for months. But when I crushed the fly beneath my foot, I knew I had an answer. And that answer begins with the character of God. Was my friend, the wing-ripping, sardonic and merciless man before me, anything like the God of the universe? Did God delight in abusing that which itself was abusive; did God aim to punish a fly that was just being itself? Would a just God punish a being that had no choice but to be unpleasant?

The clarity with which I divined my way through the problem took the following course. I imagined that I, an outsider to the fly's world yet a being full of love for all flies, descended to the mere existence of a fly. I was, to a perfect match, a horsefly. And to the other flies I spoke:

I know that you do not know exactly what it is you do. But if I were to tell you that you were an awful, nasty creature, what would you say? If I told you that the things you bite, the things from which you draw your life, are injured viciously by you, and that they loathe you, would you care? Trust me when I say this: I am not blaming you. In fact, let me state that you were even made this way. I made you this way. But now I ask you this. What if I were to tell you that you could become something new, wonderful, lovely? What if I told you I could transform you, I could liberate you from this plight? Would you follow? Would you choose to be new, different, lovely, though still in essence who you were created to be? Would you choose to be more lovely than the butterflies if I promised you such wonder? Or would you reject me?

My question to you, dear reader, is this: If I really could transform the flies, if I really could deliver them from their plight and I showed them incontrovertibly that I could, who would be responsible if they refused? If the flies could be completely transformed and yet essentially remained their fully undifferentiated selves, and they refused so great a blessing, who is to blame if they chose to remain nasty biting bugs? Surely not their creator, even if He, indeed, had created them to bite. For now He was offering them a singular gift, a chance to participate in their creation; they were to be co-creators in their new lives. But, and here is a critical point, if they refused their new lives, they would be endorsing their viciousness as wonderful and desirable. In short, if they chose to be nasty and untransformed, they would become the sole creators of who and what they were.

For those who have an understanding of the problem of predestination and free will, we come to another crux, another crossroad. For here we see something amazing. Even if the creator of the flies made them to be vicious, should they refuse his offer, they have become their own creators, setting the creator free. The flies can no longer complain that they were made to be mean by someone else: they have freely made their decision, and they have continued in their evil ways. The flies have chosen, and their NO to the creator is the one thing that is truly their own: It is a wondrous act of free will.

However, should any fly choose to be transformed, should any fly choose to be a co-creator in his (or her) re-creation, that fly would make a startling pronouncement: I had nothing to do with it at all! For the fly, now more glorious than a butterfly, would announce that his choice was not of his making, as the wondrous world in which he lived was not his doing: "You see, I am indeed new, but I had nothing to do with either the option or the choosing. I did not present the choice to myself, it came to me; I did not create the idea of a butterfly, it came from above. My assent is hardly a choice. It is more that I have been chosen, for my creator came to me at a point in time with a wonderful bit of news; I did not come to HIM with the news, but He came to me." In other words, the transformed fly would say that his YES to the creator was not really his; he was predestined to be transformed. For he did not come up with the whole idea in the first place. And, as a result, both the creator and created were set free.

So in short, free will means saying NO; but it has nothing to do with saying YES.

Where does this fit in with the problem of evil? It fits right here: that Christ became a fly, was confronted by the vicious who could not be, on their own, otherwise; they submitted Him to capital punishment for making the cosmos in the first place; He died and descended to Hell, and returned as a transcendent butterfly with POWER. And then He said, "You've killed me. I've suffered. I've taken the blame for starting it all; I have taken your sins upon me and called them my own. And now the whole of sin is buried, hidden away, tossed into the abyss. I am the murderer, and the murdered; I am the rapist and the raped; I am the Nazi and the Jew. I have been all things in all ways in all times; you have punished me and I have succumbed. And now that you are no longer to blame, now what? Will you come to me now? For there is no one left to blame."

***

"Verflucht sei Jesus! To Hell with Jesus!" To Hell indeed. For it is the God that was believed to be vindictive and petty, mean and cold, that we discover in Christ is a different God: He is the God who SUFFERS, who succumbs to the death inherent in even the smallest sin. He would rather be in hell with us than in heaven without us. He has come, He has shown us that He is a different God. "Come unto me, and I will give you rest," He offers to Jew, Gentile, and Nazi alike. And yet, and yet …

There are those who refuse, who resist transformation, healing. And in so doing their NO to God becomes a YES to sorrow, sin, death, and suffering. They freely choose to be sole creators in their sorrow; and they resist the gentle Hand that reaches forward. God does not pull off wings; He does not say "Suffer!" We say it in every moment of resistance to transformation; and in keeping our pitiable sorrows we refuse to have our sins transformed to gems. We, those who protest against such grace, true protestants as we are, are the sadomasochists: it's not the God on the Cross who is sadist, masochist. It's the obdurate who view Him that way who are mired in sadomasochism.

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly a little boy in Nazi Germany who helped the Hitler cult perform even one heinous deed, is that perfect emblem of Christianity: The wise are confounded by the grace of a God who saves -- and transforms -- not only that which is lost, but that which is revolting. Grace abounds in Christianity, from sea to sea, star to sun, earth to hearth, Heart to heart. There is no peace without forgiveness, the forgiveness of God toward man, and man toward God; and, most importantly, man to man, woman to woman, brother to sister and Palestinian to Jew. There will be no end to woe without forgiveness. Mark my words.

Forgiveness always requires that something dies, is buried. And then comes the freedom. It is the gospel, the glad tidings. Glad indeed!

Peace to you.

(Concluding thoughts tomorrow, which begin here.)

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved. (Dedicated to James Saunders.)

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil,
The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part II

In Part I of this series, I spoke of suffering, of evil and death; of the Holocaust. I discussed the problem of evil, that the existence of evil proves that God is weak, mean, or both; and that for many people the best conclusion drawn from the harsh realities of suffering is that there is no God at all.

I added my own thoughts on the problem of evil as classically defined, arguing that the problem ignores the obvious assumption in our definition of God, that God is omniscient. As an omniscient Being, God might know that the only way to eradicate evil and suffering from the cosmos is exactly the way we see events unfolding in our lives: omniscience IS at work in every tragedy and in every joy. In other words, God IS doing something, the very thing an all-wise God can only do; and it looks like Life. And it might very well be the case that God was not silent at all during the Holocaust. His voice may indeed have been quite strong. In fact, I have even heard it suggested that had Hitler not been distracted by the Jews in Germany, Poland, France; had Hitler instead ignored them and turned the German machinery of death, destruction and warfare on his enemies, he would have won World War II and far more than 6,000,000 Jews would have been killed. The suggestion posits a heroic idea, that the Jews were something of a glorious sacrifice that saved us all from Nazi tyranny: the Jews were freedom fighters even in their alleged weakness. It was the Jews who destroyed Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt had nothing to do with it.

This is not an attempt on my part to palliate the evils of the Holocaust, nor am I trying to cheer up the surviving victims of Germany's death camps. I am making a point that God may have indeed been very much at work in profoundly effective and yet strange ways, which is what one would expect of an omniscient God. Omniscience, in fact, may behave in utterly bizarre and contradictory ways; and it may act in obscurity.

A couple of years ago, I had a bit of a spat with a local shop owner about suffering, God, justice. He followed me out to the sidewalk and, in the heat of debate said, "I've done more for the suffering of starving Africans than God ever has." I must say that I understand the sentiment behind this conceit, but I do not understand the conceit. God appears not to be doing anything most of the time; He does not seem to even care. But one of the real problems associated with evil is not that God doesn't care, it's that there is sweepingly broad empirical evidence that most humans don't care either.

About 15 years ago I received a phone call from an old friend grieving about the sad death of a young mother we both knew. My friend was angry at God, for God had let not only Penny (the dead woman) down, He let lots of others down, too. My friend wondered how God could choose not to heed the prayers of Penny and her son, or the prayers of countless people surrounding that tragedy. Even Penny believed that she would be healed! How could God not honor that? How could He be content with yet another motherless child?

After awhile I shared with my friend something that hit my conscience hard. I said that in all of the time that Penny was living, all 26 years of her life, not once had anyone called me to proclaim how glad they were that Penny existed. No one called to praise Penny's smile, her laughter, her sweet goodness. No one called me to praise God for His wonderful creation which was Penny in all her simple glory. No one called to complain that there was not MORE of Penny everywhere; and no one ever said that God was too kind to us all to have created such a wonderful woman in the first place. And yet, in spite of all this silence, people were now mad that God had taken Penny away. Before, there was no gladness around Penny, but after her death there was nothing but madness. No one praised God yesterday, and yet now people were poised to curse Him today.

My friend agreed, and I believe we were both changed during that phone call.

***

I am reminded of something G. K. Chesterton once said. He imagined a rather randy man complaining to God about women and matrimony. "Explain to me God why I can't be with all women?" the man might have asked. To which God replied, "If it comes to that, explain to me why you can be with even one woman?" Chesterton went further, suggesting that Adam and Eve, given the entire cosmos and yet prevented from having just one thing -- an apple -- might have asked God something similar: "Explain to us why we can keep everything we have if we don't have just one thing? Explain why we can't have the apple, too?" God's reply? "Well, if it comes to that, explain the apple."

I am reminded of all this because we often expect an explanation for something taken from us without ever asking ourselves how we were given the thing to begin with. A man may be mad at God when his son is killed in a car wreck; but was he ever grateful to God that he even had a son who would, eventually, die?

What has come to surprise me about many reactions to death and suffering is that people respond with such surprise. When a child dies of a brain tumor or a woman is raped and murdered, one would think that such a thing had never before happened, judging by many survivors' reactions, particularly their reactions toward God. God is to blame, it seems, even though few people take the responsibility for suffering themselves. Like the shopkeeper who thinks he does more to alleviate sorrow than even God, many forget that they are perhaps the reason there is suffering at all. For surely each of us who has had a child knew about rape, murder, disease, fire, pestilence, earthquake, pedophilia, and car crashes BEFORE we had children; surely there is NO ONE on this planet choosing to have children who did not know about these things. And yet, AND YET, knowing this, knowing that death occurs every day; knowing that there are murderers and rapists and wars and droughts and suicides and divorce and cannibals and cancers, and that we nonetheless still choose to have children; all of this should lead us to one question, and one question only: When it comes to suffering and evil, who among us is NOT to blame?

Please note: I am responsible for every bit of suffering my child experiences in life, every bit. Why? Because I knew beforehand that dreadful things MAY happen; I might even have known that they WILL happen, and yet I (not anyone else) CHOSE to bring a child into this world. I am the source of suffering. If there was at least ONE thing I knew before reproducing a child, it was the simple fact that that child will someday DIE.

Interestingly, as I may be responsible for my child's sorrow, I cannot say that I am responsible for my child's joys. And this for the simple reason that before having a child I had no certainty that joy would come his or her way; but I was indeed certain that death MUST come. Life does not guarantee joy, and there is no proof that it ever did, or ever could, or ever will. But every graveyard is proof that even if there is joy, joy, eventually, falls into the ground. With family planning the only guarantee one has is death.

But since sorrow is one of life's guarantees, we can be glad that joy, should it come, is one of life's infinitely wonderful privileges. After all, there is no joy if one is entitled to it; there is no bliss if bliss is one's guaranteed right. Joy can only come in the form of a surprise or it is not joy. Hence, we take a gamble with every breath and in every birth. We hope, we pray; we throw our chance into the hand of omniscience. Surely we cannot blame God when things go wrong, particularly when we don't "blame" Him when things go remarkably right. But when things do go right, surely we are out there thanking God for the privilege of simple existence.

Well, one can only hope.

More tomorrow. [Part III begins here.]

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part I

Perhaps this will not help at all.

Pope Benedict XVI stood at Auschwitz this past weekend. He entered death chambers. He knelt before the gates of death, and he prayed. And then there was a rainbow.

It is not that the several elements, the prayers and presence of a Pope and a rainbow, are causally connected. It is that we hope they are.

Auschwitz is that geographic point that exists like an oracular black hole. Oracles, as you know, were where pilgrims traveled to hear news from the divine, hopefully good news, though usually not. Auschwitz is like an oracle in reverse: there is nothing proclaimed there, only asked. But no answer comes in that crushing dark, the oppressive silence. Auschwitz is the place of questions, the abyss with no answers. We plead for God, and God hides behind veils of smoke, the smoke of burning bodies. Atop gas chambers, birds sing. God says nothing.

The problem of evil, at least in theology, is framed something like this: If God is all-powerful and all-good, He could or would stop evil. Since there is evil, God is either not all-powerful or all-good. Many philosophers have chosen to dismiss God as not all-powerful, needing God to be at least all-benevolent. Many have rejected the idea of God altogether in light of the facts of evil and suffering. And a few malcontents have chosen to see God as so much badness, a real sadist in the sky.

Those theologians and philosophers who believe that God must be both omnipotent and benevolent often defend Him by noting God's free choice to give humanity free will; as such, He permitted us to make a mess of things. And so we have. Of course, really shrewd thinkers note that if God did in fact design humanity and the cosmos this way He is still responsible for starting the whole thing in the first place. Free will arguments don't really absolve God of apparent culpability.

Pope Benedict XVI, like countless other people before him, stood at Auschwitz and asked, “Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" Of course, I recognize that the Holy Father is asking the question rhetorically; that he is revealing his humanity, his compassion, and his ability to identify with doubt, sorrow, pain. He is like the Psalmist, or like the prophets before him: How long, O, Lord, will you let our enemies prevail? Even the Christian Savior asked in His darkest hours, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Women huddled in a gas chamber asked the question with perfect lucidity.

If readers will permit, I would like to confront the problem of evil (theodicy) in a few posts here at Contratimes. And the first place I would like to start is with the problem itself. For it strikes me as self-evident that the classic problem, that God can't be either omnipotent or benevolent before the facts of evil, is thoroughly wrong-headed.

Not long ago I called a radio talk program to join in on a conversation about this very problem. The guest was a former professor of mine, Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, and I asked if anyone had considered whether perhaps an omniscient God, one knowing everything in a state of all-wisdom, would KNOW that the only way to overcome evil in the world is to overcome evil exactly the way we see things working out every day. For all any one of us knows, an all-wise God would say to us, "You know, I am destroying evil, I am alleviating suffering; and this is the ONLY way for me to do so. This is omniscience intervening." In other words, omniscience would know exactly how to destroy the evil and suffering that besets all creatures, and that destruction might be what we are witnessing in every breath and in every sunset. There can be no other way. Should God just step in and stop, for instance, Hitler from killing Jews, then a far greater evil may follow. Oddly, the talk show host would have none of this: She wanted to blame God for being weak or malevolent. She could not buy the idea of omniscience. And I believe that she could not buy it because she had never thought of it before.

Peter Kreeft, as would be expected of a philosopher, ran with the question. He added that some have speculated that if Hitler had not committed suicide, for example, and that he was instead arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, we might find ourselves living under the dreaded Nazi flag today. For a person cannot tell how one thing ultimately influences another; one cannot tell what is materially the less evil path in the long run. One can only hope; one can only stand on principles when confronting injustice and evil. But one cannot know, unless one is God, whether one's actions will have an ill or healthy effect on the world. Kreeft's words were engaging, and correct.

Hopefully Dr. Kreeft won't mind if I put his words differently. If it were up to us, our battle with evil might be a bit like administering antibiotics: they appear to work as a victorious solution to infections, but in the long run, antibiotics may in fact have weakened humanity's innate abilities to self-immunize. The infections we beat short-term may have been overcome long-term by themselves had we just waited long enough for the human immune system to evolve. One simply does not know. Nor does doltish humanity know what God's sudden "dramatic" intervention might look like, or what effect it might have.

But the assumption in all theological discussions is that God does indeed know. God is either omniscient or He is not. If He is not, it is awfully hard to call Him God. And if He is omniscient, then one can only conclude that the very reality we are in is the best reality for overcoming sin, evil and suffering. To return to the antibiotic image for a second, it would be wrong for a sceptic to conclude that because there is a battle between cells in a person's body the antibiotics are not working, for the battle is proof that they are. If anyone concludes that an antibiotic that does not work "fast enough" (for whom?) or "well enough" is neither potent nor good, that person should be reminded that there are plenty of measures one can take to instantly and completely eradicate an infection. Killing the patient is one such measure. But good doctors are a bit like God. They are wise to the idea that killing the bad often takes time so as not to kill the good. God could perhaps instantly wipe the earth clean of all evil, but what would be left, and where is the wisdom in that?

And yet there is one more thing that complicates matters, and it is a hard pill to swallow: God is that antibody that loves everyone. In other words, God, who is love as well as justice, and who exists as the only all-wise being, loves the very persons many of us consider evil. This is alarming for many of us, but it is Christianity's truest, boldest and most controversial assertion: God loved the Jews in the gas chambers as much as he loved Hitler outside them; God loves the victimizer as much as any victim. It is almost too difficult to even write, let alone admit into one's reflections on these matters. But it must be true. God cannot HATE what we might hate; His wisdom must not be void of love or justice, nor can His love and justice be void of wisdom. God loved Hitler, and all other disgusting tyrants, as much as He loves any of us. And we know Christ the Shepherd leaves the beloved flock to find the one beloved stray, even if that stray is a rebel. That is the most difficult problem in the eradication of evil: How does God eradicate it without destroying everybody, and everything? How does God purge humanity of evil without destroying the entire body?

Only an omniscient Being has the knowledge, and power, to do that. Or there is no such Being at all.

More tomorrow, I hope. (Part II begins here.)

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
[Related post at WI Catholic can be read here.]

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

The Emerging Informality: Christianity's Dire Need, Part IV

[My apologies if you've come here to read about George Bush's foibles or Howard Dean's much hoped-for return to Vermont's Green Mountains. I remain on my topic of informalism in the American Church. If you are late to the discussion and would like to join it, I suggest you read parts I, II, and III. Not that you have to.]

Things have gone dreadfully serious here, and profoundly spiritual. In hopes of bringing a light moment to my serious series on the plight of the American church, I must share a sentence I read last night. At the risk of sounding woefully pedantic (intellectually show-offish), I admit, with a smidgeon of shame, that I was reading "The History of Philosophy," the massive, amazing series by the brilliant historian Fr. Frederick Copleston, S.J.

In Vol. 6, Part 1, I fell on this laugher penned by the genius Copleston during his discussion of Denis Diderot:

Similarly, the fluid character of his thought makes it impossible to state simply and unequivocally that Diderot was or was not a materialist.

Well, I should think that, if I were Fr. Copleston, Mr. Diderot's character unequivocally proves to the satisfaction of any erudite mind that Diderot was something of a blatant liquidist. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

[Of course, this all is funny to exactly one person.]

***

I've been writing of informalism, or, more accurately, I've been writing about the need for informed formality in American churches. All of this it must be said is in response to a reputed trend to make American Christianity more relevant by making it less formal, more casual and familiar. I have argued that this trend is going in the wrong direction: we need more formality, not less.

May the following anecdotes, all true, serve to bolster my case. They are each real; they are not fictions for argument's sake.

First, I recall only a couple of years ago speaking with friends who attended a nearby popular evangelical church on Ash Wednesday. I was excited to hear about their experiences, surprised as I was to hear that such a church would even have an Ash Wednesday service. Plus, I knew how powerful my Ash Wednesday experiences had been, kneeling before the sacramental altar, with my own mortality smudged in the shape of a cross on my furrowed brow; the priest speaking of both autumn and spring, of death and resurrection. But to my great surprise I learned that the pastor of the evangelical church decided that, instead of emulating the rituals of millions of Christian parishes and parishioners around the world, he would hold a healing service. Instead of ashes, he would anoint with oil. This, he said, was what God "laid on his heart."

I can't speak for God: God can do amazing things. But it strikes me as odd that this pastor should feel led to do something no one else was doing, considering that what everyone else was doing was really quite powerful and wonderful. These "other churches" with their dirty little ashes also believe in anointing with oil, as symbol and sacrament of God's anointing Holy Spirit, and as the sacrament of unction in the healing of broken bodies and souls. But, alas, twisting and mixing symbols did not seem to matter to this pastor: what does any of it matter? Sadly, his actions remind me of those Protestant pastors I've heard speak around Eastertime of God's great mysteries, including that great mystery called the Immaculate Conception. Of course, the Immaculate Conception is not the virgin birth, which is what too many Protestants think. Rather, it is the distinctly Catholic teaching that God lifted original sin from the Virgin Mary at her conception in her mother's womb. And it also reminds me of the many days I spent Pentecost Sundays in an evangelical church and heard nothing about Pentecost, the very birthday of the Church.

Second, I listened recently to a song sung by a woman soloist backed by the praise band at an evangelical church I visited. The chorus included a line like this: "Jesus, Jesus, come and ravish us!" After the song ended, the soloist prayed aloud, saying, "Yes, Lord! We all ask you now to come and ravish each of us." Needless to say, my response to this prayer was to lean over to my friend, a fellow writer, and whisper, "I can assure you. I do not want Jesus to ravish me at all." You see, I am something of a wordsmith. I am not a walking dictionary, mind you, but I do take words seriously. And to ravish has long suggested "to rape." And if not rape, ravish is to at least overcome a woman's resistance sexually: she's putting up a fight, but she really, really wants it, if you get my meaning. In fact, the Latin root of the word, rapere, means to seize, to carry away (and not with emotion but with sexual intent). Yes, ravish has come to mean (at times) to overwhelm with emotions. But my sense is that most people, especially most men, do not pray or wish that Jesus the Christ ravishes them.

Now these two anecdotes are not signs of anything horrible. They just point to a casual tendency in Christian worship where meanings and definitions become fuzzy and elastic, where form is immaterial or even a hindrance. At least, the loss of form became a hindrance for me, a worshipper in the pews. This next anecdote, however, points to something really quite shocking.

At the wedding of my first cousin-once removed, the pastor, married to another one of my cousins, celebrated communion. This pastor, raised Catholic but now wholly anti-Catholic, stated these two things at the beginning of that once sacred meal:

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and he brake it, saying, "This is a symbol of my body, broken for you ... " He likewise took the cup and said, "This is a symbol of the new covenant in my blood..."

Anyone familiar with either Jesus' words as recorded in Holy Scripture, or with the Holy Eucharist or Mass, is no doubt aghast at the pastor's gross perversion of the words of Christ. Jesus did not say that either the bread or wine were symbols. He said that they were his body and blood. Of course, they may be nothing but symbols, but Jesus NEVER said that they were.

Needless to say, had the pastor offered me either bread or wine, I would have refused.

Let me talk now, about the meal or feast we call communion, eucharist, mass. To some it is indeed purely symbolic and commemorative, yielding nothing salvific or gracious. It is something to just do, to unite the fellowship of believers symbolically. For others, like me and my more Catholic brothers and sisters, Eucharist is more than symbol, it is sacramental: it gives something to us that we cannot receive any other way. It is a meal of grace; it is the meal of eternal life, by being the meal of a Savior's very real death.

Who is right in this matter, the "low" church folks who treat the meal as memorial; or us "high" church folks? Let me answer that question by quoting St. Paul in what might be the most important passage he ever penned (or dictated), and it is one of the most misused in all of Christendom:

When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not! ... Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world. (I Cor. 11: 20-32)

First, this passage is not a warning to non-Christians. It is not a warning, as so many pastors wrongly suggest, that non-believers must not partake of the Holy Communion for fear of damning themselves. That every word of the New Testament is solely written directly to believers should always give us pause before we issue warnings to non-believers from that sacred text. The casual church misuses Scripture, while the formal church (and this need not be a "high church") uses Scripture rightly (or so I hope).

Second, this amazing passage proves one thing: the Communion Meal is powerful, even to the point of killing or making sick those Christians who abuse it! What kind of symbol does that? What kind of mere memorial or empty ritual kills people who use it wrongly? What sort of symbol carries with it God's discipline and judgment? Furthermore, if the meal can kill or make ill if abused, does that not imply that the meal can give life and healing if prepared, served and received properly? It seems that it must!

All of this amounts to one thing: we need more informed formality in our churches and not less. We need to return to a deep understanding of Christian worship, liturgy and tradition. We need more people formally trained in dividing the "word of truth;" we need more people attentive to the details, trained in godliness with all wisdom. The Church is not to follow the zeitgeist, it is to confront it, even change it. Nay, the Church is to be the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, even the spirit of all ages.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

[Part V/Epilogue is here.]

Taking Flights Of Logical Fancy

Sometimes I feel like lifting off, taking flight, beating weary wings toward some distant, anonymous, perhaps even forsaken place. Recently I felt this acute rush of longing while standing before several pieces of art displayed at a New Hampshire gallery. I felt like fleeing not because of the art per se, which was patently awful. I felt like fleeing because of pretensions at intellectual grandeur, particularly the pretensions of philosophical grandeur printed in one featured artist's statement elegantly displayed near his work (which was also dreadful).

I have long speculated on why it is that the art world tends to be filled with liberals, Democrats, socialists, even progressive nihilists. Is it because art is all about "pushing the envelope" and "breaking with convention" and "inventing new rules that are also made to be broken"? Is it about "shattering presuppositions" in search of the "numinous" or the "meaningful"? Or is it that artists as a class need government subsidies, are even dependent on them; and not mere handouts of cash, but subsidies of equality, where grants and honors and exhibitions are awarded solely to acknowledge the equal effort inherent in every artist's work? You know, in an "all-artists-are-trying" sort of way? After all, was this not the very point behind another recent exhibit I attended, "Art as Process", wherein was displayed the "rough drafts" of several artists' work? Surely the subtitle to that exhibit could have easily been, "Artists: Look How They Try."

But perhaps the reason art and liberalism go hand and hand is about philosophy. I've often thought that conservative thinkers were often chided or disregarded because of their dependence on logic, evidence, you know, the components of reason. Conservatives are often berated for lacking compassion, and I believe they are berated thus solely because reason seems so absolute and confining, so limiting in its expectations and demands. Liberals, on the other hand, have always struck me as being more about passion than cogitation; more affective or emotional than hard-headed logicians. Of course, there are exceptions, but by-and-large I believe this to be so. How else to explain a revolutionary's zeal than to appeal to Jean Jacques Rousseau's "passion trumps reason" (what is felt is more important than what is known or thought); or to understand why George W. Bush campaigned as a "compassionate conservative"? Conservatives tend to think toward an answer to a problem, and this, at times, looks like an uncaring luxury in the slow, calculated manner problem-solving demands. In contrast, liberals tend to feel through a problem; they are compelled to act immediately to solve an alleged injustice: Feeling, fervor, motive, intent – these are the benchmarks of liberal activism. These are the signs over their exhibit: We Are Trying. We Mean Well. We Get Things Done. We Are Urgent.

AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I stood in silent disbelief as I read the young artist's statement describing his vision and his muse. It did me no good that I was standing, a glass of cabernet sauvignon in hand, in the midst of a whirling, blustering audience so enamored of the whole, well, "process." And it did me no good to see that several pieces, some fetching fairly good sums for a first showing, had already been purchased, red stickers indicating that pieces had quickly found a home.

Here's what the statement said, which began with a quote by "process theologian" Alfred North Whitehead culled from Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage."[sic] The quote first:

"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."

I beg your pardon for being so academic here. But this is not about being didactic. It is about laughing one's head off, right off one's shoulders. For the quote above is a genuine howler. Don't you see why? It's simple, really. Mr. Whitehead has insisted on using "hard-headed clarity" to show the futility of "hard-headed clarity." Thus, by his own clear argument against clarity, it must be concluded that his observation "issues from sentimental feeling." He himself must be superstitious. And thus, he wallows in a contradiction.

But Whitehead's argument couches something more important, and it is subtle. What Whitehead has done is to give permission to thinkers everywhere to embrace a sort of anti-rationalism, a sort of "reading between the lines" of logic, reason, and argument. In short, he's given them permission to blow off the hard work which the pursuit of logically viable truth and clarity demands.

Now, I know that Whitehead is in part responding to the logical positivists in his milieu, but most readers do not know that, nor is it relevant here. What is relevant is how our young artist understood Whitehead. See if you can make sense of it all:

"I use unrefined materials in imagemaking to depict images and themes in life that range from the common and local to complicated and global. In this manner, I am attempting to metaphorically bridge an unspannable gap between what exists on human scale and that which is distinctly not human, i.e. things which necessarily exist within a global context. A gap in which, as suggested by the quote above from A.N. Whitehead, chance, instinct, intuition and creativity are far more responsive than 'hard-headed clarity' to the 'perplexities of fact' – a commodity too often misinterpreted, misused and corrupted. The interest here is to open up and complicate meaning in a way that does not compromise integrity and does not shy away from presumptions of authority."

Besides it being hard to understand how there is a bridge over an "unspannable gap" between humanity and that which is not humanity, "i.e. things which necessarily exist within a global context" (Lord knows humans don't exist within a global context – Yikes!); one wonders how this statement helps us understand anything other than the artist's flight from reason. To this artist, intuition and feeling and chance are the real forces of creativity. Reason constrains, limits; it is for the hardheaded, and not the softhearted.

This, to me, is a perfect example of the difference between myself, a conservative, and my liberal peers. No doubt my liberal chums would press me to be less intensely logical in reading the artist's statement; that I should see that he is "trying", that his "heart is in the right place", and that he "means well." No doubt they'd also tell me that what was important was not what he wrote, but what he meant, what he intended between the lines.

But there is also this statement by the artist adjacent to the one quoted above:

"My art is a venue [Yikes! again] for a realm of discussion that does not easily find a place in our everyday lives. As people, I think that we need a certain amount of..."

I am sorry, did you say, "As people"? Could we be anything else? Oh, yes, of course. We are that indefinable other thing that lives outside "a global context". Oiks! Help! (This latter artist's piece entitled "Two Birds Talking" sold for $700. It was a pen and ink cartoonish piece, wherein a bird, gripping a branch, speaks to a juvenile bird [apparently]. There are dialogue bubbles. In the final bubble, the senior bird says, and I quote: "You might think we are lying and we may not wholy believe that we are not." Now, for $700, don't you think you might want to have "wholly" spelled correctly? Talk about a venue for discussions! Who needs clarity anyway?!)

WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

This whole exercise for me is about the difference between philosophies of feeling and those of thinking. For me, the quotes above, and the work associated with them, smack not of creativity, but of laziness and even self-centeredness. The laziness part is revealed in the flight from reason, for reason is hard to master. To the lazy philosopher/artist, impulse, intuition, chance, randomness–these are what constitute creativity. Not planning, not practicing certain skills repeatedly. No, just the easy, hasty and quick burst of creative passion: This is art! This merits appraisal and approval! This trumps using one's head: The use of the Heart!

And it is self-centeredness because it seeks approval for being outside, unique, even insouciant. Instead of the tedium of logical constructions, which are all rules and traditions and practices, artists too often flaunt their improvisational skills without once proving they can do the rather rote skills possessed by the masters. Imagine if Michelangelo's David or the Sistine Chapel were mere whims of intuition! mere impulse! mere improv!

How, then does all this play out politically? Perhaps a quote from Socrates as found in Plato's Apology will suffice. Socrates, you might recall, was on trial for corrupting Athenian youth and allegedly denouncing the gods of the state. In his defense, or apology, Socrates described how he had begun his pursuit of wisdom as a result of divine inspiration: an oracle had spoken to him. And in his pursuit of wisdom, he inquired of wise men – politicians and poets and artisans – in an effort to discern what is real wisdom:

"I went to the poets ... I am ashamed to confess that there is not a person ... who would not have talked better about their poetry than the poets did themselves. So I learnt that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of ... inspiration. ... At last I went to the artisans ... I was sure that they knew many fine things; and I was not mistaken, ... But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; – because they were good workmen, they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom." [emphasis added]

The political implications of Socrates' statements are important.

No wonder he was executed.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes

PS. For you photo enthusiasts out there: the picture of the Blue Heron (above) was taken with a Canon F1, 80-200/2.8 lens (focal length 200mm). Settings were 1/1000th at f8 on Ilford HP5 Plus film. Click on it for a larger view.