The one that comes nearest to working is probably We suffer because the world is not as God intended it to be, and indeed, it has a long and distinguished history as a Christian idea that’s compatible both with experience and with keeping God’s love recognisable. Environment somewhat ramshackle, a bewildering combination of the glorious and the downright insanitary? Check. Message of love steadily broadcasting through the pitfalls and razor edges of said environment? Check. God as kind, aghast, sympathetic to our sorrow? Check. Surely we have a winner. Oh. Wait. The trouble with this one is that its convincing picture of the state of things requires, in turn, an explanation of how they got like that. How could the God of everything, the creator who precedes and sustains all nature, whose love song summons nature into existence, produce something defective? And now the question is just a restatement, in slightly different terms, of the original problem. ‘How can God permit suffering?’ has become ‘How can God permit a universe that permits suffering?’ The problem doesn’t vanish, it merely relocates, it merely moves back a step.
You can see this happening in the very first version of the idea, the Hebrew myth of the Fall in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. Once, says Genesis, God planned for human beings to live in immortal happiness, but then – Adam, Eve, tree, hiss, munch, whoops, figleaves, goodbye. It wasn’t God’s fault. It was down to us, or at least to our representatives Mr Earth and Mrs Woman (which is what ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ mean), manifesting the familiar human capacity to screw the pooch, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, to mess up a good thing. But that just shifts the problem. It only moves God from being directly responsible for the Fall, to being responsible for the situation that was responsible for the Fall. The cut-out or circuit-breaker Genesis tries to install between God and a derelict creation simply recreates the difficulty. And in any case, Genesis is fatally confused about where HPtFtU comes from. Genesis chapter 2 wants to have it both ways, with the nasty side of our free will both causing the disaster and, somehow, being caused by it as well. We’re fallen because of our HPtFtU; we have the HPtFtU because, um, we’re fallen.
Not only is this no good to us as history, as almost all Christians know,* it isn’t even any use as story. It makes immediate, intuitive emotional sense to see the universe around us as being ‘fallen’, but then we find we haven’t got a Fall. The plausibility and comprehensibility of any candidate vision seem to be inversely related. The easier a picture is to understand of creation’s soap-slick escape from God’s almighty hands, the less likely a story it seems to be. We can understand Genesis’s sex comedy in a garden setting, but it doesn’t give us much purchase on a process by which love can beget cholera. At the other end of the scale, immense abstract effort across the centuries has gone into producing speculative accounts of means by which good might just conceivably produce evil. This is where the theology of Gnosticism comes from, with its zillions of finicky little ‘emanations’ between us and God, all getting grubbier and grubbier as they approach the (yuck) matter we’re made of. And the complicated diagrams of kabbalism, separating out different aspects of divinity in order to incestuously recombine them. And for that matter, the entire ‘dialectical’ strand in respectable philosophy, from Mr Plotinus through to Mr Hegel and Mr Marx, in which change happens through the invocation and integration of opposites. But the obscurity of these unverifiable guesses at God’s absolutely obscure operations takes us further and further away from the emotions that motivated them. Why is the world unjust? Why does my brilliant friend have a brain tumour? Why is my child disabled? Why is my disabled child dying in pain and confusion before her fifth birthday, despite the best that medicine can do? I never heard of anyone being comforted by Kabbala, or by ingenious secret truths, or by the negation of negation – or even feeling that they had been substantially answered by these things. You get more for your money, emotionally speaking, if you just howl, and kick as hard as you can at the imagined ankles of the God of everything, for it is one of His functions, and one of the ways in which He’s parent-like, to be the indestructible target for our rage and sorrow, still there, still loving, whatever we say to Him. The element of useful truth in this last and best of theodicies is the reminder it contains that the creation is not the same as the creator. He may sustain it all, He may be its bright backing, He may be as near to us at every moment as our neck-veins: but it is not Him, it is not-Him, it is in some utterly mysterious sense what happens where He isn’t. To anyone inclined to think, in a happy wafty muddly way, that nature is God, nature replies: have a cup of pus, Mystic Boy.
* Except for some really stubborn Americans. It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.
And that’s about the end of what argument can do for us.
How, then, do we deal with suffering? How do we resolve the contradiction between cruel world and loving God? The short answer is that we don’t. We don’t even try to, mostly. Most Christian believers don’t spend their time and their emotional energy stuck at this point of contradiction. For most of us, worrying about it turns out to have been a phase in the early history of our belief. The question of suffering proves to be one of those questions which is replaced by other questions, rather than being answered. We move on from it, without abolishing the mystery, or seeing clear conceptual ground under our feet. Cataclysmic experiences can pitch us back into it of course, but mostly they don’t. Even in bad times we usually don’t go back there. We take the cruelties of the world as a given, as the known and familiar data of experience, and instead of anguishing about why the world is as it is, we look for comfort in coping with it as it is. We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself. We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in time of perplexity, a wider hope than we can manage in time of despair. If your child is dying, there is no reason that can ease your sorrow. Even if, impossibly, some true and sufficient explanation could be given you, it wouldn’t help, any more than the inadequate and defective explanations help you, whether they are picture-book simple or inscrutably contorted. The only comfort that can do anything – and probably the most it can do is help you to endure, or if you cannot endure to fail and fold without wholly hating yourself – is the comfort of feeling yourself loved. Given the cruel world, it’s the love song we need, to help us bear what we must; and, if we can, to go on loving.
We don’t forget, mind. It doesn’t escape us that there seems to be something wrong with any picture in which God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world. We still know that if He can help us and He doesn’t, He isn’t worth worshipping; and that if He doesn’t help us because He can’t, there must be something weirdly limited about the way He’s the God of everything. The impasse is still there. It’s just that we’re not in the jaws of it. We’re not being actively gripped and
chewed by it. Our feelings have moved on elsewhere. Because there is a long answer, too, to the question of suffering; a specifically Christian perception of what God is, which helps us move on.
I don’t honestly know how Jews and Muslims cope on this point, given that both Judaism and Islam basically do announce that God’s in His heaven, etc. etc. Presumably the orthopraxy of the other two monotheisms – all the detailed right-doing they ask for – creates a kind of emotional buffer. They don’t ask their believers to do the right thing because it will necessarily make them prosper, after all: the deal is much more stoical than that. Righteousness is righteousness, in Judaism and Islam, irrespective of how it works out for you personally. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing. If you flourish, great; if you don’t, I imagine you can at least hold on to the deep grooves of holy habit, carved into your life over and over by repetition, a repetition which itself must feel like a kind of evidence that the cosmos is benign. The stars may fall, the plague may come, but the five daily prayers still roll around. Maybe you pray them with extra fervour then, because they represent your life’s remaining pieces of dignity and order.
Christians too, of course, draw consolation from the patterns faith makes as it repeats in time. For us too there’s an important wisdom in not leading a life whose only measure is the impulse of the moment. But our main comfort in the face of unjustifiable suffering is very different. It’s not an investment in order we’re asked to make; it’s a gamble on change. Our hope is not in time cycling on predictably and benevolently under an almighty hand. Our hope is in time interrupted, disrupted, abruptly altering from moment to moment. We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.
When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. When I manage to pay attention to the continual love song, I am not trying to envisage the impossible-to-imagine domain beyond the universe. I do not picture kings, thrones, crystal pavements, or any of the possible cosmological updatings of these things. I look across, not up; I look into the world, not out or away. When I pray I see a face, a human face among other human faces. It is a face in an angry crowd, a crowd engorged by the confidence that it is doing the right thing, that it is being virtuous. The man in the middle of the crowd does not look virtuous. He looks tired and frightened and battered by the passions around him. But he is the crowd’s focus and centre. The centre of everything, in fact, because if you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic action of the God of everything is to mould the course of the universe powerfully from afar. For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.
5
Yeshua
Imagine a man, then.* It’s the man from the crowd, but he hasn’t arrived there yet. Imagine a man in whom the overwhelming, all-at-once perspective of the God of everything is not a momentary glimpse from which he rebounds, reeling, but a continual presence which in him is somehow adapted to the scale of the human mind, so that for him, uniquely, the shining is not other but self. So that he sees the world at every moment with the thwarted tenderness of its creator. So that he is that creator, not his spokesman or his representative or his ambassador, but the creator him- or her- or itself, no longer thwarted but also no longer immune. He’s the creator in the midst of the thing made, in the place which the shining backs and sustains but where it does not seem to reach to act, judging by what goes on in here; where it or she or he will be subject like the rest of us to the logic of biology, and the logic of human politics, and the logics of fear and loss and uncertainty.
* I say ‘imagine’ and I mean imagine. This is the story we have instead of an argument, and it is important that it is a story, making a story-like sense, and having a story’s chance to move us, with human stuff organised into a tellable pattern in time. But while a story is not the same thing as a lie, there are stories and stories. If you’ll hang on till I’ve (re)told this one, I undertake to bring some critical rigour to bear in the next chapter on the question of just what kind of story it is.
What does he look like? No idea. No one is ever going to write down a description. He’s a male Jew in first-century Palestine, so he’s probably bearded, a bit smelly by modern standards, and quite short. He may well have bad or missing teeth. He is in his early thirties in an age of hard labour and rudimentary medicine, when the average life expectancy is forty-something, so he may well be rather worn out and middle-aged. But we don’t know. And it really doesn’t matter. He looks like us, for a value of ‘us’ which includes the entire human race. We have faces and bodies; he has a face and a body. He is as human as we are, but if you meet him, you are also meeting the being responsible for the universe. He has no halo. He does not glow in the dark. Special lighting effects do not announce his presence. If you cut him he bleeds. His name is Yeshua, later to be Latinised as ‘Jesus’. And what he has come for? To say some things; to do some things.
The place he has come to (the place he has been born into) is a province of the empire that controls pretty much the whole known world. The empire has owned it for two generations, but it has not been independent for much longer. Before this empire there was another one, and another one before that. The province is not specially important, or specially rich. It has no famous sights. The only city is a huddle of yellow stone on a desert hilltop. But it is unusual. It is the only place in the world, so far, which is populated by worshippers of the God of everything. You can find scatterings of them elsewhere but this is the single place in which they are the majority, the natives. This is where their history happened. This is where they have worked their way from thinking that their God is the most important god, to thinking that He is the only God for them, to thinking that He is the only God there is. One-ness, singleness, commands their imaginations. Just as their god is The God, their land is The Land, and their city is The City.
The imperial authorities, seeing the peculiarity of the place, try to be tactful. They rule as much as possible at arm’s length, using the local potentates left over from the previous empire as their proxies. They keep the garrisons out of sight as much as they can. They police with a light touch. But the inhabitants hate the empire anyway. They insist on perceiving even the tactful version of imperial rule as a grotesque violation. For them, the usual deal the empire offers – obey, pay our taxes, and you’re welcome to pour your culture into the vast blend of ours – doesn’t work. For them, it has no upside. They don’t want the one God found a junior spot among the gods of Dental Health, Matching Curtains and Being Well Endowed. They don’t want Him blended. Blending would be adulteration. Or, in fact, adultery. Their prophets have told them over and over again how unfaithful they are, what a bunch of wandering-eyed wife-swappers and sluts they are in relation to their ever-committed God, and by now the metaphor has settled in, to the point that they reflexively think of worshipping any other god as being promiscuous, and conversely of literal promiscuity as having a dimension of sacrilege or existential betrayal to it. So puritanism mixes with ethical outrage when they look at – when they whisper about – the cruel, easygoing grossness of the empire. They don’t want any of that disgusting stuff the occupiers do, where the men go to the gym and cover themselves in olive oil and walk around nearly naked; or where they take their big muscles to the theatre, and fight each other till someone dies, while everyone laughs and cheers and throws peanuts.
This is not how the world is supposed to be. The world is supposed to be dignified, righteous, law-governed. For though the occupiers have laws, they are mere human contrivances; their own laws, they believe, are real laws, given directly by God on a mountaintop. A copy stands in the meeting-house in every village and town where the men get
together on Saturday to pray and argue, in the place of honour where the rest of the empire would put a statue of Being Well Endowed in his posing pouch. The law is sacred. It is the embodiment of God’s intentions in the world. It lays out the demanding but achievable pattern for a life of virtue. It tells you what to eat and what to wear and how to behave, to please God. It tells you the rules for getting back into good standing with Him, if you have been stained by the chances and mishaps of life, or by your own bad behaviour. (Usually you do it by sacrificing something, in the city, in the one temple which is The Temple.) Thanks to the adultery metaphor, these rules feel a lot like recipes for regaining purity. But there’s a huge collective impurity the law cannot tell them how to remove: the occupation itself. The empire and its filthy gods encroach. Tourists wander into holy places, chattering and laughing. The empire’s money with its blasphemous pictures has to be used for buying innocent, ordinary bread. It’s as if the people of the province are being kept forcibly dirty, all the time. Somehow, they think, the favour of God has been forfeited. For some reason, they are being punished.
Unapologetic Page 9
