This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Dr. Hart's WSJ Article Opens Up Conversation on Touchstone's "Mere Comments"

[The first response and reply come under the post, "Luse and Hart on the Meaning of Suffering":]

William Luse, who has written for Touchstone, responds to David Hart's Wall Street Journal article on the Indian Ocean tsunamis:

I read David Hart's "Tremors of Doubt", which you linked to, and a few lines caught my attention. He says:

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all.

Of course, I am no theologian and may not possess a theologian's understanding of "ultimate meaning," but I had always thought that human suffering and death did have meaning, and that it was Christ's own that allowed us to see it. In a world not created for suffering, our first parents let it in (that "primordial catastrophe" to which Hart refers), implicating not only themselves but all their descendants as well in the guilt for it and the restitution that must be made to God. What makes this imputation of universal guilt most difficult to bear is not merely the fact of suffering, but the suffering of innocents (the "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts"). We are all guilty, but some are guiltier than others. We don't understand why the (relatively) innocent must suffer in the company, and sometimes at the hands, of the implacably evil or indifferent. Our sense of justice (and, we hope, God's) demands that punishments and rewards be distributed according to our just desserts, and that if we cannot see it in this life, it will be completed in the next.

But Hart refers to Voltaire's 'deist' God—"who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality'—and says that, though Christians sometimes speak in these terms, "this is not the Christian God." And I agree, but he then goes further:

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering—when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's—no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends.

I agree that it might be prudent in the crisis of grief to swallow the "banalities about God's inscrutable counsels", but how is it that they become odious? And it might be wise in that same moment to bite one's tongue on the matter of God's good, though mysterious, ends. But how does mention of them become blasphemous, as though He would be offended by our acknowledging His providence, or by submitting our minds to His in matters beyond us?

Perhaps I'm misreading him, or reading too much into his piece, but Hart seems uncomfortable with Christians who speak of God as the great (though mysterious and secretive) balancer of accounts, as when he notes:

And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained.

People who "utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels" (with or without a license) are saying one thing and one thing only: we either have faith in those counsels, and His "good ends", or it's all a big nothing. Either the suffering of those innocents participated in Christ's own, bearing spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind, or...what? Nothing. Suffering has meaning. It can save us. (Can, not must.) To me, it would be a great sorrow and a pity to find out in eternity that it were not so.

So I ask: am I seeing something in his words that isn't there?

And David Hart replies:

One must attend to the meaning of "ultimate." The story Christian doctrine tells is that sin and death are accidental to our created nature, and so they never occupied any necessary place in God's intentions for his creatures; nor has he need of suffering and death to realize his nature or ours. Whatever good God may bring from suffering or death does not, therefore, endue suffering or death with any eternal or ontological meaning in itself.

I shall skip over the matter of universal aboriginal guilt, as it presumes an understanding of original sin that is not quite in keeping with Eastern tradition, and I am of course Orthodox. But let us grant original sin its place, and that we all sin.

Still, the notion that the suffering of, say, dying babies somehow participates in Christ's suffering and is part of some vast providential calculus whereby God balances accounts is a Stoic parody of Christian orthodoxy, and were it true Christian teaching I should advocate apostasy. There is no biblical or doctrinal warrant for such a view. Yes, the deaths of innocents are indeed meaningless, even if God's providence will indeed bring good from that evil; there is no spiritual fruit to be reaped from the drowning of tens of thousands of infants, for them or for us; the reign of death in all things is not the same as the justice of every particular death in the great scheme of things; that is why Christ came to save us from suffering and death, and why God will raise the dead. This world is fallen, and nowhere does God promise to make the sum total of its suffering add up to some greater spiritual truth. Rather, through taking our suffering upon himself, he rescues us from the meaninglessness of death, and even graciously allows us to offer up our own sufferings in obedience to him.

This is the gospel: it does not announce the perfect rationality of the history of the fallen world, but the perfect love of God who overcomes the powers of this age.

I earnestly implore all who have not done so to read Ivan Karamazov's remarks in the chapter entitled "Rebellion" in The Brothers Karamazov, and to reflect upon them.

Our thanks to Dr. Hart for responding here (for the benefit of our readers) to a piece he published elsewhere.

[The next response and reply comes in as "Luse and Hart on the Meaning of Suffering II:]

William Luse has this further reply to David Hart:

It seems I did read [Hart] right, which disappoints me. I had no idea there was such a divergence in Orthodox and Catholic traditions on the matter of original sin. Either that or I have a poor understanding of my own faith’s teaching. But Hart seems to acknowledge that the divergence is real, not peculiar to me. As to the value of individual suffering, he holds my position as “a Stoic parody of Christian orthodoxy,” a rebuke that will sting once I confirm it to be the case. If his remark is true—“Yes, the deaths of innocents are indeed meaningless, even if God’s providence will indeed bring good from that evil”—I will find it a hard pill to swallow.

My difficulty is in seeing how their deaths can be meaningless if good can be brought from the evil. The balancing of accounts I referred to is a spiritual one, of course, and I am not quite ready to abandon it.

And David Hart has this brief response:

This is not a difference between East and West. The view that Mr. Luse has advanced belongs to neither tradition, and I wish he would make an effort to rethink the implications of what he has said. Again, I recommend Dostoyevsky as a good starting point, and Aquinas’s De Malo thereafter. And as for bringing good from evil, that still does not make evil good or necessary; it means only that God is omnipotent and loving and that the gates of hell cannot prevail against his Kingdom.

[And the next response and reply is this: "Esolen and Hart on Suffering":]

Anthony Esolen, translator of a new edition of the Divine Comedy and a contributing editor of Touchstone, responds to the conversation on suffering:

Perhaps I too am not quite sure what the word “ultimate” means. But I recall the medieval frescoes and triptychs of saints bearing their wounds as marks of glory—Saint Peter Martyr most startlingly, with the axe wound that cleft his tonsure in two—and I think that the artists perceived something important. The incarnation of Christ has allowed us men to do some things that the faithful angels themselves cannot do. We can, as Paul struggles to say, make up by our suffering what is lacking in the sacrifice of Christ; that is, we can partake of that sacrifice by uniting our sufferings with that sacrifice. We can repent, and conform ourselves to Christ; and we can die, as Christ himself died, as he would have had to die even had there been no malign Sanhedrin to condemn him. Upon Christ’s glorified body there were no bruises, no lacerations, but the five wounds remained, and, as the great hymn puts it, the faithful will one day gaze upon those glorious scars—scars which we and not the angels will share with him, because we and not the angels will have borne them.

We were not meant to suffer and die; but we sinned, and having sinned, indeed we are meant, in the re-creating Providence of God, to suffer and die, but not as Satan would have it. I must believe that the incarnation and the atoning death of Christ does not simply undo the harm of sin—does not simply restore to us a lost innocence—but delivers for us the greater glory of a victory over sin and death, a victory accomplished in us through Christ. Surely David believes this too; again, perhaps I am misconstruing his use of the word “ultimate.” But will I not always, if God should see fit to save me, be the one who suffered and repented and died in a way peculiar to myself? Will not that strange eventful history be ineradicable from my being? This hope—and for me it is an abiding hope—in the ultimate meaning of suffering seems to lie behind the strange words of Christ, illogical if a found sheep is the same sheep that once dwelt in the fold, that there is more rejoicing in Heaven at the finding of the one lost than at the keeping of the ninety nine that were never lost.

I trust I’ll not be accused of creeping Stoicism merely for noticing that adumbrations of Christlike suffering are to be found in the ideals of the best of the pagans; nor, I trust, will I be tagged as a follower of that charlatan Voltaire, who, when he rejected the Incarnation, rejected also the tremendous mystery of human suffering, and of course fell back upon a cold impersonal God whom Cicero would have found appalling, much less Boethius.

The Holy Innocents, whose feast we’ve recently celebrated, suffered the same evil as did the children who died in the recent disaster. We Christians should see in that terrible incident long ago all the blind sufferings of weeping and (relatively) innocent humanity, all of us children dying we know not why, whether it is at the hands of a Herod or in the wake of a tsunami or after the slow wasting away of our vigor. Holy Innocents, martyrs who did not know to whom you were witnesses or that you were witnesses to anyone at all, pray for us, young and old alike, that one day we may bear our wounds as gloriously as you bear yours.

David Hart replies:

I’m sorry but this is utterly irrelevant to my remarks, and has nothing to do with what Luse said either. It seems tedious to rehearse again and again this simple point, but I shall try once more: that we are allowed to offer up our sufferings to God as oblations of obedience, that we are able to find grace in the midst of our sufferings (and so on) is entirely unrelated to the claim that suffering and death in themselves are meaningful or are part of the ontological “truth” of God’s creation; it is certainly unrelated to the absurd, obscene, and grotesque claim that the sum total of suffering in the world adds up to a precisely calculated “balancing” of the score for original sin. This latter suggestion is most definitely incompatible with the message of the gospels, and indeed would make a nonsense of all atonement theology. The economy of salvation should not be confused with a Hegelian passage through the finite, nor providence with a universal teleology.

Also, the notion that a triumph over sin and death won along the hard path of fallen nature is a higher good than would have prevailed had we not fallen at all is nonsense (all talk of the felix culpa aside); such a notion would require a view of evil as something in addition to God, something positive over against the divine, required to fecundate the good within creation. There is a very good set of doctrinal and metaphysical concerns behind the Church’s insistence upon a privatio boni view of evil. To suggest that evil can serve to increase the good sounds marvelous and dramatic; it is also quite heretical and quite philosophically incoherent.

Posted by Clifton at January 4, 2005 10:35 AM | TrackBack