Читать книгу Keeping Alive the Rumor of God - Martin Camroux - Страница 11

Let me set out my case. I believe the numinous, the transcendent, is real and therefore the possibility of God is open. I believe that without it life’s meaning cannot be adequately located, and that its discovery can go along with honest questioning and search. In our society this is frequently written off as simply obviously untrue. If so, we are the losers. As Paul Gifford says, “Simply reading a newspaper shows that we have not succeeded in mastering the changes that modernity poses; but makes equally evident that the old answers are no longer viable or even particularly valued.”76 Today religious faith is something of a wild card. But despite everything it remains a real possibility. Maybe we need to see more clearly what is involved in the religious choice and what kind of hope it can give.

Let me illustrate the case by looking at one life, that of Paul Tillich. It may seem an odd choice. He was one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians. Yet today almost no one reads him. There are a variety of reasons for this. He was a very bad writer who never really mastered English. As a student in the 1960s I was probably not the only one who managed to read some of his sermons but gave up on his systematic theology! God, Tillich taught in a famous phrase, is “the ground of being.” Theology students used to have great fun and demonstrate their erudition by praying, “Dear Ground of Being.” Today he suffers from not fitting in with our more conservative time. His commitment to engaging with culture is out of fashion. Even among those of a radical cast of mind, who might otherwise be sympathetic, there is the suspicion fostered by his wife’s biography that he was a sexual predator.77 Not only feminist theologians regard him as morally toxic. Diarmaid MacCulloch asks, “One wonders how far any of Tillich’s theological work can be taken seriously.”78 I share a great deal of that concern and struggle with the implications of separating authors from their work. I remember first facing this dilemma when allegations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s serial adultery became public. I am still conflicted with the contrast between Philip Larkin’s sensitive verse and the misogyny, racism, and xenophobia suggested by Andrew Motion’s biography. For me the question, however, is whether a flawed human being can still have insights to share? And if not, what hope is there for any of us?

When I started this book, I had not expected Tillich to prove in any way central to the argument. I had not read him for years. Then by chance I read Mel Thompson’s Through Mud and Barbed Wire which explores Tillich’s wartime experience in the charnel house of Verdun. The image of Tillich losing his conventional faith in the trenches, wrestling with Nietzsche’s vision of nihilism, and then through art and poetry finding a belief in a God above God, is one which has stayed with me. Reexamining them I have been realized how often his themes mirror my own personal and pastoral experience. To my own surprise I now think that, for all his faults, Tillich is an indispensable theologian for our time.

Paul Tillich was born in Germany in 1886, ordained a minister of the Lutheran Church in 1912, and served as a chaplain during the First World War. It was the war that shattered him and made him. In October 1915 he experienced heavy gunfire for the first time at the battle of Tahure as the Germans suffered heavy losses. Then the same year at the battle of Champagne his initial traditional religious faith collapsed in the face of carnage. Tillich spent the night with the wounded and the dying, “many of them my close friends. All that horrible long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night.” Reflecting on the experience in 1955 he said of the soldiers, “Most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God who would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst.”79 Instead there were young soldiers who if they did not take part in suicidal attacks would be shot by their own commanders. Tillich had a brigadier who was a dogmatic conservative Christian and believed that prayer could protect a soldier from enemy fire. Tillich challenged him to open his eyes.

Mel Thompson compares the experiences of Tillich in the trenches with those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who served as a stretcher bearer with French North African troops. Teilhard never felt the darkness of war in the way Tillich did. In a letter dated 13th November 1916, at a time when the battle of the Somme was being fought, he wrote, “Death surrenders us totally to God; it makes us enter into him; we must in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandon.”80 Words which seem difficult to correlate with the reality of bayonet charges, decapitated bodies, and maimed lives. And Teilhard could not face the honest truth that faith gives no exemption from the realities of life and death. Teilhard describes a situation in which a shell goes off near a shelter where he had just said mass with five men. All of them escaped unhurt. Teilhard said, “It was the will of Christ who is among us that none of us should be touched.”81 In other words God bent the trajectory of the shell so that it missed them and hit some other poor person. The idea is obscene, though not to the degree of the army chaplain in the Vietnam war quoted by Max Hastings who sought to show his brotherhood with the soldiers by delivering imprecations such as, “Please, God, let the bombs fall straight on the little yellow motherfuckers.”82 Tillich rejects totally any such view. The idea that in war God directly chooses one to live and another to die is morally and intellectually impossible. As Thompson says, “Tillich could not pretend to go along with conventional supernaturalism, not interpret every act of incoming shell as somehow directed by God. His integrity would not allow it.”

In 1916 Tillich was at the battle of Verdun, one of the most terrible places in human history, with the fourth artillery regiment. Ironically Teilhard was a stretcher bearer on the other side of the trenches. The battle lasted ten months and saw something like 700,000 dead. There are still 138,000 unidentified bodies. I am reminded of Wilfred Owen:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle.83

Tillich was involved both in comforting the dying and acting as a gravedigger. Writing to his father he said, “Hell rages among us. It’s unimaginable.”84 A friend sent him a picture of herself in a white dress sitting on a lawn. To him it seemed inconceivable that that such a world still existed.85 Instead in his free moments in the French forest he reads Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The death of God, moral relativism, no good or evil but deeds of massive and terrible violence, all seemed too real. Nietzsche seemed prophetic: “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”86 Unsurprisingly Tillich suffered a nervous breakdown. Returning to the front lines he broke down a second time and was admitted to hospital before finally being sent back to Germany.

The experience almost broke him. As Gary Dorrien eloquently puts it, “The war burned a hole in Tillich’s psyche that showed for the rest of his life.”87 He later said he went in the forest a dreaming innocent and went out a wild man. It was at this point that the pattern of casual sex began. For the rest of his life there was a chaos of despair always threatening him, he was walking on the edge of the abyss. He reports of that time that he had “seen too much of ugliness and horror . . . ever to be the same again.” For Tillich the God who is all-knowing and all-powerful and ordains who the shell is going to hit would be a monster, an egomaniac. For him, God had died. “This is the God Nietzsche said had to die because nobody can tolerate being turned into a mere object of absolute knowledge and control.”88 But he found a lifeline. On furlough in 1918 he went to the Kaiser Frederick Museum in Berlin and saw Botticelli’s painting Madonna and Child with Singing Angels.

Gazing at it, I felt a state approaching ecstasy. In the beauty of the painting there was Beauty itself. It shone though the colors of the paint as the light of day shines through the stained-glass windows of a medieval church. As I stood there, bathed in the beauty . . . Something of the divine source of all things came through to me. I turned away shaken. That moment has affected my whole life, given me the key for interpretation of human existence, brought vital joy and spiritual truth.89

It was a transcendent moment. There was still a depth and a wonder to life. He talked about it in a variety of ways. “Spiritual presence” is one of the most helpful to me. Tillich found, as he kept looking at the paintings, that he was doing theology; he saw that in the dimension of their greatest depth all art and, in fact all life, evokes a religious response.

Back in the trenches he read poetry, particularly Rilke, who suggests that the moment when God is dying may be the moment when God is being born. He found himself, he said, with a choice. Either to say “no” to life, and collapse into cynicism, or to say “yes” to what is experienced as good and positive. I chose, he says, the courage to be, to believe in love in the face of hatred, life in the face of death. Day in the dark of night, good in the face of evil. Despite everything it was a yes to life.

Where does this leave God? The God who is like a superior version of us, only all-powerful and all-knowing, is dead. That kind of God, the all-powerful male figure who comes down demanding our worship is inherently authoritarian and in practice reinforces elitist and patriarchal power. Such a God is both unbelievable and morally unacceptable. The God who is brought in as a stopgap to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account is intellectually vacuous. As Nietzsche says, “into every gap they put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God.”90 But out of the abyss might there not come a new picture of God? “The courage to be,” Tillich later wrote, “is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety and doubt.”91 So comes the idea of the God above God.

If the word “God” has any meaning, argued Tillich, it does not refer to an object or a being in time or space. It is therefore not helpful to try to prove the existence of God, as one might seek to determine whether there was another planet in the solar system or a place such as Middlesbrough. It is not only that all such attempts fail. It is that this is a category error. We are not seeking to discover whether a greater version of ourselves exists, we are looking to the great human experiences of love, wonder, spirit, and beauty and using a metaphor that catches their essence and articulates their meaning. God is not part of reality. God is ultimate reality. God is not a being, God is the power of being. As John Robinson puts it in Honest to God.

If this is true then theological statements are not a description of “the highest Being” but an analysis of the depth of personal relationships—or rather, an analysis of the depths of all experience “interpreted by love” . . . A statement is “theological” not because it relates to a particular Being called “God” but because it asks ultimate questions about the meaning of existence; it asks what, at the level of theos, at the level of the deepest mystery, is the reality and significance of our life.92

For Tillich the question of God is the question of whether life has depth to it, whether the seemingly deep experiences of life are real, what we find in them, and what they tell us about life itself. If they are real then materialism is not all there is to life, there is what Tillich calls spiritual presence, moments in which our spirit relates to that beyond itself, that we can only call the experience of transcendence.

This is not a simple idea. Perhaps the most famous Tillich quote of all is from one of his sermons when he says,

For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God.93

This goes too far. It is unwise to tell atheists they have no right to be so. But the central point is fundamental. In the bloody mess of the trenches it was hard to see any point, meaning, or wonder in life. But there are moments, experiences, which point to something deeper about us, and about life itself. To believe in God is to find in life’s depth, ultimate meaning, spiritual presence. As Robert Browning says,

This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.94

Despite the horrors Tillich chooses what to him must seem a desperate throw of the dice, that art, poetry, human relations, the depths within our lives, suggest it is not pointless to look for meaning. “God” is the word we use for that which makes such meaning possible, for the transcendent other.

Death is given no power over love. Love is stronger . . . It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and hunger and physical death itself . . . It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death.95

It is quite a thing to say that if you were at Verdun.

Tillich’s achievement is to clarify what the question of God is. It makes no credible sense to believe in a God who is an external arbitrator of life, who manipulates life and overrides the natural processes of causation and human free will. This is the God who is directing life, ordering what happens to us, making it rain on some and not on others, pulling strings so that human puppets reflect his (definitely his) will. Such a God is unbelievable and morally disgusting not only in the trenches but in any understanding of life. A God who intervenes periodically to reward or punish, choosing good fortune for one and cancer for another is morally objectionable. A God who, if there is a car crash, chooses who lives and who dies is a defunct concept we are better without. The God who is a greater version of us, periodically intervening to pull out a plum, like Jack Horner for one of his special favorites, does not exist. Marcus Borg says that, when one of his students tells him they don’t believe in God, he “learned many years ago to respond, ‘Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.’ It is always the God of supernatural theism.”96 If that God is dead, we are better off without him.

This once came home to me very personally. Margaret and I had three children, of whom the first, our beloved son Mark, died after a few days of what could hardly be called life. People tried to help as best they could, but one attempted line of comfort I found particularly unfortunate. As my parents were setting out to come from Norfolk, on hearing the news, their next-door neighbor said to them, “You know, sometimes ‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’” And writing to Margaret and myself one fellow minister said something very similar: “God does work in strange ways,” he wrote, but “next time you pray ‘thy will be done’ I will be there helping you. The Lord giveth and the lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” It is beyond my imagination how anyone can believe that God’s will was done when little Mark was born in the way he was. What do these people really believe? That God looks down and says I’ll strike down a few babies, that’ll shake their moral complacency! Let a drunken driver knock down a mother of four or someone die horribly of cancer, or a baby be born brain-damaged, and some idiot can be relied upon to say that God’s will is hard to understand, as if God was a cross between Adolf Hitler and one of the Moors murderers. One of the things which helped me cope with Mark’s death is that I never had believed in such a God. Thank you liberal Congregationalism!

But the death of that kind of God is not the end of the matter. There is still the question that Tillich puts to himself as he compares Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Singing Angels to the carnage of the Western front. Which is the deepest truth about life? This is the conversation that goes on at some level in every human heart. Is there a meaning or purpose to my life? Is reality confined to what we can rationally analyze, weigh, and observe, or is there more to it than that? Is there a reality bigger than and not always accessible to human reason? Is there a deeper love which alone can make sense of it all, and us?

In the Flanders trenches it looked as if there was no answer to the question. Nor is such an answer always obvious in our lives.

And if the world were black or white entirely

And all the charts were plain

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,

A prism of delight and pain,

We might be surer where we wished to go.97

Nietzsche may be right in his assessment of human life. “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.”98 Significant voices in modern science, such as Francis Crick, are not very far away from this.

Looked at in this light our mind is simply a puppet on a string and so are we. You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve-cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice [in Wonderland] may have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’99

All this fits in popular culture, with Bojack Horseman’s conviction that disillusionment inevitably comes when you look beneath the surface of life.

Tillich in the Berlin art gallery gives another answer. Such a view is not adequate to what we experience of life. Tillich says,

The moment in which we reach the last depth of our lives is the moment in which we can experience the joy that has eternity within it, the hope that cannot be destroyed, and the truth on which life and death are built. For in the depth is truth; and in the depth is hope; and in the depth is joy.100

What an answer to throw back, in the face of life’s blood, death, and pain! To be able to do that is what it means to believe in God. I think of Beethoven, by then deaf, but in his Ninth Symphony returning a triumphant “yes!” to life, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken.” Are we “nothing but a pack of neurons?” Hold a child in your arms, read poetry, listen to music, fall in love, does this really make sense? Or could the Psalmist be right? Are we “fearfully and wonderfully made?”

This is very personal to me. Growing up in Norfolk I often went for walks in the school holidays looking at country churches and vast skies. When I go back now for me, as for John Betjeman, “these Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence.” But Norfolk is, as Noel Coward pointed out, rather flat. One of the wonders of my childhood was the holidays we had in the Western Isles of Scotland. When I looked out from Pulpit Hill at Oban to the Hebrides, across the Firth of Lorne to the Isle of Mull I realized that life had a wonder to it Norfolk had not prepared me for. Later that wonder came in other ways, listening to Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in Winchester Cathedral, in poetry, art, in worship and prayer, in architecture and the experience of loving relationships. As Archibald MacLeish sang it:

Now at 60 what I see

Although the world is worse by far

Stops my heart in ecstasy,

God, the wonders that there are.101

Roger Scruton was an eminent philosopher. In the early part of his life he was influenced by Nietzsche—everything was fundamentally pointless, especially religion. Then during the Lebanese Civil War, he visited Beirut, to write about the conflict. For this it was necessary to cross into West Beirut. The only person who was prepared to take him was a nun of the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, who worked all over the Middle East trying to bring both relief and education to Christian and Muslim alike. He wrote, “At every point in this journey we found suffering, mute, helpless and often terminal. And everywhere around this suffering, were the arms of love.” They visited a convent founded by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. “The Mother Superior arrives—a small cheerful Bengali who speaks English. She shows us the children. Children with paralyzing deformities, children who cry and crawl like animals, and yet in each is a carefully nurtured person, gently tended by the good nuns into lank distorted but nevertheless eager life . . . If there is such a thing as God’s work this is it.” Scruton said he was “shocked out of the Nietzschean attitudes . . . and had been brought face to face with the mystery of charity . . . I had witnessed the descending love called agape by St Paul and it filled me with an uncomfortable wonder . . . I was being turned in a new direction.”102 This did not mean he had encountered a divine being, but love spoke of something greater. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says,

But in the mud and scum of things

There always, always something sings.103

The experience of love opens up the depths of life to us, and through it, the possibility of God remains open.

To explore what this meant Tillich turned to the classic liberal theology of Rudolf Otto who saw the core of religion not as a set of beliefs but as an experience met with in the depths and reality of life. How we speak of this inevitably changes as our insight and knowledge changes. All theologies are only partially true at best, all concepts of God are inadequate words. Augustine after all had said that “God transcends even the mind.”104 It is axiomatic therefore that the pictures we have of God are images that will often need smashing. This is the very essence of liberal theology, and, without it, Christian belief would be dead. As a young Congregationalist I grew up singing,

We limit not the truth of God

To our poor reach of mind,

By notions of our day and sect,

Crude, partial and confined.105

That still seems to me rather splendid.

For anyone who is serious about God it is a necessity. Stephen Greenblatt tells how when he was a child and went to services at the synagogue his parents would tell him to look down with bowed heads until the rabbi’s priestly benediction had finished because at that moment God passed overhead and anyone who saw God would die. Inevitably he conquered his fear of death, looked up and there was no one there. Not only that but he could now see that “many of the worshippers were glancing around, staring out of windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I was filled with outrage; I had been lied to.”106 His naïve faith collapsed at that moment. Theologies do not necessarily lie (though you would be unwise to assume they never do) but they are inevitably at best truth mixed with error, reality with illusion. We always need to examine the beliefs we hold critically and seek to go deeper and further. More often than we like to admit we simply have to say we were wrong. Intelligence is not knowing everything without questioning, but rather the willingness to question everything you think you know. Otherwise you end up a closed system—to use Sylvia Plath’s analogy, it’s like being in a bell jar, forever rebreathing our own fetid air.

All ideas of God are open to change. Life changes them, new ideas change them. What is apparently credible today may look incredible tomorrow and vice versa. Today a picture of God, as supernatural being, has died. It was never very good theology in the first place. In the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa defined God as non aliud, “not another thing.”107 Theologies crumble, sermons look even more ridiculous than when we first preached them. Thirty-volume systematic theologies turn out to say nothing at all, but the wonder of life remains and so does the possibility that what seems the death of God may not be the end of the matter.

76. Gifford, Western Religion, 112.

77. Tillich, From Time to Time.

78. MacCulloch, Silence, 202.

79. Tillich, Boundaries, 191.

80. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 40.

81. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 61.

82. Hastings, Vietnam, 357.

83. Owen, Collected Poems, 44.

84. Quoted in Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 53.

85. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 61.

86. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 146.

87. Dorrien, Social Democracy, 273.

88. Tillich, Courage to Be, 185.

89. Tillich, Art and Architecture, 155–56.

90. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 92.

91. Tillich, Courage to Be, 190.

92. Robinson, Honest to God, 49.

93. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 57.

94. Browning, Poems of Robert Browning, 129.

95. Tillich, Boundaries, 281.

96. Borg, Convictions, 48.

97. McNeice, Plant, 21.

98. Nietzsche, On Truth and Untruth, 13.

99. Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, 3.

100. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 70.

101. Quoted in Fosdick, Dear Mr. Brown, 67.

102. Scruton, I Drink, 73–74.

103. Emerson, Poems, 396.

104. Augustine, Ver. rel. 36.67.

105. Congregational Union of England and Wales, Congregational Praise, no. 230.

106 Greenblatt, Rise and Fall, 1.

107. Quoted in Williams, Christ the Heart, xiv.