An eye on the sparrow
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey AN EYE ON THE SPARROW ARISTOTLE'S GOD ISN'T OURS God's eye, we read, is on the sparrow, on the lilies of the field, and on everything else: the hairs of...
...we can't afford to pay so much for admission...
...Then I pick up the newspaper and read about a small child being raped by a retarded relative, or a child being starved to death by his parents...
...This is from the excellent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by North Point Press...
...Many Christians have accepted a more or less deistic picture of God, perhaps because a God who has given nature a certain autonomy can be absolved more easily than a God who is made responsible for obvious horrors...
...We sense a difference between floods or famines or cancers that kill people, which can be accepted with a certain stoic understanding, and the evils that result from human hatred and human delight in murder and torture—these, because we are more directly responsible, haunt and anger us more...
...There is another way, of course, to deal with evil, and that is to abandon any sense that life has a meaning of the sort that makes our suffering so terrible...
...God is present— in some way—in all of these horrible situations, and nothing happens...
...If we fail to experience it, it is not because God has somehow been withheld from us, but because our hardness of heart fails to respond to God's presence, fails even to feel or notice it...
...And therefore I hasten to return my ticket....It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket...
...From one point of view this seems naive, because we assume a universe in which "natural laws" and natural "evils" have a certain autonomy...
...Jesus cured people possessed of demons, who did what they did without choice, driven to self-destructiveness as drowning people are killed by floods...
...the tears of a tormented child are, from this point of view, only a kind of humidity...
...Let her forgive him for herself, if she wants to, let her forgive the tormentor her immeasurable maternal suffering...
...There is something collective here that challenges the two-tiered universe of the post-Enlightenment era, in which the natural and supernatural are clearly demarcated...
...If Christian revelation is essential to what we need to know, then the universe as we need to understand it is something we cannot know from within, on its own terms...
...It is a grace to feel the horror of our true condition, and that is the accuracy of Ivan Karamazov's reaction...
...Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony...
...I don't want harmony, for the love of mankind I don't want it...
...She dare not forgive him...
...I want to remain with unrequited suffering...
...but there is also the desire to control and contain our horror, to make sense of it (this is at least part of what is meant by wanting "to remain in my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even i f 1 am wrong") and this is where we are helpless, and miss the point...
...Paul says that death entered the world through sin, and even physical evils (floods and famine, cancer, and so forth) have been seen by many Christians as the result of sin itself...
...ly was a God-given command: "Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair...
...There seems to me to be a connection between the two, however: when a man who is schizophrenic murders his neighbor, something connects "natural" and "human" evils...
...The stories of Christ calming the waters, the saints in whose presence wild animals were peaceful, and the fact that children who experience love and tenderness are even physically healthier than other children all ought to make us less simplistic in our pictures of a universe in which the natural and supernatural are cleanly separated...
...Any believer who has never felt this way lacks a human heart...
...Basil came from a family that included many saints...
...he also forgave adulterers, healed people who were blind, and calmed storms...
...This is Ivan Karamazov's complaint...
...Abusive families have their terrible gravity...
...It's a little like the tale of stone soup: A hungry soldier promises to show a selfish old lady how to make soup with nothing more than water and a stone, but persuades her that it would taste a little better if he could only add a potato, some onions, some meat, some barley—all of which she adds, pleased at how clever she is to learn the secret of making soup with nothing more than a stone...
...bitter, and saw his bitterness as a moral thing...
...But in approaching the idea of God and God's responsibility for evil he assumes, as many Christians have since the Enlightenment, that the God of the deists and of Aristotle is the God Christians worship...
...Christians argue that revelation, the revelation that has made itself known in Christianity, is essential for understanding the universe and God's relationship to it...
...There are, day after day, stories about the abuse or murder of children by their mothers' boyfriends...
...Nothing happens...
...I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and Commonweal 31 January 1992: 7 my unquenched indignation, even ifI am wrong...
...A more traditional answer to the problem of evil—still probably the best we will get, if answers of a philosophically interesting sort are what we are looking for—says that what has made evil possible is not God, but the freedom we have been given...
...8: 31 January 1992Commonweal...
...To be made in God's image means that we are created free...
...This is a philosophically tenable point of view, but most of its adherents don't, thank God, live its consequences out in their personal lives...
...In the earliest Christian picture of the universe there was no clear distinction between human and natural evil...
...Their only freedom might even be so limited as to be a slight sorrow during the act of abuse or murder, a moment's remorse...
...Nothing happens for the homeless who freeze to death, or for the people who look across the room at mates they once loved but now, for some reason, regard with absolute coldness...
...Children who come from abusive families tend to become abusive...
...Something that arguably has a chemical and involuntary basis moves from the world of natural laws into the world of human freedom...
...An older man (unlike Ivan, he really existed) was recently canonized a saint of the Orthodox church: Father Silouan (1866-1938, a monk of Mount Athos) aware of every evil Ivan could imagine lived constantly with what he claimed firm...
...The first book about prayer that really moved me was Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey AN EYE ON THE SPARROW ARISTOTLE'S GOD ISN'T OURS God's eye, we read, is on the sparrow, on the lilies of the field, and on everything else: the hairs of our head, the heights we grow to, what we need to eat and drink—this is something about which we are reassured, in Scripture...
...How can a good God be present where children are tormented, and remain silent...
...In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky 's Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha the stories of children who have been horribly tormented and says, "The whole world of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little child to 'dear God'....I do not, finally, want the mother to embrace the tormentor who let his dogs tear her son to pieces...
...reason is not autonomous and grace does permeate the world...
...Is there in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive...
...We are not to worry, in other words, if we are seeking the kingdom...
...refusal to despair is possible because we believe, unlike Ivan, that there is "in the world a being who could and who would have the right to forgive...
...What does God's silence in horrible moments tell us about reality, or about God...
...A community of French Protestants resisted the evil time in which many allegedly Christian people caved in to nazism and saved the Jews in their midst...
...Ivan Karamazov was a young man...
...but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces, she dare not forgive the tormentor, even if the child himself were to forgive him...
...We have moved away from Paul's idea that death and other evils have entered the world because of sin, which is to say because of us, rather than because of God...
...The essential message was that at every second we are faced with the fullness of God's presence...
...God's presence is there, too...
...If we seek the kingdom of God, "all the rest will be added...
...0 course this can't be proven to anyone, and that in itself is an essential part of wha our freedom means...
...to be free is to have the possibility of rejecting even the source of our creation and freedom—that is, to be free to sin...
...There is a clue here to how our own indifference to those people whose misfortune comes close to us can increase evil...
...but holy families and communities have a similar, powerfully liberating force...
...a child who does not learn how to love or be compassionate will have a hard time being compassionate...
...This is not to say that they are punishments, but rather that they are signs and consequences of a world in which evil has real power...
...I think it can be argued that precisel3 because of prayer the reasoning of a sain and the reasoning of someone who is no prayerful at all will work along radically different lines...
...Our belief in God's presence must look to nonbelievers something like this...
...When we absolve ourselves of our own enormous responsibility for evil, by blaming God for the obviously enormous evil with which we are surrounded, we ignore some early clues—some indications at a lower level of what might be causes for evil on high...
...How is it necessary...
...This is God as prime mover, uncaused cause, the one who established a set of iron laws and walked away...
...At the same time, there is evidence from the lives of the saints that families and communities can be saved together...
...or I see the misery of people who are mentally ill and are terribly, unfairly, afraid of undertaking the most simple details of getting through the day...
...And if that is so, then where is the harmony...
...Anger at God for evil assumes that God is responsible for evil, because God is responsible for the universe...
...It is only through attention that we can begin to overcome this problem...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 2
