5) Identify a passage from the ‘Universal Harmony’ chapter that you find surprising, interesting, or thought provoking (providing the beginning of the passage and its page number will suffice). What about the passage do you find surprising, interesting, or thought provoking?  please answer in 3-4 sentences.   Read "Universal Harmony" as below. Universal Harmony







In that great verdant arc of lands that forms the north- eastern rim of the Indian Ocean and that takes the Bay of Bengal into its embrace — sweeping out from Sri Lanka and up the coasts of eastern India to Bangladesh and Burma, then down the Malay Peninsula to Thailand and Malaysia, and then further down the coast of Sumatra to the western tip of Java — there are Gods without number. Hinduism, in the full profusion of its various forms, is of course the dominant religion only of India, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, and the greater Indian diaspora of Southeast Asia. At one time or another, however, the Vedic deities have held sway over all these shores; among the Hina- yana Buddhist peoples of the region — the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka and most of the native inhabitants of Thailand

1


and Burma (or Myanmar, if one prefers) — they have al- ways enjoyed a high, if subordinate, eminence in the or- der of religious devotions. The Chinese communities of the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, being Mahayana Buddhist for the most part, but also Taoist and Confu- cian, are attended by bodhisattvas and divinities of a more remote provenance. Islam is the official faith of Bangladesh and Malaysia, and the dominant religion of Indonesia. Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, has a presence in all these lands, in some cases small but sub- stantial, in others somewhat more fugitive and belea- guered. As for the aboriginal animisms of the indigenous peoples, such as the Nat worship of Burma, none of the great faiths of the far or near East has succeeded in extin- guishing them. And — needless to say, perhaps — in very many places the demarcations between differing tradi- tions are lost in a golden haze of generous and unreflec- tive syncretism. Very few of those who live at the upper periphery of the Indian Ocean doubt that, among the many supernal powers keeping watch over those waters
— benign or capricious, transcendent or local, omnipo- tent or merely mighty — there is at least one who is able to govern their tides and turbulences and to keep the sea within its appointed bounds.
Far below the water's surface, however, at and be- neath the ocean floor, lies a source of elemental violence


so vast, convulsive, unpredictable, perennial, and de- structive that one might almost be tempted to think that it is itself a particularly indomitable and infernal sort of god. And, in fact, the most enduring manifestations of its power above sea level — those grim volcanic islands that lie in a long catenate archipelago off the western shores of Indonesia — have in their time no doubt been objects of worship, supplication, propitiation, and pious dread. These islands are situated along perhaps the most vola- tile geodynamic fissure in the world, the place where ap- parently two enormous tectonic plates — the Indo- Australian and the Eurasian (upon whose edge Sumatra and Java are precariously poised) — continuously pass one another by in their slow, interminable, millennial mi- grations. It is an immense seam of unquenchable fire that down through the geological epochs has shaped and re- shaped this entire crescent of islands and continental littorals. Its forces do not subside, and it is never truly dormant; but it does know long intervals of comparative stability, during which life above goes on largely undis- turbed. Up there, when the weather is calm, the water is a smooth, immeasurable, tremulous mirror of the tropical sky, gleaming like silver, furling with crystalline brilliancy, its waves sapphire blue at their crests and a deep glassy green in their inner folds. Tourists — upon whom many of the countries of the region so desperately depend —

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come by the thousands in order ( for the most part) to luxuriate on ivory beaches and gaze out at the beauty of the ocean and marvel at the extravagant lushness of the South Asian flora.
On good days, it must be all but impossible to imagine the slow, constant, savage geological ferment so many fathoms down. When, though, the power lurking below the marine fault does break forth with full strength, the devastation it wreaks is more terrible than the mind can easily encompass. It was here, for instance, in 1883, In the Strait of Sunda between Sumatra and Java, that the entire island of Krakatoa exploded, killing more than 36,ooo persons. All but a minuscule minority died not from the burning ash flung into the air by the blast, but from the massive tsunamis that followed from it. Tens of thou- sands of men, women, and children drowned on land, or were carried out to sea, or were shattered by the force of the water. It appears, moreover, that this same volcano had erupted in similar fashion many times in the past, only to form itself anew. Even now, it is growing into an island again in the broad mouth of the Sunda Strait, stor- ing up fire for its next eruption. And, of course, earth- quakes are inevitable. As the tectonic plates move, they must on occasion grate against one another, impede one another's drift, then jolt free. When this happens, the
heavier basalt of the ocean floor can even actually slide

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beneath and raise the lighter continental shelf. When this occurs, it may be as if the doors of the sea have been flung wide again. The ocean breaks from its confines with annihilating power, and God — it seems — does not stay its waves.
So it was on the second day of Christmas zoo4. when an earthquake — measured on the Richter scale at a magnitude of g.o — struck offshore of Banda Aceh, at the northern end of Sumatra, early in the morning. Near the epicenter, the tremors were horribly lethal; but the far greater devastation released by the quake came (as is al- most always the case) from the tsunamis it drove toward all the surrounding coasts. An enormous surge, scarcely visible at first, spread in all directions with extraordinary speed, then slowed and mounted as it approached land, and then struck with cataclysmic ferocity. No one was prepared. Warnings may have been given to some of the regional governments, but they were not made public. At the shorelines, the lovely glistening hyaline waters were all at once polluted with the silt and debris and murk of the ocean's bed, and rose with such terrifying suddenness that very few — even as far away as Sri Lanka — had suffi- cient time to flee.
In the days immediately following, a proper picture of the real dimensions of the disaster was strangely slow in reaching the world beyond. At first, those of us who lived


far from the region heard that thousands had perished, which seemed tragic enough; then, in subsequent days, the number of the dead began to be reckoned in tens of thousands; and then, finally, in hundreds of thousands, and the true horror of what had occurred became in some small measure appreciable for us. As I write, the most recent estimate is very near a quarter million. And when images of the aftermath began to appear, they seemed too dreadful to believe: films of those caught amid the flood clinging desperately to poles and railings, and occasionally losing their grip to be torn away by the fierce rush of the water; satellite pictures showing where whole islands had been laid waste, villages swept away, the earth stripped of vegetation; and photographs of long stretches of coastline strewn not only with wreckage but with countless corpses, a great many the corpses of small children.
Considering the scope of the catastrophe, and of the agonies and sorrows it had visited on so many, we should probably have all remained silent for a while. The claim to discern some greater meaning — or, for that matter, meaninglessness — behind the contingencies of history and nature is both cruel and presumptuous at such times. Pious platitudes and words of comfort seem not only futile and banal, but almost blasphemous; meta- physical disputes come perilously close to mocking the
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dead. There are moments, simply said, when we probably ought not to speak. But, of course, we must speak


II

It is difficult to tell sometimes, in the wake of a great di- saster, whether those who hasten to announce whatever greater significance they find in the event are moved more by an urgent moral need to sow light in the midst of darkness or by a kind of emotional and rhetorical op- portunism, which takes the torments of others as an oc- casion for the reiteration of one or another set of per- sonal convictions. I can scarcely, I hasten to say, be very sanctimonious on this score: I myself agreed to produce a short column on the Indian Ocean catastrophe for The Wall Street Journal on the Friday following the earth- quake. But it is hard not to suspect (uncharitably, per- haps) an especially glacial and doctrinaire callousness on the part of the triumphalistic atheist who feels com- pelled to leap at once into the breach and stridently to proclaim that here, finally, the materialist creed has been vindicated: that here we have an instance of empir- ical horrors too vast to be reconciled with belief in a lov- ing and omnipotent God, and that upon this rock the ship of faith must surely founder and sink and leave

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nothing but fragments of flotsam to wash up into the shoals of the future.
The vice is especially pronounced among journalists, as might be expected: for, naturally, if one believes that God's last defenses have been dashed aside, and that the coup de gr‹ice can now be dealt, one does not wish to be beaten to press. Which is not to say that other, more commendable motives are not also at work: no doubt the fanatical materialist and the captious skeptic often need to give voice to a genuine moral outrage, and this is noth- ing contemptible. But the alacrity with which some seize upon the moment when tragedy befalls to hold forth upon the indifference of the universe and the obvious nonexistence of God inevitably gives rise, at the very least, to extraordinarily inept arguments; and this in it- self suggests a certain want of care or scrupulous reflec- tion. After all, if one considers the implications of an event like the Indian Ocean disaster in a broader per- spective than is provided in the first few moments, and asks what it has taught us about the world we live in or the nature of rinitude that we did not already know per- fectly well, the answer — to be unsentimentally precise
— is absolutely nothing.
This is not to ignore the pitiless immensity of what happened that day, nor certainly to dismiss the spiritual perplexity that misery on so awful a scale occasions. But
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there comes a point when prudence, no less than intel- lectual honesty, requires us — Christians, that is — to prepare ourselves for what must inevitably follow: the perorations and tirades of secular moralists, gravely and condescendingly informing us that the last slender sup- ports for our irrational religious allegiances have been ripped away, and exhorting us to repent at last of our sav- age credulity. Christian forbearance can all too easily fal- ter at such junctures and give way to anger if one has not cultivated some degree of equanimity in advance. In the aftermath of the wreck of so many thousands of lives, it would be somewhat wicked to yield to petty annoyances. But, obviously, it is hard not to become impatient at dis- quisitions on the absurdity of religious beliefs confidently delivered by persons who have made no discernible ef- fort to ascertain what those beliefs actually are. It seems a curious delusion — but apparently it is one shared by a great number of the more passionate secularists — to imagine that Christianity has never at any point during the two millennia of its intellectual tradition considered the problem of evil, or confronted the reality of suffering and death, or at any rate responded to these things with any subtlety: that Christians have down through the cen- turies simply failed to notice every single instance of flood, earthquake, or tempest, pestilence, famine, or fire, war, genocide, or slaughter; or that every Christian who

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has been crippled, or has contracted a terminal illness, or has watched his wife die of cancer, or has stood at the graveside of his child has somehow remained inexplica- bly insensible to the depths of his own pain and to the dark moral and metaphysical enigmas haunting every moment of his grief.
The British journalist Martin Kettle, for instance, published a column in The Guardian two days after the catastrophe that, in its logic and in its tone, seemed on first reading (not to put too fine a point on it) excruciat- ingly fatuous. “Earthquakes and the belief in the judg- ment of God are ... very hard to reconcile,’ he declares. When confronting an event like the Sumatran disaster, he argues, only two explanations as to its cause are possi- ble: either one that is “purely natural” or “some other kind” (as though there must be some conflict between a naturalistic elucidation of contingent causes and the doctrine of creation, or as if God were to be imagined as some finite cause among the world's other causes — a particular worldly agency — who must occupy a place in the sequence of natural events akin to that of a shifting tectonic plate). The scientific explanation is uncomfort- ing but internally coherent; but what, he asks, of the view of “creationists”? How can they possibly look upon de- struction so vast and indiscriminate and continue to be- lieve in the workings of a divine intelligence behind the
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fabric of nature? “What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others?” Clearly, Kettle is convinced, no very impressive answer to such questions ever has been or ever will be ventured. But Ket- tle is also uncertain that there are many at present as bold as he in pressing these questions. Confident though he is in the justice of his plaint, he concludes by reflecting upon proposed laws in Britain forbidding expressions of religious hatred, which he fears might restrict open cri- tique of religious beliefs, and morosely wonders whether most of his contemporaries still have the courage to join him in his mission to écraser l'infâme, or whether they are now “too cowed” even to ask if indeed “the God can exist that can do such things? (Of course, all things being equal, it is fairly safe to say that a public avowal of athe- ism will not require any particularly plentiful reserves of courage in Britain in the foreseeable future.)
A somewhat less portentous — but even more com- bative — article by Ron Rosenbaum appeared in the Jan- uary io edition of The New York Observer, which laid out the same conventional assortment of arguments at greater (and rather more tedious) length, but did so in a way that suggested an at least fitful acquaintance with the sort of debates that, in the past few centuries, have been conducted between atheists and (it is necessary to

11


emphasize this term) theists. This is not to say that Rosenbaum is acutely clear as to his terms. He defines “theodicy” quite accurately as “the attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who in- tervenes in history ... with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from ‘natural’ causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides”; but he also calls theodicy a “subdiscipline of theology,’ which it most defi- nitely is not. Nor, clearly, is he a trained philosopher, as his audacious but reckless attempt to summarize and then criticize Leibniz's theodicy makes obvious. Nor, cer- tainly, does he address what Christian theology has tradi- tionally said over the centuries about the nature of evil, principally because he clearly has no idea what that is. But, presumptuous as it is, Rosenbaum's article does pos- sess many very real virtues: it is contemptuous of facile and evasive theodicies that seek somehow to disencum- ber God of his omnipotence; it is marked by a salutary scorn for any view of divine sovereignty that amounts to little more than the fatalistic adoration of a celestial des- pot; it is equally merciless in its derision of those who treat natural calamities as direct acts of divine retribu- tion and of those who find evidences of divine benignity in isolated anecdotes of implausible survival amid the general ruin; and it is written with the awareness that if what happened in the Indian Ocean is a challenge to any
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kind of religious belief, it is the belief in a God of consum- mate goodness: a God of love.
It is, of course, extremely tempting simply to dismiss arguments such as Kettle's and Rosenbaum's as irrelevan- cies (I confess this was my own initial reaction to both). They often seem to take issue, after all, with a God of their own devising. Rosenbaum, for example, mentions a somewhat famous article by J. L. Mackie from igss that argues that we must conclude from the evidences of his- tory and nature that if God is indeed omnipotent, he manifestly is not good, and that if he is good, he mani- festly is not omnipotent. It is an argument, says Rosen- baum, that so far no one has succeeded in refuting. In point of fact, though, there is no argument here to refute; the entire case is premised upon an inane anthropomor- phism — abstracted from any living system of belief — that reduces God to a finite ethical agent, a limited psy- chological personality, whose purposes are measurable upon the same scale as ours, and whose ultimate ends for his creatures do not transcend the cosmos as we perceive it. This is not to say that it is an argument without con- siderable emotional and even moral force; but of logical
force there is none. Unless one can see the beginning and end of all things, unless one possesses a divine, eternal vantage upon all of time, unless one knows the precise nature of the relation between divine and created free-
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dom, unless indeed one can fathom infniie wisdom, one can draw no conclusions from finite experience regard- ing the coincidence in God of omnipotence and perfect goodness. One may still hate God for worldly suffering, if one chooses, or deny him, but one cannot in this way “disprove” him.
At some level, it is even tempting to think that since strict materialism is among the most incoherent of su- perstitions — one that has never really asked the ques- tion of the being of things in any depth or with any persis- tence, or one that has at best attempted to conjure that question away as a fallacy of grammar — it is incapable of imagining any conception of God more sophisticated than its own. The materialist encounters an instance of unjust suffering and, by a sort of magical thinking, con- cludes from the absence of any immediately visible moral order that there must be nothing transcendent of mate- rial causality, in much the same way that certain of our more remote, primitive ancestors might have seen a flash of lightning in the sky and concluded that some god must have flung it from on high. In neither case does the con- clusion follow from the evidence (though in the latter case the reasoning is somewhat more rigorous); and in neither case is the god at issue much more than an affec- tive myth.
It is, as I say, tempting thus to dismiss such arguments,

*4


and then simply to ignore them; but one should not. For, if one grant them a second thought, or a third, one must sooner or later concede that they are not quite as vapid as it would be convenient to think. For one thing, while they may not be particularly germane to Christian theo- logical tradition, they are nonetheless responses to the way in which many religious persons (including many Christians) are in the habit of speaking. More to the point, though, there are even certain respects in which arguments of this sort should command not only the at- tention of Christians, but some measure of their sympa- thy — not pity, that is to say, not a patronizing longanim- ity, but sympathy in the proper sense of kindred feeling. After all, at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubt- edly authentic moral horror before the sheer extrava- gance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a re- fusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world should want to disparage. For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.


III

The locus classicus of modern disenchantment with “na- ture's God” is surely Voltaire's Poeme sur ie désastre de Lisbonne, occasioned by the great earthquake that struck offshore of Lisbon on All Saints' Day, i755 The city was at that time perhaps the most resplendent capital in Europe, the center of the vast Portuguese Empire, a seat of learn- ing, a garden of the arts, and home to a quarter of a mil- lion persons. As it was a feast day, a Sunday, and morning, most of Lisbon was at church when the earthquake came in three successive tremors, estimated now (like the Su- matran earthquake) at a Richter force of 9.o. Crevices opened in the streets as wide as fifteen feet across. Many thousands died in those first moments, crushed beneath falling buildings. Thousands more, who had fled to the mouth of the Tagus River to escape the destruction in the city, were killed in boats or along the riverbanks by the massive tsunami that was cast up on shore more than half an hour after the initial shock. Before long, an enormous fire began to consume the ruined city, as well as those who — like the invalid patients in the Hospital Real — were unable to run from the flames. In all, at least 6o,ooo perished in the city, and probably very many more. And the tsunami spread death all along the coasts of Portugal's Algarve, Southern Spain, and North Africa; in Morocco,
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io,ooo were killed. So enormous was the earthquake that it was felt in Sweden and Finland, and so powerful were the waves it sent out from its epicenter that the water could be seen to rise steeply several hours later in the An- tilles, Antigua, Martinique, and Barbados.
Voltaire was not an atheist; he was a deist of the most austere variety, whose reverent admiration for the God who had made the universe and then left it to its own im- manent devices was evidently quite genuine. His poem was a lacerating attack not on the idea of a creator God, but on the sort of theodicy that had become standard by his time, that odd, bland metaphysical optimism — most scintillatingly expressed in Pope's Essay on Man, but de- rived from the works of Leibniz, Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke — that says that this is the “best of all possi- ble worlds,’ and that thus “tout est bien.”Setting aside the vexatious question of whether Voltaire ever properly un- derstood the complexity of Leibniz's system (mostly be- cause there really is no question about it: he did not), he certainly grasped the imbecility of popular theodicy's at- tempts to explain away cosmic evil by appeal to “univer- sallaws” that have been set in place to assure the greatest possible good for creatures and that are therefore, neces- sarily, binding even upon God.
While Voltaire was no friend of Christianity, his
poem's preface does distinguish between this sort of

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theodicy and Christian teaching. Moreover, at both the beginning and the end of the preface, he affirms and even in some sense invokes (who can say with how much sin- cerity) the rule of divine providence. This demonstrates at the very least that he understood the difference be- tween the belief in a providential order in history and the belief that God has simply designed the world as it now is, as a kind of metaphysical machine perpetually pre- serving a precise cosmic equilibrium between morality and felicity, and between life and death, for the sake of our present well-being.
For the latter view, Voltaire holds none of his contempt in reserve. His poem possesses what one can only call an exquisite savagery, made all the more effective by the fine, smooth, mellifluous polish of his alexandrines. He invites all philosophers who say that “all is well” to come and con- template the wrack and ruin of Lisbon — its debris, shreds, and cinders — and explain by what calculus of the univer- sal good they can reckon the cosmic necessity of

Ces femmes, ces enfants l'un sur lautre entassés, Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres disperses; Cent mille infortunés que la terre dévore,
Qui, sanglants, déchirés, et palpitants encore, Enterrés sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours Dans l'horreur du tourment leurs lamentable jours!
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[These women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles; the hundred thousand unfortunates whom the earth devours, who — bleeding and torn, still palpitating, interred beneath their roofs — end their lamentable days without comfort, amid the horror of their torment!]

Looking upon all of this, Voltaire asks the metaphysical optimist, would you dare state that what you see is noth- ing more than the effect of eternal laws, which must de- termine even the will of a God both free and good? Or would you perhaps argue that all of this is merely God's just vengeance upon human iniquity? But then

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?

[What crime and what sin have they committed, these infants crushed and bleeding on their moth- ers’ breasts?]

Either response, in the face of such suffering, is mani- festly repellent; for those who speak in such terms, suffi- cient disdain seems scarcely possible — to judge, at least, from one particularly scornful apostrophe:
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Tranquilles spectateurs, intrépides esprits,
De vos freres mourants contemplant les naufrages, Vous recherchez en paix les causes des orages ...

[Tranquil spectators, intrepid spirits, contemplat- ing the shipwreck of your dying brothers you search in peace for the causes of the storm ...].

Quite apart from its moral hideousness, is this sort of theodicy even passingly credible?

Tout est bien, dites-vous, et tout est nécessaire. Quoi! 1'univers entier, sans ce gouffre infernal, Sans engloutir Lisbonne, eiit-i1 été plus mal?

[All is well, you say, and all is necessary. What? The entire universe, but for this infernal abyss engulfing Lisbon, would have been worse off?]

Would it indeed bring solace, asks Voltaire, to the “sad inhabitants of desolate shores, amid the horror of their torments,’ to know that others will profit from their de- mise, and that by their downfall they have discharged the role prescribed for them by universal and inviolable law? Does the entire incessant, pitiless, blood-drenched cycle of life and death become endurable, and even mor-


ally beautiful, because some sort of “general happiness” can be said to arise out of the whole “fatal chaos of indi- vidual miseries”? If indeed the theodicist would have us believe that the present order of the world is a ‘great chain of being” whose intricate calibrations and bal- ances are so delicately and cunningly poised that not even God dare alter any detail of its arrangement, then it is obvious to Voltaire that the theodicist is speaking risi- ble nonsc!nse:

Non, ne présentez plus a mon coeur agité Ces immuables lois de la nécessité,
Cette chaine des corps, des esprits et des mondes. O réves de savants! fi chimeres profondes!
Dieu tient en main la chaine, et n'est point enchainé; Par son choix bienfaisant tout est déterminé;
II est libre, il est juste, il n'est point implacable.
Pourquoi donc souffrons-nous sous un maitre equitable?

[No, no longer place these immutable laws of ne- cessity before my agitated heart, this chain of bod- ies, spirits, and worlds. O the dreams of savants! O how profoundly chimerical! God holds the chain in his hand, and he is not in any way enchained; by his beneficent will all is determined; he is free, he is


just, he is never implacable. Why then do we suffer
under so equitable a master?]

And on the poem goes, for a total of 34 lines, one glit- tering heroic couplet following upon another, until all Voltaire's indignation is spent. His verse lacks the epi-
grammatic and syntactic brilliance of Pope's, of course; but, such is its rhetorical and moral force that it leaves a far deeper impression (or perhaps some might say cau- terization) upon the mind than anything in the Essay on Man.
As I have already noted, however, Voltaire's poem is not directly concerned with the God of Christian doc- trine. Rather, it concerns a God who directly governs a cosmos that is exactly as he intended it (or as he had to intend it), balancing out all its many eventualities and particularities in a sort of infinite equation that leaves no remainder — no irredeemable evil, no irrecuperable ab- surdity — behind. Nowhere does Voltaire address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and re- duced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and ter- restrial powers hostile to God; nor certainly does he con- cern himself with the biblical narrative of redemption. His poem is an artifact of a particular moment in West-


em intellectual history — post-Christian but not yet post-theist — and as such represents a debate not be- tween atheism and faith but between two opposing schools of deism. Seen thus, it casts a purifying light upon the more maladroit and atheistic polemic of later skeptics.
So much is Voltaire's jeremiad a relic of philosophical controversies that have all but entirely died out, and of pictures of God that have long been effaced from all cul- tural consciousness, that it reminds us always to ask — when confronting something like Martin Kettle's diatribe or J. L. Mackie's famous but surreally inapposite argu- ment — precisely what God it is we are talking about. Has any living faith ever enjoined anyone to believe in the God in whom Kettle and Mackie are so desperate for us not to believe? (Certainly, I imagine, it would take no great effort on our part to oblige them.) Has anyone ever worshipped this God, or been willing to die — or kill — for him? Certainly none of those countless deities who preside over the waters of the Indian Ocean meet the de- scription. The God of those vanished theodicies, with whom Mackie felt it profitable to continue to grapple, is certainly not the boundlessly glorious and terrifying God revealed to Arjuna in the theophany of the eleventh book of the Bhagavad Gita, into whose innumerable blazing mouths men and gods and entire worlds fly to their de-

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struction. He is not any of the lesser deities whom Hindus and Buddhists alike believe to be no less bound by karma than we. Much less is he any of those native spirits of Southeast Asia who dwell within or behind all of living nature's multitudinous forms. He is not even the God of Islam, who orders everything by his illimitable and sover- eign will, but who creates the world not for any end im- manent to itself, but as an occasion for the creature to submit to his will and to accumulate works of righteous- ness. So, once more, what God is this?
Again, however, though it is tempting to let the mat-
ter rest here, one cannot. As before, in the case of less re- fined arguments, the more objectively one considers Vol- taire's poem, the less easy it becomes to pretend that it poses no challenge whatsoever to Christians. Its proxi- mate target may well be a particularly insipid kind of eth- ical deism, but that does not mean that the scope of every question it poses is limited only to its immediate object. For, if we are honest in asking what God this is that all our skeptics so despise, we must ultimately conclude that, while he is not the God announced by the Christian gospel, he is nevertheless a kind of faint and distorted echo of that announcement. It is Christianity that not only proclaimed a God of infinite goodness but equated that goodness with infinite love. The atheist who argues from worldly suffering, even crudely, against belief in a


God both benevolent and omnipotent is still someone whose moral expectations of God — and moral disap- pointments — have been shaped at the deepest level by the language of Christian faith. The actual arguments employed may not demonstrate a keen understanding of the Christian tradition, and they may fail strictly in terms of their logic; but they are not directed merely at a phan- tom, without any substance whatsoever. Behind the mask of this God in whom no one really believes is — at the very least — a memory of the God whom Christians proclaim, or a shadow of a memory. For this reason, the atheist who cannot believe for moral reasons does honor, in an elliptical way, to the Christian God, and so must not be ignored. He demands of us not the surrender of our beliefs but a meticulous recollection on our parts of what those beliefs are, and a definition of divine love that has at least the moral rigor of principled unbelief. This, it turns out, is no simple thing. For sometimes atheism seems to retain elements of “Christianity” within itself that Christians have all too frequently forgotten.




In truth, in the days following the earthquake and tsu- nami in the Indian Ocean, more unsavory than the spon-



taneous but predictable effervescence of village atheist cavils were a number of the statements made by persons claiming to speak from Christian convictions. Some it was easy to disregard as symptomatic of one or another particularly noxious pathology: the sadistic bellowing of a self-described “fundamentalist” preacher in Virginia, attributing the disaster to God's wrath against the hea- then and exulting in the spectacle of God's sublime cru- elty; the cheerful morbidity of another preacher, airily re- minding us that some of the countries affected are notorious for the persecution of Christians; the studied and depraved nonchalance of a conservative Catholic journalist, rejoicing that God had sent the tsunami be- cause of the invaluable lesson it had taught us all; and so on. But there were other, more plausible misstatements of Christian teaching that were harder to ignore, and that were for that very reason more disheartening. As irksome as Martin Kettle's argument was, after all, it was still at the end of the day merely unsophisticated in its logic and pompous in its air of didactic solemnity. More exasperat- ing were the attempts of well-intentioned Christians to rationalize the catastrophe in ways that, however inad- vertently, succeeded only in making arguments like Ket- tle's seem all at once both germane and profound.
Such rationalizations, one should note, are never of a single type. They span the whole spectrum of religious


sensibility, and (depending on the quarter of the Chris- tian world from which they emanate) can be cold with stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, palely ro- seate with a sickly metaphysical optimism, earnest with a pained spiritual tenderness. I learned something of this when I was invited to view a number of Christian Web sites in order to respond to queries and critiques of that Wall Street Journal column I mentioned above. Much of what was said on these sites was strikingly eloquent, some of it was appallingly silly, but what was most fasci- nating about all of the remarks taken together was how incompatible the different theological positions they ex- pressed tended to be one with another.
A Calvinist pastor, positively intoxicated by the gran- deur of divine sovereignty, proclaimed that the Indian Ocean disaster — like everything else — was a direct ex- pression of the divine will, acting according to hidden and eternal counsels it would be impious to attempt to pene- trate, and producing consequences it would be sinful to presume to judge. He also insisted upon uncompromis- ingly literal interpretations of verses like Isaiah 4s:7 (“I make weal and create woe” — or, even, “create evil”) and fearlessly equivocal interpretations of verses like Ezekiel i8:3> (“It is not my pleasure that anyone should die, says the Lord Gon”) or 33:** (“It is not my pleasure that the wicked man should die”). Another Calvinist, this time a ju-

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nior professor at a small college somewhere in the South, archly explained that, in the “Augustinian-Thomistic- Calvinist tradition” — for the sake of argument, let us grant this chimera a moment's life — and in Reformed thought in particular, God may have no need of suffering and death for himself, but suffering and death neverthe- less possess an “epistemic significance” for us, insofar as they reveal divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed” (one dreads to imagine what those might be). A Catholic scholar and translator whose work I greatly ad- mire contributed a moving expostulation, invoking the Holy Innocents, glorying in our special privilege (not shared even by the angels) of bearing scars like Christ's, recalling that by God's grace our sufferings are permitted to participate in Christ's and thereby in the profoundest mystery of redemption, and advancing the venerable (but dangerous) homiletic conceit that our salvation from sin will result in a higher beatitude than could ever have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. Another Catholic, who was manifestly devout and intelligent, but who (on this occasion, at least) displayed something of an unfortunate knack for making providence sound like karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our sense of justice requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distrib- uted according to our just desserts,’ that God is the great
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“balancer of accounts,’ and that we must suppose that the sufferings of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and all mankind'’
As incongruent as the various positions were one with another, one common element was impossible to overlook: each man, solicitous as he was of God's perfect righteousness, clearly seemed to wish to believe that there is a divine plan in all the seeming randomness of nature's violence that accounts for every instance of suf- fering, privation, and loss in a sort of total sum. This is an understandable impulse. That there is a transcendent providence that will bring God's good ends out of the darkness of history — in spite of every evil — no Chris- tian can fail to affirm. But providence (as even Voltaire seems to have understood) is not simply a “total sum” or “inrnite equation” that leaves nothing behind.
I will touch upon this more fully below; here, though, it seems worth noting that there is a point at which an ex- planation becomes so comprehensive that it ceases to ex- plain anything at all, because it has become a mere tau- tology. In the case of a pure determinism, this is always so. To assert that every finite contingency is solely and unambiguously the effect of a single will working all things — without any deeper mystery of created freedom
— is to assert nothing but that the world is what it is, for any meaningful distinction between the will of God and
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the simple totality of cosmic eventuality has collapsed. If all that occurs, in the minutest detail and in the entirety, of its design, is only the expression of one infinite volition that makes no real room within its transcendent deter- minations for other, secondary, subsidiary but free agen- cies (and so for some element of chance and absurdity), then the world is both arbitrary and necessary, both meaningful in every part and meaningless in its totality, an expression of pure power and nothing else. Even if the purpose of such a world is to prepare creatures to know the majesty and justice of its God, that majesty and jus- tice are, in a very real sense, fictions of his will, impressed upon creatures by means both good and evil, merciful and cruel, radiant and monstrous — some are created for eternal bliss and others for eternal torment, and all for the sake of the divine drama of perfect and irresistible might. Such a God, at the end of the day, is nothing but wifi, and so nothing but an infinite brute event; and the only adoration that such a God can evoke is an almost perfect coincidence of faith and nihilism. Quite apart from what I take to be the scriptural and philosophical incoherence of this concept of God, it provides an excel- lent moral case for atheism — or, for that matter, Gnosticism (but this too I will address below).
Equally problematic, in some ways, if far more spiritu- ally sane, is the view that all suffering and death should
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be seen as the precisely apportioned and condign recom- pense for human sin, balancing all accounts and contrib- uting to a final harmony of all things. It is a pleasing vi- sion of things, in some ways, though quite horrifying in others; it is also a vision so pointlessly complex as to verge upon banality. If it gives us comfort to believe that the death of an infant from disease and the death of a se- rial murderer late in life from a heart attack, congenital madness and innate genius, the long fortunate life of one of nature's Romans and the brief miserable life of a born pauper are all determined by a precise calculation of what each and every one of us deserves, then it is a com- fort sustained by absurdity. If nothing else, one might ask, what of all the particular instances of animal suffering (which no conscience should find it easy to ignore as un- important)? And, anyway, Christ forbade his disciples, in Luke 3: -s. to believe that there is a secret due propor- tion between misfortune and culpability: neither those whose blood Pilate mingled with the sacrifices nor those eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell met their fates on account of some special degree of iniquity on their parts. And he also made it quite clear, in Matthew zo:i-i6, that there is no distinction among the rewards re- served for the righteous corresponding to the diversity of their merits: those who labor all the day and those who labor but an hour receive the same wages.

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One may of course assert that original sin makes all of us guilty, and so nothing that happens to us can, strictly speaking, be in excess of what we deserve; but, then, this means that the diversity of our fates cannot be said to cor- respond to the diversity of our desserts, and that salva- tion, far from “balancing accounts, is utterly gratuitous. Here also it is probably wise to acknowledge the historical limitation placed upon what one can say on this matter. I, for instance, can write only as a representative of Eastern Orthodoxy, and while most of the larger theological differ- ences that are often said to exist between the Eastern and Western Churches are more illusory than real, on the is- sue of original sin there is at least one difference upon which most scholars are in agreement. While all Chris- tians must believe that we are born in sin — subject to death, corrupted in body and soul, suffering derange- ments of will and desire, our minds darkened, unable to save ourselves — it is only in Western tradition that the additional idea of an inherited guilt became a conspicu- ous feature of the concept of original sin, and it is an idea that Orthodoxy has on many occasions explicitly rejected (which is not to say that it is Orthodox teaching that any of us — slaves as we are to the rule of death in all our members — can ever fail to become guilty of transgres- sion when we attain any level of rational autonomy). As to why there should be this difference, various answers have
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Universaf Harmony

been offered: a notoriously misleading Latin translation of Romans 5:iz, for instance, or a more general “mistrans- lation” of various of the New Testament's central terms, or even the influence of the Roman jurisprudential genius upon the evolution of Latin theology; some argue that, whereas the Eastern tendency has typically been to read certain New Testament metaphors for sin and salvation almost strictly in terms of civil law concerning slavery — the “debt” of the bondsman who is enslaved in the house of death, but who is “redeemed” from slavery by the “ran- som” required for manumission — the Western tendency has been to read those same metaphors in terms of crimi- nal law as well, with its concern for forensic culpability and retribution.
While this disparity in emphasis makes little differ- ence, of course, for how the two traditions understand the disposition of “mature souls,’ it can lead to quite radi- cally divergent conclusions regarding infants. It was as natural, for instance, for Gregory of Nyssa to conclude that infants who died without baptism were all saved (their deaths being their baptism, as it were, since Hades has been overthrown) or for Theodoret of Cyrus to deny that the baptism of infants served for the remission of sins as it was for Augustine, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Fulgentius Ruspensis to believe that unbaptized infants were destined for eternal perdition. (None of these views,

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as it happens, is established doctrine in either Church.) Needless to say, I believe the Orthodox view to be the more scriptural (which spares me the effort of professing a belief I find repugnant). But there is no need for a re- treat to confessional redoubts on this issue. If, by the time of Thomas Aquinas, the eternal destiny of unbaptized in- fants had come to be understood not as everlasting tor- ment but as a state of perfect natural beatitude, this is obviously because Roman Catholic thought did not sim- ply equate inherited guilt with personal fault. In neither tradition, at any rate, is it possible intelligibly to assert that the death of a small child is in some unambiguous sense an expression of divine justice. Christ, after all, as- sured us that “little children” are the natural citizens of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 19:14: Mark io: 4: Luke i8:i6), and so surely it must be the case that at the deepest level the suffering of children is contrary to the law of the Kingdom, and to the pleasure of its King.
In any event, insofar as I could follow the intent of my interlocutors, I felt varying degrees of sympathy for their positions (though, of course, the Catholic views were somewhat more agreeable to an Orthodox palate than were certain of the others). What struck me most forc- ibly, however, was that in their apparent need to produce an apologia for God that precluded the possibility of any absurd or pointless remainder in the order of creation
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and redemption, most of them had seemed to allow cer- tain vital aspects of the language of the New Testament to become all but entirely invisible. Little was said about the sheer exorbitance of grace, the “free gift” of salvation (as Paul calls it in Romans 5), that “unjust” mercy that distributes the same rewards to all who have labored, no matter the length of their service, or God's gracious and magnanimous indifference to our “just desserts. And al- most nothing was said regarding — and this can scarcely be emphasized enough — the triumphalism of the gospel or the Johannine and Pauline imagery of spiritual and cosmic warfare; no obvious notice was taken of the strange absence of any metaphysical optimism in the New Testament, or of the refusal of any final reconcilia- tion with death — indeed, the mockery of its power. Yes, certainly, there is nothing, not even suffering or death, that cannot be providentially turned toward God's good ends. But the New Testament also teaches us that, in an- other and ultimate sense, suffering and death — consid- ered in themselves — have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts.





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Above I spoke of the moral power of Voltaire's Hoeme, but of course such judgments are necessarily relative. Vol- taire was a man of the eighteenth century and prey to the superstitions of the Enlightenment; thus there was a depth of reflection upon the darker mysteries of exis- tence, and upon the power of the irrational, that was for- ever closed to him. His mind never passed through the ordeals of nineteenth-century idealism and materialism, the death and rebirth of metaphysics in the years be- tween Kant and Hegel, revolution and Romanticism, Darwinism, or the first real stirrings of an unabashedly explicit nihilism in the wake of Christianity's slow with- drawal from European culture; and, frankly, his personal theology was far too insipid to inspire either angelic or demonic passions, or to arouse any very searching medi- tations on evil, cosmic or spiritual. His poem is, therefore, a feeble thing indeed compared to the subtler, more unre- lenting, more tortured, and more haunting case for ‘re- bellion” against “the will of God” in human suffering that Dostoyevsky placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov.
One might think this ironic, perhaps, given the ardor of Dostoyevsky's faith; but, really, it is probably the case that no one who is not a Christian could ever understand the spiritual and moral motives of such a rebellion with
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anything like sufficient fullness. Certainly it is the case that the Christian Dostoyevsky's treatment of innocent suffering possesses a profundity of which the deist Vol- taire was never even remotely capable. Admittedly, Ivan does not much concern himself with the randomness of natural calamity, as Voltaire does; the evils Ivan recounts to his brother Alexey (or Alyosha) are acts not of imper- sonal nature but of men, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. But humanity is no less a part of the natural order than earthquakes and floods, and the hu- man propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. Whatever else human evil is, it is — considered apart from any reli- gious doctrine — a cosmic constant, ceaselessly pouring forth from hidden springs of brute impulse and aimless will, driven by some deep prompting of nature as we know it, and so it raises all the same questions concern- ing the world and its maker that are raised by natural di- sasters: Unde hoc malum — Whence this evil? And what sort of God permits it?
Ivan does not really represent himself as an atheist.
He refuses to take a firm position on whether God is the creator of man or man the creator of God, in part because the very idea of God is so implausibly wise and holy an achievement for a vicious animal intellect like ours that
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he is loath to treat it as a trifle or mere fantasy. That said, he insists that God (if God there be) has supplied human- ity with finite, “Euclidean” minds, bound to the condi- tions of time and space, unable to grasp those transcen- dent designs by which God undoubtedly guides all things toward their final harmony with him and with one an- other. It is better not to worry, then, about ultimate things; our minds are conformed to the circumstances of this world, which are all that we can meaningfully judge. So, he says, he accepts that there is a God and even that there is an eternal plan that will, in its consummation, bring about a condition of perfect peace and beatitude for all creation; but it is creation, in fact, that Ivan rejects. This is the splendid perversity and genius of Ivan's (or Dostoyevsky's) argument, which makes it indeed the ar- gument of a rebel rather than of a mere unbeliever. He willingly grants, he says, that all wounds will at the last be healed, all scars will disappear, all discord will vanish like a mirage or like the miserable invention of finite Eu- clidean minds, and that such will be the splendor of the finale of all things, when that universal harmony is estab- lished, that every heart will be satisfied, all anger soothed, the debt for every crime discharged, and every- one made capable of forgiving every offense and even of finding a justification for everything that has ever hap- pened to mankind; and still he rejects the world that God
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has made, and that final harmony with it. Ivan admits that he is not a sentimentalist, that indeed he finds it dif- ficult to love his neighbor, but the terms of the final hap- piness God intends for his creatures are greater than his conscience can bear.
To elucidate his complaint, he provides Alyosha with a grim, unremitting, remorseless recitation of stories about the torture and murder of (principally) children — true stories, as it happens, that Dostoyevsky had col- lected from the press and from other sources. He tells of Turks in Bulgaria tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs with daggers, or flinging infants into the air to catch them on bayonets before their mothers’ eyes, or playing with babies held in their mothers’ arms — mak- ing them laugh, enticing them with the bright metal bar- rels of pistols — only then to fire the pistols into the ba- bies’ faces. He tells a story of two parents regularly savagely flogging their seven-year-old daughter, only to be acquitted in court of any wrongdoing. He tells the story of a “cultured and respectable” couple who tortured their five-year-old daughter with constant beatings, and who — to punish her, allegedly, for fouling her bed filled her mouth with excrement and locked her on freez- ing nights in an outhouse. And he invites Alyosha to imagine that child, in the bitter chill and darkness and stench of that place, striking her breast with her tiny fist,

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weeping her supplications to “gentle Jesus,’ begging God to release her from her misery, and then to say whether anything — the knowledge of good and evil, for instance
— could possibly be worth the bleak brutal absurdity of that little girl's torments. He relates the tale of an eight- year-old serf child who, in the days before emancipation, was bound to the land of a retired general and who acci- dentally injured the leg of his master's favorite hound by tossing a stone. As punishment, the child was locked in a guardroom through the night and in the morning brought out before his mother and all the other serfs, stripped naked, and forced to run before the entire pack of his master's hounds, which were promptly set upon him to tear him to pieces.
What can a finite Euclidean mind make of such things? How, with anything like moral integrity, can it de- fer its outrage to some promised future where some other justice will be worked, in some radically different reality than the present? Ivan says that he wants to see that final harmony, and to hear the explanation for why such horrors were necessary, but not so as to assent to ei- ther. For, while he can go some distance in granting the principle of human solidarity — in sin and retribution — he cannot figure the suffering of children into that final equation without remainder.
What makes Ivan's argument so novel and disturbing


is not that he simply accuses God of failing to save the in- nocent; in fact, he grants that in some sense God still will “save” them, in part by rescuing their suffering from sheer “absurdity” and showing what part it had in accomplish- ing the final beatitude of all creatures. Rather, Ivan re- jects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He rejects anything that would involve such a rescue — anything that would make the suffering of children meaningful or necessary. He grants that one day that eternal harmony will be established, and we will discover how it necessitated the torments endured by children. Perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their children, and the serf child, his mother, and their master will be reconciled, and all will praise God's jus- tice, and all evils will be accounted for. Or perhaps the damnation of the wicked will somehow balance the score (though how then there can be that final harmony, when the suffering of the victims has already happened and the suffering of their persecutors will persist eternally, Ivan cannot guess). But still, Ivan wants neither harmony nor the knowledge of ultimate truth at such a cost: “for love of man I reject it”; even ultimate truth ‘is not worth the tears of that one tortured child'’ Nor, indeed, does he want forgiveness: the mother of that murdered child must not forgive her child's murderer, even if the child himself can forgive. And so, not denying that there is a

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God or a divine design in all things, he simply chooses (respectfully) to return his ticket of entrance to God's Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small creature to death, would you think the price acceptable?
I am convinced that Ivan's discourse — which he con- tinues, as hardly needs to be said, by reciting his “poem” about “The Grand Inquisitor” — constitutes the only chal- lenge to a confidence in divine goodness that should give Christians serious cause for deep and difficult reflection. Those Christian readers who have found it easy to ignore or dispense with the case that Dostoyevsky constructs for Ivan have not, I submit, fully comprehended that case (or, alternatively, have comprehended it, but adhere to so de- generate a version of Christian doctrine that they can no longer be said to understand the God revealed in Christ). The reason for this (which it is so vital that one should un- derstand) is that, at base, Ivan's is a profoundly and almost prophetically Christian argument. In part this is true be- cause, even in the way Ivan frames his arraignment of the divine purpose in history, there are already foreshadow- ings of a deeper Christian riposte to the argument. Ivan's ability to imagine a genuinely moral revolt against God's creative and redemptive order has a kind of nocturnal grandeur about it, a Promethean or Romantic or Gnostic


audacity that dares to imagine some spark dwelling in the human soul that is higher and purer than the God who governs this world; and, in that very way, his argument carries within itself an echo of the gospel's vertiginous an- nunciation of our freedom from the “elements” of the world and from the power of the law. Indeed, the tale of the Grand Inquisitor is in some ways a curious hymn of adoration to Christ as the one who is himself the truest “rebels entering human history with a divine disregard for its internal economies, disrupting it in fact at the deepest level by sowing freedom with almost profligate abandon among creatures who — with very few exceptions — are incapable of receiving it.
But these are only adumbrations and presentiments of a proper response to Ivan's manifesto. A fuller answer is woven throughout the hundreds of pages of the novel that follow. Some critics doubt that any satisfactory an- swer is given at all (though I think them mistaken); but even those who believe that an answer is given have on many occasions still failed to appreciate (it seems to me) how radical that answer is, principally because they have not appreciated how radical the question is either. What- ever the case, for the Christian, Ivan's argument — taken simply in itself — provides a kind of spiritual hygiene: it is a solvent of the semi-Hegelian theology of the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century, which sue-
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ceeded in confusing eschatological hope with progres- sive social and scientific optimism, and a solvent as well as of the obdurate fatalism of the theistic determinist, and of the confidence of rational theodicy, and — in gen- eral — of the habitual and unthinking retreat of most Christians to a kind of indeterminate deism. And this, again, marks it as a Christian argument, even if Christian sub contrario, because in disabusing believers of facile certitude in the justness of all things, it forces them back toward the more complicated, ‘subversivei and magnifi- cent theology of the gospel. Ivan's rage against explana- tion arises from a Christian conscience, and so — even if Ivan cannot acknowledge it — its inner mystery is an empty tomb, which has shattered the heart of nature and history alike (as we understand them) and fashioned them anew.
This is why Ivan's indignation and anguish have a pro- fundity that Voltaire's cannot. Voltaire's poem, again, is no great challenge to Christian faith, because it inveighs against the ethical deist's God of cosmic balance (and where have his temples been erected?). But Ivan's rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoyevsky sees — and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his irreducibly Christian view of reality — that it would be far more terrible if it were.
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