Engulfed by Nothingness

Upon the disappearance of God, however, there ensued another, and quite unexpected, event: the disappearance of reality—of the supposedly solid and unquestionable things that we could see all around us. The great weakness of God, felt by human beings since the time of the ancient Hebrews, was his invisibility. He couldn’t be seen. Could his reality, then, be confidently affirmed? The things around us, in contrast, could be seen and could be studied by science. Their reality could hardly be doubted.

It turned out, however, that their reality could be doubted. Perhaps I don’t doubt their reality the moment I see them, but the next time I see them they are not quite the same. Are they still the same realities? Have the earlier realities, by changing, vanished? Such questions intensify with the passage of time and the accumulation of changes. If I look for the same realities a few years later, they may well be gone. Physical things may have been destroyed, persons may have died. Hence Thomas Wolfe’s discovery that “you can’t go home again.” How then do the supposedly solid things that you can see, and cannot question, differ from the benign clouds that form and evaporate on a summer afternoon? The clouds are scarcely real. Are the visible, and supposedly substantial, realities around us any more real?

The crucial issue, it seems, is the equation of visibility and reality. Common sense urges us to believe only what we can see. But what we can see passes away. Visible things are ephemeral, and ephemeral things are not wholly real. They may seem real today, but by tomorrow they have vanished. This points toward the core truth in this whole matter: only the invisible can be changeless and thus wholly real. Contrary to common sense, everything visible is temporal, and the temporal is the realm of the ephemeral, of the unreal. The invisibility of Israel’s God was a sign of his reality.

The evanescence and consequent compromised reality of the seen was acutely felt in the ancient world by the Jews and by the Greeks. To the eyes of the spirit, the invisibility of Israel’s God testified to his transcendence of nature and history, of the things that pass away. Eternal and authentically real, God infused his own reality into the persons he had created by giving them an eternal destiny. But to the eyes of the multitudes, God’s invisibility was deeply troubling. The Golden Calf charmed Moses’s followers precisely by its visibility. The idols that lured the Jewish people away from the God of the Bible were all made of stone and wood and could be seen by everyone. The true God could not be seen and could only be known by revelation and faith. Christians here followed the Jews. “No one has ever seen God,” John declares. And Paul asserts of himself and his followers that “we look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are temporal, while the things that are unseen are eternal.”

In Greece we see something comparable. Plato was keenly aware of the dubious reality of visible things, and one of the essential characteristics of the forms in which he found full reality was that they were known by the intellect alone and could not be seen. This is dramatized in the famous line, illustrating the gradations of reality and knowledge, in The Republic. But in Greece, as in Israel, the multitudes saw things otherwise. Plato’s philosophy was developed in reaction to the demos which, beguiled by visible glories, brought the Athenian golden age to a tragic end in the catastrophe of the Sicilian war.

As reality disappears, the quest for truth—through philosophy, art, science, and religion—becomes pointless. Nothing remains to be revealed by the light of truth. This was perfectly apparent to Plato. He was a philosopher of light, and in his political philosophy he sought ways to bring light into common life. For this to be possible, however, there had to be realities to be illuminated. These he believed to be the forms of ideas, in which all visible things participated and to which they owed such reality as they had. Intellect gave us access to these forms. The key to a good society therefore lay in vesting absolute power in those with the intellectual ability and training to apprehend the forms and, supreme over all the forms, the “idea of the good.” If the people were given liberty and power, however, they would become engrossed in visible things and draw society down into darkness. Plato’s doctrine of philosophic dictatorship is unacceptable to practically everyone (and was perhaps unacceptable to Plato himself), but the logic of his argument is surprisingly hard to resist. And the state of the world in the twenty-first century makes it even harder. The advanced societies of the West, all liberal democracies, present pictures of life carried on in the deep twilight brought on by the death of God, followed by the immersion of life in visible, but evanescent, realities. Like the captives depicted in Plato’s myth of the cave, we are fascinated by spectacles which we take to be exhibitions of reality but are in fact only a play of shadows.

The most sensitive minds in modern times have been far from unaware of our situation, and have sought a bedrock of enduring and reliable reality. Proust’s “remembrance of things past” was essentially an effort to rescue from oblivion things which seemed to have vanished into the past but in fact could be found, and brought back to life, through memory. Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence (which Nietzsche believed to be literally true) was designed to give the overwhelming force of eternal cycles to realities which seemed, on the death of the God who had kept all that had ever happened in his own memory, continually to disappear into an omnivorous past. As with Proust, the tiniest details of present experience, which appeared to be vanishing like summer clouds, in fact would reappear again and again throughout eternity.

One of the major responses to the passing of reality with the death of God was unquestionably the doctrine of progress which, as our current fascination with the latest developments in technology and the commercial cult of youth shows, is far from dead. True and lasting reality, in the guise of the future, is entering and giving substance to our lives in time. Marxism illustrated the power, and illustrated as well, by the disasters it brought on the world, the basic inadequacy of this response. In a way, the gospel of progress was the direct opposite of Proust’s resort to memory. Proust sought enduring reality in the past, through memory. The protagonists of historical progress sought reality in the future, in some cases through revolution. The principal weakness in the doctrine of progress is not that the goals of the great protagonists of progress, like Marx, have inspired some of the most terrible human atrocities in history, such as the massive killing that occurred in China and Cambodia. It is rather that any historical achievement—quite unlike the Christian eschaton—is still in history and thus is ephemeral. The doctrine of progress has not just betrayed its protagonists in practice; it is also deeply wrong in principle.

Quite a different and more sinister response to the disappearance of reality lay in reverence for the state. Indefeasible reality could be found in the sovereign and comprehensive form of our common life. The major philosopher of the state, no doubt, was Hegel, for whom the state was virtually divine—“the march of God on earth.” And the deified state was of course not just any state. In Hegel’s case, the God-state was Prussia in his own time. With the end of twentieth century, the world is acutely conscious of the terrible deeds states are inclined to commit. Yet virtual worship of a particular state, that is, nationalism, is widespread and is commonly fused in the popular mind with religion. God and country are twin objects of supreme regard.

Many sophisticated minds today believe that solid and enduring reality is to be found not through any interpretations of time, such as Nietzsche’s, and certainly not in any social or political entity, but in the disclosures of natural science. This is a formidable faith, and not to be despised. The advance of physical science is acknowledged on all sides as one of the greatest of human accomplishments. The equation of scientific and ultimate human knowledge may seem spiritually impoverished but in substance is a kind of Platonism. Reality is found not in things seen, even though seeing plays a key role scientific inquiry, but in realities known only to trained and disciplined minds—realities which are necessarily in the nature of ideas, or forms, intellectually accessible even though invisible. Science, like religion, transcends the ephemerality of things that are seen.

In all this I have said nothing of the frivolous, although highly popular, responses to the disappearance of reality: drugs and drink, sex, spectator sports, entertainment and recreation. Adventure should probably be included among these, although it includes activities like mountain climbing in which men risk their lives, and one hesitates to say that men consciously putting their lives in peril are frivolous. In any case, the key truth here seems to be that a great many people either exultantly assume that reality will be found in the pleasures and excitements of temporal life or else quietly despair of finding authentic reality and immerse themselves in things that are passing, hoping to find therein ways of forgetting what will inevitably happen to everything in time. A certain frivolity invades even the churches. Parishioners have little apparent interest in hearing what serious and well-informed Christians consider to be the eternal Word of God, which includes such highly uncomfortable doctrines as human sinfulness and divine anger. And they are not constrained to hear of these things, for their pastors are often, like themselves, theologically ill-informed and are practically always under pressure to enlarge membership of their churches. They are therefore strongly tempted, like politicians, to say the things people want to hear and the churches become, properly speaking, social rather than religious associations.

Among all these responses to the disappearance of reality, I have suggested that the one possessing a certain validity is science. Might we, then, in order to rise above popular immersion in the ephemeral, resort to science or to some other version of Platonism? Christians are bound to find this an unacceptable option. Why? What does Christianity offer that cannot be found in science, or in Platonism in some form? The answer, I suggest, is simple and elemental: persons. Personal being is affirmed in its heights and depths by Christianity more fully and unqualifiedly than by any other religion or system of thought. This is to say that only Christianity responds adequately to the disappearance of reality. Only Christianity fully recognizes persons, both in the depths to which they have cast themselves by sin, and in the heights to which they have been raised by grace. The fate of persons in the thought of Plato is made clear in his political writings. Persons as such do not have lives which must be respected and guarded. Rather, they are in the nature of material which wise men laboring to create a perfect society are fully justified in using as they see fit, or in discarding when found unusable. Plato’s quietly ruthless politics is philosophically grounded. Just as his republic is severely impersonal, so is fundamental reality. The forms, or ideas, are in the nature of eternal abstractions, purified of all personal qualities. As a kind of Platonism, science in like fashion is inhospitable to persons. To put the matter with perhaps excessive simplicity, there can be no science of persons—not in their full particularity, and not in the freedom which raises them above nature. Persons are subjects and cannot be made into objects of scientific study without being lost. They are studied by means of poetry and other arts, above all, novels. They are sources of science but are not known through science. Nor are they known through a philosophy which finds reality exclusively in forms, or ideas.

In what way does Christianity affirm personal being? In almost every aspect of its life and thought. Here I can give only examples. If the ephemeral is more or less unreal, and only the eternal is real, then persons are real only if they are heirs of eternal life. If they pass away in time, like benign clouds on a summer afternoon, they must be counted, among all the other ephemera of experience, less than real. To affirm eternal life is not to claim that our lives go on, after we have died, in roughly the same manner they did before. Christianity does not claim that they do. It claims rather that those who have died will be raised by God from death into lasting life. The idea of the resurrection of the dead is rationally incomprehensible, yet it may well be indispensible to understanding human destiny in a way that saves the reality of persons. It is a way of saying that, although the soul is not immortal naturally, and death is real, yet death is not definitive. It is not superior to a God who gave life once and can give it again—and will do so to those willing to accept it.

Another way in which Christianity affirms personal being is in its vision of God—the God who raises the dead into eternal life—as merciful. No other faith, to my knowledge, recognizes so clearly the fact of what Kant called radical evil, and Christians sin. Humankind is a fallen species. In their fallenness, humans are often selfish and inconsiderate, and sometimes despicable and horrifying. The consequence is that a God answering to the human plight must above all be a God who forgives and redeems. Otherwise, humans on earth would carry on doomed lives. The God envisioned in the Old Testament—in the prophets or in the Psalms—is often wrathful, but in the end is always merciful. In the New Testament, divine mercy comes into the center of the picture. The Cross can be taken as a symbol of wrath the energy of which is put in the service of redemption.

While other examples of ways in which Christianity affirms the person could be given, such as its understanding of Paul’s agape, which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” rather than Plato’s fundamentally impersonal eros, enough has been said to put before us the question: Is there any salvation from the nothingness engulfing us other than that offered by the crucified Christ? There does not appear to be. This is to say, not that all but Christians are lost, but that Christ on the Cross—what Jurgen Moltmann called “the crucified God”—is, for the entire human race, the heart of the matter. In the final analysis, all human hope rests on that God.