Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ