Evil and Modernity’s Unbelief

By Larry Chapp

What we need now is an unvarnished accounting for why the Christian faith has lost its purchase on the spiritual lives of Western people. For we can only treat a disease after it is properly diagnosed. The Church might indeed be a field hospital, but all too often these days it resembles a hospice for those with a dying faith rather than a center of restorative health that generates a robust belief in the Gospel. In other words, the contemporary Church is in dire need of better pastoral diagnosticians.

The statistics surrounding the rapid decline of religious affiliation in the United States are sobering. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans is staggeringly high, even as overt atheism is now the dominant “religious” view of many European countries. And as in so many other things, how long will it take those religious “nones” in America to follow their European cousins into an explicit atheism?

However, there does seem to be a small, but significant, resurgence of interest in the historic faith of the Church among some subsegments of young people who feel alienated by modernity’s anomic meaninglessness. And the forms of the Catholic faith that they seem to prefer are instructive. To wit, they seem drawn to the vertical, transcendent elements of historic Catholicism, a fact which is by now rather cliché but which is not, in my view, properly interpreted as to what it signifies.

And I hasten to add before proceeding that I am not talking here only of the so-called “traditionalists” and the devotees of the Tridentine liturgy. Because in point of fact, their numbers are relatively small, despite the rhetoric of the older leaders of the traditionalist movement. What I mean to forestall therefore is any hint that a recovery of the vertical and transcendent forms of the faith by default means a return to the Latin Mass and the general form and theology of Baroque Catholicism.

My claim is that the resurgence of faith among some young folks takes many forms but with the common denominator of an agonistic search for the irruption of the eternal into the temporal. And by “agonistic” I mean that it is faith forged in a genuine crucible, which in this case is the smelting cauldron of modernity’s reductive nihilism and its consequent rejection of all teleology, all moral meaning, of anything spiritual, and eventually, of the very reality of the self as such.

One of the consequences of this nihilism is the evacuation of genuine moral agency as the central defining characteristic of the human condition. The very concept therefore of “sin” is viewed as laughable. This entails the further rejection of the Christian narrative as hopelessly wedded to a concept of an offended and vengeful deity who needs blood sacrifice in order to be appeased. This rejection thus also includes any notion of an eschatology of rewards and punishments in a future life, since all such construals are grounded in the notion that free will is real and that our moral agency is spiritual rather than merely the epiphenomenal social gesticulations and constructions of a conventional decorousness for trousered apes.

Central to the power of this modern nihilistic narrative is what theologians traditionally call “the problem of evil.” But in its modern form this problem is not only focused on how an all good God could allow for evil in the world, but primarily on the fact that reality seems utterly random, devoid of meaning and purpose, and therefore the willy-nilly nature of the “evils” we suffer is precisely what we should expect in a pointless universe devoid of a true creator with discernible purposes.

It is next to impossible, so the criticism goes, to square the God of infinite love with the little shop of horrors that this same God has placed us within as our most proper home and has done so without our consent.

Let us begin therefore by citing just a few of the many possible examples of inexplicable evil that cry out for explanation. What of the sufferings of little children trafficked into sadistic sexual slavery that we now see all over the world and for which our governments do next to nothing? Or of children forced into slave labor in wretched conditions to provide us with the rare metals we need to power the iPhones for our porn addicted culture? Even more recently we have seen the children in Minneapolis killed and/or severely wounded while praying at Mass by a mentally ill young man consumed by an almost demonic spirit of destruction.

Where were the guardian angels of these children? Why do the guardian angels of so many such children seem completely incompetent or impotent, or worse, indifferent?

But I can already hear the rejoinder: “But what you don’t see is how in the long run these sufferings are part of a larger good!” I do not see how the horror that must invade the minds and hearts of such little children as they are being abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered furthers any greater good that is discernible to reason. And all attempts to justify such monstrous evils by somehow placing them within some putative divine plan of inscrutable benevolence seems to many to be just another backhanded way of ontologizing such evils and blasphemously placing them within the ambit of the mysterious omelet God is making by cracking a few innocent eggs.

To repeat therefore by way of doubling down on the central point, what strikes many moderns is the randomness and irrationality of the evils so inflicted. Such randomness, devoid of rationally discernible purpose, unsettles our souls in profound ways. Children die every day in the most horrific of circumstances; war, disease, famine, abuse, torture, and various random accidents. And yet little Adolf Hitler rode his Austrian tricycle in peace and tranquility as a boy with nary a scratch and survived the bullets and bombs of WWI. Hitler survived the war and yet the wonderful Charles Peguy died from a bullet to the head in that same war. The ways of Providence may be inscrutable, but there should also be something within events that do not present themselves as sheer irrationality at odds with all that we know to be good and true. For how hard would it have been for God to engineer for young Adolf to choke to death on a piece of sausage as he was sadistically pulling the wings off of a captured bug?

Part of what vexes us in such examples isn’t just the sheer irrationality of it all, but that the irrationality seems grounded in a randomness so irreducible that it renders any discernible divine providence utterly hidden and opaque to our reason. And recourse to the “God’s ways are not our ways” argument just seems to be too convenient, especially in light of the fact that those same Scriptures tell us that we have an obligation to discern God’s will in our lives, which implies that His will can be known in some clear ways. Those same Scriptures tell us that we should be able to discern the presence of a creator God by looking at the beauty and ordered structure of the natural world, which should then impel us to the worship of the one, true, creator God.

So which is it? The ways of God are so inscrutable that we dare not question the divine goodness or that the will of God is indeed “knowable” to such a degree that rejection of his existence and commandments is a morally culpable act? It is noteworthy that the book of Job initiates the same query, thus giving biblical warrant to the questions at hand. Similarly, the shocking nature of the psalms, unparalleled in world religions, is the bracing honesty of their questionings of God’s ways which appear so indifferent to the plight of Israel, God’s putative “chosen people.” And this, once again, gives a biblical warrant to the questions we ask as well. Revelation, in other words, seems to indicate that God actually blesses such questionings as part of the path to wisdom. Therefore, those who see in such questions nothing but a blasphemous doubting of God’s ways are actually being unbiblical.

When it comes to the ineradicable randomness of the events of our lives and of events in the natural world, and when it comes to the presence of great sufferings among innocent persons, we are granted by God himself the permission to be disturbed. Indeed, the disturbance in our souls caused by such random evils devoid of discernible rational purpose seems to be the biblically warranted way of coming to a deeper appreciation of the full weight of what sin actually is, especially in light of all of the consequences that flow downstream of its reality.

Nevertheless, the upshot of the apparent randomness of evil is that it leads millions of people into either overt atheism or, at the very least, into an agnostic apophaticism that claims that any and all alleged divine actions are equally inscrutable and unknowable.

What this points to is that one of the primary downstream effects of evil and the Fall is the occlusion of our spiritual senses by sin. We now experience life and existence as a seemingly disconnected set of random dots which can be drawn together into an ersatz whole only through the ruse of an imposed unity concocted out of our own subjective wish that there be such a coherence.

Life is littered with tragedies and thus it is easy to suspect that this is because life is ultimately tragic in its essence. We arise out of nothing, struggle, and laugh for a few years in a seemingly random manner, and then we die in equally random ways, with some dying peacefully in their sleep at age 99 (including very evil people who deserved no such peaceful death), while others die hideously and in their youth. And then within a few short years of our death, even our loved ones stop thinking of us much at all.

Therefore, the young people of today who seek eternity do so precisely as that which has the capacity to liberate us from the archons of meaninglessness in ways eerily reminiscent of Christ vanquishing the capricious and often hostile “principalities and powers” of pagan antiquity.

Such then is our cultural milieu, in all of its raw and depressing glory, which is an ethos very close in spirit to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov and his tale of the Grand Inquisitor. There are three details in Ivan’s story that stand out to me. First, it is the fierceness of the Inquisitor’s indictment of Jesus as one who has freighted human moral agency with too much cargo. A fierceness the very moral force of which argues for its own refutation. Second, it is the silence of Jesus in the face of this criticism that is not the silence of one guilty, but of one who sees beyond vitriol and into the tortured soul of he who confronts him. It, in other words, is the silence of redemption. And third, the only response Jesus gives is to kiss the Inquisitor on his “bloodless lips”—a kiss so disarming that it leaves the Inquisitor shaken, with his arguments now strangely irrelevant.

Returning to the book of Job, what we witness is the dismantling of the various bad theodicies of Job’s friends. And it seems as if this is the main point of the text, wherein no satisfactory “explanation” is given as to the reason for Job’s sufferings, but a whole series of bad explanations are exposed as empty and impotent. And ultimately, the text is a kind of wondering out loud if human beings will still worship God even when things are going poorly, which was no small question for a people who at that time were still in the throes of a religion of worldly rewards and punishments in a strict calculus tied to human sins.

And just as Jesus gave no answer to Ivan’s fictitious inquisitor beyond a kiss on his bloodless lips, perhaps too the message of Job and of the psalms of lamentation, is one of salvation via the path of the recognition of the presence of eternity in the smallest and quietest and most seemingly insignificant of gestures. The inquisitor, for all of his rationality and power and bluster, is “bloodless.” Just as Pontius Pilate, for all of his Imperial regalia, is an ultimately lifeless pawn of the randomness of power’s perdurance in first this potentate and then the next. He is nothing. Hitler is nothing. And all suffering is the mere conglomerate residue of a distillated form of nothingness, the very nature of which as sheer nonbeing is constitutively random.

Juxtaposed to this regime of sin, this Imperium of nonbeing, this haphazardly adorned “Kosmos,” is an economy of salvation grounded in the christologically oriented apotheosis of our own moral agency. But now it is a moral agency whose telos is that of kenotic love, a love which is at once cruciform and, precisely insofar as it is cruciform and united to Christ, an intrusion of eternity into time. No “simple answers” to the problem of evil are proffered. Revelation gives us no such calm assurance of things. But what we are given is eternity in time in the form of a cruciform kenotic sanctity.

This is what the Church is and yet must still strive to be. It is a sanctity that ever struggles to be born. A Church capable of kissing the world’s bloodless lips with the electricity of eternity. Such is the sanctity that many young people also seek today: the sanctity of the silence of eternity. But a silence which ultimately issues forth into action. The late great David L. Schindler, meditating upon time, eternity, and sanctity puts it thus:

Curious men attend closely to the passing of events all about them. But such men merely drift along on these currents of past and future, remaining on their surfaces. It is the saint who truly penetrates the events of history. And the sense of the saint’s doing so is paradoxical; by apprehending time’s intersection with the timeless. That is, only through awareness of the eternal dimension in time does the moment of time become truly attended. And how is this awareness achieved? Only by “a lifetime’s death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”… This is the meaning of Incarnation; it is the Incarnation, this life-unto-death, that fills time with its meaning, that reconciles past and future. (Heart of the World, Center of the Church, 228–29)

This is the verticality and transcendence that young searching Catholics seek in the Church today. What they seek in the midst of modernity’s crucible of random meaninglessness is that kiss on the bloodless lips. And it is a kiss that can only be given by one who lives the Gospel authentically. That is what we all seek today in our Church. The sanctity of the silence of eternity which alone can pierce the randomness of evil. The still small voice of the crucified lamb who was slain.

But in point of fact, for the past 60 years Catholics have had to endure Church that has lost its faith, its nerve, its self-confidence, and its desire for eternity. A Church that seems to agree with Ivan’s Inquisitor that moral agency is of little importance, that everything is just “complicated circumstances,” turtles all the way down, and that there are no moral norms that pierce the darkness with their clarity. A milquetoast Church with an “optional Christ” who is really a lovely life-guide for those who want that sort of thing, but is not in any way truly necessary for salvation in an explicit way, and whose primary effects seem always to be in the hidden “unthematized” passageways of worldly aspirations. A Church where the quest for eternity is downplayed even as Fr. Rupnik runs free in Rome and Bishop Zanchetta spends his retirement with a soft-landing house arrest of cushy comforts after spending years in Rome under papal protection evading justice.

What young, serious Catholics seek, therefore, is not a pure and rigorist ecclesial Vallhalla, but a Church where forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and empathy are not interpreted via the path of antinomianism, but as the gateways to a sanctity of cruciform intensity. They seek eternity via a Church whose outer life, despite its sins, clearly and unapologetically calls us to the repentance of the way of the cross. A Church from the cross, of the cross, and for the cross. A Church that once again knows itself as a lantern in the darkness, no matter how feeble the flame, which can grant to us the gift of hope.

Young Catholics of today want Christ and Him crucified. This is why our ecclesial leaders must cease the narrative that views these young Catholics as “rigid indietrists” who are “fundamentalists” seeking a simplistic “epistemic certitude” in the midst of life’s “complicated concrete situations.” This is the monumental pastoral blindness of too many prelates in our era who fail to read the signs of the times as an agonistic search for eternity. They routinely misinterpret the thirst for an experience of eternity through the living adventure of the quest for sanctity as a form of religious neurosis in need of therapeutic ecclesial remediation.

But this is a fundamentally incorrect pastoral reading of our times. It is a tragically wrong reading of our times. And it has led directly to a Church that marginalizes young, fervent Catholics as neurotics even as Fr. Rupnik continues on in good standing.

Such a Church cannot kiss modernity’s aged, bloodless lips.

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Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22. Read Larry’s other WWNN essays.