I had wanted to write more in recent weeks, but the past month or so has been rather eventful in my family. (If you know, you know.) I don’t have a ton of time right now, as I’m trying to study for an exam and write a paper without a babysitter, but I wanted to share, if briefly, some thoughts on life, death, and evil.
Earlier this year, I read The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I read it. I often hear that the Catholic Church has been anti-Semitic throughout its history, and I also hear that that is an anti-Catholic myth. This book was nuanced enough to be believable, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. Chapter 11, “The Final Solution,” begins like this:
The chronicler of antisemitism is beset at every turn with the problem of superlatives. Long before reaching the contemporary scene, he has exhausted his supply and has been forced to re-enlist many for double duty, certainly at the risk of straining the reliance of his reader. The problem is not only verbal but real. From the first literary strictures against Judaism in ancient and early Christian times to almost any major manifestation of anti-Jewish animus in a later epoch, a crescendo in violence has unfolded. The progression from early riots to the Crusades, to the Black Death, to Chmielnicki, to Czarist pogroms, to World War I has comprised an ascent in horrors, each grade of which promised to be the upper limit but which unfailingly paled before what followed.
Like many, I have often wondered why God did not prevent these evils. I have read a fair amount about the problem of theodicy and how God can be both good and omnipotent if evil exists, and I’ve found Pope John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris most compelling in a large part because it does not give an answer.
But if evil must exist, why did God allow so much of it? Why didn’t he permit the flu and stubbed toes but prevent murder, torture, and rape? Maybe, at the first moment the human race turned away from him, he could have considered the evil of which we are capable, and said “I’ll allow some of it, but I’ll prevent the absolute worst of it from happening.” But here we are, in a world scarred by horrors perpetrated by human beings.
And then I wonder, what if he did? What if he did prevent the absolute worst evil that we are capable of, or what if he is preventing it? What if untimely deaths and eerie coincidences and myriad other events of which we remain unaware are actually divine intervention preventing the worst that we could do? And what if the most horrific things that people have done are actually benign compared to what we would otherwise have done? It’s a scary thought.
Anyway, I’m reading Spe Salvi by Pope Benedict XVI, and it seems that St. Ambrose had a similar thought. Here’s Benedict:
But then the question arises: do we really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living for ever —endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable. This is precisely the point made, for example, by Saint Ambrose, one of the Church Fathers, in the funeral discourse for his deceased brother Satyrus: “Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life, because of sin ... began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting labour and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing” (10).
When Adam and Eve turned away from God, they brought death to the world. St. Ambrose sees death as a mercy, a way of limiting the amount of evil we can do. We don’t want to die, but if St. Ambrose is right, the world would be much, much worse if we lived forever in our fallen state in this fallen world.
Let us, therefore, be grateful for Christ’s death that won for us eternal life, not the “monotonous and unbearable” tedium of an endless life on this valley of tears but a new kind of life, eternal union with him who is the source of love, peace, joy, fulfillment, and goodness itself.
I’d never thought about evil in this way before, but a high school friend once told me something that would seem to confirm your point. His 9th grade younger brother was in a crash, lying in a coma for months before he died. My friend saw the mercy of God in the situation, saying that if his brother had lived, he was likely to have gotten into trouble, perhaps losing his salvation. My husband says similar things about his disabled brother. Who can understand the depth of God’s mercy?