jwilzewske: Identifying the Author(s) of Misery & Redemption: Meta-Bosnia, Misanthropy, Unnatural Lotteries, and the Almighty Blind Watchmaker

Jao meni, jao meni, u zali čas rojenu!”
[Woe is me, woe is me—I was born at the wrong hour!]
— Discourse No. 8, Vision of Tondal, tr. Katarina Livljanić, Dialogos

CMT: One thing that impressed me about last night’s Dialogos performance of the Vision of Tondal was the theology of the Glagolitic text. The moral status of Tondal’s actions was not what we would ordinarily find in Roman Catholic or Protestant traditions. The singing was truly beautiful. But, more than that, the text itself shed a glorious light on Croatian culture and medieval thought. The idea of suffering as Tondal’s (everyman's) bad luck.

DSM: There are, you know, two basic approaches to moral luck—an Aristotelian vulnerability (vulnerable to factors outside the person’s control), and the Kantian ambition to make morality immune to luck. These are not necessarily mutually incompatible. Additionally, there have been recent developments in virtue ethics and neo-Kantian ethics that add yet more approaches.

CMT: In its older forms, it’s a problem about the structure of the external world: if there is Fate, or some divine foreknowledge, or some cosmic mechanistic causality, do human beings really choose what they do and are they morally responsible for their actions? In its newer forms, it’s a problem about the structure of the internal self from which our actions emanate.

DSM: Modern scholarship has suggested that several parts of the Bible in Croat Glagolitic breviaries were initially translated from Greek but a later date were amended under the influence of the Latin Vulgate. Vajs and others believe that the Croat version of Ecclesiastes was translated from the Vulgate directly.

CMT: In fact, various translation mistakes in the Croatian texts reveal that the source for the Glagolitic translations was Latin. For example, Eccl 2:19 ‘et est quicquam tam vanum?’ [‘and is there anything so vain as this?’] is rendered as ‘i est vsacskim takoe razlicno?’ The translator misread the Latin vanum ‘vain’ for varium ‘different’ and translated it as razlicno [‘and is there anything so different/discrepant as this?’]. It diverts the meaning away from human free will and moral responsibility and redirects it to something, say, involuntarily or happenstantially matter-of-fact. Not determinism so much as just dumb luck, good or bad. This is inherent in the outlook that pervades other passages of the Croatian Bible. Evidently, the fatalistic perspective of the culture that influenced the early Croat bible translators was at odds with the Tondalian vision of moral responsibility. More recent translators have corrected the earlier mistakes and translated vanum as ispraznost. Of course, there are far greater liberties that have been taken with this text . . . The differences in wording and grammar between the texts in the Croatian Glagolitic breviaries and in the Ostrog Bible go way back.

DSM: Let me tell you a little bit of bizarre local North Shore Boston history—something that bears on theodicy and the Herzogian nature of the world. The idea of gravity specifically—or physics in general—as manifestations of the problem of evil. On Saturday, August 26, 1893, Edith Low Babson was swimming in the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and drowned in the current—a tragic, needless death of an innocent child; an undeserved horrible fate that a beneficent and omnipotent God should not allow. Edith’s older brother was Roger W. Babson, who grew up to become a prominent businessman of the early 20th Century, a statistician, philanthropist, and founder of Babson College. Roger was troubled by the problem of evil in the world, by the problem of bad things that happen to good creatures—troubled by theodicy. He was deeply affected by his sister’s death, as he was again many years later, in 1947, by the death of his grandson, Michael, who also drowned. One year after his grandson’s death, Babson dedicated a significant part of his wealth to establish the Gravity Research Foundation, which thereafter awarded an annual prize for theoretical research on gravitation, a prize whose winners include the likes of Stephen Hawking. Babson explained in a pamphlet published by the Foundation in 1948, “Gravity: Our Enemy Number One”, that the goal was to “alleviate the suffering for which gravity was responsible.” It was gravity that seized them “like a dragon and brought them to the bottom,” he said. The Foundation was chartered to support research toward developing an 'insulator' against the “evil and deleterious force of gravity.” You may like to see the Foundation’s website:

“Gravity Aids for Weak Hearts,” Grace K. Babson;
“Gravity and Health,” W. Stewart Whittemore;
“Gravity and the Weather,” Raymond H. Wheeler;
“Possibility of Free Heat,” William R. Esson;
“Is Free Power Possible?” George M. Rideout

CMT: There are some finite deists who take the position that God is not all-good. This position is actually very rare. It seems that most finite deists would rather have a good God who is weak than a strong God who is not all-good. Usually, those who feel constrained to give up the goodness of God, just give up the idea of God altogether. Nevertheless, some feel this is the best approach to the subject. Syllogistically, the argument looks like this:

If God were all-powerful, he could destroy evil.
If God were all-good, he would destroy evil.
But evil has not been destroyed.
Therefore, God is not all-good.

G od has purposefully placed us in a situation of less than optimal advantage and subject to more suffering and destruction than any purpose can account for. We have not been given good odds for success. This does not prove that there is no God but simply that we are dealing with a God capable of harshness more extreme than some people would use...”
— Frederick Sontag, “Anthropodicy and the Return of God,” in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2001, ed., Stephen Davis, p. 141.

DSM: One finite deist, John K. Roth, makes a strong denial of God’s goodness: “Everything hinges on the proposition that God possesses—but fails to use well enough—the power to intervene decisively at any moment to make history's course less wasteful. So, in spite and because of his sovereignty, this God is everlastingly guilty and the degrees run from gross negligence to murder...” (in Davis, Encountering Evil: Live Options In Theodicy, p. 11).

CMT: There is a another position on the problem of evil that says God Himself is the cause of evil and that He has included evil in the overall scheme of things for some specific, unfathomable purpose. Evil is in the world, we are told, because God wants it to be there. Those who take this position actually go so far as to say that evil is actually necessary for God to be able to carry out his purposes for mankind. Curiously, those who take this position usually hold to the view that God is both all-good and all-powerful. The idea is that moral perfection cannot be created ex nihilo: it must be developed. But since such growth is impossible apart from the experience of evil, it was therefore necessary for God to include evil in the world by His own design. According to this view, God designed evil to be in the world because evil is necessary for humankind’s spiritual and moral growth.

DSM: Yes, “a world in which there can be no pain or suffering would also be one in which there can be no moral choices and hence no possibility of moral growth and development” (John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy,” in Davis, Encountering Evil: Live Options In Theodicy, p. 46). Why? Because a morally wrong act is by definition an act that harms somebody else. But, if pain and suffering is structurally, constitutionally impossible, then no action could be morally wrong—and no person would ever face the challenge of overcoming the temptation to harm someone else. Consequently, no moral growth would occur.

CMT: So God must be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He must be eternal, existing before time and beyond time. He must be absolutely transcendent with reference to the physical universe and yet must operate in every part of it as its sustaining cause. He must create a Vale of Tears as a proving ground for morality. And if He does not do all of these things, then everything—including the basis for Good and Evil and moral action—supposedly collapses, right? That’s what they contend, right? They contend that I can have no rational basis for morally good action unless this peculiar kind of evil-causing God exists . . .

DSM: The philosophers and theologians who take this tack are gymnasts! This is a good time to point out that humans’ capacity for pain and, in some cases, even pain itself are not evils per se. In fact, the body’s pain mechanism works as a warning system that keeps us from injuring ourselves. Therefore, our capacity for pain seems to be absolutely necessary for living in this finite world. Philip Yancey says that although it is “the gift nobody wants,” man’s capacity for pain may be “the paragon of creative genius” (Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?, p. 21). However, there’s a big difference between humans’ capacity for pain including transient warning pains—and the horrific, prolonged agony of victims of certain diseases and human-inflicted torture.

CMT: Yes. What a desultory bit of backward logic it is! Without reward and punishment, there is no justice. Without justice, there is no judgment. Without judgment, there is no law. Without law, there is no lawgiver. Finally, if there is no lawgiver, then there is no God like the one described in the Bible. But there must be such a Lawgiver, and therefore we must have evil and punishment.

DSM: This is a weird argument that holds that punishment is remedial—that holds that the primary and divine purpose of evil and punishment is to reform a person’s character. A backward vindication of Law and the satisfaction of Justice. But is it so unreasonable to think that a good God would order His universe so as to make His subjects happy? Tondal—and other medieval and modern-day Croatians—face this challenge. At least the innocent Tondal didn’t agonize over what he might have done to deserve his suffering. He was just born at the wrong hour!

B orn at the wrong hour, forced to leave father and mother.

Who takes care of you now, who carries you around?

They suffered injustice and stayed in jails for endless terms,

Their lives trusted to a single tattered mat.

The Dead, their bones are buried in a dungeon corner.

When can your innocence be established and you be free?

Then there were the little babies—

How poignant your unformed cries must be!

Then, the ones drowned in rivers and rapids,

Those who slipped and fell from trees,

Those who died when well-ropes broke,

Those carried away in flood-waters, caught by fire.

Others met with mountain spirits and sea monsters,

Or got caught in wolves’ fangs, elephant tusks.

Some had children, but refused to raise them,

Others had abortions, others met with dire happenings.

Anyone walking on the road is likely to make a false step

And form endless queues with others on the Nei-ho bridge.

Who does not have his own distinct karma?

Where are they now whose souls and spirits have disintegrated?

Are you hiding in this bush or that clump,

Or are you hovering near brooks, amidst clouds?

Are you taking shelter under this grass-leaf or that tree

Or just wandering by this inn or that bridge?

For a time you take refuge in a temple or shrine

Or find lodging at the marketplace, near the riverbank.

Empty meadows also can provide you with places to stay

And so can a hillock, a bamboo grove, a sedge-clump.

Alive, all of you suffered one tragedy after another,

You spent days on end without food, in the biting cold,

For years exposed to the vagaries of life.

Yet now, you have to lament underground, sleep on dew,

Going into hiding every time the cocks crow

And groping your way out after sunset,

Forming dreary processions of children carried on the arms

And old people guided guided along.

Should you have knowing-power, come and listen to the Scriptures!

May you, through the Law, escape rebirth and reach the Pure Land!

May His Aureated Light save you from suffering, deliver you from darkness!

In the four seas and all the lands

May the Lord Buddha shake away our anxieties and cleanse our hatreds,

May the All-knowing and Omnipresent Buddha

Change the Wheel of Life in the three Worlds and Ten Directions!”

— Excerpt from ‘Summons to the Souls’, Nguyen Du (1765-1820) in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, tr. Nguyen Ngoc, W.S. Merwin, and Burton Raffel. Random House, 1975.

jwilzewske

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Identifying the Author(s) of Misery & Redemption: Meta-Bosnia, Misanthropy, Unnatural Lotteries, and the Almighty Blind Watchmaker

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