I went and saw Sin City last week with Nick and Justin, and the various stories of grotesque evil followed by equally-grotesque vigilante justice sparked a rather deep conversation about the concept of justice with respect to God (our particularly [orthodox] Christian view, that is), and how this relates to the justice actually (or propagandistically, as the case may be) being done in the world, including everything from incarceration to the death penalty to the invasion of Iraq to World War II.
We had a regular, rousing philosophical discussion, and I was glad to once again be defining terms and weighing the morality / consistency of whatever actions we were considering. Despite my decision not to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, it seems I haven’t lost the taste for it entirely. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about that discussion per se, but instead one of the paradoxical conclusions we came to as a result.
Basically, there is a deep sense in which God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and Lord of all life, is unsatisfied. There is a deep sense in which he is sad. At first glance, this looks contradictory; how can a being who is wholly x (where x is any positive property), experience dissatisfaction or sadness? How could he experience pain? Doesn’t a perfect existence preclude pain? Certainly our (well, American Christianity’s) concept of heaven, as a state of unending perfect existence, doesn’t usually come with pain.
Our answer, as you might expect, had to do with the self-limiting nature of creating beings with truly free wills (which in itself is an area ripe for exploration, and gives new and tremendously insightful meaning to Christ “humbling himself and taking the nature of a servant”). But as I was reading Kierkegaard (his Philosophical Fragments) today, I stumbled upon another understanding, which has the sorrow of God as being, not merely the logical result of having to share the will space, but actually essential to his character–a result of his deep love for us. This isn’t particularly related to the question of justice, but I think it is even deeper. Here’s a passage:
Not in this manner, then, can their love be made happy, except perhaps in appearance, i.e. in the learner’s and the maiden’s eyes, but not in the Teacher’s and the king’s, whom no delusion can satisfy.
(Here, “love” refers to the love of a king for a humble maiden in a story referenced earlier, and the love of God for us, which was the analogical purpose of the king/maiden story. The talk of delusion goes back to the point of this part of the work, which is to attempt an answer to the question of how the king (God) could ever be sure of the humble maiden’s (our) love for him, and how their love is mutually understandable)
Thus God takes pleasure in arraying the lily in a garb more glorious than that of Solomon; but if there could be any thought of an understanding here, would it not be a sorry delusion of the lily’s, if when it looked upon its fine raiment it thought that it was on account of the raiment that God loved it? Instead of standing dauntless in the field, sporting with the wind, carefree as the gust that blows, would it not under the influence of such a thought languish and droop, not daring to lift up its head? It was God’s solicitude to prevent this, for the lily’s shoot is tender and easily broken. But if the Moment is to have decisive significance, how unspeakable will be God’s anxiety!
(The “Moment” is a complicated concept to elucidate, and it is what the whole work is about. Basically, it is about how we come to know eternally True things. Socrates’ view was that it is impossible to seek to know Truth, because if you already know it you cannot seek to know it, and if you do not know it, you do not know what you are seeking. His resolution is that we all have Truth latent within us, and it just needs to be “remembered”. Socrates, in his own view, simply helped people to remember in this way–he did not teach them in any real sense. Kierkegaard’s observation is that this act of remembering is much less significant than a deep “coming to know”, and so it minimizes the moment in which you “remembered” it. In other words, real conversion would be impossible! So Kierkegaard tries to think of another paradigm of Truth, where it is not latent within us but we are actively running away from it, as a result of free choice. The Moment gains significance now, in that we need a Teacher who will not just provide us with the stimulus to realize Truth, or the content of Truth, but must even give us the ability to comprehend it!)
But here’s the part I liked the most:
There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought that no man could see God and live.–Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! The minds of men so often yearn for might and power, and their thoughts are constantly being drawn to such things, as if by their attainment all mysteries would be resolved. Hence they do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he yearns for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved.
So we have here a fundamental paradox (or tension if you think paradox means contradiction) in the heart of God. Love demands that the lovers unite, and share their love! But the ontological inequality of humans and God (i.e., the humble maiden and the glorious king) demands that the king not reveal himself to the maiden, lest his magnificence destroy her (or worse, cause the magnificence to be the object of her love and not the king himself, which is again the death of love). It looks like God has a self-destructive goal: to unite with us in love entails that we (or the love) are destroyed, but if we are destroyed, there is no one with which to unite! What incredible sorrow this must be.
What is God’s response to this tension? To “not consider equality with God something to be grasped”, to become more humble than any human being (with “no place to rest his head”), in order to win our hearts in such a way that (a) our response of love is not a delusion, and (b) we are not destroyed.
Well, I wanted to share that because I don’t think I ponder often enough the humility of God, even the tentativeness that comes across here in the analogy of human love–in Kierkegaard’s terminology a care not to offend us. There is something central to our faith here, and it is, I think, the primary take-home point of the Incarnation–God took the nature, not just of a human, but of a servant. God, himself, put himself at our service, in the most humble way possible (dying), in order to ask for our love. And this was the only way to do it so that both he and we would be satisfied that our love is real, and not an illusion.
