In Which Aquinas Answers Rebecca's Contention with Job

“The name of the Lord is truly blessed by men inasmuch as they have knowledge of His goodness, namely that He distributes all things well and does nothing unjustly.”
— Aquinas,
Commentary on Job, Chapter I, Section iii









Near the beginning of October Rebecca and I fell into an argument which concluded (as all such theological arguments tend to do) with Rebecca remarking, “Well, what about Job?”

And I sat there in silence. I knew what she meant, of course: “Why did God permit Satan to kill all Job’s sons and daughters, his cattle and sheep, his menservants and maidservants, and wrack his poor, frail frame with pestilential boils? And then leave his nagging wife and disputatious friends alive?”

It is a question with which I have been confronted many times in my life. Dr. Hopkins led us on a skeptic’s journey through the book of Job in Philosophy of Religion, a journey in which our final discussion (on the mountain-rending, glacier-cleaving terror of God’s concluding discourse) was memorably interrupted by the unwelcome intrusion of a singing telegram. I have also studied with interest the answer which Carl Jung formulated in Answer to Job, which was, in many respects, the culmination of his life’s work. Jung essentially maintains that God possesses both a light side and a dark side; that in encountering Job, He was confronted for the first time ever with the evil in His own nature; and that this was the moment when He decided to incarnate as Christ, and experience what it was like to be a man among men. When Christ re-ascended into heaven, Satan was cast down to the earth—God, you might say, was suppressing His shadow; but as all suppressed things eventually reemerge with still more potent ardor, evil is beginning to erupt into the natural realm, true, absolute evil, not the mere “absence of good” which Augustine argued was the real essence of evil (a negation, not an actual substance), but evil as a living entity, which is why the twentieth century saw tyrants, holocausts, and conflagrations on a global scale.

Which, whatever your perspective, is a fascinating theory. Probably not true at all. But fascinating.

Whatever the reason, though, I had never actually discovered the true explanation for Job’s sufferings, which is why whenever someone like Dr. Hopkins or Rebecca came along with questions like, “Well, might there, perhaps, be injustice in God?” I never had an answer. Besides all which, I wasn’t sure there was an answer; God could be as cruel and controlling as He wanted, and as long I didn’t ask too many questions, kept my head down and discharged my duties faithfully, what mattered it to me?

But then in the last few months I began to discover, through personal experience—the only way you really ever come to learn these things—that God is neither cruel nor controlling; that He is, in fact, light, and that in Him dwells no darkness at all (1 Jn. 1:5). In fact, as Tyler and Aquinas both argue, I felt controlled by God because I was controlled by sin. This is how it works: We are under the illusion that we have free will. We are not (Jn. 8:30-32). As even Melville knew, the soul that gives itself over to evil abdicates its freedom to choose (see Moby-Dick, Chapter 44). But Aquinas comes at it from another perspective. For him, the will is the slave of the judgment. The person who possesses a false understanding of God is goaded by his misperceptions (which are generally, on the deepest levels, willful) into acting against Him. It is only as the judgment aligns with the truth, as we see God for Who He truly is, the only Source and End of all good, that the will is freed to trust Him in surrender. We are thus incapable of following, or even loving Him, until we see Him as He is. We are enslaved to lies, and only Truth can free us. Thus my recent prayer: “Lord, grant me knowledge that leads to sight, and sight that leads to love.”

But the important thing to note here is the back-and-forth, symmetrical, parallel nature of it. Take my own life (please!) as an example. I viewed God as a tyrant, a maniacal, all-controlling despot. That He is not. But my perceptions were reinforced by the fact that whenever I wanted to refrain from committing a particular sin (any sin), I found myself unable. This occurred for a combination of reasons: one, because I was trying to fulfill the law (though I wouldn’t have called it that) to earn God’s favor, which I had already, and trying to fulfill the law can only draw you into further sin. You need the assistance of the Spirit of God. Two, I was unable to refrain from committing those sins precisely because of the way I viewed God, which made my will captive to sin. I felt controlled, and I was, not by God, but by my perception of God as all-controlling. It was my sense of being controlled that controlled me. And that all-controlling sense of being controlled bolstered my false understanding and imprisoned me in sin.

Wow. That’s heavy. Even heavier than Jung.

So, now that I had learned from experience that God is light, goodness, love, now that sweet waves of loving-kindness, not torment, were billowing over my soul, I was ready to receive the doctrinal foundation for the knowledge of His goodness. And—oh look, here comes Thomas Aquinas.

First, a bit of background—from the always-indispensable eleven-volume Story of Civilization:

When he was canonized [after his death] witnesses testified that he ‘was soft-spoken, easy in conversation, cheerful and bland of countenance… generous in conduct, most patient, most prudent; radiant with charity and gentle piety; wondrous compassionate to the poor.’ He was so completely filled with piety and study that these filled every thought and moment of his waking day. He attended all the hours of prayer, said one Mass or heard two each morning, read and wrote, preached and taught, and prayed. Before a sermon or a lecture, before sitting down to study or compose, he prayed; and his fellow monks thought that ‘he owed his knowledge less to the effort of the mind than to the virtue of his prayer.’ On the margin of his manuscripts we find, every now and then, pious invocations like Ave Maria! He became so absorbed in the religious and intellectual life that he hardly noticed what happened about him. In the refectory, his plate could be replaced and removed without his being aware of it; but apparently his appetite was excellent. Invited to join other clergymen at dinner with Louis IX, he lost himself in meditation during the meal; suddenly he struck the table with his fist and exclaimed: ‘That is the decisive argument against the Manicheans!’ His prior reproved him: ‘You are sitting at the table of the King of France’; but Louis, with royal courtesy, bade an attendant bring writing materials to the victorious monk. Nevertheless the absorbed saint could write with good sense on many matters of practical life. People remarked how he could adjust his sermons either to the studious minds of his fellow monks, or to the simple intellects of common folk. He had no airs, made no demands upon life, sought no honors, refused promotion to ecclesiastical office. His writings span the universe, but contain not one immodest word. He faces in them every argument against his faith, and answers with courtesy and calm.

May that truly be said of us, and all of us.

And so finally, yesterday, after perusing the first few chapters of a “biography” by Chesterton, and an introduction to his metaphysics, I sat down and began reading his commentary on the book of Job.

It is not without some measure of justice that this commentary is described as the finest commentary on Job ever written. Here I shall deal solely with the second lesson (Job 1:6-12), in which he establishes the theme and purpose of the whole work. In the process, Aquinas demonstrates not only that the intentions of God with respect to Job were good, but what exactly those intentions were. How does he do it? Let us take a look.

First: God is depicted seated on His throne in heaven, with the angels gathered round him (Job 1:6). This is to establish, from the beginning, the supremacy of God in all natural, supernatural, and worldly affairs: “Lest anyone think that the adversities of just men happen apart from divine providence… he first explains how God has care of human affairs and governs them.” Moreover, both the good and evil things which men do are subject to divine judgment.

But then Aquinas says something peculiarly fascinating. He notes that the text says, “On a certain day the sons of God presented themselves before the Lord,” and “Satan came also among them.” In the first clause, the sense is active, in the second, passive. It is as though the author wishes to emphasize that while the good angels, and, by extension, all who love Him, are willingly subject to His gaze, and willingly perform His will (see Ps. 110), the servants of wickedness perform His will, and are subject to His gaze, in a manner opposed to their own inclinations. “The wicked angels… do not intend that the things which they do are referred to God, but the fact that whatever they do is subject to divine judgment happens against their will.” Yet, at the same time, the passage says that Satan was “among them” to signify “that evil things are not done from a principal intention of God’s, but comes upon good men almost by accident.”

And then he goes a step further. The reason why evil becomes what it is, is because it seeks its ends apart from God. The good angels in all things follow the divine will. The rebellious angels, in rebelling, separate themselves from goodness, and are, by the very nature of their divergence, naturally corrupted.

In retrospect, I suppose this is essentially what Milton was aiming to show in Paradise Lost: not even the devils started out as devils. They were spurred to their rebellion by a lust for things which, in themselves, were good. Yet in warring against the very Fount of Goodness, they became perverse, malign, reptilian; till even the love of the things for which they had initially rebelled was lost to them forever. How dangerous it is for a Christian to quarrel with his God! Not because there is any danger of His blasting us to nothing—He has no desire to destroy us—but because we rage against the light itself, and no good thing can ever grow from darkness. If our course is not corrected by His mercy, we consign ourselves to hell.

The Lord then interrogates Satan: “Where have you come from?” This He apparently does to show that Satan to his inmost depths is known and seen by God, for in asking, He conveys to the Devil that He examines all the thoughts and intents of his heart. (I suppose if we accept that Satan found himself before the throne, instead of going there with willingness, this makes more sense.) It is one of many places in the Scriptures where God seems to be saying one thing, but in fact is expressing the opposite (Think of how He asked Adam, “Who told you you were naked?” thus conveying that He knew through inquiry). Satan, in the English translation of the Vulgate, responds, “From prowling through the earth.” Aquinas’ elucidation of this passage is beautifully rendered. Not only are we reminded of the line in the first epistle of Peter (“Your adversary, the Devil, prowls about like a roaring lion”), but also the various passages in the Psalms which show the wicked “prowling” (Ps. 12:8, 59:6, 14). “In prowling over the earth,” our pious friend explains, “Satan shows his craftiness in seeking out those he can deceive.” What does he mean by craftiness? In order to know that, we need to consider the path of the just, which does not deviate from its intended end. The righteous are established in their course; they know their goal, and they run towards it with abandon. The crafty, however, are not aligned with them in will nor end. They pretend one thing, yet they intend another. “Because therefore the action of the just does not diverge from its principle which is the will and from its intended end, straightness (rightness) is fittingly ascribed to the just.” Ah, how smart a lash that speech doth sting my conscience!

God responds, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on earth?” Satan has just finished explaining that he prowls about the earth. Like a proud father his child, God refers him to Job. “There is none like him on earth.” “The Lord seems to separate Job from the earth,” says Aquinas. “… However, this passage can also be understood in another way, for in each saint, there is some preeminent virtue for some special use… No one of those living on earth was like Job in that he excelled in some special use of virtue.” George MacDonald memorably wrote that we are each of us a rare and radiant flower in the garden of God, growing up to the praise of some particular glory which is ours alone.

And then, at last, Aquinas makes the crucial statement: “Consider that God not only orders the lives of the just for their own good, but he represents it for others to see.”

However, this representation has a twofold effect. In the saints, it inspires charity and burning ardor. In the wicked, in the carnal, whether saved or damned, it provokes a near-continuous eruption of envy, malice, judgment, and false accusation (2 Cor. 2:15). “Thus God wants the life of the saints to be considered not only by the elect for the progress of their salvation, but also by the iniquitous for the increase of their damnation, for from the life of the saints the perversity of the impious is shown to be blameworthy, as Wisdom says, ‘The just man who has died condemns the impious who are alive’ (Wisdom 4:16).”

And that is precisely why the Devil responds as he does: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Those who can find no taint of blame in the lives of the holy are driven to accuse their intentions, which they cannot see, because they are unable to imagine that anyone could live a life of such devotion.

Satan challenges God: “Put forth Your hand and touch all that he has, and see if he will not curse you to your face.” Aquinas writes, “Note that even the hearts of truly just men are sometimes badly shaken by great adversity, but the deceitfully just are disturbed by a slight adversity like men having no root in their virtue.” (I should note that Aquinas makes useful side remarks like this throughout the second section. I have reluctantly refrained from typing all of them, but they are well worth reading. For example, he gives an extended discourse, in the first few pages, on the nature and purpose of angels. Says The Story of Civilization: “Thomas writes ninety-three pages [in the Summa Theologica] on the hierarchy, movements, love, knowledge, will, speech, and habits of the angels—the most farfetched part of his far-flung Summa, and the most irrefutable.”)

Aquinas’ conclusion renders God, not despotic, not tyrannical, not easily seduced by Satan, but GLORIOUS in His purposes and attributes:

From what has been said already it is clear that the cause of the adversity of blessed Job was that his virtue should be clear to all. So Scripture says of Tobias, ‘Thus the Lord permitted him to be tempted so that an example might be given to posterity of his patience, like blessed Job’ (Tob. 2:12). Be careful not to believe that the Lord had been persuaded by the words of Satan to permit Job to be afflicted, but he ordered this from his eternal disposition to make clear Job’s virtue against the false accusations of the impious. Therefore, false accusations are placed first and the divine permission follows.

God wanted to vindicate Job. This He wanted to do, both for the honor of His saint, and for the glory of His name. He knew Job’s name would be preserved forever, and forever prove a consolation to the grieving and afflicted. He afflicted Job, in short, because of His faith and delight in the love of His son. In this, as Chesterton, has noted, he was not unlike the Son of God Himself.

"All the Subtle Demonisms of Life and Thought"

I wish to elaborate on some lines which I began tracing in the previous chapter.

It occurs to me that in noting some of the psychological reasons for the friction which eventually developed between me, Booth, and Augustys, I neglected the supernatural entirely. Lately I feel I’ve acquired from the Holy Spirit a certain measure of understanding on the nature of subtle, insidious demonic influences—what Carl Jung called “autonomous complexes,” by which he appears to have meant transpersonal entities acting on the psyche (“devils” or “demons,” in the common tongue). I’ve been continuously picturing knots for several days now. When you start feeding on an obsession, be it lust or rage or bitterness or excess of sorrow, it’s as though you’re chewing on things which aren’t entirely digestible. Your spirit wasn’t created to sustain within itself the noxious fruits of sin. But over time, as appetite increases, that evil begins to accumulate. It builds inside of you in knots. In the way that a cat, when in the act of cleaning itself, will swallow incidental bits of fur, so sin accumulates; and, if unchecked, the end result will be the same. Sin is a knot that grows with morbid pace, and often undetected haste.

Yes, that’s close to the feeling of what it is I’m trying to express. I’m finding that sometimes the easiest, most thorough way of understanding sin is watching it within yourself, though it makes you something like a specimen beneath a microscope—yourself the student and the subject! If you pour enough grease into a sink, it eventually coagulates and clogs the drain. We can take, for a useful example, the dream about Cassie which I had last week. In this dream (amid several other surprising events), I dated a girl who was wispy, clingy, ghostly, airy, insecure, and half-idiotic. The girl represents what some (myself included) would label a spirit; others (myself included) a psychological complex of sin. Practically and functionally, the truth is that I gave lenience to particular sins in the past (and sometimes even to the present day); yet in praying about it God showed me that the path to deliverance wasn’t exorcism, but sustained pursuit of holiness. So is it demonic? There’s certainly a greater capacity for interference by transpersonal forces; I’ve opened what many Christians call a “window” (or a “door”) to the workings of evil; yet the way to dispelling the complex is untangling the knot—in other words, making conscious decisions every day to follow righteousness. And doing so has banished it almost entirely (for the time, at least), in the space of only a few days.

Thus the simple wisdom of James begins to make profound sense: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).

Shakespeare actually wrote about this in Hamlet—in a passage blazing with inspiration and holiness, as in most of the play—though the metaphors are different:

Hamlet:
Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker…

Queen:
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!

Hamlet:
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half!
Good night: but go not to mine uncle’s bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise puts a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
And either [master] the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.

I felt something just now in the act of reading over everything I’ve written to this point in the present entry. Surprisingly, it’s not a feeling that I feel with regularity. I was struck by the seeming anachronism of the juxtaposition between my psychological descriptions of the spiritual processes at work in myself, and my (relatively cautious) understanding of demonic power; between the earnest, unquestioning citation of a verse in the New Testament of the Bible, in one paragraph, and the immediate transition to Hamlet, in the next—with the inevitable allusion to Jungian theory.

I feel that this kind of combination isn’t very common in Christian America: Those from the relatively orthodox denominations (evangelicals and, increasingly, Charismatics) have pursued their faith with such ferocious, combative tenacity that they haven’t developed a lot of understanding in what we would normally consider the “extra-religious” realms, with the possible exception of politics. Our reaction to the cesspool of immorality which constitutes so much of modern culture has been to barricade the culture out, but what have we brought in? I haven’t seen this argued in very many places, but I would guess that one of the primary reasons why there’s such a dearth of heritage in the modern American evangelical community is because we’ve been continuously embattled for a generation. The American Pageant quotes John Adams as saying, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain” (from a letter to his wife, dated 1780).

Not that this is the only reason: Much of it, I feel, is either sin or ignorance. That’s a strong claim, but I make it in the memory of what I endured at [Nameless Bible Institute], during what Bethany called my “Siberian exile,” and what I saw of the state of learning at what I had believed to be one of the foremost evangelical graduate schools in the nation. The professors there appear to have been under the delusion that Christianity didn’t begin until around 1950; in all my classes, we were never assigned to read a book written earlier than that (and several of my assigned texts had been written by the professors themselves). So it tears at my heart, not only that the average devoted, zealous Christian has so very little concept of the history and literature of the world, which in many cases he already views as irredeemably evil, but he isn’t even being taught the history of his own faith. Oh, I could forgive the generation of my peers their single-minded study of religion, if it meant that they were really learning it; but in many respects they aren’t. In this I indict myself along with everyone else. We know more about Creationism than the Council of Nicaea, more about the pre-Tribulation Rapture than we do about Polycarp. And we’ve never even heard of Dante! Lately whenever I reference the Comedy, I have to preface the allusion with a lot of elaborate explanations about how there was a man in the middle ages who wrote a long poem about heaven and hell, etc… (having to leave out any mention of Purgatory, of course, as Papal nonsense). Dante is possibly the greatest, and was, at one point, the most famous poet in all Christendom. So not only do we as a body not know history or literature, etc., etc., but we don’t even really know Christianity. I believe that the Christian culture in this country is embattled, but at least from my own experience it seems their preferred method of fighting is to ignore the whole history of warfare, and to focus their attention on inventing completely new weapons made out of straw.

I can see how a person might receive the impression, from reading over everything I’ve written so far, that my purpose is for Christians to acquire an astonishing and (to their enemies) intimidating superflux of knowledge. Well, this is definitely MY aim, but to limit it thus would be missing the point. There’s nothing which the modern world possesses in greater abundance than knowledge, and nothing to which it puts more scattershot, destructive, undiscerning use. The things we need are simple curiosity, coupled with a sense of wonder, and an understanding of God which surpasses the bounds of religion to find Him in every good thing.

And what I finally began to see in my own writing (though of course I’ve witnessed it developing and taking root in other mediums as well, particularly in the modest, but significant, Christian intellectual and artistic flowering of the last decade) is a millenarian, fundamentalist Christianity which seemed not even a little out of place in the context of the whole philosophical and literary history of the culture which it helped to create. It shouldn’t feel out of place, at all, and that’s my point. The Bible, even now, is ahead of our time; as Chesterton said, in another context, “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” The great things of history, the things which we as a generation, Christian and non-Christian alike, have so callously disregarded, are the fruits on the tree of a spiritual history and a spiritual heritage which Christians are no longer willing to claim, and non-Christians are no longer willing to acknowledge. It is impossible to imagine the last 2,000 years in Western painting, sculpture, literature, philosophy, architecture, or any other of a dozen areas without Jesus. Yet we as the body of Christ have done so; as if we could burn down the first floor of a house because we liked the second better. At the end of the day, all we’re left with is ashes, and the scorn of the nattering multitudes.

Ashes and scorn—this is our cultural inheritance. Brethren, these things ought not so to be.

Yet it goes even beyond that; this is a far bigger issue than just cultural literacy, though that’s important, too. The thing that gets me about it, more than any other practical or even theological consideration, is that it maligns the character of God and makes Him only vaguely, coldly knowable. The most prominent symptom, and most injurious result, of an over-attachment to religion, as opposed to the person of Jesus, is an inability to conceive of God in anything but narrowly-confined religious terms. Thou all-creating, everlasting, and transcendent God! Chiefly known to us through Thy Son, and by His cross—Thou madest all things, and for Thy sake they are and were created. Thy way is in the whirlwind and the storm—in the fox and the flower—on stage and on screen! There is no place so dark that is not lit with some spark of Your radiance. And Your kingdom will cover the earth—not merely with laws and proscriptions—but in every conceivable way.

That is the revelation burning in my spirit which, more than any other revelation, with one significant exception, I feel called and bound by love to release upon our generation. Until we can see God and learn of Him, with Spirit-directed understanding, no less readily through a tulip or a tiger than a testimony, no less deeply through an actual examination of the seas, than through a fruitless and unevolving debate about their age and origins—until we have, if not the ability, than at least the willingness, to see as the work of His hands the witness of George Wishart (1513-1546) or Latimer & Ridley (d. October 1555), no less than the men and women who initiated and carried the Azusa Street Revival (1906-1915); until we can recognize His Spirit peering out at us, as from behind a veil, through the faces sketched by Rembrandt and Van Gogh; until we come to view the world and its possessions as gloriously alive with His presence, for ever and ever, the inheritance of saints, we have not yet fully grasped the heart of that universal law laid down by the Psalmist and the prophets, even in the centuries of pre-incarnate darkness: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” “The whole earth is full of His glory.”

Newton's Laws of Motion

What does the work of an economist tell us, not about the financial transactions, but the souls of men? What would a “shifting comparative advantage” look like when shifted, so to speak, to the realm of the spirit? These are the questions we must ever have in view. For example, in one of the key scenes in The Count of Monte Cristo, the old priest in the prison is teaching Edmond Dantes economics and science. He strikes two stones, one against the other, and says, “For every reaction, there is an equal reaction, in physics—and in life…” to which Edmond concludes, “My quest for vengeance is a reaction against the evils committed by Mondago and Danglars.”

“Precisely,” says the priest.

That was the exact realization which I had myself yesterday when I was reading about the flowering of the Scientific Revolution in The Age of Louis XIV. Actually I had the revelation several days ago, in regards to the nature of pride, but hadn’t yet made the connection to the laws of science, till my studying suggested it. My revelation ran thus: The nature of pride is to oppose itself in others; so that two prides are ever striking against one another, like the clashing rocks that at one point threatened to destroy Odysseus (the Symplagledes, I think they were called).

This is how it works: Let’s imagine that I’ve developed, for reasons owing both to my own insecurity and defensiveness—a defensiveness which has been long building from a combination of disillusionment with the Church, frustration with authority, and irritability at the chafing limitations imposed on the vainglorious ambitions of my spirit by the mere fact of my own finitude, which I then turn around and blame on the farcical, footling confines of the narrow and repressed society in which I live—let’s imagine, I say, that I’ve developed a grudge against religion; subtle and unseen, in that even I’m not much aware of it. If you had asked, I’m sure I would tell you I’m a pretty churched-up chap; and I would think that the truth.

It’s an axiom among religious types, that anyone I find to be more radical than I am, is a fanatic. We’re pretending that I have a slow-accreting, subtle, in-built grudge against religion, and against religious folk. And, to continue with the fantasy, another person comes along; this person is religious in a particularly irritating sense, meaning he harbors the sort of religion most provoking to my pride, by conjuring up, in my own fancy at least, if not in the reality, everything that I find unsavory about my religion (which I half-despise already, without even being aware of it). He quotes from the Bible; claims that certain men and certain women have, at certain times, been given the ability to hear the voice of God; blushes at the thought of nudity or sex; gives long lectures on the nature of prophecy and the nobility of waiting; listens to the most appalling music; in sum, does things which seem inspired by some devil in the depths of hell to chase me from my own religion, by exaggerating its worst aspects, as the convex lens on the inside of a telescope, to an unsustainable degree.

And why would this malevolence be accumulating, all the while, like an obscene pearl, on the small dust of my original irritation? Because of an angry, unrighteous pride, born out of a defensive sense that in everything my fanatical fool of a friend is doing, he’s passing a cool, corresponding unspoken judgment on me and all my ways.

Meanwhile, what is my religious friend thinking? Well, my religious friend is angry and defensive. My religious friend views every mere breath of an argument blown, even but lightly, in the face of his faith, as an affront to his dignity, and not only to his own, but, far more, to the glory of the cosmos—the glory of the heavens—the glory of God! My religious friend is insecure because he doesn’t even believe in his faith as much as he would like; still regularly questions his most cherished tenets, though he would never admit so to me, whom he already more than half-suspects of harboring hatred towards him; sees the world but as a sinister, ignoble shadow-show, where evil, cackling men (who constitute the majority) beat up on the lesser, meeker men (comprised of himself alone, primarily) who become so flustered and angry whenever argument is joined that they can’t even defend their own positions, but retreat into personal attacks, and pointed, irrelevant allusions to their own superiority (“Who wins the Quizbowl tournaments? I ask you!”).

My meek, intelligent, religious friend considers himself, in the secret places of his heart, neither meek, nor intelligent, nor religious, which is why he becomes, at times, so wildly self-assertive in defense of each. He’s painfully sensitive to slights and injuries; grows angry when another person, like myself, wonders aloud whether Handel really saw the heavens opened, when he wrote Messiah, or notes the corruption inherent in religious institutions. He has actually taken on himself the responsibility for all religion, through the ages; and thus feels a corresponding need to defend it all, from paving-stone to spire.

Why does he feel thus freighted with such dreadful weight of purpose? The truth is, because of his own pride. If I’m sometimes going to rile him, by questioning the tenets of particular religions, he feels that he has to lock himself into a solidly religious position, by defending everything. He can’t accept the culpability of Catholic priests in abusing children, or at any rate can’t accept that the hierarchy of the Church was responsible for provoking, and stoking the problem. Why? Because in order to do so, he must needs agree with me! When he knows, or thinks he knows, that all the while, I’m really attacking the Church because I hate religion; and so consequently, inevitably, the implication is that I must hate him.

Thus irreligious pride, and its religious cousin, shove against each other; and one pride takes particular pleasure in riling another’s. And each of us takes particular pleasure in condemning the passions of the other as useless, like the two popes who both held the throne of Peter, at the same time, and each of whom damned the other to an everlasting hell. And just as Newton discovered that the force applied to a body in physics produces a proportional (and opposed) acceleration, so that one ball slamming against another will provoke a precisely-corresponding level of violence as it flies in the opposite direction; in the same manner, my own pride, bounding against the pride of my erstwhile companion (now my foe in all but name), provokes that in his nature which causes him to rebound against me with the same vehement loathing.