Christopher Hitchens once made a very good argument for atheism. Recounting the roughly 200,000 years plus of human life, he images God sitting with his arms folded as human beings suffer through the various horrors from disease to tribal warfare to periods of starvation, low life spans and high infant mortality on their way to conquering nature and civilization. It is an odd thing to think about. It connects to my attempts to understand responses to Ivan Karamazov.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jngMdmbFtBo
One way of responding to his argument begins with a line of thought of Simone Weil. Her response does not try to defend God by explaining why suffering is justified. She accepts the moral force behind the protest voiced by Ivan Karamazov. Innocent suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and of children, is genuinely scandalous. It should not be explained away by clever arguments. Any theology that treats suffering as easily justified, she thinks, has already lost its moral seriousness.
Her starting point is a striking idea about Creation:
“God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.
The absence of God is the most marvellous testimony of perfect love.
It is because God loves us that he allows us to exist at a distance from him.” (“The Love of God and Affliction” in Waiting for God)
For creatures to exist at all, God must withdraw. If God were present in the world, everything would be determined by divine power and nothing could exist freely. Creation therefore involves a kind of divine renunciation. God allows the world to exist at a distance from himself so that human beings can possess real freedom and so that love can be a genuine response rather than a forced obedience. This idea resembles the Jewish mystical notion that God “contracts” or makes space for the world.
But this distance has a cost. Because the
world is not continually overruled by divine intervention, it contains the
harsh realities that Hitchens lists: disease, natural disaster, war, social
cruelty, hunger, and the long, difficult struggle of human life across history.
The world can therefore look like Ivan describes it: a place where God seems
absent while human beings suffer.
Weil further distinguishes between ordinary
suffering and what she calls affliction. Affliction is suffering that
crushes a person completely. It injures the body, humiliates the person
socially, and breaks the soul’s sense of meaning. She is thinking of
experiences such as slavery, starvation, war, or torture, i.e., situations in
which a person feels abandoned not only by society but by God himself. In
affliction the world truly appears godless. Weil refuses to deny that this
experience is real.
Where
she differs from Ivan is in how she interprets the Christian story. For her the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ means that God does not remain outside this
condition of abandonment. In Christ, God enters it. The cry from the cross “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” expresses the same sense of abandonment
that human beings feel in affliction. In this way God does not stand apart from
the suffering world but shares its distance and vulnerability. Divine power, in
this view, appears not as domination but as self-emptying love.
From this perspective the proper human
response to suffering is not to justify it but to face it with what Weil calls attention.
Attention means a disciplined openness to the reality of another person’s
suffering without explaining it away or turning away from it. To see the
afflicted person clearly, to refuse indifference, and to respond with
compassion and love is the true moral response. Attempts to rationalize
suffering often become a way of protecting ourselves from the reality of
another person’s pain.
Her position therefore turns the Hitchens' image upside down. Hitchens imagines God sitting outside history with folded
arms while humanity slowly fights its way toward civilization. Weil says
that God’s power lies precisely in renouncing that kind of control so that
creatures may exist freely. The same renunciation that allows freedom also
allows suffering. But the Christian claim, as she understands it, is that God
does not remain a distant observer of that suffering. He enters it and shares
it.
Thus Weil comes very close to the
moral protest expressed by Ivan Karamazov. She agrees that suffering cannot be
neatly justified by theoretical arguments. Where she differs is that she
believes the deepest response to suffering is not an explanation but an act of
love that shares in the suffering of others rather than standing apart from it.
For her the existence of suffering does not receive a philosophical solution;
it receives a moral and spiritual answer.
Weil’s thought comes very close to the
spiritual response embodied by Alyosha Karamazov. Alyosha does not answer
Ivan’s revolt with a philosophical explanation of suffering; he responds with a
form of love that refuses to abandon the suffering person. Where Ivan demands a
rational justification for the world, Alyosha offers fidelity, compassion, and
solidarity with those who suffer. Weil’s idea of attention expresses something
similar. The answer to the scandal of suffering is not a theory that explains
it away but a form of love that remains present to the afflicted and refuses
indifference. In both Weil and Dostoevsky, the deepest reply to Ivan’s protest
is not an argument but a way of living in which love confronts suffering
directly rather than trying to make it intelligible.
That would not have
satisfied the rationalist Hitchens.
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