Marriage and the problem of evil
Not for nothing was the collection of pope John Paul’s first series of
Angelus reflections entitled ‘Original Unity’ - a counterfoil to Original
Sin. His corpus of addresses launched a developed theology of the
body and later Evangelium Vitae - to commemorate the watershed
encyclical of Paul VI: Humanae Vitae, now 50 years old.
Going to the opening of scripture, the target of malice was the
togetherness of our first human parents: a togetherness that, if left
unimpeded, the devil would see producing other human beings able in
flesh and bone, spirit and truth, to love God with a love that he, a being
‘of elevated order’, had rejected. The angel ‘of light’ (lucifer is light-
bearer) had to attack what would have been a shaming.
God, for his wise reasons, didn’t warn Adam or Eve that some created
beings were bound and bent to contradict Him. Probably our parents
would not have had the guile even to understand anything like a
mendacious contradiction of their maker. Although God warned them
of death, they really couldn’t have understood that either, any more
than a baby in the womb understands birth.
As St. Augustine concluded after long rumination, answers to problems
like: why God who is all good would allow powerful beings who turned
from Him to tempt much less powerful innocent beings, are not for the
human mind to gain, unaided. But the what was an efficient way to
exercise our free moral will, for involuntary love would have been too
meagre for God. Many doctors have explained this much of free will.
Some of our betters have asked why God might even make creatures
that He could foresee would become radically evil in turning from Him.
If evil is the radical opposition of good as I’ve been saying, the problem
remains how a creature created as well as any other could or would
find or create and seize a moral vacuum. But where the fallen intellect
is not up to it, the innocence of Adam and Eve was in a sense ‘above
it’.
It puzzles why Eve did not put to the serpent a question: “how is it that
you, a creature, know something contrary to what our Maker has said
to us, also creatures?”. But it must not have even entered her mind
that a creature of the all good God could in any way deceive. If
Augustine dressed-up could appear and warn her from the future, like
Scrooge she’d say “this is so beyond our ken that we have to dismiss it
as indigestion”.
We cannot fail to see that in satan’s cross-hairs was human progeny,
man fulfilling God’s mandate to fruitfully multiply. The dreaded
multiplying he halved right away, provoking Cain to kill Abel in jealous
rage. Then he’d whip tribes into such debauchery that only the family
of Noah could survive the purging (starting maybe in Turkey’s Valley of
the Eight). Through the ages this insatiable enemy would not be
satisfied to snare any number of souls in his netherworld: he had to
repeatedly foment mass genocides.
The fact that God visited death on Adam without eradicating his
progeny was a sign - resented by satan - that through marriage the
human race should endure until the woman’s anointed seed would
crush the serpent’s head. We may picture an insidious viper, but
Apocalypse sees this whom God rebuked as a dragon able to pull a
third of the luminaries (even other angels) from the firmament. It was
no little asp with darting tongue.
The plurality man and woman, the community of love as the image of
God in His own triune Love, satan clearly hated. He teased us apart,
tempting Eve aside, and then prodding Adam (who’d no trouble taking
her lead) to shun his wife, ‘that woman’. If Eve had been first taken in
the snare of curiosity, that was because there were two of them and
she got the draw. Adam could as easily have gone to seek a closer
look at the forbidden fruit. Likely (to speak figuratively) it was shiny
enough to reflect a face, turning attention of self to self, setting up a
Narcissistic vulnerably and suggestibility. The word ‘repent’ has ever
since meant, ‘turn back to God’.
One of the punishments of our forebears was to have to struggle - and
at that not prevailingly, as the ground would yield few harvests without
thorn and weed. Morally neutral entropy (destructive if locally
unchecked) had ascendancy over life. The remaining fact of work was
real promise of survival, but not of any one individual.
We read of a cosmic ‘groaning’ till revelation of the sons of man .. also
called the new Jerusalem. Mankind could not afford leisure - not with
wives and children - unless some obtained the power of control over
others. The love of power or control lies very near the appeal of
science, which to remain innocent requires an acuity of conscience
much finer than we’ve become accustomed to in a technological can-
do age. Holy monks and sisters might be safer in the pursuit of
science, of which they were often fathers and mothers; but we seem to
be long past that.
Another punishment was that, Eve and Adam in love before, now
would also feel tension of (largely unrequited) desire: “your desire for
your husband” on one hand, and childbearing pain on another. No-one
fully knows the etiology of such pain or its extent; random stabs as
recent as the 1960s included fetus-risking epidurals, and thalidomide -
a sport drug for back-pain - which induced deformations and even
death of offspring.
The angst of rearing children and the often earth-scraping labour of
sustaining them began to act as anaphrodisiac, giving scope to a
temptation to separate the more immediate pleasures from the great
promise of procreation. Sex took on the trappings of a ‘sport’ - a
padded one at that.
It is wrong of course to see God as author of desolate pain and difficult
tension. Rather, the outcome - less disastrous than the immediate
destruction of the human race desired by satan - was what is
unpacked by radical disobedience and woeful choices not fully to love
God both as individuals and as a couple. It had not happened without
warning. In the baggage were death rattles as sudden as murder, or
slow disease and mouldering corruption starting even in this sojourn,
as is dementia.
If evil were simply the absence of good, or just a lie against truth (albeit
that these are key elements or methods of the evil one) then God could
hardly draw ‘good’ (think of the barren fig tree), whereas He very often
does so, signifying His infinite superiority to the author of evil. The lie is
a terrible thing, well described as absence of truth, but it doesn’t exist
on its own: it has an author, who seeks receptive listeners.
While God is all-powerful it is true that there is a key sense, because of
total goodness, that he cannot do what is evil. Another way of saying
that is, whatever God does defines ‘good’. What we often call ills and
‘evils’ God acknowledges that yes, He visits upon souls as
punishments, to steer them aside from what is worse: a final death that
would conform in all respects to physical death. That is good.
Dylan Thomas chimed ‘after the first death there is no other’. But that
secular belief echoes Nicodemus in failing to see that after the first
birth there needs to be another. What satan wanted out of physical
death was final captivity in the spiritual death that he accuses any saint
of having deserved; and but few are not guilty.
This is what we call second death, even though its condition or
begetting fault occurs before the other, after which there’s no more
chance to reform. Think of a soul who sets his house afire and flees to
the upper floor: when that floor falls through (first peril), if there
remained nothing sound beneath - or a rescuing net - then all is lost
(the second).
The implicit hope which God gave our race by allowing its continuance,
work, progeny and consolations - especially the promise that the lying
head of satan would be crushed - gave Adam and Eve reason to hope
for redemption, though they die. Even when one son murdered the
other (and thus burnt his lower floor), their hope did not refrain from
love, and Seth too was received from the Lord.
Birth and then, fie, second birth has ever been, the target of satan’s
wrath. Given the family as the very cell of the mystical body of Christ
on earth: that fulness of help [paraphrasing Vatican II] to the second
birth we call salvation, the family must be the singular target.
For satan, marriage has to fall everywhere, and it’s not enough that
some cosy Christian countries will hold to the sanctity of marriage
while the rest of the world runs to the bonfire of the vanities. Infernal
dupes must attack bastions of conscience wherever they are.
Normative love relations between men and women have to be
undermined and treated as anything but ‘normal’, but as sport or as
phobic aberrations conceived in bigotry.
Marriage and family are bedrock to moral education, which the
adversarial state must replace with dictated ‘conscientiousness’. Male
and femaleness are put in dialectic tension, making the distinction
antithetical. Starting from lustful objectification, what John saw as great
whoring, pornography nails it with a flourish. Contraceptive mentality
follows, with every means, including abortifacient drugs to destroy the
living reminder that sex is something infinitely greater than a
conscience-concussive contact sport.
Where seniors are ousted from the ring, ageist disdain takes hold:
have sex appeal or fade. The birth dearth diminishes the young cohort,
to bear medical costs increasingly burdensome. Care of elders takes a
beating, as sophisticates call for euthanasia behind the wedge, the
falsely presumed ‘right’, of assisted suicide. A supreme court of nine
ruled that to keep a Guillaume-Barre patient alive till she’d lose the
ability to commit suicide unassisted, amounts to infringing on her right
to life. Such ‘enlightenment’ makes true light dark, calls darkness light,
and dulls minds that might have known ‘hard cases make bad law’ so
that they slip on the slime of adders.
Summation, or consummation of all things
When God said that the proud head of satan would be crushed, He
didn’t say that the world will rejoice. Before the definitive saving work of
the cross, Jesus posed the question “when the Son of man returns, will
he find justice in the earth?” Will anyone care or heed that He spoke to
their conscience? In Apocalypse, at the start of woes, two just souls
will seem to the world as oppressors, and will be put to death .. when
all the nations party in unbridled gayness.
Jesus cites the prophecy He, being the Word, had inspired in Daniel:
the abomination of desolation will be set up in the Holy of Holies, the
place where it ought not to be. While historians think this was fulfilled
within seventy years at the profanation of Jerusalem by Rome, it is
doubtful that Jesus was satisfied to peak on the subject of the end-of-
ages by reference to a soon impending invasion. As always He also
spoke spiritually, for the abomination of desolation is that which makes
desolate - infecund and barren, physically and spiritually.
A contraceptive mentality within marriage, sanctioned in ‘the place it
ought not to be’, will be seen to be accepted even by some who serve
the Holy of Holies: the Mass itself. A prophetic Oblate of Mary priest,
the late John Mole would say, Motherhood and the Mass are
inseparable. By the love act of the blessed sacrament, God converts
and sustains all his children who are destined to a second birth.
The radical adversaries of God and his other creatures are pure spirit,
less detectable than the wind, yet more powerful than gales. Like
Judas (“one of you a devil”) they were present with God, rejoicing at
his creation of the cosmic firmament. John Cassian gives evidence,
“when the stars were made all together, all my angels praised Me with
a loud voice” [Job 38:7] suggesting that satan’s fall followed after the
making of man’s habitat on earth - “I beheld lucifer cast down like
lightning, into the earth”. Some have said that man or God’s plan for
him occasioned satan’s fall, as his angels could not countenance
God’s love for mere flesh, even His hypostatic union with it. The
malaise yet afflicts many followers of a certain ‘prophet’.
Hereafter scripture warns of the ‘Spirit of the World’ which comes to
hold sway over the minds of persons in power and influence - unseen
powers and principalities named by St. Paul. The failure to turn in spirit
and truth to God can only mean subtle enslavement, for we must have
a master, which cannot be “both God and Mammon”.
The problem of evil: ‘why would a good God make unwilling beings or
allow evil to be visited on unwitting creatures’, may seem to surpass
the mind. However, it cannot be totally past us, if God who is ever so
much greater than any ‘problem’ can yet be “touched by our mind” to
use St. Anselm (or even Leonard Cohen, in reverse). We can glimpse
the higher plan, the outcome of salvation that God has worked for all
the world lost in condemnation. Condemned it stood, yet He saw to
making a sure means for willing souls to be saved from the ‘second
death’, even as we do lament the first.
“The death of the just looked like a disaster”, but yet the going of the
upright was life eternal. To God, one’s death - timely or untimely - but
meets in itself the necessity of the broken primordial law: by the
disobedience which brings death, ‘it is appointed to all to die’. Yet woe
to any who, like Cain, participate with the vengeful devil in perpetrating
it. This accuser of saints comes up against the parental role that only
God can have; for vengeance does not belonging to the vengeful: it
belongs to God. His slowness of anger only unchains the power of the
‘venging spirit on the obdurate and unrepentant.
If the punishment for breaking the first law was death, the final law of
Christ “love one another as I have loved you” is all mercy and life.
Each eternal soul - that principle of life which no biotechnical lab can
create - that has not consigned itself to everlasting death will escape it,
as the burning bush escaped consumption.
Our knowing is in a bit of limbo over the destiny of any whose life ends
before loss of natural innocence. We may be sure the ‘holy innocents’
killed in Herod’s pogrom were led free, come Easter some 33 years
after. God as Lord of time can apply saving power backwards: the
Ninevites repented and the unchanging God seemed to have changed
His mind.
Agnostics rebut belief in the divine on the grounds that an all-powerful,
all-good God wouldn’t allow bad things to happen to decent people.
Since existence, taken as nature, is cruel and disinterested in life,
there is no such provident being or ground of existence. Their fallacy is
to require of an all-knowing God our agenda in willful ignorance of His
greater plan. Existence goes beyond nature, and tragedies like the
Titanic striking an iceberg are not final for any who die hoping and
leaning on God’s hand.
For the sake of a bereft mother, perhaps teetering on moral despair,
Jesus revived a young man. There’s no reason to think he’d been
unjust or without conscience, or not among captivity to be set free. The
collapse of the tower of Shiloh did not signify the victims’ perdition.
Good Lazarus, far from the devil’s clutch, was raised because it could
do the mourners no good to remain in the unbelief over which Jesus
wept (Lazarus - doubtless without fear - would suffer that death all over
again). As Jesus stressed, some consumed in Sodom and Gomorrah
would face a better judgment than unbelievers in Nazareth and
neighbouring Capernaum or Chorazin. Even Lot’s imperfect wife,
empathic to cries of death, was not ‘consumed’ as they, but turned to
preservative (salus) against the day of resurrection.
Father Bedard concluded his memoirs warmly recommending: “do not
waste pain”. Pain there will be, just as ‘the poor you will ever have with
you’. Since pain and empathy can be shared with the Lord, to
squander the opportunity - sorely tempting as it is to complain - is such
a shame, especially knowing what outcome it promises.
Taking that to mind, Job exclaimed “though He slay me, yet I will love
and serve the Lord”: a bold prophetic claim on what shall be. His
wisdom already grasped salvation: “my own eyes shall see Him, in my
body I shall look on God, my saviour” [Job 19:25-27].
Many suppose that the Church, ever ancient, ever new, was overly
preoccupied with death and afterlife beyond the grave, while now
complaining she is preoccupied with vital promise (or not) of the
generation of life this side of the grave. ‘We mourned and you would
not mourn; now we dance and you will not dance’. It has been said of
Christ, his Cross and the Church that it is a sign of contradiction. It is !
Contradictions like that are pregnant with life. A climax in union is a
‘little death’ meant to signify the birth it may bring forth. A still more
beautiful signifier is the little deaths that religious make to God every
day, in accepting, even embracing, the preferment of others. As St.
Augustine showed, virginity is the higher call which harkens to
Paradaisal innocence and the beyond-sexual union of the elect with
God, their bridegroom.
What the chaste married and the virginal together show is a full reality:
that each soul yearns for second birth, birth ‘from above’ even if
drawing to the end of its first birthing. To all this God has made a sure
pledge, that the ‘problem’ of evil will be swallowed up in joy: “On that
day, you will have no question to ask me at all”.
This age’s is not a question of voids, though hell must be unimaginably
empty of good; nor even is it the problem of satan’s existence. It is the
problem of souls, destined for God, who fail to heed conscience and be
saved. Why we do that is beyond the mind to know, but is answered by
trust. As pope Benedict put it, Spe Salvi. If I may be allowed a final
quote-bend, Our hope is in the name of the Lord, Who made heaven
and earth.
