Our Mothering Father & the Problem of Evil

Eleonore Stump's essay "The Mirror of Evil" in God and the Philosophers (ed. Thomas Morris) is centered around the truth contained in Psalm 131: 1-2.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Weaning, says Stump, appears a great evil to a child who longs for his mother's milk, but eventually the child becomes "calmed and quieted" of soul in response to the mothering care of the very one who appeared the villain. The answer to the child's suffering, in other words, is in the loving face of his mother.

It is often said that God's answer to Job's sufferings was only a flurry of (justified) questions to remind Job of his own finitude and then silence. But, Stump insists, this is entirely to miss the answer God gives: Himself. "Now I see you," Job says, and he has his answer. Stump:

If you could see the loving face of a truly good God, you would have an answer to the question why God had afflicted you. When you see the deep love in the face of a person you suppose has betrayed you, you know you were wrong. Whatever happened was done out of love for you by a heart that would never betray you and a mind bent on your good. To answer a mistaken charge of betrayal, someone who loves you can explain the misunderstanding or he can show his face.

We, especially we analytic descendants of the Enlightenment, are wont to demand propositional explanations for things not understood. But doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous to presume that whatever propositional explanation could be given for the suffering and evil in the world would be mundane enough for our puny minds to comprehend, let alone to appropriate in a meaningful way? And, after all, Stump continues, "Sometimes showing his face heals the hurt much faster."

To the mind apprised only of the reality of evil, the problem of evil is likely to strike irrefutable. "But start with a view of evil and a deep taste of the goodness of God," says Stump, "and you will know that there must be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil--not some legal and ultimately unsatisfying reason, but the sort of reason...in which true goodness is manifest." Of course, we must be careful to maintain that "nothing in this thought makes evil less evil." But "it makes a great difference to suppose that the sufferers of evil, maybe ourselves included, are in the arms of a mothering God...we feel our pains of the moment, but they are encircled by an understanding that brings peace and joy."

From the vantage of the one who has tasted and seen that the Lord is good,

the mirror of evil brings us around to the hobbit's way of seeing things at the end. 'Go,' says Ecclesiastes, 'eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God' (9:7). If God is mothering the earth and if its evils are in His hands, then you may be at peace with yourself and your world. You can be grateful for the good that comes your way without always contrasting it with the ghastliness elsewhere. This road to quiet cheerfulness is the long way to the goal, but perhaps for some people it is also the only way there.

At this point, Stump wisely is careful to hedge against the critic who is ever ready to cry "Escapism!" The one who is consoled and quieted by the goodness of God will naturally wish to ally herself with what is good and to see to it that what is evil is eradicated. God hates evil, and so do those who love Him.

Mr. Russell & (Part of) What it Means to be Modern

What does it mean to be modern? It means, at least partially, to endorse the following from Bertrand Russell. In fact, I think that the degree to which one agrees with this passage is roughly the degree to which one is a modern.

The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge--knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal.
-from "The Value of Philosophy" in The Problems of Philosophy (1969)

As for me, something about Russell's view strikes me stifling and cold. I am a firm believer in the objectivity of truth and the reality of knowledge, but in my view the emotions (passions, affections) have a pivotal role to play in the pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the mind. The goal should not be to snuff out the emotions but to stimulate and refine appropriate emotions. Moreover, as persons, there is no chance of extricating the "personal" from knowing; why then ought we to pursue "impersonal" knowledge, "as purely contemplative?" Perhaps if we accept and celebrate that we are unavoidably personal knowers, we might find the world all the more opened up to us.

I, therefore, prefer the philosophical vision of Michael Polanyi to that of his contemporary. As he puts it, notably in personal terms,

"I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations. I accept the obligation to search for the truth through my own intimations of reality, knowing that there is, and can be, no strict rule by which my conclusions can be justified."
-from "Knowing and Being" (1961)