While thinking of the suffering endured by patients in the modern medical quest for miracles, I grew depressed and sought to cheer myself up by thoughts of hospices which allow human beings a bit of dignity as they approach death. And so it was that I turned to Flannery O’Connor’s insightful and Thomistically funny introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, a book which told the story of a young girl with a face-deforming cancer who went to live in a hospice run by sisters from the Dominican sub-order founded by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Mother Alphonsa after she had donned the habit. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Near the end of this short essay, Miss O’Connor tells us:
After an afternoon with [the sisters], I decided that they had had about everything [in their hospice work with cancer victims] and flinched before nothing, even though one of them asked me during the course of the visit why I wrote about such grotesque characters, why the grotesque (of all things) was my vocation. They had in the meantime inspected some of my writing. I was struggling to get off the hook she had me on when another of our guests supplied the one answer that would make it immediately plain to all of them. “It’s your vocation too,” he said to her.
This opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise.
Full of promise? How can a face distorted by disease be full of promise? How can the founder of the Church of Christ without Christ be funny, especially after blinding himself and then killing himself by prolonged, horrible penances? How about a self-named Misfit who went to prison for a crime he no longer remembers, certain though that the punishment was out of proportion to the crime, be full of promise? Was it his promise that was realized when he killed a family, mother and father, two children, and a grandmother, after finding them stuck on a dirt road? How about a smart 12 year-old girl who loses her nasty attitude only when she’s immersed in prayer? Full of promise to be a nun but that’s a pretty limited sort of promise in this modern world where God-centered people do good by finding careers with social service corporations (nonprofit, of course). As for the 14 year-old cousins of that 12 year-old nun-to-be, in a convent school but itching to be loose women…
Strange promises indeed in a world where we’ve decided our best goal isn’t the pursuit of what is truly good but rather the avoidance of pain and suffering. We wish to inhabit a world in which pain and suffering can be eliminated, a world in which the Creator brings us to prosperity and an easy death so long as we obey our understanding of His commandments. And, so, we Americans — but probably many modern peoples — do inhabit such a world, if only in our own minds. And we’ve been able to pretend this is the world since our spiritual ancestors, epitomized by Emerson and Thoreau, first discovered that God had botched His Creation and seems deaf to our advice on how to fix matters. If God won’t listen to us, we’ll create our own world… For a remarkably long time, good luck in geography and natural resources and the self-destructive tendencies of our enemies allowed us Americans to pull off this rebellion against God and to even present ourselves, even to ourselves, as a Christian, God-centered people. This is a complicated subject and I’ve written about it in various contexts, including that of the war of the European peoples of New England against the native peoples. See The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of my understanding of the basic weakness in the moral characters and moral reasoning of the Puritan leaders of New England, weaknesses I believe to have been magnified into virtues, partly through the work of Emerson and Thoreau but also through the idealistic deformations of American politics by Abraham Lincoln, deformations upon a system already deeply corrupted by Aaron Burr’s founding of Tammany Hall and Thomas Jefferson’s willingness to ally himself with this early political machine when he thought he could use Burr and his followers to his own purposes. This combination of idealism and fundamental corruption has created a political system that’s quite beyond any true reform.
We need to keep our political and social situation in mind, but I’m mostly concerned in this situation about the clear fact that people classify any grotesque creature, man or beast, and any grotesque situation as evil. Why do we not see the possibilities of good arising through the sorts of evolutionary and developmental processes which have produced the human race and also the Christian Church? Cowardice has much to do with it but there’s something still deeper involved, a revulsion to human nature as we see it when we look at a human being eaten by a cancer that grew from his own bodily stuff or a human being entering a dementia that leaves him there in body but strips him of memory and then reason and then other human characteristics or behaviors. There can be little left of our grandfather or friend, little left but a shell that even seems a mockery of human nature as the eyes grow vacant and the skeletal muscles lose their tone.
I confess to being a coward myself, not so much about death but a lot when it comes to pain and suffering, I try to be honest with myself and with the fact that this too is a part of the world as God created it. But I struggle to toughen up my backbone. I look in the mirror and see not an actively evil man but one who has to paint himself into a corner to be somewhat certain he’ll do what is right when the real trouble begins (maybe before many months pass). I feel strongly that we live in a world where there are undesirable moral implications to our dedication to avoiding pain and suffering. And we court various moral ambiguities, and even moral degradation, when we raise the avoidance of pain and suffering to such a high priority. When we also make it a priority to avoid death as long as medically possible, we begin to turn away from Creation and from our Maker. Yet, even more than death do we avoid pain and suffering though we do our best to avoid all unpleasantries. We don’t seek the good but merely seek to avoid that which fits in our pitifully inadequate understanding of evil.
Pain and suffering, and death, are often enough by-products of the historical or developmental or evolutionary processes which can produce not the good directly but the stuff from which God will make the good, mostly on the other side of death in the world of the resurrected, but this world can be quite good in its own way. In any case, when we try too hard to avoid the unpleasant aspects of the story God is telling, we risk placing ourselves outside of the story, we risk placing ourselves outside the sometimes horrifying processes by which we move forward towards the good. Then we babble on about carrying our crosses when we develop cancer or have to endure economic hardship, after devoting our lives to imposing our standards upon God’s world rather than working within God’s world, this story He’s still telling. It’s been 20 centuries since our spiritual fathers murdered the Son of God, 20 centuries since we were shown the purpose of Creation: to allow the Son of God to learn obedience as a creature and to sacrifice Himself to His Father in an act of pure, self-giving love. And still we insist that God is supposed to give us a pleasant comfortable life so long as we follow a set of rules acceptable to us. And still we insist that the purpose of this all is to save us human beings. You see, this all-powerful God created a world in which human beings were to have been god-like creatures who led peaceful and prosperous lives… Somehow, events escaped the control of God and here we are, but we’ll do our best to be those god-like creatures and to demand the peace and prosperity which is rightfully ours.
The underlying problem we have is with developmental and evolutionary processes that stretch beyond very short periods of time. When we look at days or years or even the lifespan of mortal man, the easiest way of understanding is to assume entities of a permanent nature which act in events that don’t change the entities in a fundamental way. And we fail to make the transition to thinking in terms of the eons over which God shaped us and continues to shape His Creation. Even Einstein thought in this way during his famous attacks upon any understandings of quantum physics which allowed the reality of the strange processes when very small transitions in energy or small regions of space or time are involved. See A Christian’s View of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on the Meaning of Reality for my short summary of a position stated in Critique of Scientific Reason by the German philosopher Kurt Hubner. See The Falsehoods Which are in All Forms of Paganism for a bit more discussion about the issues from the viewpoint of an updated Thomistic existentialism.
We can’t accept the idea that human nature is the result of a freely moving narrative process, a process factual to the extent it is free. We would be free to behave according to our desires and to be already fully-formed persons. Not necessarily do we desire to be God or even gods, but we have our own opinions about matters and will pretend that we can have opinions in clear conflict with reality so long as we have the power and wealth and circumstances to ignore that reality. We would rather live in Disneyworld than Darwinworld or Einsteinworld.
I can understand why we modern men wish to be “persons frozen into some sort of immutable being.” If individual human natures are shaped by responses to environments — as I’ve claimed — then we would be the sorts of creatures who’ve been shaped as mostly passive participants in a rather despicable sort of life, watching violent sports and mindless situation comedies or reality shows. We would be the sorts of creatures who are passive victims of amusement park personnel. But we would like to believe that we are truly men and women who value freedom and have strong moral characters that we exercise when called for. We like to believe that we are the types of creatures who value intelligence rather than the stupidity and bestial passions which dominate our favorite entertainment. But we go on watching and listening to that which teaches values and attitudes which disgust us when embodied in a teenager who actually kills with the abandon of our heroes and anti-heroes or a young woman who aborts her baby so she can enjoy the free life of those modern women in the movies.
And, yet, the Body of Christ continues to form even if many of its organs turn into predatory parasites and many of the individuals, cells in a manner of speaking, will not likely be part of that Body when it is fully formed in the world of the resurrected. But who can tell? Didn’t Christ forgive the sins of passionate sinners with surprising ease? Who can be more morally grotesque than those deformed by greed or sexual lust? There are other vices which also damage us badly but greed and sexual lust are pretty bad in their effects on us. While Christ seemed to often forgive the sins of those who were passionate, He offered up little or no hope for the lukewarm, those with smooth skin and regular features. The lukewarm are never grotesque in appearance. Often quite attractive the lukewarm. In a bland sort of way.
God is shaping the entirety of created being, especially the stuff of human nature and He seems willing to pound us to a bloody pulp at times, to bury us under streams of molten rock, to pour moral-carcinogens down our throats with the drugs and alcohol which our bodies can come to so crave, to trick us into eating dangerous foods — at least dangerous in high amounts — by the desires for high-calorie substances which kept our apish ancestors alive during hard times, to twist the facial features of a young girl into sheer ugliness — at least by the standards of the lukewarm with their smooth faces and their regular features.
It would seem that Darwin, despite losing his poorly founded and Biblically literalistic faith, at least faced up to God’s acts as Creator better than the vast majority of those who claim to be Christians, better than the vast majority of Christian clergymen. Yet, in the end, Darwin’s honesty about the workings of Creation led him away from his Christian faith just because he couldn’t accept a Creator who would work His wonders by such grotesque and distorted paths, paths through realms of ugliness and pain and sorrow. Any God acceptable to Charles Darwin had to be distant and uninvolved with such a world. He had to be a God who retreated after Creating. If He existed at all. Or maybe the pagans were right and matter co-exists with God. Most modern Christians seem to keep their pain by denying God would have created such a world and so they adopt a sort of semi-paganism which allows them to think that evil, from Satan or multiple sources, has somehow invaded the work of an — otherwise — all-powerful Creator. Christians who can’t deal with the grotesque aspects of God’s Creation have to act and talk as if the world doesn’t quite belong to God. And so it is that these bad things happen against the will of this all-powerful and all-knowing God, who is then reduced to vengeful acts such as aiming a hurricane at New Orleans or unleashing a volcano on the gentle inhabitants of Montserrat. And then there’s AIDS the most famous victim of which was the gentlemanly and morally well-ordered Arthur Ashe who got his HIV from a blood transfusion. I guess God sometimes has poor aim. Or else maybe these terrible aspects of Creation are a basic part of the story He’s telling, a story in which good in formation looks as grotesque as evil in its maturity?
I would suggest that Christians should grow up and accept the fact that God, while interested in our ultimate good, is clearly not interested in guaranteeing an easy and comfortable life to even His most faithful followers. In fact, He seems to sometimes hit those faithful followers all the harder and to twist them and their paths through life with all the greater force. If you eliminate all that is grotesque in your life, and your children’s lives, be aware that you might be trying to eliminate all that brings about the ultimate good that our Maker intends for those of His children who accept His will.
What could be more grotesque than a tortured Christ, a source of the true light of goodness overwhelmed by a rather sadistic darkness which is part of His Father’s Creation? What could be more grotesque than the Son of God humiliated and whipped? What could be more grotesque than Jesus Christ, His body bloody and battered and His features distorted by pain and wounds? What could be more grotesque than a God who taught us to conquer evil by watching His own true Son submitting to such horrors? What could be more grotesque than a saved world, a world after the resurrection of Christ, where children can be more often healed — for a while — of face-deforming cancers of the sort endured by Mary Ann, but increasingly our miraculous medical cures depend upontechniques and methods and extend-life-at-all-cost attitudes which are sometimes morally bothersome even when not directly immoral, at least bothersome to those of us who value the good over the elimination of what is considered evil or grotesque by men of the modern West, as dainty in their sensibilities as they are obliviously brutal in inflicting so-called collateral damage upon children and others in far-away regions of the globe.