Analogismoi Eight: der Geist, der stets verneint

In this week’s Main Project post we continued our discussion of the creation. After the heavens and earth were separated, but before Man was brought forth, God’s creative action differentiated the cosmos bringing forth the world and its denizens as we know it. With each step of the creation of order God’s final pronouncement on that order is that “it is good.”

It is no obvious thing to say that creation is good however. The short lives of man are beset by tragedy. The very precondition to man’s existence is suffering and death. Between disease and natural disaster, malice and betrayal, human entropy, depression and despair unto death it is easy to see why philosophy and literature is filled with arguments contrary to the notion that the creation is good.

Environmentalists, like my favorite whipping boy, lackwit David Suzuki, argue that the world would have been better had people never existed. We see Job when suffering the random and undeserved catastrophes which God has condoned make this argument asking “why did I not perish at birth, and die as I cam from the womb” (Job 3:11).

And Job isn’t the only one. “Cursed by the day I was born” cries the prophet Jeremiah (20:14-18) and we see the prophet Elijah express the same sentiment when he says “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life, for I am no better

than my fathers” (1 Kings 19:4). In Ecclesiastes 4:2-3 we see that it is “better than both (living and dead) is he who has not yet existed, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” Jonah asks the lord to take him for “it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:3) and even Moses feels this dread as he says to God “if this is how you are going to treat me, please kill me right now — if I have found favor in your eyes — and let me not see my own wretchedness” (Numbers 11:15) and Christ himself, despite willingness to do the father’s will, asks for the cup to be taken from him (Matthew 26:38-39, Mark 14:34-36, Luke 22:42-44).

The theme of a denial of the goodness of creation is very much a prevalent (and in time I will argue to a large degree the point) theme of the biblical library. At the very start of Genesis we have God create the world and proclaim it is good and the search for the mode of being which is compatible with this runs throughout straight to Revelations.

This denial of the goodness of creation is what we can call the Mephistophelian argument stemming from the Mephistopheles character in Goethe’s Faust (1790). Faust, an accomplished scholar, is confronted by Mephistopheles who introduces himself to Faust as “der Geist Der stets verneint!” (the spirit that negates). He says:

I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin
Thus everything that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent —
That is my proper element
-Translation Walter Kaufmann (1963)

The argument Mephistopheles makes to Faust is that the world God has created is a horrible world. It is filled with pain and tragedy and ends in death and before then it is nothing but a series of unquenched desires and disappointment. There is so much going on in Faust I can’t even begin to cover a significant portion of it. Along with Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is one of the greatest literary works of theology. I cannot stress heavily enough that it is a book worth reading and that Walter Kaufmann’s masterful translation brings the original German to English the way few translations of any book ever have.

With that said, it is this one aspect of the Mephistophelian argument I want to focus on. If the creation is not good, if God is wrong or if he is lying as Mephistopheles suggests, then why not enjoy as much creature comfort as you can, taste all of the fruits. If all there is in store for you is suffering what is the point of acting nobly. If God’s insistence that the creation is good is false why not uncreate as much as possible.

We see the same argument masterfully made by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s classic The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Ivan, a university educated materialist rationalist indicative of the intelligentsia of the day, argues not against God’s existence, but rather that he refuses to worship a God who creates a world in which such suffering is permitted. In the book Ivan recounts a story to his younger brother Alyosha, monastic novitiate, of a five year old girl who was beaten relentlessly by her parents, smeared with and forced to eat feces and then locked in a freezing outhouse to die screaming because she wet the bed.

Ivan tells Alyosha, “I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!’ But I don’t want harmony…I don’t want it at any price if it includes the suffering of a child.” The power of the argument sends Alyosha on his heels. Dostoyevsky was particularly brilliant in his refusal to use straw men to counter his arguments (none of Ayn Rand’s weak thinking and writing here). He wants the argument against his protagonist to be absolute iron and in this he is successful. It is not hard to see why a person, seeing atrocities in the world, would refuse to worship at the feet of a God who creates it, allows it and proclaims its goodness.

It isn’t like the biblical authors didn’t understand that this would be a contentious spot. There is no other reason for God to say it is good than the idea that the goodness of creation would be something in question. So what is going on here?

I think in order to unravel this we need to do a few things. The first thing is we need to remember the phenomenological level of analysis we are looking at truth with in the biblical stories. That it is good, taken the way we see the rest of the Bible, is not an empirical statement but rather an existential one. We will begin to see, starting next week, that from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to Cain and onwards through the Bible, there are people who deny the goodness of creation and as a result their world is destroyed.

Amongst other things, the biblical stories are a guide. A pattern is set down at the start of creation and throughout the Bible we see people who follow this pattern and people who oppose it and what happens as a result. If your answer to God’s claim that the creation is good is to point, as Ivan Karamazov does, to the atrocities which happen to children you are missing the point. The argument from evil about the lack of utility in the universe as such is a product of a rationalist post scientific revolution era which is not contending with the ontological issues, merely the empirical ones.

From the standpoint of the biblical stories, we are asked to look at what happens if you act out, not just say or believe, the proposition that the creation was not good — if you act out the Mephistophelian argument. The problem with disagreeing with God is not that he is big and strong and good at smiting…the problem is that he is being as such. What are you going to do, argue with being as such? Yeah, good luck. What happens when you negate being, when you step into the life denying nihilism that negates the goodness of the creation, is absolute and untrammeled catastrophe.

From the level of analysis of the biblical library the fact that the creation is good is something that you prove by either acting it out or attempting to act out its opposite. The distinction between this and a level of analysis which requires empirical objective facts is at the heart of how the world has lost the meaning of the biblical stories in the

first place. Remember, God is setting out a mode of being-in-the-world not a check list of right and wrong. We can think of this in any number of stories. On the positive end we see Noah. Noah acts out the proposition that creation is good and as such he is ensconced in an ark which will save him from the flood in such a way that he saves himself, saves his family and saves the world. Noah was perfect in his generations (Gen. 6:9). We can see this contrasted, later in the Bible, by Jonah in the beginning of his story when he flees to Tarshish instead of going to Nineveh deciding that God’s will was wrong. In doing so he brings catastrophe to everyone around him and in resolving to change his mode of being to conform with the pattern of God’s goodness he rectifies the situation and brings order to the world.

Does it sound so unrealistic that a mode of being in the world set down as a pattern by God during the creation will enable you to save yourself, your family and the world? The next time tragedy strikes and the dragon of chaos emerges, a parent falls ill or dies, a child becomes sick, the World Trade Center collapses, some unforeseen catastrophe strikes and the habituated world which was stable up until that point falls away, try to be the person who everyone can count on. Try being the person who forthrightly confronts the chaos that has reemerged as the consequence of tragedy despite the pain, despite having every reason not to, despite wanting to fall apart. What you will see happening is that if you succeed in using your attentive faculties and powers of truthful articulation you will subdue the chaos and those around you will be rescued….you will put the world back together.

This is not a metaphor. This is more real than physical objects. A catastrophe will destroy the world allowing for the reemergence of the dragon of chaos. If you confront the chaos in a manner consistent with God’s confrontation with the deep at the beginning of time you will reconstitute order, you will remake the world, you will save yourself and those around you.

If, instead, you do not follow the pattern God lays down at the beginning and you fall into the nihilistic trap of denying the goodness of the world, you and those around you will suffer even more than is necessary. You will destroy the world around you.

When we think of whether being is good or whether it should be discarded we need to think of it in the terms of the biblical library…not a series of facts and figures but with regard to the outcome should you live out one proposition or another.

The promises delivered to Abraham should he hold true to the covenant (which is the same as the ark in ways we get to with Noah) — to be the father of nations, to be a blessing to himself and to others, for his descendants to inhabit the promised land (also the ark) — are only possible if you act out the proposition that being is good and follow the pattern of God during the creation. Likewise, if you act out the Mephistophelian argument you will bar the door to the promised land, you will be a curse to yourself and to those around you.

This does not mean that a belief, or even an enacted belief, in the goodness of the world will lead to a good life. This isn’t the point. It will increase the likelihood, but still — not the point. The point is that here you are in this tragic and limited life and you are destined to suffer and die. What do you do about this? You accept the proposition that being is good, you forthrightly confront chaos when it arises despite the existential threat, you pay attention and speak honestly and this is the mode of being-in-the-world that aligns you with being itself.

If the books of the Bible tell us anything it is that acting in a proper manner is not a recipe for happiness. Happiness is not and has never been the goal. What the hell are you going to do with happiness? If you find it, great. Enjoy it because it is not going to last. In the meantime, while there is no guarantee for happiness there is one for suffering. The question isn’t how can I be happy, but rather how can I live in such a way that when catastrophe strikes I am not only capable of dealing with it, but dealing with it in such a way that will help reconstruct the world and save myself and those around me. The question is: Who do you want to be?

The question of who you want to be comes down, I believe, to admiration. The human instinct of admiration is something which is far too infrequently studied. The fact is that we admire the person who forthrightly confronts the tragic nature of life and acts honorably and with the belief that being is good. We admire heroes, not cowards. It’s a human universal and it is explained right here in the beginning of time with the creation of the world and the

pronouncement that it is good.

It is a “narrow path” (Matt. 7:13) to walk, but the broad road leads to the undoing of being and the destruction of theworld around you. If we are going to read these books we are going to have to learn how to read them. If we want to learn how to read them we are going to need to unlearn the last five hundred years of enlightenment age thinking which sees objectivity as the gold standard. The biblical library is not made up of books which conform to an epistemological epoch which wont exist until thousands of years after their writing.

Is the creation good? Well, try acting out the proposition that it is not in your daily life and see what happens. That is the phenomenological, the subjective understanding of the biblical mind. If you attempt to act out the proposition that God is wrong, that being is not good, you will unmake the world for yourself and those around you so fast you will not believe it. And if acting out the proposition that God is wrong brings with it catastrophe, there is only one wise choice — even if it is almost impossible to make at the times when the issue is most pressing.