DARWIN AND THE CRUCIFIXION 5th March195-
In the Sixth Form, whenever we can find time for it, we have discussions in which we turn our minds away from the special subjects that are a necessary part of the curriculum and try to find some bigger pattern of thought or view of life into which (sic) these special studies will fit. This involves a search for relationships between the things that we study separately. We have been much helped and stimulated by the broadcast series on the History of Science. A recent talk in this series specially interested me; it was given by Canon Raven, who is not only a distinguished exponent of Christianity, but also, to a far greater extent than most people are aware, a scientist and an erudite historian of science. In his broadcast talk he brought together two things between which you would at first see no connection: Darwin and the Crucifixion.
The sudden putting together of two things ordinarily so far apart gives one a mental shock of a sort that is very necessary. It set me thinking and here are some of the results. I am not going to repeat or interpret what Dr.Raven said, for he was concerned mainly with the historical aspect, with the effect that Darwin’s theory of evolution had upon the Victorian world. But I must follow his example in outlining what the theory was. It concerns this process by which a development has taken place over millions of years in the living things that populate the earth, so that beginning from very simple structures, stage after stage has been passed through and the present point reached in which we have a great number of highly complex creatures, including man himself with the amazing capacity for adapting himself to varying conditions. Darwin’s theory accepted the fact that the young of animals always differ slightly from each other and from their parents. These differences, called variations, may be useful ones enabling the young animal to cope with danger and difficulty more effectively than others or they may be the opposite; they may be weaknesses. In the struggle to survive, in facing danger and competition, the animal with the more valuable variations will tend to survive and the animal with weaknesses to meet an early death. If the variations are of the sort that are passed on by heredity, the obviously they will tend steadily to produce new and better strains of animal life, more elaborate structures with a greater capacity for adaptation and survival.
Darwin’s Theory shocked deeply those people who believed that God has planned everything in nature down to the last detail and brought it all into existence; just as we find it now. But it also brought to the fore the problem of pain and suffering. It did not create a wholly new problem in this respect, for even if you were one of those who believed in special creation, you would, if you were honest, have to ask yourself why God, planning things just as he wanted them, should have arranged for so much pain and conflict in nature. But in Darwin’ (sic) Theory not only was all the painful conflict in nature accepted but it was recognised as the necessary process by which development occurred. Many young people today are bewildered, as were their predecessors by the problem of suffering, and they are quick to reply to any suggestion of the existence of a loving God by referring to the apparent cruelty and callousness of his supposed creation.
It is really this question of suffering and its place in our life that I am concerned with here. Our experience of pain begins very early. As babies we were occasionally aware of a pain in the tummy and we bellowed until the pain was eased for us. It did not mean much to us, that early pain, and the crying was little more that a “reaction to a stimulus.” Later experiences of pain, of falling and hurting ourselves, or of a burn, made us aware that we lived somewhat insecurely in a dangerous world. It was nevertheless a world in which Mother was not far away, with bandages and comfort and at least temporary safety. But a more difficult experience soon comes. I remember that when my son was about four or five he found a bird – from a nest he had been lovingly watching – lying mangled on the path if front of our house. He brought the remains to me in great distress. It was his own beloved cat that killed the bird; he had seen it slink away from the corpse. What can one say to a child in this distress? That the cat doesn’t know any better? Then why in heaven’s name are cats made like that? But though no one really answers our questions we go on growing up, becoming used to these experiences and toughened by them. We become toughened to the pain we suffer ourselves, and toughened to the pain we see around us. We no longer bellow when we burn our fingers. We say “blast” or grit our teeth. So insensitive to pain around us that we may enjoy creating it, setting the dog on the cat, gleefully watching the latter spit with rage.
Later perhaps you become aware of suffering as a great general problem that somehow impinges on you. You swing backwards and forwards between an idealistic urge to try to fight the suffering of the world and an impulse to withdraw and shut it out lest it disturbs you too much. When in your teens you do begin to think seriously about the problem, it appears immense and often profoundly depressing. Not content with the pain they suffer from things they cannot help, from accident and disease, men seem all the time to be inventing new ways of inflicting suffering on each other, so now it is no longer a matter of one man hurting another, but of one man destroying ten thousand.
You may exclaim: doesn’t it make life altogether senseless? Now I do not pretend to be able to solve the great philosophical problems associated with suffering and its place in our life, but I want to suggest how we can accept it, and how, having accepted it we can get on with living. When as children we ask: why there should be pain, why there should be death, we are asking something that is not different from the question as to why stones fall downward and smoke goes upward. The brief answer is that it is in the nature of existence that these things should be and life without them is unthinkable. It is often wiser when we wonder why a thing should be to try to imagine what life would be like without it. Suppose there were no pain and no death, what would life mean to you? You would be able to jump out of a dormitory window without fear of pain or death. You might calculate that you would break your leg or your back, but what would that matter if suffering had become meaningless? You would be as content to lie permanently on a hospital bed as to play football. When you walked about you would not need to use your muscles to remain upright because if you fell over you should not feel anything. If, like King Lear, you had your eyes pulled out, it would not matter; if there were no suffering, there would be no physical or mental pain, no worry, no distress. Without suffering, it would not matter in the least how we behaved to one another, whether we loved or hated, whether we were tender or brutal.
In fact the moment we imagine pain and death to be taken away, life becomes a flat unending meaninglessness. Without death and suffering life is not worth living; that is the astonishing paradox to which our thinking inevitably drives us. Without death there can be no life, without suffering - no joy.
Perhaps it now begins to be clear that suffering and death do belong to a pattern that is not senseless; in fact so reasonable is the pattern that we cannot unthink it without becoming crazy! If you think about it you will find that most of our experience is explained, or described, in terms of opposites. Not only have we life and death, joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, but also light and shade, positive and negative, backwards and forwards, warm and cold, sweet and sour, loving and hating, and so on, almost endlessly. Whenever we try to value a thing or an experience we do it on a scale of opposites. Light has no meaning without shade, day no meaning without night. Warmth and sweetness and love cannot mean anything unless we know also cold and sourness and hate. There’s a well known story of a man in an asylum who was knocking his head against a wall. When asked the reason for inflicting this pain on himself he replied “Because it’s so nice when I leave off”. Life is indeed like that, except that outside mental homes there is quite enough pain without our having to add to it in order to throw pleasure into sharp contrast.
I shall never forget the summer skies of 1940. The beauty of those blue skies over the country south of London, with their drifting masses of cumulus clouds, can be recalled in almost every detail with only a moment’s effort. Up among those clouds there were men playing hid-and-seek with death, and threatening with destruction us and nearly everything we valued. This is not to say that we need Spit-fires and Messerschmidts (sic) – or their modern equivalents – to make our blue skies bluer, but to point out that this is the way we do in fact experience life and value it. There are indeed other contrasts that will make us appreciate the beauty of the blue sky, as those who have camped in the Lakes will readily appreciate.
Even when we raise the matter to its highest level, would there be any reality about goodness if there were no evil? What would life be like if we were all perfectly good? As John MacMurray has said! It would be just too bad if we were all too good. This again is not to provide an excuse for giving in to evil impulses, but to show that the pattern of good-and-evil is unavoidable. There can be no growth in us if we do not meet both these opposites.
The moment we come into life we are placed in a pattern of opposites, and we become involved in a whole series of conflicts. If we accept that this is just what life is like we can make something of it. If we try to wish away suffering and we spend our time conjuring up visions of a world in which it does not exist we shall make nothing of life. It is precisely for a world of conflict and difficulty and suffering that man is made, or, to put it another way, the nature of man and the nature of the world belong to each other. At our best we are “at home” in a world of conflict and suffering. It is in the soil in which we grow to our greatest stature. Some of the greatest lives have been built on intense suffering, the greatest achievements made in face of the greatest difficulties. Examples rush to one’s mind but I need only mention Beethoven, most of whose greatest works were composed after he had become totally deaf.
A few days ago I was at a conference with about thirty other headmasters. It was a most dismal experience, for as soon as they met they all began to complain of their difficulties. One of them said that we ought to have a collective noun for such a group, that just as we speak of a gaggle of geese or a herd of cattle so we should speak of a grumble of headmasters. Perhaps they were most of them in their actual jobs are more cheerful than they were, in conference; nevertheless I think they needed to be reminded that some of the best opportunities in education appear in the guise of new difficulties.
However, the difficulties of headmasters can rarely be called suffering except in a very mild sense. Let us turn to the other end of the scale, to the intense suffering experiences by the refugee or displaced person who trudges wearily over hundreds of miles, perhaps losing members of his family on the way and who may spend years living in barracks or air-raid shelters with no privacy, despairing of ever being wanted by the world again; or to the people flung into a concentration camp, subjected to the most viciously cruel treatment, seeing members of their own family taken to the gas-chambers and knowing that they will follow. If we, who have never suffered in this way, were to say to these people that they must accept their suffering as part of the pattern of life, face it with patience and courage, it would be the most insensitive presumption on our part. Any one of us might under those appalling conditions break down utterly, as many in fact did, and loose all faith and decent standards. But the fact remains that even under the worst conditions some of the sufferers – perhaps more than we know – retained faith and courage to the very end, never became selfish, or embittered and indeed found in their very sufferings a challenge to search deeper in themselves for the source of love and strength. Even if, relatively speaking, these people were only a few among all those who suffered, they profoundly alter the whole aspect of suffering, because they show the latent possibilities inhuman nature, they demonstrate what it is in humanity that prevents it from sinking into the slime. They redeem what would otherwise be a hopelessly depressing experience for the world.
This brings me to the Crucifixion, for the Crucifixion was an act of redemption. You know that Jesus is spoken of as a redeemer. A great many people have become wearied of such words as redeemer and redemption and think of them as meaningless jargon. Perhaps it is true that these words have been overworked, with too little reference to their real meaning. But we should not forget that there are a good many words on the lips of some people that seem like meaningless jargon to others – especially scientific or technical words such as “negative feed-back” or “dihedral”.
The word redemption describes something every bit as real and practical in relation to human life, as those technical words do in relation to radio and aero-dynamics. Referring to war-time; I have already shown that had everyone under the strain of fear and cruelty had broken down, life for all of us would have become meaningless and hopeless. Those who maintained their essential humanity redeemed the situation. Perhaps! I should take an example neared home and point out the horror of the air raids was redeemed by the many acts of courage and dauntless cheerfulness on the part of ordinary people. This will help to show in what sense Jesus was a redeemer, and the crucifixion was an act of redemption. In his time a great part of the population of the “civilised” world consisted of slaves, many of them treated like animals and living in an underworld of misery. Jesus identified himself with these and the many others who, though not actually slaves were treated as underdogs. His love for them revealed to them their own essential humanity and value, and their own capacity for loving each other. It revealed to them what it was that could lift them out of their misery; help them not only to bear suffering but rob them of them of their self-respect and also to resist the powers that would drive them into the sub-human slime of physical and spiritual defeat. Oppression creates fear and hate on all sides and men under the influence of fear often seek a scapegoat. Jesus was that scapegoat and he became the focus of all the poisoned and evil feeling of the time. In this sense he took on the burden of the world’s sin. Yet, knowing the hatred that was being vented upon him, he could go to his death saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Conventional religion has tended to give the world a picture of the life and death of Jesus as pre-ordained in every detail, carefully planned in advance by God as a revelation of himself to the world. There may be a sense in which this is true but the way in which it has been put forward and accepted tends to make of the Crucifixion a sort of “magic” which brings it far below its true significance. I prefer to think of the Crucifixion not as pre-ordained but as inevitable in the sense that for Jesus to undertake to reveal what he knew of God to the bitter world of his time was to ask for death. As you know, the manner of his death and the spirit in which he met it had a tremendous impact, ultimately on the whole western world.
Although it is true that the original message of Christianity was in the course of time distorted, falsified and exploited for evil ends, there can be no doubt that Jesus was a light in the darkness to millions of people. He showed how, through love for one another people could face suffering and achieve not just patience and fortitude, but also joy. Pain and difficulty became not just experiences to put up with in a stoic fashion, but significant; they were disciplines by which men grew in stature and discovered truth.
When I speak of the love that Jesus encouraged among his followers, I have, as always, to distinguish it from romantic love. It is the tenderness that people feel for each other when they see deep into each other and understand each others needs, when they have humility and offer each other friendships and support in face of whatever difficulties life may bring.
Jesus did not bring something utterly new into the world; if he had done so no one at all would have understood him. The way he lived, the way he faced death, the process by which death came to him, all this brought into startling clearness what people had dimly felt stirring in their hearts – that it was love that saved man from being overwhelmed by the weight of pain and evil. Right from the dawn of human consciousness men have had some love in their hearts, and largely without their being aware of its significance, it must have sweetened for them lives that were otherwise full of danger, toil, fear and death. In the Crucifixion, in a supreme act of commitment and self-sacrifice, one man draws out from his own and other men’s hearts what it is that they live by, what it is that gives meaning to life. It is this - held up for everyone to see and recognise. The suffering of Jesus has become a symbol for all the suffering of humanity and his love for men the supreme statement of what it is that makes suffering a meaningful experience.
It is unfortunate that Christianity as an organised religion has carried the symbolism to the point of superstition, to that people are often blind to the fact that Crucifixion and redemption are real occurrences that happen over and over again in history and in our own times. Whenever a man risks and loses his life because he believes that he will thereby save another’s life; that makes sense of what would otherwise by (sic) only a calamity. Whenever a man copes with an evil situation, braving the hostility and hatred that this so often calls into being, he is a redeemer.
Two things remain to be said. Suffering is very unequally distributed. All of us have to face ultimate death, and all of us will know grief in the loss of people we love by death. But most of the world’s people have to bear a load of suffering, through semi-starvation, disease, oppression and exploitation, which is far more than anyone needs for his own discipline or can be expected to bear. It is our task to try to share that burden. It was this conviction that sent Dr.Albert Schweitzer to Lamborene. He felt that it was for him to redeem, in humility and living service, the evil that the white man had done to the black.
The second point is that when we redeem suffering by an act of love we escape from its depression. To accept pain and suffering as an inescapable and reasonable experience is not to accept misery; it is to conquer it. It is the redeemers who “buy back” the meaning and joy of life.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 09 This is a reworking of PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 08