The Problem of Evil and Modernity: My latest in the What we need now substack

https://whatweneednow.substack.com/p/evil-and-modernitys-unbelief

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This is an edited version of the original, Here is the full version:

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Evil and Modernity’s Unbelief

Larry Chapp

What we need now is an unvarnished accounting for why the Christian faith has lost its purchase on the spiritual lives of Western people.  For we can only treat a disease after it is properly diagnosed.  The Church might indeed be a field hospital, but all too often these days it resembles a hospice for those with a dying faith rather than a center of restorative health that generates a robust belief in the Gospel. In other words, the contemporary Church is in dire need of better pastoral diagnosticians.  

The statistics surrounding the rapid decline of religious affiliation in the United States are sobering.  The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans continues to increase, even as overt atheism is now the dominant “religious” view of many European countries. And as in so many other things, how long will it take those religious “nones” in America to follow their European cousins into an explicit atheism?

However, there does seem to be a small, but significant, resurgence of interest in the historic faith of the Church among some subsegments of young people who feel alienated by modernity’s anomic meaninglessness.  And the forms of the Catholic faith that they seem to prefer are instructive.  To wit, they seem drawn to the vertical, transcendent elements of historic Catholicism, a fact which is by now rather cliché but which is not, in my view, properly interpreted as to what it signifies.  

And I hasten to add before proceeding that I am not talking here only of the so-called “traditionalists” and the devotees of the Tridentine liturgy. Because in point of fact, their numbers are small, despite the rhetoric of the older leaders of the traditionalist movement. What I mean to forestall therefore is any hint that a recovery of the vertical and transcendent forms of the faith by default means a return to the Latin Mass and the general form and theology of Baroque Catholicism.  

My claim is that the resurgence of faith among some young folks takes many forms but with the common denominator of an agonistic search for the irruption of the eternal into the temporal.  And by “agonistic” I mean that it is faith forged in a genuine crucible which in this case is the smelting cauldron of modernity’s reductive nihilism and its consequent rejection of all teleology, all moral meaning, of anything spiritual, and eventually, of the very reality of the self as such.  

One of the consequences of this nihilism is the evacuation of genuine moral agency as the central defining characteristic of the human condition.  The very concept therefore of “sin” is viewed as a laughable holdover from the days of blood taboos and totemistic prohibitions of various sexual practices.  This entails the further rejection of the Christian narrative as hopelessly wedded to a concept of an offended and vengeful deity who needs blood sacrifice in order to be appeased.  This rejection thus also includes any notion of an eschatology of rewards and punishments in a future life, since all such construals are grounded in the notion that free will is real and that our moral agency is spiritual rather than merely the epiphenomenal social gesticulations and constructions of a conventional decorousness for trousered apes.  

All too often when we read such descriptions of modernity, we recoil at the superficiality of it all, sigh deeply, and then chalk it all up to a passing cultural moment that will eventually burn itself out.  And most likely, since the Gospel is indeed true, this is probably what will happen eventually in the long run.  

But in the short term we ignore the corrosive power of this modern narrative at our peril.  For even if our cultural moment is to be surpassed someday, it will only be after an agony that will lead to an unveiling (apocalypse). There will be death involved, both physical and spiritual, and one wonders if the mainstream Church of suburban “nice” is ready for what it must surely soon confront.  Those young Catholics of today who seek eternity are doing so in and through this cultural crucible.  

Allow me then to “steel man” the argument against the faith presented by the standard narrative of modernity, which is the narrative within which young Catholics today must swim.  

Central to the power of the modern nihilistic narrative is what theologians traditionally call “the problem of evil”.  But in its modern form this problem is not only focused on how an all good God could allow for evil in the world, but primarily on the fact that reality seems utterly random, devoid of meaning and purpose, and therefore the willy-nilly nature of the “evils” we suffer is precisely what we should expect in a pointless universe devoid of a true creator with discernible purposes.  In other words, the modern complaint against God is not on its face a moral one, as we see in Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor, but is rather a much harder argument to confront since the moral complaint against God ultimately self-refutes.  

Evil is not really viewed in any moral sense therefore but is seen as a symptom of a purposeless universe that spat us forth randomly and blindly, and now treats us with a crushing indifference, with even “indifference” viewed as a crude anthropomorphic projection onto a cosmos that is simply “there” and “doing its thing” even if it harms us greatly.  

And the utter randomness of evil in terms of who it afflicts vexes and troubles us in existentially profound ways. There is nothing discernibly coherent about how and when evil strikes us, both as individuals and collectively as a global people afflicted by various sufferings, and it exhibits its own profligate excesses in the seemingly endless ways it assaults us.  In other words, if God allows evil as a kind of pedagogy of the soul, then it is a strange and brutal pedagogy indeed since what it teaches seems far too spartan in the face of such excesses of suffering.

Furthermore, the moral element does in the end have a way of reintroducing itself in the midst of our awareness of the sheer randomness of things. After affirming the meaninglessness and randomness of all things and that morality is an illusion, the modern critic of God will nevertheless still resort to a moral claim which is more of a taunt than a real moral claim. To wit, that it is next to impossible to square the God of infinite love with the little shop of horrors that this same God has placed us within as our most proper home and has done so without our consent.  

In particular, the sufferings of animals, so central to the natural rhythms of life, and the sufferings of innocent children, give rise to an instinctive sense of moral revulsion and outrage that should not be glossed over as we meditate upon the full range of what God allows to happen in this captive fallen world.  

Let us begin therefore by citing just a few of the many possible examples of inexplicable evil that cry out for explanation.  What of the sufferings of little children trafficked into sadistic sexual slavery that we now see all over the world and for which our governments do next to nothing? Or of children forced into slave labor in wretched conditions to provide us with the rare metals we need to power the iPhones for our porn addicted culture? Or of the little girl who, a few years back, was abducted, raped, tortured and then buried alive in some pervert’s backyard inside of a Hefty trash bag? I once read a news story years ago about a little boy on a farm who fell into an open pit of pig feces and urine and who drowned therein. Even more recently we have seen the children in Minneapolis killed and/or severely wounded while praying at Mass by a mentally ill young man consumed by an almost demonic spirit of destruction.  

Where were the guardian angels for all of these children? Why do the guardian angels of so many such children seem completely incompetent or impotent, or worse, indifferent?  

But I can already hear the rejoinder: “But what you don’t see is how in the long run these sufferings are part of a larger good!” I do not see how the horror that must invade the minds and hearts of such little children as they are being abducted, tortured, raped and murdered furthers any greater good that is discernible to reason.  And all attempts to justify such monstrous evils by somehow placing them within some putative divine plan of inscrutable benevolence seems to many to be just another backhanded way of ontologizing such evils and blasphemously placing them within the ambit of the mysterious omelet God is making by cracking a few innocent eggs.

To repeat therefore by way of doubling down on the central point, what strikes many moderns is the randomness and irrationality of the evils so inflicted.  Such randomness, devoid of rationally discernible purpose, unsettles our souls in profound ways. Children die every day in the most horrific of circumstances; war, disease, famine, abuse, torture and various random accidents.  And yet little Adolf Hitler rode his Austrian tricycle in peace and tranquility as a boy with nary a scratch and survived the bullets and bombs of WWI.  Hitler survived the war and yet the wonderful Charles Peguy died from a bullet to the head in that same war.  The ways of Providence may be inscrutable, but there should also be something within events that do not present themselves as sheer irrationality at odds with all that we know to be good and true.  For how hard would it have been for God to engineer for young Adolf to choke to death on a piece of sausage as he was sadistically pulling the wings off of a captured bug?

Part of what vexes us in such examples isn’t just the sheer irrationality of it all, but that the irrationality seems grounded in a randomness so irreducible that it renders any discernible divine providence utterly hidden and opaque to our reason.  And recourse to the “God’s ways are not our ways” argument just seems to be too convenient, especially in light of the fact that those same scriptures tell us that we have an obligation to discern God’s will in our lives, which implies that His will can be known in some clear ways. Those same scriptures tell us that we should be able to discern the presence of a creator God by looking at the beauty and ordered structure of the natural world, which should then impel us to the worship of the one, true, creator God.

So which is it? The ways of God are so inscrutable that we dare not question the divine goodness or that the will of God is indeed “knowable” to such a degree that rejection of his existence and commandments is a morally culpable act? It is noteworthy that the book of Job initiates the same query, thus giving biblical warrant to the questions at hand, but then ends with the frustration of a God who testifies on his own behalf by appealing to the glories of creation – underscoring the priority of the goodness of creation over all evil as a subordinate “fly in the ointment” – and then asking Job if he has the wisdom to plumb the full depths of this fundamental goodness of things and what such an ordo actually requires for its fulfillment.

This is all well and good, but it leaves us where we started, which is a reality the psalmists use as part of their lamentations of divine abandonment.  The shocking nature of the psalms, unparalleled in world religions, is the bracing honesty of their questionings of God’s ways which appear so indifferent to the plight of Israel, God’s putative “chosen people”. And this, once again, gives a biblical warrant to the questions we ask as well. Revelation, in other words, seems to indicate that God actually blesses such questionings as part of the path to wisdom.  Therefore, those who see in such questions nothing but a blasphemous doubting of God’s ways are actually being unbiblical.  

When it comes to the ineradicable randomness of the events of our lives and of events in the natural world, and when it comes to the presence of great sufferings among innocent persons, we are granted by God himself the permission to be disturbed.  Indeed, the disturbance in our souls caused by such random evils devoid of discernible rational purpose seems to be the biblically warranted way of coming to a deeper appreciation of the full weight of what sin actually is, especially in light of all of the consequences that flow downstream of its reality.  

Nevertheless, the upshot of the apparent randomness of evil is that it leads millions of people into either overt atheism or, at the very least, into an agnostic apophaticism that claims that any and all alleged divine actions are equally inscrutable and unknowable.  Especially when we cannot explain why many children die a painful and horrific death because of a birth defect while baby Hitler smiled and giggled away in full health in his little Teutonic crib.  

What this points to is that one of the primary downstream effects of evil and the Fall is that because of the occlusion of our spiritual senses by sin we now experience life and existence as a seemingly disconnected set of random dots which can be drawn together into an ersatz whole only through the ruse of an imposed unity concocted out of our own subjective wish that there be such a coherence.  Some would say that this desire for coherence is itself a sign of the inner dynamism of a transcendent orientation within us, pointing toward a very real horizon which grounds the whole and gives a context to every seemingly random event.  Rahnerians in particular love that kind of talk.  

But others would say that it is perhaps even more likely, given the full weight of the randomness of things, that all such “rumors of angels” hidden within the alleged teleology of existence are ultimately illusions that mask over the essentially tragic quality of human existence.  Even Cardinal Walter Kasper, in his now long ago book “The God of Jesus Christ”, notes that from a purely naturalistic point of view Rahner’s “dynamism of the human soul” is unconvincing to the hard-bitten secularists since in their view it might just as easily point to the “void” as to God, to a tragic contradiction in the heart of our existence rather than as an orientation to a God who remains tantalizingly ever beyond our reach.  In other words, God as the “ever more” asymptote of the teleology of our knowing and willing might just be an epiphenomenal accident of any self-aware consciousness.

Life is littered with tragedies and thus it is easy to suspect that this is because life is ultimately tragic in its essence.  We arise out of nothing, struggle and laugh for a few years in a seemingly random manner, and then we die in equally random ways, with some dying peacefully in their sleep at age 99 (including very evil people who deserved no such peaceful death), while others die hideously and in their youth. And then within a few short years of our death, even our loved ones stop thinking of us much at all.  Gravestones fade and fall over, to be discovered 500 years later and put into an out of the way pile of other such forgottens to make way for the new Dollar General or Tim Hortons.  

Perhaps this is, at least in part, what led the physicist Stephen Weinberg to state that “the more we know of the universe, the more it all seems pointless.”  He is wrong about that, but in the epistemic world of modernity it is efficiently expressive of the mystique of meaninglessness that animates the modern soul.  We are more than Charles Taylor’s “buffered selves” existing within a locked “immanent frame”.  With the rise of artificial intelligence and the digital world of illusions, this frame in which we live could also be viewed as the “Truman Show” on steroids, with our enclosure run by faceless and anonymous bureaucrats who manage the meaninglessness through digital bread and circuses.

Therefore, the young people of today who seek eternity do so precisely as that which has the capacity to break this spell and to liberate us from the archons of meaninglessness in ways eerily reminiscent of Christ vanquishing the capricious and often hostile “principalities and powers” of pagan antiquity.  

Alright then, such is our cultural milieu, in all of its raw and depressing glory, which is an ethos very close in spirit to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov and his tale of the Grand Inquisitor.  There are three details in Ivan’s story that stand out to me. First, it is the fierceness of the Inquisitor’s indictment of Jesus as one who has freighted human moral agency with too much cargo.  A fierceness the very moral force of which argues for its own refutation.  Second, it is the silence of Jesus in the face of this criticism that is not the silence of one guilty, but of one who sees beyond vitriol and into the tortured soul of he who confronts him. It, in other words, the silence of redemption. And third, the only response Jesus gives is to kiss the Inquisitor on his “bloodless lips”. A kiss so disarming that it leaves the Inquisitor shaken, with his arguments now strangely irrelevant.    

Returning to the book of Job – the second most important Old Testament book behind only Genesis – what we witness is the dismantling of the various bad theodicies of Job’s friends. And it seems as if this is the main point of the text wherein no satisfactory “explanation” is given in the book as to the reason for Job’s sufferings, but a whole series of bad explanations are exposed as empty and impotent.  And ultimately, the text is a kind of wondering out loud if human beings will still worship God even when things are going poorly, which was no small question for a people who at that time were still in the throes of a religion of worldly rewards and punishments in a strict calculus tied to human sins.  

And just as Jesus gave no answer to Ivan’s fictitious inquisitor beyond a kiss on his bloodless lips, perhaps too the message of Job and of the psalms of lamentation, is one of salvation via the path of the recognition of the presence of eternity in the smallest and quietest and most seemingly insignificant of gestures.  The inquisitor, for all of his rationality and power and bluster, is “bloodless”.  Just as Pontius Pilate, for all of his Imperial regalia, is an ultimately lifeless pawn of the randomness of power’s perdurance in first this potentate and then the next.  He is nothing.  Hitler is nothing.  And all suffering is the mere conglomerate residue of a distillated form of nothingness the very nature of which as sheer nonbeing is constitutively random.  

Juxtaposed to this regime of sin, this Imperium of nonbeing, this haphazardly adorned “Kosmos”, is an economy of salvation grounded in the christologically oriented apotheosis of our own moral agency. But now it is a moral agency whose telos is that of kenotic love, a love which is at once cruciform and, precisely insofar as it is cruciform and united to Christ, an intrusion of eternity into time.  No “simple answers” to the problem of evil are proffered. Revelation gives us no such calm assurance of things. But what we are given is eternity in time in the form of a cruciform kenotic sanctity.

This is what the Church is and yet must still strive to be.  It is a sanctity that ever struggles to be born. A Church capable of kissing the world’s bloodless lips with the electricity of eternity.  Such is the sanctity that many young people also seek today.  The sanctity of the silence of eternity.  But a silence which ultimately issues forth into action. The late great David L. Schindler, meditating upon time, eternity, and sanctity puts it thus:

Curious men attend closely to the passing of events all about them.  But such men merely drift along on these currents of past and future, remaining on their surfaces. It is the saint who truly penetrates the events of history. And the sense of the saint’s doing so is paradoxical; by apprehending time’s intersection with the timeless.  That is, only through awareness of the eternal dimension in time does the moment of time become truly attended.  And how is this awareness achieved? Only by ‘a lifetime’s death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.’  … This is the meaning of Incarnation; it is the Incarnation, this life-unto-death, that fills time with its meaning, that reconciles past and future. (Heart of the World, Center of the Church, 228-29)

This is the verticality and transcendence that young searching Catholics seek in the Church today.  What they seek in the midst of modernity’s crucible of random meaninglessness is that kiss on the bloodless lips.  And it is a kiss that can only be given by one who lives the Gospel authentically.  That is what we all seek today in our Church. The sanctity of the silence of eternity which alone can pierce the randomness of evil.  The still small voice of the crucified lamb who was slain.

The Church, of course, will always be riddled with sin and filled with all manner of nefarious characters.  Nobody is so naïve as to demand a pure Church before committing to it. Especially since we are all sinners and are thirsting for the kiss of eternity precisely in order to heal our own sins and skanky secrets. Nobody wants a neo-Jansenist Church of finger wagging rigorism.  

But in point of fact that for the past 60 years Catholics have had to endure the opposite extreme of a Church that has lost its faith, its nerve, its self-confidence and its desire for eternity.  A Church that seems to agree with Ivan’s Inquisitor that moral agency is of little importance, that everything is just “complicated circumstances” turtles all the way down, and that there are no moral norms that pierce the darkness with their clarity.  For 60 years we have been given a milquetoast Church with an “optional Christ” who is really a lovely life-guide for those who want that sort of thing, but is not in any way truly necessary for salvation in an explicit way, and whose primary effects seem always to be in the hidden “unthematized” passageways of worldly aspirations.  

A Church of lawyers and insurance reps on retainer to help us better hide our secrets. A Church where everything is horizontal and the vertical elements of the faith are treated as signs of a scrupulous fixation on the Pantocrator sky daddy of moral judgments.  A Church where the quest for eternity is downplayed even as Fr. Rupnik runs free in Rome and Bishop Zanchetta spends his retirement with a soft-landing house arrest of cushy comforts after spending years in Rome under papal protection evading justice.  

What young serious Catholics seek, therefore, is not a pure and rigorist ecclesial Vallhalla, but a Church where forgiveness, mercy, compassion and empathy are not interpreted via the path of antinomianism, but as the gateway drugs to a sanctity of cruciform intensity.  They seek eternity via a Church whose outer life, despite its sins, clearly and unapologetically calls us to the repentance of the way of the cross.  A Church from the cross, of the cross and for the cross.  A Church that once again knows itself as a lantern in the darkness, no matter how feeble the flame, which can grant to us the gift of hope.

Young Catholics of today who seek eternity do not want, mired as they are in a meaningless culture of amoral drift, a Church of drift. They do not want a synod on synods discussing the best way to do synods in a new synodal path to our synodal future.  They do not want brutalist modernist liturgies of such iconoclastic spartan simplicity that all that gets communicated is an apophaticism of open-ended “spirituality”.  They want Christ and Him crucified.  

This is why our ecclesial leaders must cease the narrative that views these young Catholics as “rigid indietrists” who are “fundamentalists” seeking a simplistic “epistemic certitude” in the midst of life’s “complicated concrete situations.”  This is the monumental pastoral blindness of too many prelates in our era who fail to read the signs of the times as an agonistic search for eternity.  They routinely misinterpret the thirst for an experience of eternity through the living adventure of the quest for sanctity as a form of religious neurosis in need of therapeutic ecclesial remediation.  

Sadly, our late Holy Father,  Pope Francis, and his allies read our times as a rejection of a pharisaical religion of “rules” which, if we would only soften the rules, would then turn that rejection into a return to the faith, as if the deeper issue of radical unbelief at the root of the crisis is not a thing.  He wrongly read the ecclesial room as littered with guilt-racked scrupulous sorts and therefore if we can just “give blessings to the gays and remarried and cohabitators” that we can turn guilt into liberative joy through the lessening of burdens.  

But this is a fundamentally incorrect pastoral reading of our times.  It is a tragically wrong reading of our times.  And it has led directly to a Church that marginalizes young fervent Catholics as neurotics even as Fr. Rupnik continues on in good standing.  

Such a Church cannot kiss modernity’s aged bloodless lips.  

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