CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 7
WHEN MEANING FAILS:
DOUBT, TRAUMA, AND DISBELIEF
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.
ANNE FRANK
Like any scholar, I am passionately committed to the pursuit of truth, irrespective of whether I like what I find or not. I share the view of the great English philosopher John Locke, who wrote of the sense of fulfilment, even delight, that accompanied the search for truth in life: “I know there is truth opposite to falsehood, that it may be found if people will, and is worth the seeking, and is not only the most valuable, but the pleasantest thing in the world.”[1] Yet anyone who pursues truth soon discovers that it is frustratingly elusive, lying beyond our grasp. We can, of course, prove certain truths in logic and mathematics—such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which neatly subverts the idea that all propositions that are true can be shown to be true. Yet the truths that give meaning and purpose to life lie beyond rational or empirical demonstration.
Some more exuberant writers of the Enlightenment held that truth could be permanently and clearly established, independently of the thinker’s cultural and historical situation. Benjamin Franklin famously declared his belief that certain truths are “self-evident”—most famously in his statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Thomas Jefferson’s original line in the Declaration of Independence—which was edited by Franklin—spoke instead of holding “these truths to be sacred and undeniable.”) Yet this is not an evidenced argument. A “self-evident” truth is basically an intuition, in which someone just “sees” that something is right, without the need for evidence or argument.[2] And many of those “intuitions” turn out to be shaped by our cultural location.
In his Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), Philip Pullman introduced the idea of the alethiometer—a mechanized device which determines truth algorithmically and objectively. It’s a great literary expression of the Enlightenment’s dream of an objective truth which lies beyond the contingencies of history and human cognitive bias. Yet Pullman’s narrative in the Dark Materials trilogy shows that the interpretation of the alethiometer’s outputs is problematic, save apparently for Lyra, the central character of the trilogy, who seems to have an intuitive grasp of the meaning of the device’s symbols.
The alethiometer is a symbol of the Enlightenment’s doomed quest for an objective truth, binding on all rational beings, which could be established through a mechanical process which was independent of history and culture. Yet we now know that the rationalizing algorithms of Descartes and Spinoza did not—and could not—answer life’s greatest questions. Although the problems of this approach were obvious from the outset, it was only in the aftermath of the First World War that a serious critique of its plausibility emerged in the writings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger.[3] Perhaps we are now more willing than before to recognize the epistemic limits of humanity, in which we realize that we have to trust, rather than expect to prove, our core beliefs.
As Bertrand Russell remarked, philosophy tries to teach us “how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.”[4] Religion is the supreme cultural exemplar of a chastised and realistic account of human rationality, not its antithesis. It affirms the importance of reason while recognizing its limits, thus avoiding the delusional tendencies of earlier generations to idealize reason, detach it from human emotions and feelings, and fail to appreciate how easily it can go wrong. The contemporary resurgence of interest in classic philosophical theologians such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas reflects many considerations, one of which is that they represent an approach to reason, experience, and imagination that exceeds both in elegance and utility the thin mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Despite our divergences in belief, both Richard Dawkins and I are trapped within the human condition of being unable to prove what we believe. I believe there is a God; Dawkins believes that there is no God. This does not mean that Dawkins and I have arbitrary beliefs; it just means we cannot prove them to be true and have to learn to live with this tension—not because we enjoy this or get some kind of weird existential satisfaction from hovering on the borderlands of a tantalizingly distant truth but because of the limits placed on human beings to discern truth in the first place. We feel it is important to grasp deep truths, but we discover that it is difficult to do so.
There is nothing new or controversial about this. The intellectual historian Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), noted for his work on ideologies, pointed out that human convictions fall into three basic categories: those that can be established by empirical observation; those that can be established by logical deduction; and those that cannot be proved in either of these ways.[5] The first two categories concern what can be known reliably through the natural sciences on the one hand and what can be proved through logic and mathematics on the other. The third category concerns the values and ideas that have shaped human culture and given human existence direction and purpose; these, however, cannot be proved by reason or science.[6] Examples include—but are not limited to—moral, political, and religious beliefs.
Even scientific truths are provisional in that they represent the most reliable judgments of the scientific community at the present moment. Yet these change over time as new evidence emerges. Back in 1900, the scientific consensus, based on classical physics, was that the universe had existed forever. Two reasons in particular should be noted. First, Newtonian physics held that time was infinite in both directions, precluding any notion of the “beginning of time.” Second, it was thought that the principle of the conservation of energy required that the universe had to be of infinite age in that the notion of a cosmic beginning seemed to violate this principle.
Today, the scientific consensus is that the universe came into existence in a singular event called the “Big Bang.” What will the scientific community believe in 2300? We do not know and have no means of knowing. Some of today’s core scientific beliefs will unquestionably be preserved; others, however, will be abandoned because they will no longer be seen as the best way of making sense of the evidence available. The difficulty lies in knowing which will be retained and which left to wither by the wayside.
Science here mirrors a wider realization of the need to live with uncertainty. The world is complex, not easily reduced to the certainties of any philosophy or theology. Blaise Pascal’s reflections on the opaqueness of the world are not a mark of skepticism. Though firmly committed to believing in a loving and benevolent God, Pascal had no doubt that nature bore witness ambivalently, if at all, to such a divinity:
I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.[7]
If it is valid, Pascal’s insight subverts the wisdom of our age, in which simple slogans triumph over nuanced attempts to do justice to the complexity of our world and human attempts to understand it. Why, to use a courtroom analogy, do so many recent philosophers sound like lawyers trying to build their case by multiple technical arguments rather than like judges who deliver revelatory verdicts of truth? Pascal’s point is that simple worldviews require the cultivation of blindness on the part of their advocates. It is only by being deliberately inattentive to some aspects of our universe that we can construct the kind of totalizing “grand narrative” that we find in secular faiths such as Marxism or the rationalist platitudes of the “New Atheism.”
There must be room for doubt and uncertainty in life, precisely because neither the universe around us nor our minds within us yield the certain deliverances that are required by fundamentalism, whether religious or anti-religious. What Karl Popper called “ultimate questions” elude our intellectual grasp and lie beyond strict logical proof. The problem is not faith, which is a natural and inevitable part of human life, but a shallow and glib dogmatism which refuses to recognize the human need for faith in the first place.
Doubt is just part of the intellectual and emotional routine of life. There is a sense in which we are all agnostics, in some sense and to some degree. We can, of course, prove shallow truths, yet the beliefs in life that really matter lie beyond proof. There may be good reasons for thinking that certain beliefs are right. But in the end, we just cannot demonstrate that this is the case. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, that is just the way things are, and we need to learn how to live without the certainty that we crave.[8]
These points are not controversial; they are, however, deeply unsettling to those who are attracted to worldviews that offer them certainty. Some are drawn to intensely dogmatic forms of religion for this reason, others to the superficial yet equally dogmatic platitudes of the New Atheism. Most of us, however, have got used to the fact that leading meaningful lives demands stepping beyond the secure deliverances of reason—without thereby degenerating into some kind of irrationalism. If we are to cope with life (and not merely make sense of it), we need answers to the question why, not merely to the question how. Let’s look at this point in more detail.
Making Sense of Things—Coping with Things
How do we cope with life? In his remarkable book The Twilight of the Idols—with the intriguing subtitle “How to Philosophize with a Hammer”—the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche answered this question with a powerful one-liner: “If someone knows the ‘why’ of life, then the ‘how’ can look after itself.”[9] If you have found the “why” of life, according to Nietzsche, then you can cope with just about any “how.” Nietzsche’s book reflects his deep disillusionment with the academic philosophy of his day. Why did so many philosophers think that life was worthless? Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates may be wide of the mark, but his point needs to be taken seriously. We need a philosophy of life which is able to engage positively and practically with the realities of everyday life rather than retreating into abstract ideas or a preoccupation with heaven that distances us from the cares and concerns of this book.
Nietzsche’s aphorism neatly anticipates a core theme of much recent psychological research: it is much easier to cope with life if we can discern purpose and meaning within events, even when these are traumatic. Empirical studies of many groups dealing with major life stressors—such as natural disasters, illness, or loss of loved ones—show that religion and spirituality are usually found to be helpful to people as they try to cope with these situations. This theme was explored some time ago by Viktor Frankl (1905–97), whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War helped him to appreciate the importance of discerning meaning in coping with traumatic situations.[10] Frankl argued that survival in concentration camps depended on maintaining the will to live, which involved the discernment of meaning and purpose even in highly demoralizing situations. Those who coped best with these appalling conditions were those who had frameworks of meaning that enabled them to fit their experiences into their mental maps of meaning.
More recently, the psychologist Kenneth Pargament has argued that religious faith provides a framework within which responses to crisis may be developed. Religious faith offers resources through teachings, rituals, and narratives for both “religious coping through conservation” (that is, assimilating these events into one’s faith perspective and enriching it) and “religious coping through transformation” (that is, accommodating one’s faith perspective to these events so that it is challenged and revised in their light).[11]
There is now a growing consensus that religion and spirituality are of major importance in coping with stressful situations, such as natural disasters—for example, by providing a map of meaning which allows individuals and communities to reorient their subjective perceptions of situations.[12] These frameworks of meaning help them to make sense of what happened, cope with the stress it generates, and move on from there.
It is important to draw a distinction between making sense of a situation and coping with it. Let’s go back to our earlier analogy of the Balcony and the Road. Someone observing a traumatic event from the safe distance of the Balcony will try to make sense of what is happening. It may be intellectually interesting, but the observer is detached and disengaged. The situation faced by people on the Road is very different. They are participants as much as observers, caught up in the events that they are experiencing. Their need is not simply to make sense of things but to cope with them—to survive and perhaps even to become stronger and better people as a result of their experience. The Balcony yields an objective account of things, leading to comprehension; the Road involves a subjective immersion in experience, which needs—and hopefully generates—resilience.
Faith can help us cope with trauma. Yet there is another side to this. What if trauma calls faith itself into question? What if that map of meaning provided by religious faith is overwhelmed by events and experience? The erosion or loss of a map of meaning is not, of course, limited to religious faith. Arthur Koestler enthusiastically embraced Marxism-Leninism in 1931, yet his political faith was placed under stress by the rise of Stalinism, which called into question many of his core assumptions. Finally, Koestler realized he could no longer maintain his position with integrity. He resigned from the Communist Party in 1938.
In his autobiography, Koestler describes his own gradual movement away from his youthful certainties about how a Marxist framework made perfect sense of the world to a reluctant recognition of its obscurity and resistance to definitive interpretation. “In my youth, I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations and social determinants, whereas it now appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.”[13] So what causes this kind of collapse of meaning in the face of trauma? There have been many psychological studies of the impact of trauma, which emphasize the threat that it poses not only to the physical survival of the individual but also to core positive beliefs about the world or the self, especially through the shattering of core personal assumptions relating to meaning and self-worth or the confirmation of converse negative assumptions.[14]
People often rely on what may seem to be somewhat naive assumptions to enable them to cope with life. The case of Anne Frank is especially significant. Frank was a member of a Jewish family who lived in hiding in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. After their hiding place was discovered in August 1944, Anne was transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she is believed to have died in February 1945 at the age of fifteen. In a diary entry for June 1944, Anne wrote of her abiding faith in the goodness of human nature, which she felt unable to abandon, despite everything around her which called it into question as “absurd and impossible.” To abandon this belief would amount to an admission that life was based on nothing more than “confusion, misery, and death.” It was clearly a conclusion that Anne found unbearable. We have no way of knowing how Anne’s experience at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp influenced her determination to continue believing that “people are really good at heart.”[15] It seems empty and totally inadequate to suggest that her experience would have been traumatic.
Human evil is one of the most significant causes of a catastrophic questioning of faith; another is the experience of intense and seemingly pointless suffering. One of the most remarkable and challenging accounts of the impact of such trauma on faith is found in a late work by C. S. Lewis. In the next section, we shall consider Lewis’s changing views on suffering and reflect on how they illuminate the issues we’re considering.
C. S. Lewis on Suffering
We have already noted how Lewis was a “big picture” thinker, committed to the idea that the Christian faith offered a better imaginative rendering of reality than his earlier atheism. Lewis’s distinct way of approaching Christianity involves both reason and imagination and is best thought of in terms of a recognition of the capacity of faith to accommodate what we observe around us and experience within us.[16] So how does his way of thinking “fit in” suffering?
Lewis’s first book of Christian apologetics, The Problem of Pain, appeared in 1940 and was well received. It was an attempt to show how the existence of suffering could be accommodated convincingly within a Christian way of thinking. Its most famous one-liner is Lewis’s declaration that pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[17] The work’s clarity and accessibility endeared it to many and laid the foundation for Lewis being invited to give a series of “broadcast talks” by the British Broadcasting Corporation, later published in a slightly revised form as the phenomenally successful Mere Christianity (1952).
The Problem of Pain remains a valuable exploration of the intellectual issues raised by suffering and pain, and many continue to find its approach helpful and plausible. Yet Lewis’s reconciliation of faith and experience is rational, not existential. The work focuses on the interconnection of abstract ideas, not the distress and anxiety caused to people by the harsh, brutal realities of suffering and death.
Many readers of The Problem of Pain have found themselves wondering whether there is a near-total disconnection between Lewis’s intellect and his emotions. Lewis himself seems to have realized this. In a letter to his brother, Warnie, written while he was working on the book, Lewis appeared to suggest that the experiences of “actual life” have no bearing on the essentially intellectual issue under discussion. What has the experience of suffering got to do with explaining how it fits into the perspective of faith?[18] Lewis here seems to imply that intellectual reflection is detached from the world of experience, which has little relevance for such abstract discussions. So what would happen if Lewis were himself to experience overwhelming distress in the face of pain—either within himself or through someone whom he loved and whose pain he felt as his own?
In 1961, a short work by N. W. Clerk appeared, with the title A Grief Observed. It consisted of the painful and brutally honest reflections of a man whose wife has died, slowly and in pain, from cancer. Those reflections included a vivid depiction of his own reaction to her death, as well as some more theological reflections on the goodness of God. How can what has happened make sense if God is good and loving? Clerk writes of his realization that his rational, cerebral faith has taken something of a battering from the emotional crisis that has overwhelmed him. The ideas that had once proved intellectual anchors to his life turned out to be inadequate in the face of such a catastrophe.
We now know that “N. W. Clerk” was actually a pseudonym for none other than C. S. Lewis. There is a sense in which The Problem of Pain laid the groundwork for the emotional firestorm of A Grief Observed. To its critics, Lewis’s approach in The Problem of Pain amounts to an evasion (or even denial) of pain and suffering as experienced realities. Instead, they seem to be reduced to abstract ideas, pieces which need to be fitted into the rational jigsaw puzzle of faith. To read A Grief Observed is to realize how a rational faith can fall to pieces when it is confronted with suffering as a personal reality rather than as an inconvenient theoretical disturbance. A Grief Observed is saturated with poignant, heartrending cries of despair and bewilderment as Lewis’s maps of meaning seem to fall apart in the face of the unrelenting pain of loss. “Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”[19]
Lewis’s powerful, frank, and honest account of his own experience is to be valued as an authentic and moving account of the impact of bereavement. It is little wonder that the work has secured such a wide readership, given its accurate description of the emotional turmoil that results from a loved one’s death. Yet the work is significant at another level, in exposing the vulnerability and fragility of a rational faith that is rooted only in the mind.
Lewis’s correspondence in his final years of life shows that he fits into the pattern now generally known as “post-traumatic growth”—that is, not a mere return to the baseline of faith before the traumatic event but rather an advance or enhancement, in which an individual comes to find deeper levels of meaning and of personal significance than before the event.[20] Earlier we noted Kenneth Pargament’s important distinction between “religious coping through conservation” (in which experiences are incorporated into someone’s faith perspective and come to enrich it) and “religious coping through transformation” (in which experiences cause an accommodation of someone’s faith perspective to these events so that it is challenged and revised in their light). So which of these better describes what happened to Lewis?
We can’t say for certain, partly because Lewis did not live long after the publication of A Grief Observed and did not write about his experience of suffering in sufficient reflective detail to allow us to answer this question definitively. Yet Lewis’s experience helps us to explore in more detail the important distinction between making sense of suffering and coping with suffering. Let’s reflect more on this.
The Role of Faith in Sense-Making and Creating Resilience
I have taught theology at Oxford University for many years and regularly lead discussions with students on various topics. One of those focused on what are traditionally known as “theodicies”—ways of making sense of suffering from a Christian perspective. These are often highly abstract intellectual explanations of why the existence of pain in the world does not defeat belief in a good God. Students enjoy kicking around and opening up the ideas of writers such as Augustine, Leibnitz, and John Hick.[21] I hope I don’t sound cynical, but it sometimes seemed to me like shadowboxing—discussing ideas that are reasonably interesting but don’t actually make any difference to those discussing them.
Another student discussion I led around the same time focused on the issue of suffering in Christian spirituality. Here, the agenda was very different. We were looking at how the great spiritual writers of the Christian tradition dealt with the experience of suffering. How could faith uphold us as we suffer? How could it help us become better people? How could these spiritual ideas and approaches help us to put our lives back together again and cope with suffering, while at the same time aspiring to learn from it? The mood of this seminar was quite different. Students were looking for help and guidance, seeing the authors under consideration as sources of wisdom which might change their lives for the better.
The marked difference between these two seminars reflects a fundamental divergence between academic theology and Christian spirituality—between a mind-set that wants a clear, truthful, and objective account of the Christian faith and another that seeks inner personal transformation, leading to a greater resilience in the face of stress and trauma. The two can, of course, be bridged in helpful and important ways,[22] yet all too often they seem to be treated as two separate, watertight compartments within the Christian mind. Historians will, of course, rightly point out that this bifurcation of theology and spirituality is quite recent and is capable of being reversed. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to make this happen.
Where academic theologians explore the cognitive tensions arising from suffering in an objective and detached manner, most spiritual writers focus on how people could deal with such pain and perplexity within their subjective worlds, using suffering as a stepping-stone to wisdom and maturity. Approaches of this kind dominated Christian spirituality during the Middle Ages, when there was a widespread acceptance that suffering was simply a fact of life that did not require explanation; it did, however, need to be engaged with. Many writers of that age considered how someone could grow in wisdom and maturity through suffering, often using images of the crucified Christ as an imaginative gateway to reflection.[23]
Lewis’s personal history helps us to see why this matters so much. To simplify what is a slightly complicated matter, we might say that The Problem of Pain represents a view from the Balcony, whereas A Grief Observed represents a view from the Road. Lewis’s detached view of the suffering observed in other people proved inadequate to deal with his own personal experience on the Road, when it became a horrific reality in the life of someone he loved and had a direct impact on his own feelings and life. Lewis did not reject the intellectual framework he developed in The Problem of Pain; rather, he realized its virtual uselessness on the Road. His earlier approach to suffering had been rationally adequate but existentially deficient. It needed reformulation and contextualization if it was to be of any use to those traveling through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23). Lewis’s correspondence of the summer of 1963 (by which time he knew he was dying) suggests that he achieved this transposition.
In the last few chapters, we have focused on the human search for meaning in life. Yet that quest for meaning also extends to the world in which we live. What is its significance? And what is our place within this world? In the next two chapters, we shall explore this broader quest for meaning and the questions that it raises. We begin by looking at our attempts to make sense of our universe and how this gives rise to the natural sciences.
[1] John Locke, The Works of John Locke, vol. 8 of 10 (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), 447.
[2] See especially Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).
[3] See the analysis in Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
[4] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), xiv.
[5] Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (New York: Viking, 1979), 2–5, 161–62.
[6] Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 114–15.
[7] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, number 229.
[8] Russell, History of Western Philosophy, xiv.
[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie Man mit dem Hammer Philosophiert (Munich: Hanser, 1954), 7. “Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?” Nietzsche then added the teasing comment: “Human beings don’t strive for happiness (only the English do that).”
[10] Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
[11] Kenneth I. Pargament et al., “Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 4 (1998): 710–24. For discussion, see Joanna Collicutt, The Psychology of Christian Character Formation (Norwich: SCM Press, 2015), 232–33.
[12] See Manfred Zaumseil et al., eds., Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters: The Case of an Earthquake in Java, Indonesia (New York: Springer, 2014), 53–54.
[13] Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An Autobiography (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 13.
[14] Joanna Collicutt McGrath, “Post-Traumatic Growth and the Origins of Early Christianity,” Mental Health, Religion and Culture 9, no. 3 (2006): 291–306.
[15] Anne Frank, diary entry July 15, 1944, in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Bantam, 1993), 263.
[16] For a useful account of Lewis’s notion of rationality, see Alister E. McGrath, “An Enhanced Vision of Rationality: C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith,” Theology 116, no. 6 (2013): 410–17.
[17] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 91. Note also the later comment (p. 94) that pain “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”
[18] Lewis to Warnie Lewis, December 3, 1939, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2 of 3 (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 302.
[19] C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 6–7. For a perceptive analysis of the issues raised by this work, see Ann Loades, “C. S. Lewis: Grief Observed, Rationality Abandoned, Faith Regained,” Literature and Theology 3, no. 1 (1989): 107–21.
[20] For the phenomenon, see Joanna Collicutt McGrath, “Post-Traumatic Growth”: 291–306.
[21] See, for example, Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 236–72.
[22] For example, see James I. Packer, “An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality,” Crux 26, no. 1 (1990): 2–8. A good account of the possibilities of enrichment and integration of theology and spirituality can be found in F. LeRon Shults and Steven J. Sandage, Transforming Spirituality: Integrating Theology and Psychology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
[23] Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).