In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I, I set forth some of the reasons why I suddenly find myself something other than the good Catholic believer I had been for a decade.
Or, rather, why I still believe in a God who is all-good, but not in one who is all-powerful. We Catholics aren't supposed to be neo-Manicheans — latter-day descendants of those early Christians who were declared heretics by the Church for finding this world to be a perpetual battleground between God and Satan, neither of whose supernatural powers are limitless or decisive.
After I wrote Part I, something happened to me that I consider emblematic of what I'm getting at: I got stung on the left thumb by a yellow jacket. I had awakened from a nap and saw something on the carpet that needed to be picked up and disposed of. I couldn't tell through sleep-drenched eyes that it was alive, if near-dead. It injected me with its venom before I could say ouch. Today my swollen hand is painful.
Symbolically, chaos zapped my life with that bee sting. Though slight in itself, it set my immediate future off on a wholly unexpected trajectory.
My life will of course recover its accustomed order soon enough — which in my worldview means a personal return somewhere to the orderly side of the "edge of chaos," the locus of change and growth where chaos' eternal novelty is tempered by the world's capacity to refine what has been introduced. Evolutionarily, according to the laws of natural selection and self-organized complexity there is nothing so constant as change.
By those laws of nature, order that is statically frozen — or that repeats itself ad infinitum, world without end, amen — is never preferred. By those laws, surprising emergence is followed by graceful evolution that transpires in a mathematically describable regime at the edge of order, cheek-by-jowl with chaos. When chaos obtrudes, there is death and destruction.
That's the way I see the world. It is no longer possible for me to square it with my Catholicism.
I've never been able to square it with what I know of evangelical Christian worldviews. I have friends and relatives in that realm of religion, and in fact my own family, on my mother's side, is Southern Baptist.
Mainline Protestant outlooks, as well, are determinedly non-Manichean. My late father's abandoned Methodist upbringing qualifies here.
All Christian approaches today, as far as I know, insist that God is both thoroughly good and omnipotently great. They are heirs to the belief of the Early Church, after it had purged itself of Manichaeanism alongside a litany of other heresies, in this regard.
But it is Roman Catholicism and its closest Protestant cousin, Anglicanism, that I know best as a religious tradition.. The Church of Rome and the Church of England share much theology and a good deal of liturgical practice, including a belief in sacraments — though they still quarrel over the exact nature of (among many other things) Holy Communion. They have in common their emphasis on the Trinity, on bishops as direct successors of the Apostles, on "high" liturgies, and on the Church as a unitary institution that is God's beachhead in a sin-corrupted world.
The Church thus stands between us and God. We have a mediated relationship. Theology is essential to it — not just you and I reading our own Bibles and possibly sharing our conclusions, posssibly not.
The foregoing paragraphs suggest the sheer variety of Christian outlooks in the modern world. There is not just one. All of them assume, though, that God's victory over evil has "always already" been won.
God, theologians say, foreknew that man would fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, that he would not be able to redeem his own sin, that God's own death on a cross would be needed ... and provided, in due course, in Christ, the Son of God, who would suffer and die like one of us. He would be one of us, in all ways but sin. After his resurrection and eventual departure from this world, Satan's defeat would be secured on our behalf for the rest of time.
That defeat of Satan would be manifested, though, only at the end of time. Meanwhile, we would have our strong faith to shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
My faith in that upbeat scenario is not so strong any more.
Perhaps it never was.
It is a beautiful picture, I grant. In fact, I would say that all the elements of good Catholic understanding (I'll revert to the particular system I know best) dovetail and interlock in ways that make for a lovely jigsaw puzzle, all the individual pieces serving one another to create a compelling, seamless tableau of thought and belief.
For the longest time, I habitually averted my gaze from those details of the Catholic theological tableau which otherwise might have bothered me. Among them: the historical tendency of the Church to dictate to believers, rather than solicit assent; the tendency to stifle free inquiry; the lack of openness to other points of view; the self-protectiveness to the point of failing to confron, say, anti-Semitism within the Church; and so on.
But I also studiously ignored how central to the magisterium of the Church is its doctrine about sex, gender, marriage, contraception, and so forth. That is not properly part of my topic here, but I need to fully disclose that I now believe the coherent "jigsaw puzzle" falls apart if you, say, affirm homosexual lifestyles. I'll return to this difficult topic in some future post.
For now, let me just say that I and Pope Benedict XVI probably agree on this much: a neo-Manichaean outlook implies we humans confront evil on a completely different footing than does a "good Catholic" point of view.
To a neo-Manichaean such as I now call myself, evil is not severable from any aspect of our human experience.
I'm struggling to find the words to express my thoughts here. Please bear with me: Just as chaos is not severable from order, just as the "edge of chaos" is essential to the evolving world that has produced our human species, everything that happens, everything that we know, is potentiated by the struggle between a good God and his evil adversary.
I use the word potentiated advisedly. An electrical "potential" is a voltage set up by the difference in charge between two elements of a battery. Without the other element, nothing happens.
This is not to say that the ideas of good and evil are any different from our usual pure conceptions of them. What is good is of God; what is bad is of the Enemy. We still ought to favor good and hate evil, in my neo-Manichaean outlook. We still need to be idealists. It's just that we're also realists who recognize that it's never really possible to surgically cut out the cancer of evil from any organ of the living, breathing world.
Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also potentially cancerous.
As I write this, the Middle East has blown up again. Israel, responding to abductions of soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah, is engaging in military strikes many say are disproportionate. There are those pundits who recommend we deal with Iran as the only power broker in the region who might put Hezbollah back on its leash. Iran could, in fact, become a new source of regional stability, if we deal with it cagily. But we're not talking to Iran. They, after all, seem to be developing a nuclear arsenal.
Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also cancerous.
There are other pundits who say our best option is to treat everyone and everthing that might be anti-Israel or pro-Islamist as absolutely malignant to the rest of the world. Cal Thomas, for example, recently wrote in Understanding the Temper of the Times, "Israel's enemies are all of the same piece by whatever name they call themselves. There are no 'moderates,' at least none who have the power to make peace."
To Cal Thomas, a well-known and dedicated member of the religious right, some cells are evil, some good.
I agree with Mr. Thomas that radical Islamism, as a pure idea, is fundamentally totalitarian and evil. And the notion of a permanent, secure Jewish state in Israel is one I, too, who recognize the absolute intolerability of the Holocaust and genocide in general, support without reservation.
But I disagree with Mr. Thomas that the fight against evil can ever be antiseptic. If the white hats in America don't talk to the black hats in the Middle East, America loses power like an anode without a cathode.
But my intention is not to talk of politics and ideology. Nor is it to evangelize in favor of a Manichaean outlook on the world. It is rather to try to state what that Manichaean outlook entails, and why it appeals to me so. More on that in upcoming posts.
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