God, the Virus and ‘Tragic Optimism’

Where is God in all this? That's the question I've tried to wrestle with since  the Coronavirus became a fact of all our lives.  For vast numbers of people in this country and across the world these are terrible times. Where is God in the suffering and dying, the loss and the loneliness, the hopelessness and despair that so many are experiencing in this pandemic? When the world finally emerges from this ordeal, what kind of story will faith tell about it? What difference will it make to the way we believe?

I opened up some of these questions in an earlier blog, Chaos, the Virus and God. I was looking for a metaphor that would help make sense of the threat and disorder that the Coronavirus has posed for the world. I came up with the idea of flood, a pervasive image in the Hebrew scriptures of the primordial fear of being overwhelmed by chaotic forces beyond human control.

All four of the elements believed by the ancients to constitute the physical universe - earth, air, fire and water - are necessary to sustain life. Yet when they break out of their bounds they wreak havoc. I want to write about one famous example in history when all four were let loose at the same time. Because this particular event happened not in some remote country on the other side of the world but to a proud and prosperous European city, it had a dramatic effect on the way people thought about natural disaster. I'm referring to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

It struck at around 09.40 on the morning of All Saints' Day, Saturday 1 November. It was remembered as a calm clear autumn day. On a major festival in this devoutly catholic city, churches were thronged with worshippers, processions and carnival-goers squeezed along the narrow streets. The earthquake probably measured about 8.5-9.0 on the Magnitude Scale, catastrophic by any standards. Its epicentre lay about 120 miles offshore in the Atlantic. Within minutes damage to the city was extensive. This was followed by a fire storm that engulfed the centre, fuelled by thousands of church candles lit for the feast and a fierce wind generated by the flames.

Then came the most destructive event of all, three tsunamis that rushed in from the ocean and up the Tagus estuary causing devastation on a huge scale. No-one knows how many were killed in this disaster. Modern estimates reckon around 25000 in Lisbon, maybe 10000 more in the surrounding areas of Portugal, Spain and North Africa. The Lisbon figure would amount to around ten percent of the city's entire population. Death on this cataclysmic scale had not been known in living memory though the Great Plague that had ravaged London in 1665 had killed even more. But it was not only the magnitude but also the character of this calamity that would never be forgotten: how earth, air, fire and water had come together in a deadly embrace to the destruction of so much human life. And that it had happened in the heart of civilised Europe.

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What did it mean? - this was the question that preoccupied philosophers and preachers for years afterwards. The overwhelming conclusion among religious people, both Catholic and Protestant, was that the city had been punished for its sinfulness. John Wesley wrote a tract Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon in which he refuted 'natural causes', described nature as 'God's method of acting in the world' and warned that if the message of Lisbon was not heeded, God might deflect Halley's Comet, due in 1758, so that it would hit the earth and 'burn it to a coal'.

You have to wonder how even good theologians could read events with such naivete. You would think they had never read the Book of Job which comprehensively dismissed the idea that suffering reflected a cosmos ordered according to the laws of reward and punishment. What was needed was what the theology of the time could not supply, a new way of thinking, a seismic shift (as it were) away from the discredited paradigms of retributive justice and direct divine intervention to understanding how even violent natural phenomena simply followed the physical principles intrinsic to the way the universe works.

The key thinker in the aftermath of the disaster was Voltaire. He had imbibed the doctrine of the German philosopher Leibniz that ours was the best of all possible worlds. But his sunny (because highly privileged) outlook on life was turned upside down by the Lisbon Earthquake. In his comic novel Candide published four years later in 1759, he has two men, the ever optimistic Pangloss and his pupil Candide undertake a grand tour to see the world. They arrive at Lisbon just as the earthquake hits. They live through its mayhem only to fall prey to the Inquisition: as if natural disaster had not done enough, they were now to be subjected to extreme human cruelty. The bloodied, terrified Candide turns to his tutor and asks plaintively, ‘if this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?’

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The death toll due to the Coronavirus in this country is comparable to the Lisbon Earthquake. It is a catastrophe of the first magnitude, but unlike 1755, this one affects the entire world. This makes it unique among natural disasters in our lifetimes. It would be strange if we did not ask what significance lies in what is happening to the human race. In an article in The Guardian American responses to the virus are examined, and the majority are found to be looking for meanings of some kind, whether or not they are derived from organised religion or particular traditions of faith.

The quest for meaning in the cosmos seems so elusive because it appears to function according to principles that are indifferent to human beings. Our experience at times of trouble is not that the cosmos is necessarily hostile, simply that it doesn't care. That's the conclusion drawn by the world-weary author of Ecclesiastes where what goes round comes round, nothing is permanent, all is ‘vanity’, as light and insubstantial as air. As the wisdom writings of the Hebrew Bible show, faith has to find a way of negotiating the capriciousness of things, living with risk, accident and disaster, turning to the best ends we can whatever happens to us whether it is good or bad. Far from Alexander Pope’s notorious ‘whatever is, is right’, it's more a case of ‘whatever is, just is’.

In such a universe, could it still be ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante puts it in the last line of the Divine Comedy? One response of contemporary faith is to reflect on the convergence of mind and matter, exploring whether consciousness of the divine could be the goal of the cosmos as it moves towards realising what the Jesuit palaeontologist-theologian Teilhard de Chardin called its Omega Point. Process theology asks whether evolutionary theory, relativity, quantum physics and the cyborg expansion of the human psyche could all be relevant here.

This would still be a universe where things still go wrong, disasters happen and life is damaged. But faith is able to affirm that in an ultimate sense, 'all shall be well' by envisaging how pain, suffering and death are woven into this cosmic ‘process’ that is always moving towards finality. This kind of faith wants to explore how God is present, not above or outside the cosmos but within it, embedded even in its changes and chances. And this ‘withinness’ is mirrored by a personal spirituality that emphasises the journey inwards, towards the centre that we symbolise as the human heart where, as the mystics of all religious traditions teach, God is found. It would mean that the Creator was humble enough to be immersed in the fabric of the cosmos, in the natural processes of the created order and in our own human life and relationships. That would be true kenosis, self-emptying, the ultimate act of love. Just as the Incarnation was. (Or do I mean is?)

Whatever we believe, it seems to me that faith in these times has to be more tentative than before, humbler in the face of a universe we know to be more profoundly mysterious than our forebears of the eighteenth century could have guessed. In particular, contemporary faith must show the utmost sensitivity to pain. With our awareness of suffering, whether due to natural events or human agency, the existence of a deity who is both benign yet ‘in control’ is more and more difficult to articulate convincingly. To many people who are sympathetic to religious faith, traditional statements of theism seem not so much impossible as incredible. They want to know what kind of power we are claiming for God when we address him as the ‘Almighty’, what we mean when we speak about ‘God’s will’ while human hearts break under the burden of pain and sorrow. Theodicy is the study of these questions. We cannot help but ask them, if not during a crisis, then later on. But however we respond, it must surely be provisionally. If we follow the Book of Job, we’re bound to conclude that in the end, the problem of suffering is unanswerable. Meanwhile we have to go on living, and very possibly suffering, and if we can, like Job, trusting and praising God.

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What I learn from the Lisbon Earthquake is that at a time of catastrophe the last thing we should do is find refuge in explanations that sound easy or obvious. If they don’t do justice to the complexity of the real world, they are certain to be wrong. The short-lived comforts of Panglossian optimism will always be unmasked in the end. To try to reassure a terminally ill patient or someone who has just been bereaved or lost home and livelihood by saying ‘don’t worry: it will be all right in the end’ can be an act of real cruelty, not least because it sounds like a denial of what they are experiencing at the time. Indeed, explanations of any kind aren’t likely to be what’s needed in a time of crisis.

After their ordeals in eighteenth century Lisbon, Pangloss and Candide survive. Voltaire’s novel takes its leave of them placidly tilling the soil. Pangloss is still exhorting Candide to look on the bright side. To which Candide replies enigmatically, ‘’Tis well said...but we must cultivate our own gardens’. That is not perhaps very different from the outlook of another work published in the same year, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. It too asks what we can do in the face of human suffering. Johnson concludes that we must each labour for our own happiness ‘by promoting within his own circle, however narrow, the happiness of others’. Which is to follow the Golden Rule, care about the welfare of others and love our neighbour as ourselves.

This needn’t mean that ‘optimism’ should be written off. But it does need nuancing carefully. Following his desperate experiences in the Nazi death camps, Victor Frankl coined the phrase tragic optimism. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he turns the fundamental human question round from ‘What do I expect of life’ to ‘What does life expect of me?’ ‘Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.’ To be able to say ‘yes’ to life in spite of tragedy is to make the best of every situation, to live purposefully even at times of pain, despair and death. Optimism means believing that the best will happen. And so it will, not in the inevitable course of external events, but in the best selves those very events help us to become.

We have all seen countless examples of tragic optimism in this crisis. We find it wherever there is kenosis, self-emptying love happening in practice. In the courage and devotion of men and women in frontline caring roles in our hospitals, residential homes, surgeries and schools. In the dogged perseverance of those engaged in biomedical research that may one day transform our management of viral disease. In the work of ordinary people who, as it says in Ecclesiasticus, 'maintain the fabric of the world' by enabling society to go on functioning. And in the myriad little acts of kindness that are happening all around us as friends and neighbours recognise need and try to meet it. The virus has brought untold suffering to so many, but it has also released untold goodness and love that bring help, lift spirits and lighten heavy hearts. There is something miraculous in that, and very comforting.

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There is something deeply Christ-like in this washing of one another’s feet as we might see these beautiful acts of service. For self-emptying, kenosis, is precisely what takes place in the upper room on Maundy Thursday, and in the cross of Jesus on Good Friday. In the darkness of Golgotha, he opens his arms wide to embrace the human race, not in a coercive act of naked power but in the crucified power of love to give itself without limit, persuade, accept, entice, draw us to itself. It’s what makes love what it is, offers us the lens by which to read the world, convinces us that even the smallest act of service done in the name of love confers meaning and has the potential to transform our vision of life.

Which makes me think Candide was right. To cultivate our own gardens in the face of catastrophe is not an act of selfishness or shoulder-shrugging indifference. It is to defy death and say yes to life, yes to hope and yes to the future. This is tragic optimism at work. Frankl tells of someone in the Warsaw Ghetto who had placed a pot of brilliant red geraniums on their window sill above the street. What could be more eloquent than a blaze of colour in a dark and desperate place? Maybe painted rainbows and candles lit in our front room windows can do something similar in our time and raise the hopes of those who pass by.

Everyone's death diminishes us, but tragedy changes things

What can I say in the aftermath of Jo Cox's shocking murder? What language can we borrow when an MP is assassinated doing what she loved - serving her constituents and seeking the welfare of her  Yorkshire community and the community of suffering people across the world? There's a real sense in which she "laid down her life for her friends". She died because she was an elected member of Parliament. Her death was an act of witness to the values she cherished. A vocation to public office carries risks. She gave herself to her role and paid a terrible price. 

Jo's sister has told us that when they were children, "all Jo wanted was for everyone to be happy". She made this her life's work. People who knew her have written tributes that it's been extraordinarily moving to read. Most of us never met her, yet it seems oddly natural to be calling her by her Christian name. We feel as if she was somehow our own elected representative, even our friend. We wish we had known her and seen for ourselves the spirit of this remarkable woman: her passion for justice; her longing to make the world a more peaceful, happier place; her fiery love for humanity especially its weak and voiceless members in distant lands and on her own doorstep. If we had problems, we could imagine taking them to her surgery and she would have listened, understood. She would have cared and helped. And what fun we'd have had with her as her guest at the kitchen table with her family, sharing bowls of pasta and salad washed down with good wine, stimulating conversation, political anecdote and I'm sure uproarious laughter.

Why do we feel this way? Not because we want to write hagiography, though it's easy to canonise people we admire, especially when their lives are dramatically cut short. We're especially prone to hagiography when they died precisely on account of their vocation to a noble task. Something of that sort did shine out of Jo's life. But if I've read her correctly, she'd have been horrified at the idea of anyone rhapsodising in stained glass window language about her. I think she'd have been baffled by the degree of worldwide attention that's been given to her death. She'd have said: this isn't about me. Think about the people I care about and do everything you can for them. 

And that's the point. Anyone less prone than Jo to status-anxiety or self-importance it's hard to imagine. She was one of the world's spontaneously generous people. What we are drawn to in people like her is not - or not only - their heroic qualities, the achievements that mark them out as extraordinary. It's that these very qualities were allied to her sheer human ordinariness, indeed, seemed to flow directly out of it. It's unbearably poignant to learn about her devotion to her husband Brendan and their children, her happy temperament and love of life, her gift for home-making, hospitality and friendship. For most of us who live in intimacy with someone else, vocation is famously the third partner in bed with us. Not so with Jo. She seemed to practise a kind of stabilitas that was immensely life-affirming.

I need to tread carefully here. John Donne's time-honoured words tell us that "every man's death diminishes me". If we didn't know this before, we know it now. When death is "wrong", whether it's murder, accident, premature illness or armed conflict, it affects us. When it suddenly ambushes a man or woman who in some way stands for us, it is symbolically happening to us too. When that person is young and at the top of their game, has everything to live for, and is living such an exemplary, courageous and fulfilled life, it diminishes us more than ever. Who among us with any shred of human feeling has not wept for the senseless waste and cruelty of Jo's being taken from us? Even as I write, I am feeling it all afresh. Why ever did God allow this? Can God himself even answer that question?

The temptation for most of us in the shock of grief is to be angry, bitter and vengeful. What a wonderful example is being set by Jo's widowed Brendan in his loss. He speaks about honouring Jo by carrying on doing what she would have wanted and gave her life to, trying to roll back the tides of hatred that threaten to engulf our world. Inspired by this remarkable couple, I want to say that this senseless act of violence is very much not just a terrible waste, though in the rawness of our emotional response right now, that is precisely what it is. But we know from our own experience of the death of those we love that their memory goes on touching our lives. They live on in us and we are better people because of them. 

Jo's death has released a huge outpouring of admiration, gratitude and affection. This includes people who energetically disagreed with her views on such big issues as refugees, the EU, poverty, sanctions, immigration or human rights. But death transcends our differences. It's the great leveller that strips away pretence and illusion so that we have to focus on what we have left: our common humanity. Wealth, privilege, status and power count for nothing in the face of death, only what has been of lasting value in our lives. It is necessary that death should "diminish" us if only because it pulls us back to what really matters: that we should live not for ourselves but for the others who have a claim on us. Her death shows us the unselfconscious beauty of this way of being a human being. And the best thing about Jo seems to have been her native simplicity. It all seemed as natural as a bloom emerging to full flower. I imagine it wasn't: achievements like hers are always hard-won over a lifetime. Nevertheless it's precious gift to be able to live in the way she did. We honour it and admire her all the more because of it. 

This isn't a Princess Diana moment - the collective grief we feel seems more earthed in reality than that. Perhaps Jo's Yorkshire grit is helping us to get things in perspective. It's too early to say whether something in our politics and in the habits of public life may be shifting. Could the discourse of politicians, journalists, campaigners, everyone with influence over others (even preachers!) be touched by her death? Could we become less cynical and compromised, more respectful, compassionate and humane? Could our motives and aspirations be purified a little? Many have posed these questions in the last few days. Tragedy can have the effect of cleansing our vision so that we see and act in new ways. Perhaps Jo's death can help us to be more serious about life, find more fulfilment in our work, put laughter, joy and generosity back into our relationships. The spirit in which we engage in the final days of the EU referendum campaign, so febrile and bad-tempered up to now, may give us a clue about how Jo's death has changed things. 

As a Christian, my faith is founded on another death. That death too was the cruel waste of an even younger life in which so much promise was never to be fulfilled. "Those whom the gods love die young" wrote Herodotus of soldiers who perished in war. "The unfinisheds are among the most beautiful of symphonies" said Viktor Frankl, writing about the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The extent to which we are diminished by a tragic death is itself a tribute to the value of the life that has been lost. But faith goes on to say: in that death we remember every Good Friday lie the seeds of transfiguration, of resurrection and of eternal life. "Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain" we sing at Easter. 

What might Jo have become with so much yet to bring to us! How might she have brought her own happiness to make a difference to our fractured world? To murder such a good person makes no sense. We feel the heartbreak at the heart of things. But we cherish the memory of a rich and rewarding life that will not lose its capacity to inspire. Perhaps we can dare to hope that some redemption might come to our nation's broken sense of self as a result of this shameful deed and a life that was sacrificed. Faith wants to believe that it's possible. 

But this much we can say for certain. She will keep the flame of hope alive for that better world she fought for so well. She restores our belief in humanity at its very best.  Grief and gratitude walk hand in hand.  Ave atque vale.