An essay on our culture and the current nastiness awake and abroad!
Nazi Germany and the holocaust require some serious thinking about faith and the presence and absence of God. The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is always how could God allow this to happen? It seems to me lately that what we see in Nazi Germany is the extreme consequence of using our human freedom to deify the will. The final result of that action, the extreme result of that is a City, so to speak, completely absent of the presence of God, completely absent of divine grace. Nazi Germany is what the City looks like from that perspective, and it is a crematorium: the complete, absolute denial of God and the meaning of humanity. It is truer, I think, to say that God does not allow this to happen; we do. We will determine what humanity means and to whom the definition applies. God is not in the business of overriding human freedom every time human freedom leads us to commit an evil act. Eventually, therefore, we get a historical reality like that of Nazi Germany and an image of what the denial of God and of objective truth means and actually looks like.
There are Biblical images of the same perspective: Sodom and Gomorrah come immediately to mind, but they are not the only ones. Even the culture of Israel comes to that condition; thus the role of the prophets to oppose the blindness and the evil, and thus, when it doesn’t happen, the exile to Babylon in 587 BC as the final consequence for Israel’s failure to repent and change its perverse and evil ways. Learn the lesson and start again. Do better the next time. Keep the two commandments front and center and obey them. ???
While Sodom and Gomorrah and Nazi Germany present us with three images of a City absent of any sense of divine presence, the point of this reflection is an attempt to clarify my own thoughts on the nature of reality and the presence or absence of God.
In the first place, while the historical reality presents us with a real image of the complete absence of God, we can see that the image is true: this is what that City of total self love and denial of the divine looks like. Ontologically and historically, however, we might discover that it’s not finally the entire picture. Ontologically, for example, I find that a scholastic definition of God, that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere is a way of saying metaphorically or in a graspable image, that God is present at all times and all places. It follows then that God was present in Nazi Germany too. Historically the nature of that presence manifests itself in the lives of those who opposed and resisted the Nazi evil and their definitions of reality, many of whom gave their lives in their resistance. Perhaps the best and most recent instance of that is the martyrdom of the Jewish Christian Saint Edith Stein, now known as Sister Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, who along with 300 other Catholic Christians was killed at Auschwitz in October of 1942 in reprisal, I understand, for a Dutch bishop’s denunciation from his pulpit of the Nazi terror.
The underlying reality of my understanding of human meaning and choice is found primarily in St. Augustine’s extensive work, the City of God, essentially his response to the accusations that the destruction of Rome in 410 AD was caused by the advent of Christianity and the rejection of the pagan pantheon. Augustin’s basic definition is that throughout history there are manifested two realities, two Cities defined by human love. The two loves are that of Self and that of God. Babylon is his image of love of Self, Jerusalem is his image of the love of God. While at heart his definition seems simple and clear, it takes him 1200 pages at last count to explain fully the definition, but I have found that book, along with his Confessions, quite compelling, especially the Confessions.
Now, the real point of this essay emerges. Simply it seems to me that our culture is quite given over to people who deny the divine and believe it is somehow their right and duty to tell the rest of us how to think and speak. The last example of that was of a young man in Canada, I think, who was denied graduation from his high school or college because he said there were two sexes, male and female. It seems laughable at first but turns out to be rather frightening. There also seem to be males who believe they can define themselves as women and thus take part in female athletics with the predictable outcomes. And of course there are females who believe that because they say it they can be males.
I have read that people ought to be allowed to chose their pronouns. I read an essay in a local newspaper, the Richmond Register, some time ago where the writer kept referring to either herself or some other as “they.” I considered the possibility that they’s name was “Legion.” And now Pride, from being one of the seven deadly sins, has become a rainbow reality under which those deniers of common sense reality may gather and determine for us our ways of thinking. Anyone who is even half awake [not “woke”] will recognize what I am talking about. Finally my assertion is that our culture has become the kind of image that Nazi Germany is, a culture that denies truth, common sense reality, and the possible presence of the divine. The examples of participating in this abomination are everywhere: consider the LA Dodgers and Target and Budweiser and, finally, the sisters of perpetual indulgence. You would think that anyone with common sense would object to these manipulations, though I suspect that there is much more to come.
NOTA BENE: There in an online free publication called “The College Fix” that I was just directed to as it keeps track of some of the current abominations like the admittance of the “gender-confused” male, William Thomas, now known as “Lia Thomas,” to the women’s swim team at the University of Pennsylvania, thereby excluding several qualified women swimmers. There is a 5 minute interview with his chief rival on the team, Paula Scanlan, at The College Fix’s website: thecollegefix.com Enough!
Image: D-Day: the invasion into enemy occupied territory. One hopes it is never too late!
