From
The June 2002 St John's Eagle
"One God - or Two?"
More
than forty years ago, my wife and I saw Ingmar Bergman's extraordinary film The
Virgin Spring (1959). I have been thinking about it ever since. Indeed, if
I were teaching a course in medieval literature, I would use The Virgin 5pring
as an introduction to the life of that era in northern Europe with its harsh juxtapositions
of pagan darkness and the new religion of Christianity. (A distant runner up would
be Wagner's Lohengrin.)
Along
with The Virgin Spring we saw what in those days was called a "selected
short subject." Its name and all the relevant details I have long ago forgotten,
but its impact has weighed upon me to this present day.
It
opened with the camera sweeping through a snow covered northern forest at night,
the moon shining though occasionally obscured by clouds. The only sounds were
the night sounds appropriate to the place—bird calls, animal rustlings, screams
of pain. For intermittently, the camera zeroed in on a grim scene of natural carnage:
an owl carrying off a small rodent, a wolf pouncing on a rabbit. Pools of blood
stained the brilliant whiteness of the snow. There were no human voices, no "background
music" of any kind. Just the black and white scenes of struggle, fear, and
sudden death.
At
the very end, the camera discovered a small clearing containing a primitive church.
Within it, a congregation was celebrating Christmas Eve. No comment of any kind
just The End.
I
have often pondered the significance of this strange juxtaposition of the "natural"
world of the implacable wilderness and the carols of human joy resounding in the
clearing. Were we to see a progression from the cruel world of the forest to the
affirmations of human faith within the clearing. Or were we to see an ironic contrast
between the fierceness of nature and the hope of Christian faith that God is a
God of love and mercy? Or, most bleakly of all, was the point that no possible
connection can be made between the two?
One
thinks of the Book of Job. job's demand that he be taken seriously by God, that
he be given justice at least if not love, is never answered. God appears as the
voice from the Whirlwind, a tornado spinning over the plain to the place where
job is crouching in misery surrounded by his "comforters "
Yahweh
thunders as lord of the entire universe—specifically, the vast non human
worlds of the depth of the sea, of snow, hail, and rain, of the constellations
in the sky, of lions ravening for their prey, of the ostrich indifferent to the
survival of her young, of the horse snorting amid the carnage of the battlefield,
of the crocodile impervious to human weaponry. The focus is on sheer power; justice
and love play no part in Yahweh's boasting. Job collapses in terror, his question
left unanswered. Right plays no part in this display of divine might.
The
Bible, be it noted, contains few other passages devoted to nature as such. Its
world is the world of men and nations (mostly city dwellers) in their encounters
with God through the processes of history. Yet the larger problem posed by the
Swedish film and by the Book of job remains. As we might put it, how is the God
of the Big Bank, the Black Holes, the Final Crunch, of evolution “red in
tooth and claw,” to be reconciled with the images of God as Good Shepherd,
as Loving Father, as benevolent King? Our religion seems to exist in a tiny clearing
in a universe charged with lethal violence.
Centuries
ago, the Calvinists experienced the terror of their God of Judgment. Jonathan
Edwards laid it on the line in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
“The
God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider,
or some
loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you ...
he looks upon you as worthy
of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.”
At
what point in history did our liturgies, our sermons, our church school lessons
resolutely avert their eyes from the horrors of the natural world to focus exclusively
on a God of tenderness and love? Modem literature, as in Eugene O'Neill's play,
images God in the mindless power of the Dynamo; do we still sing “Jesus Wants
Me for a Sunbeam”/ Are there really two gods—the god of science and
the god of religion?
How
do readers of The Eagle reconcile this apparent conflict?
