Man and God in Mark Helprin

Excerpt from the tale of Mark Helprin, author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcUxtZzi9Gs

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The year that has passed seems suddenly to have awakened many people to the greater tests of faith that have always been and will always be with us. One might ask, in a world unceasingly awash in suffering and death, where these people have been before a stressful presidential election made them rend their garments. But that would be beside the point, which is that for secular panic there is seldom effective secular remedy.

In the life of the United States thus far, we have had a great though imperfect and, in historical perspective, brief respite from tyranny, oppression, and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” Powerful forces from within and without have often been and are now poised to end this. The fundamental inhumanity, regimentation, mechanisms of control and conformity, and ceaseless reductionism inherent in modernism are the fertile seedbed of political tyranny, loss of human dignity, ideological madness, and genocide of the born and unborn. In the triumph and worship of the modern and its unprecedented riches is much ugliness and danger.

The faults and depredations that have rightly led to contemporary anxieties are well known and too many to list here. These are serial tests of faith amid hostility to religious belief and the prospect of growing secular failure and disorder. Though a majority, Christians have in a historically short time assumed the status of a defensive minority. Believing Jews, mainly the Orthodox, have always been a defensive minority. Abrahamic Muslims, due to the violence and ferment in Islam, are put upon from all sides. Modernism and materialism own the secular world as once did the Church. It is not unreasonable to assume that even in the most fertile ground of belief—the developing world—the modernism and materialism so familiar to the West will catch up, and that eventually, religion there, now on the upswing, will decline.

Tests of faith in the absence of persecution are hard to pass, just as benevolent tyrannies are the hardest to overthrow. They have benevolence on their side, with which they rock their subjects to sleep, and if their subjects awaken, they will be met with force. The answer to such things is to trust in God, who will decide all questions. But for Judaism and Christianity, unlike Islam, God has laid down principles that govern even his own actions, and has invited inquiry and exploration. Jews famously argue with God, as well as, of course, with each other and everyone else. But how can you believe that God is omnipotent, and yet wrestle with him? How can you reconcile persecution, defeat, and death with a belief in his benevolence?

Simple acceptance, even if it is demanded as in the test of Abraham, has never been the habit of an argumentative people. I myself come from the Hasidic tradition, in which, paradoxically, the requirement of intense lifelong study to understand the divine, along with close attention to all opportunities of intermediation, exist in perfect harmony with the conviction that God may also speak directly to each person without any intermediation whatsoever, either intellectual or structural. Although seeking God through study may reveal him, study as I see it is more a necessity for understanding and properly and humbly dealing with the lightning bolts of force unleashed within the soul when apprehending him. If life itself requires education, then encounters with that which is deeper and superior to life itself must require even more education.

And as for direct apprehension, if the supervisors of Nassau County, the governor of Texas, AT&T, my high school principal, and Saks Fifth Avenue can send me a message directly, God can’t? Who would deny him except those who deny him entirely?

Jews do not, as de Gaulle regally pronounced, “always come out on top.” Hardly. Had it not been for the Holocaust, conversion, and assimilation, natural growth would mean that current Jewish populations would number perhaps fifty million or more. Now there are not even fifteen million in a world of more than seven billion. Only God knows how many Jews there would be had they not been exiled so often, slaughtered so often, and excluded from so many freedoms and professions. But ultimately this does not disturb our faith.

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia put it beautifully when he said, “The Church is free even in the worst persecution. She is free even when many of her children desert her. She is free because God does exist, and the Church depends not on numbers or resources but on her fidelity to God’s word.”

Faith in God cannot be assumed like a costume. Rather, it must be apparent and apprehended in its consummate simplicity. The judgment of man is as irrelevant to it as the buzzing of a fly to the explosion of the sun. It transcends all sects, beliefs, and reason. It is the sole permanent truth. Philosophers and theologians have parsed it into many types, but to me there are only two, the faith of wishing and the faith of knowing. The faith of wishing is braver and more of a test, in that it requires hope, and trust in things that cannot be seen. The faith of knowing is to be virtually assaulted by such things for which some merely hope, some project, and others faithfully deny. The faith of knowing is to try to stay on one’s feet in mortal balance while standing as if in a torrent, a whirlwind, a hurricane of perfect light.

During the Passover service there is a song, “Dai-ainu,” meaning, “it was enough for us,” or sufficient. Its meaning and intent are to thank God for all gifts, eliminating them with each verse until none is left but life itself, only the existence of God, which is enough. If one thinks that way, one can pass any test.

When I was young, I could not for the life of me understand the notion of turning the other cheek. As a demonstration of and commitment to moral superiority, yes. But that was it. With the Holocaust as the single most impressive fact of my existence, I was impassioned by the justice and necessity of self-defense. And I still am.

But then, at around forty years of age, I was on a book tour, which is a very stressful thing for a private person. A man roughly the age my father would have been had he lived to that point approached me as I signed books. He slowly shook his head left and right, and said, “How can a young man like you, who writes such wonderful books, possibly be a Republican?”

Granted, it is an unusual combination, but not because it doesn’t make sense. As I am used to debate, there were many things I could have said. I could have been indignant and angry. I could have crushed him in rebuttal and counterattack. But I remembered my father, and, seeing a resemblance, I merely smiled and let him feel that he had gotten the best of me. Then an amazing thing happened, that in all my life I hadn’t understood. A feeling of holiness and humility possessed me. It wasn’t pride or self-satisfaction—I know those sins only too well. It came entirely from without, and was very much like when I was almost dying (or dying and didn’t die). It was not only a protective aura, but what Judaism refers to as kodesh, or holiness, which can only be fully understood once it is experienced. In the code of the samurai it is called shin’bu, “suffering without protest,” accepting mistreatment and injustice when one must, without complaint. It gives rise to holiness just as in turning the other cheek. That quality is a gift given when we surrender our powers of action in recognition of and trust in God.

I am sure that in the Holocaust that is capitalized and in the many that are not, and when even one life is unjustly taken, there were and are those who at the end, in meeting the test of faith, suffer no anguish, not merely in giving themselves over to trust but in giving themselves wholly to love.

Too many times have I imagined what it would be like to be herded into a gas chamber with my family, or to witness, before my own death, the torture and death of my wife and children—the reason for such terrible exercises being only a familiarity with recent history and a recognition of persistent evil. I’m fairly well practiced in this because throughout my life my job, literally, has been to live through my characters, to feel what they feel, to be them as much as possible.

And in the most dire and dreadful situations, as above, when all else fails, when nothing is left and you are powerless and done, the one shield and maker of justice beyond the realm of temporal powers and mortality is love. It is the conqueror of grief, and, somehow, the protector of those whom we care for even in their suffering.

Whence the power of love to conquer even the worst terrors? In its purest form, it is the love of God. But just as Dante could not look directly at God, imperfect mortals are hard pressed to love him directly, for which, presumably, having created the possibility of many forms of intermediation, he forgives us. So one loves those made “in his image,” image not to be taken literally but more deeply. Thus, Dante says, “Beatrice in suso, ed Io in lei guardava.” “Beatrice gazed upward, and I gazed at her.” As Beatrice looks upward, the light of God makes her face apprehensible, and in reflecting off her into Dante’s eyes allows him to love God by loving her.

Love will carry you, if you know it, if you let it, through all tests, through suffering and death. In suffering, it is as if an angel folds his wings to protect you. I know this not because I am a philosopher—you can plainly see that I am not—but only because I have been there. And I report back with no expectation except mockery from those who haven’t, which is perfectly all right if one has learned in life to trust one’s own eyes and listen to one’s own heart.