Sections:

1)Some Ideas on the Existence of God

2)Why be a catholic?

3)Crisis of Faith & the instiutional church

4)Atheism: "Help My Unbelief"

5)Atheism, faith and love

6)"Faith Through Crucible of Doubt" (Two Prophets: Dostoevsky and St. Thérèse of Lisieux)

7) In search of God - and of Christ

 

 

"Faith Through Crucible of Doubt"
Two Prophets: Dostoevsky and St. Thérèse of Lisieux

We must all face the fragility of our experience of faith and to suggest that this is one of the realities that needs to be faced. I am not proposing that faith itself, as rooted in God, is uncertain, a matter of "perhaps yes, perhaps no". The point is rather that on the level of experience one should not be too surprised to find flux. As Bosset put it in the seventeenth century, "there is an atheism concealed in all hearts, which is diffused in all our actions." And our situation of three centuries later only serves to make this experience of the absence of God less concealed and more frequent. God is not obvious, even to saints. And therefore I want to supplement my little incident with the much more profound experiences of two of the prophets of our modern age, a man and a woman whose names are not often linked: the novelist Dostoevsky and the Carmelite, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. They were prophets in being able to fathom the crucial spiritual struggles of their own age long before most people had become aware of them, and thus they were forerunners of the crisis of faith and of culture that surrounds us now in the late twentieth century. Both of them in quiet different ways became preoccupied with atheism, even thought both of them remained fervent believers. More significantly, they did not concern themselves only with atheism around them in other people; rather each of them struggled with a form of atheism within their own experience.

It is just over a century now since Fyodor Dostoevsky died, and yet, in his central insights about atheism he reads like one of our contempories. It was a topic that obsessed him all his life, both within his own life and in his work as a novelist. In 1868 he said that he planned to write a long novel called "Atheism", but in fact this theme stretched out over the three major works he was to complete between then and his death: The Devils, A Raw Youth, and most famous of all The Brothers Karamazov. As he said himself it was a question that had tormented him all his life long: "is it possible for a civilised man to believe?" With all his heart he came to answer yes to that question, but he was prophetic in that his portrayals of atheism in fiction have been acknowledged by many unbelievers as the best dramatisations of their position - even though they came from the pen of a convinced Christian.

For Dostoevsky the God-question was far from a purely intellectual one, and he was one of the first to explore in depth the link between atheism and the isolation of the thinker from simple human contacts and emotions. Atheism for him was never a question of the mind alone, but rather a matter of basic choice about life. He insisted vehemently that the question of God's existence would influence everything at the centre of life and society; if there is no God, then is everything morally permissible? It is against this background of his own painful searching and finding that Dosteovsky is able, in his fiction, to do justice to the lonely agony of the unbeliever and at the same time present the case against faith with frightening force.

Only on one point does Dostoevsky continually portray his atheist figures as lacking: they are intellectual giants who are deeply divided within themselves and often incapable of simple love.

At the very end of his life Dostoevsky wrote in a letter about his own journey of faith: "my hosanna has come through the great crucible of doubt." In others words he felt personally burdened with the huge complexity of the new culture then emerging in Europe and in Russia, and he experienced within himself the divided consciousness that could easily give birth to atheism. He saw this as involving a split between attitudes of submission and of rebellion, between a brotherhood of hearts and an isolation of mere mind or mere will. From the basis of his own conflicts he was able to capture the central tensions of his whole time. In this he was both alike to, and quite different from, the woman born in France some fifty years later than himself. Both were prophets, of immense spiritual stature, and both strangely concerned with atheism. Where Dostoevsky was trained by education and social milieu to be acutely conscious of the intellectual currents of his age, Thérèse was almost entirely ignorant of the world of ideas.

But both of them penetrated beneath the merely intellectual struggles to the spiritual drama of faith and atheism. And more importantly, both of these Christians entered with an extraordinary level of sympathy, into the inner world of atheism as experienced. For as will be seen Thérèse in her very different way could well echo Dostoevsky's claim to have earned her hosanna by enduring her version of the crucible of doubt.

The inner journey of Thérèse of Lisieux can be told largely in her own words, from her autobiography and her letters. It is there that an extraordinary story unfolds, how a young nun, who was to die at the age of 24, willingly entered into an experience of atheism.

This last phase of her life began in the early hours of Good Friday 1896 when she vomited blood, the first serious indications of the tuberculosis that was to kill her some eighteen months later. Her first response to this haemorrhage was one of welcome for the "first summons" of death and therefore of heaven, and her autobiography goes out of its way to stress the consolation and feeling that she experienced on that Good Friday:

I had a faith so living and so lucid that the thought of heaven was the sum of all my happiness. I couldn't believe that there really were godless people who had no faith at all.

But all this freedom of spirit was to change drastically, and she was to begin a strange and painful companionship with atheists, which lasted until just before her death. In the days after Easter she tells us that "Jesus taught me to realise" the existence of "souls which have no faith". From this moment of insight into the reality of atheism, her inner life was overrun "by an impenetrable darkness", and the idea of heaven, which had previously been such a source of joy for her, became "a subject of nothing but conflict and torment'. She entered a state of emptiness where "everything has disappeared", and where any effort to seek out some consolation seemed doomed o even deeper desolation. She recounts that when she tried to think of heaven she would experience only a darkness filled with the mocking voices of atheism:

It's all a dream this talk of a heavenly country … and of a God who made it all … All right, all right, go on longing for death. But death will only give you - not what you hope - but a still darker night, the night of nothingness.
It seems incredible that this young nun, who had led the most sheltered existence possible, should now be sharing the experience of Dostoevsky and even of Nietzche, and should be a forerunner of the drama of atheism to be voiced in similar words by so many thinkers of later generation. Yet here in 1896 we have her expressing her haunting fears that God might be mere illusion, that her hope for heaven was only a deceptive fairy-tale, and that despair was the ultimate truth.

It was these feelings of atheism that dominated the saint's inner life for the final phase of her existence. And it involved more than feelings:

If you only knew what horrible thoughts crowd in upon me all the time! My mind is gripped by the arguments of the worst materialists.

Thérèse Martin probably did not know the name of a single major materialist, much less their philosophical positions. But at a much deeper level than intellectual debate, she took on herself the burden of modern atheism as experienced, and this became now the heart of her contemplative vocation. The whole content of faith became unreal to her, and in such a powerful way that she said she understood something of the urge to suicide. But the clearest statement of her loss of any feeling of faith also reveals the motive why she had opted for such an unexpected inner journey:

I no longer believe in eternal life; it seems to me there is nothing beyond this mortal life. Everything is brought to an end. Love only remains.

This was the strange secret of Thérèse, that she retained the core of faith which is love, even while suffering the loss of all emotional and intellectual sense of faith. And the love she means is two-fold: love of God and love of her "unbelieving brothers" for whom she offers her suffering of the abyss. In spite of the blitz of her emotions and thoughts, she never swerved in her fidelity to the God she believed in:

Although I have no feeling faith, I still try to carry out the works of faith … I do try to live the faith, even when I get no satisfaction out of it.

Indeed she seems at times to have relished "each challenge from the enemy" and to imagine God as wanting "to know how far I will push my confidence".

Against a background of rapidly declining health, Thérèse went through her last year and a half with total spiritual dryness and constant temptations against faith. Through this experience of atheism, at least on the level of mind and feelings, she envisaged herself as called to eat at the table of unbelievers. It meant a sharing of bitterness and an entry to nothingness. Only a certain dark hope and love supported her in this spiritual agony. Even as her own faith seemed meaningless she offered her experience so "that those not yet illumined by the torch of faith may behold it at last".

How is one to make sense of this unique story? It would be easy to dismiss it as neurotic, an there is evidence that Thérèse was prone to emotional disturbance. What is less easy to dismiss is the love shining through the experience of darkness. Thérèse seems to embody the paradoxes of Psalm 115: "I trusted even when I said 'I am utterly in darkness' and when I said in my panic, 'No one can be trusted'. There are two levels here in the psalm and two levels in Thérèse. Her story seems to suggest that there are many layers in what we call faith (and many levels in what full atheism would mean too). One level includes one's inner or felt experience, understanding of what is happening, the words in which one seeks to interpret my experience. But there is another layer, deeper or higher than experience and interpretation of experience, it is the layer of commitment and of relationship to God. Although Thérèse suffered a total eclipse of her sense of God on the level of experience, and of her ability to find God credible on the level of understanding, she never lost her faith on the deeper levels of conviction and relationhips. Through all her desolations of mind and heart she shared the agony of atheism. But her rootedness in love kept her open to God in ways she could not perceive.

Reflecting on her inner story, one discovers a nugget of hidden treasure for all who struggle over faith, and it can be stated quite simply: love is more important than explicit faith; indeed love can be the shape faith takes when darkness comes and when understanding seems impossible. To express it so baldly is to do an injustice to the power of the story of Thérèse. Hers was a prophetic vocation, even a providential one. At the very close of the nineteenth century this young woman entered a frightening inner world of atheism as experienced, and she crowned her sainthood through this ordeal.

Her story, with its intensity, foreshadowed the minor agonies of many ordinary people in the century then about to begin, and now drawing to a close. But her story can also be read as a parable pointing to the purifying of faith by atheism. This purifying may be true both personally and collectively for many people in our century.

(Extracts from "Help My Unbelief" by M. Gallagher, S.J.)