"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Louis A. Markos

Am I the only one who has felt, on many occasions, the overwhelming urge to hurl my Oxford annotated Bible across the room? Am I the only one who has laughed (out loud, in public) at those blatant, too-ludicrous-to-be-offensive notes? You know the notes I mean. The ones that attempt to dismiss, disprove, demystify, and in general demolish the verses to which they are appended. And here I'm thinking particularly of their notes to the Old Testament. In general they leave Jesus alone (no surprise, since even the sharpest Oxford don could not hope to compete with the "historical Jesus" posse), but Moses — well that's another story. It's always field day on the Pentateuch; one need not purchase any sort of license to open fire on those stubborn, intractable miracles. With bravura feats of academic contortion that would make Houdini blush, they provide "scientific" explanations for every miracle performed in the Book of Exodus. The entire Egyptian army, they would have us believe (on faith, of course), was drowned in a couple of feet of water, the turning of the Nile to blood was a natural phenomenon, and the children of Israel lived for forty years on "the honey-dew excretion of two scale-insects which feed on the twigs of the tamarisk tree." Ugh! Maybe they were right to yearn for the flesh pots of Egypt. (No explanation, I might add, is ever given for the killing of the first-born of all Egypt, it being their contention, I surmise, that people do, after all, die.) "Why, O Lord," their notes seem to cry out, "could Thou not have found a way to get those Jews through the wilderness without messing with the natural order of things! And that Red Sea business! The less said the better."

"Modern people," writes C. S. Lewis in a brilliant essay on miracles, "have an almost aesthetic dislike of miracles. Admitting that God can, they doubt if He would. To violate the laws He Himself has imposed on His creation seems to them arbitrary, clumsy, a theatrical device only fit to impress savages — a solecism against the grammar of the universe." One can almost hear those annotators on their knees at night praying to the exegetical God that he would open their eyes, enlighten their minds with just one more natural, rational, "objective," explanation for the manna or the quails or the water from the rock. Lewis, as always, is right. Modern people do have an aesthetic dislike of miracles. We view them as an aberration, an obstruction (rather like a black-out in a major industrialized city) or at best an embarrassment (like that bothersome anatomy professor who insists on telling unfunny jokes about the workings of the human body). Miracles are like glitches in a computer program or missing notes in an elaborate symphony. Just when we thought we had it all figured out, just when we thought we had categorized, systematized, methodized everything to the tiniest detail, along comes a miracle to tear down the whole elaborate house of cards.

It's really not fair of God to pull the rug out from under us like that. Here we are in the twentieth century, monarchs of science, technology, and progress, and all it takes is one little flick of the finger of God to tear down all our conceptions of the proper and natural ordering of the universe. Like some Dickensian character who has memorized the railway timetable and lives his life by and in and through its fine web-like intricacies, we have hitched our psyche to a rationalized view of the cosmos that has emptied that same cosmos of all the wonder and mystery that our ancestors once saw in it and that Carl Sagan, in startling contradiction to his materialist beliefs, claims still to see there. Or rather, to be somewhat more fair to our century and to Carl Sagan, we have transmuted that wonder into a fascination with the iron-clad laws of the natural order — an order that extends past astronomy to take in economics, sociology, history, psychology, and above all evolution. For you see, the reason that the modern secularist resists so vehemently even the merest mention of creation in the public school system goes beyond any misguided notion of the so-called separation of church and state. Evolution must be defended at all costs for, in our day and age, it forms the very foundation, the very cornerstone, of the sciences. Nearly all the sciences (especially biology) rest on a firm faith in the workings of evolution (and the billions-year-old universe that evolution necessitates). A belief in evolution is as basic and essential to the laws of modern science as class struggle is to that vast, elephantine system known as Marxism, and to allow even one miracle to compromise the evolutionary substructure is to court disaster. Now of course, we could shift this monolithic paradigm (scientists have done so many times over the centuries) but to do so would be messy, and modern man does so hate a mess.

And something else too. To abandon the certainty of evolution is to relinquish control, and modern man hates that even more than he does a mess. Of course, not all confirmed evolutionists are atheists, but every confirmed evolutionist knows in his heart that he no longer needs God to explain the world that he sees around him. The good news of evolution is that the world did not need a Creator (though it may have had one, if you'd like it to have one). Add to this the Oxford annotated explanations for supernatural phenomenon and those two well-known facts (that Joseph was a blasted fool to believe such a lie and that the disciples stole the body from the tomb) and you no longer need to believe in anything. And if you don't have to believe, then you don't have to be held accountable. Of course a lot is lost in the shuffle (most notably that sublime conception of a living, active, sympathetic universe that empowers the works of Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton), but that's a small price to pay for a clear conscience and a nice, tidy world, free from the unpredictable, unclassifiable operations of divinity.

The old wound

But now I've gone a bit too far. It really wasn't my intention to ridicule or deflate, though I feel no guilt in doing so. After all, the Master could lay it on pretty thick when he wanted to. But it must be kept in mind that that same Good Master spent a great deal more time searching the hearts of us poor sinners to determine how and when and why we went astray. For every Pharisee he rebuked there were ten Nicodemus' and rich young rulers and women at the well whose deepest needs he sought to know and to fulfill. I shall attempt to follow his lead, to delve deeper into this modern rejection of miracles, to see if behind it there does not lurk some more essential need that only Christ (who is, among other things, a miracle worker) can fill.

Why then does our modern world reject and even mock miracles and those who profess faith in them? Well, why does anyone mock anything? Is it not to hide some deeper wound, to put yet another layer of protection around those old desires and passions that would be better left asleep? Prick beneath the surface of a cynical matron whose acidic tongue is ever quick to burst romantic bubbles and you will find a shy and sensitive girl jilted one too many times by those she'd set her heart on. Or the worldly-wise politician who scorns the young idealist; was he not once that very same idealist — that is, before he compromised. Facile pop-psychology? Perhaps. But as psychological specimens we are remarkably self-protective. Slap away our hands a couple of times and soon we'll stop reaching out. Label us as gullible and we'll soon stop trusting. Convince us that romance in marriage must eventually die and we'll kill it ourselves rather than let it happen. With age comes a stiffening: hardening of the arteries, swelling of the joints, wrinkling of the skin. And something far worse: a contraction of the soul, a shriveling of the spirit, a tearing scar in the elasticity of the imagination. Being realistic, we call it, growing up, learning to accept the world as it is. I call it a failure of will, an abandonment of wonder, a loss of that third, oft forgotten virtue: hope.

And what of miracles. What old wound do they reopen, what long-forgotten dreams do they recall to life? Indeed, not any wound or dream, but THE wound, THE dream. That child-like dream that this world is a garden filled with life and joy and growth; that painful wound when we learn that the world is none of those things. At some point in our lives, we reconcile ourselves to the harsh realities of our world. With painful step and slowly we fall in line with the grinding rhythms of that triple devourer (time, death, and decay). We close, often unwillingly, the fantastic box of youthful dreams, and, once we do, we would rather it not be opened again. How impertinent of God to work a miracle that will force us to rethink those practical verities we strove so painfully to achieve. Why teach us to hope all over again when we know what it all will lead to in the end? Just leave us alone; don't tease us with something we can't really have. We don't want to hear that someone has escaped the Cerberean mouth of the devourer — for that someone has only eluded (not escaped) it, and that someone, after all, is not us. And for that matter, what good is a miracle; it doesn't really fix anything. If it's not inherent in the fabric of this world, then it must be doomed to fail. It's really just a nuisance, an obstruction, an aberration.

Oh but thankfully, wonderfully, God-be-praised, there we are wrong! For it is not the miracle that is the aberration but our world (what we would call physical reality) with all its death and decay and disease that is the aberration, the mote in the eye of the sun. A miracle is NOT a violation of the laws of nature, but a sublime act during which the Creator, for a brief, glorious moment, restores the truly natural (i.e., original) order of his creation.

All right, I'll slow down a little and take a few steps backward. Such radical statements need to be built up to slowly.

The golden age

Let's begin here. How many of you have heard a skeptic "prove" the non-existence of God by the following argument: "How can you say that the world is run by a rational, caring God when everytime you turn on the news you hear about wars or plagues or earthquakes? Where was your God when Hitler killed six million Jews? Where was he when terrorists blew up that village? Where was he when my little boy died?" Not easy questions to answer, particularly the last one. Such questions used to shatter my confidence, turning my Christian apologetic into a feeble apology. And, of course, to some extent, we should all be silenced, for a moment, by such grim reminders of the tragedies of life. But this silence (no matter how sensitive) must finally end, must finally give way to truth. For the argument is flawed, seriously flawed. Consider: if the secular humanists are right, if there is no God (or he is removed and therefore irrelevant to the human drama) and man was formed and came into being through the brutal, heartless, amoral process of natural selection (aka "survival of the fittest"), then why, why, WHY are we dazed, upset, and even enraged when we hear that a child has died? How can we possibly label or even think of the death of a child as cruel and unfair unless we grant the touchstone of a loving, fair God against which to measure such cruelty and unfairness? It is ludicrous to think that evolution would produce in us (her crowning achievement) an attitude of abhorrence and moral anger toward the very processes (death, disease, decay, plague, war) by which nature formed us and our environment. To reject God because there is evil in the world is to reject that which allowed us to perceive the evil in the first place.

You must admit that human beings, as a species, do not make sense. We are, all of us, convinced that there existed, fifty or a hundred or a thousand years before us, a wonderful Age of Gold. How often do we say, or at least think, that if we had only been born a century earlier we would have known peace and contentment. Even in our modern, cynical, illusion-busting world people still look for past utopias. The only difference is that we're now politically correct, and so we don't look for paradise in the Western patriarchal worlds of the Bible and Greek literature but amongst the native peoples of the Americas and the lost matriarchal tribes of Africa. (That, or, like the modern socialist, we project the Golden Age forward into some John Lennon world of universal peace and communal brotherhood.) Even the pragmatic, no-nonsense George Orwell (an avowed secular humanist who, though possessed of the highest moral character, harbored no Christian "illusions") often fell prey to this belief in a kinder, gentler past. In a brief but delightful essay with the ubiquitous title of "Why I Write," Orwell confesses in a little poem what it was like to live during the rise of fascism:

True, the years of fascism were particularly harsh, but has there ever been a time that wasn't evil? Was there ever a time when little fat men did not rule and people did not have to hide at least some of their joys? It just does not make sense. We all of us know that utopia means just what its Greek derivation means: no place. Indeed, except for that day that Adam and Eve spent in Paradise (Milton is liberal; he lets them live there several days), there has never, never been a Golden Age. Murder, deceit, and death have always been the rule. Mark Twain is right when he says that the history of mankind reads like "the fantastic record of a maniac."

And yet, and yet, we persist in the foolish dream that somewhere, sometime the world was right and just. Moreover, we continue to believe, in the face of unending death and decay, that we are creatures of innate purpose possessed of an everlasting life. Nay, we do not just believe in this; every fiber of our being cries out, "I am alive, I am meaningful, I cannot merely cease to be." We assert this belief with every breath, every thought, every feeling. Here we are, dying and decaying in a world of death and decay, yet everything that is most real in us affirms the very opposite. We all say with Orwell, "I wasn't born for an age like this," but really mean, "I wasn't made for a world like this." WHY?!?

I believe, unequivocally, that everyone of us in our heart of hearts knows the answer to this question. We were not made for a world like this. We were created for the Garden: a world of life and joy and eternal, meaningful growth. God never intended for there to be death or disease or meaninglessness in this world. Perhaps the most poignant verse in all the literature of the world occurs in the third book of Genesis: "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden" (NASB throughout). No Jungian belief in the collective unconscious can possibly explain the visceral response that such a verse has on the soul of every man, woman, and child that has ever lived on our fallen world. We yearn to hear the footfall of our Creator. Our innate belief in the physical and metaphysical meaningfulness of our lives (a belief that cannot be substantiated by any empirical evidence) is just as strong (in fact, stronger) than our belief in the misery and waste of our planet (an objective, verifiable fact that cannot be denied). Our lives mean, and they mean intensely. Indeed, the very impetus that created the science that created the modern, naturalistic view of the universe flowed from our unshakable belief in our own destiny and worth.

Subject to futility

There is only one explanation that can solve the paradox, that can account for both the life we feel and the death we know, that can justify the existence of a Mother Theresa and an Adolph Hitler. We were created in the image of a perfect God, but we and our world have fallen from this perfection. The misery we see around us, the death of the young that shakes our faith, is not the creation of God but of Satan: it is his grisly poem of death written with his pen of sin. Milton's allegorical account of the origin of Sin and Death (Paradise Lost, Book II) constitutes one of the most horrifying, bone-chilling scenes in all literature. Out of the perverse, rebellious brain of Satan, Sin is born, like Athena emerging full-grown from the head of Zeus. Satan is then seized with a passion for this unnatural daughter and rapes her. Out of their incestuous union is born death, a dog-like beast who is no sooner born than he turns on his mother and rapes her as well. Sin breeds like a cancer, creating a world not of healthy, life-giving cells, but of twisted, sickly, devouring cells. Perhaps even more apt than Milton's allegory is Dante's description of the tenth ring of the eighth level of Hell — the eternal abode of the Falsifiers. Here are punished the alchemists, impersonators, counterfeiters, and false witnesses, all those who warped the natural state of things, who tried to alter the forms of their world in accordance with their own evil purposes. "If all the misery," writes Dante (Ciardi translation),

Imagine a world, created not by a God of harmony and beauty but by minds contorted with miserly dreams, turned inside out by depravity and lust, and you will come close to this stinking ditch. As creators and poets par excellence, Dante and Milton knew that we can beget only what is in our nature. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. This world was marred, warped by sin and rebellion, mistrust and deceit. Nature is not our mother, as those in the New Age would have us believe; it is rather our fallen sister, subjected to the same futility as we her intended caretakers.

It's all laid out for us, clear and succinct, in the eighth chapter of Paul's letter to the church in Rome:

This is surely more than theology, more than philosophy — it is reality. Much has been made of the existentialist leanings of Pascal and Kierkegaard, but surely every true Christian who believes in the truth of Romans 8 must have as well a touch of the existentialist. The world we live in is a world of futility. True, it does run in accordance with natural laws and processes, but those laws and processes finally lead nowhere. The earth groans for meaning and purpose, and we, who dwell on it, feel too a loss of power and purpose, as if some mighty force had abandoned it and us, leaving a terrible vacuum. But there, in the midst of the vacuum, as at the bottom of Pandora's box, lies hope. A legacy, a sacred trust has been vouchsafed us. Someday our decaying bodies will be redeemed, and we, as much the orphans as the crowns of creation, will be adopted as sons. Our slavery to the corruption (physical, emotional, spiritual) of this world will give way to the freedom of life. Something within us, some deep irrepressible life, presses outward to meet this freedom, this supra-natural metamorphosis. "Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. . . . For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed, but to be clothed, in order that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Corinthians 4:16-7, 5:4).

Of this final transfiguration we find reflections in the yearnings of our soul. But what of nature; does she too feel in her being the throes of childbirth that shall bring this new creation to light? She does; they are called miracles.

The power of joy

And now we may repeat our statement. It is not the miracle that is the aberration but our world (what we would call physical reality) with all its death and decay and disease that is the aberration, the mote in the eye of the sun. A miracle is NOT a violation of the laws of nature, but a sublime act during which the Creator, for a brief, glorious moment, restores the truly natural (i.e., original) order of his creation. To this we may now add that the restoration looks not only backward to Eden but ahead to the New Jerusalem. The miracle is a reminder of what the world once was and what it will be again. The miracle is the real thing; this world, to quote Lewis again, is only shadows. The miracle, like Plato's Forms, partakes of the eternal, the unchanging; this world, in its present state, deformed and "de-shaped" as it is by Satan, sin, and death, is but a poor, paltry imitation of that life which is glimpsed in the miracle. I sometimes fancy that the reason God does not intervene even more in this world is that the world "could not take it." Too much fresh air can damage a sickly invalid. I suppose that a man who has lived a life of constant, unending pain would perish were he to feel, for the first time, a full unbroken minute of pleasure. In that sick ward which is our modern age we are almost pathologically afraid of the miracle and its searing, restorative power. The thundering, almost tangible joy of the miracle is too much for us to bear: we hide away in our rooms like the crazed Howard Hughes, storing our hair and our urine, consumed by our own decay. We have lost faith in the power of that joy. Coleridge (who, by slow painful steps, found his way out of the materialist theories of the Associational-ists into the haven of supernatural Christianity) knew the force of this joy:

But we have lost sight of this joy even as we have lost our faith in that universal consummation (the Great Marriage) promised by scripture. We have, in short, lost our faith in the happy ending.

In the introduction to her Jungian reading of Dante's Divine Comedy (Dark Wood to White Rose), Helen Luke writes despairingly of this modern aversion to "happy endings":

Luke is writing here in psychological and literary rather than theological terms, but her comments may be adapted to the issue at hand. The modern discounting of miracles betrays a final existential blindness to our own potentiality, both as individuals and as members of a community. We think of miracles as unworthy of a serious God, mere parlor tricks; we don't realize that God is a far greater artist than that, that he can weave his miracles through human history like a leitmotif that not only gives shape to the symphony, but emerges full and resounding at the end to give meaning and closure to what otherwise might have been nothing more than an ordered but futile concatenation of notes.

Intimations

Finally though the proof lies not in the grand metaphors and apologetical proofs, but in the beatings of each of our hearts, in those age-old yearnings that each of us feels for the Golden Age. Several years ago, I attempted to capture in verse my own personal experience of these inner yearnings. I let the words flow of themselves and then shaped them in accordance with those rolling cadences that mark that most wonderful of forms, blank verse — that form which, to the English-speaking ear, mimics most closely the subtle motion of the flowing of the blood, the tilting of the earth, the spinning of the spheres. Here is my attempt; with it I close.

Louis Markos is a Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and is the author of Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Broadman & Holman, 2003).