The Massive Fact

 At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended. 

After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)

This, after all, was Augustine's solution. But still, in his arguments with the Manichees, he had to confront the objection that even if God gave us free will, he seems to have also for some reason given us a lust or desire to sin. If he did not, then Adam and Eve disobeyed God without any sinful intention to do so—so how could they have been guilty? If he did—then isn't God in fact the author of evil after all? And don't we have the same old problems as before? 

The academic paper took a great deal of time to reach this point in the argument. And when it got there—so far as I can recall—it left it dangling as a kind of mystery. Here, we are informed, is the "problem of free will" that haunts us still—and we see that it is close cousin to the "problem of evil." 

But sometime after reading this painstaking academic article, I discovered that Stephen Crane had made the same point much more succinctly in one of his poems. He imagines Adam in the Garden posing the same "problem" to God that Augustine faced in his argument with the Manichees: 

Oh, most interesting God

What folly is this?

Behold, thou hast moulded my desires

Even as thou hast moulded the apple.

So too, I find today in H.L. Mencken's Book of Calumny that he spotted the same logical hole in the free will argument. "It is not harder to believe that a man can be damned for his involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his voluntary acts," Mencken writes, "for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God could have made him a saint if He had so desired." 

And so we see that what took the philosopher and the theologian twenty pages and interminable thought experiments to say, is here said by the poet and the satirist in a handful of lines. 

Perhaps this is due to the traditional license of the jester. As Stephen Spender puts it in an essay on Evelyn Waugh: "Comedy often consists in saying what—if said seriously—would seem almost unsayable." (For Spender, this accounts in part for why Waugh became so much less honest as he became more "serious".) And perhaps what Crane and Mencken are saying is something that seems almost unsayable, even in our skeptical age, if laid out in the straightforward and serious prose of a learned journal. 

Perhaps the philosopher and the theologian do not take so painfully long to say the same thing that Crane and Mencken can say in a line or two because they are that much slower witted—but because they are looking for an escape route from Crane and Mencken's inescapable and succinct conclusions. 

Perhaps there is no "problem" of free will or "question" of theodicy—but simply obvious answers to both that the philosopher and the theologian happen not to like. And so, they overcomplicate the issue in order to avoid facing the inevitable: namely, that God could not in fact be both all-powerful and all-good; but, if he is anything at all, would have to be one or the other. 

The difficulty that the philosopher and theologian experience in just coming out with this and saying it may not be that it is actually so hard to say, or that there is such an impenetrable "mystery" and insoluble "riddle" or "problem" here, but rather that the mystery is all too readily solved—just not in the way the theologian wishes. 

The solution to the problem of evil is that there is no solution—at least not within the accepted bounds of orthodox theology. And many a tome before and since has grown fat in the fruitless effort to avoid acknowledging as much; or—like that academic paper—has simply thrown up its hands and gone silent at the end, declaring the matter to be a mystery. "[A]ll the oracles are dumb or cheat / Because they have no secret to express," as the poet James Thomson (a.k.a. Bysshe Vanolis) put it. 

But—why not have a less than omnipotent, but still well-meaning God? Writers from H.L. Mencken to John Dolan have floated the option. "The old idea of fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood," as Mencken puts it elsewhere in the same book. "God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well it is [sic?] any the less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?" 

As John Dolan expresses the same sentiment more succinctly still, in his book on the Civil War: "The only way you can forgive god, or the gods, or the galaxy or whatever you call it, is if it’s not all-powerful, if it’s trying its best but having a very hard time." And that is indeed a theology I could live with.