The Pain and the Majesty

It is true tough-mindedness to see that the ideas of God and of personal dignity are not unconnected. The awareness of man as being more than an organization of natural potentialities, as free and responsible, as dying, and as in some ways intrinsically an alien in the world—and yet paradoxically as a sacred being—arose roughly contemporaneously with Christianity. Precise dates for developments of this kind cannot, of course, be established; and it would be absurd to deny that in classical Greece, or in the religiously confused and despairing Hellenistic Age, there was some consciousness of both the pain and the majesty of personal existence. But this consciousness was always closely connected with religious searching, and it was finally given shape and accepted as perhaps the greatest and most distinctive treasure in the Western mind only when Christianity had provided the requisite faith.

It is this sense of individuality which finally, after a long period of discipline, broke forth in the individualism of the Renaissance and Reformation and has today reached the extremes described in the philosophy and the fiction of atheistic existentialism. It is this same sense of individuality which is reflected in the agnostic humanism of this century. “God is dead,” yet the individual seems to have survived.

This development in cultural attitudes is perfectly comprehensible. But the assumption that the individual can continue to survive, with his ancient religious footing destroyed, depends on an extreme degree of philosophical and spiritual negligence. It is this negligence which renders much present day atheism superficial. Against it, the words of an earlier and less tender-minded atheism can be quoted. “In the personality of God,” Ludwig Feuerbach wrote, “man consecrates the supernaturalness, immortality, independence, unlimitedness of his own personality.” And again, with even greater succinctness, he said, “The belief in God is nothing but the belief in human dignity.”

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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Dear Kate,

"This book was born as I was hungry," such is the first line in writer Yann Martel's "Author's Note" at the beginning of his international phenomenon "Life of Pi," which, I am sure you knew, was miraculously turned into a miraculous movie.

What gives God a bad name?  Just about everything human do, for no action of ours is ever good enough to reflect who God is, faithfully, wholeheartedly, eternally.

What gives God a good name?  Just about everything human do, for no action of ours is ever bad enough to deny who God is: abounding in grace, steadfast in love, everlasting.

For me, what the movie has done that the book couldn't is to bring to life "Richard Parker," the tiger who has his name swapped with his hunter, the sight and sound of his ferocity and humility, the immortal hand or eye, dare frame this fearful symmetry.  The Bengal tiger's true name is Thirsty.

We are created tigers, hungry and thirsty, to chase after God, the One who dares to frame us this way.  Godlessness is nothing but the belief that we are merely cats.

Yours, Alex