Mother Teresa's ministry to the poor of Calcutta was a world-renowned symbol of religious compassion. (AP)
VIDEO Mother Teresa Had Doubts A new book compiling Mother Teresa's letters reveals that she had deep doubts about her faith and belief in God. Mark Phillips reports [video embedded]
Book Of Iconic Nun's Letters Shows She Was Tormented By Her Doubts In Her Faith
LONDON, Aug. 23, 2007 | by Michelle Singer
(CBS) In life, Mother Teresa was an icon — for believers — of God's work on Earth. Her ministry to the poor of Calcutta was a world-renowned symbol of religious compassion. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In a rare interview in 1986, Mother Teresa told CBS News she had a calling, based on unquestioned faith.
"They are all children of God, loved and created by the same heart of God," she said.
But now, it has emerged that Mother Teresa was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.
In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious.
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.
"Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."
Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.
"Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she said.
As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.
"What do I labor for?" she asked in one letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."
"These are letters that were kept in the archbishop's house," the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk told Phillips.
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who's making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa's proposed sainthood. He said her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her case.
"Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic," said Rev. Kolodiejchuk.
According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said.
The church decided to keep her letters, even though one of her dying wishes was that they be destroyed. Perhaps now we know why.
Mother Teresa in a Calcutta orphanage, 1979. Bettmann / Corbis
By David Van Biema Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. — Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
Prequel: Near Ecstatic Communion
[Jesus:] Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my Spouse for my love — you have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far — Are you afraid to take one more step for Your Spouse — for me — for souls? Is your generosity grown cold? Am I a second to you? [Teresa:] Jesus, my own Jesus — I am only Thine — I am so stupid — I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish — as You wish — as long as you wish. [But] why can't I be a perfect Loreto Nun — here — why can't I be like everybody else. [Jesus:] I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children ... You are I know the most incapable person — weak and sinful but just because you are that — I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse? — in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, January 1947
On Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto Sisters (an uncloistered, education-oriented community based in Ireland), Mother Mary Teresa, 36, took the 400-mile (645-km) train trip to Darjeeling. She had been working herself sick, and her superiors ordered her to relax during her annual retreat in the Himalayan foothills. On the ride out, she reported, Christ spoke to her. He called her to abandon teaching and work instead in "the slums" of the city, dealing directly with "the poorest of the poor" — the sick, the dying, beggars and street children. "Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor," he told her. "Come be My light." The goal was to be both material and evangelistic — as Kolodiejchuk puts it, "to help them live their lives with dignity [and so] encounter God's infinite love, and having come to know Him, to love and serve Him in return."
It was wildly audacious — an unfunded, single-handed crusade (Teresa stipulated that she and her nuns would share their beneficiaries' poverty and started out alone) to provide individualized service to the poorest in a poor city made desperate by riots. The local Archbishop, Ferdinand Périer, was initially skeptical. But her letters to him, preserved, illustrate two linked characteristics — extreme tenacity and a profound personal bond to Christ. When Périer hesitated, Teresa, while calling herself a "little nothing," bombarded him with notes suggesting that he refer the question to an escalating list of authorities — the local apostolic delegation, her Mother General, the Pope. And when she felt all else had failed, she revealed the spiritual topper: a dramatic (melodramatic, really) dialogue with a "Voice" she eventually revealed to be Christ's. It ended with Jesus' emphatic reiteration of his call to her: "You are I know the most incapable person — weak and sinful but just because you are that — I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?"
Mother Teresa had visions, including one of herself conversing with Christ on the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was convinced that her mystical experiences were genuine. "[Her] union with Our Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem very far," he commented. Teresa later wrote simply, "Jesus gave Himself to me."
Then on Jan. 6, 1948, Périer, after consulting the Vatican, finally gave permission for Teresa to embark on her second calling. And Jesus took himself away again.
The Onset
Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart? — addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
In the first half of 1948, Teresa took a basic medical course before launching herself alone onto the streets of Calcutta. She wrote, "My soul at present is in perfect peace and joy." Kolodiejchuk includes her moving description of her first day on the job: "The old man lying on the street — not wanted — all alone just sick and dying — I gave him carborsone and water to drink and the old Man — was so strangely grateful ... Then we went to Taltala Bazaar, and there was a very poor woman dying I think of starvation more than TB ... I gave her something which will help her to sleep. — I wonder how long she will last." But two months later, shortly after her major triumph of locating a space for her headquarters, Kolodiejchuk's files find her troubled. "What tortures of loneliness," she wrote. "I wonder how long will my heart suffer this?" This complaint could be understood as an initial response to solitude and hardship were it not for subsequent letters. The more success Teresa had — and half a year later so many young women had joined her society that she needed to move again — the worse she felt. In March 1953, she wrote Périer, "Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'"
Périer may have missed the note of desperation. "God guides you, dear Mother," he answered avuncularly. "You are not so much in the dark as you think ... You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work ... Feelings are not required and often may be misleading." And yet feelings — or rather, their lack — became her life's secret torment. How can you assume the lover's ardor when he no longer grants you his voice, his touch, his very presence? The problem was exacerbated by an inhibition to even describe it. Teresa reported on several occasions inviting a confessor to visit and then being unable to speak. Eventually, one thought to ask her to write the problem down, and she complied. "The more I want him — the less I am wanted," she wrote Périer in 1955. A year later she sounded desolate: "Such deep longing for God — and ... repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."
At the suggestion of a confessor, she wrote the agonized plea that begins this section, in which she explored the theological worst-possible-case implications of her dilemma. That letter and another one from 1959 ("What do I labour for? If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true") are the only two that sound any note of doubt of God's existence. But she frequently bemoaned an inability to pray: "I utter words of Community prayers — and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give — But my prayer of union is not there any longer — I no longer pray."
As the Missionaries of Charity flourished and gradually gained the attention of her church and the world at large, Teresa progressed from confessor to confessor the way some patients move through their psychoanalysts. Van Exem gave way to Périer, who gave way in 1959 to the Rev. (later Cardinal) Lawrence Picachy, who was succeeded by the Rev. Joseph Neuner in 1961. By the 1980s the chain included figures such as Bishop William Curlin of Charlotte, N.C. For these confessors, she developed a kind of shorthand of pain, referring almost casually to "my darkness" and to Jesus as "the Absent One." There was one respite. In October 1958, Pope Pius XII died, and requiem Masses were celebrated around the Catholic world. Teresa prayed to the deceased Pope for a "proof that God is pleased with the Society." And "then and there," she rejoiced, "disappeared the long darkness ... that strange suffering of 10 years." Unfortunately, five weeks later she reported being "in the tunnel" once more. And although, as we shall see, she found a way to accept the absence, it never lifted again. Five years after her Nobel, a Jesuit priest in the Calcutta province noted that "Mother came ... to speak about the excruciating night in her soul. It was not a passing phase but had gone on for years." A 1995 letter discussed her "spiritual dryness." She died in 1997.
Explanations
Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul? — to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy, August 1959
Why did Teresa's communication with Jesus, so vivid and nourishing in the months before the founding of the Missionaries, evaporate so suddenly? Interestingly, secular and religious explanations travel for a while on parallel tracks. Both understand (although only one celebrates) that identification with Christ's extended suffering on the Cross, undertaken to redeem humanity, is a key aspect of Catholic spirituality. Teresa told her nuns that physical poverty ensured empathy in "giving themselves" to the suffering poor and established a stronger bond with Christ's redemptive agony. She wrote in 1951 that the Passion was the only aspect of Jesus' life that she was interested in sharing: "I want to ... drink ONLY [her emphasis] from His chalice of pain." And so she did, although by all indications not in a way she had expected.
Kolodiejchuk finds divine purpose in the fact that Teresa's spiritual spigot went dry just as she prevailed over her church's perceived hesitations and saw a successful way to realize Jesus' call for her. "She was a very strong personality," he suggests. "And a strong personality needs stronger purification" as an antidote to pride. As proof that it worked, he cites her written comment after receiving an important prize in the Philippines in the 1960s: "This means nothing to me, because I don't have Him."
And yet "the question is, Who determined the abandonment she experienced?" says Dr. Richard Gottlieb, a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute who has written about the church and who was provided a copy of the book by TIME. "Could she have imposed it on herself?" Psychologists have long recognized that people of a certain personality type are conflicted about their high achievement and find ways to punish themselves. Gottlieb notes that Teresa's ambitions for her ministry were tremendous. Both he and Kolodiejchuk are fascinated by her statement, "I want to love Jesus as he has never been loved before." Remarks the priest: "That's a kind of daring thing to say." Yet her letters are full of inner conflict about her accomplishments. Rather than simply giving all credit to God, Gottlieb observes, she agonizes incessantly that "any taking credit for her accomplishments — if only internally — is sinful" and hence, perhaps, requires a price to be paid. A mild secular analog, he says, might be an executive who commits a horrific social gaffe at the instant of a crucial promotion. For Teresa, "an occasion for a modicum of joy initiated a significant quantity of misery," and her subsequent successes led her to perpetuate it.
Gottlieb also suggests that starting her ministry "may have marked a turning point in her relationship with Jesus," whose urgent claims she was finally in a position to fulfill. Being the active party, he speculates, might have scared her, and in the end, the only way to accomplish great things might have been in the permanent and less risky role of the spurned yet faithful lover.
The atheist position is simpler. In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.
Most religious readers will reject that explanation, along with any that makes her the author of her own misery — or even defines it as true misery. Martin, responding to the torch-song image of Teresa, counterproposes her as the heroically constant spouse. "Let's say you're married and you fall in love and you believe with all your heart that marriage is a sacrament. And your wife, God forbid, gets a stroke and she's comatose. And you will never experience her love again. It's like loving and caring for a person for 50 years and once in a while you complain to your spiritual director, but you know on the deepest level that she loves you even though she's silent and that what you're doing makes sense. Mother Teresa knew that what she was doing made sense."
Integration
I can't express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me — for the first time in ... years — I have come to love the darkness — for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus' darkness & pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a 'spiritual side of your work' as you wrote — Today really I felt a deep joy — that Jesus can't go anymore through the agony — but that He wants to go through it in me. — to Neuner, Circa 1961
There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness and remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, to gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of open-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus.
This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release. For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ's Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the particular moment on the Cross when he asks, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross, that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling, made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, "It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion." And she thanked Neuner profusely: "I can't express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me — for the first time in ... years — I have come to love the darkness. "
Not that it didn't continue to torment her. Years later, describing the joy in Jesus experienced by some of her nuns, she observed dryly to Neuner, "I just have the joy of having nothing — not even the reality of the Presence of God [in the Eucharist]." She described her soul as like an "ice block." Yet she recognized Neuner's key distinction, writing, "I accept not in my feelings — but with my will, the Will of God — I accept His will." Although she still occasionally worried that she might "turn a Judas to Jesus in this painful darkness," with the passage of years the absence morphed from a potential wrecking ball into a kind of ragged cornerstone. Says Gottlieb, the psychoanalyst: "What is remarkable is that she integrated it in a way that enabled her to make it the organizing center of her personality, the beacon for her ongoing spiritual life." Certainly, she understood it as essential enough to project it into her afterlife. "If I ever become a Saint — I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from Heaven — to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth," she wrote in 1962. Theologically, this is a bit odd since most orthodox Christianity defines heaven as God's eternal presence and doesn't really provide for regular no-shows at the heavenly feast. But it is, Kolodiejchuk suggests, her most moving statement, since the sacrifice involved is infinite. "When she wrote, 'I am willing to suffer ... for all eternity, if this [is] possible,'" he says, "I said, Wow."
He contends that the letters reveal her as holier than anyone knew. However formidable her efforts on Christ's behalf, it is even more astounding to realize that she achieved them when he was not available to her — a bit like a person who believes she can't walk winning the Olympic 100 meters. Kolodiejchuk goes even further. Catholic theologians recognize two types of "dark night": the first is purgative, cleansing the contemplative for a "final union" with Christ; the second is "reparative," and continues after such a union, so that he or she may participate in a state of purity even closer to that of Jesus and Mary, who suffered for human salvation despite being without sin. By the end, writes Kolodiejchuk, "by all indications this was the case with Mother Teresa." That puts her in rarefied company.
A New Ministry
If this brings You glory — if souls are brought to you — with joy I accept all to the end of my life. — to Jesus, undated
But for most people, Teresa's ranking among Catholic saints may be less important than a more general implication of Come Be My Light: that if she could carry on for a half-century without God in her head or heart, then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope with less extreme versions of the same problem. One powerful instance of this may have occurred very early on. In 1968, British writer-turned-filmmaker Malcolm Muggeridge visited Teresa. Muggeridge had been an outspoken agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in Calcutta he was in full spiritual-search mode. Beyond impressing him with her work and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him in 1970 that addressed his doubts full-bore. "Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you," she wrote. "He must be forcing Himself to do so — because he loves you so much — the personal love Christ has for you is infinite — The Small difficulty you have re His Church is finite — Overcome the finite with the infinite." Muggeridge apparently did. He became an outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1982. His 1969 film, Something Beautiful for God, supported by a 1971 book of the same title, made Teresa an international sensation.
At the time, Muggeridge was something of a unique case. A child of privilege who became a minor celebrity, he was hardly Teresa's target audience. Now, with the publication of Come Be My Light, we can all play Muggeridge. Kolodiejchuk thinks the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms."
America's Martin wants to talk precisely in religious terms. "Everything she's experiencing," he says, "is what average believers experience in their spiritual lives writ large. I have known scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about God's existence. And this book expresses that in such a stunning way but shows her full of complete trust at the same time." He takes a breath. "Who would have thought that the person who was considered the most faithful woman in the world struggled like that with her faith?" he asks. "And who would have thought that the one thought to be the most ardent of believers could be a saint to the skeptics?" Martin has long used Teresa as an example to parishioners of self-emptying love. Now, he says, he will use her extraordinary faith in the face of overwhelming silence to illustrate how doubt is a natural part of everyone's life, be it an average believer's or a world-famous saint's.
Into the Light of Day
Please destroy any letters or anything I have written. — to Picachy, April 1959
Consistent with her ongoing fight against pride, Teresa's rationale for suppressing her personal correspondence was "I want the work to remain only His." If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy, "people will think more of me — less of Jesus."
The particularly holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history — or, if you will, of God's providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced — if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong — but happily, even wonderfully wrong — twice.
In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity
By Steve Paulson
June 24, 2009 | Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape -- from foreign policy to technology -- it's his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty.
Actually, "The Evolution of God [ http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-God-Robert-Wright/dp/0316734918 ]" never grapples with the most basic religious question -- the existence of God. Instead it charts the twists and turns of how God's personality has kept changing over the centuries, and specifically, how the rough-and-tumble politics of the ancient Middle East shaped the Abrahamic religions. The book is filled with richly observed details about the Bible and the Quran, though Wright wears his learning lightly as he guides us through several thousand years of religious history.
There's something to offend just about everyone in this book. Wright recounts in harrowing detail how the early Israelites, who'd been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians, invoked Yahweh to wreak vengeance on their enemies. This is no God for the faint of heart! And he's no gentler on Christianity. Wright's Jesus is not the prophet of peace and love but a sometimes mean-spirited apocalyptic preacher obsessed with the approaching End Times. Islam's founder, Muhammad, comes across as much a warrior as a prophet, bent on annihilating his enemies when they cross him.
Despite all this religious mayhem, the book also shows a gentler side of the Abrahamic religions, especially when they manage to find common cause with their heathen neighbors and rival monotheists.
At first, "The Evolution of God" reads like another atheistic tract exposing the seamier side of religion. But then I came to Wright's account of the "moral imagination" and his surprising conclusion: He may not believe in God, but Wright thinks humanity is marching -- however wobbly -- toward moral truth.
In our interview, we talked about the bloody history of monotheism, what a mature religion would look like, and Wright's own spiritual awakening at a meditation retreat.
At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?
I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he's very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that's what I mean by being a materialist.
What do you mean by the facts on the ground?
My basic premise is that when a religious group sees itself as having something to gain through peaceful interaction with another group of people, including a different religion, it will find a basis for tolerance in its scriptures and religion. When groups see each other as being in a non-zero sum relationship -- there's a possibility of a win-win outcome if they play their cards right, or a lose-lose outcome if they don't -- then they tend to warm up to one another. By contrast, if people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with another group of people -- they can only win if the other group loses -- that brings out the intolerance and the dark side of religion. You see that in the world today. A lot of Palestinians and Israelis think they're playing a win-lose game. They think their interests are opposed and inversely correlated. In the long run, I think they're wrong. They're either both going to win or both going to lose.
And you're saying these attitudes keep fluctuating back and forth over the history of religion. It's not just a gradual movement from less tolerance to more tolerance.
There hasn't been any smooth progression toward tolerance in any of the religions. If you look at the way human beings treated each other 10,000 years ago, it was not uncommon for members of one hunter-gatherer tribe to consider strangers as subhuman and worthy of death. I try to show that all the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are capable of making great moral progress by extending compassion across national and ethnic and religious bounds. But there has not been any kind of smooth progression.
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn't originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.
And bad things happened because the gods were against you or certain spirits had it out for you?
Yes, you had done something to offend a god or spirit. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That's an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge. Everyone knows everybody, so it's hard to conceal anything you steal. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap.
But it's easier to explain why bad things happen in these older religions. You can attribute it to an angry spirit. It's harder to explain evil if there's an all-powerful, all-loving God.
The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good -- and can do anything He or She wants -- why do innocent people suffer? If you've got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they're not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem.
Why did monotheism first develop?
My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think -- in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.
Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It's not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today's Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.
So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?
In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel's desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel's god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.
Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?
You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God's most favored people.
King Josiah comes off rather badly in your book. He's hugely influential in the development of monotheism, but also a brutal tyrant who tried to wipe out people with competing religious beliefs.
He was an authoritarian. By the standards of the day, maybe not an unusually harsh one. Politics were pretty rough and tumble in those days. He was a nationalist, populist authoritarian -- maybe a little bit like Hugo Chavez. It was a rejection of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. By our standards, King Josiah was a bad guy. He kills a bunch of priests who had the misfortune of not focusing their devotion exclusively on Yahweh. He cleans out the temple.
For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it's interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible's account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods.
However, after the exile, monotheism evolves into something much more laudable and inclusive. Now the exiles have returned to Jerusalem and Israel is in a secure neighborhood. It's part of the Persian empire and so are its neighbors. So you see a much sunnier side of God, with expressions of tolerance and compassion toward other nations. This shows that monotheism isn't intrinsically good or bad. It depends on the circumstances in which it finds itself.
This gets pretty confusing for today's religious believer. There's a vengeful God in some of these early books of the Old Testament -- a God who at times says you need to wipe out people with different religious beliefs. But within this same sacred text, you can also read about a very compassionate God.
You're right, the contrasts are extreme. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, God is saying, "I want you to annihilate nearby peoples who worship the wrong gods." He says do not leave anything alive that breathes -- not livestock, women or children. Then other times you have Israelites not only tolerating a neighbor who worships another god but using that other god to validate their desire for tolerance. So they'll say to the Ammonites, "Look, you've got your god, Chemosh. He gave you your land. We've got our god, Yahweh, who gave us our land. Can't we just get along?"
You see this kind of vacillation in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it's a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people. That's also the challenge in the modern world. Barack Obama gets this. So long as Israeli settlements are expanding, you're not going to convince Palestinians that they're playing anything other than a zero-sum game with the Israelis. Obama understands it's partly a question of perception. Muslims who feel disrespected -- whether or not they really are -- will fuel religious extremism.
Let's skip ahead to the next great monotheistic religion. Why did Christianity take root?
The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There's reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire. Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business.
Paul also made some good strategic choices. There were followers of Jesus who dictated that any non-Jews who became part of the Jesus movement had to be circumcised. Adult men had to be circumcised to join the church. This was before modern anesthesia, so you can see this would be a disincentive. Paul said no, and they don't have to follow the dietary laws either. They also developed an attractive doctrine of an afterlife. The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable.
So later Christians, Paul among others, really institutionalized Christianity. What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?
It's popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it's the opposite.
He's typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.
Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he's not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with "love your enemies." Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn't say Jesus said it. It's only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn't the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it's actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.
If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he's commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?
I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I'm not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn't mean in heaven. He meant God's going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you'd expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn't seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There's one episode where a woman who's not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He's pretty mean and basically says, no, we don't serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it's an ugly story. It's only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.
But wasn't Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.
It's certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don't think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don't think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn't new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I'm sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.
So you are distinguishing between Jesus and Christ -- Jesus the flesh and blood historical figure as opposed to how he was later represented as Christ, the son of God.
That's right. There's no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but "messiah" in those days didn't mean what it's come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ -- the son of God -- that's something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written. So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime.
Do you see Islam as essentially an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tradition or as something fundamentally new?
Muhammad was trying to create a synthetic religion, drawing on the existing traditions of Judaism and Christianity. He says very nice things in the Quran about Christians and Jesus, though he can't quite accept the idea that Jesus was the son of God. He also made great overtures toward Jews. He established a fast that was essentially Yom Kippur. The ban on eating pork probably comes as a reflection of Judaism. There's every indication that he hoped to play a successful non-zero-sum game with Christians and Jews and draw them into a larger religion. He insisted that his God was their God. But it didn't work out. Apparently, not that many Jews bought into his mission.
In the standard telling, once Muhammad was ruling the city of Medina and he'd become a statesman as well as a prophet, some Jewish tribes betrayed him and were collaborating with the enemy. So there was a very violent falling out. And he expelled Jewish tribes and in one case killed the adult males. But there's no doubt that the origins of Islam are rooted in the existing traditions of Christianity and Judaism.
You make the point that the Quran is a different kind of sacred text than the Bible. It was probably written over the course of two decades, while the stories collected in the Bible were written over centuries. That's why the Bible is such a diverse document.
We think of the Bible as a book, but in ancient times it would have been thought of as a library. There were books written by lots of different people, including a lot of cosmopolitan elites. You also see elements of Greek philosophy. The Quran is just one guy talking. In the Muslim view, he's mediating the word of God. He's not especially cosmopolitan. He is, according to Islamic tradition, illiterate. So it's not surprising that the Quran didn't have the intellectual diversity and, in some cases, the philosophical depth that you find in the Bible. I do think he was actually a very modern thinker. Muhammad's argument for why you should be devoted exclusively to this one God is very modern.
Do you think it's been harder for today's Muslims to accept liberal interpretations of the Quran because it's linked so directly to Muhammad, while the Bible isn't so closely associated with Moses or Jesus?
Yes, and also because Muhammad spent a certain amount of his career as a politician and a military leader. There are parts of the Quran that are a military manual, which advocate killing the enemy. Of course, the Bible has these things too, but they're a smaller portion of the overall Bible. But when you look at that part of the Quran, it's much more subtle than a lot of people think.
Take the famous verse "Kill the infidels wherever you find them." Actually, it's a mistranslation. It's "Kill the polytheists." So it probably wouldn't include Christians and Jews. If you look at the verse in context, it seems that he exempts those polytheists who are on the side of the Muslims in this particular war. So all that passage says is "Kill the people who are enemies in this war." It's not fundamentally about religion. In this case and others, it complies with my basic argument: When people see themselves in a non-zero-sum relationship with other people, they will be tolerant of them and of their religion. Muhammad probably exemplifies that better than any single figure in ancient Abrahamic history.
Your book focuses on the Abrahamic religions. But aren't Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation?
Yes, it's not uncommon in Asia for somebody to be a little bit of a Buddhist and a little bit of a Taoist. It's certainly possible for religion to be non-exclusive. Parts of Buddhism are exemplary. In some ways it was the earliest religion to recognize the fundamental problem of being human. The challenge is to change the already existing character of a religion. The world is not full of Buddhists. And even Buddhist monks have gone on rampages. There is no religion that is always a religion of peace. But in Buddhism, you're seeing some very interesting developments. The Western, quasi-secular Buddhism is an interesting adaptation to a scientific age because it makes relatively few claims about the supernatural.
You've written a secular history of how religion has been used by various political movements to consolidate power. But you're ignoring the power of personal spiritual experience -- what some people would call revelation. Can you explain religion without acknowledging the importance of actual religious experience?
I do think religious experience has played an important part in religion. I think the Apostle Paul felt genuinely inspired. I myself have had profound experiences that could be characterized as religious. I certainly had some when I was young and a believing Christian. And I've had some since then. I did a one-week silent meditation retreat and had very profound experiences.
What kinds of experiences?
As the week wore on, the walls between me and other people and the rest of reality broke down a little. I became much less judgmental. I remember at one point looking at a weed and thinking, I can't believe I've been killing weeds because they're as pretty as anything else. Who put this label on weeds? And that's just a metaphor for what was changing in my consciousness. It was completely profound by the end of the week. Of course, a week later it wore off and I was a jerk again. But I think it was a movement toward moral truth. The truth is that I'm not special, and you're not special.
That is the key adaptation that religions have to make in the modern world -- to make people appreciate the moral value of people in circumstances very different from their own. That is a move toward moral truth. It's a fascinating feature of the world we live in that as technology expands the realm of social organization, its coherence and integrity depends on moral progress.
There is another way to understand religion. Certain influential people have intense and profound spiritual experiences, which are later codified and turned into systems of belief for their followers. Do you accept this distinction between spiritual experience and organized religion?
I'm against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders. At the same time, there are valid spiritual experiences. I've had them.
But you don't acknowledge that there's anything transcendent about spiritual experience -- any communication with a deeper, alternative reality.
No, I do think the experience I had at that meditation retreat was transcendent. It removed me from the ordinary trappings of mundane consciousness. There is a moral axis to the universe. If we don't make moral progress, chaos ensues. If only in that sense, we are tethered to a moral axis. It raises legitimate questions as to whether the whole system was in fact set up by some being, something you could call a divinity.
It's really interesting to hear you say there's moral truth. That's not the kind of thing we usually hear from someone who calls himself a materialist.
Maybe not, but materialism has gotten a bad name. You can be a materialist and still believe that some larger purpose is unfolding through the history of life on this planet. And you can think of the source of that purpose -- however hard it is to conceive of that source -- in favorable terms. You can use the term "divine," if you want. I do believe there's evidence of some larger purpose unfolding; you'd think religious people would like that. On the other hand, I take a very skeptical view of the claims to special revelation that religions make. You would think my account of religious history would be to the liking of atheists and agnostics.
So we can believe there's an underlying moral truth without believing in God.
The phrase that philosophers use is "moral realism." Do you think morality is in some sense a real thing out there? It's a very elusive question. What I feel sure of is that there's a moral axis to the universe, a moral order, without believing in God.
Are you also saying we can be religious without believing in God?
By some definitions, yes. It's hard to find a definition of religion that encompasses everything we call religion. The definition I like comes from William James. He said, "Religious belief consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting to that order." In that sense, you can be religious without believing in God. In that sense, I'm religious. On the God question, I'm not sure. But I can call myself religious and have a fully scientific worldview.
You write, "Religion needs to mature more if the world is going to survive in good shape -- and for that matter, if religion is going to hold the respect of intellectually critical people." How does it need to mature?
You can't believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. There's a whole list of things that are not compatible with modern science.
That's obvious. But some people would also say the idea of a personal God does not square with the scientific worldview today.
It's not a logical impossibility that there's a personal God out there. It's not even quite impossible that God intervenes when the scientists are not measuring stuff, when nobody's watching. But if you're going to have a religion that's broadly reconcilable with a scientific worldview and going to win acceptance among intellectual elites, then it's not going to involve an interventionist God. There are certainly people who find tremendous reassurance and guidance from religions that don't involve a god of any kind, and here I'm thinking about secular Buddhism.
Or you have a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich who tried to get away from an anthropomorphic God. He talked about God as "the ground of being."
Of course, he got accused of sugarcoating what was in fact something like agnosticism or atheism. It's easier to get reassurance by thinking there's some powerful being looking out for you than for something called "the ground of being." But for my money, if you're interested in hanging on to some kind of religious worldview that's viable in the modern world, you have to make that effort. I haven't tried to work out any detailed program here. It's something I'd like to think about in the future.
At the end of your book, you say the great divide in modern thinking is between people who think there is some divine source of meaning -- a higher purpose in the universe -- and those people who don't. Is this different than the usual dichotomy between believers and atheists?
It's a little different. I'm trying to get members of the different Abrahamic religions to realize that if they want to have an enemy, there's a bigger one than each other. I don't want them to declare jihad on atheists, but it might be good for them to realize, in the modern intellectual battle, they all have something in common: not only a specific Abrahamic God, but belief in a transcendent source of meaning. And I'd like to add that there are a lot of other people who don't subscribe to your notion of God, maybe not to any notion of God, who do believe in a transcendent source of meaning and a larger purpose that's unfolding.
As opposed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
I think he's wrong. But it's not surprising. Physicists don't think much about the animate world. So he probably hasn't given a lot of thought to the human condition and the direction of human history. But I'd say even the realm of physics -- just the weirdness of quantum physics -- should instill in all of us a little humility. It should make us aware that human consciousness, designed by natural selection to do really mundane things, is clearly not capable of grasping some ultimate things that are probably out there.
Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." He has also been a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science & Religion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHiT_vLIN4w [with comments] [in case this full version goes dark, the second-listed links for the respective parts of the film in the post to which this is a reply are still working as I make this post]
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