The mystic is a good example of a writer who may appear to set out to justify the ways of God to man, but who really does otherwise. It is the nature of the mystic calling to feel compelled, almost as a poet does to write poetry, to a life of meditation and selflessness. When a mystic has a religious experience, frequently they will seek only to describe their feelings of transcendence and how they came about. The often-didactic tone of these forms of writing could be mistaken for a justification of God’s ways, but the mystic will typically be filled more with a desire to impart to the community what they can do to achieve such a state of union, rather than a defence of the ways of God. The reasons for this lie in human nature – it is human nature to seek acceptance, understanding, human contact and so on. The mystic is like any other human – they feel a need to express and they are unique in that expressing their lives they are expressing a search for religious meaning. This does not reflect or require a justification of God’s manners or methods – justification is very much a philosopher’s tool; expression is the religious writer’s tool.
Milton said of his own work that it set out to ‘justifie the wayes of God to men’ (Milton’s Paradise Lost 1997 Book I lines 25-7), but he was not speaking of all religious works. Moreover, his work explored historical Christian beliefs and stories. These allegorical forms of religious writing often pertain to know all the answers, but the vast majority of religious writings are centred around doubt, death, despair, suffering, self-questioning, searching for a reason for being, searching for security both in and after life, searching for meaning both within ourselves and without in the natural world, and so on. Milton’s Paradise Lost aimed to justify the ways of God to man, but it was a select case amongst religious works. Although it characterises much Christian writing, which often mimics the allegorical ‘storybook’ style of modern Bibles, his work was an epic version of a popular religious story from one religion where God is to a large extent transparent, that is, his ways are known implicitly to man. It did not reflect the majority of other religions, or the majority of other religious writings. Thus not all religious writers set out to ‘justify the ways of God to man’. The second statement made was that, of those religious writers who do set out to justify the ways of God to man, very few succeed. There are several reasons why religious writers would have difficulty making such a large justification.
There are only a few tools that the religious writer can use to justify the ways of God to man. They can call upon personal experiences, views, visions or beliefs; they can call upon institutionalised religion, or religious doctrines; they can call upon examples of the ways of God, present in the natural world. There are difficulties associated with each of these. No matter how honest, how articulate, how learned a person appears to be, the subjectivity of personal experiences or beliefs will still prompt questions, ‘Is the person lying?’ ‘Is the person deluded?’ ‘Is the person suffering from madness or an attack brought on by physical sickness?’ If ‘need is not quite belief’ (Sexton TOF 1985 p85) it follows that belief is not quite truth. A person may be perfectly honest, and absolutely believe what they are saying, yet they can be lying. 600 years ago, the world was convinced that the earth was flat and ships that went too close to the edge would fall off or be eaten by sea monsters! 450 years ago, the world still knew from Ptolemy that the earth was the centre of the universe, and many people believed the stars were Gods and spirits. Calling on subjective forms of proof such as ‘I believe’ is a difficult tool to use, especially in this modern era of scepticism brought on by a proliferation of groups all pertaining to know the only ‘true’ answer. Religious writers who attempt to prove God’s existence through stories about seeing and talking to God are rarely successful, and more often than not only convince their readers that they are delusional or fabricating for effect. Calling upon institutionalised religions or doctrines, while it is frequently used, is an equally subjective proof. In these cases however, the integrity of a number of prophets who claimed to be messengers of God are questioned, and answers to questions regarding honesty or sickness are not so readily answered. This form of proof also calls into question the integrity of every person and every action that has ever pertained to come from that institution. For example, the white persecution of blacks in America was closely linked with Christianity, and even now groups such as the Ku Klux Klan weaken the integrity of such religious institutions. Calling upon the natural world as a source of spiritual justification is becoming an increasingly utilised tool for religious writers. Although justifications of this form lack the absolute rules of institutionalised religion, they tend to be highly philosophical, and their answers are still rather vague, not providing the sort of ‘concrete comfort’ as Christianity, Buddhism or similar established religions. A good example of this lies in An Imaginary Life: ‘We are continuous with the earth in all our particles of being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce’ (Malouf 1994 p147). Malouf presents a spiritual connection between humans and nature, however he does not provide a simplistic set of rules to live by, such as attending Church and prayers do for the Christian. The reader shares in the transcendental experience, but will have difficulty in finding a wild boy who just might be a satyr to lead them to experience it, and allow them to believe in more than the subjective words of fiction writer. For these reasons, justifying the ways of God to man is difficult to accomplish.
To justify the ways of God to man, two elements are in place: the reader and the writer. The writer must be successful in justifying the ways of God to ‘man’, but this to a large extent depends on the position of ‘man’, and how willing he is to believe what the writer has to say. To justify, you have to prove. What you have to prove will depend on the audience, and these possibilities are outlined below. The person may not yet believe in God, in which case you will have to prove that
- God exists
The difficulties associated with proving God’s existence were outlined earlier in this essay, and because of the subjective nature of these proofs, very few, if any, religious writers are successful in proving God’s existence to someone who is unwilling to believe. If the person is willing to believe in God, or has already come to the conclusion that God exists, there are two more possible avenues for the religious writer to seek to justify the ways of God through:
- God is in complete control of all actions, everything is under God’s will, and thus we have no ‘free will’.
- God created a perfect world and gave us free will, we abused it, and that is the cause of pain and hardship in the world.
In the case of the former proof, postulations become purely theoretical and subjective: ‘I can move my arm so I believe God gave us free will’ ‘God preordained me moving my arm so I believe God is in complete control of everything’. In the case of the latter proof, the ways of God aren’t being justified at all because the ways of God are that we have free will and the ways of man are the instigators of an imperfect world. Believers in God have used these ideas to justify pain and suffering on the earth, when the omniscient creator of the universe could have chosen not to create it. The fourth possibility is that
- The reader may appear to believe God exists, but see his ways as wrong or unreasonable.
For an example of this, consider Milton’s Paradise Lost. The text essentially sets out to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, yet romantic poets such as Shelly and Blake saw the portrayal of Lucifer as deeply sympathetic and the real theme of the work a rebellion against the tyranny of Heaven (WBR1). In all these cases however, the primary obstacle is the lack of accountability of God. Depending on your state of enlightenment, it is impossible to ask God personally whether he gave us free will or not. In the case of the reader believing the ways are unreasonable, this is possibly the singular case where God’s ways can be justified to man. In this case, philosophical justifications, such as the justification of pain presented above, make justifying God’s ways to man a possibility. Of course, the philosophical nature of this inevitably results in philosophical writers setting out to justify the ways of God to man, not religious writers.
Another barrier to proving right or reasonable God’s ways lies in the inadequacy of language to express the inexplicable. Relating personal religious experiences, even within a subjective tone, would appear to be a clever way of proving God’s existence, and in doing so opening the paths to proving there is a greater meaning to life, that is, to justify the ways of God to man. The nature of expression however, is that you cannot express the inexplicable. It thus becomes difficult to believe articulately constructed descriptions of religious experience, except when the writer claims inexpressibility. A similar theme was explored within Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Ovid uses Latin, an articulate language of ‘distinctions’ where ‘every ending defines and divides’ (Malouf 1994 p98), to write insincere verse about the Gods. When he is exiled from Rome however, he begins to seek to justify the ways of the Gods to himself, and when he finds both Latin and Getae inadequate to do so, he comes close to discovering a deeper language that is capable of expressing the inexplicable: ‘a language my tongue almost rediscovers and which would, I believe, reveal the secrets of the universe to me’ (Malouf 1994 p98). Shortly before his death, Ovid comes vitally close to this deeper language: ‘Wandering along together…is a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect interchange…like one side of the head passing thoughts across to the other, and knowing in a kind of foreglow, before the thought arrives, what it will be’ (Malouf 1994 p145). To justify the ways of God to man through a revelation of experiencing God, a religious writer would have to discover the language that can ‘reveal the secrets of the universe’ or knowledge that has not yet been gained, as this is an essential part of the concept of ‘God’.
The difficulties of proving the unprovable are amplified by the ability of the human mind to fabricate. The incredible amount of creativity and imagination that modern society possesses makes it difficult to obtain one set of beliefs, and even harder to distinguish between what is reality and what is imagined reality. Movies such as The Matrix (FBR1) and The Thirteenth Floor (FBR2) have presented age-old philosophical hypothesis in startling reality, and the increasing number of psychiatric institutions and asylums has made it painfully obvious that human beings have the capacity to believe the unbelievable and create impressive and realistic ‘make-believe realities’ that are far from the truth.
Moving away from the theoretical difficulties associated with ‘proving the unprovable’ and ‘expressing the inexplicable’, on a real level there is relatively little a religious writer can call upon to justify the ways of God to man. They can seek to explain and justify the ways of God through an exploration of death and the afterlife, or they can examine transcendental or divine experiences that might give an indication of a spiritual being greater than ourselves. Poets such as Wordsworth call upon a pantheistic Nature rather than a Supreme Being among the clouds, as a source of truth, health and happiness: “let Nature…our minds and hearts to bless…wisdom breathed by health, / truth breathed by cheerfulness” (Wordsworth TOF 1985 p194) and even go so far as to declare nature can be an instrument in transcending everyday life, similar to the transcendence achieved by Teresa of Avila through meditation: ‘A daily wanderer…With living Nature…Is stirred to ecstasy…enduring joy…Visionary power’ (Wordsworth TOF 1985 p103). However, like Teresa of Avila’s work, Wordsworth does not aim to justify the ways of God to man, but rather to explore how man should choose to live. The relationship between man and the natural world is a central theme in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Malouf presents Ovid as atheist who discovers a spiritual union with nature after being divorced from the contentment of the society in which he feels at home in. Ovid begins the novel forsaking the unmade landscape and is bitter in his limited understanding of nature. Throughout the novel, however, he begins to experience all those things that were previously only literary tools to him, and realises, and eventually attains, a selflessness similar to that sought by the Sufi: ‘I must drive out my old self and let the universe in…The spirit of things will come migrating back into us. We shall be whole’ (Malouf 1994 p96) ‘I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards toward the blue roundness of the sky’ (Malouf 1994 p145-6). Nature is seen as the source to a higher state of existence. This is similar to the contentment experienced by the Christian through prayer, or the Spiritualist through meditation. Ovid embodies this higher state of existence through a communion with the landscape surrounding him: ‘The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of the landscape…I now have a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time…venturing out into a space that has no physical dimensions’ (Malouf 1994 p144). In all these instances, the poet feels in contact with something greater than himself. But in writing about these experiences, is he trying to justify the ways of God to man? Malouf, Wordsworth, and other naturalist poets do not seek to prove that their ways are ‘Gods ways’, or even that they are the only ways, or the correct ways. They seek only to express their communion with nature, and at most, provide direction on how human beings can attain a similar state of mental calm or ecstasy. The concept of earthly Nature as an almost spiritual entity is one that implies that perhaps it is not in other worlds that we must seek to find a higher state of being, but within our own. This is obviously at odds with many religions that see an afterlife as a release into a higher state of being. It also suggests perhaps humans possess an inner ability to create their own sense of transcendence, normally associated with Heaven or Nirvana: ‘It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it’ (Malouf 1994 p28). A belief in the powers of nature as an alternative to theistic belief however, despite its obvious attractions, fails to resolve many important unexplained issues, such as the ultimate source of original creation and the reason for being. For this reason, religious writers rarely try to justify the ways of God as being in essence part of nature and no more, as this leaves too many unexplained questions.
Other religious writers discuss the concepts of death and the afterlife when exploring or justifying supernatural existence. Emily Dickinson is a great byword for the poet who writes about the concepts of death and the afterlife, essentially creating a religiously based poem. She is not deeply religious herself, and she does not set out to justify the ways of God to man. I Heard A Fly Buzz – When I Died (TOF 1985 p43) is a poem very much concerned with vision. The concept of vision is treated on three levels in the poem – physical sight, which eludes the dying speaker, spiritual vision, also known as the sight of the soul, and vision as the postulation of the final moment of life when God’s presence or absence will be revealed. It is then rather intriguing that the concern of the first line should be auditory. The droning of the fly is amplified by the ‘Stillness in the Room…Stillness in the Air’. This ‘stillness’ refers to the atmosphere of the deathwatch or deathbed scene, common in Dickinson’s time, when the family and close relatives would gather around the dying to witness ‘that last Onset – when the King / Be witnessed’. The King could possibly represent Christ, and the religious nature of the deathwatch tradition could support this idea. This is also reinforced by Dickinson’s personal attempts to discover whether or not God exists by viewing dying people (WBR2). A far more likely interpretation, however, is that the ‘King’ is the physical embodiment of Death. This idea is supported by the nature of the poem, which sets out in a similar way to the traditional interpretations of death in the sixteenth century, but with the introduction of the fly becomes almost a rebellion against the preconceived notions of Dickinson’s society as to what happens when you die. This interpretation is also supported by Dickinson’s attachment to life and scepticism towards the Christian religion. Whether the King be Death or Christ, it is obvious that the ‘portion of me [that] be assignable’ that Dickinson distributes to her relatives leaves behind the soul or the body respectively for Christ or Death. There is an immense build up of anticipation up until this point. The broken syntax, causing individual units of meaning to be considered both separately and as a part of the whole, has created a tensity at odds with the calm tone of the words used, and the speaker’s role as the focus of attention of the surrounding relatives, and the resolution of death’s secrets imminently approaching, amplifies this expectancy. But just when the speaker is ready to witness the majesty of Christ or Death and move to another life there enters a fly. This fly comes to represent a number of things. On a most literal interpretation, the ‘Fly – / With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz’ is a blowfly. Dickinson was a housewife, and this blowfly would be a great distraction to her. This reveals another interpretation, where the blowfly comes to represent earthly distractions that prevent the soul from attaining the sort of mental peace and calm that is commonly associated with the union with God, and which seemed evident and was anticipated in the second and third stanzas. The fly could also represent the final touch from life before the consciousness fades, but the failing of the windows and the distressed, almost incoherent tone of the final stanza suggests otherwise. Perhaps the most logical interpretation is that the fly, in its coming between the disruptive audience in the deathwatch, whose eyes ‘wrung them dry’ and whose breaths invaded the ‘Stillness in the Air’, shifts the perspective of the dying speaker away from the fantasy-like glory of dying, as the focus of a room full of eager observers, to the harsh reality of death. Interpreting the fly in this light, the final two lines of the poem would take on the following meaning: ‘the Windows failed – and then / I could not see to see’. The windows represent both light as an earthly sensory perception of reality through sight, and Light as the divine being. With the removal of this light, the speaker expects to see with spiritual vision, and finally behold God and the afterlife. But upon the removal of their physical sight, they are deprived of what it is to see. They cannot see to see if the afterlife and God exists or not. They are rendered blind, and they are deprived of their expected afterlife. This interpretation is perfectly valid, beyond the fact that to tell us that you cannot see to see after you have died, there must of course be an afterlife. This implicit paradox captures the difficulties involved with the concept of an afterlife, and it lies at the heart of the reason why religious writers have difficulty in justifying the ways of God to man. Dickinson delves into the final moments of life and the oncoming realization of the afterlife and returns with the only definite answer humans can ever hope to attain in this lifetime: ‘while we may hope for an afterlife, no one, not even the dying can prove it exists’. (WBR2)
In measuring the success of a religious writer in ‘justifying the ways of God to man’, a good indication is the response of man, to which there are two sides: Doubt and Faith. If a writer is successful in justifying the ways of God to man, readers of his work will have faith in the ways of God as justified by that writer. If the writer is unsuccessful however, the resulting reaction displayed by the reader will be one of doubt or disbelief. Of course, because of the inverse relationship between doubt and faith, doubt also represents the beginning of a conversion to a new faith, as in An Imaginary Life: ‘I thought of what I do not believe in and know belongs only to our world of fables, which is where I found myself…These, I knew, were gods. In whom I also do not believe…Believe in us. Believe…I put out my hand, and touched it’ (Malouf 1994 p23-4). Ovid’s initial reaction is one of scepticism, but his acceptance of the existence of the Centaurs, symbolised in his reaching out to touch them, is simultaneously a doubt in his existing position of disbelief in the Gods, and a new beginning in his spiritual development.
The concepts of death and doubt are explored in great detail in Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (TOF 1985 p43). Written to his dying father, the villanelle expressly warns his father against taking death lying down. He challenges the conventional perceptions of death as a path to a new beginning, a better life and a place of rewards in a similar way to Emily Dickinson. The repeated alternation between ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ juxtaposed against the almost sardonic ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ at the end of each tercet creates a fragile balance between two extremes of emotion. The anger that Dylan feels at the reduction of such a great mind through sickness, and his anger at the possibility of losing a dear family member to death, is evident in his strong use of verbs: ‘rave’ ‘rage’ ‘burn’ ‘blaze’ ‘curse’. His defiant stance against the emotionally demanding death that approaches is contrasted strongly with his love for his father, expressed in gentle adjectives: ‘bright’ ‘good’ ‘gay’ ‘light’ ‘frail’. The switch from the universal to the particular adds incredible force to his directive to his father to fight against death as something to be feared, not revered, but again this is contrasted with his praying for his father to bless him with his tears. Again this is an essentially religious poem in nature, targeting religious issues such as death and the afterlife, written by an agnostic who does not endeavour to justify the ways of God to man. Dylan Thomas sets out to dissuade his father from belief in other explanations of the ways of God that would make him feel comfortable with his death. Quite the opposite to Teresa of Avila, who reveres and longs for death, Thomas feels that his father is banking on an uncertain chance of another life, and that rather than seeking the possibility of an easy alternative he should fight against his illness and try to retain the only life he is absolutely sure exists.
Consider the diversity of religious belief in the modern world. It would seem obvious from this observation that no sole writer has ever justified the ways of God to man. If this were the case, there would not be so many religious vocations around the globe. Even within Christianity, one of the central religions of the world, there are divisions between Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Church of England, Gideons, Seventh Day Adventists…indeed, the essay question to a large extent answered itself – if a religious writer had been successful in justifying the ways of God to mankind, we would not need to discuss the issue because it would be obvious we would all be of the same consensus about religion and our reason for being. The lack of an absolute certainty, and a ‘cloud of unknowing’ that possesses the vast majority of people indicates that we have not produced a universal justification of God’s ways to man. Most people have faith. But because there is so much diversity amongst religions, no one religion can have justified the ways of God to mankind. When Milton set out to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, he was not referring to a single man. He was talking about ‘man’ as an abbreviation of mankind. And no singular justification of God or God’s ways has ever proved successful in persuading even the majority of mankind to its absolute truth, let alone mankind in its entirety.
Essentially, religion remains an intensely personal experience, and few and foolish, usually egotistical polemic writers, set out to defend the ways of God to all mankind. Even Milton showed less concern with discovering absolute truth (which he already pertained to know) than with proving that he was right to the world: ‘to the highth of this great Argument / I may assert Eternal Providence / And justifie the ways of God to men’ (Milton’s Paradise Lost 1997 Book I lines 25-7). On a lexical level, his choice of the word ‘assert’ conveys with it a forceful declaration and insistence that seems less concerned with God and more concerned with himself, almost as if he is not trying to justify God’s position to man, but rather his own. Milton goes on to admit of himself, ‘Nor skilld nor studious, higher Argument / Remaines, sufficient of it self’ (Milton’s Paradise Lost 1997 Book VIII lines 42-3). This line implies that answers derived through faith exist of their own accord, and not because of justifications or proofs, as in science or mathematics. To defend God’s existence you need to prove God’s existence, and it is difficult to do so as the vast majority of possible proofs are based on subjective sources. In the end it all comes down to believing unproven things, meaning that very few, if not any, religious writers can justify the ways of God to man unless man is willing to believe, in which case the writer does not need to justify the ways of God to man anyway, just present them for belief.
The original statement, that ‘all religious writers seek…to justify the ways of God to man’ is obviously incorrect. Rewritten, it asserts that a writer is not a religious writer unless they aim to justify the ways of God to man. Throughout this essay the vast majority of religious writers examined sought not to justify the ways of God to man, but to explore the ways of God, particularly in relation to death and suffering, to process religious doubt, to express a lack of religious conviction, or simply to express what they were feeling. Add this to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between faith, which is often an unprovable belief, and the justification of that unprovable belief, and it becomes obvious that relatively few, and certainly not all, religious writers set out to justify the ways of God to man.
It is also evident that, of those religious writers who do set out to justify the ways of God to man, few succeed. The subjective nature of faith and belief, the subjective nature of justification based on the position of the audience, the lack of accountability of God, the possible lack of integrity of documents of humans who claimed to be messengers of God, the imaginative possibilities of the human mind, and the difficulties associated with expressing the inexplicable, all make justifying God to man incredibly difficult, and the writer who tries to do so rarely succeeds.
John Milton, in his epic work Paradise Lost, arguably came closer to justifying the ways of God to man than any writer before or since. Yet even he was forced to admit that in this life, we can never truly know the ways of God, that all we can hope to do is ‘know to know no more’ (Milton’s Paradise Lost 1997 Book IV lines 773-5).
Reference List
Malouf, D. (1994) An Imaginary Life. Pan Macmillan: Sydney
Board Of Studies (1994) Module 3: Poetry and Religious Experience. Board of Studies: Sydney
Poems referenced from Armstrong, K. (1985) Tongues of Fire. Penguin: Victoria
Dylan Thomas – Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night – p43
Emily Dickinson – I heard a Fly buzz - when I died – p43
Anne Sexton – With Mercy for the Greedy – p85
Abraham Ibn Ezra – God Supreme – p90
William Wordsworth – From The Prelude Book V – p103
Elizabeth Jennings – To a Friend with a Religious Vocation – p147
William Wordsworth – The Tables Turned – p194
Teresa of Avila – I Die Because I Do Not Die – p229
John of the Cross – Stanzas of the Soul that Suffers with Longing to See God – p231
Poems referenced from website: Milton’s Paradise Lost. (1997) Renaissance Editions http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/lost/lost.html
John Milton – Paradise Lost – Book I
John Milton – Paradise Lost – Book IV
John Milton – Paradise Lost – Book VIII
Web Based Sources (WBS)
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Books and Writers: John Milton http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jmilton.htm
Website managed by Ari Pesonen
- Modern American Poetry On 465 – [“I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--”]
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/465.htm
Website managed by Richard Bear
Film Based Sources (FBS)
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Director, (year) The Matrix. Film Company
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Director, (year) The Thirteenth Floor. Film Company
Alex Gould Comparative Literature Essay: Poetry and Religious Experience Page
