Christian stories often finish a page later than they ought. Take the story of St. Nicassius, where the saint courageously offers his head in return for the people’s safety of his soon-to-be sacked city. Predictably, the (literally) Barbarian hordes unhesitatingly lop it off and proceed to murder, rape and pillage his people unobstructed.
As far as I’m concerned, this is where the story should have ended. The tragic sentiment of self-sacrifice has already been conveyed. The saint himself is dead and presumably unaware of whether or not his offering was pragmatically successful or not … and indeed it doesn’t really matter if it was. What matters is the loving beauty of his martyrdom.
Now, while more sophisticated readers might well appreciate this already, it’s as if, for the sake of the children to whom such stories are told at bedtime, someone has felt it necessary to add on a perfunctory happy ending to what might otherwise be a truly moving story. So, in the case of St. Nicassius, a day or so later, the sudden onset of a plague of locusts forces the invaders to move on to terrorise the next city in line (presumably St. Nicassius’ very own neighbours), and this ‘miracle’ is happily attributed to the good will of God in recognition for St Nicassius’ sacrifice.
If victorious triumph (or even the shortening of a sacking via the utter devastation of one’s material resources) is the reward of supererogatory acts, then, morally, they are little better than equally if not more effective displays of brute power and force. For morality to transcend relativistic pragmatics, the actual success or failure of any given act must be of no consequence. Certainly, the intended outcome is of significance, but whether or not such an outcome is reached should not be thought to validate or negate the moral beauty of act itself.
Perhaps a better example can be found in the story of Christianity; namely, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
In The Need for Roots, Simone Weil wrote:
When the subject in question is the good, beauty is a rigorous and positive proof; and, indeed, there can be none other. It is absolutely impossible for there to be any other.
… Surely those who are called blessed are they who have no need of the resurrection in order to believe, and for whom Christ’s perfection and the Cross are in themselves proof.
Note that Weil isn’t suggesting that it is the belief in the factuality of the resurrection that can be done away with, but, rather, the resurrection altogether. Indeed, what more movingly beautiful and yet tragic story could there be, than of the individual who sincerely wanted to help all of humanity and was executed for it? (Normally we think it just only to punish those who harm humanity, either individually or collectively.) Why is it necessary for the ceaselessly loving and forgiving actions of Jesus to be indirectly validated by a phenomenon external to the action itself? If a guilty murderer was resurrected three days after their rightful death, what would that suggest about the individual? Nothing a priori, at least. But, in the case of Jesus, the tragic beauty of the crucifixion itself should be validation enough. In order to better appreciate how this is so, let us momentarily digress into considering the Metaethics (and aesthetics) of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Towards the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes:
6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – an it there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express
anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics are transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
6.432 How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
6.4321 The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance.
6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
6.45 The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.
While, here, Wittgenstein is circumscribing the outermost limits of propositional logic that the preceding sections of the Tractatus have attempted to explicate, the sentiment expressed has a more familiar everyday application:
Science, it is well known, cannot ask why? of the world, only how?. So, for example, if science wants to explain ‘why’ objects fall to the ground, it can only properly describe how they fall (i.e. their physical behaviour). To this description, they give the name ‘Gravity’ and so may mistakenly seem to identify the ‘why’, but, in reality, they have only identified the manifest ‘how’ of the physical interactions between objects, not the how of ‘how does gravity cause objects to behave in such a way?’ As Goethe wrote:
~ The magnet is a primeval phenomenon, the naming of which appears to serve as an explanation. (Cf. Maxims and Sayings)
What gravity is and what its purpose might be (in the greater scheme of things) remains a mystery (indeed, there are many who think that such issues will not only remain forever unanswered, but are in themselves non-issues insofar as they are properly nonsensical).
To return then to the tragic beauty of the crucifixion of Jesus, we might ask ourselves, what significance is the uniquely tragic beauty of this story? Why is the universe such that, to us humans, stories of self-sacrifice – such as was exemplified by the gospels of The New Testament – resonate so deeply to our emotional and moral core? Certainly, one may be tempted to make recourse to Evolutionary Theory as an attempt to dismiss the question as merely one of non-value laden ‘survival’ – eg. evolutionarily speaking, the capacity to die for what one is passionate about is a desirable trait in prospective reproductive partners, given the (hopeful) thought that such commitment would be useful if usefully directed. As what it is to be human extends beyond the merely biological (shared family genetics, etc.), to the cultural, Jesus’ death is evolutionarily desirable insofar as he is thought to protectively represent the interest of certain people (perhaps only the meek; perhaps all humanity, were they to recognise their innate meekness).
Even so, even if such an account was found to be (psychologically) ‘correct’, it still does not in any way detract from the tragic beauty of crucifixion itself. And, indeed, though it may seem to explain ‘why’ it is that many humans feel this way towards the gospels, in reality it still has only pushed back the real question one-remove, and hasn’t even begun to answer the ever-persistant question, ‘Well, why is the universe such that evolution is the way that it is? Why not something else? Why isn’t, say, the ability to fart more useful/desirable to life? Of course, one will want to appeal to a survival of the fittest sentiment. But as Jesus’ own sermon on the mount suggests, such a sentiment is purely speculative (in a Hegelian sense), whereby the content of the concept ‘fittest’ is determined by the traits that survive or endure. If the meek were one day to inherit the Earth (indeed, it hardly seems like there will be any inhabitable Earth left if the ‘strong’ continue on their path of mutual self-destruction), then ‘meekness’ would be deemed ‘fit’.
That the universe is one way and not the other, however, is the real ‘kicker’.
Admittedly, the reason why (if there is or can be one) does not seem possible to answer. To take an analogous case: Intelligent Design is a fallacious argument, not only because the answer to the thing to be explained needs to be better understood than that which it explains (a criteria that God fails to meet, as the invocation of the concept ‘God’ only begs the even bigger question of ‘what, then, is God?’), but because humans are incapable of rationally transcending their rationality. By this, I mean, that, were there proof of ‘intelligent design’ in the world, we would be incapable of determining whether or not the intelligence was in the thing itself or in our thinking (comprehending) of it. Indeed, what more ‘proof’ do we need that the physical world manifests intelligence that to watch a grand chess master at work? Thinking that if we were to ‘find’ evidence of ‘intelligence’ in the basic structures of the universe, however, is to willingly pull the wool over our own eyes, as it were, for man is and remains the measure of all things.
The same argument applies to beauty and the apparent telos of the universe. To wonder at the tragic beauty of the crucifixion and conclude that, as the Christians might put it, it is the means by which God displays the depth of his divine love for humans, is not thereby to ‘prove’ that the universe is the way it is as it derives its meaning, purpose or telos in distinction from another ‘possible world’, for no-one is able to actually transcend this world to have any idea what such a world might look like. Rather, it is to accept this fact and to embrace the miracle of the world and the immense beauty that it is capable of manifesting to us even in the most otherwise horrific and tragic corners of the universe.
