Doubt

 

On 6^th April 1767, Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) [1694-1778] wrote this in a letter to Frederick the Great: 1. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

 

It is hard for anyone who is both prominent and religious to express doubt. The media pounce on it as if they have just exposed another Tory ‘split’ on Europe.

 

You may remember that couple of years ago they thoroughly overexcited about the revelation (in fact it was old hat) that Mother Teresa suffered a deep crisis of faith for the last 40 years of her life.

 

            She wrote in a private letter 2. : “I am told that God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

 

            Anyone who has prayed fervently and unsuccessfully will know this feeling. And, if we are honest, almost all Christians experience times when we have no sense of response from God or even a simple feeling of God’s presence.

 

            The Welsh poet and Anglican priest, R.S. Thomas [1917-2000] expressed this superbly well in his poem The Absence: 3.

 

 

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

 

from which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come

I modernise the anachronism

 

of my language, but he is no more here

than before. Genes and molecules

have no more power to call

him up than the incense of the Hebrews

 

at their altars. My equations fail

as my words do. What resource have I

other than the emptiness without him of my whole

being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

 

            The natural result of this feeling – or lack if it – is doubt.

 

            For centuries, religious faith and science were assumed to be in harmony.  Indeed, the harmony created by God's design was thought to be what science revealed.

 

By Victorian times, however, the old certainties were under the cosh.

 

Palaeontology, the study of fossils, and geology, for most thinking Christians, delivered conclusively deadly blows to belief in the literal truth of the creation stories of the Old Testament.

 

The necessary implication of Darwin was not merely that the Bible was not literally true. Even more seriously, his work struck at the heart of the conception of man as unique among living creatures, having a particular relationship with God.

 

Added to this, literary scholarship increasingly treated the Bible a collection of texts which could be analysed in the same way as other works of literature. Thus Holy Scripture came to be seen as the work of men and women, in the context of their historical cultural circumstances, rather than the inerrant Word of God.

 

As a 19th-century liberal preacher (the Rev. F.W. Robertson), who was famous in his day, said:4.            “It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it has blindly rested for so long are, many of them, rotten and begins to suspect them all.”

F.W. Robertson (19^th century vicar of Holy Trinity, Brighton).

 

This sense was famously echoed by Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach 5.:

The Sea of Faith

Was once too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Matthew Arnold [1822-1888]

 

            Some robust Victorians dealt with doubt by hearty, no-nonsense activism. Charles Kingsley wrote to his wife:

 

6.         “Feed on Nature, and not try to understand it. … Look around you much. Think little and read less. Never give way to reveries.”

Charles Kingsley [1819-1875]

 

This approach continues to work for many. But what about those who have more reflective personalities?

 

Doubt should not be a cause of anxiety. It can be welcomed as something creative which can contribute to the development of faith. And we should draw strength from those who have gone before us and confronted the same thing.

 

Right back to St. Augustine:

7.         “For if I doubt, I am.”

St. Augustine of Hippo [354-430]

 

            Mother Teresa is a wonderful example. For all her doubts, she continued to have faith in the Christ to whom she prayed without discernible response. And that faith sustained her in great, hard works of love.

 

            Tennyson put it this way 8.:

There lives more faith in honest doubt

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

 

For R.S. Thomas, disenchantment with institutional religion did not weaken his faith 9.:

a faith to enable me to outstare

the grinning faces of the inmates of its asylum,

the failed experiments that God put away.

 

            Tennyson’s expression of mature, questioning faith and hope, in In Memoriam 55, should inspire us all 10.:

 

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope through darkness up to God.

 

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-1892]