Reflections on Freedom and COVID-19
Tonight I sat and watched the news while eating supper. In normal times, these ordinary activities serve as a chance to slow down and relax at the end of a lively day. But now, as COVID cases continue to rise and we approach the tenth month of the pandemic, rather than slow down at the end of the day we persist through such activities in a state of flat affect, boredom, and melancholy.
At least, that’s if you’re as fortunate as I have thankfully been during all this. There are many, many, people right now who are sick, afraid, depressed, without a job, grieving the death of a loved one, and so on, and my heart sincerely goes out to those who are less fortunate during this crisis.
In times like this, we often ask ourselves; why? Why the suffering? Why the pandemic? If you’re neurotically inclined like me, you tend to think about these things anyway, but these questions are especially pressing right now.
On the news tonight, CTV’s Steve Murphy spoke with a retiring Roman Catholic Archbishop of Halifax Anthony Mancini. Steve, in his usual wit and passion which I greatly admire, asked Archbishop Mancini the why question – Why does God allow for the coronavirus pandemic? Archbishop Mancini answered sincerely, in a way that I have heard many religious people answer, explaining that there are greater purposes God has in store for us, and that is why He allows these things to happen. I think it is fair to say that Steve at least did not seem satisfied (or at least, if he was satisfied, he played a fantastic skeptic for the sake of pressing on for the audience). To be honest, I was not satisfied. I’ve never found these kinds of answers satisfying. Even though I’m an agnostic, I still believe there is a better religious response that is both deeper and closer to the correct theology.
A few months back, I was chatting about religion with a philosophically inclined friend. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about the Problem of Evil, which argues that God must not exist because if He did, there would not be all this suffering. I wanted to find a solution to this problem, and the simplicity of my friend’s response made it click for me. He argued that evil disproves the existence of God, and that he’d rather have his freedom of choice anyway if it meant not being interfered with by the supernatural. It was this, along with some reflection in the coming weeks, that made me realize the only solution I could see for the Problem of Evil. I hope to at least give the reader some existential comfort in these challenging times by making sense of this solution, even if you take my solution in purely metaphorical terms.
I will start from the start: Genesis. Particularly, the story of the fall of man. To put it briefly, the first two people, Adam and Eve, are hanging out in the Garden of Eden. God tells them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In a rather comedic fashion, Eve is then convinced by a snake to eat an apple from the tree so she will become powerful like God. Eve eats the apple, and obtains for man the knowledge of good and evil. God isn’t exactly pleased with this, and makes it pretty clear to the two that life, from here on in, is going to have some serious ups, and some really serious downs (to put it lightly).
When I first read Genesis for myself, I was roughly eleven or twelve years old. I knew the story to some extent, but I had never really pondered what it meant to obtain knowledge of good and evil. I’m twenty now, and can confidently say that this has been the defining problem of everything I have seriously thought about ever since. Allow me to share my thoughts, still through some stories of the Old Testament.
Fast forward a long time, to the Book of Samuel. In 2 Samuel 11, we find the story of David and Uriah. King David was known for his greatness, but also for a single sin. One day, he sees a beautiful woman named Bathsheba as she bathes. In his lust, David goes on to invite her to sleep with him, and impregnates her. Then he calls for her husband, a good man named Uriah the Hittite, to be sent to the front lines of battle to be killed. David takes Bathsheba as his own wife. God is angry with David, and sends a prophet Nathan to curse David with the death of his child. Bathsheba bears the child, and he subsequently dies, leaving David in a state of mourning. David is remembered in later books as a great, holy king, but nobody ever forgets that even he was corrupted by the temptations of sin.
These stories tell us that humans have the capacity for both good and evil, and that this knowledge (as laid out in Genesis) leaves us vulnerable to suffering. In our freedom to choose good or evil, and our recognition of the horrors of life, only then do we find a reason to live. Surely it is more honourable for David to be remembered as a great king who chose good most of the time, than for David to be remembered as an automata who did the good only out of necessity. If David could not have chosen other than to do the great things he did and to sin against Uriah, would he be worth discussing? I can’t see how – it is only in the fact that he is a human being, capable of good and evil, who most often chose the good, that he is worth remembering. It is in light of his very freedom that his actions become good and admirable. In recalling his sin, we find a piece of ourselves in David, acknowledging that he is fundamentally the same as us. He was a man vulnerable to evil choices but who did great things.
One last story, this one more personal. I was driving the other day to get some coffee. I saw a teenage boy walking in the cold, pouring rain. I thought about how stupid it is that I couldn’t offer him a ride, because I am a stranger and it is obviously a stupid idea to get in a car with a stranger, even if they seem well-meaning. It felt stupid and absurd that he should walk in this without a hood or umbrella all because there are some bastards out there sick enough to twist the good wishes of ordinary people. But then I thought; maybe it actually is better off this way. This is not to say that he ought to walk in the rain, but that the elimination of the possibility of these human forms of suffering would make other parts of life not as valuable. I thought about all the times this young man has probably had a car ride with a parent, family member, or friend. When you think about it, to trust someone enough to get in a machine capable of going 200km/hr and of inflicting some serious damage, that trust is beautiful in its own way. You could also get in a vehicle if there were no bad people in the world, but it isn’t obvious to me you would have the same depth of trust for the person. At the extreme, there could just be no rain at all, no vulnerability at all, but then there would be no point in building this trust in the first place. It is as if our vulnerability to suffering – both the natural kind and the kind inflicted upon us by evil – is what makes it meaningful to live for other people in the first place. This is not to say that we should act to increase suffering, but that it is a serious question as to whether we would want to eliminate the total possibility of it and evil. It is a serious question, further, as to whether we actually should blame God for our freedom, or be glad that we have it. This is at least a deeper way of looking at theology and existential concerns than to believe that God is doing this for some supernatural purpose, because if that were true we wouldn’t exactly be free.
In summary: It is in freedom that I hope to find an answer to Steve Murphy’s question. I simply cannot find forgiveness for God unless I hold that He has gifted me with freedom. In this freedom, I am free to suffer, free to choose, and free even to reject Him, but it is this freedom that gifts us with purpose. We find purpose in fighting suffering through good will – good will being the only thing which Immanuel Kant said was good in and of itself. We find the heights of love, the depths of sorrow, and the battle scars of grieving and healing all in the freedom that makes us human. Perhaps now we can understand the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit and forgive both Eve and God for our condition. This is the answer I wish Archbishop Mancini had given to Steve Murphy: God is not a supernatural force who prevents us from suffering, because if He was He’d be robbing us of our essence in doing so. In the words of the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (pg. 168):
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Notes
Solzhenitsyn, A. (2007). The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vol. 1). HarperCollins.
