Deus absconditus: the God unknown to man; the God who fled, taking His justice with Him, leaving humanity, in the words of nineteenth-century British poet Matthew Arnold, "here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight."
I had a moment of clarity the other night, in which I realized that what I'm going through--the whole agony of an unwanted divorce--can be explained in purely biological or anthropological terms. I'm simply an undesirable mate. After seven years of a childless marriage, despite the fact that the childlessness was the result of "family planning," my wife simply moved on to a different mate, a more potentially fertile seed-bearer.
There is no transcendental truth other than that of reproductive efficiency. All our belief in "God," "the higher Good," "first principles," "karma," what have you, are simply consoling fictions we craft to distract us from the horror of existence. There is no ideal realm; there are only fluctuations in the field. Intensities. Love is an intensity, as is wrath. If the state sanctioned my love by licensing my marriage, why can it not also sanction my wrath? I want to see my ex-wife's lover's face crushed beneath my boot.
Yet I cannot fault my ex-wife for leaving me no more than I can fault a tigress for disenterating a gazelle. What is, is--and "is" does not imply "ought." My wife ought to have gone to counseling with me in the proper spirit, but she did not. I ought to still be married to her, but I am not. I am alone, though I ought not to be.
No merit acquired; no justification through works--Martin Luther taught us that.
No comments:
Post a Comment