I read a great deal, as is probably obvious to frequent visitors of this space. So when I come across similar ideas five or ten minutes apart in two or more different places, I don’t necessarily take it as an omen — it could be sheer coincidence — but it sometimes gives me pause, and the occasion to reflect a little.
That happened to me again last Monday, for probably the umpteenth time, resulting in a “hmm” moment.
The Fires of Judgment
The first line to catch my attention came from Doug Wilson’s regular Monday political commentary post, entitled “Revenge of the Blue Collar White Guy”, in which he writes:
“I was asked the other day if I thought that these terrible fires in California were God’s judgment. My answer to that was yes, but we really do need to make some distinctions first.”
Doug goes on distinguish between God’s direct judgment (à la Sodom and Gomorrah), on the one hand, and consequences that arise naturally from foolish or sinful behavior (where forests full of dead growth never removed eventually catch fire, and reservoirs allowed to sit empty cannot provide water to extinguish the runaway blaze), on the other. The latter is still God “judging” in a sense, but at at least one remove. Doug says California’s current plight is what we might call a “reap-what-you-sow” kind of judgment. That is certainly how it appears to me at the moment — which is neither here nor there, as we shall perhaps see.
War and Pieces
The second line to catch my attention was this one, from the final pages of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace, which covers a fifteen-year period in Russia during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The edition I got in the mail the last week of December runs 1,548 pages and weighs enough to make your arm go numb carrying it home from the post office, so “epic” is no exaggeration. Tolstoy’s most notable work combines a fictional storyline about several families of Russian aristocrats with a quasi-historical war narrative and a few disjointed chapters of philosophical musings that may well be the heart of the book. In his Second Epilogue, Tolstoy writes:
“If history had retained the conception of the ancients it would have said that God, to reward or punish his people, gave Napoleon power and directed his will to the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that reply would have been clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve in the divine significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in it there would have been nothing unintelligible in the history of that period, nor would there have been any contradictions.
But modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit the conception of the ancients as to the direct participation of the Deity in human affairs, and therefore history ought to give other answers.”
Tolstoy goes on to discuss the utter failure of “modern historians” to assess their subject matter with any accuracy or perceptiveness. He means historians of the nineteenth century, but what he has to say certainly applies to our own generation of analysts as well. Having eliminated God from the picture, all these can only fall back on concepts like “genius” or “chance” as they ruminate on the cause of this or that action, which leaves them entirely missing the point and offering nothing useful. Throughout the book, Tolstoy dissects the impressions of the historians, portraying Napoleon not as a genius, but rather as the beneficiary (and later a victim) of a confluence of circumstances he did not engineer and could not control.
Time: A Questionable Advantage
Tolstoy’s pessimistic view of historians is not without its internal contradictions. On one hand, he points out their failures, while on the other apparently praising history’s potential exactitude and calling it a “science”:
“For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, history has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the question is dealt with, that for history this question does not refer to the essence of man’s free will but its manifestation in the past and under certain conditions.
In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences as experimental science stands to abstract science.”
The problem, of course, is that historians can only analyze information they are actually working with. What we call “histories” are mere subsets of the relevant facts: a cocktail of truth, fiction and propaganda. Further, that “manifestation” of man’s free will “in the past and under certain conditions” becomes grayer and fuzzier with each passing decade, rendering the so-called “advantage” of historians questionable at best.
Free Will and Inevitability
Tolstoy’s Second Epilogue winds its way into a discussion of free will vs “inevitability”, which is his way of referring to determinism. Despite many Christian presuppositions, Tolstoy relentlessly portrays his characters as victims of apparent randomness. The fictional parts of the book effectively illustrate the conclusions of Tolstoy’s philosophical meanderings: all the characters who set out to do meaningful things with glorious aspirations perish in a hail of flying bullets or die lingering, pointless deaths, while the more passive, reflective characters prosper by engaging with grand events only when absolutely necessary. Observing and accomplishing little, they fare better than their relatives who tempt fate. Love (such as it is in Tolstoy) comes not to the “Romeo and Juliet” couples introduced in the first volume, but almost by accident to the ones left standing at the end. The “winner” of the brutal winter war of 1812 is an old, disrespected Russian alcoholic who cannot control his troops and succeeds by doing as little as possible, letting Napoleon and his men destroy themselves.
The lesson of all this, such as it is, remains unlearned by the book’s characters. Tolstoy’s final fictional paragraph takes place in the bedroom of young Nicholas Bolkónski, aspiring to the greatness he ascribes to his dead father: “Oh, Father, Father! Yes, I will do something with which even he would be satisfied.” Had Tolstoy written a sequel, young Nick would have probably have died by great and entirely unpredictable misfortune in its first chapter.
Now, that doesn’t make Tolstoy nihilistic after the manner of, say, George R.R. Martin, whose post-modern bleakness confirms him, in my humble estimation, as the least satisfying author of the last century and, if his online persona is any reliable indication of the man, a miserable human being besides. No, Tolstoy is simply affirming that the narratives we build for ourselves are reliably unreliable, which is in fact the case.
Two Things
I have learned at least two things in my six-plus decades: (1) that it is impossible to assess accurately the meaning of anything independently of God’s part in it; and (2) that almost all narratives written by human beings are questionable at best. This is as true of the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives as it is of historical analyses. We do no better with our own histories than the historians with theirs, even with our knowledge of scripture. Of necessity, any “meaning” we assign to each series of events in each of our lives — the lessons learned; the triumphs or failures; what God was, in our view, doing at the time — will depend on where we start and end the story we are telling. Any conclusions we come to will be fragmentary and subject to reinterpretation in the light of subsequent events. This does not mean our lives are random, as the consistent atheist must hold. Quite to the contrary, God is at work accomplishing his divine will in and through us. Scripture teaches it, and faith affirms it. I find the greatest comfort in it.
But understand it? Not yet, my friends. The end of the story awaits. Not just mine, but also the story of California and, for some, the meaning of history.
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