Suicide is wrong

There’s been a lot of suicide this week. Many students are killing themselves. A musician killed himself. A very old man killed himself.

The key to understanding suicide today is to look at the story of a 104 year old man who travelled to Switzerland to kill himself in a clinic. This man considered that he had the right to choose the means and the time of his death. Lots of other people in Britain and elsewhere have gone to the courts in order to fight for the same right. These cases are usually viewed sympathetically. Someone with a terminal illness wants to avoid suffering. Few of us would dare say “no” you must continue to suffer. But every time someone goes to a clinic to commit suicide it chips away at the taboo surrounding suicide. Why should we be surprised then, when there are a lot of suicides?

Until relatively recently in history suicide almost universally was considered to be perhaps the greatest sin. The problem is that the view that suicide is wrong depends on theology. Without theology it is very easy to argue for the right to commit suicide. David Hume’s argument is as good as any other. But then how are we to discourage suicide in an age when Christianity is in decline? It becomes rather difficult.

Suicides sometimes happen because someone genuinely is in a position that is impossible. A soldier about to be captured and facing torture and ultimately death may prefer to kill himself. Another soldier may choose death in order to save his comrades. But these sorts of situation are rare in ordinary life.

The two main categories of suicide today are where someone wishes to kill himself because of a physical illness and where someone wishes to kill himself because of a mental illness.

The crucial thing to realise however is that while the situation may appear hopeless to the suicide it isn’t.

Someone who is terminally ill need not commit suicide because there are ways of alleviating pain such that suffering can be minimised, even eliminated. If my pain becomes so great that I require a dose of morphine that ultimately will have the side effect of killing me, I am not committing suicide. All I am doing is trying to avoid pain. The care that dying people receive in hospices means that travelling abroad to die is quite unnecessary.

It is particularly unnecessary when a man is 104, not terminally ill and is merely looking forward to death. So long as he is not in any physical pain and has every material need fulfilled, then his position is better than the vast majority of people in the world. In the natural course of events his wish to die will be fulfilled, probably quite quickly.

The greatest pity is when someone suffering from depression believes that his situation is hopeless and that the only alternative is to die. The reason for this is that the person’s situation is not hopeless.

Someone may be devastated by an event, failing an exam, losing a loved one, but each of us who has ever experienced suffering for these reasons knows that the experience of suffering changes, passes and that new forms of happiness are possible even after great loss. From the perspective of twenty years later, failing an exam can seem trivial. The key is to wait and to be patient. This too shall pass.

Depression may occur because of a tangible reason or may strike from nowhere. The situation can seem hopeless to the depressed person. But it isn’t hopeless. It isn’t like the soldier who has no way out. Depression for the most part can be cured or at least eased. People who have been depressed frequently go on to live lives where there is the usual mixture of happiness and sadness, disappointment and fulfilment. Once more the key is to wait and to be patient.

One of the reasons why in the past depressed people were able to wait and be patient is that they were taught that suicide is wrong. The problem today is because no-one is willing to say that suicide is wrong, there is precious little to deter the person who is contemplating suicide. If a man of 104 is tired of life and kills himself and everyone looks at the story sympathetically, is it any surprise when a musician who is tired of life also decides to kill himself. He will get glowing tributes afterwards and no-one will say that what he did was wrong. Is it any surprise then when we get the next suicide?  

The immorality of suicide consists not merely in its rejection of the gift of life, but more importantly in the selfishness of contributing to the climate which sees suicide as something normal and life as not really being the most precious of gifts. Better by far not to encourage suicide with your sympathy.

We must learn to be British again

Something happened to Britain in the past fifty years or so. We were famous for not making a fuss no matter what happened and we were famous for not showing emotion. When Lord Uxbridge had his leg shot off at Waterloo, he is said to have remarked casually to the Duke of Wellington that it seemed he had lost his leg. The Duke equally casually agreed with him. Both were unruffled, neither showed much emotion.  It doesn’t matter if this story is true, because it used to express something about the British character that was true.

Until relatively recently in history death was all around us. There was a fairly high chance that a woman would die in childbirth. If she did not die, a high proportion of her children would either in infancy or from a one of the childhood diseases that still had not been cured. There were also many killer diseases that could strike at any time in adulthood. Many illnesses that can be easily cured today were simply a death sentence even fifty or sixty years ago.

British civilians and soldiers alike risked death in the two World Wars on a scale that few can even comprehend today. Most of them did so willingly and if asked how they were doing would say something like “mustn’t grumble”. We have access to this attitude in some of the films of the period. British heroes are depicted as downplaying any heroism. Death is taken in its stride and the only sign of emotion is a slight change in voice and just a hint of an alternation of expression. Grief was felt, but not in public.

It seems like another world now, this Britain with its impossibly posh accents. But if you watch Celia Johnson in This Happy Breed (1944) you see how people used to be. It may seem callous. A mother informed of a death chokes up for a second and then thanks the person who took the trouble to tell her. She goes on as before and maybe offers to make some tea. Whatever she is feeling is barely shown. We can only guess at the depth.  But this was the British character. It was this that meant that we kept going when times were tough. Unfortunately it is something that many of us lost somewhere, or perhaps never even had.

There have been rather a lot of terrible events recently. We have had terrorist attacks and now a horrible fire that has killed people in a cruel and unexpected way. Who thinks that such a thing is possible when they go to their bed?

But some perspective is necessary. We have done much to make the world safer. One hundred years ago the world of work was much more dangerous than it is today. Our homes too were much more likely to kill us. We risked illness from unrefrigerated food. Quality control did not exist and health and safety was unknown. Life expectancy was massively lower than today.

There have always been disasters. No doubt there always will be. Ships sink, planes crash, cars have accidents. We work hard to minimise risk, but we cannot eliminate it. Unfortunately mistakes are made. It is human to make mistakes. Which of us does not make many of them every day?

Whenever something bad happens today there are two reactions, something must be done and someone must be blamed. The “something must be done” mentality usually leads to something being done quickly and without much thought. Often it therefore does not help, sometimes it makes the situation worse. The “someone must be blamed” mentality frequently leads to injustice.

Who is to blame for the fire in Grenfell Tower? We don’t really know yet. There will be an inquiry which may or may not find out. It may turn out that a faulty fridge caused the fire. If the person had replaced this fridge or perhaps not bought it in the first place, then there would not have been a fire. Should this person be blamed? Perhaps he knew that the fridge was a risk and failed to replace it. Should he be punished for negligence? But which of us has never had out of date or faulty electrical equipment?

It looks as if it was a terrible mistake to renovate the tower with material that helped the fire to spread. Should we blame the firm responsible for the renovation? Did they know that it would lead to a fire? Did they intend that their work would kill people?

This really is the crucial issue in morality. Blame after all is fundamentally a moral issue. In general I want to be blamed for things that I intended to do. I think it is unjust to be blamed for something that I neither wanted nor could foresee would happen. But this is not how the law sees it. But then law often has little to do with morality and less to do with truth. It is for this reason that it is a subject that is not worth studying. 

Recently a lorry was poorly maintained and crashed. Two men were convicted of manslaughter. They were nowhere near the crash when it happened, but were convicted none the less and jailed for a long time. They were responsible for maintaining the vehicle which killed people and it is for this reason they have been punished. But did they intend to kill anyone? No. Could they foresee that their actions would lead to these particular deaths? No. If their lorry had not crashed, would they have been blamed for their negligence? No. Would they have been punished? No.

There are, no doubt, many firms that poorly maintain their vehicles. Most of them get away with it. If they are caught with a faulty vehicle, the punishment will be minimal. But if that faulty vehicle kills someone, they will go to jail for a long time. It is purely a matter of luck. The intent was the same. Luck, by the way, is not a moral quality. 

A few years ago someone stayed up all night and then drove home. He crashed his car and the car ended up on a railway line. This caused an accident and many people were killed. Once more the driver was sent to prison. But if he had stayed up all night, crashed his car onto the track and there had not been a train coming, he would have been barely punished at all. Which of us has never driven when tired? Which of us has never even for a second done something dangerous while driving? Well we have just been lucky. 

It would be more just to punish the intent rather than the result. The person who drives while talking on a mobile should be punished the same as someone who drives while talking on a mobile and who kills someone. The intent and the negligence is the same. The punishment should be the same?

No-one intended to cause a fire in Grenfell Tower, though it may turn out that some people were negligent. But if dangerous materials were used in Grenfell Tower by one firm, they were, no doubt, used in other towers around the country. To punish one firm more for their actions because people died is unjust for their actions were the same as those of another firm that killed no-one. By all means punish negligence, but don’t punish more for something no-one could foresee and no-one wanted. Punish the intent, because I am only responsible for what I intended, not for what I did not intend.

Unfortunately however, we live in a society that always wants to blame. Sometimes this attempt to blame reaches absurd levels. Until a few days ago neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn had heard of Grenfell Tower. Neither of them knew anything about how buildings like this one have been renovated recently. Yet somehow it has been turned into a political issue.

It may turn out that corners were cut and the people responsible for either building or renovating Grenfell Tower tried to save money. Sorry folks, but we live in a world where we have to try to save money. The reason for this is long-term. We spend more than we earn. I wish we didn’t but we do. This is the fault of both main political parties who have been in government.

We have an excess of demand on housing in Britain especially in London. The reason we have this demand is that a lot of people want to live in London. There are jobs there. London draws people from everywhere. The resulting pressure on accommodation has been caused by the policies of both political parties in the past decades. If there were not this pressure, it might have been possible to tear down dangerous tower blocks decades ago, but in the present circumstances this is not possible. We have a duty to house everybody and must make do with the housing available. I wish that this were not so, but demand on housing especially in London is outstripping supply and has been for decades. 

So if we are looking for the causes of this fire we could find them just as much in the fact that our country has been living beyond its means and has struggled to house everyone who wants to come here as in the fact that this particular building was poorly maintained and renovated.  

This shows the folly of trying to turn tragedy into a political issue. Those on the Right, just as much as the Left, could try to take political advantage of this fire. But it is seriously lacking in taste to do so. Every government and every council has to be make choices about how to spend their money. If you spend too much on one thing you don’t have enough for something else. But spending money won’t necessarily save you from disaster. Unfortunately we have to learn from experience. We have made progress in safety only because we have learned from mistakes and turned catastrophes into lessons.

Those who have lost their lives and their friends and families have the country’s sympathy. But if the Far Left try to hijack that sympathy they may rapidly find that it diminishes. Neither Theresa May nor her Government are in any way to blame for this fire.

People are upset and angry, but this is not the British way to deal with disaster. Shouting at the Queen and asking her what she is going to do is ludicrous. Chasing Theresa May in a threatening way is unjustified and not how British people respond to affliction.

Theresa May is focussing on practical ways to help. She may not be wailing and gnashing her teeth, nor ripping her clothes to shreds. But this is because she is British and from a generation that did not do these things. Until recently all of us were like this. Now unfortunately we are few. It would be much better if there were rather less emotion instead of rather more. Let us accept that disaster will always periodically happen. There is nothing we can do about this. It is futile to look for blame for these deaths. These people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, just as much as some people were beneath a bomb in 1940 while others were not.

When emotions are less raw we will be able to look calmly at what can be done to make our housing safer, but do not think that we can live in a world that is risk free. We have greater life expectancy than anyone in history. We are less likely to die because of war, disease or accident. But someone right now is making a mistake, because he is human, and that mistake may kill someone. I might make that mistake, you may make it too.  

Blame is like a stone. It is very easy to throw it. But which of us is without blame for something. Go then and blame no more.  Rather reflect that in the end we have no choice but to accept misfortune and we must put away anger, for rage solves no problems but rather makes them worse. Better by far to learn how British people used to deal with tragedy quietly and without much fuss. In dark days there is a comfort in knowing that we have been through worse, much worse. This is what it is to be British. We must learn to be that way again. Let us “grieve not, rather find, strength in what remains behind.”

Marriage has no purpose now

I always think that it’s worth reflecting that in essence we are the same as we were 40,000 years ago. Evolution is a matter of millions of years rather than tens of thousands. There may have been some slight changes, but we have the same instincts as our ancestors who lived in caves. In terms of morality and law this means I believe that we should not try to legislate against human nature. Morality must flow out of human nature and must reflect our strengths and weaknesses as human beings.

It is in the nature of men to want to have sex with as many young healthy women as they can possibly find. If it were up to the average young man, other things being equal, they would sleep with one woman and then move on to the next ad infinitum. There are good evolutionary reasons for this. A man can make hundreds of women pregnant in the space of time that one woman can have one baby. If he lived in a land where all the other men had been wiped out, it might even be his duty to do so. Even today young single men are invariably looking for sex. Until fairly recently in human history young single women were not so much looking for sex as looking for marriage.

But why seek marriage? It may be helpful to think about all those years ago when we were hunting mammoths. A pregnant woman on her own would struggle to look after herself. Society needed a way to prevent men simply having sex with a woman and leaving. It is for this reason above all that we developed something called marriage. It followed from human nature. Stable family units were needed, otherwise humanity would not last past the Stone Age.

Imagine you are a pioneer on your way to Oregon in the 1840s. If you are a man, you know that if you want to have sex on a regular basis, you will need to find a wife. In those days no woman on the wagon train would have sex with a man without already having married him. The reason for this was very simple. If she ended up in a log cabin on her own with a baby, she would struggle very hard to bring up the child. In order to develop an ordered society in Oregon, certain rules of morality and law were established. Men, who wanted to have sex, had to be married. Women did not have sex before marriage. Once married it was difficult, if not impossible, to become unmarried. But why did society develop all these prohibitions? Why not just have free love? The reason again is quite simple. In the wilderness women needed men to help them raise the children they had created together. It would have been a disaster in Oregon in the 1840s if there had been thousands of children without fathers. Who would have paid for them? The Government was thousands of miles away. Fellow pioneers might have been willing to look after the odd woman and child if her husband died in an accident, or more likely she would rapidly remarry, but the stability of the pioneer society required that sex and marriage went together.

Much of our present day thinking about marriage stems from a time when there was a prohibition on sex. Much of the elaborate courtship ritual of 19th century fiction is dependent on the idea that these people cannot possibly sleep with each other until and unless they marry. The romance rather goes out of the fiction if after one or two dates the couple are already sleeping together. Who needs romance if you both simply get drunk and end up sleeping with someone you just met. Why indeed have words like love and romance at all under these rather instinctual arrangements?

In a world where there is freely available sex, it is a wonder that men marry at all. Why should they? In what way is it in their interest? The ideal sexual situation for a young man is probably that of a harem. If he could have a different woman every night, would he not choose that? No need to kill them, of course, as threatened in the 1001 nights: eventually the man ends up back where he started. What’s not to like? So why limit himself to one woman? Even if he does tire of always seeking new mates, so long as he can live with his partner, what possible purpose can marriage have for him? It is no longer the condition for him to have sex. In what way then does it benefit him any more than living together? Why need the law get involved? Why should there be any question of promises and undying faithfulness?

For women, too, it is no longer such a great disaster if they have children outside marriage. There is no taboo about it. People admit it on television. If it so happens that a woman is deserted by her partner, she will at the very least receive benefits and quite possibly child support. What purpose then does marriage have for her, too? Marriage no longer acts as the gate keeper to women’s sexual favours. It is no longer needed as a way of guaranteeing that a woman won’t be left destitute if she’s pregnant. It is a promise which if made, can easily be broken by either party. Apart from tradition, what is it for at all?

This is the issue that we ought to be facing in the context of a world where there is no prohibition on sex, when men and women can sleep with who they please, when they please. Why do we still maintain institutions like marriage when we have already given up the morality that underpins the idea? When I talk to people about marriage, they frequently do not even think of it as much of a promise. They are as it were crossing their fingers when they marry, for they reflect, if it doesn’t work out, I can always get a divorce. Nothing bad will happen. But to marry in this way is not to marry at all. To make a promise while thinking to yourself it will be easy to break it, is a form of self-deception. Only someone who marries while thinking I will never break this promise can be said to actually be married. The others are merely going through a complicated ritual for no purpose.

Marriage today has become about white dresses and a huge party costing thousands of pounds which is planned years in advance. Meanwhile, the couple live together “as man and wife”. Why spend all that money? What do you obtain that you don’t already have? No-one is preventing you making an eternal promise to your partner. But why turn it into a legal contract?

The reason we developed the whole idea of marriage in the first place was to protect women from being deserted by those who made them pregnant. All of this depended on a context of morality shared by everyone. We have thrown out the morality, but retained this thing called ‘marriage’, but we no longer believe the words that are said at the ceremony. It’s all very romantic, no doubt, to listen to the marriage service, but who actually believes these words? In that case, it would be more honest to simply dispense with marriage.

The real inequality is this. It is between the married and the unmarried. Why should those who have not taken part in this elaborate ritual be discriminated against? Rather, let us say that all those who love are before the law “married” and have the same rights as everyone else. We are, moreover, tasked to love all our neighbours and, indeed, all our enemies. So let us be married to everyone. Above all, let us abolish this expensive day, for in reality we have already abolished it. The logic of the past sixty years is not that marriage should be available for everyone, it is that marriage no longer has a purpose and should be abolished. Promise eternal devotion to whom you please, but don’t let’s kid ourselves that this ceremony brings about something that can justly be called  ‘marriage’. That is something we actually abolished rather a long time ago. All we have left is a charade. We play at something that people in the distant past understood, but it is forever lost to us because we don’t even share the same morality as they did. We lost it somewhere about the same time as we lost love and romance. 

If you like my writing, you can find my books Scarlet on the Horizon, An Indyref Romance and Lily of St Leonards on Amazon. Please follow the links on the side. Thanks. I appreciate your support.

If God does not exist everything, is permitted

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov’s philosophical and theological ideas are complex and develop in the course of the novel. However, near the beginning of the novel, in Book 2 Chapter 6, an idea is attributed to him by a character named Miusov who reports that at a recent meeting Ivan began by saying that if love has existed between people, it is only because they have believed in immortality. Moreover, without the belief in immortality, there would be no morality and everything would be permitted. If someone ceases to believe in God, then logically he should be an egoist and even become an evil doer. Ivan is asked by the Elder Zosima if this is his view and he says: “Yes, it was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality.” (p. 70) The Elder seems to commiserate with Ivan, accepting that, indeed, he neither believes in God, nor in immortality.

There is no need to go into the ins and outs of Ivan’s theology, nor be overly concerned about who said what and when in the novel. The idea that is being put forward is that morality and love of other human beings in some way depend on immortality with the implication that immortality depends on God. The inference is that God and immortality are really one and the same belief or at least interconnected. To cease to believe in the one is to cease to believe in the other. But why should this be so? It is worth investigating in what way morality is dependent on belief in God or, perhaps, more accurately in the existence of God. 

Let’s look at the situation from the point of view of someone contemplating doing wrong. If by wrong we mean something like theft or murder, why do I not do these things? One reason is that there are laws and the police, and I realise that if I commit a crime, there is a reasonable chance that I will be caught and punished. I therefore decide out of self-interest not to steal from a shop or to commit murder, because I don’t want to end up in prison or have some other punishment given to me.

The problem with this is that if everyone thought in this way, law would rapidly collapse. The population of a country massively outnumbers the police. If everyone sat waiting for their chance to break the law, when they thought there was a chance of getting away with it, how could the police catch all of them? The law works only insofar as a minority of people are criminally minded. The majority do not break the law because they are scared of the police or punishment, but because they think breaking the law is wrong. But from where do we get this sense of wrong? From where do we get the concept of something being morally wrong?

Furthermore, what of things which most of us consider to be wrong, which are not illegal? Why should couples remain faithful to each other, why should we not tell lies? Is it that we fear that if we are unfaithful, perhaps, our marriage will break up, or if we tell lies, then no one will trust us further? But what if we know at this moment that we can tell a lie and get away with it? What if we are in another country when we have the chance to be unfaithful? And yet we might choose to remain moral. Why do people act sometimes in a way that entails self-sacrifice, why, indeed, are people kind and altruistic?

It’s worth focussing on how we actually learn morality. We learn morality normally from a mother who watches. From an early age, she sees me do something and says don’t do that. If I continue to do the thing which is wrong, she may punish me. Let’s say I steal sweets from the sweet jar. The first time, she says ‘don’t steal sweets, it’s wrong.’ And so I learn not to steal sweets while she is looking. I may think that I can steal sweets when she is not looking and so when she is in another room I creep up to the jar and steal a sweet. But mother is cleverer than me, she has counted the sweets. I’m asked did you steal a sweet? I say ‘no’. She knows better. She counts out the sweets, one is missing. I’m punished, moreover, she shows disapproval and I want that approval. I feel shame. In time I don’t steal from the sweet jar even when I know that I could get away with it. This feeling of guilt is developed in a myriad of ways such that eventually about a whole mass of matters I have an internalised sense of guilt when I contemplate doing wrong. This is what we call conscience. It is based on the idea of mother somehow overseeing what I do, even when she is not there.

But when I grow up and can reason about these things, why do I not realise that I can throw off this conscience? Mother is now far away. I know that she will not discover if I take from the sweet jar. Who else can be overseeing me? The police observe. And so I should be careful not to be caught. But this is simply a matter of self-interest and we are back to the idea of morality being simply a matter of law.  What about God? Can He take the role of the mother watching to see if I steal from the sweet jar? Perhaps. But if I begin to study philosophy, I quickly realise that this whole matter of God’s existence is rather uncertain. Descartes is not even certain of the existence of the outside world. Perhaps, all my perceptions are deceptions.  Any course of philosophy seems to see scepticism win out. First year philosophy classes are dominated by questions like “How do I know the sun will rise tomorrow?” But if I don’t even know this, how can the fact that a God who might exist and might be observing me steal from the sweet jar motivate my behaviour? Is God, indeed, not just an extension of the observing mother, who created my conscience in the first place?

Moreover, I quickly realise when studying philosophy that there are lots of systems of morality that do not depend on God. Each major philosopher seems to have such a system. One says that I should do that which leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Another thinks that I should imagine what would happen if everyone followed a course of action and act accordingly. There are any number of such systems and they don’t all mention God. But why should I follow such a system? Who is to make me? Perhaps, it’s in my self-interest to do so. But that is not morality. That is just another form of egoism. Perhaps, I realise that it’s my duty to follow a particular philosopher’s system of morality. But why should I follow my duty? Perhaps, I realise that rationality calls for me to follow a particular morality. But then why be rational? Let me be irrational just so long as I get what I want.

This is our problem. Either I follow the system of morality out of self-interest in which case it is really the same as law (just a matter of pragmatism and self-interest), or I follow the system out of duty. But then I’m already moral. But whence this morality as it cannot be coming from the system? There is obviously circularity here.

The problem of morality goes far back. It is stated as well as anywhere in Plato’s Republic with the story of the ring of Gyges. If I had the ring of Gyges which makes me invisible, such that I could get away with any crime, would I refrain from doing so? Only if I would refrain from doing wrong, even if I could get away with it, can I be said to be truly moral. 

The idea of the watcher is present here also. If no one can watch, because I am invisible, would I steal from the sweet jar? I don’t steal from the sweet jar, even when mother is not around, because she has shown that sometimes she knows better than me. Eventually, I internalise this into conscience and I don’t steal even when I know I would get away with it, because I have this thing called conscience taught by my mother. But what if I realise that I’m being a mug, that this conscience thing is just a fraud? Why then not put on the ring of Gyges and do what I wish so long as I can get away with it?

Of course, here God can play a role. Even if someone wears the ring of Gyges and can do what he likes on Earth, God observes him. The idea of God and with it the idea of immortality is the idea that even if you get away with immorality on Earth, even if you are a criminal who is never caught by the law, still God watches. God is the ultimate mother and the fundament which underpins conscience. God’s justice, the fact that He can reward or punish can be seen as a reason to be moral, for it may seem to solve the problem of the ring of Gyges. Even if I am to get away with evil here and now, it may not be rational to do so if I am to be punished later in eternity. God is like a universal police force. The lawbreaker may not be sent to prison on Earth, but there is the equivalent of prison after death. Is this the reason that Ivan thinks that if there is no immortality, then everything is permitted?

The observant mother is now in the transcendent sphere and able to judge according to how I lived my life. There is no chance that I can escape detection. All my sins will be found out. But this is our problem. If I do good in order to gain salvation or to avoid hell, then this is really no different from law. It is in my self interest in the long run to do good. Out of egoism and selfishness, it would be rational for me to choose to do good in order to obtain a reward and to avoid punishment. But this is no more morality than the person who is law abiding solely because he fears the police. The police have simply been transferred to a transcendent realm with powers to detect every crime, even those committed with the ring of Gyges.

Perhaps, the solution is in this way. The idea that I can treat God as a policeman who rewards and punishes like the police and the courts is to misunderstand the nature of God. Salvation both does and does not depend on what I do, how I live my life. My actions are both necessary and unnecessary. Salvation is by faith alone and by good works. In Kierkegaardian terms, salvation is a matter of both of what he calls “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness B”, inwardness and externality, relation to self and relation to other, how I act and how I believe. In the Reformation debate between Protestantism and Catholicism we must hold together both sides of the argument even though they contradict each other, we must have both Luther and the Pope, ‘works righteousness’ and ‘faith alone.’  

What this means can be explained in the following way. I must believe that how I live is decisive for my salvation. This is Kierkegaard’s religiousness B and decisive Christianity. Therefore, I must want to witness to the truth and imitate the life of Christ as far as is possible. The lesson that Kierkegaard has to teach us, indeed, is that my faith is my action. This is the importance of the Epistle of James in his work. What is it to suppose that someone has faith? It is to see that he acts in certain ways. This was the lesson from Wittgenstein. How can I know if I can whistle a tune? I must whistle it. How can I know if I have faith? I must act according to it. There is no faith without action. Once I understand that faith is action, then there can be no question of faith without it. But and here is the crucial point. Although I believe that how I live is decisive for my salvation, I cannot bargain. God’s choice is free and from the point of view of eternity already made.

Thus I cannot act in order to obtain a reward and to avoid a punishment. I recognise from my faith the need to act as a Christian or try to act as a Christian. I also recognise that these actions are crucial. Following Kierkegaard again, only through relating to other people, through living the Christian life, do I create the self that God can save. But I must trust in God. I realise, when faced with God, that nothing I could do would be enough. Therefore, I am absolutely dependent on his love and grace for my salvation.

This is not something that can be understood, for it depends on a Kierkegaardian paradox. Christian morality is the paradoxical unity of salvation by faith alone and salvation by means of good works. This is a genuine contradiction, and something that we cannot understand. A similar contradiction exists in the two ideas that salvation is a matter of predestination and that how I live is decisive for whether or not I obtain salvation. This is to look at the matters from the point of view of eternity and from the point of view of temporality. The combination of the positions is the truth. Just as Christ was the Eternal in time. So my salvation is the eternal in time. It is an absolute paradox and a matter for faith, not for reason. It is for this reason that the Bible at times seems contradictory on this matter. The thief on the cross will be with Jesus today in paradise, but salvation is a matter of waiting until the Day of Judgement. But this, too, is just the paradoxical combination of the eternal point of view with the temporal point of view. We cannot expect to fully understand these matters. Here indeed is something that cannot be fully expressed, something that defeats language and thought.  

Thus I believe both that my good works are decisive for my salvation, that how I live my life is crucial and that nothing I do could ever be good enough. I am saved from egoism by my realisation that God’s choice is free and that I am absolutely dependent on his love and grace. Thus I am not acting in order to gain salvation, for there can be no bargaining with God. Faith is action. It can even be said that I am saved by faith alone. For when I understand that faith is not, or not merely a matter of inwardness, I realise that faith is simply what I do.

If faith is only inwardness, it is only the relationship to the eternal. In Kierkegaardian terms this is paganism, the relationship merely to God. The incarnation brings the eternal into time and enables us to relate externally. The only way to relate to Christ as a Christian is to love Christ and to try to live as He did. This means action. Once I understand this, then action inevitably follows.

It is the free choice of God that makes Christian morality and means that it is neither a matter of law, nor a matter of egoism. God’s free choice means that Christianity can never be a matter of self-interest. I have no guarantee, no matter how saintly I live my life. Thus we have the Bible story of the workers who turn up late getting just the same as those who came early (Matthew 20: 1-16). I cannot gain God’s perspective. But I know that God is love and therefore I have hope.

But what I realise also is that finally my only way of relating to God is through Christ. When I try to relate to the eternal, the infinite, the omniscient and omnipotent, then I deal with what is forever distant and remote from my life. I have no way really of relating. I can try to relate inwardly and I can have a sense of this faith, but it is not concrete. It's like the idea that I can whistle the tune. Until I actually do whistle it, there is no whistling. Likewise with faith, it comes into existence through my actions. But when I begin relating to Christ, through imitation, witnessing. I relate to something, someone concrete. I can follow his lead. And through the fact that Christ is paradoxically both God and man, I in this way relate to God.

In Kierkegaardian terms it is the paradoxical combination of religiousness A (relating to God, through inwardness), (the eternal), (relation to self), (Protestantism, salvation by faith alone, for it has already from the point of view of eternity been determined), and religiousness B (Relation to Christ), (the temporal), (relation to another), (Catholicism, the idea that my salvation is not yet determined and depends on how I live my life). It is this combination that creates morality.

It is this combination also that creates the self that can be saved. This shows, indeed, that God is the fundament of morality. If God does not exist, then ultimately everything is permitted. It is for this reason that Ivan is to be pitied. Through his lack of faith he puts himself in a position, which makes it impossible for God to save him, for he has no self to save. Following Grushenka’s story in the Brothers Karamazov (Book 7 Ch. 3), God needs at least one onion in order to grab the self.

For Ivan, God is dead and everything is permitted. The unbeliever’s unbelief is for him the truth, for he has put himself in a position where God cannot help him. This is his eternal punishment. His eternal punishment is not that God judges him and condemns him, but that God cannot even judge him, cannot even notice him. His hell is that his atheism turns out, for him to be quite accurate. 

Brothers Karamazov, Translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1992

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