From the carte de jour that is my reading list, I recently selected Jim Garrison's The Darkness of God - Theology after Hiroshima (SCM Press, 1982). This book was written at the height of the Cold War stand-off when nuclear annihilation loomed over the imagination of everyday citizens. It is an attempt to reconcile the mysterious workings of God in the new age of Plutonium, the diabolical element that can unleash all the furies of hell on this earth by the hand of man (it is no accident this element was officially named after the ancient Greek God of hell).
Garrison's description of Plutonium is spine-chilling. A single particle of Plutonium-239, weighing less than one millionth of a gram is 20,000 times deadlier than a pellet of potassium cyanide one of the most potent carcinogens known. He doesn't specify how much a pellet weighs, but a browse of the world wide web (not available to Garrison in the dark ages of the early 1980s) revealed the oral lethal dose of cyanide for an average size man is 0.2 grams (see http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_can_potassium_cyanide_kill_you for other tips on killing yourself most effectively)
Potassium Cyanide, which gained its notoriety from the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, was still used for capital punishment in Arizona as late as 1999. But potassium cyanide, and its associations with Nazi Germany, seems almost innocuous compared to the properties of plutonium-239, and its use in the atomic bomb. To describe the power of Pluto, the god of hell, Garrison quotes a passage from Frank Chinnock -Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb -
"For some 1,000 yards, or three-fifths of a mile, in all directions from the epicentre...it was as if a malevolent god has suddenly focused a gigantic blowtorch on a small section of our planet. Within that perimeter, nearly all unprotected living organisms - birds, insects, horses, cats, chickens - perished instantly. Flowers, trees, grass, plants, all shrivelled and died. Wood burst into flames. Metal beams and galvanized iron roofs began to bubble, and the soft gooey masses twisted into grotesque shapes. Stones were pulverized, and for a second every last bit of air was burned away. The people exposed within that doomed section neither knew nor felt anything, and their blackend unrecognisable forms dropped silently where they stood." (1982, p67)
Reading his chapter on the historical events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his analysis of the modern Plutonium culture is a deeply troubling experience. There is no doubt for Garrison that the so-called peaceful development of nuclear reactors is a misnomer - "Nuclear reactors are merely the extension of the nuclear weapons programme into the civil sector" (1982, p77). Garrison spends a chapter citing evidence from numerous studies on biological effects of low levels of radiation, and explaining the grim reality of disposing of radioactive waste and decommisioning nuclear reactors. We are children playing with dynamite. Nuclear technology and its relationship with the technotronic society has resulted in a "crisis of of sanity".
"We are living in a world gripped by a plutonium culture polluting the planet with radioactive wastes; by a technotronic society which dehumanizes our dignity by forcing us to interlock with technologies over which we have less and less control; by a permanent war economy that employs 40% of the world's scientists and consumes vast amounts of material and human resources; and by the cries of those who are poor, who are hungry, who are illiterate, and who are diseased. The tragedy is that this is not a world that has been forced on us; it is a world we have built up of our own accord" (1982, p90)
With Hiroshima, says Garrison, the apocalyptic power of God has fallen in the hands of men. More than that, men have grasped this power and have become willing agents for the destruction of the world and the end of human history. We find ourselves in a unique position, capable of destroying the source of life that sustains us; capable of undoing thousands of millions of years of evolution. We have taken upon ourselves the determination of apocalyptic judgment.
Most of this book is an explicitly theological argument, a form of theodicy that seeks to justify the nature of God following the magnitude of suffering experienced from the atomic bomb. Garrison argues God is at work even in the atom bomb, calling us to a transformation of consciousness and understanding. Hiroshima can be a saving event in history, but we must recognise ourselves as partners in this. God is still working in the world, even if modern man has become the agent of the apocalypse.
In a chapter called The Confessional Heritage: Apocalyptic and the Wrath of God, Garrison enters a hermeneutic engagment with the historical event of Hiroshima, now understood as a "mighty act of God", or "the wrath of God". The apocalypts (from the narrative of both the Deutero-Isaiah prophecies and Revelations) asserted God do be in control of history with all things under his dominion, despite the overwhelming presence of evil in the world, an evil that is the result of the human heart and the cosmic battle between demonic and angelic forces. The saving wrath of God that ushers in a new age functions as an integral part of the personhood of God, and similar to the forces of evil in its appearance, disregards conventional morality to affect both the good and evil alike. Despite this experience of God’s wrath, the apocalypts believed in its functional role in an over-all plan of election. God could use the left hand of darkness and the right of light to integrate all aspects of life into an organic whole which demonstrated the final purpose in divine love.
The left hand of God, the hand of darkness, gives Garrison's book its title. It is an important image, both theologically and philosophically, as it bears on both the nature of God and that of good and evil.
For Garrison, the nuclear annihilation that looms over us has declared the god of theism is dead, and with it the classic notions of evil (Summum Bonum - that God is the highest good, and privatio boni, that evil is the privation of good). But a new ontology, that of process panentheism, can be salvaged form the rubble to help us understand the apocalyptic power we now possess and enables us to become co-creators in history. Utilising the process philosophy of Whitehead and Hartshorne's dipolar theory of the godhead, this new ontology understands God as a dual transcendence, recognises God and the world as integral to one another, sees God and humanity as joined in a co-creative relationship that impinges upon and changes both, and believes God and humanity possess both light and dark dimensions.
The classic doctrines of evil are deficient in their refusal to acknowledge the genuine reality of evil, and both deny the shadow dimension to God.
"My use of the term 'evil' is based on the affirmation that evil is objectively and intrinsically real. Taking seriously the profound and startling assertion of Isaiah 45.7 that God creates evil, as a strand of thought that runs through scripture but is not easily assimilated into traditional theological concepts, I hold that evil, like good, comes from God and therefore is an objectively real phenomenon."
This evil has three strands - divine evil, the moral evil of human sin and the creative intention of God that are inextricably interwoves into a single whole. Wisdom, through the Holy Spirit, teaches us the painful process of discerning between these strands. The painful process of discerning is explored by Garrison through Jungian depth psychology, particularly the process of Individuation, through which the co-creation of God and humanity can be actualized. It is an engagement between consciousness and unconscious where both poles must be maintained, so that consciousness will not become one-sided.
Translating the process of Individuation into the development of historical Christianity, we can see that in the person of Christ, God’s light side became incarnate and traditional Christianity responded by focussing on God’s goodness with the doctrines of the Summum Bonum and the privatio boni. God’s wrath, foreshadowed in Revelations, must now be integrated into the human psyche to return a balance to the one-sided polarity of traditional Christianity. We must integrate the shadow side, and this can only be done with the help of the Holy Spirit, the continuing indwelling of God which reveals to us the other side of God - the Antichrist.
This is how Garrison somewhat startlingly integrates the historic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a theodicy, or a justification of God. Between discussions of Whitehead, process panentheism, Jungian depth psychology, the problem of God in the modern age, and deficiencies in classical notions of evil, Garrison concludes that when God "slipped us the atom bomb", the Holy Spirit was at work. The apocalyptic darkness of God has been actualized in Hiroshima.
“In co-creation, God joins with the human and humanity joins with the divine in the exercise of power, thus blurring the normal distinctions between sacred and profane, infinite and finite. It is a dynamic that transforms, links and empowers both, intermingling God and humanity together for a brief moment in time…Christ came from above, issuing forth from the Godhead; Antichrist comes from the bowels of the bottomless pit, spewing plutonium the world over.” (1982, p212)
And so.... this.....
this...
this...
and this...
is our "co-creation with God"?
To be fair, Garrison is not offering an explanation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather looks for a way to integrate these horrific events into a modern theology that deals adequately with the new reality of the nuclear age. But to suggest a nuclear holocaust may be the necessary shadow of God, the Antichrist revealing itself in the world seems a fantastic leap that negates the sheer madness of the atomic bomb. I am not surprised at his conclusion, which is somehow a blending of Jungian depth pscychology with theology to create a cosmic map of the human psyche and experience. But I cannot reconcile myself to his idea that an apocalypse by the hands of men can somehow become an act of co-creation with the divine. How does this hold those accountable who dream up such weaponry and put it to use? And on a wider scale, how do we deal with other acts of injustice or suffering? If Garrison's "evil" has three strands tightly bound, how do we make judgments over which evil is the result of human immorality, and which is God's "creative intention"? Surely the test of a theodicy is how it gives words to the experiences of the ones whose suffering has rendered speechless. While much of the book is sensetive and puts suffering in the centre, I'm not sure his final rationalization does justice to the historical events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But how do we make sense of of the sufferings of the 20th, this most murderous century? By rationalizing suffering, do we give it "meaning" that restores the humanity of victims, or do we negate the experiences of the victim, for whom suffering constitutes a complete loss of meaning, a loss which cannot be simply glued back together? I don't know. But I do suspect that those who have experienced the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who have directly encountered the god of hell, may speak more truthfully than the armchair philosopher or theologian. Speak truthfully without words.
http://ocw.unam.na/OCWExternal/Akamai/21f/21f.027/groundzero1945/gz_essay01.html
The last picture above was found among survivor's paintings a the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, without any explanation. It is an amateur painting of the floating lanterns, with Hiroshima's famous, unreconstructed city-hall dome visible against the evening sky. The brief caption that came with this read "The lanterns floated and prayers lifted up for the peaceful repose of the A-bomb dead and for peace." The artist was a young woman born 11 years after the end of the war. She was 18 when, in 1974, she responded to the invitation to draw personal memories of the bomb.
