St Thrse & Atheism

 

Text published as booklet by Carmelite Community, Dublin, in 1998

 

St. Thrse and Todays Crisis of Faith

 

Either the Little Flower is looked upon (perhaps because of her nickname) with sentimentality, or, as one gets to know her better, with dread. On that frail battleground of her flesh were fought the wars of today. . . She was tempted against faith and said that for the last years of her life she forced herself to believe with her indomitable will, while a mocking voice cried in her ears that there was neither heaven nor hell, and she was flinging away her life for nothing. - Dorothy Day (1949).

Having known the painful ordeal of religious doubt and even the night of faith, Thrse united herself in mysterious solidarity with non-believers. Convinced that all human beings have the right to know themselves loved by God, she wanted to reach them all. - Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Secretary of State (1991). 

 

These two quotations, with nearly half a century between them, introduce us to the extraordinary last chapter of the life of St Thrse of Lisieux, not only the hidden crisis of her own sense of faith but her embracing of this darkness as part of a mission to the atheists of her time. My focus here is only partly on that moment of her unique struggle; the aim is also to reflect on its relevance for the forms of non-belief typical now, a century and more later.

 To begin with, let us recall the outline of that ordeal of her final eighteen months - from Easter 1896 to her death. It is a question of paraphrasing this story, as revealed in her own words in the so-called C text, addressed to Mother Mary Gonzaga. The crucial passages of this diary were composed - at the command of the Prioress - in June 1897 and hence at a time of weakness and pain, when she found even the physical act of writing difficult. There she recounts the episode of vomiting blood on two nights running during the sacred triduum of 1896, something leaves Thrse bathed with joy at the thought of dying and of the arrival of the Spouse. But this fervour and great consolation are more the end than the beginning of a chapter. Paradoxically in the days of Easter this expansion of heart at the prospect of heaven collapses into thick darknesses, struggle and torment, a trial or ordeal [Ҏpreuve is her constantly repeated French term for it] that lasted, possibly with varying  intensity for her remaining year and a half of life.

At table with unbelievers

The hinge of this surprising loss of felt joy and of her entry into this dark tunnel was an insight about unbelievers. Previously she had pondered the question of people who declared themselves atheists, but possibly she had never believed in the reality of their unbelief. Their words surely did not represent a serious thought or choice, she felt. But now Jesus made me feel that there are really souls without faith; this powerful intuition becomes a costly grace, a purifying darkness, and ultimately a new mission field of fellowship solidarity for Thrse. She accepts this darkness in order to beg pardon for unbelievers and she declares, famously, her willingness to sit as long as God wills at this table with unbelievers, sharing the bread of pain and the table full of bitterness where these poor sinners eat. Her insight into the lived actuality of atheism leads her immediately to see unbelievers as her brothers, to an identification with them in a void of feeling which she embraces in a missionary spirit on their behalf. Thus she enters her long months of temptations against faith (her own expression used once only in the C text).

            In an extraordinary comment she tells Mother Gonzaga that the fairy tale chapter of her life had ended. Ever since childhood, she says, she had longed for heaven by contrast with the sadness of earth, but now all has disappeared, all sense of a happy homeland with God, and apologizing to her prioress for seeming to approach blasphemy, she sets down the voices that now mock her previous serenity of faith: You dream of light, of a country of sweet perfumes . . you think you will one day leave behind the surrounding fog . . . Go ahead, rejoice in a death that will give you .. only a darker night, the night of nothingness (la nuit du nant).

            The frightening clarity of this account is accompanied by an equally striking declaration of strength in trial. Jesus knows, she tells her surely alarmed superioress, that in the absence of any joy of faith, I at least try to do the works of faith: I think I have made more acts of faith in this year than in all my life. With almost humorous wisdom he adds that she does not dare her enemy to a duel; instead she turns and runs towards Jesus, to ask him to open eternity to the poor unbelievers (pauvres incrdules). In another moment, she compares herself to the great saints who did great things, even mad things for God: ma folie moi, cest esprer: my madness is to hope.

Lucidity in the Dark

Bishop Guy Gaucher (of Lisieux) has summarized her strategy of response to this trial in three words: silence, struggle, acceptance. In similar fashion Jean-Francois Six also picked out three characteristics: deep peace; intense lucidity; silent suffering. Lucidity is a note that sounds strongly in the B manuscript of her last private retreat, of autumn 1896. Addressing the Lord, she writes: Tu le sait, je cherche la verit - you know it, I seek the truth. Father Madelaine, Prior of Mondaye, gave witness in 1910 to the peace and even good humour that reigned in the upper part of her soul in spite of all the anguish deeper down. He was the director of that last retreat of hers and advised her to write out and carry the creed on her heart. She did so, as is well known, having written it in her blood. 

            But the surprising courage of Thrse goes further than these characteristics of honesty and silence. She was silent about this ordeal but far from silent in her more public expressions during these months. In the whole period between her entry into darkness at Easter 1896 and her death, she produced at least 26 poems and two little dramas or recreations - all of them full of expressions of consolation and trust. With her alert intelligence, she realizes that Mother Gonzaga might well ask herself how this effusive and pious poetry is consistent with the hidden reality of her ordeal of faith. She explains that it is all part of her strategy of resistance to the darkness within. This artistic creativity was her deliberate attempt at expressing her will-to-believe, singing what she so much wants to believe (je chante simplement ce que JE VEUX CROIRE). Thus her writing of poetry was intended as a wall while she herself felt nothing of joy, except some flashes of light that only served to deepen the darkness when they quickly faded.

            By contrast with the poetry, the prose style of the C narrative is without any touch of exaggeration. Perhaps because her physical energy was in such short supply as she wrote, its mode of expression is crisp, unelaborate, and blunt, - a narrative with only brief flashes of vivid detail. However the key pages on her darkness of faith end with a certain confident realism and self-knowledge: the Lord sent me this trial when I had to strength to bear it, earlier it would have plunged me into discouragement.

Discerning the Significance

            Let us draw some initial strands together. This suffering of Thrse was provoked by a realization that refusal of God is a lived reality among her contemporaries and by an immediate generous acceptance of this darkness as companionship with unbelievers.

In this - for her- new absence of joy, there is immediately a solidarity with the agents or victims of atheism (a distinction she does not make) and yet resistance to any weakening of her own lived faith. Resistance takes the form of ferocious trusting,  a petition to Jesus for those who live in such darkness always, and a conscious use of imagination to resist the temptations against faith. If Ҏpreuve, as already mentioned, is one of her favourite words (63 times in the manuscripts), audace is another, as Balthasar pointed out. She interprets her trial as an invitation to deeper daring in dark trust. It is not for nothing that she enjoyed acting the part of St Joan of Arc in one of the convent dramas, and we have some striking photographs to prove it. Nevertheless last months see her not as Joan the victorious, rather as Joan in the days of prison and confusion of heart. Her daring is linked to littleness: Jesus will have to love through her in this numb darkness; she can do nothing of herself. Your will is to love in me [Votre volont est daimer en moi] is her translation of the new commandment for her situation. As she expressed it in the retreat notebook, the nothingness thus becomes fire.

            This courage of hers is reminiscent in ways of the famous moment of her Christmas conversion a decade earlier -  when she emerged from an excessive sensitivity that she had suffered from as a small child and entered into a new ownership of her life. One might even say that she left behind the childish to begin her journey towards a truly childlike maturity. And it is in the same spirit of the little way of hidden trusting that she confronts the final pruning of her spirit - the fog of faith where only love can find its way.

Her context of faith and unbelief

            What can be said about the outer context of faith struggles during her life-time? The religious climate of the Martin family was one of intense piety, which some commentators judge to have been ghetto-like and puritan in its interpretation of the world. It was a time when Catholics in France found themselves embattled against powerful forces of lay or atheistic thought, and when they viewed this scene in a dualistic fashion of black and white. Indeed it is one of the minor miracles in the life of Thrse that - although so young - she soared above all this quasi-neurotic narrowness of her upbringing (and indeed of her sisters and her Sisters). Her extraordinary response to the world of unbelief is only one powerful example of this largeness of vision that was hers and it seems to have been more a matter of spiritual intuition than an intellectually worked-out insight.

In fact her moment of history coincided with the climax of a certain kind of vehement atheism - Nietzsche or Marx or Freud, as inheritors of Feuerbach. About these she probably knew nothing but through them atheism was changing its tone dramatically - as well be seen. At one point in her account of her long battle with darkness she mentions that her head was filled with the worst thoughts of  the materialists. Hence she may have been more explicitly aware of this older form of rejection of faith, which was an Enlightenment inheritance, a cultural product of the scientific revolution and of a Church poorly prepared to rethink its theology. This intellectual stance went hand in hand with the new politics of revolution, which at least in Europe saw the Church as allied with the oppressive monarchies of the past.

By the time of Thrses childhood, however, a new note was sounding in intellectual quarters: God was a source of human alienation, deception, and irresponsibility. What Henri de Lubac later called the drama of atheistic humanism was at its height. God was now being rejected not just as incredible to the scientific world-view but as the dangerous enemy of human freedom, as an illusion that humanity must outgrow in order to reach its true dignity. The details of this school of suspicion would be utterly unknown to Thrse but her own extraordinary inner conflict seems to have put her into imaginative contact with this night battle of her culture.

Just as its vehement refusal of God was more hate-filled than than the intellectual doubts of the materialists, so too Thrse seems to have understood in her subterranean way that the deepest unbelief involved a bitter refusal of any infinite love. Without any of the scaffolding of Karl Rahner on a non-innocent atheism of fundamental sin, she became aware of the frightening possibility of a total and conscious refusal of Gods love. In its most destructive form, this is not an intellectual refusal of the God of the philosophers but an existential negation of love. In her own way Thrse experienced something of the famous The horror, the horror of Conrads The Heart of Darkness - a story from exactly the same decade. The difference was that she confronted this abyss in a spirit of companionship with those in the darkness and with a vehement trust that love could survive this eclipse of faith.

Her relevance for todays cultural desolation

A century later, as we draw to an end of this millennium, unbelief has again changed its tone drastically. We seem to be leaving behind the angry refusals of modernity and entering a new phase provisionally labelled post-modern. It is a time of fragmentation, of rootlessness and yet of new openness and spiritual searching. The description that God is missing but not missed has become a popular summary of the absence of faith most typical of our culture. Its mood is not dramatic but rather disappointed and distant, and for many people the distance is mainly from the inherited forms of church religion and from the ordinary expressions of the Christ-story.

In such a situation of cultural incredibility for the forms of faith, families suffer guilt and confusion. Where the Martin family could create for their children an oasis of Catholic piety within a world that often seemed anti-Church, todays families are inevitably exposed to an avalanche of complexity. Some parents react in quasi-fundamentalist ways, seeking to defend and preserve the old languages. Others share the same pain and anxiety about passing on the faith but know that the old ways are gone for good. Others again have stopped worrying and bought into the new secular life-styles.

If I may be allowed  to summarize an argument I have expanded on elsewhere, it might be said that todays main form of unbelief has its roots in cultural desolation. In my book Clashing Symbols (chapter 10) I described how the pressures of the dominant culture can leave many people blocked in a cultural desolation on the level of disposition or readiness for faith. It is not a question of rejecting faith but rather of being out of reach. Why? Largely because the way of life can kidnaps the imagination in trivial ways and leaves us unfree for Revelation, or more precisely for the hearing from which faith comes (cf. Romans 10:17). If so, the blockages are on this pre-religious level of culturally-induced deafness. When such desolation reigns, people can live with apathy, in the literal sense of being separated and shielded from their own pain - the void of surface existing. To respond to such spiritual numbness calls above all for a retrieval of hunger and depth in people. Indeed it is because of this unreality of God and of religion for many people in the new culture that the Pope so often insists on a new evangelization and has sought to read the spiritual searching of our time in terms of a new Areopagus - (like St Paul in Acts 17).

In the light of her struggles and spirituality the question of cultural desolation could be re-expressed in different terms: if it is possible for a whole way of life to become deaf to the call of Love, then hearts have to reached in fresh ways. It is not a crisis of the content of faith but of its embodiment. Can Thrse be a guide towards a new imagination of faith? Towards a liberation from our tiredness and a rediscovery of the freshness of the Gospel? In this moment of cultural desolation and the resulting distance from the fountains of faith what might be the role and relevance of Thrse?

At her simplest she offers our world the shock and the beauty of the essentials of faith, not mainly the essentials of creed but the basics of faith as lived. In this sense her unique witness could be a source of healing for the desolations we suffer. Without going into detail, I want to list three areas of potential relevance for today that this Saint incarnates.

1). If, as Cardinal Newman discerned more than a century ago, the battleground for faith is disposition rather than doctrine, a secret of Thrse was to protect and deepen her fundamental disposition of littleness and of trust; this she did all the more carefully when she entered  her last period of being plagued by dark thoughts and the suspense of her previous consoled sense of God. Besides, faith is not culturally possible today without a certain conversion of disposition, an awakening to the calls of love as involving Christs passion.

2). Our contemporary context of so-called postmodernity is sensitive in new ways to the contemplative and the aesthetic dimensions of searching for meaning.  Even todays unbelievers seem to listen to witness that speaks a language of depth, that does justice to the contemplative dimension of experience rather than the doctrinal level of interpretation of faith. It is striking that Thrse deliberately used the medium of poetry to counter the potential damage of her darkness. Once again one thinks of how Newman highlighted the crucial role of imagination as part of a spiritual preambles of faith. In contemporary theology there has been a remarkable renewal of interest in the aesthetic - ranging from Hans Urs von Balthasar to Pierangelo Sequeri.

3). Equally characteristic of the postmodern sensibility is a suspicion of excessive clarities and certainties of a rational kind and a preference for humbler claims and even for weak thought. Not only does Thrses little way seems strangely in tune with this tone of our time, but her extraordinary witness to a God of tenderness is attractive for this sensibility that elevates human holism and the feminine. There is an argument to be made that she is strangely postmodern in her response to her encounter with unbelief: she cultivated a mature feminine trust in her own deepest experiences of tenderness as capable of overcoming the emptiness on the level of mind or meaning. She would live - and love - what she could no longer think.

A witness to merciful love - even for unbelievers

This last point concerning tenderness seems central and worth expanding by way of conclusion. Thrse remains an extraordinary incarnation of the saying of Pole Paul VI that this generation is more impressed by witnesses than by teachers, or by teachers of faith who are transparent witnesses. Her story has intrigued many a searcher or unbeliever, not because of any arguments (of which she has few or none) but rather because of the power of her love, the simplicity of her way, the hidden heroism of her wisdom in pain. But here she is more than silent witness: she is eloquent and constantly insistent on one aspect of God constantly in need of freshness - God as merciful intimacy. This was concretized in her solemn offering of Trinity Sunday 1895 to merciful Love. And there is a deep if non-explicit link between her 1895 grace of offering and her 1896 darker grace of solidarity: it is the pain of realizing that it is possible to reject the God of tenderness, not just some distorted image of God or some badly embodied reaction against religion. If real refusal in full liberty is possible and indeed actual, then this abyss of sinful self-destructiveness must be the field of her missionary and contemplative dedication as colleague of the mercy of God. 

 This image is far from the God of explanation, of old deism, that still lurks in some forms of unbelief. Her God of merciful tenderness could also help to heal the unreality of the unbelief of apathy: this is a God who suffers when love is blocked, refused, forgotten, and hence a God who seeks to pierce the lonely shields of indifference with the amazement of relationship in love. Only love lived in simple constancy, in transparent authenticity, in undramatic ordinariness, can mirror the presence of Jesus and thus be the crucial foundation of any new evangelization for unbelievers now.

Thinking back on her whole story one of the most remarkable features of this saint is how - in spite of her youth - she manages to cross thresholds into maturity with such courage and imagination. She leaves behind her, intuitively, what could have been a childish, regressive and even neurotic version of religion - found in her culture and in her family, and she arrives at a depth of simplicity and surrender that seems amazing in someone so young and from that narrow background. In the last period of her life she crosses the threshold from a fairly easy and peaceful road of faith into a profoundly anguished clinging on to faith through love alone.

She represents for today a surprising convergence of attractions - once one gets behind the sugary presentations of her encouraged by the piety the decades immediately after her death. As we have explored here, she unites three lights, so to speak: her image of God as tenderness, what she calls her little way, and her urgent sense of mission for a world without faith. The God of tenderness was her antidote for all the fearful images of God around in her upbringing. Her little way was an option to trust both friendship with Jesus and ordinary daily love rather than seek anything extraordinary. And then her world vision as missionary of love led her to embrace the loss of faith that she intuited as the drama of her moment of history. And in a different mood and mode we are still in the same moment.

The tone of unbelief, as was seen earlier, has shifted over these last centuries from seeing God as an unnecessary hypothesis (the scientific denial of faith) to seeing God as an insult not just to human intelligence but to human freedom (the humanist-nihilist dismissiveness). In our own day the tone is a less angry mixture of apathy and lostness, where God is made culturally unreal by the life-style and the assumptions we live. The gentle power of the Thrse story can disturb all these forms of unbelief by the sheer simplicity of her trust allied to the costly witness of her struggles. Those final months crown her witness in this regard.

In one of his provocative essays, the novelist Georges Bernanos, himself a great admirer of the saint of Lisieux, imagined an agnostic being given a chance to preach in a cathedral. This particular unbeliever was a spiritually sensitive person who saw beyond the battle-weary hearts of modern people to their secret hunger for hope. Bernanos put into his mouth these words:

I cannot help feeling that this is your last chance. Your last chance and ours. Are you capable of rejuvenating our world or not? The New Testament is eternally young, it is you who are old. . . The remarkable fate of an obscure little Carmelite girl seems to me a serious sign for us all. Christians, hurry up and become children again, that we unbelievers may become children too. It cant be so very difficult. If you do not live your faith, your faith stops being a living thing. It becomes abstract - bodyless.

But Thrse for this imaginary unbeliever was the opposite of abstract, an incarnation of childlike freshness, and therefore a gospel glimpse of salvation for our tired world and culture. No doubt her authenticity can provoke a similar hope and healing in others who think they cannot believe in God.