Safe in the arms of Jesus 4

‘What led Cain to kill Abel? Murderous rage is not as we think a form of insanity. We’d like to think it is, you know: we’d love to imagine the urge to put another person to death is simply a species of madness, a break in the normal habits of human thinking. We really long for it to be psychopathic.’

Bryan’s tea cup rattled on his knee as spoke, sitting in the armchair in Graham’s study.

‘Or maybe the result of the forces that shape us as individuals – our deprivations or our upbringing, or perhaps even our genes. Wouldn’t that comfort us if we could in some way produce a kind of circuit board of causes for our actions tracing right back into the distant past, beyond even our own coming into being; if we could say, in the presence of a terrible present moment, as we see the body of the one we’ve killed fall prone on to the grave stone of some long-dead child, that this instant was already programmed in? That we had at that moment no other choice but to do what it was that we in fact did do?

‘These are not new thoughts’, said Graham. ‘The Greeks got there first, didn’t they?’

‘That they did, that they did. But this thought is pressing with particular force upon us in the present time, since the scientific academy is claiming that knowledge of genes and evolutionary biology will be able to provide a causal explanation for everything that is – which, in a way, is a way of blaming not ourselves but God himself for it all.’

‘I don’t follow you?’

‘Ah – well, like a huge field of toppling dominos, the domino that falls falls because the one before it fell, no less and no more. And the one before it, and so on, right back to the start so that you can in the end say that the only freely independent action is the first one – the act of creation itself. Which means the only single moral act in the entire universe ever was that first act from which all the others sprang and still spring. Cain thwarted Abel, but God made Cain. Whoever swung the blow that killed poor Ma’afu was simply the instrument of destiny. The horror of being human is that we are gifted with the ability to observe ourselves in the act which we cannot it seems stop, even as we do it. We have this feeling in our nightmares – you know those nightmares where you are sure you have done the most terrible of things and you cannot, even as you wake, shake the feeling that you have been exposed for the fraud that you undoubtedly are?

‘Well, yeah-’

‘But this is too convenient. Of course, theology tells us that we are to be held accountable for what we ourselves do – which implies that we are genuinely the doers of deeds. We do, we are doers, even as we are entangled in a web of causes and influences. Thinking apart from the theological it becomes difficult of course; though I am inclined to say that the experience of feeling as if we and others too ought to be held responsible for what we do is enough. Even if we can’t give a coherent explanation for that feeling – not yet – we still have to live within it.

‘So would you say that even if we found out that we were living within a dream, in a complete fantasy world, we would still be accountable for acting in that world-’

‘Well, yes. We are still conscious of making choices. Though we must admit that it is more complicated than that, we still bear the burden of making them, don’t we? Whoever cracked the back of Ma’afu’s skull is certainly a victim of living in the world. But you can be a victim and a perpetrator. We all are.’