{"id":116,"date":"2006-08-10T13:19:09","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T21:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phlogma.com\/?p=116"},"modified":"2023-05-08T21:10:22","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T21:10:22","slug":"god-exists-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/philosophical-hatred\/god-exists-after-all-116","title":{"rendered":"God exists after all…"},"content":{"rendered":"

[47]<\/em>
\nHave we kept God’s word intact: the poor you have always with you?<\/em> Does that sound like the slogan of a demagogue? But it’s God’s word and we have received it. All the worse for the rich who pretend to believe it justifies their selfishness. All the worse for us whom the powerful use as their hostages each time the army of paupers returns to the assault. It is the saddest saying in the Gospels, the most burdened with sadness. And firstly it is addressed to Judas. Judas! Saint Luke relates that he was purse-bearer and didn’t always keep his books very accurately. That may be so. But after all he was banker to the twelve, and I’ve never yet heard of a bank with all accounts strictly in order. No doubt he kept his commission fairly high, like most people. Judging by that last deal of his, he’d hardly have made a first-rate broker’s clerk, old Judas wouldn’t… But Our Father takes our poor world as it is, not like the charlatans who manufacture one on paper and keep on reforming it still on paper. Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first installment of funds. Can you beat that? It’s so magnificent! God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories. Remember he was already interested in the pauper problem, like any millionaire. The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you<\/em>, answered Our Lord. Which amounts to this: [48]<\/em> don’t let the hour of mercy strike in vain. You’d do far better to cough up that money you stole, at once, instead of trying to get My apostles worked up over all your imaginary financial deals in toilet waters, and your charitable enterprises. Moreover you think you’re flattering My notorious weakness for down-and-outs, but you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I’m not attached to My paupers like an English old maids to lost cats, or to the poor bulls in the Spanish bull-ring. I love poverty with a deep, lucid, reasoned love—as equal loves equal. I love her as a wife who is faithful and fruitful. If the poor man’s right was derived only from strict necessity, your piddling selfishness would soon reduce him to a bare minimum, paid for by unending gratitude and servility. You’ve been holding forth against this woman to-day who has just bathed my feet with very expensive nard, as though my poor people had no right to the best scent. You’re obviously one of those folk who give a ha’penny to a beggar and then hold up their hands in horror if they don’t see him scurry off at once to the nearest baker’s to stuff himself with yesterdays’ stale bread, which the canny shopkeeper will in any case have sold him as fresh. In his place those people would do just as he did: they’d go straight to the nearest pub. A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread. You fool! What else is that gold, which means so much to you, but a kind of false hope, a dream and sometimes merely the promise of a dream? Poverty weighs heavily in the scales of My Heavenly Father, and all your hoarded smoke won’t redress the balance. The poor you have always with you, just because there will always be rich, that is to say there will always be hard and grasping men out for power more than possession. These men exist as much among the poor as among the rich, and the scallywag vomiting up his drink in the gutter is perhaps drunk with the very same dreams as Caesar asleep under his purple canopy. Rich and poor alike, you’d do better to look at yourselves in the mirror of want, for poverty is the image of your own fundamental illusion. Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. It is only because your malice is known to Me that I have placed poverty so high, crowned her and taken her as My bride. If once I allowed you to think [49]<\/em> of her as an enemy, or even a stranger, if I let you hope that one day you might drive her out of the world, that would be the death sentence of the weak. For the weak shall always be an insufferable burden on your shoulders, a dead weight which your proud civilizations will pass on to each other with rage and loathing. I have placed My mark upon their foreheads, and now you can only confront them with cringing fury; you may devour one lost sheep, but you will never again dare attack the flock. If My arm were to be lifted for only an instant, slavery—My great enemy—would revive of itself, under one name or another, since your law of life is debit and credit, and the weakling has nothing to give but his skin.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest<\/em>, trans. by Pamela Morris, (New York: Image Books, 1954), pp. 47-49.<\/p>\n

The argument from design, the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, even the one from absurdity, etc. all fail to impress me\u2026 I do like this one, though. The argument from human niggardliness. It places the problem of evil where we can see it. The universe<\/em> may need God’s protection, not us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[47] Have we kept God’s word intact: the poor you have always with you? Does that sound like the slogan of a demagogue? But it’s God’s word and we have received it. All the worse for the rich who pretend to believe it justifies their selfishness. All the worse for us whom the powerful use … <\/p>\n

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