The Ethics of Sport Hunting

Deer season is upon us, and to commemorate it, a Michigan news outlet has posed the question to a variety of clerics: in what context is hunting morally permissible? Four panelists offer responses.

The Jewish respondent concludes from a review of Genesis and the Law that the killing of animals required extraordinary justification but that God Himself has given such a justification. The only question that remains is how to treat those animals who will be killed. "It is acceptable to kill animals, but it is not acceptable to be callous toward animal life." The response is a laudable beginning, but it leaves so much of the heart of the question unexplored. What constitutes callousness? Killing for the sake of killing? Or is it only killing in an "inhumane" way? The rabbi gives no satisfactory answers.

The Muslim respondent provides a richer, fuller picture of his religion's ethical stance on hunting and on the slaughter of animals more generally. The result, somewhat unexpectedly, is a decidedly palatable set of rules governing both the ethical treatment of animals intended for slaughter and a strict utilitarian boundary for when such slaughter is appropriate. "Killing is not for sport but only for sustenance." Yet, even while his regulations for slaughter are better explained and (for my part) better received, his justification for killing to begin with leaves much to be desired. He states, rather matter-of-factly, that animals are going to die anyway, so it makes no difference whether they die of old age or by human hands. Curiously, the same premise could be applied to humanity, but even with Islam's decidedly different stance on justifiable violence relative to Christianity, sure no Muslim would want to argue that humans are going to die anyway so it doesn't matter whether we let them die of old age or kill them for utilitarian purposes. At least I hope not.

Next, a reverend gives the traditional and decidedly unsophisticated view of Christians throughout history. God said we could kill animals. Society says we can kill animals. What's the problem. I mean, in some cases, not killing animals is like disobeying Jesus. That's no good. Alright...it's a paraphrase and a parody, but it nevertheless represents the essential message. There is no consideration of the importance of the creation account or the Law in determining the ethical stance of Christians toward animals. Not even a mention of the eschatological place of the natural world in the Christian scheme. A personal inclination matched with a proof text remains the surest Christian hermeneutic.

The same, unfortunately, proved true for the equally unsatisfying response from the Christian vegetarian. He makes the highly dubious claim that God allows animals to be killed only because it is a necessity and that, since it is no longer a necessity, there is no justification for continuing to kill them even for food. Of course, he offers no support for the argument that the permission to use animals for food and clothing is need based nor does he demonstrate that something has fundamentally changed to remove that need. (Incidentally, he also makes the easily falsifiable claim that eating meat is more efficient.) Most importantly of all, however, he seems to be woefully ignorant of the historical fact that meat has only recently begun to play a significant role in the human diet. Precisely because it is such a painstaking and inefficient means of ingesting calories, meat has been a luxury in most cultures throughout human history. Slaughtering an animal and eating it was a significant event reserved for feasts and sacred occasions, a fact typified in the rituals of both Judaism and Islam. The notion that you can eat meat at every meal is a relatively modern, primarily American innovation.

Disappointingly, with the exception of the Muslim, none of the respondents deal directly with the question of the ethics of sport hunting. More disappointing still is the facile responses of both Christians--leading me to believe that some lazy journalist probably just found four clerics who had nothing better to do that day than answer the phone. No one gets to the root of what sport hunting is or why it might be ethically problematic. Hunting, neither out of necessity nor even with any intent to make reasonably full use of the kill, is violence for violence sake, a behavior which is difficult to justify from the viewpoint of any of the three major religions. It is the agonistic modern analog to the gladiatorial arena, only instead of the helpless slave being thrown to the lion for the amusement of the masses it is the helpless herbivore which is turned over to the heavily armed and merciless hunter to end its life for his amusement.

Hunters who love the taste of venison, who eat whatever they kill and kill only what they will eat, are on ethically safe ground. In more omnivorous days gone by, I have even gladly shared in their spoils. But the point at which hunting is undertaken exclusively or even primarily for the thrill of killing and pride in the trophy, it becomes the exclusive province of lovers of violence, about whom God is quite clear.

Christ, Jain, and the Nature of Ethics

In one of the previous examinations of Jain and Christianity, there was an affinity observed between the way both Christ and the teachers of Jain both moved the ethic of violence beyond mere action into the heart of the moral agent. In this final comparative look at the two faiths, it will be interesting to notice that this shift in morality beyond the realm of action extends beyond just questions of violence. In fact, that may be the most potent quality of both ethical systems. In each, what makes a good or bad person (or more precisely a moral or immoral person) is more than merely the incidental fact of good or bad actions. The measure of a person is the heart (taken metaphorically) from which flows a wellspring of not only right action but right thought and right disposition. This is exemplified in the Mahavrata, or Five Great Vows, of Jain. These vows--intended as binding on Jain monks and as an ideal for the Jain laity--were handed down by Mahavira and form the core ethical canon for Jain. Briefly stated, they are:

1. Renunciation of violence
2. Renunciation of lying
3. Renunciation of stealing
4. Renunciation of sex
5. Renunciation of attachment/possession

There are a number of interesting points of contact here with the Christian faith. Most obviously, they appear to form a kind of atheistic distillation Decalogue, with its laws against murder, dishonesty, theft, sexual impropriety, and covetousness. Beyond this lies a more basic commitment of each faith to ethical behavior, because both insist that what someone does in this life has eternal repercussions. The most interesting parallel, however, requires a fuller, closer reading of the text of the vows. Take the first vow, as an example:

I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtle or gross, whether movable or immovable. Nor shall I myself kill living beings (nor cause others to do it, no consent to it). As long as I live, I confess and blame, repent and exempt myself of these sins, in the thrice threefold way, in mind, speech, and body.

Each of the vows conforms to this same basic pattern: "I shall neither speak lies, nor cause others to speak lies, nor consent to the speaking of lies by others," "I shall neither take myself what is not given, nor cause others to take it, nor consent to their taking it," and so on even down to attachment to material things, so that the Jain monk commits never to offer even consent to others being attached to worldly possessions. For the practitioner of Jain, it is not enough merely to avoid theft with the body. Theft must be excised from the mind. It is not enough to merely avoid dishonesty in speech. Dishonesty within oneself or dishonesty with one's actions are no less lies than those which are spoken. Chastity is more than merely going one's whole life without having sexual intercourse. The Jain monk must be chaste not only at his own core, but he must also not incite or consent to impropriety in anyone else.

Taking this final example, we can see that--in a less concisely stated way--Christianity offers a similar picture of ethics. The New Testament presents a very definite picture of an ethical system which is committed to a very narrow definition of sexual propriety. Overemphasized as it is today within the larger scheme of Christian moral thought, it is still undeniable that there is a basic vision of sexual ethics in Christianity which is indisputable: sex belongs between a single consenting man and a single consenting woman within the institution of marriage. This, in behavioral terms, excludes a host of sexual sins, including but not limited to rape, premarital sex, homosexual sex, and extramarital sex. These, however, are only the bodily manifestations of sexual impurity. As with Jain, the chastity extends far beyond that. For Christ, sexual purity is no less important in the mind. In fact, Jesus famously insists that the desire to have sex with a woman in a way which is inappropriate is the same as committing the act. The moment the heart wills the sinful behavior, whatever prevents it from actualizing that will is incidental. What is necessary of thoughts and actions Paul will expand to include speech as well, counseling Christians against engaging in any kind of lewd talk. As with Jain, Christianity takes the commitment to chastity and applies it to body, mind, and speech, or, more appropriately given the obvious merism at work, the entire human person.

The Christian understanding of sexual propriety, as with Jain, extends beyond merely the individual moral agent as well. The New Testament also presents an ideal of Christian behavior which echoes the Jain commitment to neither incite nor consent to sin. In fact, much of the commitment to modesty in Christian ethics should be understood in these terms (though it should be noted that "modesty" in the New Testament has a much broader meaning and application which does not always neatly collapse into a rejection of sexually provocative dress and behavior). Christians commit not only to resisting the temptation to be sexually inappropriate but commit to not being that temptation for others. What is more, out of a concern for communal purity, Paul makes it very clear that Christians cannot offer their tacit approval (their "consent" in Mahavira's terms) to improper sexual behavior in their midst. It must be opposed, at least as it appears in the context of a church.

Christianity suffers (if that is not, perhaps, too strong a term) from not having the comprehensiveness of its ethic as neatly concentrated as does Jain. Nevertheless, it is important for Christians to realize that, for example, a Christian sexual ethic is not just being faithful to one's wife or taking a purity pledge as a teenager. It certainly isn't making sure that you scream the loudest to prevent homosexuals from getting married. It is a holistic understanding of ethics which grasps that God created sex with a purpose, and that the church is a place in which that purpose is both joyously celebrated and fiercely guarded. The same spiritual process of cutting to the heart of an ethical concern and then marveling at the depth and breadth of its impact can and should be carried out on any of the above moral maxims or any moral impulse within Christianity. Taking the cue from Jain, Christians need to realize that a commitment to honesty, chastity, non-violence, charity, or any other guiding ethical principle of the faith is more than just a legal concern, a commitment to compliance. It is a richer statement about the way the world was intended by the One whose intentions formed it. In broadening the understanding of Christian ethics, their scope and their interrelatedness, Christians can better understand that the moral precepts of Christ are not a guidebook to technical propriety but an invitation into a perfect kingdom in which all people are at harmony with themselves, with each other, with creation, and with the Creator.

Christ, Jain, and Mutual Forgiveness

The previous conversation between Jain and Christian thought focused almost entirely on the negative aspects of Jain's approach to the material world as it related to the transcendent and life's ultimate destiny. As a counter balance, the question of forgiveness and particularly the universal stress on mutual forgiveness offers a delightful point of overlap between Christianity and Jain. The Jain focus on forgiveness is an extension of the goal of practitioners to be at harmony with other living beings. There is a semi-liturgical rite known as the Vandana Formula in which a member of the Jain laity approaches a monk and has the following interchange:

Layperson: I wish to reverence you, ascetic who suffers with equanimity, with
intense concentration.
Monk: So be it.
Layperson: You will have passed the day auspiciously with little disturbance.
Monk: Yes
Layperson: You make spiritual progress
Monk: And you also.
Layperson: I wish to ask pardon for transgressions.
Monk: I ask for it too.
Layperson: I must confess, ascetic who suffers with equanimity, for lack of
respect and day-to-day transgressions of the mind, speech, or body;
through anger, pride, deceit, or greed; false behavior and neglect of the
Teaching; and whatever offense I have committed I here confess, repudiate
and repent of it and set aside my past deeds.

This ritual ought to resonate strongly with Christians, particularly as it so nearly resembles the practice of some traditions with regard to confession. There is a clear sense of the inequality of the two people with regard to spiritual progress, and at the same time they meet on the level playing field of their mutual inadequacy. The laity ask for forgiveness and the monk responds "I ask for it too." There is no illusion that one can come to the other for forgiveness, and yet there is spiritual power in the act of seeking it from one another.

The Vandana Formula is by no means peculiar in Jain. In the Kalpasutra, the teachings of Mahavira once again speak to this central place of mutual forbearance and forgiveness among practitioners of Jain. In this text, it arises in the context of a yearly retreat for monks and nuns. Knowing that such a congregation will ultimately give rise to conflict, Mahavira gave the ascetics the following advice:

If, during the retreat, among monks or nuns occurs a quarrel or dispute or dissension, the young monk should ask forgiveness of the superior, and the superior of the young monk. They should forgive and ask forgiveness, appease and be appeased, and converse without restraint.

It is almost too easy to find parallel concepts in Christianity. Jesus' hyperbolic reply to Peter that we ought to forgive one another seventy times seven times springs immediately to mind, as does the command in the Sermon on the Mount to seek forgiveness before making a gift to God. More interesting than merely an emphasis on forgiveness, however, is the parallel idea that exists in both religions that mutual forgiveness is not ultimately about our ability to expiate one another's sins. There is something else going on in each. For Jain, the forgiveness is an attempt to live at harmony with other living beings, to be released from the burden of the illusion of guilt and the corruption of anger. In Christianity, we forgive not because our forgiveness is somehow necessary in order to free one another from sin but because we serve a God who forgives. It is ultimately Christians' own attempt at harmony, but not necessarily with one another (though that is a penultimate goal) but with a God who is overflowing with forgiveness.

The unfortunate truth, I suspect, is that both Jain and Christianity suffer from the same flaw: confession and mutual forgiveness are more readily found in their holy texts than in the lives of modern practitioners.

Christ, Jain, and the Material World

Perhaps the most constant--and, in the opinion of many, damning--critique leveled against Eastern religions by Westerners is their negative view of the world and their apparently escapist approach to soteriology, borrowing from Christian theological jargon. There is a perception, right or wrong, that Eastern religions see the world as a fundamentally broken place which must be fled and that flight from the world involves the absorption of the self into a cosmic consciousness or nothingness or both. Jain is certainly at least as open to this criticism as any other Eastern faith. While the commitment to life that is apparent in ahimsa would suggest a profound respect for the world, Jain religion does not actually protect life because it believes it is in some sense enduring, sacred, and intrinsically valuable. Instead, the respect for life is, in some sense, merely a subtle act of self-interest, a necessary ethical step on the path toward liberation, an escape from the cycle of death and reincarnation. Included in this escape is an escape also from the confines of materiality and anything which is in any sense associated with the world. In the Acaranga Sutra, the reader encounters once again the teachings of Mahavira which here describe the nature of existence after liberation is finally achieved:

The liberated is not long nor small nor round nor triangular nor quadrangular nor circular; he is not black nor blue nor red nor green nor white; neither of good nor bad smell; nor bitter nor pungent nor astringent nor sweet; neither rough nor soft; neither heavy nor light; neither cold nor hot; neither harsh nor smooth; he is without body, without resurrection, without contact of matter, he is not feminine nor masculine nor neuter; he perceives, he knows, but there is no analogy whereby to know the transcendent; its essence is without form; there is no condition of the unconditioned. There is no sound, no color, no smell, no taste, not touch--nothing of that kind. Thus I say.

The idea certainly has an aesthetic appeal. The idea of a conscious, non-corporeal existence has such an appeal to the Christian mind that it has been adopted (from Greek philosophy rather than Jain) into Christianity's own escapist soteriology in the form of the soul's flight to heaven. While that expression of Christian thought is deeply suspect, there is admittedly a strong affinity between the way Mahavira speaks of the transcendent and the way orthodox Christian thinkers have spoken of it. Consider this roughly parallel thought of Gregory Palamas:

Every nature is utterly remote and absolutely estranged from the divine nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature, but if each of the other things is nature, he is not nature: just as he is not a being, if others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not being. If you accept this as true also for wisdom and goodness and generally all the things around God or said about God, then your theology will be correct and in accord with the saints.

Gregory describes transcendent reality--in this case, God--in many of the same terms as Mahavira: real and aware, but invisible, non-corporeal, and fundamentally indescribable. There is, in both, the bare minimum agreement that philosophical materialism must be rejected. It is part of an intuitive function of human psychology that scientists explain as evolutionary attempt to grapple with and quantify the unknown but which theologians more liberally suggest may be an innate sense of the divine common to the species. Beyond this, Jain and Christianity diverge in their understanding of the relationship of the transcendent to the divine. In spite of what many Christians have suggested about Orthodox theology, for example, there are no Christian bodies which believe that humanity's ultimate goal is to become that transcendent reality which is non-corporeal and indescribable. The essence of the transcendent God, in Christianity, is what all reality is defined against; at the moment when the creation is absorbed wholesale into the Creator, both cease to exist in any meaningful sense as Christians conceive them.

More importantly, and with significantly less flavor of the esoteric, the Christian view of the transcendent and its relationship to the material world reveals an essential disagreement with Jain about the value of material existence. In creating the material world, God declared it good, and, whatever evil occurs in it, His handiwork has never ceased to be good at its core. That would explain why the Christian picture of redemption is not one of the transcendent calling people out of the material but of the immaterial taking on physical form in order to redeem creation. The Christian story of salvation has never been one of Christ leading people out of the world (in the sense of material existence). Just the opposite: the promise of Christian salvation centers around the idea that humanity will be resurrected into a new body to enjoy the presence of God on a new earth. A Christian respect for life and for creation is centered, therefore, not on a self-serving ethic but on a commitment to the eternal value of God's creation. Christian liberation is not a liberation from the world (again, in the sense of materiality) but liberation for the world. Christians have been freed from sin so that they might free the rest of the creation from the consequences of sin and so that all creation might then share in the experience the transcendent, not in ceasing to be creatures but as creatures were intended to experience the Creator.

Christ, Jain, and the Ethic of Non-violence

It would be blatantly dishonest to suggest that my attraction to Jain was not closely tied to Jain's most conspicuous ethical feature: ahimsa (the symbol for which is pictured on the left). Ahimsa, as a principle, corresponds closely to Western ideas like pacifism, non-violence, or non-harm, though--as with all peculiarly foreign concepts--it would be wrong to simply equate it with any of these. It is, in some respects, a richer and more comprehensive understanding of nonviolence than is found in many Western streams of pacifist thought. At other times, however, it lends itself to a shallower and more thoroughly material understanding of non-violence that Christianity may, at times, legitimately critique. The primary text to be examined on the question of ahimsa is the Sutrakrtanga written by Sudharma, a sixth century B.C. Jain monk.

The serious, even extreme, nature of Jain non-violence is immediately apparent both to the casual observer of Jain monks and to the casual reader of Jain texts. Sudharma specifies that the principle of "non-killing" should extend to all "living beings whether they move or not, on high, below and on earth." He criticizes Buddhist monks for not following this principle: "Eating seeds and drinking cold water and what has been prepared for them, they enter upon meditation, but are ignorant of of the truth and do not possess carefulness." The true practitioner of Jain strives not to destroy even the microscopic life that exists in water or to unthinkingly consume life simply because it has been offered as alms. Even admitting that some inadvertent killing is inevitable in life, the Jain monk takes extreme measures to avoid it and is penitent when he falls short. This is reflected in the First of the Mahavrata, or Five Great Vows, of Jain: "I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtle or gross, whether movable or immovable. Nor shall I myself kill living beings (nor cause others to do it, nor consent to it). As long as I live, I confess and blame, repent and exempt myself of these sins, in the thrice threefold way, in mind, speech, and body."

One of the most interesting common focuses of ahimsa and Christian non-violence is the way each faith explicitly extends the definition of violence beyond mere action. Both in the Mahavrata and the Sutrakirtanga, Jain teachers emphasize that it is not enough merely to avoid killing. One must vow to neither cause it nor consent to others doing it; "Master of his senses and avoiding wrong, he should do no harm to anybody, neither by thoughts, nor words, nor acts." This translation of active sin into the heart of the sinner was the ethical revolution which Jesus brought to Judaism in the Sermon on the Mount. In his initial volley with the Pharisees and their legalistic application of the Law, Jesus takes up the question of murder: "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire." In the strongest possible terms, Jesus insists that it is not enough to merely not act in violence, which may be avoided simply for fear of the consequences or cowardice or lack of opportunity. As he will explain in the next passage with regard to lust, the very inclination to violence is a spiritual act of violence. In both Christianity and Jain we find a more comprehensive form of non-violence than contemporary political forms of pacifism offer. To commit to non-violence requires a total transformation not only of what one does but also how one thinks and how one experiences the world.

The most most substantial practical difference between Jain and Christianity should be obvious: Christians, overwhelmingly, don't have a problem killing, cooking, and eating animals. Jain, in contrast, takes its version of the golden rule and applies it indiscriminately to all life: "...a man should wander about treating all creatures in the world so as he himself would be treated.” It is here where the Jain tradition offers its most pertinent critique of Christianity. Let me immediate clarify that I am by no means commending the wearing of protective masks, the methodical sweeping of the ground wherever one walks, or even thoroughgoing vegetarianism. Jesus was almost certainly not a vegetarian, and he certainly didn't insist that his followers practice it. Quite the opposite. There is, however, an extent to which Christians have historically taken too great a license with the teaching that humanity has "dominion over" creation. It is critical that Christians remember that humans were not created distinct from creation but distinct within creation, and that our dominion is intended to be as regents of God. There is no reason that Christians should adopt the Jain version of the golden rule and follow it down the path toward ethical vegetarianism (among other applications of ahimsa), but we may appropriate reformulate it as to heighten our own sense of duty within creation: rather than "treat all living things as you would want to be treated," perhaps, "govern creation as you would expect God to govern it."

The reason Christianity does not accept the Jain understanding of the at least apparent scope of non-violence is because Jain has, in some sense, a more superficial understanding of what violence is and at what it may directed. Jain seems to understand ahimsa as applying to primarily acts of physical violence against biological life. Ahimsa is not as stridently applied to issues, for example, of economic, social, environmental (in a non-biological sense), and institutional violence which Christianity has stressed with varying degrees throughout its history. Peace is, for both Christianity and Jain, among the highest if not the very highest ideal, but in Christianity, the idea of peace is much more than merely non-harm toward life. It is an image of physical and metaphysical harmony where all creation is finally it accord with the Creator. Peace is the narrative of Micah 4, where in addition to the cessation of war all people flock to the mountain of God to receive instruction there and obedience to God becomes the hallmark of human existence. In this vision, as in so many other images of eschatological peace, the earth still gives up its fruit for the sustenance of all life as God had always intended it to, and in the eating of it there is no hint of violence. Thus, even while the Jain emphasis on peace as the ultimate goal appeals to Christians and teachings such as "the enlightened ones that were, and the enlightened ones that will be, they have Peace as their foundation, even as all things have the earth for their foundation" resonate, it must always be remembered that the peace of God is something more than non-violence. It is a peace which surpasses understanding, one which is better summed up in the parallelism of the psalm "Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it" than in the teaching of Sudharma, "He should cease to injure living beings...for this has been called the Nirvana, which consists in peace."

Christ, Jain, and the Perennial Allure of Vomit

I confess a strange amusement with the way certain idioms transcend time and space, keeping their relevance throughout history and across cultures. Though it is by no means the first time, I found one such saying while reading through one of the sacred discourses of Jain, a teaching by Indrabhuti Gautama entitled Uttaradhyayana (which, curiously, is a word too often neglected at spelling bees). In this passage, Indrabhuti Gautama is recording the deathbed discourse of his master, Mahavira, who is concerned that Gautama loves him too much. After musing for a time on the nature of reincarnation, Mahavira gives this curious advice:

Give up your wealth and your wife; you have entered the state of the houseless; do not, as it were, return to your vomit; Gautama, be careful all the while!

The regular reader of Scripture--or for that matter, anyone familiar with Western culture which has been so influenced by the language of the Bible--should immediately think of the famous biblical proverb: "Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool that repeats his folly." The parallel is striking and not at all, as it might first appear, entirely superficial. There is a strong sense in both Jain and Christianity of progress and of the profound sense of loss that comes from moving backward. Especially telling is that in both instances there is a sense in which it is better to have never been purified than to have been once cleansed and then again defiled. This is particularly pronounced when Peter takes up the proverb in his epistle, but first let us examine more deeply how the image functions in the Jain text.

Perhaps the crucial purpose of Mahavira's speech is to convey to Gautama the rarity (though not the singularity) of human life. Mahavira explains in protracted detail just how fortunate one is to exist on earth at all, even as a speck of dust, a state in which the soul may remain "as long as an aeon." And if it is fortunate, it may someday be reborn into a drop of water, where it can stay "as long as an aeon." Mahavira continues this formula through rebirth into a flame, the wind, a vegetable, and various forms of advancing life until finally he speaks of the great fortune of being born as a human and then as an Aryan (as opposed to a barbarian). Mahavira even observes that not all are fortunate enough to ascend directly up this path, as "the soul which suffers for its carelessness is driven about in the round of rebirth by its good and bad karma." But Gautama is even more fortunate still, because not only is he a human but a human who has had the karmic good fortune to be instructed in the sacred teachings and to believe the sacred teachings.

All this building of tension toward the climax is intended to indicate to Gautama just how blessed he is to be in a position where he literally stands on the cusp of enlightenment if only he would seize it. His existence--this particular life in this particular body with its nearness toward perfection--has been aeons in the making, the result of countless previous lives of karmic struggle toward this precise moment when he finally has the opportunity to break the vicious cycle of reincarnation and ascend into the eternal heavens. Given that this is true, how can Gautama still be distracted by inconsequential illusions. Mahavira insists, "Cast aside from you all attachments...Give up your wealth and your wife; you have entered the state of the houseless...Leave your friends and relations, the large fortune you have amassed; do not desire the a second time." It would be worse to squander the opportunity for perfection so nearly grasped than to have never crawled up out of the mire to begin with. Or, in biblical parlance, "to whom much was given, of him much will be required."

Peter will make the concept even clearer in his second epistle in a rant about the presence of false teachers leading Christians astray:

They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: "The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire."

The passage offers a very similar message to that of the Jain text. In both, those who have made that all important progress on the path toward perfection are being tempted by a host of apparent pleasures when the true goal lies just ahead of them. Peter exhorts them to fight on because "the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials," and to remember that those sins to which they are now drawn are the very things which they have labored so hard in Christ to be freed from. Having known the truth that freedom comes in Christ, how much more foolish would it be for them to return to slavery because it appeared to them to be liberty? Paul will make much the same point about the new life versus the old in Ephesians.

This is not to say that Christian and Jain ideas of progress, regress, salvation, and apostasy are in any sense the same, though clearly they have affinities which converse well with one another. The Jain concept of perfection is intimately tied to a much more extreme rejection of the world than Christ ever advocated, which is a matter for another text on another day. A greater difference still is the way Christianity relates the goal to progress. There is a sense, in Christ, in which we are truly liberated first and then are expected to progress and be sanctified. In Jain liberation is an end which precludes the possibility of further progress. The most interesting point of contrast, however, also bears the richest fruits for thought about Christianity. In spite of startling statistics that suggest this is changing, Christians do not traditionally believe in reincarnation, an idea which is central to the Jain understanding of progress. Mahavira's aim, as already established, is to instill in his pupil a sense of the enormity of the task before him based on the aeons of karmic labor which led him to his current life and the prospect of ages more in the eternal cycle of rebirth should he fail. The importance of this life and this chance for liberation is based on the great struggle represented in reincarnation.

It strikes me then that Christianity should have an even greater sense of urgency than Mahavira does when we speak about the prospect of what we are to achieve in this life. Quite unlike the Jain system, there is no opportunity to struggle through the aeons to achieve a second shot at salvation in Christ. We are given this one life--of which Mahavira says "As the fallow leaf of the tree falls to the ground when its days are gone, even so the life of men" and of which Peter writes "All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls." As earnest as Mahavira's pleas are to Gautama that he should get it right now while the opportunity is before him, how much more intense ought our own resolve be as Christians, when we know that we are given but one life and one opportunity to turn ourselves away from the world, to put off the old, and to clothe ourselves in Christ for all eternity?

On Christ and Jain

Jain has always fascinated me, no doubt in large part because of the peculiar intensity with which its practitioners pursue its principles. Islam, for example, has won my admiration for the popular level of its devotion. While in Christianity, we must constantly hear sermons about the value of daily prayer, the Muslim knows instinctively to pray no less than five times a day. Jain takes this kind of meticulous devotion to another level, with serious practitioners being so committed to total non-violence that they wear masks to keep from inhaling tiny organisms and sweep the ground in front of them wherever they go in order to brush aside unsuspecting insects. Even the Jain laity take strict vows of vegetarianism as part of a broader programme of non-violence. It is precisely this mixture of definite belief and assiduous application that has made Jain one of the smallest and yet one of the most influential world religions, relative to its size.

It is this fascination with Jain which recently led me to undertake studies in a reader of world religions and to listen to a series of lectures on Eastern religions by Stephen Prothero (who, unfortunately, elected to skip Jain altogether). Over the coming weeks, I would like to share some of the insights into Jain that these very cursory studies have brought, particularly those musings which may help challenge and deepen Christian faith and which might enlighten the curious outsider looking at Jain.

The Absurd and Ignorance

This final exploration of the interaction of absurdism with Christianity proposes to look at a passage of Camus which is both true and antithetical to proper faith. Camus writes:

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.

It is immediately striking to me how surigically this sentiment cuts to the heart of humanity's relationship with its own incomplete knowledge. We lament our own ignorance but only because we know that we are ignorant. The constant quest for knowledge by humanity is a product of the incompleteness of its understanding. The moment we unify two thoughts in our comprehension, there are four more born that are in total disharmony. The very fact of partial understanding exacerbates our ignorance and torments us. To understand nothing at all, including one's own ignorance, is perhaps the only desirable alternative to comprehensive understanding, at least from an existential standpoint. It is not for nothing that our culture has embraced the proverb, "Ignorance is bliss."

And yet, for Christians, partial knowledge is a necessary part of our faith. We can speak practically of the formal incompleteness of God's revelation as recorded in Scripture (even if we want to doctrinally assert its functional completeness), but there is an even more important gap in our knowledge. We do not yet understand even basic facts which are logically prior to Scripture: what is man, what is his purpose, why is the world so beautiful and terrible? Even as we begin to formulate responses--good, true responses so far as they go--to these questions, our self-perpetuating ignorance proves that the very ability to formulate the questions is itself a kind of curse. Consider, for example, how the problem of evil arises from such questions.

At the same time, we must embrace what partial knowledge we have with all the burdens it includes, because it is in this incomplete knowledge that we have the promise of total knowledge. Consider Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." It is only in our lamentable state, steeped as we are in the torturous knowledge of our own ignorance, that we become aware of the prospect of full knowledge. The kind of comprehensive knowledge that Camus assumes to be inaccessible and therefore to validate the absurd, we have a secure hope of because we have been allowed to know in part.

In this is the substantial difference between a Christian absurdism and that of Camus. Understood as Camus did, the collision of man and an alien world could result only in futility and despair. Understood in Christ, the collision of man and an alien world gives content to a hope of true unification which includes and exceeds simple comprehensive understanding. Even the recognition of the ultimate futility of human efforts and the despair which inevitably results from that are transfigured in Christ; the very awareness of these weaknesses is a call to the promise of God. I can accept readily most of what Camus has to say as a genuine and unusually brilliant expression of the existential turmoil I see as intrinsic to this world. But as I cry out in his voice, I admit that there is an unknown and perhaps nonexistent interlocutor who calls back not with answers but with an invitation: "Come to me, and I will give you rest."

The Absurd and Science

Perhaps the most beautiful and compelling of all the passages I have encountered in Camus is his critique of the insufficiency of science to resolve the problem of the absurd. It is the ultimate aim of secluarist scientists to reduce the world to a mathematical series of formulas, and they assume that such a reduction is more or less inevitable. They treat the comprehensibility of the world and their materialist philosophy as so self-evident as to defy criticism. Camus, and of course others, have rightly observed that by all objective standards, science always ultimately dissolves not into scientific formulas but into romantic verse:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

It is intriguing how Camus' despair at the inability of science to resolve the absurd is also vividly poetic. It mirrors the sentiments of Petru Dumitriu as he laments the simultaneously mathematical and incomprehensible universe. But while Camus stops with the lament that he cannot find assurance that the world is his, Dumitriu so embraces the foreignness of the world that, so far from being his, he insists that it must belong to someone else:

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

The most perfect parallel to Camus' critique of science (at least that I have found) is actually in the work of G. K. Chesterton. Writing well before the birth of absurdism, Chesterton anticipated Camus' observations about science and its inability to adequately give answers to the truly pressing questions of the world. Just as it completely failed to resolve the problem of the absurd, science was totally impotent in the face of the ultimate question: why?

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears...It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

Chesterton goes on with astonishing parallels to Camus and his complaint that science inevitably collapses into poetry:

Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

Just as with Camus, Chesterton himself slips easily into his own rhetorical poetry when speaking about the world. They admit that awed ignorance is the appropriate response to reality and recognize that even science (in its own cold, self-deluded way) will always end at the same place as everyone else: wide-eyed wonder. It certainly raises questions about the whether or not apophatic thinkers have had it right all along; the end of human knowledge is silence before God. More to the point though, this realization should work to resolve the lingering fear that has been created by the false triumphalism of science with reference to religion. Faith has nothing to fear in science because science ultimately has nothing to say to faith. It is itself just a gelid, mechanical mysticism which has had the unfortunate fate of being so convinced by its own facade that it thinks it is somehow above and apart. In truth, science offers only transient answers to transient problems. It crumbles in the face of the absurd, like all human effort.

The Absurd and Christian Knowledge

In the course of a discussion on humanity's attempt to find clarity in the world, Camus wrote:

Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.

It is intriguing how closely this idea parallels the hesychast understanding of what it was to know. For Camus, the act of trying to know was an attempt to impress a distinctly human character onto a decidedly inhuman world. Understanding was at its heart the human superimposition of its nature onto the nature of everything. This is his recognition of the human character of constructed meaning: because understanding is the effort to compose meaning and because meaning has the human intellect as its composer, to understand is ultimately to give an artificial human quality to reality.

This behavior is born from a desire for clarity and unity which is absurd insofar as real clarity and unity is impossible. This despair in the effort to know and the total inaccessibility the object to be known is echoed (or perhaps prefigured) in the hesycahst thought of the fourteenth century. Like Camus, the hesychasts recognized that the effort to know was an effort for unity (though they understood this unity metaphysically rather than in terms of mere logical clarity) but that the foreign nature of the world which was to be known made this ultimately impossible.

Unlike Camus, who stressed the flaw in humanity's expectation of unity, the hesychasts stressed the flaw in humanity's perception of ultimate disunity in the world. Relying instead on the knowledge the unity must be there (in part because of an existential predisposition to assume a unified, comprehensible universe) they translated the desire to find unity from a natural human yearning to an ethical imperative. Unity existed in the world and to know that unity was to have transcended the human predicament. This, incidentally, was achieved through union with the one object, unlike the perceived world, with which that union was possible: God. In union with the divine, the hesychasts expected to achieve a unified understanding of all reality. In an eschatological vision of perfect knowledge, Gregory Palamas writes of a time when humanity will know everything as it is because, through God, humanity has become a participator in the unifying principle of everything that is: light.

For it is in light that the light is seen, and that which sees operates in a similar light, since this faculty has no other way in which to work. Having separated itself from all other beings, it becomes itself all light and is assimilated to what it sees, or rather, it is united to it without mingling, being itself light and seeing light through light. If it sees itself, it sees light; if it behold the object of its vision, that too is light; and if it looks at the means by which it sees, again it is light. For such is the character of the union, that all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the means nor the object nor its nature, but simply has the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature.

This is by no means an attempt to collapse Christian eschatology (or even epistemology) with absurdism. Camus and Gregory could hardly have arrived at more divergent conclusions about the possibility of knowledge. They begin, however, with a similar observation that when humanity attempts to understand the world the behavior is essentially unitive, born out of an innate human desire to collapse everything into a single system or schema. They both recognize the natural human despair when, by our own efforts, the desired and expected unity cannot be achieved. What is left, then, is to decide what to do with those observations.

The Absurd and Christian Theodicy

I have a proud and profound love for absurdism. I first encountered the movement in a general introduction to philosophy. The system was described to me thus: absurdism is the simultaneous belief that God must exist and that the world as we experience it precludes the existence of God. More even than a positive belief, absurdism is the recognition and acceptance of the absurdity of those two conclusions. It lives in and embraces that absurdity. It allows the absurd to color its thoughts and actions. At times, it even seems to revel in it.

Since that brief introduction, I have come to see the limits in the particular definition of absurdism--favoring instead a definition which focuses on both the necessity and impossibility of there being meaning in the world--but that original explanation has stuck with me nonetheless. In the fundamental contradiction of absurdism can be seen powerful links to an appropriate understanding of Christian theodicy. It is deeply existential in character, recognizing both the deep-seated human desire for God and our experience which defies His existence. Both are rooted in the very nature of human existence which both sees meaning (and with it, God) and knows at the same time that all meaning is illusory. We experience both a true sense of inclusion and even power in the world as both its masters and inhabitants, but we are constantly returned to an unshakable sense of alienation from it in our woeful ignorance and microcosmic insignificance, as if God is speaking to us once again from the storm.

Consider Albert Camus, the father of absurdism, on the paradoxical nearness and separation from the world, even ourselves:

A step lower and the strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

How can the world appear so empty and foreign in one moment and so profoundly meaningful in another? What if anything can resolve the absurdity we experience in a world which refuses to bend to our ideas of justice, goodness, or even order? What can resolve the absurdity of realizing that the meaning we know exists, we also know that we are creating ex nihilo? These are questions on which God may be brought to bear, not logically but existentially as a force which enters into the human experience and ameliorates our experience of the absurdity even if He declines to resolve it.

Just as they can speak to and give philosohpical vitality to Christian theodicy, Camus and absurdism have other points of contact with Christian thought. An examination of quotes from Camus juxtaposed with both classical and modern Christian thought can demonstrate places where both have a common object of critique and other places where there exists substantive tension between them which must be judged either creative or destructive. The next few entries will attempt to explore these points of contact with varying degrees of depth.