H,
There is a celestial war
just beyond our range of vision. It is not a Greek tragedy or Homer’s other
epic. It does not rage just beyond the clouds above but deep inside the human
soul. It is a fight for the very survival of the human spirit.
Some will argue that
humanism is enough. They will say that religion brings evil and personal guilt
and we should instead be guided by our most rational thoughts and our deepest
hopes of collegiate happiness. There are many points here but none of them solve
the problem of man or woman. Inside us, as we grow older and more self-aware,
and if we grant ourselves the benefit of standing in any sort of real light, we
can see the cracks and damages and problems of the human soul. We can be our
own test case for how optimism and a general idea of doing good does not go far
enough to solve the problem of being human. In various ways we have come up
against the very wide limits of our own good intentions. We know we struggle to
live up to the things we say. We know we give up to nihilism and cynicism and
call it being realistic. Or we take a big bit out of some other sort of belief-relief
and find safety in various placebos for the soul.
The battle rages on. In places
where the rule of law and laws of ‘civilization’ have thrived the human soul is
curbed and seems to rise above murder and mayhem to pay taxes, go to work and
school while pursuing a sort of material happiness. This is materially better
than in places still ravaged by an ancestry of hurt and exploitation. These other
places suffer from the uncurbed excesses of those who hold power but are
painfully human. So, they hurt others. The former is manifestly and materially
preferable to the latter. Yet both speak to our material state and remove the
eternal nature of the human soul from contemplation.
This is the real
manifestation of the ages old struggle for the human soul in modern times. We are
not expected to believe in ghosts or spirits anymore. We are to base our whole
life on the things that end in fifty to seventy years on this blue planet, if
we are lucky. The real battle is for the human soul to reach beyond “the surly
bonds of earth and touch the face of God.”
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