Notes & asides.

EARTHQUAKES; DEATH; GOD; QUESTION (Logic); GLORY of God; PRAISE of God; TRANSCENDENCE of God; NATURAL disasters

This article contemplates how to approach God in the wake of a disaster such as an earthquake. A few years ago, when I was weekending with an old friend in the English countryside near London, the morning paper brought news of an earthquake in eastern Turkey that had the day before killed some 400 men, women, and children. It simply didn't pay off to speculate on what might have been God's purpose, benign or punitive, in permitting the earthquake yesterday in eastern Turkey. What is the point in glorifying God when God -- in the nature of things -- is already the locus of infinite glory? Consider a passage from St. Augustine. We arrive finally at the simple question, How, reasonably, can man be expected to praise that God which we have agreed to call the god-of-the-earthquake? So: we come to rest with the mysteries. We have the wonderful tabulation of them done by St. Augustine. In agreeing that that is what they are, we are not violating the rule of Ronald Knox to prefer mystery to vagueness. We do not abandon reason, we merely recognize its limitations. We reason to the existence of God, it is revealed to us that His Son was the incarnation, and that such was His love of us that He endured a torture excruciating in pain, and unique in aspect -- the God of hosts, mutilated by His own creatures, whom He dies forgiving, loving. Can we do less? Yes, we do less, but must die trying to do more.