Guardian Comment is Free

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/28/theology-philosophy-theodicy

Lord Jim's Dad

I'm getting round to thinking about an essay on the theme of religion and morality. I'm supposed to provide a Buddhist perspective ... Coincidentally, though, I have been reading Conrad's Lord Jim, a sobering novel when it is not terrifying. Here first, though, is a sentence from Conrad which must effectively set the scene:

Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings (Conrad)

Near the end of Lord Jim Marlow writes to a friend explaining the contents of a package he has sent him. It includes an old letter from Jim’s father, who was a country parson. Marlow says of Jim:

He had treasured it all those years. The good old parson fancied his sailor-son. I’ve looked in at a sentence here and there. There is nothing in it except just affection. He tells his ‘dear James’ that the last long letter from him was very ‘honest and entertaining’. He would not have him ‘judge men harshly or hastily’. There are four pages of it, easy morality and family news … the old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his dear James’ will never forget those ‘who once given way to temptation in the very instant hazards his total depravity and ever-lasting ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong’

Marlow remarks that this letter was never answered but

who can say what converse he may have held with all those placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger and strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so many things ‘had come’. Nothing ever came to them, they would never be taken unawares and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they are all evoked by the mild gossip of the father … gazing with clear unconscious eyes …

I suppose Jim's father is not the exemplar I would propose for an account of the relationship of morality and religion. The 'serenity', the 'equability' and so on go with the inviolable shelter. It is that and the 'clear unconscious gaze' that is frightening. If I have been there, it has always also been with a sense of something stirring beyond the periphery, a sense of foreboding ... Marlow is perhaps not entirely just but, he sees the old parson from a position unavailable to him and his offspring, Jim's siblings. He knows just what they are unaware of and what makes them unaware. These people are also in Plato's Cave, but to leave the cave is in effect to be expelled from Eden ...