NIGHT a book review- Part 2 By Robert Fullarton

NIGHT a book review- Part 2

By Robert Fullarton

copyright Robert Fullarton 2016

To speak on the story of Wiesal is to examine the theological, philosophical and spiritual dilemma of existence in its entirety. C.S Lewis had pointed out before that he had bemoaned and accused the creator, even in a state of disbelief about the creation being so “cruel and unfair” and yet later stated “where did I get this idea of it being “fair” and “unfair” from?” Lewis speaks upon our judgements and perspectives that may be both unrealistic, inaccurate and incomplete in their pronouncements and presumptions. From the existence of human conscience, we have the innate and intrinsic sense of distinguishing between good and bad behaviour, but we must go further and see them as being attached to a spiritual truth, for which all behaviour has its nexus and its kernel, a point of reference if you will, where all adheres and obeys, being sustained in perfection.

The notion of goodness and badness always had an intrinsic worth, and a sense of meaning to ancient civilizations, in their fear and respect of what lay beyond the partiality of the observable human world. Today the power of such moral force has been degraded to modern terminology, wilfully nailed shut with political innuendos and scepticism but the moral universe of man was seen by the ancients to be partially known in what was seen and fully known in what was unseen. For without a reference point, no belief system or perspective can have credence or soundness to it.

Basically the belief in an afterlife was and has been the belief that all things are left unfinished and are to be resumed or attended to, after the partition of death, that life itself has no answer in itself, and of itself but in something outside it, beyond it and something more profound than the world we live in, there is the source that brings complete unison and wholeness. The pantheist believes all things to be god, but cannot give a justifiable or viable answer to the belief and notion of what good and evil really are, and of course the intrinsic reality of morality that exists in man is denied. Do we not have a natural idea of what justice demands?

Civilizations were built upon codes of conduct, reprimand and edification. Good and evil to be honest is lived out in the minds and hearts of men every day in many situations. In one man’s heart there is a revulsion and a heartfelt response to the cause of a moral catastrophe and in another person there may exist a shallow sadism to the suffering of the first man. The drama gains breadth of power because, it has been described and declared by the Theist (and the Christian Triunetheist) to be an issue concerning the metaphysical, on the spiritual wholeness of truth, one that concerns all major questions, as the enigmatic answers to the riddle we call creation.

I had not planned on writing an essay on theology or on Christian apologetics in regards to this book review, but I felt that the more I wrote, the more I got thinking on the matter and it seemed to me that this book cannot be given a mere conventional review or be dismissed in a typically modern way, using the scholar’s high-brow misunderstanding of what is at stake. Wiesal’s book and Wiesal’s experience, cannot be wistfully or flippantly dismissed, but must be examined for the individual reader. For me personally as a Christian it is the age old story of what humans can do given sufficient means and excuse to do so. What is stated by Wiesal is clear to see in the narrative, what is implied or assumed carries though the reader’s mind as the assumption and conclusion of the generation, it came further to unbelief in God, no longer was such unbelief a thing for the upper classes, the intellectuals and elite of the day but was to penetrate all levels of the social stratum. Man in the post-war western world for the greater part became comfortable in the secular society but more disillusioned, more dis-orientated than ever, his religion became the creed of communism, capitalism, scientism and even environmentalism. Ancient answers and beliefs form the Judeo-Christian faith went ignored, but men without orientation, with a diluted moral source both aspired to and later abhorred the consequences of extreme liberality, of the unimpeded nature of man, that was and has been growing.

The world today is the menagerie from which the wild animals are set loose upon each other, silent voices, in great terror can only watch on with premonitions as the first tremors begin, the ideologies, the nature of man reaches full force and then the earthquake comes to its devastating conclusion, ripping through all, it tears the ligaments of the social orders to shreds, pitches neighbour against neighbour and the talk of God only reaches a whisper in the obscure believer, as sighs and groans in human hearts tower unto an atmosphere of sheer terror.

This was what Wiesal wrote about, this was what Wiesal experienced and this is what Wiesal could not understand and still cannot to this day, for to divorce your understanding of the natural and the supernatural, means that life cannot have order against chaotic forces, cannot have definition or reason to begin with it. The common understanding or connotation of rationality and rationalism is a long unknown misnomer of human understanding for which grants dramatic irony to the man who believes in accidental chance but accords all things to a system of luck -he without knowing it is conditioned to believe in the notions of justice, fairness, good behaviour, bad behaviour, freedom and fortune etc- but has no idea why he uses such terms. The verbiage of enlightenment still hangs and drifts as not an antidote to the terrors of the inquisition but as an alternative that gives men free-reign and an unhealthy level of pride to make man aspire “above the mount of God and the flaming stones”, where one then states “I created myself.” These are the ramifications; this is the fullness of the chaotic end of order.

Christianity is about relationship with the creator, it is about the fullness of knowing and living with the spirit of God and it is about the changing of our nature into a nature of moral perfection, of physical perfection and the knowledge of spiritual truths and therefore it matures into an everlasting species, of moral perfection and everlasting life. For the Christian believes that the separation between man and God is not one purely of ontological and metaphysical proportions, but of moral differences, which need to be resolved in the nature of humanity. That is why and how Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection makes sense to me and is a perfect example of all that can be attained and lived as the separation between God and man is abolished. The night is truly horrific but men must come out from underneath the dark hideouts of the world and see the fullness of day for themselves.

Great searching of the heart by Robert Fullarton- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2016

Great searching of the heart

by Robert Fullarton

Great unspoken fear

Have you got a voice?

Calling through another broken year

The winnowing of the days, the fatal choice

Wanting and seeking through the jungle

For this desire there are no words

But merely the burdens and the groans

The feelings, like a pan that cooks the depths

Of the withheld responses and the words

All that could and can be said

Remains in the deep dark

Like pangs for God

In deep existential hunger

When the sun descends on my joy

There is a sense of sorrow in the valley

Where the dreams seem real and the day unreal

It goes on and we trudge, we trudge and trudge

Up that mountain of Moriah

The pageantry of the world

The symposium,

The facade, the colonnade of temporal celebration

All in all deceasing in time

But this hunger is tremendous

What body can tolerate

And dreams conjure?

All goes to God in the end

Much is unfinished

And much is yet to happen

NIGHT by Elie Wiesal, a book review. part 1..by Robert Fullarton

NIGHT by Elie Wiesal, a book review. part 1

on human suffering and faith.- by Robert Fullarton

I recently read Night by Eli Wiesal, a renowned Noble prize winning author of more than forty books. It touches on the well-known familiar story of the holocaust and ancient history of the Jewish people, the diaspora and the devastation caused indirectly through Jewish assimilation in Europe.

Wiesal however is more keen to emphasise the philosophical implications and the personal events, with the aftermath that has come to both his life and the world at large. His preconceptions on life have been separated and shattered like the hopes that he and the people of Sighet in Romania gave that “things could not possibly get any worse” or stoop any lower.

Each man and woman’s worst fears were confirmed, it was and has been another collective, truly refined display of human nature without prohibition, deterrence of will and force. It is the examination of what human beings possess given significant room and excuse to commit what man is capable of perpetrating on a massive and previously unknown scale.

Wiesal the optimistic and intelligent youth, the student of the Talmud, the reader of the Kabballah, the dutiful son and seeker of God in contemplation comes out of the book having been hardened, de-sensitized and made cynical after all that has happened and can possibly happen in the worst of all possible situations. To be honest however it must be stated that both Wiesal, his family and even the villagers of Sighet were warned and had opportunities to avoid what was coming and escape the “night” that would fall upon them. One man had prophetically escaped a death camp and came to tell them all what was coming their way -which gives it a distinctly contemporaneous feel to our generation and to those past where an eerie warning goes unheard and where a dreadful disaster comes upon a scoffing and incredulous people- with biblical like proportions and with typical ignorance this man was laughed at, for he could see what they could not, for he knew what was coming in the future and that the fires of persecution to the north were coming south, when Hungary actively involved itself in the persecution and the rounding up of Jewish people into hands of the WaffenSS.

Wiesal waits for the “rescuer” or the “deliverer” in the classical sense of the meaning, but the deliverer does not come, at least in the sense that Wiesal had assumed for and hoped in. His expectations are flattened and all that he has been taught and has valued is set aside as a void of meaning engulfs him from within.

He declares both God and man to be dead, as he recollects the very paces he took with his father through the selection process, between life and death, between camp labour and a burning pit. His descriptions of the camp are almost otherworldly, filled with judgments, hellish moments, here men act with a demonic passion for the system of brutality that can be in the hearts of men. Who can Wiesal trust and love in this world of betrayal, murder, survival, brute force and labour?

Truly his "night" is compared to that of what was called a dark night of the soul as St. John on the cross once termed it, or is it a realisation of what can happen and inevitably will happen in the wild house, that is mankind, perhaps if man is left to his desires he will inevitably destroy himself (to be ripped in two) or be subdued by the forces of evil that are bent on falsehood and destruction. Was Wiesal's world an idealistic shelter which kept him from the horrible reality that exists in its terrible manifestation. Perhaps one can argue that Wiesal was shocked and disturbed from within, after what had happened as his expectations were so high and so great that the experiences were beyond anything he could give understanding, reason, clarity or justification to. Wiesal's books are his long witheld expression, his breath that came after the trauma. Wiesal however could not see a reason or a redeeming factor or even a principle behind all that had happened and that is why he had declared "God and man to be dead." In part he is a spokesman for those many other people, both men and women who overtime, fell away from faith in God. In this book it is ever more poignant because he envelops the theme of the “chosen people” and he is just a 15 year old boy whose innocence has been stolen so soon in calamity that he cannot understand, nor does he even have ample time to think it over and so he comes to bewail for his people and think to himself in one powerful scene “where is God?” when a young boy with the “face of an angel”, hangs upon the gallows, with his face baring no suffering but silence and even peace. Then strangely there comes the thought in his head “he is there upon the gallows”, with the boy, (this infamous line is one of the most moving in the whole book). This book asks the honest questions each generation should ask (particularly those who want to ask why a good God would allow so much suffering to exist to those who are innocent of such circumstances).

This is the toughest inquiry for the believer and the non-believer alike, but it is nonetheless a truth and a fully rounded truth that needs to be addressed and which I would like to address further with this book review in the next part

NOTES:

 Does not man have a lot to answer for...and examine the way man treats man..its a pretty terrible legacy..one in which we all have a possible impetus to do bad. That's reality.

Destiny through thick and thin copyright 2016

Destiny through thick and thin

copyright 2016

Destiny has spoken from the heavens

that declare to me all I am

and will become

from the toiling of the earth

to the rising from the grave

my tears have fallen upon stone

and let not my heart be stone

but be the repository of love

for all who come upon me

and I will go from the wayward people

unto my home

from the toiling of the earth 

to the rising from the grave