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.