No Place for Rain

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EmToRs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XII OCTOBER, 1949 No.4 NO PLACE FOR RAIN HE western world has nearly come to the conclusion that hell is probably unpleasant. At least the previews of the last fifteen years have shaken us out of a smug dismissal of the possibilities of hell. No amount of evidence can move any man to an admittance of the certainties of hell, since hell, like heaven, is a supernatural thing that must be believed until the doors swing open for the investigator who demands first hand evidence. Still, the previews are as convincing as intrinsic evidence can be in such a matter. For in these past fifteen years whole nations have adopted the habits of hell as first principles of personal and national activities. Injustice, and its inevitable climax of hatred of God, have been paraded with pride and praised for their obvious and immediate successes. Until recently, we have taken injustice rather lightly, perhaps because we have thought of it in terms of disparate acts of burglary or business acumen. When it appeared on the stage of the world as a fixed habit, a vice, men found it hard to 397 398 WALTER FARRELL believe their eyes; surely, such stark evil could not walk nakedly through the lives of men shamelessly, without embarrassment , with no attempt at secrecy. It took the unmistakable evidence of concentration camps, murder kitchens, dying testimony of hulks of battered eyewitnesses who testified with their bodies as well as their words, to convince the men of the West that the foulness of this vice was poisoning the world that had been Christian. But this, as we learned in the slow way of incredulous men, was only a beginning; the kindergarten level of the science of evil was initiated in Nazi Germany. The graduate level was reached only after the world writhed in agony from its contacts with the tots who had learned so quickly and so eagerly. Now the western world is slowly coming to realize that the masters have taken over behind the Iron Curtain, with no intention of limiting their fundamental principles of injustice and hatred to the territory already besmirched by the soot from the fires of hell. We are shocked by flagrant injustice, superabundant even for vicious goals. Political slavery, police terrorism, mock trials cluttered with the harvest of torture, murder, imprisonment, flagrant and barefaced falsehood, nations disappearing under our very eyes and human beings by the thousands snatched into a mysteriously evil oblivion; these things have shaken us badly. Such extremes go beyond any assignable purpose except sheer malice. The hand we lift in protest is, we notice, trembling ; for such loathsomeness does more than turn the stomach of a man. We are not yet looking through the open doors of h~ll; but the preview is almost too much for us. It is a badly needed comfort to look about the part of the world still left to us and breathe its air deeply. Here, thank God, things are different. Every detail of the comparison of the two worlds is flattering, and we begin to think of ourselves as angels of light girding for battle with the powers of darkness. Almost, we thank God that we are not as the rest of men. Here is a battle of absolute fundamentals, a basic opposition of love and justice to hatred and injustice; and we are on the side of NO PLACE FOR RAIN 399 the angels. So we begin to muster our forces, particularly our moral forces since this is ultimately a moral battle. At this point our vigorous righteousness begins to ooze away. Not that we are any less revolted by the reign of the vice of injustice; but we are bewildered by the paradoxical condition of the world of the West. That flattering uprightness, so long considered a kind of inheritance, fares badly when we bring it out of the shadow of assumptions into the pitiless glare of close scrutiny. Perhaps our mustering of forces will have to be much...