Thomas Aquinas wrote similarly, accepting that if you don’t have your own limitations built into your concept of the divine, you’re not engaging with the divine but with an idol of your own making. What we know best about God is, therefore, what God is not. When we call God immortal, we are not saying anything positive, but simply that God is not mortal. When we say God is invisible, we are distinguishing God from the visible things that we do understand. The preacher, Meister Eckhart, travelled around Europe popularising the negative way. “If thou lovest God as God, as spirit, as Person or as image, that must all go,” he declared. “‘Then how shall I love him?’ Love him as he is: a not-God, a non-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image.”
Such logic might appeal if scholastic the-
ology does too. But what does this have to do with the agnosticism of today? Aquinas does, in fact, present a substantial challenge to the modern agnostic. It might be thought of in this way. Imagine, one day, you receive a bank state-
ment. Just before you push it to one side, you notice the balance. It reads £1 million. There must be a mistake, you think, and you call the clerk. They check and recheck. But, no, you later learn: everything is in order. There is no mistake. You can reach one of three con- clusions. The first is that the money is a gift from an unknown benefactor. The second is that the new balance is the result of a glitch, though now the money is yours. The third is to be unsure what has happened: it could be luck or it could be a gift.
T
he believer is like the first person. Life is like the money that suddenly appears: pure, extravagant gift. The atheist is like the second person: life
is a glitch in the vacuum of the cosmos, a bunch of stuff that suddenly, like the money, pops into existence. As for the agnostic, they are not sure where the cash came from. What they can decide to do, though, is spend some of it trying to find out whether there is a bene- factor. After all, the balance feels like a gift, and perhaps it is.
Aquinas has, as it were, something to say to all three. To the atheist, he observes that if you can honestly affirm that the richness of life is nothing more than a piece of brute luck, then there we must part ways. To the believer, he affirms that there is something behind the mystery that is existence, though he asserts that it’s a grave mistake to presume you know what that mystery is. And to the modern agnostic? He suggests that there is a living mystery behind it all, for if you can’t really believe life is just luck, how else could there be everything that is? So, he continues, you might want to spend some of your energies asking after that unknown which he called God. At worst, you’ll only deepen your sense of what it is to be human, the “in-between” creature whose own existence is irritatingly too small for itself.
■Mark Vernon is the author of How to be an Agnostic, published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.
DAVID BLAIR
‘Scarcely anyone opposed Mr Blair’s rapprochement with Libya at the time’
Colonel Mu’ammer Gaddafi, unshaven and unkempt, looked his usual scarecrow-like self when he met Tony Blair in the depths of the Libyan desert in 2007. The two leaders talked inside a tent decorated with imprints of camels while a gaggle of journalists, including myself, waited in the sand outside, being pushed to and fro by nervous Libyan soldiers. A plump, elderly Irishman in a
smart suit found himself enduring this indignity along with the rest of us. This harassed-looking figure turned out to be Peter Sutherland, then chairman of BP, who was waiting his turn to see Libya’s “Brother Leader”. Eventually, Mr Sutherland was allowed inside the tent, whereupon Col. Gaddafi invited BP to return to Libya 35 years after all its assets in the country were nationalised. The story of the deal done in the
desert by Mr Blair (no relation, incidentally, to me) has been retold in the last few weeks as Col. Gaddafi’s obdurate refusal to surrender power has pushed Libya into civil war. Mr Blair’s encounter with Tripoli’s quixotic leader has been presented as a parable of amoral statecraft, with British commercial interests, especially the greed of oil companies, being allowed to override everything else. But this critique is wide of the mark. Scarcely anyone opposed Mr Blair’s rapprochement with Libya at the time and, in truth, Col. Gaddafi’s rehabilitation marked a genuine success for British diplomacy. Barely four years before Mr Blair’s visit in 2007, Libya had been one of the world’s foremost supporters of terrorism. Today, Col. Gaddafi’s name is indelibly linked with the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, an atrocity that claimed 270 lives. But the amount of suffering he once inflicted on his own continent has faded from memory. From the 1970s onwards, Col. Gaddafi sponsored civil wars across Africa, causing bloodshed on a terrible scale. The Brother Leader invaded neighbouring Chad, fighting a forgotten war over a useless strip of land in the middle of
the Sahara that claimed thousands of lives and laid waste one of Africa’s poorest countries. Col. Gaddafi also armed and supplied Idi Amin’s regime, going so far as to deploy Libyan troops to fight alongside Uganda’s tyrant before his downfall in 1979. But all this came to an end as Col. Gaddafi sought to rehabilitate himself. The fact that he sacrificed his malign role as the chief sponsor of African civil wars should, in itself, justify Mr Blair’s policy. As a sideline, Col. Gaddafi was also running a covert nuclear weapons programme and doing his best to lay his hands on chemical and biological munitions. But in December 2003, he chose to give all this up and cooperate with British and American experts. Col. Gaddafi also disclosed the
details of his illegal suppliers. This breakthrough allowed Britain and America to prove that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, had been selling the key components for making nuclear bombs to the highest bidder. Libya’s full disclosure allowed Khan’s global proliferation network to be shut down. All this amounted to a crucial contribution to global security. As for what motivated Col. Gaddafi’s decision to come clean, Saddam Hussein’s fate a few months earlier must have influenced his calculations. The Brother Leader will have realised that his former path increased the risk of America and Britain combining to overthrow him. As for the commercial side of Mr
Blair’s deal in the desert, one vital point is often overlooked. Whenever an oil company signs a contract, journalists often leap to the conclusion that the agreement must be a money-spinner. Thus BP’s Libyan contract was described as “lucrative” in the Financial Times on 24 February, while last week’s Tablet stressed the “rich pickings” that Col. Gaddafi offered Western oil companies. In fact, BP has yet to make a
penny out of the Libyan deal signed in 2007. This was merely an exploration contract and the company has done nothing but conduct seismic surveys. BP has not deployed a single drilling rig in Libya; when the company’s international staff were evacuated this month, only 40 individuals left. So Mr Blair’s deal must be judged a commercial failure, but a strategic success. As such, it was fully justified. (See Tony Blair, page 4.)
■David Blair writes for the Financial Times.
12 March 2011 | THE TABLET | 7
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40