Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — May 16, 2010

I sat down this afternoon to resume work on the next installment
of the memoir, and had written a few paragraphs when my wife offered me
some lunch, which of course I accepted. Then we decided to eat in
front of the television, something we haven’t done very often since
last fall, when she began work on an online Master’s degree in
library studies. And that’s how I ended up spending the following two hours
watching Sophie Scholl: The Final
Days, one of three movies that
have been sitting here unwatched since sometime in March.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed
that I don’t discuss movies as much as I used to. That’s because I
haven’t seen many of them for the past nine months. A few years ago
we joined Netflix, and went on a long binge in which we saw a great
many movies that we (or I) had always wanted to see, and a great many
that people had recommended to us, and a great many that just struck
one of us as interesting. Our habit got so bad that we upgraded
our Netflix account to allow us to have three movies at once—that
meant we always had at least one at home, while the others made their
way through the mail back and forth to the Netflix distribution
center. But that traffic dropped off sharply last fall, when my wife started
spending every spare moment studying or attending class, and came
pretty much to a standstill back in March. The three movies that we
had on hand then had been here for six or eight weeks, until a week
or so ago, when the semester ended. Sophie Scholl was
the last of the three, and although I had some reservations about
beginning a movie late Sunday afternoon, when I still had a lot of
writing to do, I did it anyway.

All of this is to explain why
that next installment did not get written, and why I’m writing about
the movie instead: once I’d seen it I knew I wouldn’t be able
to concentrate on any other subject for a while. It’s a very, very
fine work and I strongly recommend it. Moreover, it touches on a
question so important to me that I’m not exaggerating when I say that I
spend some time thinking about it every day.

As you may know, Sophie Scholl
was one of the members of the clandestine German anti-Nazi group
called The White Rose (you can read about them
here). Most of them
were Christians, Protestant and Catholic. The group was not very
large, and it seems to have had little direct impact. Most of the
participants, including Sophie and her brother Hans, were arrested
and executed. The film begins with the incident that led to their
arrest, and most of it follows the struggle between Sophie and her
interrogators. At first she attempts (naturally) to deny everything,
and when that proves fruitless she turns defiant, telling the
authorities exactly what she thinks of Hitler and National Socialism.
But this resolve does not come easily to her: she’s very much afraid,
not only for herself, but for her family. And the authorities give
her a chance to cooperate and perhaps save herself, or at least get
by with a lighter punishment.

Why did she stand firm? In one
way, we all know the answer to that. It’s clear to us that she was
right, and from our safe places in societies where free speech is
taken for granted and the government is not thoroughly evil and is at least somewhat accountable
and constrained by law and custom, we applaud her purity. Certainly,
we say, one must resist manifest evil, one must stand on principle,
one must be true to one’s conscience,etc.—all true, all very fine things
to say, and very, very easy to say when there is little or no
possibility that one will be forced to live up to them at the cost of
one’s life.

What makes a martyr? I think
there are souls of such simple integrity that there is for them not
much distance between knowing what is right and attempting to do
it—not that the doing is easy for them, but that they are not
much troubled by the decision to do it. If one is to believe what
they say about themselves, some of the more vocal atheists are of
this type, not thinking too deeply about what is right or wrong and why, or why one
should choose the first and reject the second. They are positively
contemptuous of the idea that one would want to seek an intelligible
and metaphysically convincing justification for doing what is right:
what’s right is right, and that’s what you do, and that’s all there
is to it, they say; philosophy and theology don’t enter into it at
all. I am not confident of their judgment as to what is right, nor
quite as confident as they are of their own willingness to choose it
when the choice is difficult. But that is the way they talk,
and the way they seem to think it should work.

Others—and I am one of
these—want a better answer. Like children, we can’t stop asking
why? Not, in my case
at any rate, why
this or that action is right or wrong, but why
is it so important that we choose? This is only another way of asking
the question to which I alluded above: does
my life have, finally, any meaning? Not just a subjective and
emotional importance to me, because it’s mine and I desire to have
pleasure and avoid pain, but an objective meaning, an absolute
meaning.

If I should be put in the
position of sacrificing my life for the benefit of others, what is at
stake? If I believe that in a hundred or a thousand years, it will no
longer matter, because everyone involved will be equally dead, and
there is nothing beyond death, where will I get the strength to do
such a thing? If, believing this, I were in the position of Sophie
Scholl, twenty-two years old, still early in the one earthly life
that is all I have and all I ever
will have, why should I throw away my remaining sixty or so years for
a mere principle, or for the hope that my actions might hinder
the progress of the evil that is about to kill me? Isn’t the
only rational position for any individual to preserve his own life
for as long as he can, or at least until he finds it so unpleasant
that he no longer wants to preserve it, all the while taking what
pleasure he can find? If we are all going to disappear forever,
what does it matter whether any of us disappears now or later?

I must believe that my choice
matters in some ultimate way. Only then might I be able to make the
right choice in the face of death. I might still fail—if this
film is accurate, then Sophie Scholl suffered terrible anguish in her
effort to persevere in her decision. But I must believe that it matters.

Ultimate or absolute meaning must be eternal. If there is a time when it will
cease to matter, it is not ultimate or absolute. And meaning requires mind; it
exists only in relation to mind. Therefore absolute meaning requires God—eternal mind— though
it may not require me. I might be able to bear the idea that my death
will be the absolute extinguishing of my consciousness if I believe
that the meaning of my sacrifice is absolute
because it exists forever in the mind of God. (Thus the atheist who
gives his life for a cause or a person testifies to his belief in God.)

I understand of course that
this logic does not persuade anyone who does not wish to be
persuaded; to accept it is more a matter of seeing it than of
acknowledging it as proven.
And I don’t
believe God wants us
to be able to prove it that way. He wants us to make the choice, in
the most secret places of our hearts, where we are hardly even
conscious of choosing: the choice between meaning and not-meaning,
between love and not-love. Sophie Scholl put her trust in God, but it
was not simple or easy for her to do so. She submitted to her
crucifixion, but not without the fear that God had abandoned her. And
she prayed for deliverance that did not come. As I contemplate that
unanswered prayer (and I must say in passing that it is portrayed
with almost unbearable pathos in the movie) I ask myself whether she
was, perhaps, a fool to think that anyone heard her prayer, much less
that there was any possibility of its being answered.

But I don’t stop believing that she was not a fool, that
she was right, that her prayer was heard, and that there was a reason
why it was not answered. Well,
maybe that’s not exactly correct: say rather that I don’t stop
choosing to believe.

***

By the way, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is in German, with English subtitles. And the next installment of the memoir will be along in a few days; I’ve been thinking I might uncouple it from the Sunday night journal, because there are so many other things I want to write about in addition to it. But I’ll only do that if I can continue to produce a new section every week.