Religion, Perfectionism and the Fair Deal

IN A RECENT ARTICLE in The New York Times about his play, Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller said, “Every birth is a rebirth of the claim for justice.” This reflects, it seems to me, man's perennial struggle for meaning as against meaninglessness, for fairness as against unfairness, justice as against injustice.

“How can this happen to me?” Was the anguished cry of Ben, a fifty-six-year-old accountant who was slowly losing his vision. Into a world where one accounts for everything and all is accountable, there exploded the unimagined and unexpected terror of blindness. Ben believed that if a man uses his intelligence and follows the rules, good fortune and success will be his reward. Evil is the due of the stupid and the rule-breakers. He had no reason to believe otherwise since good fortune and success had come his way for fifty-six years. All of his life had been dedicated to making himself independent and self-sufficient, and now he was confronted with the spectre of increasing helplessness and dependency on other people. If he were a religious man, his anguish could have been an offering: he could have surrendered himself to the providence of God; he could have entered into a dialogue with God as did Job in his suffering. As did Job he would have to conclude that the omnipotent creator, God, must be envisaged as beyond all the ethical claims of His creatures, and His counsels must be regarded impervious to human comprehension. His solution would then be one of ultimate trust, expressed so often in the phrase: “It is the will of God.” These consolations were not available to Ben, nor was there any comfort in the cold medical facts of what was going on in his eyes. His anguished cries were sent into a void of silence, the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces” which so frightened Pascal. Herman Melville described it as the sea in Moby Dick: “the aweful lonesomeness of the open shoreless ocean is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a