In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul.
But what are his qualifications for such commentary?
Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.
Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.
Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.
I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing
it.
And the same goes for the whole gang (Dawkins,Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)
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