Yesterday, I was reading a small article on
an Islamic perspective on COVID19, the virus that's been going around and, for
most of us, disrupted our lives in significant ways. The author quoted the Holy
Qur'an 2:124 and explained this trial by saying: "Allāh sends us tests to see how we will react
and handle them."
I have been trying to determine what has bothered me about many of the
responses to COVID19. I was going through Jonathan Lear's work, Happiness,
Death, and the Remainder of Life, and that is when I realised what it
was: they all shared the common approach of trying to explain breakdown or
disruption in a principled way. Let me explain what I mean.
COVID19 has clearly disrupted our lives. More than mere disruption, however, it
has been a cause of anxiety: fear over getting sick and anxiety over not
knowing what to expect. Rather than appreciating it as a disruption, however,
there seems to be a tendency to quickly cover-up and move-past the significance
of the pandemic by seeing it as a test, and not as a trial.
In this essay, I want to suggest that trials are disruptions to our mental and
social structures. As such, they cannot logically be accommodated within an
existing structure. I want to suggest that individuals want to cover up this
anxiety-laden meaninglessness, but instead inappropriately respond to
afflictions in a manner that prevents them from appreciating their religious
value as blind or chance events.
Trials and tests
I want to tentatively
suggest the following theoretical distinction between tests and trials: a test
is done for-the-sake-of something. In particular, Islamically,
a test seems to be a means that we can interact with the world and build our
virtues, cultivate God-consciousness, etc. Thus, we know that God tests people
with wealth. He also tests us with negative events, but they do not necessarily
disrupt the edifice of our mental or social structure. Rather, they require a
principled, ethical response. So, for instance, I may develop a back injury,
and my reaction to it (patience, fortitude, etc) would be a typical response.
Many tests seem to be the tests of things staying the same, but we are supposed
to react to them more appropriately.
A trial, on the other hand, refers to something else altogether (in the way I
am using it). A trial is not for-the-sake-of-something. A trial is a disruption in
our understandings of the world, or typical meaning-making processes. In other
words, a trial "overcomes" us (Quran 90:5).
The key thing about a trial is that it cannot carry an inherent purpose
with it. Why not? Because the very thing that is purpose-making (our
understanding of the world) is disrupted. A disruption is a flaw, sort of like a privation (or absence) of mental order. Privations can't have
properties or essences. They are absences. A trial is an absence of
meaningfulness*.
Let me try to draw this out further. Normally, when I am tested in life, I must
respond in a principled way. I should ask myself: what is
the right thing to do Islamically? or: what is the best thing to do in terms of
courage? or: what is the best thing to do in terms of justice? etc. I am
constantly considering the situation in terms of creative (novel) applications
of principles. The thing that makes it a test is whether my creativity with the
principle (or application of the principle to the particular situation) can analyse the correct thing to do,
whether I stick to the principle, whether I learn from mistakes, etc. If I want
to be able to say: yes, I passed the test, I have to be able to show that I
responded in a principled way to the best of my abilities.
In a trial, however, there is no room to respond in a principled way. This is
because the mental structure (the cognitive structure) that allows me to even
assess the situation is disrupted. You could say that there is a type of
temporary insanity, except that it need not be psychotic. It is because of this
disruption of regular mental functioning that we have new possibilities for
growth and degradation.
So, for example, imagine that my back injury is very severe. It is so severe
that I am no longer able to work or even dress myself. I cannot understand the
meaning of this. I try to cope, say by praying, trying to understand what is
happening to me as a result of God's wisdom, and so on, but I find myself
having to work very hard to maintain this understanding of divine wisdom. I
want to suggest that it is hard to maintain an understanding of God's wisdom in
this event because it is (ethically) random. It is a disruption, it cannot be understood
meaningfully. It
has disrupted my typical ways of having understood divine wisdom - say, from
having read books about it and not having had to really 'encounter it - and as
a result, I am struggling to maintain that understanding.
An example of this seems to be Qur'an 33:10-11:
"You who believe, remember God’s
goodness to you when mighty armies massed against you: We sent a violent wind
and invisible forces against them. God sees all that you do.They massed against
you from above and below; your eyes rolled [with fear], your hearts rose into
your throats, and you thought [ill] thoughts of God.There the believers were
sorely tested and deeply shaken: the hypocrites and the sick at heart
said, ‘God and His Messenger promised us nothing but delusions!’"
What happens after a trial is crucial. A trial results in
one of two things: it either reinforces the existing structure (sometimes seen
as a "compulsion to repetition," as Freud thought), or it causes a
breakthrough of new possibilities because it has broken through an
existing structure. If we go down the former route, we will not have
actualized the possibilities of a disruption. We see that the hypocrites in the
verses quoted above merely go back to their old understandings of events. The
believers, however, are “shaken,” because this trial has forced them to
re-understand who they are and what they think God owes them.
An affliction, in my view, is an extended trial. There is an extended period of
meaninglessness, of a need to react and reinforce old habits of thinking, that
is wearying on the mind. There is a real possibility of helplessness in the
face of lacking ways to understand what is happening. Despair can be another
consequence of afflictions, as the person loses hope in finding meaning or
a stable mental structure again. Or there can be the development of bitterness,
spite, rage. Afflicted people often feel as though they are cursed: continually unable to understand the randomness and extensiveness of what they are experiencing.
*Though the lack of purposiveness is a conclusion that Jonathan Lear also
reaches, his rationale is somewhat different and depends on the psychoanalytic
idea of life lived under tension
Why do trials exist?
Let’s say we agree that a trial is a sort of suspension of typical, principled
ethical life. Why would it exist then? Why does God afflict us at all?
Unlike Jonathan Lear, religious believers cannot be content with the view that
there are just some things in life that lack a principle. After all, God has
power over all things. It goes against the Islamic fibre to suggest that He
would just let stuff happen.
I want to suggest – again, rather tentatively – that the “divine purpose” of a
trial is precisely its lack of ethical purpose. A test is for-the-sake-of
something. A trial exists because it is not for-the-sake-of an ethical something. The fact that we
cannot respond to a trial in a typical way is an opening for religious
possibilities that would otherwise not exist. You may, for example, see the
world so radically different that you become open to the possibility of God’s
existence.
Conversely, however, there is also a possibility of a further reinforcement of
prior structures, a sort of insane repetition. I think that Satan suffers from
this. His response to “affliction” (a disruption of his mental structures) has
been to repeatedly and spitefully torment mankind.
Analogously, in psychoanalysis, these sorts of moments may not prove the
existence of a fundamental drive or principle like the death drive; they may be
entirely meaningless like Mr Lear thinks. However, they are still useful. Their usefulness is
precisely in their disruptive ability to open up possibilities of thinking and
being. However, this opening-up has to be seized. This breakdown has to be made
into a lucky break.
Despite this, however, it is clear that trials are deeply uncomfortable
experiences, particularly because they seem to be random. The blindness of the
whole thing is what makes it so jarring. We do not “earn” afflictions. And they
will always carry with them the deep discomfort of an unprincipled, disruptive
thing, a sort of latent virus inside the stable mind. They will never be
comforting or comfortable things. Thus, Simone Weil says:
“A blind mechanism, which takes no account of the degree of spiritual
perfection, continually tosses people and throws some of them at the foot of
the Cross. It depends only on them to keep – or not – their eyes turned towards
God through the shaking. It is not that the providence of God is absent. It is
by His providence that God willed necessity as a blind mechanism.”
In that sense, it is similar to the existence of evil. Evil, if we take it to
be a privation (absence) of good, as I do, cannot carry an inherent purpose
with it. But there is no doubt that it carries certain “uses,” including
usefully disrupting what we think or how we live so that we create purposes out of that evil. (It works against
complacency, for example.)
Divine wisdom and lack of
teleology
Why can't we say that the
purpose of the event is the after-the-fact approaches to the
event? The objector might say to me: look, sure there is a disruptive event.
And maybe in the moment, that event seems meaningless and we can't know how to
respond. However, when we look back on the event, we see that it was, in fact,
an incidence of God's wisdom. We see that we took this meaningless event and
grew because of it. So clearly the purpose of the event was the growth that
followed!
I want to argue against this
inclination. We can do this with tests, because tests exist with an
ethical purpose. There is a principle, e.g. demonstration of courage, that they
can be subsumed under. The existence of the test is clearly purposive, in that
it follows the normal precepts of ethical action. (It doesn't disrupt our
mental structure.)
However, we cannot do this
with trials. Trials, if they are meaningless, can't be post-hoc given meaning
by how we approach them. The meaning will be located in the approach,
not in the event itself. Why must this be the case? Because any
appropriate response to the affliction must include the
understanding of its overall meaninglessness, otherwise it will not touch the
afflicted person deeply. Meaningless suffering is one of the greatest trials a
person can undergo. Take Prophet Ayyub عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ. He was an eminently pious man who was touched with torments, seemingly
because Satan wanted to prove that he would be weak and lose faith in God. Thus
the Holy Qur'an says (38:41):
"Bring to mind Our
servant Job who cried to his Lord, ‘Satan has afflicted me with weariness and
suffering.'"
His suffering having
originated from Satan speaks to the disruptive and meaninglessness of the
suffering. He is aware of this, which is why he knows it is from Satan – a
being whose evil is such that it is frustrating i.e. it is vain, it will come
to nought. His evil has the element of chaos in it. It cannot be fully grasped
why he does what he does. However, it can be grasped that
meaninglessness should be responded to with meaningfulness. Prophet Ayyub عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ knows that Satan's affliction is meaningless; he
knows that he cannot turn to anyone but God to tolerate meaningless suffering.
The meaninglessness of affliction is what is wearying about it.
If we too quickly give
meaning to a meaningless event, we lose out on the opportunity of receiving new
meanings or a new mental structure from God. Had Prophet Ayyub عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ not seen his affliction as from Satan and called to God, had he
not patiently waited for God to respond, he would not have been blessed as he
was with divine inspiration and abundance. His reward is for tolerating meaningless suffering (Qur'an 38:42-43):
“‘Stamp
your foot! Here is cool water for you to wash in and drink,’ and We restored
his family to him, with many more like them: a sign of Our mercy and a lesson
to all who understand.”
There are at least three major types of anxieties that we can suffer from during our earthly lives, which Paul Tillich outlines in his work, The Courage to Be: anxiety of death (or non-being), anxiety of meaninglessness, and anxiety of guilt. Each of these corresponds to a type of suffering. Certainly the sufferings of death and of guilt is explained well in Islamic theology. Nobody says, for example, that guilt does not exist or that it is not painful. Rather, the phenomenon of guilt is accepted and then we are forgiven. However, when it comes to the affliction of meaninglessness, we often seem to want to reject that it exists. We don't want to accept it and then explain it. We want to give it meaning. But that would destroy the very thing that makes it an affliction! The meaninglessness of affliction has to be accepted for it to be understood as an affliction.
What is the relationship
between the meaningless and the existence of a higher-order wisdom of
affliction? Meaninglessness means that there is no ethical principle that affliction
falls under. However, there is a metaphysical principle, namely Providence
(inayat), that it falls under. From an ethical perspective, it is a
matter of chance that falls upon an innocent person. From a metaphysical perspective, however, it continues to be
a matter of necessity and is thus subsumed under the general order of goodness. Yet attempts to understand this general providential role with an ethical principle
will underestimate the ethical senselessness within the event, as well as the
ethical possibilities that exist after or in response to the event. We cannot keep conflating the existence of divine wisdom with the existence of a meaningful and purposeful event upon which we can easily stick the label of 'blessing' or 'punishment.'
Back to COVID19
It is now time to return to
COVID19. I want to suggest that COVID19 is an example of a trial for many of
us, though not for all of us; some of us seem to be experiencing it more as a
test. Thus, we see a disruption in our understanding of the world, as the world
changes around us in response to a random virus. Especially in first-world
countries, it is stunning to consider that our economy might ‘stop,’ that we
might choose to enter a recession to save lives, that we might
go to a hospital and not get treated or go to a supermarket and not find bread.
We are not used to not having data, living in such a fragile and uncertain way.
This virus is acting like a trial, and we are forced to reconsider our previous
way of understanding the world.
Some people respond to this with a steady hold on what they have believe. Still
others recognise the disruption and try to cover over it with a fantasy of
meaning that is not there. I want to suggest that we avoid both these
temptations. Religiously, COVID19 seems to be an example of a trial that is
afflicting a great many people at once. Rather than quickly covering over its
randomness, arbitrariness, and meaninglessness in our lives, I want to suggest
that we take it as a time to re-understand and re-relate to the world creatively
in light of the possibility of meaningless affliction.
Conclusion
How is affliction alleviated? I do not mean the technical aspects of pandemics,
which is the work of specialists. I mean: how is the meaningless disruption of an affliction alleviated?
It seems to me that we must “wait on God,” as Simone Weil says:
“Affliction renders God (God seems) absent for a time, more absent than a dead
man, more absent than the light in a completely dark cell. A sort of horror
submerges the whole soul. During this absence, there is nothing to love. What
is terrible is that in this darkness when there is nothing to love, if the soul
ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive. The soul must continues
to love in the void…”
When afflicted, we only have the choice of whether we look upon God or not. It might be a long wait – the wait of Prophet Ayyub عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ – but it is not an inactive
wait. It is a wait for meanings from God, rather than emboldening our prior
meanings. The
sense of ethical meaninglessness during this time can only be assuaged by the
knowledge of metaphysical meaningfulness i.e. providence. The concern with
leaping too quickly on a journey of meaning-making for COVID19, and for
afflictions in general, is that our prior mental structures are not
appreciating the possibility of growth in the event. We are attempting to cover
up the disruption and deep discomfort that such an event forces us to face. And
ultimately, we may miss out on the religious possibilities that exist in a
recognition of blind suffering.
I pray that God grants each one of us and our families health, blessings, and
understanding. And God knows best.
- MM, April 5th,
2020
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