“… I discovered a strange coincidence. Among those who survived the carnage of the Great War, two of the 20th century’s greatest religious thinkers had faced one another across exactly the same stretch of the Front on the devastated hillsides to the west of Verdun in June 1916. Both went on to describe their war service as the most formative experience of their lives and, out of that hell of exploding mud and body-parts, they were to forge radical new ideas about the role of religion and the future of humanity. They could not have been more different: one was a Lutheran pastor and philosopher, proud to be Prussian and brought up to be politically and religiously conservative; the other a French Jesuit, fascinated by science and evolution and soaked in traditional Catholicism.

Separated by no more than a few hundred yards of mud and barbed wire, they struggled, each in his own way, to make sense of their faith in the face of the horrors they witnessed on the battlefield. Paul Tillich served as a Lutheran chaplain, often also as a gravedigger, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a stretcher-bearer. Their subsequent writings do not simply illustrate their own personal struggles with faith and their courage in the face of opposition, but shed light on some of the ways in which our thinking has changed over the last hundred years…

Beyond any logical answers given by believers and theologians to the ‘problem of evil’ or their rational refutations by enlightened sceptics, what I am searching for here is a way of thinking and feeling that can help us cope with the facts of human fragility that threaten each of us, whether or not we follow a religious tradition.  Insight of that sort comes at a price; both men went through hell, during the war and after it.

Paul Tillich had two nervous breakdowns during his war service and emerged with his social, political and religious outlook transformed. Teilhard de Chardin appeared to emerge religiously unscathed, but an examination of his letters and journals reveals that he suffered from severe anxiety states. He felt himself paralysed, unable to act effectively, unless he could see some definite and guaranteed goal to which his action could contribute. For him, affirming and re-affirming his beliefs became his therapy, his way of overcoming the threats he faced day by day on the battlefield and in the years that followed. He judged that, without purpose and direction, we are lost.

Teilhard fought against doubt, while Tillich embraced it. Of course, one might argue that the field of battle is the one place where there is no room for doubt. Orders are given and obeyed; men are trained out of any habits of independent action. On a superficial level, freedom and choice give way to brutal necessity, but that does not preclude a deeper longing to make sense of life in an environment where the chance falling of a shell brings sudden death or slow burial.

The front line is all about movement and purpose, attempting to gain ground or being forced to relinquish it. But is that enough to confer meaning? Is a forward charge, in any sphere of life, sufficient to give personal satisfaction?

Nietzsche might have found his source of happiness in a straight line and a goal, but is that requirement universal? So, as we prepare to scan the battlefield, here are some of the questions we might ask: Is it possible to be truly content while living with uncertainty and vulnerability, whether on the battlefield or in a cancer ward? How do we make sense of a world in which death is the only certainty? How is it possible to maintain a sense of yourself, when all that is familiar crumbles about you? Is it possible to find a narrative that makes sense of the world, or is our desire to do so just another proof that life is inherently absurd?

Is it reasonable to believe in a God, or Providence, or to trust that, through reason and science, life will tend to improve in the long term? Is war a natural and inevitable part of human life, or a hideous distortion of a potential that is both reasonable and collaborative? And is it sensible to give yourself to a cause, national, global or religious, in the hope that your life will thereby take on meaning, significance and value, or is enlightened self-interest the only reasonable option?

These are universal and perennial questions, and I cannot pretend even to start to offer answers to them. But sometimes such questions are presented to us in a particularly stark form, as I believe is the case in the story of Teilhard and Tillich and their responses to the Great War.  But, for me, their story is also deeply personal; so please indulge me for a moment, while I explain.

In the 1960s, while still at school, I read two books that were to influence the course of my life. The first was Honest to God(1), written by John Robinson, then [CoE]  Bishop of Woolwich. I had been brought up in a conventionally Anglican family and regularly took part in worship as a choirboy and altar boy and later as a lay clerk in a cathedral. My life had been soaked in the heady mixture music, architecture, ceremony and precisely choreographed liturgy that nourishes a sense of wonder.  Here was something real, beautiful, profound; something that seemed to sum up all that made life worthwhile.  But secretly I had doubts, even then, about the literal truth of the beliefs that I was required to recite in the creeds.

I could not bring myself to believe in the supernatural. There was wonder, but no magic; a sense of the ultimate, yet no external deity; a world more real than the trivia of daily routines, yet one that spoke of a god in whom I could not believe.  That was why Honest to God (1) came as such a relief. It allowed critical, rational thinking on matters of religion; it showed that it was not necessary to believe in a crude or literal way in the existence of God, indeed that any such belief was at best inadequate and at worst idolatrous. It also introduced me to the work of Paul Tillich, a German theologian who had spent the previous three decades in the United States and whose interest for me centred on a single claim that ‘God is not a being, but being-itself.’ 

At the time I knew nothing of Heidegger, so the background to the discussion of ‘Being’ was rather lost on me. But that simple statement offered a moment of liberation, of finally not having to feel guilty about secretly failing to believe in the supernatural. ‘God’ – and hence everything that religion was about – concerned reality itself, life itself. I could plunge into life without the need to give everything some external reference. This was reinforced shortly afterwards by reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man.  I was far less certain about that book, except that it seemed to offer a view of evolution based on increasing complexity and consciousness and moving towards a point where humanity would come together as a single entity – an Omega point, at once the end of human evolution and the fulfilment, as he saw it, of the universal Christ. If Tillich had freed me from supernaturalism, it was Teilhard who hinted at a religious dimension for humanity’s future.  And this, of course, was in the mid 1960s, when anything seemed possible!

It was therefore with naïve ideas about what might shortly be happening on the religious and philosophical front that I headed off to university.  I was hardly aware at the time that, in reality, the church was still mostly stuck with supernatural beliefs, and that philosophy was obsessed with linguistic analysis, definition of terms and a refusal to become engaged with practical issues.  I assumed that the world was about change and that those of us lucky enough to be undergraduates in 1968, would soon find the future shaped by the near-revolution taking place in Paris and the energy of those who were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and all forms of imposed authority, out in the streets of London.

We were metaphorically at the barricades against past repression and naïve beliefs. The future was there for the taking. At the time, those studying law or theology at Kings College, London, were still required to wear gowns for lectures, while a few hundred yards away, the London School of Economics had been occupied by demonstrators and crowds were surging along the Strand. I bundled my gown away in my locker and joined the throng, unaware of just how tragic and naïve it was to think that such a gesture might make any difference. —- Through Mud and Barbed Wire by Melvin Thompson

(1) More on this later…