How can we deal with existential doubt in a more productive creative way? It doesn’t leave us, might as well put it to good use! For me, the arts provide a tool for coping with it. We live in the gray, not the black and white, it’s unsustainable. And someone always gets hurt.
James Carroll goes to extraordinary lengths, writing of truths that he unearthed in his extraordinary research.
“The ultimate example of this image would emerge in Germany, but the fear that led Nazis to regard Jews as bloodsuckers to be excised was anticipated by the Iberian suspicion that Jews were more to be feared as assimilated insiders then as dissenting outsiders. Thus hatred of the other became a society’s scare-driven urge to eradicate an alien part of itself.”
“And once again, many Christians, and most of their leaders, moved against doubt in the traditional way - by repressing existential anxiety, defining it as evil, and projecting it especially onto Jews.”
“Universalist absolutism,” a Catholic veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, Patrick O’Hare, has said, “thrives on the diminishment of the other. The more the Church shores up the reach of its claim, the greater the danger that again - here is the lesson of the Inquisition - we will have “religion as a source of brutality.”
“In academia, the history of antisemitism is taught in Jewish studies departments, if at all, when it should be taught as a core component of the history of Western civilization. When the narrative of Jew hatred is recounted within the relatively narrow scope of Jewish studies, the structure of Jewish accusation and Christian guilt is reified, and antisemitism is defined as the Jews’ problem, instead of that of Western civilization, the culture that came into being with a Jew defined as a religious, economic, social, and, ultimately, racial outsider. But when antisemitism is treated mainly as a Jewish problem, the Jew is condemned to play the role of either self-flagellant or denouncer, with obvious dangers attached to each. That is why this history must be recounted not as the history of Jews but primarily as a history of the Church.”
“Difference is to be respected, not condemned.”
“We understand one another, if at all, only through analogies. Each recognizes that any attempt to reduce the authentic otherness of another’s focus to one’s own with our common habits of domination only seems to destroy us all, only increases the leveling power of the all-too-common denominators making no one at home. Conflict is our actuality. Conversation is our hope.”
“Conversation is our hope. In that simple statement lies the kernel of democracy. There is a special tragedy in the fact that, for contingent historical reasons, the Catholic Church set itself so ferociously against the coming of democracy - tragic because Christianity began its life as a small gathering of Jews who were devoted to conversation. This was, of course, characteristically Jewish, since Judaism is a religion of the book. Indeed, that was what made Judaism unique. That the book was at the center of this groups identity meant that the group was never more itself than when reading and responding to texts, and while the rabbinical schools may have presided over such a process, all Jews participated in it, especially after the liturgical cult of sacrifice was lost when the Temple was destroyed. Gatherings around the book became everything. Conversation became everything the assumption among the followers of Jesus was that they were all endowed with the wisdom, insight, maturity, and holiness necessary to contribute to the pursuit of the truth of who Jesus had been to them.”