Beslan's Children

I've been reluctant to blog about the massacre of the children in Beslan, as there seems to be very little insight that can be brought to such a horror. Get Religion, though, has two helpful posts: one on the media's approach to the religious dimension of the massacre, and one on an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury reconciling faith in God with such unspeakable human suffering.

The massacre undoubtedly represents the most serious challenge to our belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God. It's not a new challenge, of course. Ivan, from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, famously indicts God on behalf of all suffering children, including Beslan's:

This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!

Certainly an emphasis on free will is intellectually essential in constructing a response, if not emotionally satisfying. In that regard, I prefer the work of Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft, whose Making Sense Out of Suffering is one of the most helpful and accessible attempts to reconcile Christian faith with the reality of our existence. It centers, as any meaningful response must, on the Incarnation, which does not mitigate or justify the suffering of Beslan's children, but insists that they have not suffered alone.

Rob