In the wake of Easter, the likelihood of coming across some aspect of Jesus’s life has been high. These past few days I’ve encountered, here and there, bits and fragments of content about Jesus. Two ideas in particular stood out.
One was the idea that helping the marginalised is an essential aspect of fulfilling God’s will in order to be granted access to eternal life in Heaven. The other is that of human beings as having sin inherently built into them.1
These two ideas together made me think about what is called God’s infinite kindness.
This interlacing of ideas is far from qualifying as an actual, well-informed theological analysis, or in any way a rigorous interpretation of Christian thought. In fact, I take it more as an initial prompt to reflect upon an often repeated Christian phrase, namely“The goodness of God knows no bounds”.
It is challenging to grapple with the concept of divine infinite kindness in a culture where the specific and concrete, -or the logically founded abstract- reliably overshadows this kind of spiritual assertions rooted in religious traditions.
To be clear, with such a qualification of being ‘this kind of spiritual assertions’, I do not mean to downplay their value. What I mean is that, it seems to me that nowadays, and in many parts of the world, we find ourselves primed with a different way of interpreting assertions about reality. This outlook works great when dealing with assertions with some empirical or logical foundation, but not so much when it comes to aspects of transcendence which we tend to confine to the realm of feeling or intuition. It also is naturally compatible to readings of these assertions originating from secular narratives, where the notion of God is subsumed under the category of relics of superstitious times. So, the secular narrative relegates the origin of what used to be an instantiation of a set of transcendent and life-defining ideas about how to live to a bygone era: ancient, archaic, science-less times. It imagines a past where too many breakthroughs that now we take for granted were still a nebulous spot in the horizon of historic progress. A past where the amount of unexplained phenomena reached a density intolerable for the human psyche and its need to make sense of things, to order chaos. So as a result, divine intervention had to be invented to explain why things happen the way they do.
Therefore, it is fair to say that in secular times we are not well equipped to unpack assertions that speak about things like what bounds divine kindness has, unless we choose to go down the symbolic, historic or anthropologic route. While effective, this approach only tackles single layers, thin coating of the phenomenon’s full coomplex thickness.
Thus, when the concept of ‘The goodness of God” is present in a sentence, some complications become immediately evident. For starters, it already denotes the presence of what is, in strict secular terms, considered an inexistent entity, namely a god. Then, attributing the possession of such as quality as ‘goodness’ to this inexistent entity further hinders the generation of interpretations that go beyond rejecting it as a statement based upon fantastical premises. In the most orthodox cases, it is almost as if the word ‘God’ becomes a shorthand litmus test for invalidity.
Conversely, if one decides to give it a shot and lay aside one’s usual secular world-view, it is unlikely that one will scratch much deeper than its surface semantic layers. One of the main reasons for this is that there is a full world of living through the lens of true faith that must be experienced, along with the learning of its basic body of knowledge such as the New Testament, to get a better sense of what it means, and why it is repeated by practicing believers with such ease and conviction. It is as if it contained some inner, radiant power invisible to the aforementioned secular interpretative equipment. Only then can one properly absorb the deeper webs of meaning and evocative power contained within these assertions.
This caveat, itself possibly longer than the actual idea that I want to develop, is just meant to be clear about where I position myself as an interpreter. That is, this specific interpretation comes from a mostly secularly equipped pattern of understanding the world.
So, let’s now repeat the phrase in question: “The goodness of God knows no bounds“
As I said in the beginning, the first Christian idea that contributes to setting the tone of this interpretation is the following: that unconditionally helping those in need, or the marginalised in general, allows you to enter Heaven and the eternal afterlife. In other words, if we don’t help the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the homeless, the injured, the dispossessed migrant when they need it, we don’t enter paradise (again, refer to footnote 1: Matthew 25:42-45).
But if, as a human, I decide to help everyone in need that I become aware of, because it is about the act of goodness itself and not its long-term consequences, I could end up with nothing myself. In individualistic terms, I would stray too far from realising my own individual potential that would make me capable of doing more good in the world, by increasing my abilities, networks, individual agency, and so on for contributing better things to humanity or expanding my possibilities for effective help. So, as the reasoning goes, meticulously following the maxim of helping for the sake of helping would become an obstacle to helping better and with lasting impact in the future.
The other idea is the sin of the flesh. The inescapable human tendency to sin. The notion of flesh being the locus of sin is just that, that we in this world we are beings made of organic flesh which requires us to deviate from the path of spiritual purity to sustain itself. It is the idea that my body, with its limitations, its cyclically renewing needs, its vulnerability, its subjection to persistent entropy, is almost designed to fail at this task of consistent act of unmediated goodness (goodness in its ideal sense, before any consideration of obstacles that might get in the way between intention and result).
Hence, because of the sin of the flesh, our human limitations to help the marginalised, there is the adage of helping yourself first before you help others. The idea is that you need to straighten your life to protect your ‘flesh’ (in the symbolic sense) from all the trials that helping others will put it through. A modern twist of this phrase that circulates quite a bit is putting the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on the person next to you.
The limitations broaden when we also consider the limitations of human intelligence, which is incapable of quickly conceiving ways to help all those in need and continue to do so effectively in the future. That is, effective help is true help that goes beyond token gestures. To me, an easy way to spot a token gesture is when you perform an action of ‘help’ that can be called as such because it is reaching out to someone else, but it is quite evident that the ratio between it being merely a gesture to which the word ‘help’ can be loosely attached and it actually being helpful is significantly low. Good deeds are like art, no amount of mediocre art can be accumulated to equate a good work of art2. It is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference; no amount of token gestures add up to a true gesture of kindness.
But divinity is supposed to be free from these limitations. The divine, as it were, can infinitely bet on kindness and never lose. It possesses infinite goodness because it could help everyone all the time and it’s not a matter of losing or gaining or preserving itself, it doesn’t have these limitations and therefore it can simply unleash this boundless goodness, something that humans are incapable of doing. No doubt one of the reasons for this is that from the standpoint of eternity, where time does not exist, time-bound consequences don’t matter, so goodness remains an absolute, undifferentiated from idea to practice.
So, at the risk of sounding redundant, in the broadest view possible, which is, again, that of eternity, goodness is, indeed, good. That is, all acts of kindness and goodness in the temporal world of phenomenality will have eventually added up to the ultimate absolute goodness that overcomes all obstacles and human limitations that might have prevented it from happening in the world from the temporal scale of a human lifespan. In other words, in eternity’s view, all obstacles originating from the ‘sin of the flesh’ and the limitations of the human mind will have been but tiny, almost inexistent bumps in its overall trajectory.
But jumping back from the eternal to the human, what happens within oneself when there is no reason to hesitate in creating true goodness? Would there be any reason not to be good, or in religious speak, to save one’s soul?
Now, to achieve such a condition is almost impossible for the vast majority of people. It is hard to think of many people, especially those who are skeptic of the notion of a reward in eternal life, who will not hesitate in unfailingly doing true good, the good that they know deep down they could be doing every time the opportunity presents itself. And that is perfectly fine, that is why we have centuries upon centuries of fabulously intricate, profound ethical thought, of societal structures, political theory, economics (with a special nod to almost exclusively logical approaches to ethics such as game theory), law and so on.
So, unsurprisingly, the infinite good of divinity becomes a virtuality,3 an unfulfillable hypothetical that can only signal the way. It is something akin to the concept of an absolute truth which, as Jonathan Rauch describes it, is a direction and not a destination. It is another of such unattainable North Stars. Akin to truth, doing good might not always seem to be the beneficial choice, be it for oneself, a group of people or the general public, but we can choose to, as an operating principle, always give it a chance, never give up on it.
Doing good is the same; it is natural to acknowledge one’s ‘limitations of the flesh’, one’s limitations as a finite, vulnerable being. But there can be faith in an absolute good that transcends these limitations and that we can always choose to keep in our minds as a tendency, a gravitational force.
This is one interpretation of it. In a way the ancient tradition of Easter fulfilled a purpose in me that goes beyond being just a name for one of the year’s holidays, and a signpost of the coming of spring. It inspired me to set aside some time that I could very well have used for more immediately beneficial things. It inspired me to toy with the idea of something that, if it really existed, would be a beautiful thing (and it makes it all the more beautiful when we humans have been thinking hard about it for millennia). It made me look hard for the possibility of a goodness that knows no bounds, and which of our bounds were born within us and which ones we have created.
- Matthew 25:42-45
“For I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn’t give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’
‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’
And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me. And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.’” ↩︎ - I read this statement about art from Naval Ravikant. I do not know if he is the one who came up with it ↩︎
- For the reader interested in canonical philosophy, my idea of virtuality largely coincides with that of Henri Bergson through the eyes of Gilles Deleuze. In the world in a state of endless flux with all its continuously actualising things, there are always instances of immanent good that can be generated by human agency, whether or not we can actually see it (or are willing to see it). ↩︎
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