Today, WVU observed Spring Recess. I observed Good Friday.

During my writing session this morning, I finished the first draft of a chapter about the emigration of a man named Hans Michel Finter from southwest Germany to Pennsylvania in 1737.

In order to understand the conditions he left behind, I’ve had to immerse myself lately in the history of early modern Europe, especially the wars that devastated the Rhineland in the seventeenth century and the poverty caused by overcrowding and partible inheritance as populations recovered in the early eighteenth. (Think of it as sort of a postwar(s) baby boom on steroids.)

Occupational Hazards of Reading History

Two major divides drove the warfare in Central Europe in the early modern era. One divide pitted the Bourbon monarchy in France against the Habsburgs in Austria and Spain. But the Protestant Reformation that began around 1517 also created schisms and chaos.

I knew next to nothing about early modern Europe before beginning this project. I found myself endlessly fascinated, reading everything I could find in English (and struggling through a few important original sources with my elementary German).

But this study has affected my experience of the Lenten season. Immersing myself in a review of the unfathomable suffering that confessional divisions can cause (or at least exacerbate), I’ve felt deep doubt about the wisdom of organized religions — or “isms” of any kind, really.

Personally, I never struggle with faith in God. But as a Christian, I take it as Gospel (literally) that our religion does not tell us all we need to know. In John 16:12-13, Jesus said,

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

(Would it be irreverent to paraphrase this passage as “You can’t handle the truth!”?)

If Jesus himself said he wasn’t showing us the whole picture, why should we think our religious traditions know everything? And if we know we don’t know everything, religious arrogance makes no sense.

Living in Uncertainty

To my mind, that doesn’t mean religions are wrong — they may be pointing to a truth that cannot, as Jesus suggested, be understood by humanity, at least not yet.

And if there is a truth to point to, I don’t feel qualified to dismiss the discoveries of millennia of other seekers and rely solely on my own instincts. That seems like trying to navigate a wild foreign country entirely by my own senses even though prior travelers have left thousands of detailed maps.

And when wandering in a strange land, maybe it makes sense to travel with a group — like at a church, on Sunday mornings.

Heeding the Warning

But when does this journey tip over into tribalism? That’s the warning of early modern Europe. Some of those souls left behind harrowing and terrible journals and letters, and they peer out at us through the veil of history. ACHTUNG, they warn — seek the truth, but never forget humility, or this could be you too.

Thus humbled, all I could do is what my travel guides have long recommended I do on this day: I attended the Passion of Our Lord and got on my knees in front of the cross. Not because I know, but precisely because I don’t.