1How Is Human Existence Possible?1943
There has never been a century of Western history so far removed from an awareness of the tragic as that which bequeathed to us two world wars. It has trained all of us to suppress the tragic, to shut our eyes to it, to deny its existence.
Not quite 200 years ago—in 1755 to be exact—the death of 15,000 men in the Lisbon earthquake was enough to bring down the structure of traditional Christian belief in Europe. The contemporaries could not make sense of it. They could not reconcile this horror with the concept of an all-merciful God. And they could not see any answer to a catastrophe of such magnitude. Now, we daily learn of slaughter and destruction of vastly greater numbers, of whole peoples being starved ...
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