Is Jesus Christ "red in tooth and claw?"

To ask whether Jesus Christ is “red in tooth and claw” (as Alfred Lord Tennyson described the natural world) is to invite the charge of blasphemy; it suggests an ugly futility of the Incarnation. The intuition that it’s blasphemous to even ask the question should also be enough to reveal our intuitions about the answer, namely, that Christ did not come to perpetuate the violence and savagery of the world but to bear it, expose it, and transform it. Divine judgment and justice do not perpetuate suffering but bring it to an end. This is in keeping with the divine ethos of faith, hope, and charity, which Christ’s body in the Church is commanded and impelled to reflect. Before the fall, there was no death and Christ’s work undoes the fall and death. Biblical revelation therefore does not accord with Dante’s picture of everlasting suffering, but teaches rather that death and suffering are finally finished—not merely relegated to another principality called hell, where demonic torment is given full reign just outside the walls of the Kingdom forever and ever.

I’ve written more extensively on Camus and Marcel elsewhere but it’s worthwhile to draw attention here to their divergence where, while Camus perceives the conflict between human longing and a world “red in tooth and claw” as one to be faced and resisted, Marcel sees it as a place where faith, hope, and love must break through the walls of isolation and hostility that Camus’s philosophy implicitly erects.

This distinction becomes critical when applied to the violence and oppression inherent in history. If one views Christ through the lens of the absurd—as one might be tempted to do when grappling with the apparent contradictions between Christ’s meekness and the brutality of history—then His suffering becomes little more than a tragic gesture in the face of the world’s unrelenting cruelty. Alienation is impossible in Christ’s kingdom; and absurdity is impossible under the sovereign Lord of history. From Marcel’s perspective, Christ’s suffering is the very key to unraveling the false dichotomy between divine omnipotence and human vulnerability. The cross is not an absurdity to be passively endured or resisted through rebellion; it is the divine encounter that brings a new order into being. The world’s violence, its endless parade of wars, persecutions, and inquisitions, all testify to the reality that human efforts to impose order through force only serve to perpetuate chaos. The history of violence against heretics and the deployment of just war theory as an ad hoc, self-serving, justification for bloodshed must be seen as deep betrayals of Christ’s call to love, mercy, and reconciliation.

In the end, death and suffering are have no place in eternity—neither prior to sin which marred creation, nor after the final judgment upon which all that opposes Christ loses its gift of life and existence. To insist that violence should have a place in the meantime is to take one’s eyes off of these eternal things and off of Christ.