This article is the fifth installment in a series on the gospel and Vietnam’s search for identity. Photos by Kristin. Names have been shortened for security reasons.
Vietnam’s 1986 Doi Moi reforms re-opened the country to much of the outside world. Five years after this loosening legislation, Bao Ninh, a former Viet Minh soldier, published the novel The Sorrow of War, a work with a timeliness best validated by its nearly immediate banning. For just as Vietnam was reacquainting itself with a jaded Western world, it too was forfeiting idealism for cynicism. Ninh writes of life after those 30 years of combat:
Those who survived continue to live. But the will has gone, that burning will which was once Vietnam’s salvation. Where is the reward of enlightenment due to us for attaining our sacred war goals? Our history-making efforts for the great generations have been to no avail. What’s so different here and now from the vulgar and cruel life we all experienced during the war?
The writer, along with those who fought with him, talk of the country’s “salvation.” He longs for “that burning will,” which has since vanished, without trace or reward. Worst of all, “enlightenment” had been sought for enlightenment’s sake, a seemingly “sacred” ambition. At the moment of its hard-fought finding, it revealed itself to be a “vulgar and cruel” thing.
In a way, it’s a chilling and ironic principal. You get exactly what you want, and it makes you suffer. Scarier still, many victors the world over, Ninh included, deem this the stopping point, the last word. They count a cure no better than a diagnosis since the suffering must be untreatable. The conclusion seems logical enough. Had they laid down and traded their “history making efforts” for the what-if wonderings of resignation, or even unfulfilled feats of failure, they could still hold hope in the unachieved. But for them—those who have succeeded—their very victory made them victims.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer told us in the last installment, “He stands between us and God, and for that very reason he stands between us and all other men and things.” Nothing can be ours except by way of Christ’s mediation. Or as C. S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
Nothing secondary—namely, creation—can be attained for the sake of itself. It’s not just philosophy, it’s a law, as much a part of reality as gravity. But it goes even deeper. Proverbs 1:7a declares, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” We can know nothing of creation in the fullest sense except through God’s mediation. Left to our own devices, we, like Ninh, seek after something analogous to shadows.
Less Than Nothing
We might give a shadow a noble name, such as “enlightenment,” but in reality, such a name contradicts its nature. Whereas nobility is certainly a good something, a shadow is less than nothing and emptier than a void. It is a negative. It starts where light stops. It exists only as a byproduct of some secondary thing blocking the light behind our backs. Think of it like this, from left to right: the shining light, the secondary thing, us, and the shadow of the thing. Instinctively misguided, we have our backs to the first two, looking only on the shadow.
When I say that the shadow is less than nothing, I don’t mean that it lacks a source. In fact, the negative alerts us to its source. Its source is that secondary thing fixed between our backside and the light. By nature, any secondary thing can only ever be a source of shadow, of darkness.
So when we pursue the secondary for the sake of itself, or more concretely, as a source of happiness, a source of fulfillment, a source of security, and so on, we strive after darkness, regardless of the shape cast before our eyes. The shape may seem abstract, perhaps taking the form of what we imagine “enlightenment” to look like. Or it might appear as something quite concrete, perhaps tracing the outline of a particular person. Either way, with such an orientation, you can never have the thing itself, only its shadow.
As we know, it’s not uncommon for people to devote their entire lives to chasing shadows. But as always happens, they end up in the dark. Their treasure grows greater where the light flickers more faintly and greatest where it doesn’t flicker at all. Darkness is their natural destination and desire, finally engulfed by that shadow who appeared prey but proved parasite. And if we consider it anything other than parasitic in the end, we underestimate its void. For by attaining a negative, we have added it to ourselves and decreased our humanity.
Catching the Void
In the case of Ninh and his comrades, the shadow of “enlightenment” was chased for 30 long years, through jungle and gunfire. When finally caught, its void suffocated an important part of their humanity, “that burning will,” and left in its place the emptiness of cynicism. In more concrete terms, we might call “that burning will” naïveté, which can only be resuscitated into realism by the gospel—reality. The shadow, the conceited master it is, points only to itself. It reveals its “vulgarity and cruelty” and convinces its victims that only it exists, that everything is made up of its darkness, that diversity and originality have no place in the world.
As a character tells Ninh’s protagonist, “You loved the idea of going to war; you were headstrong, you wanted to remain pure and loyal to your ideals. I don’t want to sound disdainful, but there’s nothing original in all that.” And the thing is, what the character says is true, but only of shadows. All shadows do share the same content. They are only darkness and nothing more, even if they assume a seemingly noble shape. As such, they render their greatest victors the greatest victims.
However, the irony cuts deeper. Returning to the analogy, this means that the pursuer has never actually seen the thing he spent his life seeking. He has only ever seen its shadow. For “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” and without it, we cannot look directly on anything. Only if Christ reorients us, turning us around and putting his light between us and the thing, can we truly look on the thing itself.
The shadow alone was enough to enslave our hearts to a lifetime of labor. How much more, then, will we enjoy the proper pleasure of the thing engulfed in the light of Christ, the true source. For in the light, the thing has shed darkness for color, outline for three dimensions, and void for substance. It is more intricate, nuanced, and delightful than its shadow could have ever suggested. And so illuminated by his light, we find in the secondary thing that of which it could never be the source, a thousand different joys, not the least of which is enlightenment.
