ROY FINCH
295
qualifications) has from the start never had any theological standing
in any of these religions. Small wonder that, when the time came, a
brutal racialism in a so-called Christian country could violate the
common humanity which none of the monotheistic religions had
ever recognized.
What about the "universalism" of the teaching of the Prophets
and the Gospels? Do we forget that the religions always maintained
that
first
the rest of the world must accept Jesus Christ or the People
of Israel or the Revelation of Islam
before
entering into one or the
other of these "universalisms"? None of these religions ever shared
their chosenness or election except on these conditions.
Never
was it
maintained that humanity, without qualification or reservation,
came first. And so inured are we to this way of thinking that even
now it scarcely strikes us as the inhuman mind-freezing which it is.
We always talked about human beings who were Christians,
Muslims or Jews
first
and so necessarily in implacable hostility to
each other. This is the still unacknowledged original crime against
humanity.
All these years, but most of all recently in the century of Hitler
and Stalin, we have been told that humanity is an abstraction . How
close we are to Hitler and Stalin that now we agree with this! But
there is a different and opposite lesson to be learned from the
Holocaust:
Humanity was no abstraction in the death camps.
It
was the
most real fact of all just because it was so overwhelmingly not pre–
sent. Does its absence show that it is not real? On the contrary, we
saw what "acts of humanity" really were when they took place (so
rarely, so impossibly) under these circumstances. It might even oc–
cur to us that they were what was most "concrete" (along with the
death and destruction), while the Germanism and the Judaism and
the Christianity were the" abstractions. "
The victims have said it plainly enough: Humanness is what
was deliberately excluded from the extermination program. Every
last vestige of it was driven out. We who read and talk about this see
remotely what was proved in agony and abandonment: how fragile,
how essential, how incalculably precious is human feeling, the
human bond, and what happens when it is systematically,
deliberately and down to the last detail nullified. Whatever we may
say about the Biblical God (whether he was present in the camps or
present only in His negation), the God whose absence mattered was
the God of humanity, the God we haven't found yet.
In Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in their last ex–
tremities, humanity was
all
that mattered,
all
that anyone asked for,
