Divine justice and fate

Divine justice and fate are joined in Rong Jinzhen’s attempt to make sense of catastrophe: providence first appears to encompass every opposite, then becomes an authority he accuses of injustice. His changing belief does not resolve his suffering. Instead, it turns his sense of personal doom into a conflict over whether fate can be just when it destroys him and those bound to him.

Providence and Its Opposites

After a torrential downpour confronts him with the apparent ruin of his hopes, Rong Jinzhen looks back over the preceding twelve years. He recalls that a dream about Mendeleev had given him inspiration for deciphering PURPLE, transforming him, in his own understanding, through a rare stroke of providence. He had come to think that such a miracle was no longer available to him. Now, in the wake of catastrophe, providence seems to have returned—but in a form that includes both radiance and menace. What he had previously seen only from its proper side now appears reversed.

For Rong Jinzhen, a former student of Mr Auslander whose heart had been shaped by teachings of Jesus, this encompassing power is God, understood as the omnipotent Holy Spirit. God’s nature is not simply benevolent: beauty and evil, kindness and harm, belong together within its reach. The narration unfolds this idea through paired opposites—happiness and pain, hope and despair, heaven and hell, honour and dishonour, good and evil, brightness and darkness. Providence is powerful because nothing escapes it, but that comprehensiveness makes it difficult to reconcile with a fair moral order. The same force that contains joy also contains suffering.

From Acceptance to Accusation

At first, this vision calms Rong Jinzhen. He takes PURPLE and BLACK as means through which God has shown him the nature of things, and concludes that resisting God’s plan would be futile. He believes that no individual’s aspirations can require God to alter divine laws, and that creation’s beauty will ultimately become clear. His acceptance rests on a total picture: apparent opposites belong to one order, even when that order includes pain.

The assurance is unsettled in a dream. A voice challenges his faith by invoking Johannes’s imperfect life and insisting that God’s laws are unjust. Rong Jinzhen does not recognize the speaker, nor does he know why it speaks. The accusation persists after he wakes, repeating until it becomes the focus of his attention. At first, his thoughts remain disordered; then memories of the train journey, the thief, his leather attaché case, and the rainstorm return. These memories bring his personal doom back into view, but their significance does not immediately become clear to him. The movement from confusion toward recognition is gradual: the challenge is not merely that suffering exists, but that an accident may have been allowed to become the cause of his ruin.

BLACK, Catastrophe, and the Missing Notebook

Rong Jinzhen’s response turns the abstract question of justice into an accusation against God. He declares that he will let BLACK defeat him, as though accepting defeat could expose or answer the injustice he believes has been done to him. This is not a settled return to his earlier confidence in providence. His appeal to justice now takes the form of confrontation: he opposes the God whose plan he had just accepted, and treats his own defeat as evidence against divine fairness.

After this outburst, his sense of himself and his surroundings becomes indistinct. The narration then gives voice to an uncertain possibility through the image of his lost notebook: perhaps floodwater that carried it away might also carry it back. The notebook’s possible return does not undo what has happened, and the passage offers no confirmation that it is recovered here. Rather, the thought introduces a small counterweight to finality. The same water is imagined as a force of loss and as a possible means of return, echoing the larger pattern in which catastrophe and hope occupy opposite sides of one uncertain event.

Entangled Fates and Self-Destruction

A later retrospective account extends the question of justice beyond Rong Jinzhen’s crisis. It reports Liseiwicz’s judgment that their lives were ruined by Jinzhen, yet that Jinzhen ultimately destroyed himself. The account then places both men under the pressure of fate: it says fate killed them, while distinguishing their circumstances by noting that Jinzhen’s fate was not independent but tied to Liseiwicz’s destiny.

That connection does not mean Jinzhen understood the relationship in the same terms. From his perspective, Liseiwicz was his gifted teacher, and nothing more. The difference between their perspectives gives the idea of fate a painful asymmetry: a later account presents their destinies as bound together, while Jinzhen’s own understanding of Liseiwicz remains narrower. The book thus leaves divine justice unresolved. Jinzhen moves from trusting a power that encompasses all opposites to believing that its treatment of him is unjust; the later account offers fate as an explanation for the destruction of both men, but not as proof that their suffering was fair.