Rain: When the heavens are indifferent to the righteous and the wicked

Source: When the rain falls alike upon all

"so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and brings rain upon the righteous and also upon the wicked."

"The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."

(New Testament, Matthew 5:45; Somerset Maugham, 'Rain', 1921)

Explanation: A tropical rain that reveals cosmic indifference

In the New Testament, Matthew seeks to prove that God loves everyone—wicked and righteous alike—from the fact that rain falls on everyone equally. By contrast, in Maugham's story, a missionary and a prostitute are stuck together due to relentless tropical rain. The missionary is certain the rain is a divine opportunity to redeem the prostitute, but the pressure and isolation break him; he gives in to his urges and commits suicide. The rain continues to fall, indifferent to human tragedy and religious hypocrisy. The echoing insight is that nature is not moral. It is not "evil"; it simply does not care.

Perspective: On freeing nature from hidden meaning

It is hard for modern people to accept the idea that the weather is connected to our behavior. "It rained at my wedding—a sign of good luck," "There is a drought—a sign we have sinned," are no longer comfortable to utter.

Somerset Maugham throws the ugly truth right in our faces: rain proves that God is indifferent, the exact opposite of beliefs held throughout history. The rain will soak the missionary's suit just as thoroughly as it will soak the prostitute's dress, with no distinction of religion, race, or sex.

Is nature pious, a bully, or indifferent? Liberation from religion arrived when humanity stopped looking for hidden meaning in nature. When everything is mechanical, indifferent, and egalitarian, there is no reward and punishment, nor any natural morality—no meaning at all.

Going Deeper: Between a tempering storm and seasonal depression

Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science, section 19) does not buy into the mechanism of rain. For him, bad weather is an essential test of character: "Can a tree that must grow tall do without bad weather and storms?" Would the tree be strong and towering without a tempest? Is the storm arbitrary, or perhaps part of a causal, meaningful balance? Modern psychology, by contrast, identifies seasonal affective disorder (SAD; an overproduction of melatonin and a drop in serotonin production), a condition in which rain disrupts our biology. This tension—between the Nietzschean rain that tempers tree and human alike, and the clinical, depressing, mechanical rain—is the essence of the human experience facing winter.

Culture: A downpour that washes away the lies in Rashomon

In the film Rashomon (Oscar winner, Akira Kurosawa, 1950), rain frames the entire story. The characters (the samurai and his wife, the priest, the woodcutter, and the commoner) are trapped by a torrential downpour raging from the heavens, as they try to determine whether the samurai was murdered. The rain serves as a symbolic frame, echoing the blurring of truth, turning testimonies muddy and unreliable, while also washing away the lies. Only when a moment of grace appears—when the woodcutter decides to adopt an abandoned baby—does the storm subside.