On God: An Uncommon Conversation

by Norman Mailer

  Here’s where I have a problem with your notion of reincarnation—when did God create such a process?

  It may have occurred only after God endowed a great many higher animals and humans with souls. He may then have decided, “I, as an artist, can improve on this Creation. Some could have turned out better if they had not lived their lives under grievous circumstances. Give them, therefore, another opportunity to exercise their free will. Maybe they will be wiser.” It comes down to something basic. God’s notion: Let’s make the Creation better. The Devil’s: Let’s maim the Creation. I have, says the Devil, something in mind that will supplant and replace it.

  What would the Devil want? Total destruction? Nihilism?

  For the sake of argument, let’s say the Devil would want to fashion a universe on His or Her terms.

  Have we any idea what those terms would be?

  I suppose it could be an immensely technological universe where the need for existence—individual existence—and the concomitant need for soul would be less. That might be more to the Devil’s taste: individual units functioning in relation to other individual units. Less spiritual. More mechanized. That seems to be the prevailing tendency in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—more and more interchangeable units, ready to serve a corporate machine. At the other end of it, you have the maniacal intensity of the most extreme Muslims, whose only feeling is that there’s something so wrong with this approach that it all has to be destroyed, and don’t ask questions. Once again, we are at a point in history between the rock and the hard place.

  III

  Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell

  MICHAEL LENNON: I want to ask a question about Purgatory. Do you feel some sympathy for that idea?

  NORMAN MAILER: Some—and a fair portion of uneasiness. I will say that I expect there may be some sizable difficulties present after death, a universal Hell, perhaps, of waiting that we may all have to go through before we are born again—those of us who will be born again. I will add that there’s an automatic assumption in most people who are religious that God is not only All-Powerful but instantaneous in His action. There’s an Irish saying: “When God made time, He made a lot of it.” So God could be instantaneous—but why would He want to be? Nevertheless, this expectation of quick reception and quick designation for one’s afterlife is at odds with our own experience—which is that everything takes longer than we think it will. That is the accrued wisdom of most men and women after many decades of life. In the economy of human experience, there are always time-consuming episodes you didn’t anticipate. To assume that once you pass into another realm of existence things will be faster and more responsive—that is no small assumption. It’s as ungrounded as to expect that there are no destinations in the Hereafter other than Purgatory, Limbo, or Hell. Another, after all, might be God’s need to judge whether a particular soul should be reborn or might as well expire. So Purgatory might sit there as a set of possibilities with many unhappy holding tanks. God may look at three quarters of us, say, “I don’t want to make up my mind just yet,” and drop us into slow Purgatory, so to speak.

  Now, what the form of this Purgatory might be—whether it bears resemblance to a Palestinian refugee camp—I have no idea. One of the beliefs I hold is that the Hereafter is less different than we assume. We may have the same frustrations and difficulties in the afterlife—overcrowding, for example, or even, conceivably, waste. After the Holocaust, we were forced to recognize there was something absolutely murderous in our species—obviously, it was not just reserved for the Germans; there was something vastly destructive in our nature. We received this knowledge over and over again, in Russia, in China, in Africa, in some of our own actions—indeed, in Vietnam. The point I want to make is that the Holocaust may have exacted a great price from God, even greater than from us. At the core of karma is the notion that it is composed of wise judgment. What if that is not always true? In the godly assessment of each life—in the reading of the soul, so to speak, that takes place after one dies—can it be that God sometimes says, “I’m too weary to think about this now”? After all, if God is an artist, is it always necessary to make instantaneous judgments? Under certain conditions of overcrowding, literal overcrowding in eternity of the sort caused by the Holocaust or Hiroshima, Purgatory can become a vast way station.

  Let me try to expatiate on that. Given the number of people exterminated in a day during the Holocaust, the number of souls arriving in tumult, is it possible they became too great in number for God to measure with calm and justice? It may be that karma has been in a species of uproar ever since the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the gulags.

  The moment you postulate that God is striving to promulgate His vision across the stars, you are also postulating that the nature of the Beyond—to use another word than the Hereafter—is existential. Not fixed, but changing with cosmic circumstances.

  Well, you have certainly touched on my next question. You see God as an artist. I think all too often your visions of the Hereafter or the Beyond are built on your own experience of this life. Couldn’t God just as well be an engineer?

  Absolutely.

  Or a general?

  Yes.

  A public administrator? Or a diplomat?

  Yes, yes.

  Those are all human occupations.

  How can God not be all those things? God is certainly an engineer. An engineer would see it all in terms of future construction. How do you organize the Hereafter? How do you arrive at the best levels of spiritual sanitation? Yes! Heavenly comfort stations for psychic waste are not necessarily to be taken for granted. When I speak of God as an artist, I don’t pretend to mean that God might be a novelist, as if that is all God is up to. Finally, the word “artist” has hegemony over other professions because whatever else, it is creative. God is a creator. A Creator. I don’t like the prefix “mega”—it’s been used too often—but God is, all right, at the least, a mega-artist. All the faculties of engineering, war, social building, art, music, sport, painting, science, philosophy, medicine, herbology are His or Hers, and at a level more highly developed than we can begin to conceive. But God is still an artist. A great engineer is an artist. So is a great general like Clausewitz or Robert E. Lee. So are the best in all human categories. We point to that in our own speech. We do speak of artists at war. That is the sense in which I want to use the word. I don’t want to diminish this projection of what God might be. Let’s think of the size of the Creation. Even if God is not All-Powerful, we have only to contemplate the vast extent of flora and fauna, the painterly touches—to offer one example—revealed in the chromatic scales of a butterfly’s wing.

  Well, the thing that did appeal to me about your notion of God as an artist—and, indeed, as a novelist—is that novelists have to conceive of the destinies and the forked paths that people take through their lives and so create the second phase, the third phase. In a sense, that’s very much like God presiding over reincarnation—the second, third, fourth phases. God as an artist is portraying His or Her conception of the metamorphoses in each character’s destiny.

  Well, we are parts of God’s vision, certainly. I believe that, yes—lively but seriously skewed parts of God’s vision. That, I would add quickly, is because the Devil is also present. I don’t presume to say exactly what part He plays in cosmic affairs or local earthly matters—but in any event, we are not pure representations of God. We are tainted, warped, even treacherous in relation to the divine projects offered us. We are torn between God and the Devil, and our own vanity can be counter to both of them. Across the centuries, human vanity has become a factor, a prodigious factor. The human ego, which has always been fearful of God’s power and the Devil’s—that same human ego can still separate itself into a simulacrum of omnipotent confidence. There’s nothing more irritating to most of us than the feeling that we are not completely under our own power, that other forces are pushing us, external forces that are stronger than we are: “Oh, God, here comes t
hat awful compulsion starting up again,” whatever it is—some impulse we consider unworthy of ourselves or too risky for our adventurous capacities or opposed too magnetically to our spiritual inclinations.

  In Advertisements for Myself, you take sides. You say that humankind is roughly more good than evil.

  No. That was my assumption about the faith some of us have in democracy, our belief that it will work because there’s more good than bad in us as a human multitude. That still remains to be proven.

  Still, if we are roughly more good than evil, wouldn’t that signal the ultimate victory of good?

  There is no guarantee. This is an existential question—which is to say, a not-yet-determined answer. To say “existential” means you are in the midst of an activity to which you cannot see the result. Rather, you are living in the midst of an intense question. I think existentialism can only be understood in that manner.

  It becomes more and more clear to me all the time why courage must be the cardinal virtue in your cosmic scheme. If the forces of good are brave, strong, and daring, then there’s a chance that evil will be defeated. Would the pacifism of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King play into the Devil’s hands, then? Would He applaud its use?

  Everything plays into the Devil’s hands. We live in an immensely complicated mesh of cause and effect. I can make an argument for Gandhi and against him—that’s no problem. One can also take either side for some great general: pro-Napoleon, let’s say, or anti-Napoleon. Gandhi, finally, was a man of significant courage. He did something no one else had ever done before. So in that sense, he was searching for the answer to the same question I’m searching for, but at a much higher and much more dangerous level: Are we more good than bad?

  In India, the answer that came back to him before he died was that we may be more bad than good. The immense riots as he came to power—those events had to be a spiritual disaster for him. So I certainly don’t sneer at Gandhi, nor would I wish to systematize him by declaring, “Oh, he brought on so much that was bad because he advocated passivity.” After all, his kind of passivity demanded huge courage. And discipline. Heroic passivity. One of the things we might do well to begin to try to understand as humans will be our future need to reconstruct the essential energy contained in oxymorons. Certain oxymorons are absurdities—so many, indeed, that we feel free to dismiss all of them by saying, “It’s an oxymoron.” But there are a few that are vital and valuable. One of them is “heroic passivity.” There, one’s experience must serve as the arbiter. There can be heroic passivity, or quasi-heroic passivity. The latter can be a disaster. And we’ve all seen that: stubborn, frantic passivity—certain pacifists we’d like to throw down the stairs.

  What came first in your scheme of things? Belief in courage as the cardinal virtue? Or does your vision of the divided universe require courage to be the cardinal virtue?

  I would rather go back to God’s experience as He or She was creating the flora and fauna of existence, all those incredible biological experiments that went on over millions of years. Plus, most crucially, the percipience gathered from the failures. Think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being, the immense excitement that He had something pretty big and pretty formidable. Then it proved too big—badly designed. The record of bad design in evolution is also there, could stuff the shelves of many a library. Yet what became obvious was that animals who had courage—or those plants that had a kind of odd integrity, if you will, in terms of their environment—seemed to do better for the most part than those who didn’t. Of course, there are animals—we can see this directly—who had too much courage. This notion of balance underwriting courage is what God began to search for.

  Let me shift a little bit over to the dark side, to the Devil. If things are indeed getting worse—if Satan, as you seem to fear, could be winning—why would the Devil wish to destroy the world, rather than run the world as an ultimate tyrant? Wouldn’t he wish to rule humans, convert them to his evil slaves and minions, rather than destroy them?

  Let’s start with the Devil’s point of view—the word “evil” is not even present for him.

  Evil is his good, as in Paradise Lost?

  He might see it that way. It’s such a blatant speculation, let’s have a little fun with it. My guess is that the Devil sees God as incompetent. After all, the Devil is a fallen angel, that I assume. Why? Because certain geniuses have come along who had intimations of what our origins might be. Milton was certainly one. I think Milton is as good a rule of thumb for approaching this matter of God and the Devil as anyone I’ve come across—homage to Milton. So I propose that the Devil’s belief is that He or She could end up with a better world, a better form of existence, a more sophisticated, more intelligent, well-run notion of things. Now, what are the Devil’s means? Well, our fear is that He could destroy the whole world in order to start over again. There, I’m out on the end of my mental belay—does the Devil have the same creative powers that God does to create animals, plants, humans, a system? Or is the Devil a parasite, essentially, upon God? That’s a question I wouldn’t presume to answer.

  That’s why I have more trouble dealing with the notion of the Devil than with that of God. It’s relatively more direct to deal with the notion of God as the Creator.

  But if you see the Devil as capable of defeating God, He must have equal powers.

  Well, even at the highest level, there is such a matter as mindless destruction. When you can’t win, you destroy the game. The spoiled kid who picks up the marbles comes in all forms. But such a kid hardly has to be the best player. If the Devil feels that He or She cannot gain those powers that are needed to form a new universe, the rage generated may be so intense that the next move is to destroy the works. Talk about rank speculation, let’s suppose the Devil is treacherous and has sold His or Her birthright to some other god in the cosmos and will do His or Her best to turn over a paralyzed, inane, stupid, mainly destroyed world to someone who can build it up. The Devil could be a lieutenant, rather than a majordomo. In that case, the game starts all over again.

  These notions of what the Devil might be are not nearly so comfortable as assuming that God is an imperfect creator. That makes sense to me. But the Devil could be this, that, anything—I don’t know. One guess: Technology is an arm of the Devil, which I think is probably true. Still, technology could be a third force, ready to destroy both God and the Devil—man’s assertion against God and the Devil.

  The questions are wide-open. No way to propose answers yet, but perhaps the question will become somewhat more focused as the new century goes on. As of now, for example, I would assume technology is indeed the Devil’s force. Why? I feel it viscerally. That’s the best I can offer. I think of all the things I’ve detested for all these years, starting with plastic. It seems to me plastic is a perfect weapon in the Devil’s armory, for it desensitizes human beings. Living in and with plastic, we are subtly sickened. And the Devil looks to destroy God’s hope in us. Whether this effort looks to attain a world that can be taken over, or whether the Devil, to the contrary, aims to acquire a ruined world or works toward a world transferable to some other god are, I repeat, questions that obviously remain far beyond our reach right now.

  So you’re not sure whether the Devil is ambitious or nihilistic?

  Why must you see that as contradictory? As a novelist, I would say some characters in Dostoyevsky are both nihilistic and immensely ambitious. The two go together. Frustrated ambition can turn quickly to nihilism. A rotten fruit can grow poisonous.

  You seem to be in agreement with some of the other religions of the world on the role of saints.

  Saints?

  Do you see them as intermediaries, or do they play a larger role, a prophetic role? Do they actually see themselves as instruments of God, paralleling demons on the other side? I wonder if you could say something about saints and monsters.

  Hagiography is not my strong point. I would guess, given my general hypotheses, that very
few of the saints were wholly bona fide—by that I mean vastly more good than bad. I would think some of them had incredible powers. I believe many saints were perfectly capable of small miracles—that doesn’t bother me a bit. I would take that for granted. There are such things as psychic powers, and they can be raised to a very high degree in certain humans.

  But the idea that saints are as good as the hagiographers have made them out to be does give great pause because, finally, the Catholic Church may be the most complex and powerful and manipulative and intricate power system in history. But from what we have learned about history, we also know that most powerful people rewrite history to their own specifications. Many a saint may have been built up into much more than that saint deserved—the Church needed him or her at the moment. Nonetheless, I also subscribe to the notion that some people do represent the best and most magical elements in God. That is not a concept I would scorn. I believe there were, and are, saints. I would just approach them more critically than might a devout Catholic.

  I guess I agree with you. In each period, the Church has to create saints of a certain stripe. But one thing that struck me about your scheme is your declaration that most of us don’t know most of the time whether our actions are ultimately for good or for ill—or, indeed, which side we’re helping, which hindering. But saints struck me as those who might have greater premonitions, greater knowledge of what was to come and what certain human actions could do to advance the cause of good. And I can see a similar faction on the side of the Devil—those who asked, “What can I do to bring down, hurt, or destroy some strength of the Lord?” In that sense, human demons would also be more aware of their mission.