What would make that come about?
Technology. It’s obvious—well, obvious to me—that every effort is being made in these years to replicate a human being and, once done, forge armies of them. It might take two centuries, but it does seem to be what we humans are hell-bent on doing. At that point, free will will have grown so large and so livid that it will be looking to replace God. I naturally see that as absolutely disastrous. If I have been ready to question God’s judgment on many a matter, I am wholly reluctant to put faith in our judgment. We are far from equipped to deal with the cosmos.
Here is the last theodicy. The eighth. God is a righteous judge. And so people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, it is because they have committed a sin that merits such suffering.
What if a divine balance has been disrupted? We had a different relation to existence ten thousand years ago. You had to hunt an animal down if you wished to eat meat. Now the beasts are brought to stockyards. Flesh for consumption is slaughtered in disagreeable fashion. Sows are kept in cribs so small they do not have room to move once they are fattened. The world of nature once lived on the basis that nearly everything contributed to the feeding chain. Add reincarnation, and the cycles of life and death were taken care of. This was the original conception. Today, as one example, contemporary agribusiness has skewed it. So, in like fashion, can we speak of the earlier human notion that excessive evil was compensated for? The idea that if you were killed before your time, reincarnation could make adjustments may no longer be operative. Yet it still remains the only explanation I know for why many young soldiers are, when tested, ready to die in battle. I think they have a sense—comparable in some degree to the terrorists who are blowing themselves up—that they are going somewhere special. Right or wrong, this is their belief. It is a deep belief—indeed, so profound that one cannot necessarily ignore the possibility that it is real. But repeat this theodicy, would you?
God is righteous. People get what they deserve.
God does the best He or She can do. That doesn’t mean people get what they deserve. If they did, the universe would be equal to a clock.
Would you agree that it was inevitable once God gave us free will and intelligence that technology would follow?
No. I am working against the tide on this one, but it could be that at a certain point God hoped and expected all of us would become psychic. Great entertainers would be so intense in their art that men and women all over the world could experience the performance. Of course, it did not happen. We looked instead for technological means of communicating. And that blunted the possibility of such fine senses. It helps to account in part for the near-mute, somewhat odd and wistful sense we acquire when we watch a world event on television.
I would say that if you put people in a physical world, they are going to invent the wheel. And once they do, technology follows from that.
No, sir. No, sir. Electronics has nothing to do with the wheel.
So when we went from a mechanical universe to an electronic universe—
A leap not anticipated. Or such is my supposition.
Now, most people who believe in reincarnation do expect that sooner or later they will reach enlightenment or some equitable resting place and look back upon the problems and sufferings of earthly life as no more than way stations on the journey. But I can’t agree. I think reincarnation makes no sense if the end is foretold. I can’t emphasize this enough. None of my arguments makes sense if the end is known. I think it is precisely because the end is unknown that human terror sits at the root of every theology, as it has for millennia. It is so difficult for humans to accept the likelihood that this world is as open and undecipherable, as chaotic, as wayward, as playful, as perverse, as unexpected as, in secret, we fear it is. I think this is what has driven any number of theologians to the notion that it has all been foretold, that the end has been granted to us. Such conclusions are not only philosophically untethered, even outrageous, but have gotten us into all sorts of trouble because a foreordained end narrows our lives, shrinks our thinking, and tends to bring out the worst in us. We become addicted to quick judgment concerning others, even as we cling to a partial optimism in which we only half believe.
In all these conversations we’ve had about the nature of God, your supposition has been that God makes mistakes, He is not perfect, He is much like us. But we know we have evil in us. There is evil in us as individuals and as a race. And if God is so much like us, then God does indeed have evil in Him or Her. And that explains everything—you don’t need a Devil.
No, no, no, no, I don’t think that’s it at all. God could have a little evil in Him, and the Devil a great deal.
Let’s say it’s eighty-twenty. If God just has 20 percent evil, wouldn’t that be enough to account for all the natural disasters and the Holocaust?
But eighty-twenty is an assumption. What if it’s ninety-five–five, or ninety-eight to two?
There are theologians who take this position. They’re called “open theists” and take the position that God is imperfect and has enough evil in Him—and the evil in God, coupled with the Devil, is responsible for the miseries of the world.
Well, that could certainly be an answer, and if you want to respect the Old Testament as more than a great work of literature but also as a document with some reality, you certainly have a Jehovah out there wreaking evil on a large scale as well as goodness. And it could be that God, being existential like us, was trying to reduce the amount of evil in Himself or Herself.
By doing what?
By Jehovah trying, for one thing, to get that prodigious temper under control. By daring to have a son, a great attempt to improve matters. It may be that God was always trying for more, over and over, and often deciding, “No, this move won’t work.” It may be that after Christ’s death, He had to decide if He wished to build the Catholic Church. And maybe the Devil was joining Him. It may be easier to comprehend the history of the Catholic Church if we assume that They were building this Church together and worked in collaboration, and with some considerable unhappiness, yes, God and the Devil built it together as most unhappy and embattled partners.
In other words, God may be out on an odyssey not unrelated to ours. He or She may get better along the way but not succeed altogether.
Are you saying that many human institutions can be the creation of both God and the Devil?
Of course.
Do you see any human organizations or institutions that are free from the taint of evil? Or are they all mixed?
I think there’s evil in everything.
Baseball teams…
You bet.
Football…
How not? [pause] One last thought. Earlier, you were advancing the argument that suffering is good for you, that submitting to God’s will without complaint is virtuous. And this virtue will earn you all kinds of rewards. We will endure whatever God sends since that is our ticket to eternal bliss. Of course, if you dare to ask how a perfect God can make matters so imperfect—or, worse, unjust—the only answer you can give is, “Do not presume to understand the mind of God.” Right there is the most dangerous single argument advanced by churchmen. It is exactly what drives people out of their faith because it tends to make faith brittle. Any time there is something you cannot comprehend, you are told, “It is beyond you—your faith has to carry you through this.” So greater and greater spiritual loans are extracted from faith. Sooner or later, faith snaps. And people leave the Church, leave religion, cease to believe. While “Do not presume to understand the mind of God” is the most employed of the various explanations of evil, it is also, in its final effect, the most demoralizing.
I vote then, as is obvious, for an existential God who does not demand my unwavering faith but prefers instead that we look to find, despite God’s flaws and ours, a core of mutual respect as we set out together to attempt to create a viable vision that can lead us into the unforeseeable future out there with its galaxies, its light-year
s, its enigmas, and ultimately, let us hope, its availability. Perhaps the greatest gods of the cosmos are also on a search and may not be wholly indisposed to welcome us.
IX
On Gnosticism
MICHAEL LENNON: As we have agreed, the form of this interview will be a discussion on Gnosticism.
NORMAN MAILER: That may be. But I have to recognize that although I have lived with that word in many a text over many a year—indeed, even gave a full reading to Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels some years ago—I am still not comfortable with the term. I feel ignorant of its meaning in relation to what we have talked about. One of the perils of bad memory, from which I suffer, is that one retains not nearly enough of one’s serious reading. Growing old usually ensures that if you last long enough to reach your eighties, your memory will bear more resemblance to a bare wall than to a text.
Forewarned, forewarned. I come prepared. I would start by saying that you are hardly alone. Gnosticism is not a religious movement, and it has been shunted pretty much off the face of the ideological earth.
Here are a few of the general traits: There is, first, a disdain for authority and Orthodoxy, which is opposed by a great belief in studying the self. The self is regarded as a phenomenon that you had to understand to some serious degree in order to attain larger knowledge. In this sense, the Gnostics were close to the Manichaeans, who were dualists but not absolute about it. Like the Gnostics, they saw the body and the spirit as separate but mutually dependent. They were very taken with Jewish mysticism, which of course had been present long before Christ, and so predates the Gnostics, who seem to have come into existence around the second century B.C. and, indeed, in the beginning they were an esoteric branch of Judaism. As you may recall from reading The Golden Bough, there were many competing sects at this time. But the Gnostics had great respect for Judaism while at the same time valuing the Greek belief in knowledge and self-examination.
My knowledge of Jewish mysticism is not profound, but I did some reading in the Kabalah and the Zohar. Neither existed, however, at that point.
No, although later, when the Kabalah did develop, the Gnostics were not opposed to it. They liked it. As they liked certain Buddhist texts—
You’re talking about a thousand years later.
That’s right.
The Gnostics, in other words, continue well into the Middle Ages.
Probably they end with the Inquisition.
I thought the various uprootings of the heresies in the early centuries of Christianity took care of the Gnostics. Not so?
It diminished them greatly. As I say, Gnosticism came into existence around the second century B.C. and built its ongoing strength by taking in Jewish strains, Christian strains, even Buddhist strains right up to the fourth century A.D. At that point, the Christian Church, especially under St. Irenaeus, mounted a strong campaign against them, using St. John as the point of their spear, because St. John was a great believer in Revelation, and the Gnostics were not. St. Augustine was another fierce opponent, and, of course, St. Irenaeus wrote five volumes against the heresy. Many of the tenets of Christianity—for example Original Sin, resurrection, and Jesus as the son of God—were later additions. In the year 200, however, there was no sense of Original Sin, and resurrection was barely an idea. The assumption that Jesus was God also came later. In good part, these ideas came in opposition to Gnosticism.
Could you say that the first purpose of Original Sin was to forge a powerful weapon against the Gnostics?
It seems likely. Gnosticism advocated individualism in search of enlightenment. It believed in reincarnation. It believed that all humans had some kind of divine spark. The spark may be trapped, impossible to free; one might be out of touch with it, but it was there.
I agree with so much of this.
I thought you might. It’s no accident that the Fundamentalists, to the extent that they know anything about Gnosticism, see it as a disreputable part of early Christianity, best kept in the closet. If Gnosticism survives at all now, it may be among some sects who live on the border of Iraq and Iran—the Mandeans, for example, are still there. The attribute to emphasize is that in Greek, “Gnosis” means “knowledge.” “Gnosticos” is someone who seeks knowledge by searching the depths of the self, looking at the self as the available ground for enlightenment. When it came to the body, they were more divided. Some saw a division between the spirit and the flesh; some felt that the flesh wasn’t important at all, and therefore they could go out and fuck themselves silly because it didn’t make any difference. Another branch of the Gnostics were purifiers. To the Zoroastrians, fire was holy because it purified. Water was holy. But they didn’t believe in sex. Ergo, they died out. While Christianity became monolithic, Gnosticism splintered. And that is another one of the reasons it didn’t survive. Nor did it have an Augustine or an Irenaeus organizing a belief system.
Well, I think it hardly matters whether it was a conscious move on the part of the early Church Fathers or an instinct, but I expect the Church Fathers were certain that Christianity had to be absolute. Otherwise, it was not going to work. To hold together, there must be no questions—naught but answers. So the Gnostics were directly offensive to the Church Fathers. It seems as if they certainly agree with what some of us are saying today: that there are no answers. There are only questions. The mark of a good society, a few of us might argue, speaking of a society that has not yet come into existence, is that you move from one set of questions up to a higher level of questions. Whereas the early Christian philosophers founded their church upon the opposed conclusion. People must be given absolute certainty about life and death—particularly about death. An absolute statement of Heaven and Hell was required. The notion of reincarnation was too nuanced, too special, too elegant, too delicate, too possible. So it had to be absolutely forbidden and today, for Fundamentalists, is still off the board.
I was reading Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ a few days ago, and at a certain point he says, “All priests are liars.” It’s a marvelous remark because it happens to be not only daring but true. Whenever you speak with absolute authority about something that you cannot prove, the decision to speak with such authority means that you are ready to live as a liar. It seems to me that Christianity, because of its determination to be wholly authoritative, was able ultimately to create huge societies. Now, these huge societies work by half, and by half they fail. Certainly, for centuries, they functioned well enough to limp along philosophically full of unanswerable questions, hideous inequalities, and clouds of mendacity, ready to sweep all unanswerable questions under a rug of absolute faith.
Long before the Gnostics, it was taken for granted that there were many gods. This is certainly true of the Egyptians and of the Greeks. The Hindus believed in a variety of deities. The Africans reacted to all kinds of spirits, high and low. It is as if Judaism and then Christianity came to a contrary conclusion; this plethora of gods did not serve their faiths. It would be better for humans to believe there was one truth only.
And one God, which would of course explain the intensity of the early Christian attacks on the Gnostics.
Yes, they burned their books, they expelled them, they killed them. You know, when they found the Gnostic Gospels in 1945 in Egypt, those were remarkable documents—third- or fourth-century copies of documents that went back to the time of Christ. Elsewhere they had been systematically burned and destroyed. But because of the obscurity of this hiding place, these scrolls had not been uncovered, and so it was a great revelation. Historical and biblical scholars had always known about the Gnostics but mainly because Augustine and Irenaeus had attacked them. They never heard them speak for themselves. When they found the Gnostic Gospels, they discovered a much different Christianity, one that did not embrace a monolithic God and had a host of negative feelings about the Old Testament and the intensity of rage and jealousy in Jehovah. We can ask: What was he jealous of? Maybe other gods. So the Gnostics became the losers in this huge struggle.
But you could see—at least personally I see in the narrowness and the Orthodoxy of Christianity from the time of Augustine on—how narrow Christianity is in relation to its roots: a hatred of the flesh, the concept of Original Sin, the insistence that Jesus must be God. He cannot merely be God’s messenger. Such remarkable figures did come out of the Middle East—John the Baptist, Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Adonis, Dionysus, Osiris—incredible figures. From a Gnostic point of view, they would all be messengers sent down to keep alive the spark.
Wouldn’t it also be an early attempt to understand the mechanics of existence? I would even say that this curiosity about the nature of God was seen by Judaism and Christianity as the great enemy. You cannot build a powerfully structured society so long as there are all too many ways to elaborate the details. The Judeo-Christian enterprise was determined then to become an absolute arbiter over the more mysterious elements of existence.
And should there be a debate, it was to be resolved by the supreme leaders of the Church.
Yes, do not look into yourself. Refer to your external authority.
And so you could say that the final expression of this was in 1870, when the Catholic Church came up with the infallibility of the Pope. That was always implicit. But finally they now had to state it. It was the final consolidation of Papal power. When you think of the world that was in existence around the time of the birth of Christ, you had two prevailing religious visions—in the Middle East, at any rate: the Greek and the Judaic. They were opposed to each other in a variety of ways and complemented each other in other ways. Christianity can be seen as the synthesis of many of those ideas.
On God: An Uncommon Conversation Page 15