A lot of what you learn comes direct from the feeling. You reflect on it, and you find out about it. You find out what kinds of description of it can perhaps be true. You find out what descriptions of it can’t possibly be true. For instance: is it like having an imaginary friend? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that it can’t be denied that the whisper of presence in your head, when you attend to it, makes you feel that you’re in company even when you’re physically alone. But no, in that the presence which gleams intermittently in your mind doesn’t chatter cosily on, making conversation, endorsing your judgements, helping you to whistle bravely in the dark, being what you want an ideally understanding friend to be. It doesn’t say: they’re all meanies, but I love you. It doesn’t say: yes Tony, yes George, I want you to invade Iraq right now. In fact it doesn’t speak at all, in my experience. And it doesn’t feel, at all, as if it is available for ventriloquism. You can’t stick your metaphorical hand up its metaphorical back and waggle its metaphorical jaws, while projecting onto it some message you’d like to hear. Of all the personalities to whom we might lend headspace when they aren’t physically present – the little inboard simulacra of the people we love, the remembered dead, Mr Knightley, Obi-wan Kenobi – this is the one in whose mouth it seems least plausible to put words of our own. It is not ours to play with. It is other.
Which may seem a little strange as a statement, when I so clearly suggested at the beginning of this chapter that people look for God because they’re hoping, they’re yearning, they’re wishing for His existence. Doesn’t that imply that the God we wish for will behave, when we think we’ve found Him, like a wish fulfilled? Gratifying us, being what we wish Him to be, modelling Himself to our expectations with squishy responsiveness? That’s certainly the infantile image of God that New Atheists promulgate, God as an image of our own need imprinted onto the soft jelly of the universe. But – nope. We wish for God to exist, but we don’t wish for Him to exist as a wish, scattering fairy dust to order. And in this logic is on our side. Follow me closely now: whether God exists or not is unprovable, so for an individual person, whether He exists or not is always going to be a matter of belief. But at the same time, quite independently, He either exists or He doesn’t, irrespective of whether He’s believed in. He’s a fact, or a non-fact, about the nature of the universe. So if you believe, you’re making a bet that God exists whether you believe or not. If you believe, you’re not perceiving God as a creature of your belief, called into being by it, ebbing and flowing as it ebbs and flows. You’re perceiving a state of the universe. You may be wrong, but if you are wrong, you’re not wrong because of your emotional motives for belief, you’re not wrong because you’re weak and credulous. You’re just wrong. Likewise, if you’re right, you’re not right because of anything you did or felt, because there was anything deserving or admirable about your feelings. You just are right. I realise this may come as a shock, but wishing does not in fact cause things to exist. Or to cease to exist. If something does exist, then wishing for that something does not infect it with wishfulness.
But the logic here is just giving an abstract demonstration of what, in my experience, you possess as a very un-abstract emotion. One of the things you can feel you are sure of about this presence is that it doesn’t behave like any kind of straightforward projection of your own attributes. It won’t be fixed, bounded, tied down that way. It won’t stay within the limits of any particular piece of your imagining. Any description you may give of it, it exceeds. It is always different from what you expected: not because your expectations are necessarily wrong, but because it is always more than them. It offers an ocean when you propose a glass of water. It feels as if having even the ghost of a hint of a taste of a suggestion of it in your mind requires a spatially impossible contortion in which the immense is contained in the tiny. If you try to imagine what the world is like from its point of view you stumble into awe, defeated.
This is a feeling that seems to tell against the impression people often have that ‘God’ is a device for infusing comfortable human qualities into the vast, cold cosmos. The science-fiction writer Adam Roberts put the point very wittily in a recent novel: ‘I enjoy eating beefsteaks, and because beefsteaks serve the useful purpose of keeping me alive, I therefore declare the universe to be beefsteak, God a beefsteak, and beefsteak the universal core value of everything.’ He’s taking the piss, of course, out of the high valuation humans tend to set on love. Christianity is dead set* on God being loving, and being Love, which may indeed be a bizarre category error: one little species busily projecting its concerns out onto vast material indifference, moseying on up to neutron stars and saying hey, let’s talk about heartbreak. But again, that’s not what it feels like. It doesn’t feel, at least in my experience, as if ‘declaring’ is what’s going on. Or asserting, or deciding, or selecting, or any of the active, uh, activities that would be involved in using religion as a hand mirror we hold up to view our own faces. Here the big difference between monotheism and polytheism comes in, because in polytheism you do have a form of religion which projects human attributes; where, in fact, projecting human attributes is pretty much the point.
* Pun intended.
Greek and Roman and Norse paganism provided – sometimes the modern Wiccan variety too provides – a way to acknowledge the power of the impulses that buffet us within and without, by turning them into capitalised Powers. Many-god religions separate out and purify human qualities, and then concentrate them into mythological figures who express each quality in blazing, drastic, unmediated form. For love, a goddess of love. For rage, a god of war. For motherhood, fatherhood, wisdom, justice, death, vengeance, craft, boundary-making, youth, music, healing, language – a god or goddess each. And you can see that this can make for a very effective tool of self-understanding, not on the analytical level but concretely and immediately, down deep where stories live. The pantheons of polytheism give you something like a card pack or Tarot pack of potent figures, which the myths deal out again and again, each deal, each arrangement, each story having the potential to reveal some legible new aspect of the relationship between the powers that jostle and feud within us. Polytheism honours the range of what we are. Which is nice. But quite egocentric. And it’s not what the shimmer of presence in my mind feels like, with its universal backing for everything, its imperturbably equal support for a fabric of being stretching far beyond and away from our preoccupations. Which is one reason why it makes sense to me to interpret the shimmer not as the presence of a god, some local force from our psyche’s back catalogue, but as the God, Ha Shem, Ho Theos, Al-Lah, dimly and locally perceived as He (She, It) goes about His (Her, Its) unimaginable business of being the ground and origin of everything.
Everything meaning really everything, not some broad-sounding but secretly uplifting selection from everything. Monotheism can’t pick and choose the nice bits – or the interesting bits, or the impressive bits, or any particular category of bits of existence at all. It can’t, as one unexpected consequence, be tasteful. Or let’s put it more strongly, since saying ‘tasteful’ may sound as if I’m claiming some kind of avant-garde, épatez-les-bourgeois virtue here, which only disrupts twee or kitsch or chocolate-boxy versions of good taste. Let’s say, it can’t be beautiful, or it can’t ever only be beautiful, according to whatever serious standard of beauty you care to specify. It can’t do this –
Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skilful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light . . .
– which is the Roman poet Lucretius praising the goddess Venus, as recently translated by the American writer Ursula Le Guin. The God of everything can’t claim this kind of beautifully matched suite of natural moods and natural moments and natural symbols. A goddess of fertility can have pick
ed out for her the peaceful, the smiling parts of natural fruitfulness; she can have attributed to her what the growing and breeding of the living world feels like on a calm bright day in spring. But the God of everything must be manifest in everything.
Just to stay in the domain of living processes and the reproduction thereof: as well as backing the existence of roses and kittens, the God of everything must sustain tapeworms, necrotising bacteria that reduce flesh to a puddle of pus, and parasitic wasps as they eat their way out of their hosts. Any cell that divides in any organism must be doing so in the radiance of the universal attention. Our judgements of beauty and utility and desirability are beside the point. Crocuses multiply, and so do anthrax spores, and the God of everything smiles on all alike. The same has to be true of all the acts and events of human societies; and of all places, and of all times; and in fact of every configuration of matter and energy everywhere, continuously. The God of everything must be equally present for everything. You name it. He is exactly as present in a room in a failing strip-mall where a malfunctioning fluorescent tube is jittering out headache for all onlookers as He is in a cathedral. He pays equal attention to the individual way each of the billion separate pebbles lie on a pebble beach. And on all the other beaches. He knows and sustains the exact placement of every single molecule of frozen carbon dioxide in the northern polar cap of Mars. And of every other molecule of every other planet, around every other star. The lot. For every unselected speck of existence, patient shining.
Now I seem to be coming perilously close to the sycophantic prayer in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. You know the one I mean: ‘Oh God, you are so very, very big. So absolutely huge. Oh Lord, you really are gigantic . . . ’ But, unencompassable though the God of everything must be to a human imagination, it doesn’t seem to be the case in my experience that you respond to Him (Her, It) as if He were some looming giant requiring to be admired and praised and buttered up; anxiously complimented on His bulk. There’s some fear there, all right, but it’s not the fear you feel for power when you encounter a powerful force or a powerful person in the world. It’s more like the fear you might feel for an overwhelming landscape, where the palpable bigness around you makes it clear you are amidst something that does not operate within your limits. The God of everything’s omnipresence in time can do this just as much as His omnipresence in space; maybe more so, given the short shelf-life of awe compared to our permanent preoccupation with the chronological limits on our existence. If there is an attention that was shining away fully-formed at the t-zero moment when the universe began, then it must also, more to the point, have been steadily holding everything in being at the moment when you yourself were conceived; and it will still be shining on, unchanged, unaged, unexhausted, at the moment when your last breath sighs out on the hospice bed. And for all the ages afterwards. Something that does not begin and does not end can be a fearful prospect, for creatures like us who do both. Yet more Hebrew poetry:
As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting unto everlasting upon them that fear him . . .
Humility is one option here – the urge to kneel, or to sit very quietly, conscious of your microscopic brevity in relation to what is visiting you. Another option is resentment, at this impervious immortal thing that is immune to our mortality. (And doesn’t even exist, the bastard.) But humiliation – the sensation of being forcibly reduced or pressed down by power – doesn’t seem to come into it. It doesn’t seem to be in the nature of the presence you’re feeling that it should make you feel crushed or abject. It has no designs on your dignity, perhaps because of the way in which the power of the God of everything differs from all the other manifestations of power you’ll ever meet. This power is not exercised from the top of any hierarchy. It does not radiate from any local point within the universe at all. It works entirely through presence. Kings and caliphs, emperors and popes, televangelists and household bullies have all wanted to claim that their authority is a licensed copy of its universal reach, but their claim must always be incomplete at best. In the end, their power and His are unlike. Their power is rivalrous, in the economic sense. It is big because others’ power is small. It needs to be extracted from the submission of other apes like themselves. But His power needs nothing, competes with nothing, compels nothing, exists at nothing’s expense. You could no more be humiliated by Him (Her, It) than you could by the height of the Himalayas or the depth of the Atlantic or the number of oxygen atoms in the air. It may make sense to compare Him to a king, if a king is your best local image of unparalleled majesty, but even if He is like a king, kings are not like Him.* He is more than any king. He is as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence. And yet a person.
* A discovery which has had profound historical consequences. There’s a direct line from ‘Long live Christ the King!’ to ‘No king but King Jesus!’ to the rediscovery of republicanism in modern Europe and North America.
When is it that you can say you believe? It’s tricky, since belief is often so intermittent; is so often chequered through or stippled through with disbelief; is so much something come upon, or sensed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, rather than securely possessed. Is it when you feel you’ve found something? Or is it much earlier: when you feel the need that will make you start looking? When you do start looking? When you fail to find anything and yet somehow don’t give up the hope that you might find something some day? Maybe it’s when you hope at all, in this direction.
But one point at which you can know you’ve started to believe is the point at which the tentative houseroom or headroom you’re giving to the God of everything starts to have emotional consequences of its own. Problematic consequences; uncomfortable consequences; unpleasant consequences. Because if the bastard does exist, if the God of everything is shining patiently in every room, then you can’t escape the truth that He must be shining in some horrible places. He must be lending his uncritical sustaining power to rooms in which the vilest things are happening. There He must be, obligingly maintaining the flow of electrons through the rusty wires that are conducting 240 volts into the soft tissue of some poor screaming soul in a torture chamber. There He must be, benignly silent, as a migrant worker is raped at a truck stop. There He must be, shining contentedly away, in the overrun emergency room where the children from a crushed school bus are dying.
And when you’ve noticed that you’re ready for the next act in the emotional drama of belief we’re following here.* Which is, of course, horrified disgust.
* One of the several possible such dramas, of course. I can just follow this one with particular confidence because it happens to be mine.
4
Hello, Cruel World
As you may remember if you ever read the book version of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter collects church collapses. ‘Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvellous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass.’ Dr Lecter likes the thud and squelch of falling masonry because it seems to suggest that, if anyone is in charge of the universe, it must be a being as cruelly, capriciously amused by human suffering as he is himself. You look up in the naive hope of love and protection, and back comes your answer: a bus-sized chunk of baroque stonework. What’s more, as Lecter delightedly notes, it’s actually faith that creates the black joke here. Without faith, there’d be nothing but indifferent material forces at work. It’s only when the idea of events having an author is introduced that the universe becomes cruel, as opposed to merely heavy, or fast-moving, or prone to unpredictable acceleration. ‘Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans, it all comes from the same place.’
It’s faith that creates the ‘problem of pain’, as the whole issue is known in theological shorthand: the whole problem of suffering�
�s existence in a world supposedly presided over by a loving and all-powerful God. In the absence of God, of course, there’s still pain. But there’s no problem. It’s just what happens. Once the God of everything is there in the picture, and the physics and biology and history of the world we know become in some ultimate sense His responsibility, the lack of love and protection in the order of things begins to shriek out. If the universe is a made thing, instead of an accidental thing, it only takes a fairly short adult acquaintance with it for it to be obvious that it is, in certain respects, very badly made. It is intricately, beautifully, wonderfully made; but also carelessly, dangerously, clumsily made. And aswarm with cruelties. There is no finessing this. No matter how remote you believe God is from the day-to-day management of the cosmos – and for me He’s pretty damn remote, withdrawn from the whole thing as a condition of it existing at all – He still bears a maker’s responsibility for what goes on inside it. It doesn’t help to know, as almost all Christians have known for 150 years now, that God didn’t design living creatures. Evolution doesn’t let Him off the hook. He is still the creator and the sustainer of the processes by which life takes its myriads of altering forms, and therefore answerable for the results of those processes. And for their costs. The only easy way out of the problem is to discard the expectation that causes the problem, by ditching the author Himself. After all, there’s no logical need for Him anyway. But then there’s that shining, there’s that glimmer, there’s that never-ending song of loving intent threaded through the substrate of things; and if you find you can’t discard that, the cruelties of the world are an emotional, not just a logical, challenge.
Unapologetic Page 7