Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  I now know my teachers steered clear of several Biblical stories showing God at his worst, but am still surprised by how his believers justify these. In an 1879 introduction to Deuteronomy the Reverend C. H. Mackintosh wrote, “some persons, allowing themselves to be influenced by morbid feeling and false sentimentality… find difficulty in the directions given to Israel in reference to the Canaanites. It seems to them inconsistent with a Benevolent Being to command His people to smite their fellow creatures and show them no mercy. They cannot understand how a merciful God could command His people to slay women and children with the edge of the sword.” Mackintosh then explains that folk who cannot understand this are presuming to judge God, when they should have the faith to know that everything He commanded in the Bible was right. In 1941 The Bible Today, published by Oxford University Press, had a commentary excusing the massacre of Ammonites, Midianites, Canaanites and Philistines because the Israelite invasion was a “life-and-death struggle between truth and falsehood for the cultural development of God’s people.” Years earlier the Nazis had started promoting German cultural development by killing the Jews. The one excuse for that old God is that he caused everything, so is everyone’s dad but the dad especially of Jesus, whose Sermon on the Mount should replace the punishment clauses for the Ten Commandments. But Christian, Muslim and Zionist governments have preferred the Old Testament Dad when His words can be used when invading, killing, robbing those of another faith, or of a very similar but slightly different faith.

  But I could not dismiss Nobodaddy (Blake called Him that) as a fantasy like the Wizard of Oz. If God was the soul of the universe like I was the soul of my body, then newspapers and history books showed that innocent, helpless people were still being hurt and killed on a universal scale, so the soul of the universe often IS horribly unjust. This sensible assumption would not let me rest and gave me an appetite for stories about how evil happens.

  Six centuries before Christ was born, Lao Tze wrote that the cause of all things is not nameable, but those who need a name should call it Mother. Alas, my education made it impossible for me to think the soul of all things was female. I also wanted to name the not-nameable in a way that made me think it essentially good. My earthly dad, Alex Gray, did not need to do that — he thought God a name for something he did not know, so need neither accept nor reject. Like many others he had lost the Christian faith of his parents when fighting in France, so had directly experienced more evil between 1914 and 18 than I have met in a life of 73 years. He seldom spoke of his war experiences, thought evil sprang from human greed and ignorance, and that wars and exploitation would end in the victory of co-operative Socialism, though the struggle for this might last centuries. He was enviably content with this faith. The struggle he believed in had achieved many good things I enjoyed – our council house, my schooling, the public libraries, the National Health Service – but the victory over Fascism that founded the British Welfare State in 1945 was soured by the needless testing of the first atomic bombs, after which the biggest nations invested huge wealth in a nuclear weapons race that was supposed to save the world from Communism, and is now supposed to save it from terrorism but is really maintained because the arms industry is Britain and the USA’s most profitable source of investment, and gives them means of bullying poorer nations. Needing to believe in a creative goodness more lasting than people I searched for it through literature and art, and found much in the works of Bernard Shaw and William Blake who, surprisingly, sent me back to the Bible.

  Both of them pointed out that, even before Jesus arrived, it contained more than a blood-thirsty battle god hell-bent on destruction. He is found speaking like the demon of Socrates, not in thunder but in a still, small voice. He threatens to punish an evil empire with worse evil, but spares the wrongdoers when they repent and beg for mercy. Prophets arise who, speaking for God, denounce sacrifices – say the smell of burnt offerings stink in His nostrils, because the rich Jews are using these to win His favour while exploiting their poorer brethren. He promises that if they obey Him and love their neighbours as themselves, everyone will adopt their faith and wars will cease because (as Burns puts it) “Man to man the wide world o’er / Shall brothers be for all that”. Blake especially pointed me to Job, the Bible’s eighteenth and most humane book. It is a unique poem which does not ascribe evil to human disobedience and folly, but to The Lord (as God is named here) who starts by calling a conference of his heavenly sons. One of them, Satan, has been patrolling the earth and reports on it, like a secret service chief to a prime minister. The Lord (rather smugly) says Satan can have found nothing wrong with Job, a perfectly just man who not only obeys God’s commandments, but sacrifices burnt offerings on behalf of his seven sons, in case one of them has secretly sinned by cursing God in his heart. Satan replies with a question, – “ls Job not highly paid for trusting you? He is spectacularly rich. Remove his possessions and see what he thinks of you then.” God refuses to do that but lets Satan do it. Job’s seven sons and three daughters are killed by lightning and a storm knocking their house down, while invading foreigners kill all his servants and steal his thousands of camels, oxen, asses and other worldly goods. Job, now a pauper, says, “I was born naked and will die naked. The Lord gave and the Lord takes away. Bless Him!”

  So at the next heavenly conference the Lord can still boast of Job’s faith. Satan points out that, despite Job’s losses, he still has his health. So Satan is allowed to make Job’s skin erupt in such dreadful boils from the soles of his feet to the top of his head that soft ashes are the only seat he can bear. He squats in them, scraping his scabs with a piece of broken pot. When his horrified wife tells him to curse God and die he answers, “Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?” Worse evil comes to him in the form of three old friends who try to persuade him the evils he suffers are God’s punishments for sins he must have committed – by claiming he has never sinned he casts doubt on God’s justice, so deserves to suffer. At this restatement of the bad old parental double-bind The Lord intervenes on His own and Job’s behalf, telling the friends they don’t know what they are talking about. In a great hymn to the glory of the universe He declares that it is too vast for human minds to completely understand, so people must accept the universe and the Lord who made it. What else can they do? Beyond this point The Book of Job ends unconvincingly with Job being finally given more wealth and children than he originally lost. Job is the only Old Testament book where Satan appears. He appears just once again in the Bible when tempting Christ in the Wilderness. These are the Devil’s only Biblical appearances. Genesis does not suggest that Satan was the snake who tempted Eve and Adam.

  After the crucifixion Satan’s power was hugely magnified by a revolutionary Christian doctrine claiming that God gave a new immortal soul to every body at birth. Greek Pythagoras, Indian Buddha also thought souls were immortal, but had been created with the universe, after which everyone who died was reborn in a different body. Most religions, including the Jewish, thought death ended the soul, though one or two great folk might be carried up bodily into heaven and live there eternally. Most funeral rites were to ensure the dead stayed dead, and did not trouble the living as miserable ghosts. Egyptians assumed the soul disintegrated with the body, so those who could afford it tried keeping bodies and souls together by having their corpses mummified and securely entombed. An early pharaoh sought immortality by having his mummy stored with many of his riches in the world’s heaviest tomb. Raiders were too smart for him. A few centuries later an Egyptian scribe lamented that even the builder of the Great Pyramid was now, like the poorest slave, dust blown around the desert sands. So when Christianity declared everyone was equally immortal, whether slave or emperor, it spread fast through the Roman Empire whose basic activity was slave-making.

  But immortality was a threat as well as a glad promise, since only good Christians would enter heaven after death. Fathers of the Christian church decided that, since Adam and Eve’s disobedi
ence, Satan was the God of this world because all natural forces and nearly all people were ruled by Satan, who was no longer a son of heaven allowed by God to walk the earth as His secret policeman, but a fiery rebel whose main kingdom was Hell – the lowest part of the universe in the world’s centre – with the surface being Hell’s suburb where new-born souls graduated to heaven or hell after death. Nearly every earthly pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, was denounced by the church as a Satanic snare. Christians still exist who think that way. When that assumption was more widespread it is not surprising that the Devil became popular, especially after Roman Emperors made Christianity official. For about sixteen centuries after that there were tug-of-wars for supremacy between Christian churches and Christian governments, but usually they got on well together, so critics of either were condemned as Devilish. The clergy found Satan indispensable. Description of Hell’s tortures were the strongest part of many sermons. Thomas Aquinas, theologian and Saint, declared that viewing the agonies of the damned were half the delight of Heaven. The logic of Aquinas became the limit of Roman Catholic philosophy for centuries. Those who tried to know more were often condemned as heretics.

  The story of Faust became widely known shortly after the invention of printing. The name of an early German printer was attached to the wicked hero of a puppet play as famous as the story of Punch, and very similar. Faust pawns his soul to enjoy twenty years of unlimited knowledge, wealth and mischief before the Devil collects it. Kit Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great forerunner, was a homosexual atheist and a member of the Elizabethan secret service which finally murdered him because he knew too many state secrets. His play Doctor Faustus is about the price of knowledge giving his hero invisibility, air-flight and time travel. But Marlowe’s Devil, Mephistopheles, after one or two fine speeches, becomes a mere prankster – not an interesting character. Apart from his two Old and New Testament appearances the Prince of Darkness made no great appearance in world literature before Protestant Milton took him up. In Dante’s Inferno he cannot even move, being a three-headed giant frozen upside down in the world’s dead centre.

  Milton’s Paradise Lost is still England’s national epic and Satan is certainly its greatest and most sympathetic character. Being enthusiasts for the French Revolution, William Blake and Robert Burns greatly admired this archetypal rebel. Blake pointed out that after creating the universe Milton’s God does nothing but forbid and punish, so all creative energy is left to God’s enemy. In the 20th century it was disparaged by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who thought it made better sound than sense. The critic Leavis found Milton’s supernatural universe full of contradictions, also pantomime slapstick in the Heavenly war between angels and devils who try hard but cannot seriously injure each other. But the contradictions in Paradise Lost are all in the Bible and what Christians have since made of it, and Milton has deliberately compounded them by adding every other convincing vision of the universe offered by Greek legend, New World geography and Renaissance science. Milton probably believed what God told Job’s false comforters – that understanding Him is too big a job for the human brain, but he felt it right to try, and would probably have defended the contradictions in Paradise Lost as Walt Whitman defended those in Leaves of Grass: ”Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes.” Before the 20th century most Believers accepted the contradictions. Voltaire mocked them because he was a sceptic for whom God and the nature of the universe were identical. Then at the height of European Enlightenment in the late 18th century, Goethe arrived and gave the Devil a new lease of post-Christian life.

  A 20th century German author (perhaps Spengler?) wrote that modern man lived in a Faustian age where human powers had been hugely increased by Devilish bargains. It is a fact that literary masterpieces after Goethe’s Faust are about wealth and power gained or sought by wrong-doing: Stendhal’s Red and Black, Crime and Punishment, Great Expectations, Wagner’s Ring, all Ibsen’s plays. Strangest of all, bestsellers about supernatural evil were written by folk without faith in the supernatural – Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Trilby, Dracula, A Picture of Dorian Gray, The Wild Ass’s Skin. The last is Balzac’s only supernatural tale. His realistic ones show that criminal bargains are worth striking if you are smart enough to keep the gains. Thomas Mann’s novel Dr Faustus describes a great German composer born soon after Bismark unifies his nation, who deals with the Devil shortly before World War One, writes masterpieces, but finally goes insane when Hitler comes to power.

  I was fourteen in 1949 when the BBC Third Programme celebrated the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth in a fortnight of broadcasts about the man and his work. For several nights it broadcast the five acts of Faust, and its vast scope so excited me that I bought a Penguin translation of Parts 7 and 2 by Philip Wayne, and acquired Victorian translations of the whole by Bayard Taylor and John Anster. I easily enjoyed inconsistencies as bad as any in Paradise Lost. Like The Book of Job, this play starts with God allowing the Devil to test the faith of a good old professor whose knowledge of life is theoretical. Mephistopheles restores Faust’s youth, helps him to seduce a young and loving girl, kill her brother in a duel, then abandon her when pregnant. Maddened by shame and loneliness she kills her baby and dies in jail, refusing Faust’s last-minute efforts to free her because she fears his devilish friend. It is a richer play than that bare outline, mixing supernatural events with the social variety and humour of a Dickens novel, but written in poetry only those who know German appreciate. Yet the inferior English verse translations excited and delighted me.

  Goethe was a young man when he wrote this first part and a famous middle-aged German writer when it was published, staged, acclaimed. Coleridge considered translating it, Delacroix illustrated it, Berlioz and Gounod set it to music. Goethe’s admirers thought that if he completed Faust it would be to Germany what the Iliad had been to Greece, the Aeneid to Rome, the Divine Comedy to Italy – a display of Germany’s cultural greatness through the power of her language. In 1832 at the age of eighty-three Goethe published the end of the play, dying soon after.

  With the Devil's support Faust is now shown creating modern commerce by inventing paper money, saves Europe from civil warfare by hiring a mercenary army, time-travels to Ancient Greece, learns much ancient wisdom and returns with Helen of Troy. Their son has some of Lord Byron’s traits, but Faust does not need family life. He acquires land by forcibly evicting peasants, imagines he is building a great new home for mankind by reclaiming desolate seashores, and becomes too old and blind to know or care that Mephisto has financed all his grand schemes by theft and piracy. After death he is conducted upward through angelic circles dimly recalling Dante’s Paradiso, and left reunited with the pure spirit of the first woman he betrayed. What more could any man get? We all have fantasies of absolute power and absolute approval. No wonder the slightly miserable youth I was in 1949 liked that play.

  Nietzsche thought the play’s weakness was a German professor needing Satan’s help to seduce a woman of the servant class. I disagree. The weakness is its unstinting sympathy for a billionaire businessman always enriching and aggrandising himself without a sign of remorse and dying happy, being fooled by Satan into thinking himself a public benefactor. The first part ended with Faust regretting he harmed Gretchen, but neither before or after does he regret using Satan to get all he wants. Since Goethe gives him an immortal soul, he might at least have put him through a purgatory that taught him to repent. No. Satan tries to seize the soul he has earned by so much hard work, and the angels cheat him out of it because (they say), ”He who unwearedly kept trying, we have the power to free” – an excuse for Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, William the Conqueror, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all such tyrants who could honestly say, “To the end of my days I never had a moment’s rest.” God in Heaven starts Faust’s adventure, but even Goethe flinched from showing Him at the end, telling His angels to cheat the Devil.

  What finally makes Goeth
e’s Faust structurally inferior to the epics of Dante and Milton is its almost total indifference to Christianity. In the first scene Faust is restrained from committing suicide by a cathedral choir celebrating Easter morning, which reminds him of his innocent youth. Thereafter Jesus has no place in his world-view, because the mature Goethe was as much a pagan as any ancient Greek or Roman.

  So Goethe’s Faust joined God the Dad as my most haunting fictions. Both had authority I recognized but could not be at peace with. Over the years God excited my imagination (which Blake said was the Holy Ghost in people) to write verses about Him with more and more sympathy. Nobody imagining God can help making Him in their own image, so of course for me He is an artist struggling with difficult materials, some of them in his own personality. I have never been able to take Satan seriously – he is all too human – but in 1999 I saw Glasgow Citizens Theatre perform Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in a version by Edwin Morgan. This kept all the great poetry, replacing the slapstick clowning with modern devices – the infernal contract signed in blood became a drug injection into a vein, the three books of infernal knowledge were compressed into a laptop computer. This so impressed me that I suggested to Eddie that he should now write a more satisfactory version of Goethe’s Faust. He rejected the idea. Maybe like MacDiarmid he disliked Olympian Goethe for turning Faust into a successful businessman who goes to heaven.

  In 2006 I wrote Goodbye Jimmy for the Glasgow Oran Mor lunch hour theatre, a play whose main character is an absentee God who is finally shown subordinate to the Great Mother of All Things. Perhaps that prompted my own attempt to translate Goethe’s Faust. The Prologue and First Act were completed by Hogmanay 2007 and those who know Goethe will see it only contains what he invented, though I have compressed much and omitted more. Not knowing how to continue I sent it to a Director of the Scottish National Theatre, hoping for a commission to research it further. The script was returned because the Edinburgh Lyceum had recently performed another modern version by John Clifford, so I decided to change Faust’s name to Fleck and make him a Scot. At the time I was working hard on a book I had been busy with for years and had promised to give the publisher at the end of April 2008. Halfway through April I faced the fact that my Life in Pictures book could not be finished so soon, told my publisher I would finish it in a year or two, and enjoyed a wonderful freedom that suddenly let me finish Fleck in four or five weeks, with secretarial help from Helen Lloyd and Roger Glass.