Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  That was followed by the sound of Dad stomping down the stairs into the basement, furious at all of us, me for back-talking Erma and making wild accusations, and Lori even more for daring to strike her own grandmother, and Brian for being such a pussy and starting the whole thing. I thought Dad would come around to our side once he’d heard what had happened, and I tried to explain. “I don’t care what happened!” he yelled. “But we were just protecting ourselves,” I said. “Brian’s a man, he can take it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear another word of this. Do you hear me?” He was shaking his head, but wildly, almost as if he thought he could keep out the sound of my voice. He wouldn’t even look at me. After Dad had gone back upstairs to tie into Erma’s hooch and we kids were all in bed, Brian bit my toe to try to make me laugh, but I kicked him away. We all lay there in the silent darkness. “Dad was really weird,” I said, because someone had to say it. “You’d be weird, too, if Erma was your mom,” Lori said. “Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?” I asked. No one said a thing. It was gross and creepy to think about, but it would explain a lot. Why Dad left home as soon as he could. Why he drank so much and why he got so angry. Why he never wanted to visit Welch when we were younger. Why he at first refused to come to West Virginia with us and only at the last possible moment overcame his reluctance and jumped into the car. Why he was shaking his head so hard, almost like he wanted to put his hands over his ears, when I tried to explain what Erma had been doing to Brian. “Don’t think about things like that,” Lori told me. “It’ll make you crazy.” And so I put it out of my mind. MOM AND DAD TOLD us how they’d made it to Phoenix only to find that Mom’s laundry-on-the-clothesline ploy hadn’t kept out intruders. Our house on North Third Street had been looted. Pretty much everything was gone, including, of course, our bikes. Mom and Dad had rented a trailer to carry back what little was left—Mom said those foolish thieves had overlooked some good stuff, such as a pair of Grandma Smith’s riding breeches from the thirties that were of the highest quality—but the Oldsmobile’s engine had seized up in Nashville, and they’d had to abandon it along with the trailer and Grandma Smith’s riding breeches and take the bus the rest of the way to Welch. I thought that once Mom and Dad returned, they’d be able to make peace with Erma.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He folded his arms. ‘Perfect,’ he said. After that - clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl - my entry into the profession was rather rapid. The very next day Walter sent my costume to a seamstress, and had it properly re-sewn; within a week he had borrowed a hall and a band from a manager who owed him a favour, and had Kitty and I, in our matching suits, practising upon the stage. It was not at all like singing in Mrs Dendy’s parlour. The strangers, the dark and empty hall, disconcerted me; I was stiff and awkward, quite unable to master the few simple strolling steps that Kitty and Walter tried patiently to teach me. At last Walter handed me a cane, and said I should just stand and lean upon it, and let Kitty dance; and that was better, and I grew easier, and the song began to sound funny again. When we had finished and were practising our bows, some of the men in the orchestra clapped us. Kitty sat and took a cup of tea, then; but Walter led me off to a seat in the stalls, away from the others, and looked grave. ‘Nan,’ he began, ‘I told you when all this started that I would not press you, and I meant it; I would give up the business altogether before I forced a girl upon the stage against her will. There are fellows who do that sort of thing, you know, fellows who think of nothing but their own pockets. But I am not one of them; and besides, you are my friend. But -’ he took a breath. ‘We have come this far, the three of us; and you are good - I promise you, you are good.’ ‘With work, perhaps,’ I said doubtfully. He shook his head. ‘Not even with that. Haven’t you worked, these past six months - harder than Kitty, almost? You know the act as well as she; you know her songs, her bits of business - why, you taught them to her, most of them!’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘This is all so new, and strange. All my life I’ve loved the music hall, but I never thought of getting up upon the stage, myself...’ ‘Didn’t you?’ he said then. ‘Didn’t you, really?’ Every time you saw some little serio-comic captivate the crowd, at that Palace of yours, in Canterbury, didn’t you wish that it was you? Didn’t you close your eyes and see your name upon the programmes, your number in the box? Didn’t you sing to your - oyster-barrel - as if it were a crowded hall, and you could make those little fishes weep, or shriek with laughter?’ I bit my nail, and frowned. ‘Dreams,’ I said. He snapped his fingers. ‘The very stuff that stages are made of.’ ‘Where would we start?’

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  ¿La pregunta fue insultante? No quise que lo fuera. Me di cuenta que él sabe mucho sobre mí, y apenas sé nada sobre él. Sabe quiénes son mis padres, qué le pasó a Cole y a mi amigo, que amo las cosas de los 80, que crecí sin una madre, lo que estudio en la universidad… Pero él todavía es un gran misterio. —Lo siento si eso sonó mal —le digo cuando no responde—. Es una hermosa casa. Es solo que Cole mencionó que tú y su madre se conocieron en la secundaria, donde eras una especie de estrella de béisbol. Debes amar el deporte. Solo tengo curiosidad por qué no veo trofeos o imágenes, o algo así en la casa. No hay fotos recientes de ti y Cole, tampoco música, ni libros… Nada que describa lo que te gusta. Respira, se aclara la garganta y un sudor frío recorre mi cuello. —Está todo empacado en el sótano —me dice—. Supongo que nunca lo saqué después de mudarme a la casa. —¿Cuánto tiempo has estado en esa casa? —Eh… —se voz se desvanece como si estuviera pensando—, supongo que la compré hace diez años. ¿Diez años? —Pike… —digo, tratando de no reírme. Exhala una risa en mi oído, y sonrío, sacudiendo la cabeza. —Supongo que suena raro, ¿eh? —pregunta. ¿Que todavía no hayas desempacado todo? Sí. Giro sobre mi espalda, manteniendo mi brazo metido debajo de mi cabeza. —Entiendo que botemos ciertas cosas a medida que envejecemos —le digo—. Pero has tenido una vida desde que te mudaste a ese lugar, ¿cierto? No veo nada de tu personalidad. Lugares que has visitado, baratijas que has recogido a lo largo de los años… —Sí, lo sé, yo eh… Vacila de nuevo, dejando escapar un suspiro, y el sonido de su aliento vibra en mi oído, enviando hormigueos por mi espina dorsal. Ojalá pudiera ver su rostro. Es tan difícil leerlo por teléfono. Todo lo que puedo imaginar es la forma en que baja los ojos a veces, como si no quisiera que alguien supiera lo que está sintiendo, o la forma en que asiente, como si temiera lo que va a salir de su boca si habla. Finalmente continúa: —Cole se hizo más importante —admite—. En algún momento, quién era yo y lo que quería se volvió irrelevante. Entiendo. Cuando tienes hijos, tus esperanzas se transfieren a ellos. Tu vida queda relegada a lo que ellos necesitan. Lo entiendo. Pero Cole es un adulto ahora, y Pike ha estado solo por un tiempo. ¿Qué hace cuando no está en el trabajo? —Me encantaría ver algunas de las cosas —le digo—. Si alguna vez quieres desempacar, te ayudaré. —Nah, está bien. Frunzo el ceño por la rapidez con que me rechaza. —¿Quieres decir que no puedo ver anuarios antiguos, y si tú y Cole eran iguales a la misma edad? —bromeo. Suelta una risita tranquila. —Dios no. ¿De regreso a cuando lo único importante que tenía que hacer era mi cabello?

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  At the close of his brief paragraph on the negative Oedipal complex in the young girl, Freud remarks that the factor that decides which identification is accomplished is the strength or weakness of masculinity and femininity in her disposition. Significantly, Freud avows his confusion about what precisely a masculine or feminine disposition is when he interrupts his statement midway with the hyphenated doubt:“—whatever that may consist in—” (22). What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders? Are these attributes of an unconscious libidinal organization, and how precisely do the various identifications set up in consequence of the Oedipal conflict work to reinforce or dissolve each of these dispositions? What aspect of “femininity” do we call dispositional, and which is the consequence of identification? Indeed, what is to keep us from understanding the “dispositions” of bisexuality as the effects or productions of a series of internalizations? Moreover, how do we identify a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition at the outset? By what traces is it known, and to what extent do we assume a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition as the precondition of a heterosexual object choice? In other words, to what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The language of usurpation suggests a participation in the very categories from which s/he feels inevitably distanced, suggesting also the denaturalized and fluid possibilities of such categories once they are no longer linked causally or expressively to the presumed fixity of sex. Herculine’s anatomy does not fall outside the categories of sex, but confuses and redistributes the constitutive elements of those categories; indeed, the free play of attributes has the effect of exposing the illusory character of sex as an abiding substantive substrate to which these various attributes are presumed to adhere. Moreover, Herculine’s sexuality constitutes a set of gender transgressions which challenge the very distinction between heterosexual and lesbian erotic exchange, underscoring the points of their ambiguous convergence and redistribution. But it seems we are compelled to ask, is there not, even at the level of a discursively constituted sexual ambiguity, some questions of “sex” and, indeed, of its relation to “power” that set limits on the free play of sexual categories? In other words, how free is that play, whether conceived as a prediscursive libidinal multiplicity or as a discursively constituted multiplicity? Foucault’s original objection to the category of sex is that it imposes the artifice of unity

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  So let the plot go left in this one place instead of right, or let your character decide to go back to her loathsome passive-aggressive husband. Maybe it was the right thing, maybe not. If not, go back and try something else. Some of us tend to think that what we do and say and decide and write are cosmically important things. But they’re not. If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch. Radio Station KFKDI need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here. It is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to listening to your broccoli that exists for writers. Then I promise I’ll never mention it again. If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. You might as well have heavy-metal music piped in through headphones while you’re trying to get your work done. You have to get things quiet in your head so you can hear your characters and let them guide your story. The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer—please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you—an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small-animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalized them. (I cut out the headline the day this news came out and taped it above the kitty’s water dish.) Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in. You might also consider trying to breathe.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Consequently a conversation with Socrates could be disturbing. Even if somebody started to talk to him about something quite different, his friend Niceas explained, he would finally be forced to “submit to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And … Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.”36 He would discuss only those subjects that his conversation partners felt comfortable with. Laches, for example, as a general in the army, thought he understood the nature of courage and was convinced that it was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example after another, a courageous act could seem stupid and foolhardy. When Niceas pointed out that, on the contrary, courage required the intelligence to appreciate terror, Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future and were unknown to us, so we could not separate the knowledge of future evil from our present and past experience. How could we separate courage from the other virtues when a truly valiant person must also be temperate, just, and wise and good? A single virtue like courage must in reality be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, these veterans of the Peloponnesian War, who had all endured the trauma of battle and should have been experts on the subject, found that they did not have the first idea what courage was. They felt deeply perplexed and rather stupid, as though they were ignorant children who needed to go back to school. Socrates’ dialectic was a rational version of the Indian Brahmodya, which had led participants to a direct appreciation of the transcendent otherness that lay beyond the reach of words. However closely he and his partners reasoned, something always eluded them, so the Socratic dialogue led people to the shocking realization of the profundity of their ignorance. Instead of achieving intellectual certainty, his rigorous logos had uncovered a transcendence that seemed an inescapable part of human experience. But Socrates did not see this unknowing as a handicap. People must interrogate their most fundamental prejudices or they would live superficial, expedient lives. As he explained to the court that condemned him to death: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living.”37

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  III. Augustine begins to consider “big questions” that he will struggle with for many years. A. What is the nature of evil? Augustine wonders where evil originates. B. What is the nature of God? In his initial questioning, Augustine wonders whether God has a body, although he will refine this question over the next decade. C. How can people of the past be considered moral if they did things that today are condemned as evil? 1. Augustine gives examples of Old Testament figures who offered animal sacrifices and practiced polygamy. 2. Augustine ponders the act of God commanding people to do unprecedented things. IV. Young Augustine, seeking eternal wisdom, wants it rather quickly. A. He turns to a group called the Manichees for answers. The Manichees were a quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical movement named for the 3rd-century thinker Mani. B. The Manichees took basically a dualist stance—everything material is evil and everything that is spirit is good. C. Among other things, this dualism led the Manichees to take rather peculiar positions on Christian teachings. 1. The God who, in Hebrew Scripture, created the material world and declared it to be good is not a good God. 2. Jesus was not flesh and blood, because all matter is evil. 3. The Crucifixion was not what it appeared, because nails can hardly harm pure spirit. V. Augustine became associated with the Manichees for almost a decade. A. The Manichees, despite a complicated mythology, offered a rather simple answer to complex questions: All could be explained as the struggle between matter (evil) and spirit (good). B. Augustine, in his Manichean period, learned about the teachings of Christianity through the prism of Manichean thought and found it to be intellectually indefensible. 28 ©2004 The Teaching Company. VI. At the end of Book III, Augustine is asking good questions and beginning to get serious about life. A. He is ready to learn. B. He is impatient and does not yet understand the struggle that he must go through to find eternal wisdom. Suggested Readings: Cooper, chapter 3. O’Connell, Images of Conversion in St. Augustine’s Confessions, chapter 1. ———, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, chapter 5. A Reader’s Companion, chapter 3. Questions to Consider: 1. Can you think of any experience you have had of reading a book that has radically altered your way of thinking and priorities similar to the way Augustine responded to reading Cicero? 2. In what way might the cliché “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing” apply to Augustine after he has read Cicero’s Hortensius? 3. How important is figuring out what questions to ask to anyone’s education? 4. How do we gear ourselves up for a long struggle once we embark on a quest for genuine wisdom? ©2004 The Teaching Company. 29

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  2. Now, he makes it clear that he could not have come to an understanding of the intellectual truth of Christianity without these texts. II. At the beginning of the book, Augustine is still wrestling with the problem of evil. A. The Manichees had a consistent answer for this problem, because they believed that there was an ultimate principle of good and an ultimate principle of evil. B. Now that he has become disillusioned with the Manichees, Augustine can no longer accept that answer. III. At this time, Augustine also sees the intellectual contradiction of predictive astrology. A. He had already become suspicious of it. B. He receives help from a man who tells him that the idea is bogus. C. He uses the example of twins to put the final nail in the coffin, using in particular, the biblical examples of Jacob and Esau. D. The implication here seems to be that astrology was important for Manichaean beliefs and practices. IV. Augustine tells us that he read books “written by the Platonists” and translated from Greek into Latin. A. He is not specific about the exact texts that he has read. B. He paraphrases these books, rather than quoting them directly. C. His paraphrase is also a paraphrase of one of the most important texts of Christian Scripture, the beginning of the gospel according to John. D. The surprising and, to some extent, shocking claim that he makes is that these Platonists teach the same thing as the Gospel of John. E. Augustine’s claim is that even though these words may not have been exactly what was said in the text of these philosophers, they accurately represent the substance of what he saw in them. F. Thus, in these pagan philosophical texts, he finds a way of articulating Christian beliefs. 40 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex. 7 If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. 8 The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? 9 Does sex have a history? 10 Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. 11 It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This particular mood, of supposing that the four gospels were not really “about Jesus,” let alone “about the gospel,” but, instead, “about the early Christian faith,” has largely passed. Many scholars now use material from all four gospels, with appropriate critical controls, as evidence for Jesus himself. But the underlying problem has not been addressed. Here we meet a telling irony. Bultmann’s theology has been met, down through the years, with a stubborn and solid “No” from “conservative” quarters. Many “conservative” Christians, in both Europe and America, have been very concerned to stress the authority of the Bible, and so have been horrified by the insistence of Bultmann and his followers on the nonhistoricity of the gospels (this is not the same thing as careful critical judgment about this or that incident; it was part of Bultmann’s whole agenda that the gospels, or at least the early forms of the gospels, should not as a point of principle be offering “history,” since that might represent an attempt to base Christian faith on something solid and provable—in other words, to turn “faith” into a “work”). Such “conservatives,” then, have stressed the historicity of the gospels as part of their insistence that “the Bible is true.” But when it comes to interpretation and meaning, those same “conservatives” are regularly to be found on exactly the same page as Bultmann, reading most of the stories in the gospels as signposts toward the cross and the faith of the early church. I recall one colleague proudly telling me that his Christmas sermon was going to be on Matthew 1:21: “You are to give him the name Jesus; he is the one who will save his people from their sins.” In other words, neither incarnation nor kingdom were going to be mentioned; Christmas was simply another occasion to preach the (supposedly Pauline) message of the cross. When such people claim to be “Bible Christians,” I find myself saying (at least in my imagination): “If you’re a ‘Bible Christian,’ how come you don’t know what the gospels are there for? How is it that you simply treat them as somewhat random illustrative material for the thing you obviously want to focus on, the saving death and resurrection of the divine Savior?” What I observe is this. Faced with a choice between the creed (some version of it) and the canon of scripture, in which the four gospels occupy such a central position, the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—which it hasn’t always managed to do very successfully. The same is true when, in Protestantism, the great early creeds are implicitly replaced as the “rule of faith” by the various sixteenth-and seventeenth-century formulas that highlight the Reformers’ message of “justification by faith.” This too, in its turn, becomes the central thing, and the four gospels are valued insofar as they illustrate it and not much beyond.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  2 CAITLIN DIDN’T ALWAYS tell the truth. She left things out. Sometimes, important things. She had a brother. A brother and a dog. The brother was puny for fourteen with a sad face framed by shaggy brown hair. He didn’t look anything like Caitlin, didn’t even live with her, but she swore they were from the same mother and father. She called him Sharkey. The father had already told Vix to call him Lamb. “As in baby sheep,” Caitlin added. “As in baaa baaa ...” Maybe they had some kind of animal fixation. “Lamb,” Vix said, trying it out. It felt weird to call a grownup, somebody’s father, Lamb. He was tall and lean, wearing Birkenstocks, jeans with an iron-on patch, and a black pocket tee. He had the same toothy smile as Caitlin, and when he held out his hand to welcome her she saw that his arms were covered in pale fuzz, lighter than the hair on his head, which was mixed with gray even though he wasn’t old-old, not that his age meant a thing to Vix. Parents were parents. They were all about the same. In the baggage area at Logan she identified her bag and Lamb grabbed it from the carousel. She wished she had a canvas duffel like Caitlin’s instead of her mother’s old Black Watch plaid suitcase held together by duct tape, with her name printed across it in Magic Marker. The dog, a black lab with a bandanna around its neck, was in the back seat of a beat-up gray Volvo wagon. The brother was in the front. “They both live with Lamb in Cambridge,” Caitlin told her, before dashing across the street, making the driver of a Toyota slam on his brakes. But Lamb didn’t say anything. He just smiled and shook his head. Tawny would have shouted, Watch where you’re going, Victoria! Do you want to get killed? Do you have any idea how much a funeral costs these days? “Sweetie, you old thing!” Caitlin cooed, kissing the dog on the mouth.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Lacan continues this paragraph on “feminine homosexuality” with the statement partially quoted above: “These remarks should be qualified by going back to the function of the mask [which is] to dominate the identifications through which refusals of love are resolved,” and if female homosexuality is understood as a consequence of a disappointment “as observation shows,” then this disappointment must appear, and appear clearly, in order to be observed. If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality? Is it the mask of the female homosexual that is “observed,” and if so, what clearly readable expression gives evidence of that “disappointment” and that “orientation” as well as the displacement of desire by the (idealized) demand for love? Lacan is perhaps suggesting that what is clear to observation is the desexualized status of the lesbian, the incorporation of a refusal that appears as the absence of desire. 20 But we can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point

• From The Case for God (2009)

  They feel that they know exactly what they mean by God. The catechism definition I learned at the age of eight—”God is the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections”—was not only dry, abstract, and rather boring; it was also incorrect. Not only did it imply that God was a fact that it was possible to “define,” but it represented only the first stage in Denys’s threefold dialectical method. I was not taught to take the next step and see that God is not a spirit; that “he” has no gender; and that we have no idea what we mean when we say that a being “exists” who is “infinite in all perfections.” The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an “otherness” beyond the competence of language ended prematurely. The result is that many of us have been left stranded with an incoherent concept of God. We learned about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Claus. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our theology remained somewhat infantile. Not surprisingly, when we attained intellectual maturity, many of us rejected the God we had inherited and denied that he existed. Paul Tillich pointed out that it is difficult to speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a God exists. This means that the symbol of God is no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call “God” has become the end of the story. We have seen that during the early modern period the idea of God was reduced to a scientific hypothesis and God became the ultimate explanation of the universe. Instead of symbolizing the ineffable, God was in effect reduced to a mere deva, a lowercase god that was a member of the cosmos with a precise function and location. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before atheism became a viable proposition, because scientists were soon able to find alternative explanatory hypotheses that rendered “God” redundant. This would not have been a disaster had not the churches come to rely on scientific proof. Other paths to knowledge had been downgraded in the modern world, and scientific rationality was now regarded as the only acceptable path to truth. People had grown accustomed to thinking of God as a “clear,” “distinct,” and self-evident idea. Had not Descartes, founder of modern philosophy, told them that the existence of God was even clearer and more obvious than one of Euclid’s theorems? Did not the great Newton insist that religion should be “easy”?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  At first, the author explains, a beginner would encounter only darkness “and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing.”97 If he asked: “How am I to think of God himself and what is he?” our author replied: “I cannot answer you, except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!”98 We can think about all kinds of things, but “of God himself can no man think.”99 This state of “unknowing” was not a defeat but an achievement; we arrived at this point by ruthlessly paring down all our God talk, until prayer was reduced to a single syllable: “God!” or “Love!” It was not easy. The mind rushed to fill the vacuum we were trying to create within ourselves with “wonderful thoughts of [God’s] kindness” and reminded us “of God’s sweetness and love, his grace and mercy.” But unless we turned a deaf ear to this pious clamor, we would be back where we started.100 In the meantime, the apprentice must continue with his prayers, liturgy, and lectio divina like everybody else. This was not what Eckhart would have called a special spiritual “way” but was a practice that should inform all the routine devotions and spiritual exercises of the Christian life. If we persevere, the intellect will eventually abdicate and allow love to take over. Here we see the new separation of knowledge from the affections: “Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that which I cannot think!” the author exclaims. “Why? Because [God] may well be loved but not thought. By love he may be caught and held but by thinking never.”101 But the apophatic habit is still so strong that the author immediately starts to deconstruct the notion of “love” and explain what it is not. There is no glow, no heavenly music, or interior sweetness in the Cloud. In fact the author seems to have Rolle in mind when he comes out strongly against the idea of an intense experience of God’s love. He warns beginners to be on their guard against the absurd literalism of this new spirituality. Novices hear talk of all kinds of special feelings— “how a man shall lift up his heart to God and continually long to feel his love. And immediately in their silly minds they understand these words not in the intended spiritual sense but in a physical and material, and they strain their natural hearts outrageously within their breasts!” Some even feel an “unnatural glow.”102 It is impossible to feel for God the love we feel for creatures; the “God” with whom these so-called mystics are infatuated is simply the product of their unhinged imagination.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The theological quarrels between Rome and the reformers and, later, among the reformers themselves were giving more importance to the exact formulation of abstruse doctrines. The Protestant reformers and their Catholic opponents all used the printing press, council, and synod to draw ever finer dogmatic distinctions as they struggled to express their differences from one another. From the 1520s, the reformers started to issue “catechisms,” dialogues of stereotyped questions and answers, to ensure that their congregations accepted a particular interpretation of the creed. Correct faith was gradually becoming a matter of accepting the proper teachings. The Protestant reliance on “scripture alone” dispensed with the Catholic notion of “tradition” that saw each generation deepening its understanding of the sacred text in a cumulative “bricolage.” Instead of trying to get beyond language, Protestants would be encouraged to focus on the precise, original, and supposedly unchanging word of God in print. Instead of reading the sacred text in a communal setting, they would wrestle with its obscurities on their own. Slowly, in tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctively “modern” notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated, and objective was emerging in the Western Christian world.42 As the Reformation proceeded, Protestantism began to morph into a bewildering number of sects, each with its own doctrinal bias, its own interpretation of the Bible, and each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on truth.43 There was now a clamor of religious opinion in Europe. When Luther had battled with the Catholic authorities, other intellectually minded clergy either did the same or took vociferous issue with his ideas. Preachers began to air their disagreements in public and urged the laity to join the debate. Zwingli argued that lay folk should feel empowered to question official dogma and should not need to wait on the decisions of a synod. “Calvinists” started to articulate doctrines to distinguish themselves from “Lutherans.” Inevitably, this orgy of acrimonious doctrinal debate would affect the traditional notion of “belief,” pushing intellectual orthodoxy to the fore.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now the malenurse entered with a tray. “Youve fixed a tray for my guest, of course?” the Professor asked him. “I didnt know he’d be here,” said the malenurse. He left, returned with a tray for me. “Larry is not an angel,” the Professor said again. “There is even, wouldnt you say? something Uncomfortable about him. I distrust him sometimes. Do you suppose—” he asked, lowering his voice, “—that Larry is a misplaced agent for the FBI—in the wrong cell?” He laughed, pleased with himself. “Perhaps,” he whispered in posed secrecy, “he is writing a book about me—but then, it wouldnt be the first time I have been between covers!” He proceeded to eat, talking between mouthfuls. When he had finished, he placed the tray on the table. “We have talked enough,” he said. “Come over here, uncategorized angel. Stand next to me now. We have looked into the Soul long enough for today—now: Now let us look in the other, equally sacred, direction....” Later as I walked out the door of his bedroom, I heard him call after me: “God Is Love....” In the outside room, the malenurse sat reading a thick book. He rose, walking swiftly toward me as if I would escape. He thrust the book at me: “The Professor wrote this!” he said. “Hes written many great things!” I reached for the book; but before I could even read the title, he withdrew it from me, not allowing me to touch it. “Heres the check,” he said. 4 The next day I received a more desperate telegram: VITAL UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE TO THE CONTRARY THAT YOU MAINTAIN DAILY CONTACT WITH ME. I NEED THIS CONTACT VERY BADLY NOW FOR THE REASSURANCE IT GIVES ME IN MOMENTS OF VARIOUS CONFUSIONS AND DANGERS TO MY PEACE OF MIND. CAN EXPLAIN ALL WHEN YOU COME TO SEE ME. G IS L. When I saw the Professor, again there was no mention of the telegram. The tape-measure was on the bed.... The “interview” proceeded: the mountainous anarchy of the facts of his life piling higher and higher. Occasionally, I stopped listening, the drumming of his voice lulling me. There were episodes begun, interrupted, picked up, sometimes not finished—the story of Robbie winding through it like a wayward river.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Jews who had fled to Portugal were tougher; they had preferred exile rather than abjuring their faith. Initially, they were welcomed by King João II, but when Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, forced him to baptize all the Jews in Portugal. Manuel compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for fifty years. Known as Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse that Portuguese Jews adopted as a badge of pride, they had time to organize a successful Jewish underground. For generations, closet Jews tried to practice their faith to the best of their ability, but they labored under huge difficulties. Cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, they had no access to Jewish literature and no synagogues and were able to perform only a few of the major rituals. Because they had received a Catholic education, their minds were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines, so inevitably, as the years passed, their faith was neither authentically Jewish nor truly Christian.4 Others, as we shall see, would become the first atheists and freethinkers in modern Europe. Deprived of the observances that made the Torah a living reality, Marrano religion became distorted. In the Portuguese universities, the Marranos had studied logic, physics, medicine, and mathematics, but they had no expertise in the more intuitive disciplines of Jewish practice. Relying perforce on reason alone, their theology bore no relation to traditional Judaism.5 Their God was the First Cause of all being, who did not intervene directly in human affairs; there was no need for the Torah, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This is the kind of God that, left to itself, human reason tends to create, but in the past Jews had found the rational God of the philosophers religiously empty. Like many modern people—and for many of the same reasons—some of the Marranos would find this God alien and incredible.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But, in parallel with this, there was an “opening of their minds” that had to happen as well (24:45). Luke is clear that the events involving Jesus are the events in which all of Israel’s previous history has been summed up and brought to its divinely appointed goal. But this is not something that casual readers can see at a glance. It is not something that Caiaphas or the Pharisees would instantly recognize when Jesus’s followers began to announce that he had been raised from the dead. People would need to “search the scriptures day by day to see if what they were hearing was indeed the case” (Acts 17:11). The point the gospel writers are eager to get across—that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is in fact the climax of the story of Israel, even though nobody was expecting such a thing and many didn’t like the look of it when it was presented to them—is something that, like the risen Jesus himself, is visible to the eye of faith. The story makes sense as a whole or not at all. John: Creation and New Creation The paradox we saw in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that the events involving Jesus are to be seen as the fulfillment of the story of Israel, but that this “fulfillment” is not what Israel was expecting or wanting—is stated sharply right at the start of John’s gospel. John’s prologue (1:1–18) takes us back to the first books of the Bible, to Genesis and Exodus. He frames his simple, profound opening statement with echoes of the creation story (“In the beginning…,” leading up to the creation of humans in God’s image) and echoes of the climax of the book of Exodus (“The Word became flesh, and lived among us,” 1:14, where the word “lived” is literally “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent,” as in the construction of the tabernacle for God’s glory in the wilderness). This, in other words, is where Israel’s history and with it world history reached their moment of destiny. But Israel, the people whose very backbone was Genesis and Exodus, were looking the other way: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:11). Yes, some did accept him, and they were given “the right to become God’s children” (1:12), not because of human ancestry or effort, but because of God’s strange mercy. So John too sees the story of Jesus as the paradoxical climax of the story of Israel. That is why, of course, the theme of Jesus’s messiahship is highlighted repeatedly—along with the constant question as to whether someone like Jesus can really be the one for whom Israel had been longing: “We’ve found him!” said Philip. “The one Moses wrote about in the law! And the prophets, too! We’ve found him! It’s Jesus, Joseph’s son, from Nazareth!” “Really?” replied Nathanael. “Are you telling me that something good can come out of Nazareth?” (1:45–46)

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But in 1749, the novelist Denis Diderot (1713–84) was imprisoned in Vincennes for writing an atheistic tract. As a young man, he had been intensely religious and even considered becoming a Jesuit. When his adolescent ardor faded, Diderot threw in his lot with the philosophes and studied biology, physiology, and medicine, but he had not yet given up on religion. In his Pensées philosophiques, like any good Deist, he sought rational evidence from Descartes and Newton to combat atheism, and was increasingly drawn to microscopic biology, which claimed to find evidence for the existence of God in the minutiae of nature. But he was not wholly convinced. Diderot passionately believed that even our most cherished beliefs must be subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny, and started to attend the lectures of Pigeon’s circle, where he learned of some disturbing new experiments. In 1741, the Swiss zoologist Abraham Trembley discovered that a hydra could regenerate itself if cut in two. In 1745, John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest, found that minute creatures generated spontaneously in putrefying gravy and that a whole world of infinitesimally small organisms inhabited a single drop of water, coming into being and passing away only to be replaced by others within the span of a few minutes. Perhaps, Diderot could not help reflecting, the whole cosmos was like that drop of water, endlessly creating and re-creating itself without the intervention of a Creator. In 1749, Diderot published A Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, the treatise that put him in prison, which took the form of a fictional dialogue between Nicolas Sanderson, the blind Cambridge mathematician, and Gervase Holmes, an Anglican minister who represented Newtonian orthodoxy.45 Sanderson is on his deathbed and can find no consolation in Newton’s proof for God’s existence, because he cannot see any of the marvels that so impressed Holmes. Sanderson has been forced to rely on ideas that could be tested mathematically, and this has led him into an outright denial of God’s existence. At the very beginning of time, Sanderson believes, there had been no trace of God—only swirling particles in an empty void. The evolution of our world was probably a good deal more arbitrary and messier than the tidy, purposive process described by Newton. Here, remarkably, Diderot makes Sanderson envisage a process of brutal natural selection. The “design” we see in the universe is simply due to the survival of the fittest. Only those animals survived “whose mechanism was not defective in any important particular and who were able to support themselves,”46 while those born without heads, feet, or intestines perished. But such aberrations still occur. “Look at me, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson cries. “I have no eyes. What have we done, you and I, to God, that one of us has this organ—while the other has not?”47 It is no good relying on God to find a solution to such insoluble problems: “My good friend, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson concludes, “confess your ignorance.”48