Despair

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.

Page 76 of 267 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” 34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology. Yet it is also true that even in Auschwitz some Jews continued to study the Talmud and observe the traditional festivals, not because they hoped that God would rescue them but because it made sense. There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with cruelty and betrayal. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening prayer. A 11 Does God Have a Future? S WE APPROACH the end of the second millennium, it seems likely that the world we know is passing away. For decades we have lived with the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet. The Cold War may have ended, but the new world order seems no less frightening than the old.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” 34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia , becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology. Yet it is also true that even in Auschwitz some Jews continued to study the Talmud and observe the traditional festivals, not because they hoped that God would rescue them but because it made sense. There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with cruelty and betrayal. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening prayer. 1 In the Beginning … I N THE BEGINNING , human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But where did that leave the honest seeker after truth? Was a sound, unshakable faith in God impossible? The strain of his quest caused al-Ghazzali such personal distress that he had a breakdown. He found himself unable to swallow or to eat and felt overwhelmed by a weight of doom and despair. Finally in about 1094 he found that he could not speak or give his lectures: God shriveled my tongue until I was prevented from giving instruction. So I used to force myself to teach on a particular day for the benefit of my various pupils but my tongue would not utter a single word.12 He fell into a clinical depression. The doctors rightly diagnosed a deep-rooted conflict and told him that until he was delivered from his hidden anxiety, he would never recover. Fearing that he was in danger of hellfire if he did not recover his faith, al-Ghazzali resigned his prestigious academic post and went off to join the Sufis. There he found what he was looking for. Without abandoning his reason—he always distrusted the more extravagant forms of Sufism—al-Ghazzali discovered that the mystical disciplines yielded a direct but intuitive sense of something that could be called “God.” The British scholar John Bowker shows that the Arabic word for existence (wujud) derives from the root wajada: “he found.”13 Literally, therefore, wujud means “that which is findable”: it was more concrete than the Greek metaphysical terms and yet gave Muslims more leeway. An Arabic-speaking philosopher who attempted to prove that God existed did not have to produce God as another object among many. He simply had to prove that he could be found. The only absolute proof of God’s wujud would appear—or not—when the believer came face to face with the divine reality after death, but the reports of such people as the prophets and mystics who claimed to have experienced it in this life should be considered carefully. The Sufis certainly claimed that they had experienced the wujud of God: the word wajd was a technical term for their ecstatic apprehension of God which gave them complete certainty (yaqin) that it was a reality, not just a fantasy. Admittedly those reports could be mistaken in their claims, but after living for ten years as a Sufi, al-Ghazzali found that the religious experience was the only way of verifying a reality that lay beyond the reach of the human intellect and cerebral process. The Sufis’ knowledge of God was not a rational or metaphysical knowledge, but it was clearly akin to the intuitive experience of the prophets of old: Sufis thus found the essential truths of Islam for themselves by reliving its central experience.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now that they are not deliberately creating a faith in “God” or anything else—it matters little what—many people are falling into despair. In the United States, we have seen that ninety-nine percent of the population claim to believe in God, yet the prevalence of fundamentalism, apocalypticism and “instant” charismatic forms of religiosity in America is not reassuring. The escalating crime rate, drug addiction and the revival of the death penalty are not signs of a spiritually healthy society. In Europe there is a growing blankness where God once existed in the human consciousness. One of the first people to express this dry desolation—quite different from the heroic atheism of Nietzsche—was Thomas Hardy. In “The Darkling Thrush,” written on December 30, 1900, at the turn of the twentieth century, he expressed the death of spirit that was no longer able to create a faith in life’s meaning: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Münster now became the focus of millenarian hopes, and Anabaptists started to flood into the town from all over northern Germany and the Low Countries, inspired by the prophecies of the Strasbourg preacher Melchior Hoffman to turn the city into the New Jerusalem, soon forming a sizable group within the original population of around nine thousand townspeople. 17 Up to this point, Münster’s Reformation was rather like the radical phase of the Reformation in Wittenberg, with city council and preachers working together to introduce a godly society, but in September 1534, the charismatic Jan van Leiden took over, establishing a theocracy with him as its head and the old mayor Bernhard Knipperdolling his “swordbearer.” 18 The bishop of Münster besieged the city with a coalition that included not only the archbishop of Cologne and the Catholic duke of Cleve but also the Lutheran Philip of Hesse, who all promised financial aid. Jan van Leiden tried to send out “apostles” to other Anabaptist communities to recruit reinforcements, but Münster was isolated and in a state of military emergency, and few could get through. It mustered its menfolk to defend the town and try to repel the forces of the bishop but many of them were killed in the fighting. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Leiden now became reality, and he took on the role of judge and executioner, going so far as to behead an accused spy himself and introducing polygamy so that the Anabaptists would be able to re-create the twelve tribes of Israel. 19 In June 1535, after a siege that lasted a little over a year, the city fell. Jan van Leiden and two other leaders were brutally tortured and executed in January 1536, their remains put in iron cages that were hung from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church, where the cages can still be seen. It is difficult to know exactly what happened in Münster, since all the reports we have were composed by the victors and are hostile, and the town records were largely destroyed. The episode is usually viewed as an aberration in the history of the Reformation, and this is certainly how Luther regarded it. Most shocking to contemporaries was its introduction of polygamy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Napoleon asked him: “Who was the author of this?” Laplace simply replied: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.” For centuries monotheists in each of the God-religions had insisted that God was not merely another being. He did not exist like the other phenomena we experience. In the West, however, Christian theologians had got into the habit of talking about God as though he really were one of the things that existed. They had seized upon the new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and analyzed like anything else. Diderot, Holbach and Laplace had turned this attempt on its head and come to the same conclusion as the more extreme mystics: there was nothing out there. It was not long before other scientists and philosophers triumphantly declared that God was dead. B 10 The Death of God? Y THE BEGINNING of the nineteenth century, atheism was definitely on the agenda. The advances in science and technology were creating a new spirit of autonomy and independence which led some to declare their independence of God. This was the century in which Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud forged philosophies and scientific interpretations of reality which had no place for God. Indeed, by the end of the century, a significant number of people were beginning to feel that if God was not yet dead, it was the duty of rational, emancipated human beings to kill him. The idea of God which had been fostered for centuries in the Christian West now appeared disastrously inadequate, and the Age of Reason seemed to have triumphed over centuries of superstition and bigotry. Or had it? The West had now seized the initiative, and its activities would have fateful consequences for Jews and Muslims, who would be forced to review their own position. Many of the ideologies which rejected the idea of God made good sense. The anthropomorphic, personal God of Western Christendom was vulnerable. Appalling crimes had been committed in his name. Yet his demise was not experienced as a joyous liberation but attended by doubt, dread and, in some cases, agonizing conflict. Some people tried to save God by evolving new theologies to free him from the inhibiting systems of empirical thought, but atheism had come to stay. There was also a reaction against the cult of reason. The poets, novelists and philosophers of the Romantic movement pointed out that a thoroughgoing rationalism was reductive, because it left out the imaginative and intuitive activities of the human spirit. Some reinterpreted dogmas and mysteries of Christianity in a secular way.

• From A History of God (1993)

  These “vessels” or “pipes” were not material, of course, but were composed of a sort of thicker light that served as “shells” (kelipot) for the purer light of the sefiroth. When the three highest sefiroth had radiated from Adam Kadmon, their vessels had functioned perfectly. But when the next six sefiroth issued from his “eyes,” their vessels were not strong enough to contain the divine light and they smashed. Consequently the light was scattered. Some of it rose upward and returned to the Godhead, but some divine “sparks” fell into the empty waste and remained trapped in chaos. Thenceforth nothing was in its proper place. Even the three highest sefiroth had fallen to a lower sphere as a result of the catastrophe. The original harmony had been ruined and the divine sparks were lost in the formless waste of tohu u-bohu, in exile from the Godhead. This strange myth is reminiscent of the earlier Gnostic myths of a primordial dislocation. It expresses the tension involved in the whole creative process, which is far closer to the Big Bang envisaged by scientists today than the more peaceful, orderly sequence described by Genesis. It was not easy for En Sof to emerge from his hidden state: he could only do so—as it were—in a sort of trial and error. In the Talmud, the Rabbis had had a similar idea. They had said that God had made other worlds and had destroyed them before he created this one. But all was not lost. Some Kabbalists compared this “Breaking” (Shevirath) to the breakthrough of birth or the bursting of a seed pod. The destruction had simply been a prelude to a new creation. Although everything was in disarray, En Sof would bring new life out of this apparent chaos by means of the process of Tikkun or reintegration. After the catastrophe, a new stream of light issued from En Sof and broke through the “forehead” of Adam Kadmon. This time the sefiroth were reorganized into new configurations: they were no longer to be generalized aspects of God. Each one became a “Countenance” (parzuf) in which the entire personality of God was revealed, with—as it were—distinctive features, in rather the same way as in the three personae of the Trinity. Luria was trying to find a new way of expressing the old Kabbalistic idea of the inscrutable God giving birth to himself as a person. In the process of Tikkun, Luria used the symbolism of the conception, birth and development of a human personality to suggest a similar evolution in God. It is complicated and perhaps best explained in diagrammatic form. In the reintegration of Tikkun, God restored order by regrouping the ten sefiroth into five “Countenances” (parzufim) in the following stages: 1. Kether (The Crown), the highest sefirah, which The Zohar had called “Nothing,” becomes the first parzuf, called “Arik” Anpin: the Forebearing One. 2. Hokhmah (Wisdom) becomes the second parzuf, called Abba: Father. 3.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The last came to a climax in 1529 when he encountered the Swiss at the colloquy of Marburg, arranged by Philip of Hesse, but there was no meeting of minds.53 Luther wrote, “This is my body,” in chalk on the table where the debaters sat, and covered it over with the velvet tablecloth—as if protecting a relic—only to reveal it dramatically during the debate, to underline the importance of the biblical words. Insisting that the words “This is my body” meant exactly what they said, he added, “Here is our text. You haven’t yet managed to wring it from us, as you said you would, and we need no other.”54 Where Oecolampadius and Zwingli insisted on the importance of John 6 and “spiritual eating,” repeating their stock phrase that the “flesh availeth nothing,”55 Luther replied that physical eating was essential, too. “My dearest gentlemen, because the text of my lord Jesus Christ clearly states: ‘Hoc est corpus meum,’ truly I cannot get around it, but must confess and believe that the body of Christ is present therein,” he expostulated to Zwingli, breaking out of the Latin of debate into German (although still using Latin for the words of consecration).56 When Zwingli, who to Luther’s great irritation frequently used Greek in the debate, accused him of restoring the sacrifice of the Mass yet again, Luther insisted, as at Worms, that he was “bound and held captive by the words of the Lord.”57 As it became clear that the two sides could not agree, Luther washed his hands of them, consigning them to the judgment of God, “who will certainly decide who is right,” at which Zwingli burst into tears.58 At the end of the meeting, Oecolampadius and Zwingli, pleased that at least they had all now met in person, wanted to embrace their opponents as brothers and allow all of them to take Communion with one another, but Luther bitterly refused.59 He was, however, shattered by the debate, and the “angel of Satan, or whoever the angel of Death is” was attacking him so severely that he worried he might not reach home alive.60 Luther’s intransigence in dealing with his opponents, and the toll it took on him, had settled into a pattern both grim and unrelenting. Although the energies of the early evangelical awakening were now directed toward building an institutional Church, what had once been a broad evangelical movement was threatening to split as its leaders each defended their theological territory.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This made it much more difficult for a populist movement based around religious conviction to gain traction there again. It marked the end of distinctive versions of evangelicalism in Augsburg, Ulm, Strasbourg, and a host of other cities, though it would not mean the permanent obliteration of alternatives to the Lutheran model. In Geneva, Calvin would develop his theocratic vision of a reformed community, an inspiration for a new generation. 72. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1548. This woodcut portrait produced after Luther’s death shows his bulky frame as authoritative and comforting. In the German lands, Charles V imposed on May 15, 1548, the “Interim,” a settlement that required Lutheran preachers to accept many traditional Catholic practices, including the existence of seven sacraments, although it did permit married clergy and Communion in both kinds. It split the Lutheran movement between those who were willing to compromise and those who were not. Many preachers went into exile. Long-standing divisions among the Lutheran leadership also became evident, as Melanchthon was prepared to reach an accord while Amsdorf angrily rejected any deviation from what he saw as Luther’s legacy. The tensions that had long underlain the alliance between Luther and Melanchthon began to play themselves out in public; Luther was no longer there to arbitrate and balance the opposing factions, and Melanchthon lacked both the authority and the personal charisma to lead. The movement started to splinter. 73. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, 1553. This was also part of Luther’s legacy, because, though he opposed the hierarchy of the papal Church, he had not created an institutional structure to replace it. While his 1539 tract On the Councils and the Churches had grandly rejected conciliarism, it failed to detail how his new Church should function, or what the relationship should be between the individual congregation and the Church as a whole. No overall organization constrained the haphazardly created “superintendents,” who were, as Luther recognized, bishops in all but name. Lutheran preachers, subordinate to the secular authorities who paid their salaries, now had to plot their own course through the doctrinal wars and wishes of the local political powers; if they modeled their behavior on Luther’s prophetic mode, they often found that charisma availed little against local authorities. Adulating Luther, the movement also saddled itself with a model of preacherly authority that encouraged each local pastor to counter anything he considered a deviation in doctrine as though it would open the door to the Devil—a recipe for acerbic, public argument. Luther’s personal network had enabled him to place “his” men in parishes all over north and central Germany, even as far as Denmark, Bohemia, and Poland, and had given him the ear of many rulers and princes, but this network died with the personal authority that had generated it.

• From A History of God (1993)

  52 In this last saying, we can sense the connection between Frank’s dark vision and the rationalist Enlightenment. The Polish Jews who had adopted his gospel had clearly found their religion unable to help them to adjust to their appalling circumstances in a world that was not safe for Jews. After Frank’s death, Frankism lost much of its anarchism, retaining only a belief in Frank as God incarnate and what Scholem calls an “intense, luminous feeling of salvation.” 53 They had seen the French Revolution as a sign of God on their behalf: they abandoned their antinomianism for political action, dreaming of a revolution which would rebuild the world. Similarly, the Donmeh who had converted to Islam would often be active Young Turks in the early years of the twentieth century, and many assimilated completely in the secular Turkey of Kemal Atatürk. The hostility that all Sabbatarians had felt toward external observance was in one sense a rebellion against the conditions of the ghetto. Sabbatarianism, which had seemed such a backward, obscurantist religion, had helped them to liberate themselves from the old ways and made them susceptible to new ideas. The moderate Sabbatarians, who had remained outwardly loyal to Judaism, were often pioneers in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah); they were also active in the creation of Reform Judaism during the nineteenth century. Often these reforming maskilim had ideas that were a strange amalgam of old and new. Thus Joseph Wehte of Prague, who was writing in about 1800, said that his heroes were Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Shabbetai Zevi and Isaac Luria. Not everybody could make his way into modernity via the difficult paths of science and philosophy: the mystical creeds of radical Christians and Jews enabled them to work toward a secularism that they would once have found abhorrent by addressing the deeper, more primitive regions of the psyche. Some adopted new and blasphemous ideas of God that would enable their children to abandon him altogether. At the same time as Jacob Frank was evolving his nihilistic gospel, other Polish Jews had found a very different Messiah. Since the pogroms of 1648, Polish Jewry had undergone a trauma of dislocation and demoralization that was as intense as the exile of the Sephardim from Spain. Many of the most learned and spiritual Jewish families of Poland had either been killed or had migrated to the comparative safety of Western Europe. Tens of thousands of Jews had been displaced and many had become wanderers, roaming from town to town, barred from permanent settlement.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jeremiah’s career shows the immense pain and effort involved in the forging of this more challenging image of God. He hated being a prophet and was profoundly distressed to have to condemn the people he loved.40 He was not a natural firebrand but a tenderhearted man. When the call had come to him, he cried out in protest: “Ah, Lord Yahweh; look, I do not know how to speak: I am a child!” and Yahweh had “put out his hand” and touched his lips, putting his words on his mouth. The message that he had to articulate was ambiguous and contradictory: “to tear up and to knock down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”41 It demanded an agonizing tension between irreconcilable extremes. Jeremiah experienced God as a pain that convulsed his limbs, broke his heart and made him stagger about like a drunk.42 The prophetic experience of the mysterium terribile et fascinans was at one and the same time rape and seduction: Yahweh, you have seduced me and I am seduced, You have raped me and I am overcome … I used to say, “I will not think about him, I will not speak his name anymore.” Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not bear it.43 God was pulling Jeremiah in two different directions: on the one hand, he felt a profound attraction toward Yahweh that had all the sweet surrender of a seduction, but at other times he felt ravaged by a force that carried him along against his will. Ever since Amos, the prophet had been a man on his own. Unlike the other areas of the Oikumene at this time, the Middle East did not adopt a broadly united religious ideology.44 The God of the prophets was forcing Israelites to sever themselves from the mythical consciousness of the Middle East and go in quite a different direction from the mainstream. In the agony of Jeremiah, we can see what an immense wrench and dislocation this involved. Israel was a tiny enclave of Yahwism surrounded by a pagan world, and Yahweh was also rejected by many of the Israelites themselves. Even the Deuteronomist, whose image of God was less threatening, saw a meeting with Yahweh as an abrasive confrontation: he makes Moses explain to the Israelites, who are appalled by the prospect of unmediated contact with Yahweh, that God will send them a prophet in each generation to bear the brunt of the divine impact.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Throughout history people have discarded a conception of God when it no longer works for them. Sometimes this has taken the form of a violent iconoclasm, as when the ancient Israelites had torn down the shrines of the Canaanites or when the prophets railed against the gods of their pagan neighbors. In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche resorted to similarly violent tactics when he proclaimed that God was dead. He announced this cataclysmic event in the parable of the madman who ran into the marketplace one morning, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” When the supercilious bystanders asked where he imagined God had gone—had he run away, perhaps, or emigrated?—the madman glared at them. “ ‘Where has God gone?’ he called out. ‘I mean to tell you. We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!’ ” An unimaginable but irreversible event had torn mankind from its roots, thrown the earth off course and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had previously given human beings a sense of direction had vanished. The death of God would lead to unparalleled despair and panic. “Is there still an above and below?” cried the madman in his anguish. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?” 17 Nietzsche realized that there had been a radical shift in the consciousness of the West which would make it increasingly difficult to believe in the phenomenon most people described as “God.” Not only had our science made such notions as the literal understanding of creation an impossibility, but our greater control and power made the idea of a divine overseer unacceptable. People felt that they were witnessing a new dawn. Nietzsche’s madman insisted that the death of God would bring about a newer, higher phase of human history. To become worthy of their deicide, human beings would have to become gods themselves. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche proclaimed the birth of the Superman who would replace God; the new enlightened man would declare war upon the old Christian values, trample upon the base mores of the rabble and herald a new, powerful humanity which would have none of the feeble Christian virtues of love and pity. He also turned to the ancient myth of perpetual recurrence and rebirth, found in such religions as Buddhism. Now that God was dead, this world could take his place as the supreme value. Whatever goes comes back; whatever dies blooms again; whatever breaks is joined anew. Our world could be revered as eternal and divine, attributes that had once applied only to the distant, transcendent God.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Before I can open it, I do have the sense to phone Joan the Bone, who’s on her way to the theater and can’t talk. This, she tells me, is a test of your new willingness. You’ve gotta keep calling till you reach somebody. I hang up and stare again at the medicine bottle. Raising it to eye level, I study the small blue pills, now glowing ethereally. Are you sick? Dev wants to know. He’s holding a matchbox car, studying me with the intensity I no doubt brought to my own mother, whose invisible engines of misery could—at the slightest spark—ignite and blast her off into the stratosphere. That level stare of his guides my hand to put the valium back above the sink, where the bottle pulses and throbs. That night I ask Warren to hide it from me. I phone Lux, who’s barbecuing for his family. They have us over. It’s a freakishly warm day, so they’ve gotten the wading pool out. He pokes at meat splayed on the grill while Dev splashes around the water. I ask Lux, Do you actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it—Lux, that dismal sucker. Ever taciturn, Lux tells me: I say thanks for all kinds of things. For what? I want to know, for I’m a habitually morbid bitch. Even my poetry is obsessed with our collective hurtle toward death—the prospect of my own death seeming specially tragic and unsung. For me, everything’s too much and nothing’s enough. I honestly can’t think of anything to be grateful for. I tell Lux something like I’m glad I still have all my limbs. (Why—I now wonder—couldn’t I register the privilege of tossing my wriggling blond boy off the pool float?) Lux stands in his baggy blue swim trunks at the barbecue, turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical-looking forks. In the considerable smoke, he looks like a bronzed Satan at the devil’s cauldron. Say thanks for the sky, Lux says, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare. What’re you so miserable about? In truth, I dread Warren coming home that night, how we skirt each other’s paths, how he still looks at me with suspicion after my short sobriety. I really mean it this time. I fear I’ve sculpted for Dev a childhood tortured and lonely as mine was. But to confess these realities to Lux would reveal too much of my chewing insides. Instead, I babble on about my long-held grudges against the god I don’t believe in, saying, What kind of god would permit the holocaust? To which Lux says, You’re not in the holocaust. In other words, what is the holocaust my business? When my own life is falling apart, he wants to know, why am I taking as evidence of my own prospects the worst carnage of history? The smoke coils around him as he says, Try getting on your effing knees tonight. Just find ten things you’re grateful for. Your effing knees!

• From A History of God (1993)

  31 The Zionist no longer needs God; he himself is the creator. Other Zionists retained a more conventional faith. The Kabbalist Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who served as the Chief Rabbi for Palestinian Jewry, had had little contact with the Gentile world before his arrival in the Land of Israel. He insisted that as long as the concept of serving God was defined as the service of a particular Being, separate from the ideals and duties of religion, it would not be “free from the immature outlook which is always focused in particular beings.” 32 God was not another Being: En Sof transcended all human concepts such as personality. To think of God as a particular being was idolatry and the sign of a primitive mentality. Kook was steeped in Jewish tradition, but he was not dismayed by the Zionist ideology. True, the Laborites believed that they had shaken off religion, but this atheistic Zionism was only a phase. God was at work in the pioneers: the divine “sparks” were trapped in these “husks” of darkness and were awaiting redemption. Whether they thought so or not, Jews were in their essence inseparable from God and were fulfilling God’s plan without realizing it. During the exile, the Holy Spirit had departed from his people. They had hidden the Shekinah away in synagogues and study halls, but soon Israel would become the spiritual center of the world and reveal the true conception of God to the Gentiles. This type of spirituality could be dangerous. The devotion to the Holy Land would give birth to the idolatry of Jewish fundamentalism in our own day. Devotion to historical “Islam” has contributed to a similar fundamentalism in the Muslim world. Both Jews and Muslims were struggling to find meaning in a dark world. The God of history seemed to have failed them. The Zionists had been right to fear the final elimination of their people. For many Jews, the traditional idea of God would become an impossibility after the Holocaust. The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.” 33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Yet all Hans Luder’s careful calculations and long-term strategies would eventually come to nought. The Mansfeld mines were collectively administered by the five counts, with the exercise of jurisdiction alternating among them. It seems to have been a fair system, but the mining income also had to produce enough funds to support the Renaissance palaces looming over the town. It was long after Luther had left home, in the 1520s, that this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain. While the counts continued to squeeze money out of the leaseholders, income from the mines began to decline—the seams were deeper and therefore harder to reach, water had to be pumped out, and they required more machinery. The numbers of smelter-masters shrank and the silver-refining companies (Saigergesellschaften) that had been financing the mine operators now began to gain possession of the mines as the smelter-masters became indebted to them.45 A proud, independent man, by the 1520s Hans Luder himself was unable to pay off his debts and was forced to work for the hated capitalists, in his case the Saigerhandelsgesellschaft at Schwarza, on a salary of fifty guilders a year with, humiliatingly, a supervisor at his side.46 When he died in 1530 there were no mines for his son in Mansfeld to inherit, only the family property—worth a not insubstantial sum—to be shared equally among the children.47 While in 1508 there had been forty-two smelter-masters in Mansfeld, by 1536 their number had halved.48 In the 1560s, by which time the counts were running the Mansfeld mines themselves, the entire mining enterprise went bankrupt.49 By the end of the century, the seams were exhausted and German silver production had given way to competition from the silver of the New World. Hans Luder and his contemporaries tried to make sense of economic relationships that no one could understand or control, and which were eventually to destroy them. They had no economic theory and little understanding of how wealth was created: No one knew why the capitalists in Nuremberg and Leipzig profited while the mine owners suddenly became impoverished. Economic thought was based on the assumption that wealth was limited. If one person had wealth, another could not get it. Metals, it was believed, resulted from the mixing of quicksilver and brimstone and were shaped by the influences of the planets. Mining was a matter of luck. There were diviners, and there were printed advice books, but no one knew where the rich seams might lie. Small wonder that the figure of Fate should have been so ubiquitous in the Mansfelders’ lives.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalized, subjective God. Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion. People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression. We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears onto the “other.” Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed signs of strain. Thus, despite his advocacy of a compassionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse who communicated only with his poodle, Atman. Nietzsche was a tenderhearted, lonely man, plagued by ill health, who was very different from his Superman. Eventually he went mad. He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine. In a poem delivered “after much trembling, quivering and self-contortion,” he makes Zarathustra plead with God to return: No! come back, With all your torments! Oh come back To the last of all solitaries! All the streams of my tears Run their course for you! And the last flame of my heart— It burns up to you! Oh come back My unknown God! My pain! my last—happiness.20 Like Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of “God.” God had always been a struggle in the West. His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay. Thus in In Memoriam, the great Victorian poem of doubt, Alfred Lord Tennyson recoiled in horror from the prospect of a purposeless, indifferent nature, red in tooth and claw. Published in 1850, nine years before the publication of The Origin of Species, the poem shows that Tennyson had already felt his faith crumbling and himself reduced to An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry.21 In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold had lamented the inexorable withdrawal of the sea of faith, which left mankind wandering on a darkling plain. The doubt and dismay had spread to the Orthodox world, though the denial of God did not take on the precise lineaments of Western doubt but was more in the nature of a denial of ultimate meaning. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) can be seen to describe the death of God, articulated his own conflict between faith and belief in a letter to a friend, written in March 1854:

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind …oh how oddly the drinker seems to withdraw from the act of drinking. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (trans. David Young) I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time. Swaying on the back landing in the small hours, I stare at the boxy garage and ghostly replicas of it multiplying along either side, like playing cards spread against the slate sky. Though this plural perspective is standard, I’m surprised by my own shitfaced state. The walkman sends punk rock banging across the tiny bones of my ears. And with the phonebook-sized stack of papers on my lap still unmarked, I—once more, with feeling—take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here . Okay, I say in my head. I give. You’re right. (Who am I talking to? Fighting with?) By the next afternoon, while I’m lugging the third armload of groceries up the back stairs, Dev, who’s bolted ahead to the living room, shrieks like he’s been stabbed, and I drop the sack on the kitchen floor, hearing as it hits what must be a jar of tomato sauce detonating. In the living room, I find Dev has leaped—illicitly, for the nine hundredth time—off the sofa back, trying to land in the clothes basket like a circus diver into a bucket of water. He’s whapped his noggin on the coffee table corner. Now dead center on his pale, formerly smooth forehead, there’s a blue knot like a horn trying to break through. I gather him up and rush to the kitchen, aiming to grab a soothing bag of frozen peas. But I step on a shard of tomato sauce jar, gash my instep, slide as on a banana peel, barely hanging on to Dev till we skid to a stop. I tiptoe across the linoleum, dragging a snail of blood till I can plop him in a kitchen chair, instructing him to hold the peas to his head and not move an inch while I bunny-hop upstairs to bandage my foot. Coming back, I find he’s dragged the formerly white laundry into the kitchen to mop up the tomato sauce. I’m helping, he says, albeit surrounded by gleaming daggers of glass while on his forehead the blue Bambi horn seems to throb. Minutes later, my hand twists off a beer cap as I tell myself that a beer isn’t really a drink after all. So I have another after that to speed preparing the pot roast, and maybe even a third.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Everything had to be broken down: “Wherever Adam trod, a city was built, but wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, for I have come into this world only to destroy and annihilate.” 50 There is a disturbing similarity to some of the sayings of Christ, who had also claimed that he had come to bring not peace but the sword. Unlike Jesus and St. Paul, however, Frank proposed to put nothing in the place of the old sanctities. His nihilistic creed was not too dissimilar, perhaps, to that of his younger contemporary the Marquis de Sade. It was only by descending to the depths of degradation that men could ascend to find the Good God. This meant not only the rejection of all religion but the commission of “strange acts” that resulted in voluntary abasement and utter shamelessness. Frank was not a Kabbalist but preached a cruder version of Cardazo’s theology. He believed that each of the three parzufim of the Sabbatarian Trinity would be represented on earth by a different Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi, whom Frank used to call “The First One,” had been the incarnation of “the Good God,” who was Cardazo’s Atika Kadisha (the Holy Ancient One); he himself was the incarnation of the second parzuf, the God of Israel. The third Messiah, who would incarnate the Shekinah, would be a woman whom Frank called “the Virgin.” At present, the world was in thrall to evil powers, however. It would not be redeemed until men had adopted Frank’s nihilistic gospel. Jacob’s ladder was in the shape of a V: to ascend to God, one had first to descend to the depths like Jesus and Shabbetai: “This much I tell you,” Frank declared, “Christ, as you know, said that he had come to redeem the world from the power of the devil, but I have come to redeem it from all the laws and customs that have ever existed. It is my task to annihilate all this so that the Good God can reveal himself.” 51 Those who wished to find God and liberate themselves from the evil powers had to follow their leader step by step into the abyss, violating all the laws that they held most sacred: U I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own powers.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology. Yet it is also true that even in Auschwitz some Jews continued to study the Talmud and observe the traditional festivals, not because they hoped that God would rescue them but because it made sense. There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with cruelty and betrayal. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening prayer.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  So I failed to tell her that my husband and I had barely spoken that week, and sometimes, before I made dinner, I considered dousing the oven’s pilot light and sticking my head in. Or that—driving to my in-laws’ for Christmas dinner—I’d risen at four, ostensibly to bake pies but actually to drive around the local reservoir, finishing a six-pack of beer while listening to Argentine tangos. Wheeling in tight rings at about sixty around the local reservoir—night smearing across the windows as the tangos unrolled—I’d felt myself circling my marriage and being erased with each rotation. Around and around my head I went. My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses—that middle-class disguise I’d wished for—are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. I’d never have let on when Warren and I married how it tickled me to see our names in the Social Registry, an attitude I now despise in myself, and my sole act of penance had been agreeing with Warren to take us out. During the war-zone months of early infancy when Warren slept, it was as if every hour of sleep I lost, he’d stolen. Now I’ve placed Warren at the radiant center of my misery, no longer comrade but capo. We’ve devolved into a cold war with a child-centered détente. Whap…thunk. The scanning light casts my face the color of ectoplasm in horror films. Plus, just thinking about the easeful, educated parents at daycare makes my throat sour. Walking up the tree-lined boulevard toward the center always brings out my inner Igor. I often run into Wincing Evan, so called because of the flinch—bordering on a Tourette’s-like seizure—he goes into whenever he spots Dev and me approaching. Head down, he’ll actually scamper across the street to avoid saying hello. In some ways, Evan is a figure of the type I aspire to cut. He translates (let’s say) Gogol. He publishes in The New York Review of Books and abroad. Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents’ Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped smile could’ve sold lipstick) summer overseas often enough to use summer as a verb. Their immaculately turned-out son—Jonathan, age under four years—has shining hair and a good start on French and German. He’s a chess player with a princely manner. I swear if his voice were a little deeper, he could join the diplomatic corps.