On God: An Uncommon Conversation (18 page)

         

In all these conversations we've had about the nature of God, your supposition has been that God makes mistakes, He is not perfect, He is much like us. But we know we have evil in us. There is evil in us as individuals and as a race. And if God is so much like us, then God does indeed have evil in Him or Her. And that explains everything—you don't need a Devil.

No, no, no, no, I don't think that's it at all. God could have a little evil in Him, and the Devil a great deal.

         

Let's say it's eighty-twenty. If God just has 20 percent evil, wouldn't that be enough to account for all the natural disasters and the Holocaust?

But eighty-twenty is an assumption. What if it's ninety-five–five, or ninety-eight to two?

         

There are theologians who take this position. They're called “open theists” and take the position that God is imperfect and has enough evil in Him—and the evil in God, coupled with the Devil, is responsible for the miseries of the world.

Well, that could certainly be an answer, and if you want to respect the Old Testament as more than a great work of literature but also as a document with some reality, you certainly have a Jehovah out there wreaking evil on a large scale as well as goodness. And it could be that God, being existential like us, was trying to reduce the amount of evil in Himself or Herself.

         

By doing what?

By Jehovah trying, for one thing, to get that prodigious temper under control. By daring to have a son, a great attempt to improve matters. It may be that God was always trying for more, over and over, and often deciding, “No, this move won't work.” It may be that after Christ's death, He had to decide if He wished to build the Catholic Church. And maybe the Devil was joining Him. It may be easier to comprehend the history of the Catholic Church if we assume that They were building this Church together and worked in collaboration, and with some considerable unhappiness, yes, God and the Devil built it together as most unhappy and embattled partners.

In other words, God may be out on an odyssey not unrelated to ours. He or She may get better along the way but not succeed altogether.

         

Are you saying that many human institutions can be the creation of both God and the Devil?

Of course.

         

Do you see any human organizations or institutions that are free from the taint of evil? Or are they all mixed?

I think there's evil in everything.

         

Baseball teams…

You bet.

         

Football…

How not?
[pause]
One last thought. Earlier, you were advancing the argument that suffering is good for you, that submitting to God's will without complaint is virtuous. And this virtue will earn you all kinds of rewards. We will endure whatever God sends since that is our ticket to eternal bliss. Of course, if you dare to ask how a perfect God can make matters so imperfect—or, worse, unjust—the only answer you can give is, “Do not presume to understand the mind of God.” Right there is the most dangerous single argument advanced by churchmen. It is exactly what drives people out of their faith because it tends to make faith brittle. Any time there is something you cannot comprehend, you are told, “It is beyond you—your faith has to carry you through this.” So greater and greater spiritual loans are extracted from faith. Sooner or later, faith snaps. And people leave the Church, leave religion, cease to believe. While “Do not presume to understand the mind of God” is the most employed of the various explanations of evil, it is also, in its final effect, the most demoralizing.

I vote then, as is obvious, for an existential God who does not demand my unwavering faith but prefers instead that we look to find, despite God's flaws and ours, a core of mutual respect as we set out together to attempt to create a viable vision that can lead us into the unforeseeable future out there with its galaxies, its light-years, its enigmas, and ultimately, let us hope, its availability. Perhaps the greatest gods of the cosmos are also on a search and may not be wholly indisposed to welcome us.

IX

On Gnosticism

MICHAEL LENNON:
As we have agreed, the form of this interview will be a discussion on Gnosticism.

         

NORMAN MAILER:
That may be. But I have to recognize that although I have lived with that word in many a text over many a year—indeed, even gave a full reading to Elaine Pagels's
The Gnostic Gospels
some years ago—I am still not comfortable with the term. I feel ignorant of its meaning in relation to what we have talked about. One of the perils of bad memory, from which I suffer, is that one retains not nearly enough of one's serious reading. Growing old usually ensures that if you last long enough to reach your eighties, your memory will bear more resemblance to a bare wall than to a text.

         

Forewarned, forewarned. I come prepared. I would start by saying that you are hardly alone. Gnosticism is not a religious movement, and it has been shunted pretty much off the face of the ideological earth.

Here are a few of the general traits: There is, first, a disdain for authority and Orthodoxy, which is opposed by a great belief in studying the self. The self is regarded as a phenomenon that you had to understand to some serious degree in order to attain larger knowledge. In this sense, the Gnostics were close to the Manichaeans, who were dualists but not absolute about it. Like the Gnostics, they saw the body and the spirit as separate but mutually dependent. They were very taken with Jewish mysticism, which of course had been present long before Christ, and so predates the Gnostics, who seem to have come into existence around the second century
B.C.
and, indeed, in the beginning they were an esoteric branch of Judaism. As you may recall from reading
The Golden Bough,
there were many competing sects at this time. But the Gnostics had great respect for Judaism while at the same time valuing the Greek belief in knowledge and self-examination.

My knowledge of Jewish mysticism is not profound, but I did some reading in the Kabalah and the Zohar. Neither existed, however, at that point.

         

No, although later, when the Kabalah did develop, the Gnostics were not opposed to it. They liked it. As they liked certain Buddhist texts—

You're talking about a thousand years later.

         

That's right.

The Gnostics, in other words, continue well into the Middle Ages.

         

Probably they end with the Inquisition.

I thought the various uprootings of the heresies in the early centuries of Christianity took care of the Gnostics. Not so?

         

It diminished them greatly. As I say, Gnosticism came into existence around the second century
B.C.
and built its ongoing strength by taking in Jewish strains, Christian strains, even Buddhist strains right up to the fourth century
A.D.
At that point, the Christian Church, especially under St. Irenaeus, mounted a strong campaign against them, using St. John as the point of their spear, because St. John was a great believer in Revelation, and the Gnostics were not. St. Augustine was another fierce opponent, and, of course, St. Irenaeus wrote five volumes against the heresy. Many of the tenets of Christianity—for example Original Sin, resurrection, and Jesus as the son of God—were later additions. In the year 200, however, there was no sense of Original Sin, and resurrection was barely an idea. The assumption that Jesus was God also came later. In good part, these ideas came in opposition to Gnosticism.

Could you say that the first purpose of Original Sin was to forge a powerful weapon against the Gnostics?

         

It seems likely. Gnosticism advocated individualism in search of enlightenment. It believed in reincarnation. It believed that all humans had some kind of divine spark. The spark may be trapped, impossible to free; one might be out of touch with it, but it was there.

I agree with so much of this.

         

I thought you might. It's no accident that the Fundamentalists, to the extent that they know anything about Gnosticism, see it as a disreputable part of early Christianity, best kept in the closet. If Gnosticism survives at all now, it may be among some sects who live on the border of Iraq and Iran—the Mandeans, for example, are still there. The attribute to emphasize is that in Greek,
“Gnosis”
means “knowledge.”
“Gnosticos”
is someone who seeks knowledge by searching the depths of the self, looking at the self as the available ground for enlightenment. When it came to the body, they were more divided. Some saw a division between the spirit and the flesh; some felt that the flesh wasn't important at all, and therefore they could go out and fuck themselves silly because it didn't make any difference. Another branch of the Gnostics were purifiers. To the Zoroastrians, fire was holy because it purified. Water was holy. But they didn't believe in sex. Ergo, they died out. While Christianity became monolithic, Gnosticism splintered. And that is another one of the reasons it didn't survive. Nor did it have an Augustine or an Irenaeus organizing a belief system.

Well, I think it hardly matters whether it was a conscious move on the part of the early Church Fathers or an instinct, but I expect the Church Fathers were certain that Christianity had to be absolute. Otherwise, it was not going to work. To hold together, there must be no questions—naught but answers. So the Gnostics were directly offensive to the Church Fathers. It seems as if they certainly agree with what some of us are saying today: that there are no answers. There are only questions. The mark of a good society, a few of us might argue, speaking of a society that has not yet come into existence, is that you move from one set of questions up to a higher level of questions. Whereas the early Christian philosophers founded their church upon the opposed conclusion. People must be given absolute certainty about life and death—particularly about death. An absolute statement of Heaven and Hell was required. The notion of reincarnation was too nuanced, too special, too elegant, too delicate, too possible. So it had to be absolutely forbidden and today, for Fundamentalists, is still off the board.

I was reading Nietzsche's
Anti-Christ
a few days ago, and at a certain point he says, “All priests are liars.” It's a marvelous remark because it happens to be not only daring but true. Whenever you speak with absolute authority about something that you cannot prove, the decision to speak with such authority means that you are ready to live as a liar. It seems to me that Christianity, because of its determination to be wholly authoritative, was able ultimately to create huge societies. Now, these huge societies work by half, and by half they fail. Certainly, for centuries, they functioned well enough to limp along philosophically full of unanswerable questions, hideous inequalities, and clouds of mendacity, ready to sweep all unanswerable questions under a rug of absolute faith.

         

Long before the Gnostics, it was taken for granted that there were many gods. This is certainly true of the Egyptians and of the Greeks. The Hindus believed in a variety of deities. The Africans reacted to all kinds of spirits, high and low. It is as if Judaism and then Christianity came to a contrary conclusion; this plethora of gods did not serve their faiths. It would be better for humans to believe there was one truth only.

And one God, which would of course explain the intensity of the early Christian attacks on the Gnostics.

         

Yes, they burned their books, they expelled them, they killed them. You know, when they found the Gnostic Gospels in 1945 in Egypt, those were remarkable documents—third- or fourth-century copies of documents that went back to the time of Christ. Elsewhere they had been systematically burned and destroyed. But because of the obscurity of this hiding place, these scrolls had not been uncovered, and so it was a great revelation. Historical and biblical scholars had always known about the Gnostics but mainly because Augustine and Irenaeus had attacked them. They never heard them speak for themselves. When they found the Gnostic Gospels, they discovered a much different Christianity, one that did not embrace a monolithic God and had a host of negative feelings about the Old Testament and the intensity of rage and jealousy in Jehovah. We can ask: What was he jealous of? Maybe other gods. So the Gnostics became the losers in this huge struggle.

But you could see—at least personally I see in the narrowness and the Orthodoxy of Christianity from the time of Augustine on—how narrow Christianity is in relation to its roots: a hatred of the flesh, the concept of Original Sin, the insistence that Jesus must be God. He cannot merely be God's messenger. Such remarkable figures did come out of the Middle East—John the Baptist, Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Adonis, Dionysus, Osiris—incredible figures. From a Gnostic point of view, they would all be messengers sent down to keep alive the spark.

Wouldn't it also be an early attempt to understand the mechanics of existence? I would even say that this curiosity about the nature of God was seen by Judaism and Christianity as the great enemy. You cannot build a powerfully structured society so long as there are all too many ways to elaborate the details. The Judeo-Christian enterprise was determined then to become an absolute arbiter over the more mysterious elements of existence.

         

And should there be a debate, it was to be resolved by the supreme leaders of the Church.

Yes, do not look into yourself. Refer to your external authority.

         

And so you could say that the final expression of this was in 1870, when the Catholic Church came up with the infallibility of the Pope. That was always implicit. But finally they now had to state it. It was the final consolidation of Papal power. When you think of the world that was in existence around the time of the birth of Christ, you had two prevailing religious visions—in the Middle East, at any rate: the Greek and the Judaic. They were opposed to each other in a variety of ways and complemented each other in other ways. Christianity can be seen as the synthesis of many of those ideas.

Wasn't Judaism more of a complete religion? On the other hand, Judaism was relatively small. To explain how a Christian sect of Judaism took over that much of the Western world in a few centuries it is necessary, I think, to assume that Rome was at the core of that development. If Rome hadn't existed, one could suspect that Gnosticism might have continued. Gnosticism, after all, had to be congenial to many upper-class Romans. That would be my guess.

         

Yes.

It gave them a chance to explore themselves. When people are wealthy, they want to do just that. But there were other leaders in Rome who believed that Rome had to become the final answer to existence—Rome and its government. Some even saw that with the aid of Christianity they could fortify authoritative government. Existence could be dictated from the top down. They could even overcome their own upper classes. So this becomes my assumption: It took the Romans to recognize that belief in Jesus Christ was going to be very good for Rome. Immediately, however, this was far from happening. In the first centuries after Christ, Christianity softened Romans. Compassion, after all, was at the core of these new beliefs. Nonetheless, the fundamental Roman concept—that it was vital to have an immensely powerful government at the top—did prevail. And Rome became the seedbed of the idea in the Middle Ages that for society to exist, there must be absolute authority wielded at the center of the summit.

Perhaps without this Roman spur to centrality, our civilization could not have been built. In that sense, the authoritative lie, the New Testament, upon which Christianity was founded did create Western civilization—even if it took twelve centuries to reach the Renaissance. I expect it took so long because the lie implicit in this new theologically ordained faith, this respect for order from above, did present built-in obstacles. The finest minds were obliged to believe in dogma. Their lives, after all, were at stake—which can account for the philosophical distances they traveled to make the illogic of faith palatable to themselves. Medieval philosophy became a study of the ways in which you can arrive at your desired end by the most special means of language, which enable you to come out at the end with an affirmation of mighty oxymorons—as, for example, God is All-Good and All-Powerful, which, of course, violates not only our own experience but our sense of history. All we can know or feel are intimations that something did create us.

There is also our philosophical sense that it is far more difficult to explain our existence by the absence of a first cause than as the consequence of one. Yes, it is not because of anything I read, nor anything I have been taught, certainly not because of what spiritual propagandists have been trying to put in my head all these years. No, I believe there is a Creator because that makes more sense to me. If there is not a God, then I cannot conceive of how our universe came to be. So I go on from there to say that if there is such a God, I have to assume that He or She is not perfect. Not on the aforesaid basis of one's own experience and the world's experience. With that, we blunder forward into further intimations of existence, not knowing whether there are forces in existence larger than our God. Quite possibly, there are. And so the reason we are having these dialogues—and I cringe at the ongoing crudity necessarily inherent in such brusque presentation of such sensitive ideas; nonetheless, it is what I can now offer—the reason we are having these dialogues is that Fundamentalist notions of absolute authority are too much of a manic faith machine capable of inspiring world disasters. There was a period, let's say, when without Fundamentalism there might not have been a civilization. That period is now gone. In our age, those same ideas are choking us, distorting us, perverting and blinding us. Just turn on your TV and listen to televangelists yelling for faith and money. Their presence is so toxic that I feel ready to dismiss the eloquent and exceptional rationale of the best theologians and philosophers of the past. I have to add that their need to justify the very improbable propositions that make the televangelists possible also makes the more serious theologies go through excruciating intellectual gymnastics. Embarking on an immense error demands special powers of development in the brain of the person who is working on that vast error. Even though they fail ultimately (and so egregiously that we have had to pay for their failures through the centuries), nonetheless, the powers of human ratiocination have been increased. That is part of the perversity of philosophy. Working with an ill-founded thesis can also improve one's ability to cogitate and debate.