On God: An Uncommon Conversation (20 page)

Right. Even in the Islamic world we know there is such a chasm between the Sunnis and the Shiites. Their detestation of each other is profound.

They certainly outdo the old animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants.

         

You've spoken about dreams being a contested field. That is, divine and demonic forces use dreams to send their messages to humans. If this is true, why can't God and the Devil also communicate Their messages to a mind seeking a line of communication with something transcendental? I assume you believe that humans can pray to the Devil as easily as to the Lord.

Unwittingly. Let me put it this way: I think people who believe in the Devil have ceremonies that are not exactly prayer but more like invocations. There may be a fundamental concept in magical groups that you don't reach the Devil by praying to Him or Her. You invoke such a presence. I would say that the tendency in Christianity, all exceptions noted, is to pray to God rather than invoke Him.

         

Does your belief in karma have anything to do with your less-than-enthusiastic feelings about prayer?

I think I would say that if you live a life that is a little better, a little braver, a little more compassionate or responsible than what was expected of you, you may well be taken care of in your rebirth. This assumes that a foul-up in communication does not occur in reincarnation, but of that one can hardly be certain. In any event, let me argue that attention to one's karma is a grand substitute for prayer, a real and legitimate and profound substitute for prayer. Nonetheless, I can see exceptional cases where a prayer is so beautiful and comes out of such depth in a human and has such inner resonance that divine attention is paid. But I think such prayers are as rare as the work of a fine artist. Let me add that you don't have to be an educated person to have a beautiful prayer. Such a prayer comes out of the depths of your experience and shows a hard-earned balance of perception and passion, of forgiveness and true human need. Such elements can form an exceptional unity. We can understand a parent praying for the health of a sick child and find it honorable and true whether the prayer is heard or not, honorable because of the intensity and focus of the love.

         

You are arguing then that if prayer is to be efficacious or to be heard at all, it has to be all of those things you said: whole, pure, and free of cynicisms.

And best of all, free of motive that is concealed from one's self.

         

The saints can also be addressed in prayer.

For Catholics.

         

For some Protestants, too, Episcopalians.

It seems to me that Catholics have about five times as many saints as the Protestants. Is that true?

         

Well, they do have a lot of saints. But there are some that Episcopals will recognize. Obviously, if there is a Heaven and there are as many people up there as Christians think there are, untold numbers of saints are to be found in Heaven. However, to know for certain that someone is in Heaven, that's the definition of a saint.

Among Catholics? Literally?

         

Literally. Among Fundamentalists you almost never hear about individual saints.

Jesus is the all-purpose saint for Baptists. God, archangel, saint, lawgiver, cheerleader, and coach all in one. I suspect that the mental and spiritual benefits that some good, honest people receive from referring in their thoughts to a particular saint come because that helps to bring some kind of focus to their problem. That is one more reason why the Church lasted two thousand years but, not being a Catholic, I feel equally that the distortions of existence that accompany Catholicism are immense. I am not, however, going to say that the Church has not been good for a good many people in a good many ways, yet it has also stomped upon human imagination. So I would go so far as to say that Catholicism ultimately may be stultifying to God and is half possessed by the Devil. I would say as much for any other established religion. I don't need Catholicism to be the villain. All organized churches and synagogues are, in that sense, obfuscations to separate us from a closer sense of the nature of God.

         

But you have talked about God's involvement in some of the great religions over the years.

How not? But what about the Devil's involvement? And the congregation? There they are, fighting it out in the alleys and on the altars of religion. There is not a seminary in the world of whatever persuasion where you don't have God and the Devil working day and night right down into the acolyte's genitals—the temptations, the agonies, the repressions, the wonders. How many fine seminarians have to wonder, finally, whether they are working for God or the Devil? Can one even be a fine seminarian without some concern over that?

         

To conclude—can you begin to explain why so many people do pray?

The act is obviously cleansing for a good many. It requires some concentration on what is one's greatest need at the moment and what might be one's greatest hope. It can encourage modesty in men and women who are vain and perhaps even inspire courage in a few. Prayer can also enable one to come closer to what is most awful in oneself. Prayer can offer the only solace available when grief is overwhelming. All of those positive elements can be present. What I distrust, however, is the notion that prayers will certainly be heard on high and thereby will prove efficacious. Believe in that as a fact, and one is back in the depth of century-old superstitions that left our minds circling endlessly around the same empty intellectual places. It's a mystery, so don't think about it. Be philosophical! That was the theological comfort you were offered.

AFTERWORD

NORMAN MAILER:
To shift the course of this discussion, there are some remarks I have been thinking about for some time with which I would like to conclude. Part of the interest I've had in theology has been political. If I pose the question “What kind of political system would God like?” I'm not convinced God is certain. In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!) These systems are not without comparison to the designs of God's animals. Which ones turn out best? I think a great deal was put into communism at one point. However, I also have this notion that the Devil is at war with God, so, even as communism ended badly, democracy could end badly. It's why I speak of an existential God.

You may ask: Where is the positive element in all this? How can politics give us a sense of beauty, awe, or even a feeling that we might want to be nearer to God? What do people like me believe in this vein? What are my positive intimations of God as a political presence? Well, I do believe there are elements of compassion in our political world, elements of goodness. It is not difficult to believe that love is more of a life-giving force than hate. The majority of us are working, after all, to create a world where there is reasonable equity. What political form could that world take? If we start with the brilliant forays of writers as great as Nietzsche, we would have to argue that it is wrong to pay great attention to the weak, the poor, the hungry, the meek, the mediocre, the inferior. They are, Nietzsche declares, a prodigious deadweight upon existence. Filled with hatred, they wish to destroy all that is noble or aristocratic, beautiful or fine. It is a sustainable argument—Nietzsche is probably the most talented and powerful conservative of them all. Yet as a thesis, it goes only just so far before it crashes, and that is for a very simple reason: The aristocracy was corrupt, as were the theologians and the oligarchs of capitalism. Conservatism is as filthy in its practices as its leftist opponents. If the poor are malodorous, so are the rich. And the rich have advantages that the poor do not have.

On the other hand, even at its best, socialism has never worked too well. Why? Because it refuses to live with the notion that God exists and is part of the human balance. So a built-in paradox intrudes on what was conceived as an open, equitable system. It is that the majority of leaders who come to power under socialism do not believe in the existence of God and are soon engaged in personal competitions, rivalry, and finally the overriding impulse to be the sole leader—yes, who will have the prevailing ego? My feeling, then, is that to advocate socialism without some sense that religion may also have to be the foundation itself may be to make a profound error.

The beauty of Christ—what Christ was saying to all of us—is that the poor have as much reason to exist as the wealthy. I don't want to oversimplify Nietzsche's argument, but finally he did feel that Christ was not only speaking to the unwashed but arousing a great rage in them, and this rage would yet destroy all that was first-rate in civilization. I would argue that unless we have some real understanding of the needs of the poor, and the rights of the poor, plus the passion of the poor to become more than they have been condemned to be for generations, we are only looking to bypass the horrors of society. I would also say that socialism without belief in an existential God cannot offer real riches to human illumination. Whereas socialism accompanied by belief in a God who wants much of what we want can liberate society for us. So I suppose that if a socialist society should ever come into being with a belief in an existential God, I think we might begin to find some more developed stirrings of human equity.

Let me say, since I have a great distrust of large organizations and monumental government power, that I also think small business must be a viable part of any existential socialism. Let the largest organizations be socialist rather than corporate, because the corporations cannot be trusted. The corporation is—I've called it the Big Empty. The corporation is psychopathic. It does not care about its past; it has very little interest in its previous history; it has very little interest in its future.

         

MICHAEL LENNON:
It does have an interest in its future.

         

Things are done without looking to the long future. For example, outsourcing is an immediate way of making profits. So many are obliged to show a profit every year, just like the psychopath has to feel that he and his ego are larger today than yesterday. Otherwise, they will go into a depression. By contrast, under existential socialism, it would be natural to have an interest in the past and the future. The idea: You don't look for huge profits but for the gradually increasing well-being of all, the ongoing enrichment of culture. To keep such socialism alive, small business has to be encouraged, and the notion of community, of neighborhood. For small business may be more innovative than socialism, more on a par with inventors, artist, gamblers, and adventurers and teachers, more in proportion to the scope of human wit—whereas the concerns of corporate management are for power and profit, exceptional overweening profit for the top.

Behind an existential socialism with some open regard for small business stirs the idea that we might even be working with God. Not working to obey Him, to praise Him, to slave for His vanity, but on the contrary, to live with the idea that God does share desires with us, that we are at last working together, yes, finally—after millennia of hatred of God, be-seechments of God, intense if mindless prayer, sloughs and promontories of ritual, attempts to work for God and oneself by inquisitorial force, attempts to do without God, attempts to glorify Him at the expense of all reason—there might be at last an agreeable sense that, yes, we might be working with the deity, and He might be working with us. If we don't understand God in large part, God, in turn, may not understand us altogether. Yet we might even develop the beginnings of a real and nourishing regard for each other. So one would postulate a society built on the lively concept that God needs us as much as we need God. I would say that premise offers more promise than the ongoing overinflated managerial ethic of corporate capitalism so ready to believe that greed is good and full of God's sanction, and that the free market is Valhalla. Yet how much more life could be gained by the opposed belief that in company (at least some of the time) with the Creator, we can try to do the best of which we are capable, even as we navigate the falls, the rapids, the rocks, and the unforeseen events of our ongoing experience.

APPRECIATIONS

The authors would like to thank Eugene Kennedy and Robert Klaus for their criticisms and contributions to this book. They are not, of course, to be identified with any of its arguments.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was born in 1923 and published his first book,
The Naked and the Dead,
in 1948.
The Armies of the Night
won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for
The Executioner's Song.
He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in Brooklyn, New York.

M
ICHAEL
L
ENNON
is emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and serves as Norman Mailer's archivist, authorized biographer, and one of his literary executors. The author or editor of six books on Mailer's works, he is the president of the Norman Mailer Society. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

ALSO BY NORMAN MAILER

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner's Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Harlot's Ghost

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

Why Are We at War?

The Spooky Art

Modest Gifts

The Castle in the Forest