36 Arguments for the Existence of God (33 page)

Cass recognized the proof from
Men of Mathematics
. It was Euclid who first discovered it, though his proof had been slightly different, more geometrical than Azarya’s. And the Alexandrian giant had not been six years old.

The angels pour their beauty down on us, Azarya had said. They are above, yes, but also here, in everything. 36 descends from on high to sit at the Rebbe’s
tish
. It carries the beauty of its own composition, and of its invisible bonds with the immaculate others of its realm, transporting this beauty down to us to grace our humble table. As it is, so it must be, and that is the nature of the beauty. In every row, in every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners, there are numbers, and this very room, filled with so much shifting strangeness, which before had been an undifferentiated black and bubbling sea, and then had resolved into individual men, now yields its surface again so that Cass can glimpse the silent presence of Azarya’s angels conspiring with one another to bring about what is, because as it is, then so it must be, and this is the nature of the beauty.

The room is reeling for Cass with Azarya’s angels, beating their furious wings of diaphanous flames, this is what it must be like for the child, what he must see out of those luminous blue eyes, only Cass knows that for Azarya there is infinitely more to be seen, even now, at six years old, and this is all the divine that we need, this is the strange fire that is worth almost anything, the angels within angels in their infinite and necessary configurations, a fleeting glimpse, let it last a little longer, let me savor this tiny bit tossed from the
shirayim
, the remains, of the infinite that is
ayn sof
, without end, emanations of the extraordinary that burst on us in rapture, and look how that small boy is laughing and clapping his hands, riding up on top of his adoring father’s shoulders, and Cass thinks that he can hear a child’s laughter rippling like water over the din.

The melody continued. The Valdeners were deep into their ecstasy. They loved their Rebbe’s son, the Dauphin of New Walden, heir to the most royal of all lineages, necessary to the continuity that made their lives worth living, this small, laughing boy who was bouncing on his dancing father’s back, with the Valdeners kissing their prayer shawls and reaching them out to touch him as they do when the Torah scroll is paraded among them. The wonderful child was to them a proof more conclusive than Euclid’s of all that they believed. They couldn’t know who it was they were loving. But Cass knew, and his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance.

Cass’s cup of tea has grown cold while he was speaking with Lucinda, and he is going back to the kitchen to put the kettle back on when the phone rings again.

It’s Roz.

“So how did it go down with Shimmy?”

“Not so great. He’s pretty upset.”

“Over your leaving?”

“That, but also that whole fraternity-fracas thing you helped to stir up on Tuesday.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“There are posters, protesters, banners hung from the dorms, petitions. Shimmy called it a tinder keg, a powder box.”

“The slim edge of the wedgie!”

“Don’t laugh, Roz.” She’s laughing. “He made me feel so sorry for him that I promised him I’d think about what kind of retention package would tempt me to stay.”

“Oh, Cass. He’s playing you for a shlemiel, using that
Saturday Night Live
sketch of a protest to guilt you into staying. What an ox-shit artist.”

“Well, maybe. But Shimmy really did seem shaken.”

“I can imagine. It’s Gamma Gamma Gamma, or he can just forget about his yes indeedee.” As an alum, Roz has kept abreast. She even knows the name of the expert doctor that Deedee and her sorority sister Bunny share.

“His weak spot is that woman.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“I could feel his pain. He kept talking about being squeezed.”

“That Southern belle of his can probably squeeze them like they were limes for mint juleps.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, Cass! I’m sorry, but this is one beautiful hoot!” She breaks off a spell to demonstrate just how beautiful a hoot she thinks it is. She’s a bit breathless when she returns. “I guess I might have contributed some to this kankedort.”

“Don’t start getting a swelled head.”

“Did any of the kids use my motto?”

“At least a dozen. I have to say, though, that the banner I liked the best was one that had “Toga Party!” written out in Greek letters.
Tau, omicron, gamma, alpha, pi, alpha, rho, tau, iota!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me a moment to think.” He gives her a moment to think. “Okay, here’s what we do to end Shimmy’s Hanukkah Wars. Tell him to Hebraicize the Greeks! So, instead of some fraternity named Alpha Delta Kappa, make it Aleph Daleth Qooph!”

He can’t help joining in her laughter. “Deedee’s Gamma Gamma Gamma could be Gimel Gimel Gimel.”

“Instead of sororities and fraternities, they can call them sisterhoods and brotherhoods—like in a synagogue! It’s so ridiculous, it just might work!”

“As Shimmy likes to say, ‘Stranger things have gone down the tubes.’”

“But whether it works or not, you’re out of there! Stop letting the Shim-mys of the world work you over. Get it through your head, you’re a star. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for your big God debate tomorrow.”

“What big God debate?”

“The debate with Felix Fidley! I was over at Harvard today, and there are posters plastered all over the place! ‘Resolved: God Exists.’ You can’t have forgotten!”

“But I did! Fuck! I totally forgot. Fuck!”

“It’s upsetting when you curse, Cass. You’re the only person I know who only curses in extremis.”

“Fuck, Roz. Fuck.”

“Really upsetting.”

It’s all coming back to him. Felix Fidley, a Nobel-laureate economist who has been taking his stand on a wide range of issues by publishing in
the neoconservative magazine
Provocation
, has been challenging the so-called new atheists to debate him on the existence of God. He’d written to Cass with a mixture of arrogance and flattery:

“What do you think of Felix Fidley?” he had asked Lucinda. They were in bed, Lucinda tucked neatly into the pockets of the comforter, reading.

“Felix Fidley?” Lucinda looked up from
A Proper English Murder
. She’s addicted to mysteries. “He’s got a Nobel.”

“Yes, but what do you think of him?”

“He’s one of the most brilliant economists of the last twenty years. In fact, I co-authored a paper with him, ‘Mandelbaum Equilibria in Hostile Takeovers.’ Why?”

“He wants to debate me.”

“Really?” Lucinda marked her page with her bookmark and set
A Proper English Murder
down on her night table. “About what?”

“The existence of God.”

“I should have guessed!” She laughed. “Are you telling me Felix Fidley believes?”

“Belligerently.”

“How odd. He’s such a rationalist—University of Chicago and all. Are you sure?”

It was touching how sincerely Lucinda believed in reason. It was difficult for her to get her mind around the fact that believers weren’t all high-school dropouts who used their fingers and toes to add and subtract.

“For lots of people it’s become a matter of political coalitions more than anything having to do with theology. The enemy of my enemy is my
friend. If liberals are going in one direction in the religion-versus-reason debates, defending the theory of evolution and secular humanism, neocons feel they have to head off in the opposite direction. Or they think that it’s okay for people like them, who are thoroughly civilized, to question God’s existence, but that it would be moral anarchy if the teeming masses started to doubt God. I suspect that that’s what Fidley believes.”

Provocation
is a good example of what Cass was describing. It was founded by left-wing intellectuals in the 1940s, but its editors had been profoundly insulted by the new leftism of the sixties and reacted by lurching to the right. By now
Provocation’s
policy of opposing anything advocated by the liberals—a word it had helped besmirch—has carried it into open warfare against the entire project of the Enlightenment. Darwin has come in for multiple attacks, and religious scientists have shown off their creativity. There was an article by an Orthodox Jewish linguist who used Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar to vindicate the Bible’s story of the Tower of Babel. There was an article authored by a fundamentalist geologist on the movement of the tectonic plates of the earth as consistent with a worldwide flood on the order of Noah’s. There was an article by a Catholic anthropologist arguing against the liberal denial of distinct races and backing it up with Genesis 10, where the begettings of Noah’s three sons are explained.
Provocation’s
review of
The Varieties of Religious Illusion
had been so negative as to border on the actionable.

“Are you going to debate him?” Lucinda had asked him, turning over on her side so that she was facing Cass, her head propped up on her palm.

“Do you think I should?”

“What day did you say this thing is?” he’s asking Roz now on the phone.

“February 29. I think that’s tomorrow.”

“It
is
tomorrow! I’m fucked. And that’s when Lucinda is getting back from Santa Barbara. What was I
thinking
?
”

“Well, if anyone is worth debating on this issue, then Felix Fidley is,” Lucinda had said. “It would certainly be a major win for you, and I don’t
see how you could fail to win.” She’d smiled, and her delicate nostrils flared ever so slightly. “I’d like to see that.”

She’d reached out her hand and laid it on Cass’s stomach and then had slid it slowly up his chest. She reached up for Cass’s glasses and gently removed them, leaning over him to place them on his night table, her brandy-glass-shaped breasts just grazing his uplifted face.

That minute adjustment had come over her face, unstiffening her upper lip and unloosing the full extravagance of her beauty, flooding all of Cass’s modules, seizing him up with the one and wordless premise that composes the Argument from Lucinda.

“I’m fucked for real,” he says now to Roz.

Jonas Elijah Klapper had intimate knowledge of all the prominent thinkers across the ages. There was not a novelist, poet, essayist, critic, historian, metaphysician, ethicist, theologian, or belletrist worth the reading (an emphatically necessary qualification) of whom he had not taken the reckoning. He had expended himself in exhaustively computing the ranking of anyone meriting mention in the great chain of genius. His project had been demanding. It had demanded neither more nor less than omniscience. The (all but) universal ovation was not disproportionate to the accomplishment. He had organized the vast reaches of human thought in a way that could be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the commendable efforts of Miss Ching in helping him to settle into his Frankfurter suite of offices, her admirable zeal in conceiving categories for the color-coded files, craftily alphabetized.

So, when Jonas Elijah Klapper stated that the Grand Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim was a religious genius on the order of Meister Eck-hart, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Nathan Benjamin ben Elisha ha-Levi Ghazzati (also known as “Nathan of Gaza” or “Nathan the Prophet”), it was quite a statement. Professor Klapper confided in Cass that the Valdener Grand Rabbi was among the most extraordinary men of his lifetime—and he had met all the extraordinary men of his lifetime, including the pre-eminent secular scholar of Qabalah, one of the few non-Americans granted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Jonas had been initiated as a mere pup of thirty-eight), the Jerusalemite Yehuda Ickel.

Cass had liked the Valdener Rebbe quite a lot, almost in spite of himself, and certainly in spite of his mother. In fact, one of the Rebbe’s most endearing traits, at least to Cass, was the warmth he still harbored toward
the former Devorah Sheiner. The Rebbe seemed to regard her with none of the severity with which she regarded him, though perhaps this was just part of his Socratic slyness. Still, listening to Professor Klapper’s assessment, he had to conclude that it was probably his own ignorance of Yiddish that had blocked him from seeing the full extent of the Rebbe’s extraordinariness, though he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the blame lay in his intrinsic soul-shortage.

According to Professor Klapper, the Valdener Grand Rabbi was like the Palomar Observatory, which he had been compelled to visit with his fulsome hosts at the University of California at San Diego when he had been out there to deliver, soon after the publication of “my little book
The Perversity of Persuasion,”
the prestigious John Shade Lecture in Literature and Truth. They had organized quite the tour for him, in consequence of which he had immediately resolved never to accept another invitation from anywhere in the entire state of California, a ban he had, over the years, gradually widened until it included everything west of the Hudson. Jonas Elijah Klapper was ready to confess his vagueness on such details, since Sigmund Freud was as far as he would venture in the direction of the hard sciences, but he had carried away the impression that the contraption took the compass of the infinite cosmos. If that was so, then it was still as nothing compared with the observatory that was the Valdener Grand Rabbi.