Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Job's question ...

... Holiday in Hellmouth. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Leon Shestov suggests somewhere - I think in Postestas Clavium - that the God of the Bible could be defined as "Infinite Caprice." There is, at the heart of being and life, something terrifying. Many of us, myself included, think that there is a Personality to be found there as well, from Whom everyone and everything lives and moves and has its being. A few of us, myself included, decline to affirm much in particular about that Personality, while acting on the hunch that the mystery at the center of it all is somehow resolved in love and mercy. The notion that God is there to make sure nothing bad ever happens to us and to kiss our boo-boos strikes me as disgustingly naive. That evil happens, that "God maketh his rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike," in no way argues against God's existence, however much it may confound certain notions of God. It may well be that God does not correspond very exactly to the preaching of prophets, the doctrines of theologians, or the ideas of philosophers. Faith, Cardinal Newman said, means "being capable of bearing doubt." It also means having the courage to face the sheer terror of being with the hope that "all will be well and all manner of thing will be well." Poets do a better job than the philosophers and theologians. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," the Psalmist warns. Look at the sun, that vast and terrifying sphere of exploding gases. It is the source of all life on our planet, but ultimately unapproachable and not at all inviting, or cute, or cuddly. But Wallace Stevens was on to something with that phrase "as a god might be":

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.

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