How to Tell God from the Devil

On the Way to Comedy

A. Roy Eckardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351293860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How to Tell God From the Devil is the first book to depict the relationship among comedy, the Devil, and God. Drawing from Jewish and Christian theories, Eckardt describes comedy as a means to distinguish the divine from the diabolic. He presents a thorough critique of efforts throughout history to justify God in the presence of radical evil and suffering. How to Tell God From the Devil is a sequel to Eckardt's fascinating earlier study Sitting in the Earth and Laughing.

Eckardt offers a theological vision of the comic, and shows its practical use in differentiating God from the Devil. The viewpoint presupposed is a special application of the incongruity theory of humor, which sees humor as an attempt to deal with inexplicable occurrences. Eckardt shows how humor can make faulty explanations tolerable for examining evil and suffering, particularly the notion that God can somehow be "excused" for the terrible evils extant in the world. Eckardt critiques dualistic views that make the Devil and God independent sovereign beings, and monistic views that try to reduce evil to non-being. Eckardt holds God to be ultimately responsible for evil, in such ways that the only final resolution of evil-if there is such-is a form of divine comedy.

Eckardt employs a variety of historical, psychological, sociological, philosophical, and theological sources. He discusses and assesses such diverse figures as Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Zen Buddhists, Conrad Hyers, Nancy A. Walker, Jon D. Levenson, and Harvey Cox. How to Tell God From The Devil is an exceptional work, and will be significant and enjoyable for sociologists, theologians, philosophers, and specialists concerned with the study of humor.

1

Prologue

The Devil reveals the reality of our situation, the fact that we can’t really escape our earthly destiny.

—Ernest Becker

The late Abba Kovner used to show visitors at his kibbutz that the hut in which he composed his poems stood halfway between the children’s playground and the cemetery. Is not this where we all do our work? We are propelled from the joy of childhood (i.e., those of us who are not, when little ones, hopelessly downtrodden and hungry) to the graveness of death; here is the story each of us shares. This story is particularly on my mind as I prepare this, one of my final books.

I

Many will lament, and properly so, the predominantly male cast of this work. I could ask readers to consult my Black-Woman-Jew, which sets forth the view that the question and the eventuality of human liberation are primarily the question and the eventuality of female liberation.¹ I could further plead that the sources I select for review and comment in this new book have been chosen, consciously at least, in a sex-blind way for their bearing upon our subject. Yet once all such pleas are offered up, the male bias and futility behind and within this volume will not have gone away. (Recently, I found myself attracted by the following lines—until I saw that they were written by a male uneasy about feminism: “I don’t understand guys who say they’re feminists. That’s like the time Hubert Humphrey, running for president, told a black audience he was a soul brother.”²)

I might venture to insert that were it not so unwieldy, a more complete subtitle of the book would be On the Way to Comedy; A Few New Twists and Turns Within the Christian Social Gospel In this connection I follow Harvey Cox’s understanding of politics as something very broad and deep, the entire “sphere of human mastery and responsibility.” I further agree with Cox, and with Paul Lehmann, when they suggest that God is a politician: “What God is doing in the world is politics, which means making and keeping life human.” From this point of view, theology today ought to be “that reflection in action” whereby we try to find out “what this politician-God is up to” and seek to move in a like direction. “In the epoch of the secular city, politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology.” Of course, there is “no high court before which those who affirm God’s reality and hiddenness can press their case against those who suspect, as Kafka did, that there is No One There at all.”³ If this is so with God, it is surely the case with the Devil. (Whether the Devil is also a politician remains for our reflection.)

Ordinarily I shy away from “how-to” books (other than technical ones). At best such endeavors manage only more or less superficial answers to questions whose gravity and complexity elude that kind of treatment. Yet here I am with a “how-to” creation of my own. My excuse is that I am grappling with a grave and complex human challenge, if only in provisional and heuristic ways, and that such an effort bears directly upon human living and dying.

This short study seeks to relate God, Devil, and Comedy. I could say “the myth of God, the myth of the Devil, and the myth of Comedy,” but perhaps we ought to wait to see whether or how that eventuality can be made cogent. In a quite different frame of reference, Hippolyte Taine devised, a long time ago, the phrase “metaphysical poem.”⁴ Despite its oxymoronish cast—or maybe because of that—the expression might be applied to the present work.

We have witnessed in recent years a widespread effort to reconcile the incommensurateness of “transcendent” reality and “immanent” reality through the offering up of the construct of myth.⁵ Myth fashions a marvelous, sometimes even magical, world of mediation between objective phenomena and pure fancy, between hard data and subjective invention. It expresses “truths” and “claims” that, in words favored by Reinhold Niebuhr, are to be taken “seriously though not literally.”⁶ An alternate yet rather related stance is that of the comic, which covets a like mediating role between the mystery of fact and the mystery of interpretation, thereby creating additional mysteries. The comic joins myth in nurturing the human imagination, yet at the same time it worries over the difficulties myth often gets into when trying to sustain its connection with real history, and then, in the end, it ventures a few words quite peculiar to itself.

The procedure I follow here can be simply, though not uncontroversially, stated (with a partial bow to Immanuel Kant): One preeminent, even historic instrument for distinguishing God and the Devil, or at least God and evil, is linked to theoretical (speculative) reason. It entails a markedly philosophic, sometimes a theologic, approach. Noteworthy is its creation of one or another implicitly or explicitly rationalist (traditionalist, classical) theodicy. Rationalist, traditionalist theodicies endeavor to justify God before the fact of evil, to reconcile God and faith in the very face of evil, to attest to the justice of God despite evil.⁷ In a word, theodicy strives to argue.

I do not say that this approach (reported upon at some length in chapters 2 and 3) is bereft of value, nor do I hold to an unbridgeable gulf between rationalist theodicy and an alternative, noticeably different, way, a turn toward resources within practical reason. I do suggest that the latter way is also worthy of being heard (chapters 5 and those that follow), with its greater allowance for or reliance upon the imaginative impulse. Theodicy as a whole is hardly lacking in creative imagination; I speak here in highly comparative terms. A peculiar resource for us may be found in the world of comedy, which is rather more childlike and joyful than is rationalist theodicy, with the latter’s prevailing soberness. Perhaps lightheartedness ought to be taken more seriously.

I have inserted the adjective “rationalist” in front of the kind of theodicy primarily analyzed and assessed in this book because I am not referring to such a transrationalist theodicy as that of Wendy Farley in Tragic Vision and the Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy⁸ Despite the unqualified wording of her subtitle, Farley is able to transcend the traditional rationalist-theodicean stance in ways not incompatible with the second part of the present study. I have in mind her insistence upon the divine compassion and divine justice. She is anything but a rationalist. Furthermore, for me, as we shall see, “the divine compassion” is coextensive with “the divine comedy.” It is the case that the critique of theodicy we will eventually be making applies to all theodicies, including my own, insofar as such endeavors constitute human efforts to explain and cope with the reality of radical evil. However, as we shall also maintain, the relative convincingness of particular theodicies turns upon the degree to which they take the Devil into account, or at least a serviceably equivalent reality, as source and agent of radical evil. At this point, Wendy Farley’s contribution is as problematic as any theodicy. As Jeffrey Burton Russell writes, “no theodicy that does not take the Devil fully into consideration is likely to be persuasive.”⁹ I propose a basic paradox for our ongoing reflection: Theodicy is least reasonable—indeed, least scientific or empiricist—when it denies the Devil, and even when it ignores him.

Were the category of theodicy to be ballooned out to encompass any and every reckoning with God in the face of evil, we should clearly have to include comedy within that endeavor. But I am suggesting a fundamental, if not wholly ironclad, distinction, at once methodological and existential, between theodicy as the utilization of human contemplation (theōriá) to deal with a life-and-death matter, and comedy, one application on the part of the practical reason to the same matter. We need little familiarity with comedy to be apprised of its essentially nonspeculative or transspeculative qualities—even if it is not possible to claim that its “practical,” earthy, playful, or seemingly crazy bent is automatically more useful than “theory.”

To “go beyond” theoretical/speculative reason is not to fall into irrationality or antirationality. The very term “practical reason” retains reason as its anchor. Surrogates of a comic vision are not required to be antiphilosophical. (The “philosophy of comedy” is, indeed, a highly reputable enterprise.)¹⁰ All that these representatives need do, or what they can do, is to carry ahead the discussion of God/Devil by calling attention to resources that strictly theodicean analysis does not provide.

Hippolyte Taine’s expression, a “metaphysical poem” (poetic metaphysics?), may thus be retained as allowing for the two sides of our dialectic: “metaphysical,” i.e., the theoretical aspect, and “poem,” i.e., the aspect of imaginative practicality.

I do not presume to boast any saving power for comedy/humor/laughter. I am only in search of ways to tell God from the Devil, not ways to vanquish the Devil. Differently put, I am not coveting one of God’s major jobs. However, I should nowhere rule out the eventuality that laughter (divine as perhaps human) may do something to help rout the devilish forces, or at least to disconcert the Devil a little bit. In question form: Can anyone be counted upon to have a last laugh?

In olden times, when I was serving as editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, I included as one rule on our stylesheet the noncapitalization of d-e-v-i-1. Since then, I have come to take the Devil rather more seriously than that—but also, I think, God, and also, I think, the grace of comedy.

Accordingly, the present inquiry is not an exercise upon the question of the existence of God as such, nor is it a disquisition upon the Devil as such, nor is it an analysis of the theme of comedy as such. Instead, I am limiting myself to relations. I want to consider how all of these concepts (realities?) might be connected. Taken together, the three seem to me to suggest a triangle, which, if not eternal, is at least historical and moral. The question is: How, if at all, may God-Devil-Comedy be linked?

II

Proceeding in reverse order, I venture a word upon the identity of each of our three variables.

1.I have already said a little about comedy. In coming to terms with comedy and the comic vision, I have grown to appreciate Edward L. Galligan’s treatment of comedy as a constitutive, vital, and widely encompassing mode of the human imagination. Thus is comedy much more at home with images than with pure (?) ideas.¹¹ However, I concede, with E. B. White, that humor is essentially a mystery.¹² (If such is indeed the case for a fully human phenomenon like humor, is it not even more the case for the transcending identities of God and Devil? Gracious, we have no less than three most formidable mysteries on our hands!)

Mysteries do their best to elude definition. Yet we owe it to one another to make plain the varied linguistic and/or phenomenological ways we go about using our primary terms, however mysterious the realities or claims behind them.

I tend to place comedy and humor under the heading (my notion is indebted to the views of others) of a certain way or certain ways of celebrating the incongruous, the contradictory, the absurd.¹³ John Morreall writes: “The essence of humor lies in the enjoyment of incongruity.”¹⁴ It is incongruity that makes humor and comedy possible. (Should you be moved to protest that this proposal merely substitutes one mystery for another, you are entirely right. For example, why should incongruity so often give rise to laughter? I don’t think anyone knows.)

A closely parallel interpretation is that of Søren Kierkegaard: “Wherever there is life there is contradiction,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Prologue
• Part I: Rationalist Theodicy and Its Nemesis
• Part II: Under Construction
• Selected Reading List
• Index