Fictions of God

Frank England

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532696749, 9781532696756
• eBook ISBN: 9781532696763
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Fiction and theology share an attempt to articulate what it means to be human. They both include narrative accounts of virtue and vice, moral worth and moral failure. Through the themes of courtesy, brutality, silence, sound, and divine absence, the sacred nature and character of being human is explored in novels by Anita Brookner, Chuck Palahniuk, Anne Michaels, Richard Powers, and Iris Murdoch.

Chapter 5

The End of God

The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966)

In being human, one’s enacted civility of courtesy confronts the embodied reality of other persons. They, like oneself, participate materially in the world. They too speak from the silences of their sounded listenings, in the presence of other presences—in searching endeavors to be, to know, and to love. These tasks, one may propose, reside at the center of living humanly. But in this quest to become more humanly human, perfect knowledge of the self and of others always, and annoyingly, recedes. It never is apprehended definitively, and known fully. With each disclosure, with each unveiling, of a hidden aspect of oneself—as, indeed, of others—so there is a new concealment, a new veiling, an additional and frustratingly obstructive occlusion, another, unexpected and blinding, unknown. Concomitantly, no matter how dispassionately, no matter how selflessly one may endeavor to love, every act of relational loving betrays one’s own need, and this desire to fulfill one’s own want threatens the perfect loving of another.263

Perhaps, too boldly, one may suggest that the tragedy of being human is pivotally focused upon the distressing awareness of the possibilities of knowing perfectly and loving consummately, and the recognition of one’s persistently limited comprehension and thwarted affections. For when the immaculate portrait of “man,” in Shakespeare’s terms,

noble in reason . . . infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! (Hamlet, II. ii)

is perceived in less glowing colors, and one does examine more closely one’s own reflected image and its conditioned distortion, then one is compelled to ask, with Hamlet: “What is this quintessence of dust?” and to answer, with Hamlet: “Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither” (Hamlet, II. ii).

Notwithstanding the chasm between who one is and who one, with undeflected attentiveness, the purest of intentions, and a singular and selfless willing, could become, it is this intuitive portrayal that perhaps impels the venture of a crossing. It is this imaged—and imagined—hoped-for future that auspicates human striving. But this venturous risk is arrested by the shackled cognition that one will fail—indeed, one always already—toujours déjà—fails. Disconsolately, human effort is frustrated and, ultimately, defeated. And whilst one may live beguiled by pre-lapserian portraits of oneself, they depict merely hubristic sketches of human promise unfulfilled and unrealized on canvases that crack and in hues that fade. When self-scrutiny is practiced, these edenic portraits are what they are: the sap and soil and produce of an earth that bleeds color, and merely lacquers its posed and postured human subjects. But no veneer can airbrush the blemishes; no payment can liquidate the deficit; no commitment or belief can eradicate human fallenness, which is the ἀρχή and the τέλοϛ—the beginning and the end—of the human condition, this indelibly etched, uncompromising and paradoxical principle that cannot be overcome which is implicit in, and entails, what being human simply is, and that, in the course of one’s living, foretells one’s own failure and final defeat.

But as noted and, probably, equally as paradoxical, this restriction, this awareness of ultimate limitation has not deterred the ambitions of pressured human striving, of the ascetic practice of moral improvement, of political, economic, and cultural achievements, and of scientific, medical, and technological advancements. And yet, from all of them, questions of self-interest and of the less than commendable legacies of well-intentioned schemes arise. For within projects of enhancement, of change, and of progress, there are warnings that should be heard, listened to, and investigated, and yet frequently go unheeded.

Futures of such plans are notoriously difficult to predict. But various attempts to examine the possible, yet admittedly also unforeseeable, results of their implementations that may scar the futures of one’s own life and of the lives of others often are neglected. Instead, they are justified by their apparent, even genuinely sincere, informing good intentions; or the extent of the human and economic investment in their development may cause more predictably noxious outcomes to be set aside in a suspicious and nefarious complicity, to invoke the “risk-calculating” unnamed narrator in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) in chapter two,264 or, perhaps more mundanely, one may deflect one’s gaze quite deliberately from the challenges and obstacles that are situated in the vis...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustration
• Preface
• Acknowledgments and Permissions
• Introduction
• The Courtesy of God
• The Brutality of God
• The Silence of God
• The Sound of God
• The End of God
• Conclusion
• Bibliography