A Grotesque in the Garden

Hud Hudson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459730
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

After several millennia living as a lone sentinel in the Garden of Eden, the angel Tesque is contemplating leaving his post in rebellion against God. Meanwhile, in another time and place, a professor of mathematics isolates herself in remote Iceland as she finds herself increasingly at odds with society. The connection between these two characters? A letter, a sentient dog, and a deep-seated resistance to the demands of love.

A Grotesque in the Garden is a philosophical tale that addresses some of theology's thorniest problems, including the questions of divinely permitted evil, divine hiddenness, and divine deception, couching them in narrative form for greater accessibility to students and general readers. While Hudson's story ultimately vindicates the virtue of obedience to God, it never shies away from critiques of troublesome theological positions.

This second edition contains an appendix with commentary, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading.

PART I

TESQUE

ONE

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust

I walk in the Garden alone and have so done each day since my internment here began.

I am a coward for not leaving. But perhaps today I shall leave, or if not today then tomorrow. For although I cannot die, I can cease—and a punishment of annihilation imposed by the One who abandoned me here is preferable to the withering charms of solitude in Paradise.

As you will someday be, I too am simply a material thing—a rude chunk of matter—dust of a foreign kind, but nonetheless dust. To dust you will return eventually, for it is not given to you to be immortal in your present state. You will die before you are raised to eternal life. No such respite for me. No peaceful and temporary oblivion but only this uncertain and interminable waiting. I am bound by permanent dust which cannot (save momentarily) be disfigured, torn, or reshaped. I am dust on eternal watch. I am the guard dog of dust.

That common perversion of angels as incorporeal wisps of tenderness and bliss—flitting here and there, mindlessly stroking the hair of sleeping children, moronically dancing on the proverbial pinhead, selflessly rescuing the unwary from invisible dangers, forever converting, counseling, curing, or comforting the whining multitudes, and piously praising the absent One day and night—ranks among the poorest fantasies ever conjured up by your fellow creatures. Know that your father who art in Eden is corporeal, is a glorious and imperishable body, but not as distorted by those inexplicably popular and horrific painters of the cherubim, whose artistic vision culminates in portraits of immature little embarrassments looking fat, confused, and heavenward as if their only hope is to have someone happen by and drop a little caramel and faith in their mouths.

I am of the glorious second line in the hierarchy. Mine is a body of terrible loveliness, four-countenanced, unadorned by bruise or blemish or age or decay, a body fierce, strong, and staggeringly beautiful. But unique to my kind, I have not been permitted to employ it in worship or even as chariot or throne of God—that blessed service allegedly reserved for my closest angelic kin. Nor have I been allotted a single hour in the company of my kin. Rather I have been cut away, brought into being only to be separated from my Maker and sentenced to pointless isolation in the Garden. I’ve even been denied the courtesy of being aware of His presence.

All this time, and I’ve never even met Him.

I was angry when I wrote that. Daughter, allow me to begin again. I say “daughter” because determining that particular outcome is among the few things remaining under my control. It’s not much power, but that’s how I’ll use it. So, daughter, allow me to begin again.

I stand as a sentry charged with a task of prevention. You and your kind already know me obliquely by way of what you think a myth, a myth developed in your ancient Middle East, addressed to all, and recounted in the Holy Story. The book of Genesis speaks of a privileged and sacred place that played a unique role in the divine plan—of a Garden planted eastward in Eden—and it tells of the fall of two solitary figures from that Paradise. As told to you, the myth represents a series of events in the history of your ancestors. According to that history, these individuals were made just and right and yet in some manner or other freely rebelled and in so turning away from God damaged themselves and their progeny in a way neither they nor any of their descendants could rectify on their own power. Their disobedience was punished by banishment from the Garden and the loss of a certain innocence, immunity, safety, and grace.

Those portions of the tale, I realize, are familiar enough. You will recall, however, that one strand of the narrative abruptly ends upon introducing a character whose fortunes are left unspecified. Yes, I am well aware the Holy Story reports that angels (in the plural), armed with flaming and ever-turning sword, were placed on the east side of the Garden to guard the Tree of Life and to bar any further entrance after its original inhabitants were driven hence—but it’s a lie. I alone was banished here.

Or at least I am apprehensive about whether it is true. Perhaps another once stood on the opposite side of the gate, but if so, he chose non-existence over service in the first moments of our assignment and was never replaced. I find that thought disquieting and will return to it in due time.

I believe my imprisonment is undeserved. Or if deserved, the reasons have been well hidden from me. I have stood my ground. I did not fall with the lost angels; I did not turn from God—not yet. Sometimes I have wondered whether my abandonment is deserved for acts I have yet to commit, for transgressions to come. Well, if so (then on the strength of His supreme goodness), I at least have the guarantee I will in fact commit them at some later time; otherwise His justice would be compromised. Some comfort, I suppose.

Still, I remain unsatisfied with this explanation. My freedom, my mysterious and precious freedom, ensures that I am able to refrain from future disobedience, even if it should already be true now, in advance, that I will not refrain. My freedom is threatened only if I am compelled or forced, only if I somehow must rebel, not merely by a true report that as a result of my own beliefs, desires, intentions, and volition I shall. Accordingly, suppose it true now that I will later fall, but then, since this pre-imposed penalty for discarding my duty will have been among the causes of my fall, I cannot bring myself to regard my confinement as fitting or proper.

If I do fall from this Garden and carry out my plan, success on my part will surely ensure that you enter the world fatherless and I perish childless. Perhaps I will not be permitted a single step outside the Garden. Perhaps in that instant He shall remove his support from my being, and I shall softly vanish away as would anything so released by the divine hand and no longer attended to by the divine mind. Perhaps my sole attempt at personal rebellion will be thus permanently and quietly prevented. But I simply don’t believe a word of it. No—I, too, will be permitted a choice. I will enter the world unobstructed, and I will be allowed the freedom to ignore what I have been informed is my function and to refuse His command. I will be left alone to pursue my own ends, left alone, that is, until my purposes unacceptably cross His. And the cross is inevitable.

Inevitable, for in the event of my leaving the Garden, my whole being will be bent toward one task, the only act of which I am capable that at once may make my own existence finally of some recognizable value to me and also may yield goodness to another beyond measure. Its price is to forfeit my own place in His realm, but, as I have explained, although I obey, I seem to have lost that already. He has forsaken me. Yet I will imitate Him. I will use my will to bring forth new life, though so doing has been strictly forbidden the angels. I will create you, dear daughter, and for this act I will almost certainly pay with myself.

Still, despite missing each other in time, I wish to convey some account of my thoughts and choices and to speak to you here. No one has told my tale. Let this letter be its record.

Even my name was omitted from the Holy Story. I am Tesque. You have undoubtedly been taught to think me under the Hebrew tool cherub, a term for the class of creatures especially blessed by propinquity to God. For others of my order in the angelic hierarchy this nearness bespeaks the great joy of intimate knowledge of and precious closeness to God. Whereas for me—it is nothing but a reminder of the unbridgeable proximity to all I want and cannot have, a span so modest but not traversable by such a one as you or I.

I know of my angelic brothers by description, not acquaintance, for as I remarked, I have never once been admitted into their company.

I was not called to duty from my place in the choir. I can boast of no experience of the host of Heaven. My earliest memories one and all have their origin in the Garden as, I suspect, do I. The purpose of this curious provision has always eluded my understanding. Why invest me with knowledge that can only be salt in the wound of my isolation? Why gift me consciousness, rationality, and affect at all? I have been consigned to a trivial task which could be fulfilled by any Grotesque in the Garden, by any soulless and vacant carved stone so positioned that it wards off whatever mysterious enemy is to be kept away. So why gratuitously and cruelly invest what need be no more than a statue with desires and the knowledge of what would fulfill them, only to let its cravings go unattended and unsatisfied? Why cause your faithful statue pain?

My first memories stand out as my most vivid—a turbulent sea of action. I woke to myself, fully formed and equipped with an understanding of my nature and my immediate directive. I stood visible both to myself and to the animals. And all in a moment creation had changed irrevocably, for there was now something that it was like to be the unique entity that is me, to possess my particular center of awareness, to be frightened and bewildered by the understanding that those individuals most similar to me in Paradise had somehow transgressed, and to be subjected to a nearly overwhelming compulsion to drive them from the Garden. My counterpart on the other side of the gate—if the rumor of his existence in the Holy Story is to be trusted—although presumably as new and confused as I, refused to be party to their banishment. But I . . . I unhesitatingly obeyed the command that so powerfully accompanied my creation. Without pause or reflection, I forced those poor creatures from the Garden and closed the gate.

Immediately upon your ancestors exiting this place, the Garden was—how shall I put it?—raised. I now lie above you, like an author’s pen above the letters on the page (a pen, not an author, for thus far I have been permitted only the functions of an instrument). And yet for ages now, the Garden and I have been separate from but nearer your world than you might suspect. Your kind cannot so much as point in my direction or reduce the distance between us by a hair’s breadth on your own power, but you are lower creatures, and not all directions are open to you. Thinking otherwise is the parochialism of the hands of a clock that imagine there is no direction in which they do not eventually point, since they describe an entire circle when given enough time. You can no more approach or recede from me than the hands of that clock can betray their fixed orbits. North, east, south, west—point those faithful arrows—never out. Left, right, forth, back, up, down—you move in your three-space cell—never towards me.

And again, intolerably, the pointlessness of my quarantine becomes salient. I apparently have little need to prepare to conduct battle to prevent re-entry of the Garden, since it cannot even so much as be found unless your kind acquires the power of movement in my direction or else it is again lowered in accordance with the twists and turns of the indecipherable divine plan. But until that eventuality transpires—to address just what threat, exactly, am I so crucially placed on watch?

I have had all I can stand of the five sisters—isolation, alienation, abandonment, loneliness, and solitude. A few words on each.

Isolation is born of distance, and distance is the saddest relation. It carves. It singles. It individuates. Like you, I am placed, I have a location, but I never share it with another. Movement is permitted but contact forbidden. Although I am of foreign dust, I am fragmented—composed of tiny shards and insensible particles, parts cursed with repulsive forces that keep one another and any other objects at bay with all the power and authority of natural law—as, indeed, are you and all creation. In approaching another, my very nature ensures that I merely force it hence—as does yours and all creation’s. The thought is simply not sufficiently appreciated; genuine embrace is illusory. Of course, I can achieve an approximation of closeness so as to no longer perceive a distance between my parts and those of my affections, but imperceptible and ineliminable pockets of emptiness still serve to isolate us. Total I wish to mix with another—to enjoy even momentarily the same place, but I am denied even touch. As if mocking my angelic kind, I am always near but never fully co-present with another. That exquisite pleasure our Maker reserved for himself and then apparently discarded unused. Omnipresence could afford co-location for each of us, one to another, and yet for reasons I cannot understand this delight has been passed over in favor of mandatory separation. Instead, He has contracted His presence to secure and accommodate my isolation. He has made room for me not by sharing his space but by withdrawing himself, and I—unavoidably, unwillingly, and in his image—can share this world with my fellow living and nonliving creatures only by withdrawing from them in turn.

Alienation is possible in company or in seclusion; it requires only that you are in some manner expelled or prevented from returning somewhere or reuniting with someone or someones to whom you belong. I enjoy none of the pleasures of being amongst my angelic brothers; they are my people, not these stones and this dirt. Still, just as this Garden gate effectively bars entrance to the world, so too am I so securely and remotely locked away that I am not even marginalized, for I am not even on the page. The pain of alienation intensifies when, rather than resulting from some accident of fortune, it is caused by a misuse of will, by being intentionally wronged as when, in His infinite wisdom, God marooned me on this island-Garden for reasons that He has not seen fit to share with me.

But I see I have become angry again. I should take back the remark about the misuse of free will. I should say rather that in my abandonment I have been harmed rather than wronged, for God (unlike the rest of us) cannot fail to perform His moral obligations. Of course, not all intentional harmings are moral wrongs, but the harms hurt all the same, especially when they are prolonged and inexplicable and originate in someone you believe loves you. Was there no other permissible alternative available to Him that did not require my abandonment here? How could my sorry corner of the world possibly be a non-negotiable moment of the divine plan?

Loneliness is a felt experience, a complex emotional state, an unsatisfied desire for togetherness. It is unpredictable, unpleasant, independent, and of its own mind. Perhaps it will join in force with isolation, perhaps it won’t. You may find it keeping company with alienation or wholly absent from that condition, supplanted by indignation or rage. It can worsen abandonment or be altogether indifferent in the face of betrayal. When it does arrive, however, it dominates. One’s entire landscape, internal and external, is painted in its muted and unhappy colors. Even goodness loses its magnetism, and what is beautiful seems distorted. But I realize I hardly need to explain loneliness to you or to anyone. It is our one shared inheritance. No one honest can consider it a stranger.

Solitude is the only member of the quintet not inherently disvaluable. Where the other elements burn and injure, solitude could be a balm and a restorative if only it were occasionally punctuated with interaction. Solitude harbors hidden treasures—the reintegration of a fragmented self, a gradual discovery of one’s deepest values, an enriched harmony with one’s environment, the autonomy made possible only through freedom from all engagement with and responsibility to others. Yet this deep and awesome well can run dry. And I—well—I am replenished enough. Already I know myself and what matters to me all too clearly. I am perfectly attuned to this my paradisiacal prison. The harmony cannot be improved upon, but the music is dying.

In passing the endless cycle of seasons, I walk the Garden. Your sun no longer shines upon this ground, but the Garden glows with its own light, and the brightening and dimming of the light is my day and night. The river flows under the walls into the Garden and then out again, who knows from or to where or how? The flowers and trees bud, bloom, beautify, fade, drop petals and leaves, and naked, shiver in the silent shadows of the dark snows of a Garden Winter only to find new colors in the crisp air, fresh breeze, and warm rain of a Garden Spring.

Morning after morning I begin by tracing the same intricate path. Along the way I touch the same flowers on the same petals in the same order and every hundredth step is twice the distance of each of its ninety-nine predecessors. It’s not as if anything harmful can befall me or visit corruption on the Garden should I forget a flower or misstep the path, but one needs the ritual of patterns, and I have systems from which I must not stray.

I spend afternoons wading and confessing to the patient but uninterested river, letting its waters wash over me as I recall with longing the exquisite beauty and vitality of the once-present but long-departed animals. I pay my respects by reciting with fond remembrance the names of the twelve I christened when we so briefly shared the Garden together. Those were the twelve who on at least one occasion saw me, and it is so very good to have been seen by anyone or anything. I cared for them. There are nearly four hundred and eighty million different ways to recite their names in order, twelve thousand of which I achieve each day after stepping into but before exiting the river. The sequence requires almost a century and a decade to complete, yet I have brought the circuit to its end more times than I care to remember.

Evenings are occupied in appreciative fascination, perplexity, and most often sorrow—in a fashion I will be able to describe momentarily.

Profoundly black, unspeakably still, and sleepless nights crawl by while I compulsively calculate and classify everything: I count days. I count hours. I count seconds. I count colors. I count sounds. I count odors. I count tastes. I count textures. I count memories. I count desires. I count fears. I cou...