Journal #10

Mailer, Norman. "Cosmic Ventures: A Meditation on God at War." Esquire December 1989.

1. Thirty years ago in Chicago, during an interview with Richard G. Stern and Robert Lucid, I was asked -- I paraphrase the question -- "What is your notion of God?" I replied: "I think that . . .God is not all-powerful. He exists as a warring element in a divided universe, and we are a part -- perhaps the most important part -- of His great expression, His enormous destiny; perhaps He is trying to impose upon the universe His conception of being against other conceptions of being very much opposed to His. Maybe we are in a sense the seed, the seed carriers, the voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment of that embattled vision; maybe we are engaged in a heroic activity and not a mean one." A moment later, I went on to suggest that this was more noble and arduous as a religious conception than any notion of an all-powerful God who would take absolute care of us. It was the only belief, I proposed, "that explains to me the problem of evil. You see, the answer may well be -- how to put it? -- that God Himself is engaged in a destiny so extraordinary, so demanding, that He, too, can suffer from a moral corruption, that He can make demands upon us which are unfair, that He can abuse our beings in order to achieve His means, even as we abuse the very cells of our body."

2. Over three decades, I have not felt the need to change more than a few words of that speech. It has occurred to me since, despite my reputation as a male chauvinist, that God may be referred to as "She" as legitimately (for all we know) as "He," or, even better, as "They," if one can conceive of divinity as marriage between godlike Male and Female, a marriage, indeed, that may not work a great deal better than the majority of ours! The jest is feeble because it is unprofitable to speculate about the particularity of God, but I still adhere to a thirty-year-old intuition that He or She is not Love (not Love alone, and not Love first), but Vision. God has a vision of existence more extraordinary, more humane, more incalculably splendid and beautiful, and conceivably more risky, than other visions of existence that are at war with Him or Her or Them. God is, in this sense, a general trying to win a war across the heavens, and we are the wet and wounded infantry of that titanic war. God, as a general, has to give at least as much to the campaign as to the welfare of His troops. God, like a general, can be obliged to sacrifice us, or ignore us, since God, like a general, is powerful but not all-powerful. God, like a general (or the mother of a hundred children), is merely doing His or Her best.

3. This belief, which will hardly attract people in such numbers as to raise a subscription committee for a new church, is arduous, tough-minded, unsentimental, and intellectually satisfying to me. It gives a reasonable explanation for the Holocaust. Two and more generations have come along since that catastrophe to ask the age-old question: How can Evil exist side by side with an all-powerful, all-good God? The pre-World War II answer that we were to exercise our free will to avoid evil was hardly satisfying. It intruded on the unpleasant but inescapable suspicion that God was playwright, director, producer, and theater critic watching an enormous and now odious pageant He had created for His own . . . own what? Own amusement? Diversion? . . . The mind grew confused. Once evil took on the dimensions of the Holocaust, however, God was either not all-good or all-powerful. The second alternative seemed more reasonable to me; most certainly so, if all-good was altered to all-good-but-embattled. On this last assumption, I have lived, considering all, with a kind of equanimity. It convinces me that life is hard, and the hereafter may be harder, but it offers its stern comforts as well. I do not have to see my life as absurd. We have a purpose in existence. It is to help to fulfill God's will, which is not preordained. God is discovering the purpose of His will, even as we spend our lives looking for the purpose and meaning of our existence, and can measure each of our days by our support and/or betrayal of God. Do I speak of betrayal? If God is an embattled vision at war with other visions of existence in the universe, then we do not have to look far to find the Devil. He or She is located somewhere in all those other visions of existence that now impinge on our earth (that God can lose this war is the precise fear that will keep my religion from prospering). Sometimes I need look no farther than the blank walls of corporate offices to decide where the Devil nests, and sometimes wonder whether the Devil, like God, is also dying, and we are getting ready as a muddled mass man to live in the graveyard of the divinities and the diabolicals, but those are sentiments for the worst days. On a good day, I can still believe that the war is worthwhile, and it is not absurd to love my children and do my work, for I am blessed by a philosophy that does away with self-pity. The universe may not be fair from day to day, nor from century to century, but it is fighting to be just and awesome and beautiful in its endeavors, and we are the soldiers, some of us if we are lucky enough to be born and born again, to pick up and pick up again the great battles of these apocalyptic visions. So we may be doomed and damned and often less than we should be, but at least we are not absurd, and need not hate the heavens for ignoring us. We can curse the General for leaving us in the rain, but at least we do not have to hate Him. He or She or They -- when They get along -- are out there, working and striving and on rare days even playing Their way toward the same goal, which will extend itself once we get there. Which is as it should be. The universe is not determined, and the Vision will open -- as all democratic vision should -- into another Vision, and so we need never feel sorry for ourselves. In such a celestial war, our mistakes can teach God as much as our triumphs. It is nice to believe that we are here for this much purpose; that God, when He or She has the time, can even feel for our pain. It is even nicer to believe that some of the pain we bear relieves Their pain.

4. At this point, however, human masochism being what it is, one had better close up shop or the subscription for a new Jerusalem might commence. I recommend my religion (to those who can bear it) for one reason. It flushes out self-pity, that quintessential and most personal human poison. It reminds us that something other than ourselves is going on in the turns and circuits of our existence, and it consoles us with the knowledge that this belief, if it is valid, is buried so carefully in all of us that we may yet perceive a millenium where we can worship the Lord (and the Lady) without a church.

VOCABULARY WORDS: arduous, chauvinist, pageant, stern, quintessential.

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