The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  ‘How conceited you are,’ the theologian said coldly. ‘Unless you in fact are God, whyever should an artist interest himself in you?’

  ‘It looks’, commented Voltaire, ‘as though those who love God are really only impressed by his power.’

  ‘Surely’, God said in a slightly pleading tone, ‘an irreligious artist, who didn’t believe in my power, could make me interesting in my own right? I don’t ask for a whitewash job. I wouldn’t mind being held responsible for fictitious earthquakes – though I suppose that would have to be in a sort of fairy tale. I wouldn’t even mind if I were treated, which I suppose my record might naturally suggest, as a criminal, provided I was sympathetically treated: say, by Patricia Highsmith. Though now I think of it, what I would take to most readily is a romantic opera. I could well become something like the hero of The Queen of Spades. He’s scarcely more nice than I am, and yet he engages the audience’s sympathy. Indeed, without self-flattery, I think I’m the ideal romantic-opera hero. It leaps to the eye. You have only to consider my moodiness, my sudden but inexorable anger and my frequent obstinate silences when addressed.’

  ‘How’, the theologian said contemptuously, ‘anyone could prefer to be the hero of a romantic opera when he could be the centre of a religion passes my understanding. Frankly, I would have expected you to think up some more genuinely tempting guise in which to tempt my faith. As it is, I have no difficulty in saying “Get thee behind me Satan”.’

  And the theologian turned his back on God and his interlocutors, and took no further part in the discussion.

  ‘Why don’t you’, Voltaire asked God, ‘write a book explaining yourself?’

  ‘O’, said God, ‘I quite lack the literary skill. Such style as I have is so pompous. Besides, I’m unversed in developing a proper reasoned argument. All my experience has been of laying down the law. You wouldn’t’ (God looked slyly at Voltaire) ‘undertake the task for me?’

  ‘It’s true I’m in the habit,’ Voltaire said, ‘whenever I see an injustice, of coming to the support of the victim. But my recent doubts of the validity of addressing oneself, however splendidly, only to the conscious and reasonable part of the mind lead me to hesitate….’

  ‘I doubt if I’d do any better,’ the psychoanalyst said. ‘No one could say psychoanalysis has shewn itself highly persuasive. Of course, if it’s untrue, that’s what you’d expect. The trouble is: that’s also what you’d expect if it’s true. Alone of man’s discoveries, psychoanalysis could, if it’s correct, disclose to man the truth about man. But the truth it purports to disclose to him is that he doesn’t want the truth disclosed.’

  ‘And therefore’, said Voltaire, ‘of all man’s discoveries, psychoanalysis is inevitably, if it’s correct, the one that man has devised the largest number of rationalisations for rejecting.’

  ‘Your opponents’, Gibbon said to the psychoanalyst, ‘accuse you on this point of intellectual double-dealing. They say you will not admit of any conditions in which you could be refuted – that, the more resistance you meet, the more you claim that that proves your point.’

  ‘I know,’ the psychoanalyst replied sadly. ‘I would like to avoid that reproach, but is it avoidable? What, after all, would refute the psychoanalytic contention that people reject the disclosure of material from the unconscious? Only a situation where our opponents unhesitatingly agreed with it. If they say we try to have the argument both ways, they should add that we are, by the same terms, doomed to lose it both ways. Any tendency towards universal agreement with us would tend to shew that we are wrong.’ He sighed and turned to God. ‘It’s a question of whether the paradox is in psychoanalysis or, as psychoanalysis maintains, in the psychology of man. But in any case, so long as psychoanalysis remains out of fashion, I think your rehabilitation will proceed better without my help.’

  ‘If I were you’, the historian advised God in a loud, bon homous whisper, ‘I shouldn’t invite Gibbon to be your biographer. Confidentially, he lacks, in the profession, standing. However, since you’re in need, and since everyone else is overawed by the task, I’d be prepared to consider undertaking it myself. But you realise: it will be a major project. I’ll need several research assistants. And a grant. And I trust you can let me have access to your correspondence?’

  ‘I hope’, God said tactfully, ‘that eventually you will all kindly contribute to my rehabilitation. I shall also suggest myself to Tchaikovsky and Pushkin as an operatic subject. I wonder if I couldn’t tempt Tchaikovsky with a scene about the Beloved Disciple. But an opera, too, will take a long time. For the moment, I’m so oppressed by the hateful character thrust on me, and I feel so confused about my identity, that I urgently want to get something started at once. As a matter of fact, I was on my way to try and arrange something when I was attracted to your discussion. If you’ll excuse me’ (God stood up) ‘I’ll resume my quest.’

  ‘Godspeed,’ Voltaire wished him. ‘Since God doesn’t after all exist, it has become necessary to re-invent him.’

  They were all, variously, echoing Voltaire’s farewell and good wishes when God’s departure was interrupted by the humble Christian, who, evidently precipitated to his feet by sheer outrage, rushed at God, spluttering:

  ‘Stop! I won’t let you get away with it! You’ve been unspeakably unfair!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Unfair?’ asked God, sounding a little hurt. ‘Whom to?’

  ‘Yourself. You kept breaking into my prayers maligning yourself.’

  ‘I’m afraid’, God said gently, ‘all that I said of myself was true. I appreciate your wish to think well of me. But when one looks into the matter, which I have had to do because of my personal interest in it, it turns out that the necessity of inventing me, which Voltaire mentioned, is the necessity of inventing a pretext for humans to behave badly. Whenever they want to do something they consider immoral, like committing genocide against seven neighbouring tribes or having more babies than they know the earth can support, they say I command it. Thus they spare their conscience at the expense of my character. A character who can issue such monstrous commands as I am said to have done will take some rehabilitating. So you’ll forgive me if I hurry off to see about it.’

  ‘I shan’t forgive you’, the humble Christian threatened God, ‘if you do anything of the kind. You’ve misunderstood the entire question. Sit down, and I’ll put you straight in a matter of minutes.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure’, God said, tentatively obeying, ‘that it won’t take long. I really would like to find the Black—’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ the humble Christian said firmly, ‘because it’s utterly simple. All that’s needed is a simple and humble approach. That will always get you further than the arguments of intellectuals. Now the truth is: you don’t need rehabilitating.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ God said, leaning forward attentively and hopefully.

  ‘Your character is exemplary. It has been so from the start. Why, as early as Leviticus, you gave the command “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. What could be more moral than that? Sometimes, it’s true, we misinterpreted your commands. Sometimes we even twisted your words. But that was our wicked fault.’

  ‘Or’, God said, ‘a failure of communication on my part.’

  ‘You can’t fail. You’re omnipotent.’

  ‘Well,’ said God, ‘if my followers had misinterpreted my command when they set about exterminating seven neighbouring tribes, why didn’t I exert my omnipotence to save the victims? Is that your concept of divine justice?’

  ‘I can’t have a concept of divine justice,’ the humble Christian said impatiently. ‘Divine justice is a mystery. Man is too puny to scrutinise God.’

  ‘It’s easy to make man look puny’, Voltaire said, ‘if you deny him the authorship of all his best ideas, including the idea of God.’

  ‘God is greater than man,’ the humble Christian affirmed. ‘That should be obvious. Certainly, it wasn’t man who
created the world.’

  ‘No,’ said God, ‘what man created was the sublime idea of God creating the world. If that idea had emanated from a god of whom it was true, it would have been (if Gibbon will excuse me the seeming disparagement) merely history or autobiography. Coming from man, it was a tremendous artistic metaphor and also, though it had eventually to be discarded, a brilliant scientific hypothesis. Honestly, I am overwhelmed by awe when I contemplate the imagination of man.’

  ‘You’ve been misled’, the humble Christian said briskly, ‘by man’s pride. Man is an ingenious creature, it’s true. But that doesn’t give him the right to set himself up and judge questions of morality for himself, instead of humbly accepting your word.’

  ‘D’you know,’ God said, a little quizzically, to the humble Christian, ‘you don’t strike me as terribly humble yourself.’

  ‘I? I’m the only humble person present!’ the humble Christian exclaimed. ‘Not’, he added quickly to God, ‘that that’s any reflexion on you. You’ve no call to be humble.’

  ‘I’ve never much seen that anyone has, actually,’ God replied. ‘Next to faith and hope, humility seems to me the quaintest thing to count as a virtue. If virtue is a sensible concept at all, I’d have thought it much more virtuous to know the plain truth about one’s own value, irrespective of whether it did one credit or not.’

  ‘My very own creed,’ murmured Voltaire approvingly.

  ‘Anyway,’ God went on to the humble Christian, ‘I’m objecting not to your lack of humility, which doesn’t offend me, since I don’t count humility as a virtue, but to your lack of consistency. You say you’re the only humble person present. Yet you’re the only person present who claims he can tell what is and what isn’t the word of God.’

  ‘It’s not I who tell,’ the humble Christian cried in horror. ‘I’m far too humble to rely on my own judgment. God tells us what his word is.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘Obviously, the Bible.’

  ‘And where does he tell us that the Bible is his word?’

  ‘In the Bible, obviously.’

  ‘Then you must’, Gibbon remarked, ‘have already relied on your own judgment to decide that the Bible was the word of God before you could decide to rely on the authority of the Bible, as the word of God, rather than on your own judgment, in considering the merits of the Bible’s claim to be the word of God.’

  ‘And in fact’, God added, ‘you don’t trust the authority of the Bible one bit. You rely on your own judgment to decide which passages of the Bible you’ll accept as the word of God. You accept it as verbatim reporting when Leviticus says I commanded you to love your neighbour. But when Deuteronomy names seven neighbouring tribes and reports “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them”, you maintain that humans made a transcription error.’

  ‘Well, that must be what happened. It stands to reason.’

  ‘If it’s reason you’re going on,’ said Voltaire, ‘why drag in the Bible?’

  ‘God has generously given us both the Bible and our commonsense,’ the humble Christian said primly, ‘and he means us to use both, like all his gifts to us.’

  ‘If he means you to use your vermiform appendix’, Voltaire replied, ‘he has failed to make his intentions plain.’

  ‘His intentions are inscrutable. We do not know what purpose he has assigned to the appendix.’

  ‘It gives employment to surgeons,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘No doubt you will have no difficulty in believing that God made surgery an especially blessed profession from the moment he instituted circumcision?’

  ‘I really can’t’, the humble Christian said with some irritation to God, ‘explain this essentially simple matter unless you can keep your terrier from yapping at my heels. I was trying to make it clear that the Bible is to be read in the light of common sense. And anyone with a shred of that can see that God can’t have ordered the extermination of seven tribes.’

  ‘Can’t?’ queried God. ‘Then you don’t in fact believe I’m omnipotent?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to contradict your own nature.’

  ‘I may have a self-contradictory nature. Can you say I haven’t? Have you fathomed my nature?’

  ‘We know certain things about your nature’, the humble Christian said staunchly, ‘though we don’t of course know it all. For instance, we know that God is love.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘From the Bible.’

  ‘Then you also know I ordered the extermination of seven tribes.’

  ‘Even discounting the Bible,’ the humble Christian insisted, becoming a little red in the face as though to discount the Bible cost him some internal physical effort, ‘we know a great deal about your nature. It can be deduced from the fact that you created the world.’

  ‘If you discount the Bible,’ God said, ‘you don’t know that I created the world. It might just as easily have created itself, as you apparently believe I did, though the Bible gives you no guidance on that point. Of course, you can always call the world-creating faculty “God”, just as you could call it x, but then you mustn’t pretend that x is the same thing as the nasty old person who overshadowed a virgin and gave orders for the extinction of seven tribes. I’m afraid’ (God rose) ‘you haven’t convinced me that that nasty old person doesn’t need rehabilitating, and I really must go and see to it.’

  ‘Are you so frightened’, the humble Christian demanded in a bullying tone, ‘of the power and convincingness of my arguments that you daren’t even stay to hear them?’

  With a sigh, God sat down again.

  ‘Now’, the humble Christian said: ‘you are, you agree, the world-creating faculty. We therefore know that your nature consists of love, because creation is an act of love.’

  ‘I think you confuse it with human reproduction,’ God said, ‘whose creativeness humans often over-estimate. It’s usually when they want to excuse themselves for keeping women in domestic servitude and denying them access to the creative professions that people call having babies “creative”. It’s interesting but incidental that they usually imply at the same time that women “create” babies without any “creative” assistance from men. But in fact the man and the woman, however much they may love each other, don’t in any way create the sperm and the egg. And though it pleases the English language to say that the woman “conceives” the child, she has in fact not the smallest idea what it will be like till she sees it.’

  ‘Isn’t that just what I told you a moment since?’ the humble Christian cried in exasperation. ‘Our poor human love is but a puny echo of your great loving act of creation.’

  ‘Its lovingness, I should say,’ said God, ‘was relative to one’s standpoint. Does the lamb think it was loving of me to create the wolf?’

  ‘You are the Good Shepherd,’ the humble Christian answered piously.

  ‘It’s been remarked elsewhere’,3 God said, ‘that that metaphor betrays just how cruel and hypocritical you believe me to be. The Good Shepherd is the one who saves the lamb from the wolf, in order that the lamb may presently be sent to the slaughterhouse and served up as a human’s dinner, to the financial profit of the Good Shepherd.’

  ‘Pshaw!’ scoffed the humble Christian. ‘Are you trying to convert me to some out-of-date crankiness, like vegetarianism or socialism? Your interpretation is absurd. You shouldn’t take a parable literally.’

  ‘You’re’, God said mildly, ‘telling me.’

  ‘I suppose’, the humble Christian said, ‘you imagine you’re twitting me with the literal interpretation of Genesis. You’re so prejudiced against Christians that you haven’t noticed they dropped that ages ago.’

  ‘Not so very many ages ago,’ God murmured, ‘even making allowance for the foreshortening of a thousand ages in my sight. You’ve had about a century of reluctantly accepting evolution, compared with three or four millennia during which you took Genesis literally. Still, it
would be churlish of me to hold it against you, when you believe that it was I who gave you the misinformation in the first place.’

  ‘I don’t! You didn’t! Genesis is spiritually true.’

  ‘All good fictions are spiritually true,’ God said, ‘Genesis no more than Treasure Island.’

  ‘Now you’re being frivolous.’

  ‘By “frivolous” you mean “serious about literature”,’ God said. ‘People usually do. And of course I am serious about literature. A fictitious character can hardly afford not to be. The only bit of the Bible I’ve ever been able to believe is the bit that makes me out anti-philistine.’

  ‘But you can’t seriously compare an ancient, poetic allegory of the creation with a book for children.’

  ‘I suspect’, Gibbon remarked to the humble Christian, ‘that, like those who seek to suppress what they call obscene books, you confuse literary value with content. You think Genesis must be the more creative book because it’s about creation.’

  ‘On which theory’, Voltaire added, ‘you must suppose all editions of Treasure Island to be pirated.’

  ‘Genesis’, Gibbon pronounced, ‘is certainly the more inventive and fantastical tale. But Treasure Island has undoubtedly the better of it for logical and narrative coherency. An impartial judge of literature would no doubt reckon their merits even. Should you wish, as you seem to wish, to establish the superiority of one of them, you must have recourse to another kind of scale.’