On God: An Uncommon Conversation
Norman Mailer, J.Michael Lennon
(Random House)
Norman Mailer has spent a good deal of his fifty plus year career as a writer wrestling with the issue of God and the nature of His being, speculations that have helped make his books rich texts for advancing limitless sets of dualisms about the condition of America and the growing complexity in the issue of good vs. evil. He has now brought us his new book,”On God:An Uncommon Conversation”, a series of discussions with his literary archivist, professor J.Michael Lennon. It is a fascinating discussion, intriguing quite despite Mailer’s confessed lack of theological training. The lack of training works to Mailer’s advantage; his God is less an all seeing General Manager of the universe than he is an artist trying to fill a page with beautiful words , or a canvas with arresting figures in sublime colors and shades.
Mailer is that rare creature, an actual American religious existentialist, a philosophy that insists that we cannot have a meaningful faith unless we face the circumstances of our life straight on, without reservation, and take a creative action to deal with them, sans the comforting catechisms priests, rabbis or monks might offer us. The point is that we advance toward a solution, create a meaningful context for ourselves in an existence where greater assurances are impossible, and that we take full responsibility for the consequences of the acts we do; we commit acts of faith that God is with us, without guarantees, and that we make mistakes along the way.
Mailer is taken with the notion that we’re created in his image, and speculates that he also gave us his temperament and liabilities as well as his best graces, all without the supernatural abilities. God is more like us, let us say, than we are like him, and it is in this area where religious existentialism finds another nuance. Far from being the silent Kierkegaardian God who is static,cold and despairing, apropos for Northern European weather conditions, Mailer is considering a God of Action, something of a Hemingway in deistic form who must prove himself with creative acts, a deity in the trenches, making mistakes, failing, succeeding, learning from his mistakes, constantly evolving.
The God that interests Mailer is one guided by intuition no less than we, His creations whom we are said to resemble.One might say that it’s a pity that Mailer hadn’t followed through on his spiritual notions and developed a fully argued theology, but he is a novelist and storyteller, after all, and his long held ideas about God’s motive, condition and instincts have served him splendidly as a source of metaphor in his fiction, journalism and essays. Mailer and Lennon go through Mailer’s ruminations at length, and there is something of great interest in how his conception of The Lord as literary figure, an artist have informed and enlarged his fiction and nonfiction writings; it is in the books, from “Presidential Papers” through his latest novel “The Castle in the Forest “where one finds the greatest and most provocative application of his religious thinking.
“On God” , always intriguing, quietly quirky, lacks the energy and , one may say, the conviction of older writings.Lacking a novel or a major essay to reinvigorate his metaphors and thus surprise himself and the reader with the limitless ambiguities involved in reconciling Higher Powers with the flux of actual experience, he sounds weary,as if he’s explaining himself yet again one time too many . Mailer’s spiritual thinking is best witnessed elsewhere, in his novels “ An American Dream”,”Ancient Evenings” and “Castle in the Forest”, and his journalism, especially in “Armies of the Night”. Norman Mailer, I suspect, is given to the thinking of religious existentialists and considers that the Ultimate Nature of God is unknowable and that, if we’re created in His likeness and have our best attributes due to his nature, it’s neither unreasonable nor blasphemous to think of Him as resembling his children more closely than one would suppose. A good amount of that is that God continues to learn , continues to grow, and is one to come up with new ideas about what do with this problematic earth-bound existence he gave us, and that he’s inclined to change His mind.
Since God is creation, and creation includes the constancy of change, it is plausible, feasible, very attractive to regard the notion of God sticking to a Master Plan, and that He micromanages the affairs of each soul that entreats Him in crisis as wishful thinking; the desire to have phenomena explained as being meaningful in a Grand Scheme has us undermining the idea that we are God’s servants who, subtly, want to control the definition of a Higher Power as being rigid, fixed, useful for a population’s sense of linked continuity , and useful as well for political purposes for those who use the few words of The Bible and have them mean their opposite.This Static God is at odds with the world He created, which by its nature is sustained by dynamic change. God is subtler, I think, than the cloud-bound bully that millions have been forced to endure from childhood until an accumulation of experience forces one to change, lest one become rigid and fixed as the God they grew up with, without joy and without value to one’s fellows.
Originally published at https://www.ted-burke.com.
