Guðmundur Meets the Volcano: God is Ticked Off About...

• Health care reform (Rush Limbaugh).

• Catholic boy sex (Roger Ebert).

Are there other contenders? I should have thought "sovereign debt" was reason enough, although S/he is a little slow in getting around to it. Or maybe just "Rush Limbaugh."

God and Mr. James

Yesterday I showcased Cynthia Ozick’s perplexity over her relationship to the Bible. Here’s another appreciator, more secular but no less enthusiastic and less conflicted:

The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could write English. The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability…. Those responsible for the [New English Bible] probably did realize that they were atheists: otherwise they could scarcely have been so determined to leave not one stone standing upon another. For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. When I joined in a public protest against the rejigging of the Book of Common Prayer, a practising Christian among the London editors—it was Richard Ingrams of Private Eye—accused me of being in bad faith. He hated the new prayer book even more than I did, but thought I could have no reason for sharing his contempt. But it was my book too. I had been brought up on the scriptures, the prayers and the hymns. I had better reasons than inertia for deploring their destruction.

--Clive James, Cultural Amnesia 488 (2007)

God and Mr. Darcy

Cynthia Ozick has a din in her head, but it doesn’t mean she is crazy. She’s just feeling “that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread.” She finds its source chiefly in “the art of the novel; in the novel’s infinity of plasticity and elasticity.” (162)

Is God a character in a novel? In God: A Biography, by Jack Miles, God (per Ozick)

has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. (234)

Ozick isn’t happy with this view:

[I]f the God of the Bible is not “real,” then—in creative-writing-course argot—the Bible’s stories won’t and don’t work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austin. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightly, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere “comes to life” of character. (Id.)

And in the Bible, she says,

[T]he antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty—whether or not we are willing to go there.

It is (I mean this without disrespect) a decidedly odd conclusion, or non-conclusion. God in the Bible is a success because he "doesn't work?" The point invites, to put it mildly, more development. Ozick says that “most of us” read Scripture as faithless skeptics or rationalists. Does she, I wonder, include herself?

All quotations from Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head: Essays (2006).eadHead