City of God (42 page)

His words had brought Pem to his feet, or rather to turn and, with one knee on his chair, half raise himself to see who this was. When I had first come in the man had caught my attention, a broad-backed figure hunched over like Rodin's thinker, although less reflective than impatient. He had looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. Now, as he spoke, all at once it came to me.

“It was not a large world, ancient Israel,” he was saying to no one in particular. “The Hebrews conceived of a cosmic God, a magnificent single God of the universe, but naturally in terms of their land and its crops and its tribal wars, and His up-and-down relationship with them. So He was localized to a great degree, the Creator, the applicable honorifics being Lord or King. All very understandable.”

The speaker raised his head and addressed himself to the room. “But if you take the trouble to think of what we know today about the universe. . . how it is roughly fifteen billion years old, and how it suddenly inflated and has been expanding since, how space is ineluctably time, and time is ineluctably space, how gravity can bend it, how another force in space countermands gravity so that the universe doesn't collapse into itself. . . and how the universe in its perhaps ever increasing rate of expansion accommodates not just galaxies, which contain millions of stars, but multiple clusters of galaxies that are themselves strung out in clusters of clusters. . . and with all of this a dark matter we are yet to understand. . . well, it would seem to me that the Creator who originated the universe, or what may possibly be a number of universes of which this is the only one we are capable of perceiving. . . the Creator, blessed be His name, who can make solid reality,
or what we perceive as reality, out of indeterminate, unpredictable wave/particle functions. . . or perhaps make everything our senses can note or our minds deduce. . . out of what finally may be the vibration of cosmic-string frequencies. . . that all this is from Himself, or Herself or Itself, who is by definition vaster and greater than all this. . . and has given living things evolving forms and the human species a slowly evolving consciousness that is barely beginning to appreciate the magnitude of what is being revealed.. . . Well, I am forced to ask the traditionalists among us if our Creator, of blessed name, is perhaps not insufficiently praised by our usage of the honorifics Lord and King, let alone Father and Shepherd.. . .”

The man sat. A long silence. The rabbi cleared her throat. “I think, now, perhaps it's time for the Kaddish?”

—“Everett, who was that!”

“It has to be Seligman. Bigger, heavier, and he combs his hair now. But it's Seligman, all right. Christ. Am I glad he didn't see me.”

“Why? What's the matter with him?”

“Seligman was a shlub, he landed on people. Never had enough lunch money. Never paid attention in class. I had to tell him the plot of
Macbeth.
”

“When was this?”

“At Science. He'd plop down next to me in study hall to copy my algebra homework.”

“Where?”

“Bronx Science. That was my high school. The Bronx High School of Science.”

“Wait a minute.. . . you don't mean Murray Seligman!”

“He never tied his shoelaces. His teeth were green.”

“
The
Murray Seligman—the Nobelist in physics?”

“That too.”

Pem peering into my eyes. A smile, slowly widening. “My oh my. . .”

“What, my oh my?”

“Who told him about the EJ? He just walk in?”

“How should I know? Ask Sarah.”

“She probably won't know either. It doesn't matter anyway.”

He leans across the table, puts his hand on the back of my neck, and kisses me on the forehead. “Ways of God. You'll just have to take my word for it. This is the Divinity Detective you're talking to.”

“Pem—”

“What happened this evening was signal.”

“Oh right. Murray the jerk who nearly blew up the chem lab. He was such a slob they wouldn't let him do the experiments. Don't give me that!”

“Give you what? What am I giving you? I'm not attributing anything to the slob. I'm attributing to the occasion. I'll tell you something, Everett. As a secularist, you don't understand—if there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else. It will be cryptic, discerned over time, piecemeal, to be communally understood at the end like a law of science.”

“Yeah, they'll put it on a silicon chip.”

“For shame! These are democratic times, Everett. We're living in a postmodern democracy. You think God doesn't know that?”

“I need a drink.”

“Waiter, another round!. . . What are you so upset about?”

“I don't know.”

“You're upset because you're implicated.”

“Give me a break.”

Pem begins to laugh, a great chesty, robust baritone laugh. “You're upset because it's coming through you! As the cross arriving on the roof of the synagogue, as I have fallen in love with Sarah Blumenthal, as the great Nobel Prize–winning physicist who showed up this evening is the jerk who copied your homework at Bronx Science. . . and as you have erroneously, gloriously assumed you could write a book about it!”

—Sarah Blumenthal's Address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion, Washington, D.C.

In the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. But to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm convictions of God, or of an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow. And among the doctrinaire religious, I find I trust those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees. It is just those uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs and practices, or who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filling conversion performers, who are the professional religious I trust. The faithful who read Scripture in the way Coleridge defined the act of reading poetry or fiction, i.e., with a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Yet they must be true to themselves and understand theirs is a compromised faith. Something more is required of them. Something more. . .

I ask the question: Is it possible that the behavioral commandments of religion, its precipitate ethics or positive social values, can be maintained without reference to the authority of God? In my undergraduate seminar in metaphysics at Harvard, the professor said there can be no
ought,
no categorical imperative in Kantian terms, no action from an irresistible conscience, without a supreme authority. But that does not quite address the point. I ask if after the exclusionary, the sacramental, the ritualistic, and simply fantastic elements of religion are abandoned, can a universalist ethics be maintained—
in its numi-nousness
? To a certain extent, in advanced industrial democracies, such behavior is already codified with reference to no higher authority than civil law. If our Constitution not only separated church and state but adapted as the basis of civil law something of the best essence of the
Judeo-Christian ethical system, was there not only a separation but an appropriation, which largely goes unremarked by our more passionate preachers?

Suppose then that in the context of a hallowed secularism, the idea of God could be recognized as Something Evolving, as civilization has evolved—that God can be redefined, and recast, as the human race trains itself to a greater degree of metaphysical and scientific sophistication. With the understanding, in other words, that human history does show a pattern at least of progressively sophisticated metaphors. So that we pursue a teleology thus far that, in the universe as vast as the perceivable cosmos, and as infinitesimal as a subatomic particle, has given us only the one substantive indication of itself—that we, as human beings, live in moral consequence.

In this view the supreme authority is not God, who is sacramental-ized, prayed to, pleaded with, portrayed, textualized, or given voice, choir, or temple walls, but God who is imperceptible, ineffable, except. . . for our evolved moral sense of ourselves.

Constitutional scholars are accustomed to speak of the American civil religion. But perhaps two hundred or so years ago something happened, in terms not of national history but of human history, that has yet to be realized. To understand what that is may be the task of the moment for our theologians. But it involves the expansion of ethical obligation democratically to be directed all three hundred and sixty degrees around, not just upon one's co-religionists, a daily indiscriminate and matter-of-fact reverence of human rights unself-conscious as a handshake. Dare we hope the theologians might emancipate themselves, so as to articulate or perceive another possibility for us in our quest for the sacred? Not just a new chapter but a new story?

There may not be much time. If the demographers are right, ten billion people will inhabit the earth by the middle of the coming century. Huge megacities of people all over the planet fighting for its resources. And perhaps with only the time-tested politics of God on their side to see them through. Under those circumstances, the prayers of mankind will sound to heaven as shrieks. And such abuses, shocks, to our hope for what life can be, as to make the twentieth century a paradise lost.

Thank you.

—Songbirds: Skylark. . . Red Red Robin. . . Bluebird of Happiness. . .