36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “Gauss wasn’t a Gump.”

  “Coulda been. But Goethe? No way a Gump.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so sure.”

  “Here’s how: literature works the whole soul, and mathematics doesn’t. It’s as easy as that. That’s why Gauss could be a prodigy at two, before he’d even acquired a self.”

  The need to acquire a self had been a sustained theme in the thought of Jonas Elijah Klapper, surviving every paradox shift. All of Klapper’s students understood that education is a desperate business, psychopoiesis, the making of the soul of which they would have been otherwise bereft. Psychopoiesis requires that one be in the right place at the right time, one of the hot spots, occasionally located at our better universities, where the overhang is porous, and scraps from the higher conversation rain down. Thus we acquire an education; thus the species lurches on.

  There were of course the exceptions, upon whom Jonas thought much, but of whom he seldom spoke: potential progenitors of a greatness that made mere genius seem jejune. Goethe, for example, had settled for genius, announcing to the world that, although he had been present at the creation, he would not lay claim to the final knowledge of the world, a revelation that had provided the subtext of Jonas’s first work, Goethedämmerung.

  The sad truth was that almost nobody had a self. None of Professor Klapper’s students were certain they had one, not even Gideon Raven. The only people they were certain had selves were the writers whom Professor Klapper assigned them to read, and even here there was room for debate. And then, of course, there was Jonas Elijah Klapper himself.

  “Gauss wasn’t a full-fledged mathematician at two. He wasn’t creating mathematics yet, just demonstrating the enormous capacity for doing so. There’s creative genius in mathematics, too.”

  “I don’t dispute the existence of mathematical genius.”

  Cass laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “It just struck me as funny, I couldn’t really say why.”

  “Could be the beer laughing, Baby Budd,” Gideon had replied good-naturedly.

  “‘We do not prove the existence of the poem,’” Cass had quoted from Wallace Stevens.

  “Not bad, Baby Budd. Not bad at all.” Gideon lifted the near-empty pitcher in a toast.

  There was a large and raucous group of graduate-student types at the next table, with a lot of punning going on, mostly around philosophers’ names, to judge from the comments that got lifted airborne and floated over to where Gideon and Cass were sitting.

  “When my mistake was pointed out to me, I felt like a complete buber,” they heard, followed by shouts of laughter. And: “It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.” And: “He went into a bertrand and began to babble about the class of all classes that aren’t members of themselves.” There were more, judging from the shouts of laughter, but those were the ones that Cass had caught.

  One of the punsters got up to get another pitcher and, on his way to the bar, paused and greeted Cass and Gideon.

  “You probably don’t recognize me, right?”

  “Who could recognize anybody in this light?” Gideon had returned pleasantly.

  “Yeah. You know, I once saw Jed over there”—the kid indicated the bartender with a backward toss of his head—“outside, in so-called natural light, and it was scary. Anyway, I’m Jordan Block. I’m a grad student in philosophy. I was in that Klapper seminar the first day, and I think I recognize you two. You guys were there, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever hope in your wildest dreams to witness such a farce? The whole scene was out of Monty Python. That bit when he went into his trance and intoned, ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,’ and then, in the same breath, lumped it with the Private Language Argument, with no inkling that there’s a distinction between early and later Wittgenstein. What about ‘wovon man nicht knows the first fucking thing, darüber muss man schweigen?’ I was almost tempted to come back the next week just to hear the hash he was going to make out of Aristotle. You think anyone showed up?”

  Cass glanced at Gideon, who was listening to Jordan with an insouciant smile. He shrugged at the question, and then added an affable “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Jordan laughed. “Yeah, I recognized you.” He nodded at Cass. “You were the one he started shrieking bloody murder at because he didn’t like what you said about a poem. What a douche bag. Well, see you around.”

  “Yeah,” Gideon returned with his imperturbable smile, which was removed as soon as Jordan left them.

  “That’s typical.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course. Jonas gets that all the time from the so-called philosophers. He’s the only one who’s doing real philosophy these days, ever since the logical positivists set out to hunt down and exterminate any genuine philosophical insights. These are the guys who run around calling out ‘meaningless’ wherever they find something difficult and profound. It’s like skeet shooters shouting ‘pull.’ If they can’t bag it in some trivial empirical test, they blast it out of the skies with ‘meaningless.’ Look, according to these guys, even Nietzsche isn’t a real philosopher, and that—to use one of their own favorite ploys—is a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one.”

  “Why didn’t we set the guy straight? Shouldn’t we have defended Professor Klapper?”

  “There’s no point. These guys are ideologues. Their worldviews would crumble if you got them to give up their positivistic, nihilistic scientism. The English departments are mired in political ideology, and the philosophers are buried in scientistic ideology. Jonas is the sole defender of the faith.”

  “I still think we should have defended him. It doesn’t seem honorable. I feel like we’ve let Professor Klapper down. It just isn’t right to let him be smeared that way. It’s like letting truth be smeared.”

  “It’s okay.” Gideon laughed. He laughed for a while, and he laughed hard, and Cass figured it was, as Gideon was likely to say, the beer that was laughing. “We don’t need to set guys like that straight,” he finally said. “What we need is a new pitcher. You look like you could use a little protein, too. I’ll wait a few minutes—I don’t want to run into that Blockhead again—and then I’ll go get you a nice nourishing plate of jerky.”

  It was reassuring to Cass that Gideon wasn’t ruffled by the philosophy student’s riff. Cass had felt a cold, numbing shock of disbelief go through him as Jordan Block defamed Jonas Elijah Klapper. But Gideon’s explanation made sense. Of course, if Professor Klapper had picked up the lit taper of philosophy after the professional philosophers had tried to stamp it out with scorn and scientism, they would resent him and try to make him a laughingstock. Jonas Elijah Klapper often remarked that professionalism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  IX

  The Argument from the Eternity of Irony

  Though the Blockheads might scoff, the undeniable truth was that Klapper’s standing in the world was as high as, if not higher than, it had ever been. As proof, he had been invited to deliver one of the most prestigious endowed lectureships in the civilized world, the Prufrock Lecture in the Humanities and Human Values at Harvard University.

  Cass had gone over to Cambridge by himself, taking the two-car commuter train to Porter Square. He hadn’t yet seen Harvard, and he’d wanted to get there early to wander around the iconic institution of higher learning.

  Cass had loved the whole feel of the place. The self-enclosed Yard, with the homey iron fence around it as if to protect grazing cattle; the freshman dormitories framing the green in brotherly, and now sisterly, communion; the understated Puritan architecture, the prim red brick with white trim, content to be as it is without ostentation; and then, in another frame of self-containment, side by side with the communing dormitories, there was another open expanse, anchored at one end by the neoclassical grandeur of the Widener Library and at the other by the nobility
of the Memorial Church, the simplicity of the red-brick-and-white-trim theme taking on an inspired transcendence with that soaring white spire. This scene, this Yard, this fenced oasis of American genius, is where Jonas Elijah Klapper belonged.

  Professor Klapper had touched on this circumstance himself, toward the end of last week’s seminar—devoted to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietz sche’s most incandescent work, Klapper had said, and he himself had burned with a rare flame, prolonging the seminar by twenty minutes, which happened seldom, since teaching was, for him, an all-consuming fire in which he was, as he put it, the korban, the burnt offering, so that by the end of the two-and-a-half-hour seminar he would be utterly spent, instantaneously passing from inferno to ash. But for Nietzsche there had been an extra twenty minutes of divine afflatus, which had carried Jonas Elijah Klapper to an inspired recitation of the famous words from Götzen-Dämmerung, or Twilight of the Idols: “Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. Whatever we have words for, that is already dead in our hearts. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.” He had, appropriately, gone silent, staring off beyond the head of the tallest person, who was, of course, Cass, and then, all at once, Jonas Elijah Klapper had crumpled, the bulk of his upper body slumping, his massive head’s precipitous descent fortuitously broken by his open palm, into which his face was then buried, and he had sat prostrate and immobile, which could be alarming if one hadn’t seen it before, but they all had, and they waited until he would recover himself and would, with the weariness of the woe-besotted world, gather up his papers and books and shuffle out, only this time he had bestirred himself to remind the class of the upcoming Prufrock Lecture and, more specifically, of the literary illustriousness of the hall where the lecture would take place, “since, my cherubim”—his endearments to the class had grown ever fonder as the semester had progressed—“the masterful Henry James had chosen that precise stage for the pivotal scene in The Bostonians.

  “I thought for your amusement I would provide you with a snippet of James’s rendering of Memorial Hall to deepen your own apperception when you attend on Tuesday coming. I shall recite, as is my wont, from memory:

  “‘ “Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a Mississippian,” Verena said, after this episode. “I mean the great place that towers above the others—that big building with the beautiful pinnacles which you see from every point.” But Basil Ransom had heard of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen, had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half hour. He thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed, cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen anything; though it didn’t look old, it looked significant, it covered a large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached from the rest of the collegiate groups, and it stood in a grassy triangle of its own.’ I skip a few paragraphs now, for I have taught long and must wonder myself at how I am managing to persevere. I shall conclude with this: ‘The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart.’ The expatriated Henry James, who, returning to his native shores, finds much to strike him as tawdry, inferior, and small, is being ironical, of course. But the Jamesian irony negates the negation into contrapuntal affirmation. You, too, shall, I rather think, find contrapuntal affirmation within the bombastic Ruskinian Gothic extravaganza of Memorial Hall, as, too, within the quieter interior of its Sanders Theatre.”

  After hearing Memorial Hall so brilliantly described, Cass felt stupid that he hadn’t been able to find it. He kept passing it by, thinking it was a church. He was misled, too, by its no longer sitting on a grassy triangle, separated from the collegiate groups. The university had grown up around it. By the time he finally figured out what a bombastic Ruskinian Gothic extravaganza looked like, and located Sanders Theatre within it, there were no more seats to be had in the vast interior.

  The theater fanned out from the stage, and he was just able to squeeze himself onto a cold stone bench that was inside the entrance and up against a wall. A couple of moments later, a tall girl in dreadlocks entered and asked if she could squeeze in beside him. Somehow they managed.

  “Did I miss anything?” she whispered.

  “I don’t think so. I just got here myself,” he whispered back.

  There was a chain of introducers, a Harvard faculty member introducing a Harvard dean who introduced another Harvard faculty member who finally introduced Jonas Elijah Klapper.

  “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum,” Cass’s neighbor whispered.

  He was worried that she was going to be a problem. First of all, she was almost in his lap, which was distracting. Second, she was one of those people who consider attendance at a lecture a participatory sport. Cass preferred, under any circumstances, less activist lecture neighbors. And this was Jonas Elijah Klapper’s Prufrock Lecture! He needed to concentrate.

  “Professor Klapper was for many years referred to as the ‘Sage of Morningside Heights.’ New York’s loss is our gain, and I take this opportunity to formally rechristen him the ‘Wise Man of Weedham.’ And now, without any further ado, I give you the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values at Frankfurter University, Jonas Elijah Klapper, who will enlighten us all tonight on the subject of ‘The Eternity of Irony: The Messianic Ideal, 750 B.C.E. to 1987 C.E.’”

  Cass gasped aloud, so that the girl sitting next to him gave him a quizzical look.

  “It’s ‘The Irony of Eternity,’” he told her, because that was the correct title of Professor Klapper’s talk. But the girl thought Cass was making a joke and dissolved into giggles, which were fortunately drowned out by applause as Professor Klapper mounted the stage. Klapper kept his eyes cast down, his expression inscrutable, as if determined to let the acclaim make its way around him unheeded. A great man, thought Cass, swelling with an overpowering emotion, a joy splanchnic (that is from one’s inner parts, from the Greek for “organ;” Cass’s vocabulary had been undergoing a rapid expansion, pari passu with his soul’s—“pari passu” was new, too).

  “I thank you for that introduction. I shall indeed essay to live up to the sobriquet of the Wise Man of Weedham, so eloquently bestowed upon me by Professor Knudsen, who is our premier guide through the thickets of Norwegian folk tales.

  “I must, embarrassingly enough, begin with an emendation in regard to the title of my lecture tonight,” and Cass turned to the girl beside him and gave her a vigorous nod. “I must add to the span of years I shall traverse a full millennium. Should I have said that we must travel backward in time to 1750 B.C.E. I feared you might have thought the task too daunting.”

  Cass figured that Professor Klapper hadn’t wanted to embarrass Professor Knudsen with the more substantive emendation. As for Cass’s too-near neighbor, she was muttering, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  Cass’s fears regarding his bench-mate were realized. She never let up. His desire to shush her struggled with his deeply ingrained sense of politeness. As usual, the latter prevailed. He lost the thread at 1750 B.C.E, with that “figure shrouded in legend whom we call by the Greek name Zoroaster, though ‘Zarathustra’ was the name much preferred by Nietzsche,” unable to follow the labyrinthine trail as it wound its way to the “omen-encrusted moment of the chosen now, when it is becoming awkward for even the most scientistic non-seers of the hardened Materialist Mafia, with their stranglehold on our great institutions of learning, to deny the liminal sublime before us.”

  “Well, were you able to follow that?” the dreadful girl asked him when it was all over. She was grinning.

  Cass shook his head no.

&nbs
p; “Where you headed now?”

  “To the reception for Professor Klapper at the Faculty Club.”

  “You are? Me, too!”

  It was a private reception with various big shots invited, but Jonas Elijah Klapper had secured invitations for the seven graduate students of his own department.

  “We might as well head on over,” the girl announced. “Do you know the way?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You’re not Harvard?”

  “No, I’m Frankfurter.”

  “No kidding! I went there as an undergraduate! What are you there?”

  “Graduate student.”

  “What department?”

  “Faith, Literature, and Values.”

  “That’s a department?”

  “That’s Jonas Elijah Klapper’s department.”

  “I don’t think they had it when I was there.”

  “No, they didn’t. They just created it this year in order to get him to come.” He knew he was bragging.

  “So he’s the first professor in the Department of Faith, Religion, and whatsit?”

  “Faith, Literature, and Values. That’s right. He’s the whole department.”

  “Well, I know he loves his colleagues.”

  The girl laughed at her own joke, and Cass smiled politely.

  “What did you major in at Frankfurter?” he asked.

  “Anthropology.”

  “How was that?”

  “Total bullshit.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “No, it worked out great. I needed to detox from all that verbiage, so what do you think I did?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to the Amazon to study the Onuma. That was as far away as I could get from bullshit and still remain in academia.”