The Book Against God

by James Wood

  “You’re not unread in the vicarage. My parents are always going on about you. The Times is their paper.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Well, do be sorry for one thing. I wish you hadn’t mentioned those obituaries to them. Dad turned it into a joke to use against me, and it just enabled him and Mum to sharpen the comparison they already like to make between us.” I did find it hard to forgive Max for wantonly spreading the news about my failed assignments.

  “Oh, I didn’t think those obituaries meant so much to you, or else you would have written them, right?” Max was being inscrutable.

  “Well, they didn’t mean very much. It was journalism, I could have written them in a flash.”

  Again Max looked at me with his magnified eyes.

  “I don’t mean it like that, you know I don’t. I meant that I could have written them without any difficulty. It’s simply that I have very little time at the moment. Very little time! I have to get this Ph.D. finished.”

  “Fine. Fine. I know you have to complete the Ph.D. Certainly I wouldn’t have mentioned them if I had thought that … the powers-that-be in the vicarage would use them against you. So what was your dad’s joke?”

  “He said that it was a good thing that the obituaries were still unwritten, since obviously my not writing them was keeping the subjects alive. Very droll.”

  Max laughed at this, and exclaimed: “I do love your dad!”

  “I wish I had written those obituaries. Hegley will have recommissioned them now.”

  “I can check if you want,” said Max eagerly.

  “Forget it. It’s very nice of you. Truly. And, yes, I could have done with the money. You bet. Jane and I had another row last night. We’re going to have to start economizing. You should approve, Max. We’ll have to learn how to be good monetarists.”

  “Well, yes, Thatcher’s monetarism was a good thing, but as far as personal finances go I think that one should always try not to spend less but to earn more instead.”

  “Oh, thanks for the advice. What if I am one of those people who earns less while spending more? Is there a name for that?”

  “Yes, there is. Monetary laxist, that’s what you are.”

  “What?”

  “In economics, there’s a term, ‘monetary laxist’—for people who are lax with the … monetary flow. I like the sound of it. Vaguely … medicinal.”

  I felt a familiar surge of warmth for Max, as his slow, clever words, spaced by exhalations of smoke, sounded across the table.

  “It’s no laughing matter. Right now, Jane and I are always at each other’s throats. She blames me for not bringing in any money. The burden for earning is entirely on her.”

  “You can appreciate her position, then? It’s very difficult for her. I bet she’d love to give up the teaching and just play.”

  “What’s she been saying to you?” I asked quickly.

  “Nothing at all,” said Max. “Nothing at all.” I thought he said this a bit too certainly.

  We both drank, and then had little to say to each other. After a while I began again:

  “You know I told you about this other project I have in mind?” Now I was the one speaking slowly.

  “Yes, it’s the … bag you’re currently into.”

  “The bag … You’re teasing me.”

  “Could be.”

  “Well, Jane has no appreciation of it, I’m sure. That’s why we are arguing at the moment.”

  “Have you mentioned it to her?”

  “Yes, just before I went north.”

  “What did you tell her it was about?”

  “I didn’t really tell her anything. I said to her that it was something I was thinking about, when in fact I’ve been filling notebooks with it for months. I had to have some explanation for what I’ve been doing.”

  “So how do you expect her to … appreciate it if she doesn’t know anything about it? I can’t ‘appreciate’ … poltergeists, or Bombay.”

  “You wouldn’t appreciate it, either, probably,” I grumbled into my drink.

  “That’s a non sequitur.”

  “Pitmatic!” I said, smiling at Max.

  “I’m sure I would appreciate it if you deigned to show any of it to me.”

  “Actually—I have a few pages with me. I brought them.” I suddenly felt very shy. I removed four folded pages from my jacket pocket. They were about Kierkegaard. Max looked very pleased, and said:

  “This is the first thing you have shown me since—when?—I can’t remember. Can I read them now?” He started to read, and to give him time I went to the lavatory. The filthy blocked urinal displayed my bubbling piss for me. Behind me, in a cubicle, a man said again and again to himself with great vehemence, “Bollocks! Bollocks! That’s complete bollocks!” When I returned, Max exclaimed:

  “It’s all about Jane, not about Kierkegaard.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Here, and here, and throughout.”

  “Oh God, I meant to cut out the references to Jane before I gave the passage to you.”

  “Keep them in,” said Max.

  “For whom? It doesn’t have any readers.”

  “I can think of one reader—in the … medieval sense.”

  “You’ve lost me … Oh … bloody hell that’s a nasty joke.” I laughed.

  “Not at all. Isn’t God your intended reader?”

  “But I don’t believe in Him.”

  “Yes you do,” said Max. “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t. Why are you so anxious to prove that I do? You’re not secretly scurrying to church yourself, are you? If you have revelations to make, please be gentle with me.”

  “No,” replied Max. “I’m not going to church. But I think as I get older that no one is really ever an atheist. Everyone believes.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said sarcastically, “it’s sort of unavoidable, rather the way that mysteriously I always seem to have a recent cut or bruise somewhere on my shins. I don’t know where the hell I got it, I don’t remember bumping into anything, I’m not in any pain, but always there’s this scab on my shins. Religion is like this. Is that what you mean?”

  “The scab of religion! Tom, I can see you getting worked up. Your voice has risen. You don’t need to. I’m not about to … fall on my knees. I’m just probably moving towards the idea that since religion is a human creation, and its form is man’s, then … everything in it is at least as true as we are.”

  “Ha. I never did believe in your atheism. You’re a closet Christian.”

  “No … neither closet nor Christian. But I don’t think that religion is … a machinery of propositions, to be argued with, fought with, and disproved. It’s away of life, a series of habits. Practices rather than knowledge, facts of existence. If a peasant woman kisses an icon, you can’t say that she is wrong to do this. It’s like farming. People have always gathered the harvest in a certain way, and this can never be … wrong, even if newer and quicker methods are invented which supersede it. Or like music. You can like or dislike a piece of music but you can’t call it wrong. It is not only … pointless to argue with this, it is … meaningless to argue with it. Am I right?”

  “Why meaningless?”

  “Because the desire to pray, like gathering the harvest, is a need, a hunger, not an idea. You can argue with an idea, but you can’t argue with a hunger. Nor … should you.”

  “I reject almost every word of what you just said.”

  “Well, you would, or you wouldn’t be writing a Book Against God.” Max smiled.

  “It’s nonsense. First of all, music, when I last looked, has not caused centuries of wars. Nor has farming. At least, not as a timeless business of cultivation and harvesting. But religion has. Ergo, this hunger, this ‘need’ you talk about, contains ideas about which people have cared enough to go to war. The peasant who kisses an icon before embarking on a journey does so because her tradition tells her that to do so will guarantee her divine pro
tection and blessing, as a man might nowadays cross himself before his plane takes off into the air. How come that isn’t a proposition? In your scheme,” I continued, “how would one ever be converted, as Paul was, and how would one ever lose one’s faith, as I did? As we did! To find or lose a faith is to find or lose belief in a series of propositions and guarantees, laid out by Jesus and the Gospel writers.”

  “It’s not a contract! Anyway, there we’re a bit different,” said Max. “I … never had a faith to lose.”

  “Well, neither did I, really.”

  “That’s not true. You had something, then you lost it. At fourteen or fifteen. I remember you telling me about it. Most of all you had your parents’ faith, and that … had to be fought.”

  “Oh, I’m not fighting their faith. Definitely not.”

  “No? Oh, this is getting good. We haven’t done this for a while. What are you … staring at?” asked Max.

  “There’s a large fly sauntering across the table. Christ, look at it!”

  “Tom, it’s a … fly. A fly.”

  “You know how I feel about insects.”

  “A fly, Tom, a fly.”

  “I will have to liquidate it. It’s disgusting.” I slapped the table with the beermat; the fly veered away, then cheekily landed once again on the table, pausing to sharpen its front legs. I tried again with the beermat. Again the fly evaded me and returned.

  “I can’t sit here with that insect,” I said. Part of me sincerely meant what I was saying—I do loathe insects very much—and part of me was quite happy to use my hatred of insects as a way of ending our discussion.

  “This is a phobia you are going to … have to control,” said Max.

  “Indeed, that’s what Jane says. But in the meantime, let’s go, shall we?”

  Max was right: it was a joy to be arguing with him again, as we used to. But our meeting left me a little suspicious. Max seemed to be crossing over to the other side, joining the group of people we used to call, when we were boys, “the God-talkers.” And when I look back at our conversation a year later, I notice how cleverly he avoided the real subject: Jane.

  12

  THESE ARE THE PAGES Max read in the pub. I have followed Max’s advice, and retained all references to Jane, to our marriage, and the Islington flat, where I originally wrote this passage:

  Kierkegaard was an awful prig, how could he not be; his name essentially means “churchyard” in Danish. He is always amassing all the qualities that make Christianity hateful—its cruelty, asceticism, the impossible challenge of imitating Christ—and then shouting out: And this is exactly why you must follow Christ! For instance, he writes that Christianity is rooted in the concept of sin, and this strikes even him as too severe. But, too bad, he says. Christianity is severe. Socrates thought of sin as ignorance of the good; but Kierkegaard thinks this was too generous of Socrates. Christianity, he says, knows that we sin in two ways: we sin willfully; and secondly we are all inheritors of original sin. The Churchyard admits that original sin is a hateful idea—“the Christian doctrine of sin is nothing but insolent disrespect of man, accusation upon accusation”—and writes that “a man sitting in a glass case is not so constrained as is each human in his transparency before God.” These are beautiful words, and over the years I have often thought of this poor man in the glass case being watched by God, which merges in my mind with something I read about Momus, the god of ridicule, who wished that a glass case could be installed in the breast of man so that his heart could be seen (a vile image!). Yes, these are beautiful words, suffused with anger against God, against the disrespect of the idea of sin, against the awful glassy transparency of our relationship with God.

  And what does Kierkegaard do, of course, but, like a man eating black beetles or sheeps’ testicles and then stubbornly pronouncing them delicious, turns and says: But this is exactly why we must be Christians!

  But nothing is worse than the passage entitled “The Edifying in the Thought That Against God We Are Always in the Wrong,” at the end of Either/Or, which surely represents The Churchyard’s own horrible thoughts. Kierkegaard says that we are always more loved by God than we can possibly love Him, and this (combined with the fact that we are always sinful) means that “against God we are always in the wrong.” We should want this wrongness, he says, it is edifying. His analogy is with ordinary love. If I really love my wife, and she does me a wrong, says The Churchyard, I will be unhappy because I am suddenly made to be in the right and she in the wrong. In fact, if I really love her, I will want to exchange places with her, so that suddenly she is made to be in the right and I in the wrong.

  It’s true that when Jane sometimes makes a verbal error (the other night she made “hoi polloi” sound like the elite), or puts a philosopher in the wrong century, I have a momentary urge to correct her, which then passes and is replaced with a stronger desire to say nothing at all, as if the error were my mistake. Kierkegaard may be right about this: perhaps because I love her I do not want to be in the right against Jane, which is painful, but rather in the wrong against her, which is less painful. I’m writing this in Islington, while lying on our bed. Looking at the bed, at the two sides, hers and mine, I ask myself: Why is it that Jane’s side is always fragrant, cool, creaseless, as if she has hardly slept there, while my side seems to have been monstrously inhabited in the night, with trapped smells, crushed pillows, and sheets cast with hairs? How delicious it is to lean over onto her side, and breathe into her perfumed pillow. Yes, yes, I think, the Dane is very wise, one wants to change places with the person one loves, because one is in the wrong and she is so often in the right. One longs to be right.

  But that isn’t what Kierkegaard says. He argues that I should want to exchange places with Jane not because I am in the wrong and want to be with her in the right, but because I should want to be in the wrong against her. He envisages an ideal world in which, if Jane said, “Spinoza was German, wasn’t he?” I, feeling horribly in the right, would not only not correct her, but would take the mistake on as my own, and murmur in reply, “My mistake, my mistake.” And she would do likewise if I claimed that Berlioz was Spanish.

  That is what our relation with God should be like. With this great difference, says Kierkegaard: we should not think, “God is always right, therefore I am always in the wrong.” Instead, we should think, “I am always in the wrong, therefore God is always in the right.” He loves us more than we can ever love Him, and we do not deserve that love and we must rejoice in the gorgeous injustice of it, the swollenness of this top-heavy fraction, and simply say to ourselves again and again, “Against God we are always in the wrong.”

  Doesn’t Kierkegaard’s “love” sound rather like hate? He is exactly like Simone Weil in this regard. Couldn’t we substitute “hate” for every use of “love” in Kierkegaard’s (or Weil’s) work, and get a more accurate picture of the world? God hates us more than we can hate Him, and we do not deserve that hate, and therefore against God we are always in the wrong. Kierkegaard wants us to go about muttering, “My mistake, my mistake,” while God lets His earthquakes and Holocausts and famines rage, all the while saying whatever nonsense God feels He wants to say: “Plato was English,” perhaps, or “the Holocaust never happened, I, the Almighty, great Jehovah, deny it.” (Yes, God would have a very good reason to be the first Holocaust-denier.) Kierkegaard’s idea of our relations with God reminds me of a story told by Cicero and several other classical authors, one of those exemplary stories offered as a model of Stoical self-control. Archytas, the owner of a vineyard, discovered that slaves on his estate had behaved offensively and disobediently, and then, realizing that he was feeling too wound up and violent towards them, stopped himself doing anything, except to say mildly, as he walked by them, “You’re lucky I’m angry with you.”

  Well, that’s our relationship with God in brief, isn’t it? Archytas’s idea of “luck” is not far from Kierkegaard’s, is it? We are “lucky” that God is angry with us, “lucky” th
at He made us, and even when we have not behaved badly in the vineyard and have done nothing bad at all, we should still bow and scrape, and murmur, like my father’s poor parishioners going down on their knees, “My mistake, my mistake, I am lucky that You are angry with me”—all because Adam, who was anyway created by this hateful tyrant and might not have wanted to be created, this poor Adam, ate the luckless apple. Oh when will humans murder this devilish concept of God? For is God really any more dead now than when Nietzsche told us He was a hundred or so years ago? Until that final day, that real day of murder, of cancellation, of blissful clearing, the holiday of life, an emptied sabbath of repose—until that moment, I propose instead an edifying inversion of Kierkegaard: “the edifying in the thought that against us God is always in the wrong.”

  13

  WHY SHOULD I BELIEVE in Jane’s promise of reconciliation? How many times has she deigned to see me since the end of the Harrods job? Three times. Three times in as many months. And now September has just become October, and whatever kindly momentum there was has completely gone. This weekend I got into a panic and phoned Roger to ask his advice. I thought he might be willing to intercede for me, put in a good word (even tell a white lie on my behalf). He is very close to Jane, has known her since music college. But first of all, Roger typically enrolled me in physical labour. He is always moving something somewhere—a harpsichord, or fifty folders of sheet music, or a thousand LPs, or clumps of human beings, usually carless members of his choir. Would I be “a brick,” he asked, and help him take six boxes of fliers about a forthcoming concert from the printers to his flat? “This concert’s crucial,” he said, very fast. “We have to take on the Tallis Scholars and beat the bastards at their own game.” So we spent the morning crossing London, in a cab filled with boxes. And then Roger said he had to “dash off” to pick something else up, and I was left alone in his chilly flat for two hours. At three o’clock he came racing back, poached in sweat, and voluble.