The Book Against God

by James Wood

  “He was a bloody lifesaver when I first arrived and everyone thought I was a Marxist.”

  We both looked at Peter, who was on the other side of the room, talking to Jane and the Thurlows. One of his hands was on my mother’s shoulder, the other held a wineglass. He was a picture of genial energy. His bald head was glowing. I saw his round, clean face, with its little loyal ears—seemingly tightly pinned to his head—and his smooth young cheeks, and at that moment I thought, “He will live for a long time.” And a sudden urge for honesty, for honest encounter, came over me. I had a strong desire to say to Timothy, “You know, my father can’t tell if you believe in God or not.” Instead, I said,

  “What Dad likes is the fact that you can’t be pinned down. On belief …”

  “Likes?”

  “Well, it interests him, I think.”

  “It interests me quite a bit, too,” said Timothy. “I’m not surprised that he is interested; he’s quite wily himself, isn’t he?”

  I felt an inexplicable desperation, as I stood beside Timothy and looked at my handsome, “wily” father across the room. It was suddenly important that I knew what Timothy believed and did not believe, important that he spoke directly to me, passionately even.

  “You’re not wily, are you?” I asked anxiously. “I mean, you’re not playing games? It’s a matter of the utmost importance, life-or-death, to you as for anyone else?” I felt my hand shaking a little. Timothy looked with alarm for a second, and then breezily said,

  “Oh, you know, it’s as Pascal has it—impossible to believe in God, impossible not to.”

  “But that won’t do, in the end, will it? We have to decide, no?” I asked, with a tremor in my voice. Timothy paused, and then in very even, calm, academic tones, said:

  “The extremity with which you pose the question—either/or, yes or no, for or against—assumes that one can know, that one either believes or doesn’t because of some certainty, a certainty founded either on inner knowledge—i.e., faith—or some kind of external suggestion, i.e., some kind of vision or visitation, a miracle, or what as you know were in the medieval dispensation called ‘proofs’ of God. Since you ask, I don’t have that kind of certainty one way or another. I’ve never had a vision, and I don’t hear God’s still, small voice in my breast. Formal proofs, of course, like the ontological proof, are pretty silly nowadays, hardly anyone intellectually decent is working in that field. So I suppose I do envy the certainty of a Newman, say, who thought that when he died he would see God face-to-face and also his nearest and dearest. On the other hand, I can’t possibly say to you that because of this paucity of proof or suggestion that I don’t think God exists, or that ‘I don’t believe’—whatever that word ‘believe’ means. Even Newman, to return to him, lamented God’s absence, His invisibility in the world, what he called ‘the tokens, so faint and broken, of a superintending design.’ We all have to live with these faint and broken tokens, and, unlike Newman, just because of their faintness and brokenness I can’t commit myself to your kind of language of certainty. I can’t even speak it, because if I do I am committing an intellectual lie.” He stopped, looked across the room, and then at me, and said, much more kindly, “Your father, by the way, if it’s a consolation, is probably much less wily than he seems, and more conventional. I think he’s a pretty solid believer. I’m sure Peter would say, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’”

  I was moved by Timothy’s confession, and certainly moved by his unexpected kindness. I poured myself another large drink, and then turned to him, with my back to the room, and said, quietly, insistently:

  “I can’t help being certain! I don’t believe that a God exists who created the world we live in. And if you ask me for ‘proof’ of this certainty, for how I know this, what do I do but ask you to look at the world. There’s the proof! A place of horror and pain and utter senseless longevity for millions and millions.”

  “Well, but it’s not a proof. And the world isn’t horrid for you,” said Timothy, again with an alarmed look on his face.

  “Not for me—not yet. Not much,” I said. I lowered my voice as my mother came towards us. But she was on her way to the kitchen.

  “Timothy, give Tom a deadline for his Ph.D., won’t you,” she said with a light laugh as she left the room.

  “But my small happiness and small unhappiness—that’s all irrelevant,” I continued. My mother’s joke was best ignored.

  “Yes, but if instead of cosmically including the globe in your gaze, you start with your life, you might find that you don’t have this certainty about God’s nonexistence anymore. You might say to yourself: ‘I am healthy, happy, purposeful, loved. And I was undeniably created by someone or something.’ That’s quite a good start. And, by the way, exactly how is your atheism saving people from starvation in Africa or rescuing children from Romanian orphanages?”

  “Well, but how is religion helping them? I’m surprised at you. You know perfectly well that I don’t have to prove that atheism can alleviate pain. I simply have to show that the existence of pain is not compatible with the idea of God. Atheism isn’t a practice, it’s a principle.”

  “Or, more precisely, it’s a belief,” said Tim, with a smirk.

  “Okay, it’s a belief, a rival belief. And I believe that this world vandalizes the face of God. I don’t believe that any God worthy of worship or comprehension made this world.” As I said this, I looked directly at my father, who, I could tell, was being lectured to by Colin Thurlow. Though the words I was speaking to Timothy described the very abyss that separated me from my father, the sight of him stoically suffering Colin, something we had all done, brought forth a surge of fellow feeling.

  “What interests me is your certainty,” said Tim. “It’s one thing to say that the world is a horrid place—if indeed it is—but it’s another to say, ‘Ergo God doesn’t exist.’ I’m not sure you can make that leap. I mean, if you suddenly lived in a world without any suffering, without any pain at all, would you then say to yourself, ‘This is such a happy world that I am convinced that God does exist’? I don’t think so. Arguments from design are always a bad idea, whether practised by believers or atheists, and that’s what you’re doing.”

  “I simply repeat that either God doesn’t exist, or if He exists He is not a creator worthy of worship, love, or even comprehension,” I said.

  “Well, hang on a minute, if He exists, it’s not up to you to decide if He is worthy of worship, love, or comprehension. You don’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “If He exists,” I continued, in a kind of rage, “He is a Satan. You mentioned Newman. He writes, doesn’t he, ‘if God exists, since God exists,’ somewhere or other.”

  “Yeah. Apologia.”

  “Well, I would say, inverting that: ‘if God doesn’t exist, since God doesn’t exist.’ In other words, even if He exists, I can’t believe in Him and won’t believe in Him—He doesn’t exist for me.”

  “Except that He palpably does exist for you,” said Timothy, almost wearily, “because you can’t stop talking about ‘God.’ You can’t say ‘He doesn’t exist.’ And you can’t say ‘He doesn’t exist for me.’ And I can’t say the opposite—I mean, I can’t know that God does exist. Neither of us can. Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you know that the whole of religion is a colossal error? Can you look at our cathedral and just know that it simply represents an error, ancient ignorance, that it’s just a big mistake?”

  I was silent for a moment, and finished my drink. I thought of the cathedral, always watching the town, the grey trance of its hushed interior, the aspiring columns stout in their waists and bursting into fanned splendour as they met the ceiling, the long bare nave like a grey carpet, the patient, stony, everlasting, exact ambition of it. I hesitated, and Timothy, with a bland, victorious smile, said:

  “A building Ruskin thought one of the wonders of the world, a city the medievalists likened to Jerusalem.”

  “You sound like Max. You rememb
er Max Thurlow?”

  “Oh, sure. Colin and Belinda’s kid. To whom we should now bow down as The Times’s Voice of Unreason, right?”

  “Max said something similar a few months ago to me. About how if religion has the form of the human, and is the product of humans, it can’t be wrong. The cathedral is very noble, yes. I grew up with it, in a sense. But, look, there are many beautiful creations, beautiful representations, that arise out of beliefs subsequently known to be false or primitive. We all revere the Pyramids, but we don’t believe in Isis, and in the primitive theological system disclosed by the hieroglyphics, do we? Or a better example, the medieval maps, with their information about sea monsters and vicious cannibals. No one would call these maps a mistake exactly, yet none of us now shares the worldview of the people who drew them.”

  “So,” said Timothy calmly, as if he had just heard a paper delivered at a conference, “the cathedral is, after all, a beautiful mistake, a magnificent lie.”

  “Christ, yes, of course, if you insist. But, but …”

  I had been conscious of someone standing directly behind me for half a minute or so. It was Peter, who looked at me for a second with despairing enormity, and then gathered himself into false pleasantness, and said:

  “I’m loath to interrupt your architectural discussions, but Sarah has instructed me that supper is ready.” So we moved into the hall, and then into the dining room, which was lively with the moving flames of many candles.

  For the rest of the evening I had an image in my mind of my father’s imploring eyes, glistening with what seemed like sadness. I had never seen him looking at me with such a strange look of pleading. I wasn’t sure how much he had heard, but the last few minutes had constituted a greater confession than I had ever made to him. You see, I was pretty liberal with such speeches, as long as they were made to people other than my father. Really, I’m quite addicted to theological discussion, and like nothing better than the argumentative wrestle over God. I think that the secularist’s duty is to proselytize, to take the flag over to enemy territory and firmly plant it there. I want to be what a nineteenth-century thinker called an athlete of reason. But my father always made me feel, as it were, fat and short of breath, because he was himself a kind of athlete of reason while simultaneously a knight of faith. So we never had this kind of discussion.

  Towards the end of the party, I broke away and returned to the kitchen. Mary could be heard rustling with something in the pantry. Terry sat very still at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. I burst his silence. My words were thick; I felt quite drunk.

  “Terry, do you believe in God? I’m sorry …”

  “Look out, now—”

  “I was talking to Tim Biffen about it all, and my father.”

  “Depends a touch, doesn’t it?”

  “Depends—depends on what?”

  “Just depends. Eee look out, I’ll be had up if I start answering your questions.”

  “I believe,” I said suddenly, the lie almost frothing in my mouth.

  “Well, it didn’t do any good for me da, did it? He knew he was shot to hell.” Terry sounded suddenly bitter.

  “What didn’t? What didn’t do any good?”

  “Go on, I’ll be had up.”

  Mother came in. “Dearest, the last guests are going. Hello, Terry, did you enjoy your supper?” I followed her out, said goodbye to the guests. We stood in the hall.

  “All over for another year,” said Father. “I say,” he added quietly, but sparkling, “I think Terry has the hotpants for Mary.”

  “He spent hours in the kitchen while Mary fed him salmon like a prize cat,” said Mother, laughing. “Mary may be a bit less keen.”

  19

  WHAT A STRANGE TIME, that last Christmas before my father died. First the Gathering, then my poor behaviour on Christmas Eve …

  Christmas Eve began well. Jane and I went to see Max, who was at home for two days over the holiday. We were both curious to meet his new girlfriend, who had come north with him, his first after a drought of two years. Max had told me about her on the phone. “Her name is … Fiona Raymond. The short version is—she’s ten years older than us. She’s written … comic novels, now she makes documentary films. Met her at a Times party. She’s just back from Romania. You’ll like her.”

  Even with their adult son home, the Thurlows seemed to be hard at work in their separate studies. Max opened the front door, and in the familiar way the study doors on either side opened almost simultaneously, as in a West End farce, or perhaps a masque representing dawn, and Colin and Belinda emerged. Max, always high-spirited, generally became buoyant and irresponsible when forced to spend time with his parents. “Christ, let’s … get out of here,” he whispered to me on the front step, and suddenly we were little boys again, and the running truancy of those days came back to me.

  I set my face to the customary mask for Belinda and Colin—a slightly gloomy, scholarly sobriety, my eyes halfclosed in an analytical squint, my mouth a little pursed in the Bunting style—and shook hands with them both. Colin was in an agony: his study door was open, and he kept on glancing at it with mournful indulgence. Obviously he was calculating how many minutes he had to sacrifice to the wasteful frivolity of human encounter. Fiona was introduced. Max was right, I did like her; she was blond, with rather dry, lined skin that seemed to have been written on. She had an appealing, open, frank manner, and a deep voice that made everyone think she smoked. “I don’t, actually, but with Max around I don’t need to.”

  We escaped Colin and Belinda, and drove down the wintry road to Vaughan House, Mrs. Millington’s old place, now the treasure of Philip Zealy, the crooked businessman from Newcastle. The weather was cold and dead in that way that Christmas seems to reserve for itself. Everything I could see was drained of life; the grey bricks of the small houses were dead to colour, and lucid with cold: the tight sharp windows, the certain front doors, the black pavement, the river renewed by icy apprentice streams from the hills, all dead. We passed a wooden viewing bench, now alienated by the season. After a few minutes, we reached Vaughan House. It is very large, set well back from the road, and unusual for the area because built out of red brick rather than the local stone. A huge, undisciplined lawn stretches from the front of the house to the clear fast little river, the same one that comes sharp and novel from the hills, goes quickly through Sundershall, and then grows wide and mud-delayed as it reaches Durham. We stopped to gaze. I told Fiona and Jane that Max and I had always loved Vaughan House.

  “The Pekineses,” said Max.

  “The Pekineses indeed, with the extraordinary names.”

  “It was always said that Mrs. Millington used to give overnight guests a dog to take to bed, for warmth … Animal hot water bottles,” said Max.

  “Well, now it’s Zealy’s to do whatever he wants with it. I’m sure he’ll put efficient heating in.”

  On a whim, we drove to Durham for lunch, where we ate at a very bad restaurant—“there being no other kind in Durham,” as Max remarked. Fiona told us about her work. She had written six comic novels, superstitiously finishing each on her birthday, one a year. But she decided to stop writing when the reviewers began to write of each new book after her second that”this is not Fiona Raymond’s best novel.” This sentence had come up again and again.

  “I got absolutely bloody sick of reading ‘this is not her best novel, this is not her best novel.’ I felt like shouting to reviewers at parties: ‘Tell me which bloody novel was my best!’ So there were two conclusions, then,” she said, with pleasing crispness. “I once wrote a book that was my best—presumably my first—and I can’t match it. Or I have not yet written that best book yet, and that is why no one ever mentions its title. For a while I believed the latter, and it got me up in the morning. Faint praise can be surprisingly energizing, it turns out! But slowly, oh, I don’t know, over a period of a couple of years, I started to believe the former, and I got depressed about it all. I could see a dismal car
eer stretching out for decades, books and books and books, with each one received in exactly the same way: ‘This is not her best novel.’ The books weren’t the biggest thing for me, anyway.”

  “And since then …” said Max fondly, in a leading way.

  “Yes, since then I’ve been doing this other thing—mak—ing documentaries, which I sort of slid into while I was doing my last book. That one was set in Monaco, and I did a short film about gambling.”

  “Fiona’s come back from Romania with an extraordinary film,” said Max. “About Romanian orphans. Terrible and harrowing. No one in the West knows the full extent of it. We all need to do … something, whatever we can, about this.”

  “I’ve seen some of that on the news. Awful. But you can count me out of that,” I said. “I’m sure your film is brilliant, but I’m too weak for that kind of thing. Oh no, I couldn’t bear it. Fortunately we don’t have a video, so I may be spared it anyway.”

  After lunch we took Fiona, who had not visited Durham before, to the cathedral. The building rose up before us with black wings of stone. As we crossed the broad apron of grass in front of the cathedral, I reflected that the monks and masons who built it so long ago could not have foreseen a time when many or most of its visitors did not believe in God. Yet perhaps they did foresee that time; for what was the purpose of this sheer enormity except as a kind of insurance against the scepticism of futurity? Here we were, unbelievers at the end of the twentieth century, still bowing our heads before its size, and throughout Europe were these great flying buildings which had lasted longer than God, flying like the flags of countries that had disappeared.

  Back at Sundershall, we tried to get Max and Fiona to come to dinner at the vicarage, but Max said that he was at home for such a short time that he should stay at The Oratory and “take the medicine in one … quick shot.” They would come over later, though, after dinner. By the time Jane and I arrived at the vicarage Uncle Karl had arrived. Karl always came to stay for a week over Christmas; his regular visit was one of the indices of my childhood. When I was young, I didn’t understand why he would not attend the Christmas services. I used to slouch in the festive church, on Christmas morning, the place crowded with villagers. What a boyish feeling of anticipation and excitement: I liked the service, but I wanted it to end, I willed the hymns to their close, longed for the organ to cease its metal mimicry, urged on each prayer and waited for the divine moment at the end when Father opened the heavy dungeon-door of the church entrance and let the light, swelling all morning in the porch, fall into the church in spreading fathoms. I could not imagine, in those days, anyone in the world not having Christmas. Surely there was no child who was not getting Christmas presents, who was not going to run home over cold earth “hard as iron” to a lunch of turkey or goose and roast potatoes—and brussels sprouts, those funny tattered turbans of green leaves. Yet Uncle Karl was not beside me in church, Uncle Karl was not celebrating Christmas. What on earth was he doing at home, while everyone else was at church?