On God: An Uncommon Conversation

by Norman Mailer

  I never told you this story, but when I was writing my doctoral thesis on you, I had a chapter on your cosmology. I had to face two or three English professors plus a philosophy professor on the Ph.D. committee. He argued with me about it. Wrote me long letters.

  Let me get this straight. While you were formulating the thesis, this happened?

  Yes, he was reading drafts. He said that your system, as far as he could understand it, was terribly incomplete.

  [N.M. laughs]

  He said he could not find in it either a beginning, how the universe came into being, or how it ends—how the cosmic war would end at the end of time or even if there would be an end of time.

  He sounds like a major-league ass.

  Well, no, he was gentle with me. But he thought anybody who had a philosophical system, ought to have—let me finish—

  Let me just stress one point: I’ve never heard of this before, that you have to have a beginning and an end to your philosophy. What about Logical Positivists? Do they have a beginning and an end?

  Well, he was an Aristotelian. That probably explains a lot. But he also felt that you had no clear definition of Being—what he believed and what a lot of philosophers believe is the central question of philosophy: Being. What is Being? What is the ultimate nature of man? What is the ultimate nature of God? What is Being? When he confronted me, I kept saying existentialism, existentialism—as much as I knew about it, and I knew a little but not a great deal. One of my English professors on the committee said, “Look, Mailer is a literary man. He’s not a systematic philosopher. He has ideas, he has feelings, but he isn’t out to create a philosophical system.” And that’s what finally got the philosopher to back down. He goes, “You’re right. This is a literature Ph.D., not a philosophy Ph.D.” After all, you have written about Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Schopenhauer—it wasn’t that you weren’t familiar with some philosophy; you were clearly interested in philosophical questions. But finally, I guess, any philosopher who won’t propose any ultimates is a very unusual philosopher. As I read it, you present no ultimate nature of God, no ultimate answer to any of these questions. And so, reading over everything that we have done so far, I keep coming to the same thing—we don’t know, we can’t be certain. Yet from most philosophical points of view, there’s usually one rock somewhere.

  What if the rock is in transit? In other words, when we say “rock,” we mean something that is eternal. What if eternity is in passage itself? The simplest response I could give is that no philosopher has ever come up with an answer to these questions that is satisfactory to us. No human, and I won’t be the first either. What I will say is this. I have basic beliefs. I don’t know what we’ve been talking about through these interviews. I thought I’d said it. God is not All-Powerful and not All-Good. God is comparable to a Greek god if you will—Zeus, if we need some model. I don’t need one. In other words, God is a divine protagonist engaged in trying to shape some very large part of existence. How large is a question beyond our means. Of course! I have no notion at all whether our God is only a master of the solar system or commands galaxies. I have no notion whether God is in command of black holes in space or is terrified of them. My fundamental idea is that the cosmos is at war within itself and the God who created us is not the Emperor, but the Artist. This is my most basic notion: God—Being, if you will—is not a lawgiver but an artist. Being is doing the best that He or She can do to project a new notion of existence into the cosmos. There may be other notions out there as well—other concepts concerning which turn the cosmos should take. We humans are part of God’s venture into the unknown. We humans are God’s soldiers, God’s ability to change the given in the cosmos. To ask, then, that the end be posited is philosophically misleading, since we commence with the notion that the end is as yet undetermined.

  When I say that I am an existentialist, I mean that the purpose of existence is not known. It is the presence of life, not the definitive of it. God may often dwell in states of bewilderment. That makes more sense to me than that God knows clearly what He or She is doing and tells us how to do it. If that is the case, we are no more than extras in a huge opera. I’ve said this over and over. The end is open. Existence is open. The notion that there is a predetermined place we all will reach, that there is a single point to existence that we will achieve by fulfilling God’s notion is, if you stop to think, no more than a personification of God as the director of an immense opera. There He stands, holding his full libretto in mind. But I am saying it is more complex, more difficult, more ennobling. And the libretto is not done. It is still being written. We are not just serfs, nor children drawn in to sing in the chorus. We are the base of this opera. So to demand a philosophical presentation where I must say where we are going is, given my point of view, not an answerable demand. All we can know, at best, is where we might be at the present. Everything in existence fortifies this concept for me. I know where I am at this moment, within reason. But do I know where I will be in a year? Will I still be alive? I don’t know. If I should remain alive for twenty years, can I have any notion of how I will be then? Can I have a concept of where society will find itself in a hundred years? Hardly. We live in the present. That is what we are given. We do have instincts, and they can be far-reaching. I would go so far as to say that I would go along with Goethe’s belief that these powerful instincts are God given. We are embodying God’s plans, but such plans are subject to change because the storms of the cosmos are not all prerecorded; the future of the world is not yet written. The Devil, after all, warps human affairs.

  Here I wish to enter a relevant note. The moment of death carries more weight in your theological thinking than in any other I know of, but I don’t see any consideration of what happens to those, I believe it’s 20 percent of all people, who die of strokes, heart attacks, aneurysms. I have a friend who died, so the doctor said, before he hit the ground—you know, there is no time for them to prepare themselves, there is no time to reflect, project, anything. Are they just unlucky? Is this just a flaw in the way God did things, given the importance of our state of mind when we go into eternity? These people have no chance.

  The answer may lie in the famous Catholic dictum with which Graham Greene was obsessed: There is always time to repent! Between the stirrup and the ground! Time, after all, as anyone who has had experience with minor drugs like marijuana will know, can extend or compress. A tenth of a second in a dream, we are told, can feel like five minutes. But apart from that, even if you have no time at the moment before your death, I would say that death takes place within us as we live our lives. The recognition of death is always posing the question, “Am I a good man or a bad man?” that accompanies us from an early age. “Am I a good child or a bad child?” As you grow older, you also think more about judgment. Of course, not everyone believes that such a process exists. It is disheartening that so often you will hear fine people say, “Oh, there is nothing after this. All I want is a little peace.” It is a sad remark, particularly sad to me because, given my notion that many of us look to the promise of being reborn, it is sad if life has been so corrosive that one does not care to be reincarnated. That suggests there has been too punishing an existence, too deep a sense of defeat.

  I’m not making myself sufficiently clear. We had a long discussion in which you emphasized how critical the final moments of one’s life were. They were, according to you, extraordinarily important because that was the time to prepare yourself. You used the example of people in the gas chambers who were cheated out of that moment and how terrible it was for them. But, you know, if you have a brain aneurysm, you don’t have a tenth of a second. You have nothing. Your brain stops. There’s no thought.

  Let’s say 99 percent of the people who are alive have a reasonable amount of time to think before they die.

  They do.

  All right. You are talking about the 1 percent who don’t. And if I can’t account for that 1 percent, then I can’t. Everything I attempt
here, if I may honor it with the assumption that it is philosophical, suggests that we don’t look for 100 percent in anything. I’m opposed to the notion that any kind of thought can be wholly complete once it looks to engage the meaning of life. That is another reason for detesting Fundamentalism. It insists on 100 percent. What I have to say may be valid only for some people, but I do believe that, yes, our preparation for death is important. If you have just a few minutes at the end, it isn’t as if you are facing death for the first time; you have been facing it all your life. Let us say you are handing in the final submission.

  Now, let me go back a moment. As I’ve indicated, I think reincarnation is a species of reward. To repeat, that’s why I get depressed when people say, “Oh, I just want some peace,” and mean it—whereas others can feel that with all the ill they’ve admittedly caused there is still enough good in them to want another chance. I believe God is ready to give that chance to the most impossible cases. I go back to my basic notion: God is our Artist. A fine artist is never satisfied with what has been created but looks for another attempt to do better. I even believe that the dullest human is still an intrinsic work of art. It is just that virtually none of the potential was realized. Still, there may be some reason for the Creator to wish to see if this human can improve.

  God needs us. To repeat: He wishes to take His notion of existence and carry it across the stars. And for that, God needs humans to become more extraordinary. But you don’t create people who are wonderful by an act of will. Often, such development can come only from rebirth and endless small steps of change. If you are put in situations where you failed in one life but manage to succeed in the next, then, yes, to that degree, you have strengthened God.

  Let me offer a crude scenario. If, in one existence, you were terrified of heights, well, then, possibly for the next you are placed in a family of mountain climbers. So as a child in this new existence, you may go through horrors. But now you have guides to carry you up to an aerie you could not reach in your previous life.

  So I would venture to say that at the moment of one’s death, one may have a better sense of what one did or didn’t do in one’s life and what one might like for the next life. Can that not give a coloration to the soul even at the last moment?

  All right. Let us say that such a person does become a successful mountain climber. If you have a succession of such good reincarnations, what happens then? Does a person ever get to be as good as it is possible to become?

  I don’t think so. Most of us are so highly imperfect, so underdeveloped, so frustrated, so small in relation to what we could have been—every one of us, even those of us who are relatively successful—that the question also becomes: How much has God learned from us? It isn’t that God understands us so well that all we need is a little tweaking. God learns along with us. Continue to think of God as a protagonist in the cosmos. So, some of His divine decisions on reincarnation will work; others not. God’s hope is that His works succeed more than they fail.

  So most reincarnations might not show a clear improvement?

  Who knows? Karma itself may be embattled. When too many people die at once—when a hundred thousand souls living in Hiroshima are incinerated in one second—that may create incalculable damage. Karma may not have been equipped to deal with so many deaths in one instant. Might this not be one of the Devil’s most profound urges? To maim karma irreparably? Destroy reincarnation, which is to say, destroy God’s way of adjusting the balance?

  I don’t see any reason why reincarnations can’t go on for a couple of million years. Why not? No problem.

  The question here is, How much time does God have? Are eons available, or is it a cosmic race? There may be other visions of existence seeking to overtake us in the universe—or, worse, speed far away from us. So God may be in a great hurry. God may have less patience now than He possessed hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  Well, to go back to my philosophy professor, there is usually some teleological sense among philosophers about how it’s going to turn out in the end.

  I would say that God has a vision of existence that He sees as more creative and more useful to the future than other competing visions in the cosmos.

  What is that vision?

  That life can become more and more creative, diverse, splendid, and incredible.

  Okay.

  Now give me another vision of existence. That we all are to sit in the heavenly fold and listen to hymns that are beautiful because God has put us in Heaven? What the hell is more final about that?

  There is the vision in many religions that you merge with the universal mind. You merge with the mind of God, you become part and parcel of God. And you do not just exist in sugar land or Club Med but exist in pure intellectual bliss, having been completely purged of all weaknesses and corruptions and so forth. Many religions hold this belief. The Hindus, for example.

  That assumes we’re all here, ideally, to get to a certain place. If we keep our lives pure enough, we will reach such bliss. But I am saying that heavenly bliss is not guaranteed. Everything we know about the nature of existence also shows us that it’s cruel, paradoxical, glorious, disappointing, tremendous, and often more modest than we expected. And so I believe we are part of a vast creative process that is attempting to go somewhere without being able to guarantee what the end is. In our lives, we certainly work without knowing the end. The only certainty we possess is that we are going to die. We don’t know what will follow that. We can assume certain answers, but we know, or ought to know, that we are making no more than an assumption. Let me add that if every one of our understandings comes down to uncertainty, why assume that God knows what the end is? That is also a large assumption.

  Does it fit or not fit in your theology that America has a special place in God’s vision?

  I’ve written about that on occasion. The quagmire in Iraq can be blamed on American Exceptionalism. I would say that all of us, all humans, belong to exceptionalism—not just Americans. All of the globe is part of God’s exceptionalism. It’s vainglory to think we Americans have sole purchase on it. How, for God’s sakes, could God put up with suburbs and malls and superhighways and plastics?

  Well, maybe we’ve blown it. You know, in the beginning, the idea of American Exceptionalism came from the idea that they blew it in Europe. There were endless wars and corruption. And we were a new start.

  I won’t argue that there may have been certain divine hopes for America. But I don’t think He has had much of that since the Second World War. In the last five decades, we’ve not only roiled the depths but cheapened the surface of life. We’ve ruined the freshness of the air, the cleanliness of the rivers, the integrity of the earth. At this point, I would say that America is not a country whose spiritual goodness is guaranteed to hold up under examination.

  I know when Kennedy was assassinated somebody said, and you quoted it, that God may have withdrawn His blessing from America.

  It was John Updike.

  And that remark moved you. You thought he might be onto something there.

  Yes.

  Several times in this and other conversations I’ve had with you, you’ve mentioned the possibility that God might have intended human beings to develop their telepathic powers. In your novel Ancient Evenings some of the characters do employ exactly such powers. And modern novelists can, in a sense, read minds, because they’re exploring what people are thinking. One of the great advances is when the novel moved into the human mind.

  In which century would you say that was?

  Well, it really only started around a hundred years ago.

  Dickens enters people’s minds.

  Not much. Not like Joyce. Or Virginia Woolf.

  All right.

  Do your speculations about telepathy have anything to do with using this novelistic tool? I mean you certainly explore the consciousness of virtually all of your heroes. You rarely see characters from just the outside.

  Yes, but I don’t thi
nk that I would lay claim to any more telepathy than is average. We all have had the experience of thinking of a song and then someone in the room starts humming it. People who are married for a while often find they’re thinking of something at the same time. We phone someone just as they are about to call us. But in terms of daily novel writing, I think we study everybody from the outside. Once in a while, through love, we do literally enter the inner presence of someone else. But generally speaking, we novelists observe. We study society. We try to understand how the social machine works. We try to understand characters who are different from ourselves. We work with the notion that there is a little bit of ourselves in the stranger. Certain characters do come alive even though they are far apart from our notion of our self. The best novelists can do that. All the same, telepathy is but a small part of it now. Electronics, I suspect, are the Devil’s contribution. God just assumed we would become more and more telepathic, and, in the course of that, there would be less need for technology. Technology stifles God’s creation. Smog is not good for God’s air. Static is not good for His ears or ours. I don’t want to go through the old litany of all that is wrong with modern civilization. I will add one notion, however, which is that technology now being with us, we have to look upon human history as God’s attempt to deal with the Devil as well as with us. If the Devil succeeds in establishing technological shoots and outbursts and venues and avenues throughout all of society, God must engage technology as well. But He comes in second. The Devil is the pioneer in technology. So I would assert, unless it is we humans who outstripped the Devil.