Readers of this blog may recall my review
of The Bible
According to Spike Milligan. When I came across the
book The Bible According to Mark Twain, I thought: this I
must read.
It is a very different book from Milligan's; but that shouldn't be
surprising, as they were very different characters. The book consists of
narratives by Twain, some of them previously published, some not, on the two
subjects of Adam, Eve, and the antediluvian civilisation (which Twain portrays
as a high civilisation, in order to use it to satirise his own—I bet you didn't
know Cain and Abel's sisters were called Gladys and Edwina), and Heaven and the
afterlife.
Much of the book consists of gentle mockery of an overliteral reading
of the Bible and the traditional Christian interpretation of it, for
example (from "Adam's Diary"):
[Eve] engages herself in
many foolish things: among others, trying to study why the animals
called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says,
the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to
eat each other.
(I thought as I was growing up that this
kind of argument was fully thrashed out in the mid-nineteenth century
(certainly Joseph Herman Hertz, Chief Rabbi in the first half of the
twentieth, wrote a wonderful rebuttal of literal Creationism that I
can post here if anyone is interested); it's depressing that this has
come back as an issue in our day and age.)
I wasn't strongly grabbed by these narratives, and found some of them
wandered somewhat, failing to maintain a uniform voice or theme. However,
later in the book—corresponding, loosely, to later in the author's life—the
narratives grow darker and more theologically challenging, and hence more
interesting to myself.
One of the appendices to the book, "God of the Bible vs. God of the
Present Day", sets out Mark Twain's views on the nature of God circa
1870, in which he contrasts the pettiness of the scope or scale of God
and his interests as portrayed by the Bible, with that as envisaged by
the theologians of his day.
The Biblical universe consisted of but one important
feature, a miiniature world 8,000 miles in diameter; the minor
features were a roof a rocket-flight overhead, containing a toy sun
and moon, and speckled with dimensionless sparks, placed there with
the avowedly sole object of confining their homage to that little
world and humbly serving it. The difference between that universe and
the modern one revealed by science is as the difference between
dust-flecked ray in a barn and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in
the skies. Its God was strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His
sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads. [...] One
day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried
and lashed them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged,
he grieved [...] but all to no purpose; his efforts were all vain, he
could not govern them.
In comparison:
The universe discovered by modern men comports with the
dignity of the modern God, the God whom we trust, believe in and
humbly adore.
And so forth, at greater length than I am willing to beg your
indulgence by quoting. He concludes from this:
To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible,
vindictive, fierce, and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the
true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
beneficent, exact and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being equal
and impartial show that he is just and fair.
This I found astonishing: He is willing to avow disbelief in much of
what the Bible says, yet goes on believing in God. Apparently in this
he was much influenced by the classic eighteenth-century deist tract
The Age of Reason. I think I shall have to read this now. I'd known
about deism in an abstract way, but had never seen belief in God set out
alongside outright denial of core Christian values in that way beforehand. (I
think I thought of deism and (intellectually informed) theism as both
acknowledging the Bible and the evidence from the universe, but differing in
which was considered trustworthy for proof.)
It's also interesting that Twain concludes that God is still to be
worshipped, as some of the charges that can be put against the
Biblical God can also be put against the deistic one. These charges
came to the fore as Twain's theological outlook darkened in the 1890s
and 1900s. They include the way that God, although claiming to be
just and fair, has a habit of punishing not just the guilty, but
anyone remotely connected with them.
Here I think Twain is making a theological mistake: He is conflating
the ascription to God of attributes we value and should wish to
emulate—lovingkindness, etc—with the ancients' attempting to find
meaning in a world in which bad things happen to good people by
declaring that they must be acts of God, i.e. beyond the human
capacity to understand or explain. Without a firm mental separation
between the two, you end up with a contradictory depiction of God,
which lends itself to the charge of hypocrisy.
Another theological mistake Twain makes is to say that Man is not to blame
for his nature, given that that nature is the work of God. It is (as I have
heard other theologians say) unfair to blame Adam and Eve for sampling the
forbidden fruit when it was both in their nature to do so, and they neither
did, nor could, understand the nature of the punishment (without having eaten
of the fruit in the first place). Twain's mistake here is to extend that
to all Man's nature and actions. He would absolve an adulterer for
adultery simply because he is of an adulterous nature. But by that criterion,
surely all law systems are in the wrong! But of course without them
civilisations would descend into anarchy (which, despite the protestations of
some anarchists, is not a good thing, as we have seen in countries deprived of
law and order in the last few years). What Twain seems to forget is that what
distinguishes Man from the beasts is an ability to overcome his nature. I
cannot understand how Twain did not mention this, but of course have only read
in this book a selection of his thoughts on the subject.
Twain's darkened theological outlook is captured in his powerful Letters
from the Earth (sent by an incredulous Satan back to the other archangels
about the nature of life on Earth). These depicts God as having created a
universe in which everyone and everything suffers. The fly being eaten by the
spider, and the spider by the wasp are all part of this suffering for Twain;
indeed for him the situation is even worse for the animals, as they don't even get a
heaven to look forward to afterwards. Yet for him the advent of the promise of
a Heaven is a double-edged sword, because it resulted in the creation of Hell
too. Recognising (implicitly) that neither exist in the Hebrew Bible, he talks
about Hell as having come about "When God got religion" or "became
Christian".
Of course, Twain's antagonism to these derives from the Christian
concept that only a tiny proportion of humanity will get into Heaven,
the rest will fry in eternal torment; this concept is mercifully
lacking in my own religion.
Twain goes on to criticise God for supposedly being omnipotent but not
saving everyone. What perversity is it to cure one leper without
curing all lepers? Indeed, what perversity was it to create
diseases in the first place? This finds expresson in Twain's
treatment of Noah, whom he criticises for having taken the housefly on
the Ark, rather than letting it and all the diseases it carries die out.
Which raises the question of whether, then, one still owes such a God
worship. In a quotation from his autobiography dating from 1906,
Twain concludes emphatically no. It's strange to read Twain
going on in this manner, and yet still using the term "God" to
describe this entity to which worship is not due. I suppose it's
because English doesn't really have a term for an entity that is
Creator and Supreme Being but not suitable to be the object of
worship. Or, to put it another way, what makes such a being worthy of
being called God if worship is not due it?
Twain concludes:
[Man] is flung head over heels into this world without
ever a chance to decline, and straightaway he conceives and accepts
the notion that he is in some mysterious way under obligations to the
unknown Power that inflicted this outrage upon him—and thenceforth he
considered himself responsible to that Power for every act of his
life, and punishable for such of his acts as do not meet with the
approval of that Power—yet that same man would argue quite differently
if a human tyrant should capture him and put chains upon him and make
him a slave.
Though of course we cannot expect Twain to have heard of Stockholm
syndrome! Which raises a question that's been going through my mind
in recent years: How much bad does God have to do to the Jewish people
before we stop praising God for the few good things God has done in
our long history?
The answer to this I think lies in the appeal of the traditional
liturgy, as borne out by the history of the Reform movement, which
started out by throwing out everything traditional, and then has spent
the last two centuries gradually putting it back in again.
This is not, however, for me a closed question. I've spent years
looking for a theology which does not leave me unsatisfied. I read
Nill Gillman's book Sacred Fragments, which gives a
description of all modern such attempts, and none of them really did
much for me.
There's a story of a group of rabbis in a concentration camp during
the Holocaust who decided to put God on trial for what God had allowed
to pass. They assigned counsels for the prosecution and defence,
weighed up the evidence, and eventually, after much debate, found God
guilty. But they came to pronounce sentence, one of them
looked at his watch and said, "It's time for
mincha!;
so instead of sentencing God, they went off to pray to God instead.
There is a sense that we—they, I—continue because it's what we do.
I've posted
before about how I came to start reciting בִּרְכוֹת every day because
I wanted to express gratitude for things, but got sucked into using
theistical language, because it's the language of Jewish prayer. This
is the same problem here, just on a wider scope.