The Divine Sodomy (You might think it very God of me)
Imagine if Dante had written Meet the Feebles instead of Peter Jackson. According to Auerbach, one of the founders of comparative literary criticism, a literary triptych based on a complete fantasy both inaugurated realism in Western literature and beyond this, the image of the self in contemporary fiction. Seen in this light, Dante’s seemingly semi-satirical vision of the Thomistic afterlife was stunningly successful in convincing the very few readers it must have originally had – remember, this is 1308-1321 – that somehow as vile a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux would be the best guide to Paradiso. Yeah, right. Even the more plausible idea that the work helped establish the Tuscan language as the general Italian vernacular is a bit of a ‘so what’? Clearly the merit of religious fantasy lies not so much in any allegorical narrative but rather in the art of the writing itself; in this case the High Medieval poetry which is unmatched in any similar epic. Otherwise, it’s simply the author, under the guise of the divine, doing us up the collective, well, you know where.
It wasn’t until 1472 that the qualifier ‘divine’ was added, by none other than Boccaccio, subsequently to appear in print under the title we know it today by 1555. It is within this period, the High Renaissance this time, that the work took hold, not of the growing humanistic imagination, but rather of the world of arts and letters. On the one hand, the first-person of Dante as disembodied pilgrim lends itself to the idea of self-portraiture, but one might be forgiven – term used advisedly – if he was rather testing his own idea of personhood in the light of values that he as author had already rejected. Why call such a serious undertaking, ahem, a comedy in the first place? T.S. Eliot’s own cantos on his own age of modernity, seemingly so dryly driven, mark the author as a critic after all, though one in the lineage of John Donne and to a certain extent, William Blake as well. But there are a number of ways in which to engage in literary KulturKritik. Today, at least, we can appreciate the underside of Dante’s vision, the nether regions whereabouts good things happen to bad people, speaking of forgiveness.
But this piece is supposed to be about types of Godhead, perhaps pace its introduction. In Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses we find some most valuable cross-cultural perspective: ‘What kind of God listen to you complain all day?’. Precisely. The Christian God, apparently open 24/7 to entreaty and plaintiff, would not rate as divine at all in many other civilizations. Certainly, in so doing, He takes out his frustrations upon erring humanity through the tortuous pilgrim’s progress in this version of the afterlife. The original Egyptian idea of posthumous evaluation, momentary as it was in their underworld, not even lasting long enough to perhaps have felt violated in some intimate manner, has been distended apace. This suggests that while the ancient Egyptian was no bottom and Horus no top, it is quite otherwise by the time we get to Christianity. Of course, no one could beat the ancient Hebrews – likely the scions of the displaced Akhenatonites – for unbending themselves to a God who was perpetually wearied of their lack of attentiveness to his wisdom. Much of the Jewish testaments is a repetitive accounting of ‘Look, I told you guys to do this and you didn’t do it, and look what happened! And now you come braying to me to fix it! God!’, and all this to be mouthed in a Brooklyn accent, of course.
But more seriously, folks, the attempt by historical Christian writers, beginning with Augustine and perhaps ending just before Thomas Merton, to maintain a metaphysical aspect to their Godhead is no divine comedy at all, but rather its opposite. This human tragedy misses entirely the point of both the radical new ethics Jesus made manifest, as well as the equally historical fact of His presence on the earth, as one of us, living and dying, working and loving, and placing Himself at risk on an almost daily basis, even though He too was understood as being a Hebrew. Perhaps this was where the truer tension lay, however, for if He had been Greek, the Jews would have ignored Him, not seen Him as a threat. How could a Greek be ‘King of the Jews’? Ask Jacques Derrida, maybe, for in his terms ‘Greek-Jew is Jew-Greek’. Hmm, what was that again? I take up this obscure quote only to provide a bridge back into the topic at hand, right or left it matters not; the Greek gods were disdainful of their mortals and to the point of outright hatred, while the Jewish god was merely offended by them: ‘Hey, I try to love you guys, but really, what’s in it for me?’ When Nietzsche suggests that a number of these pre-Christian dynamics held such peoples to be in the ‘correct relationship to their God’, he is reminding us of the crucial difference between the divine and the human, the transcendental and the historical and so on: a God, by definition, cannot have a human interest.
That we also have imagined a different narrative, one in which the divinity actually recasts Himself as a human being, is nothing less than revolutionary. But even now, some two millennia after the facts, we do not own that narrative, preferring to place this new form of being at a similar distance as had been occupied by earlier guises of Godhead. What kind of God, again? And while we do not need to agree, in the least, with any potential implication of Nietzsche’s logically accurate reminder – for one, that the only authentic kind of God would be happiest coming at us from behind, as it were, with all the divine oversight that might be had from such a position – we do need to get a different grip on the one God whose earthly presence shatters the whole edifice of what could constitute divinity at all, West or East. Buddha was a man ascending, Mohammed a prophet divinely inspired, so of the three second-age agrarian world systems, only Jesus was a God who had descended to become one of us, in the flesh. To take a step back even today and contemplate the implications of this version of Godhead gives one pause.
Or at least it should. For the model of more humane, compassionate, concernful, human relations had thus been written. No allegory, no comedy, no tragedy, no satire of itself or of others, it simply told the truth of things and that truth was not at all a divine one, but human through and through. And yet we, who are human and remain so, have almost entirely ignored it. Clearly, perhaps allegorically speaking once again, we are more comfortable being metaphysically sodomized, which in the ‘end’ can only be a plug, excuse me, for the atheists among us. ‘Thank God, finally some people who want to take responsibility for themselves.’, Yahweh mutters sotto voce. Oh yeah, the vernacular, right; maybe its time that we termini di rapporto anale. Or something to that effect. And in keeping with our other literary temporal benchmarks, high time.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as (sometimes witty) fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decadent decades.