The Burden of the God

A year or two ago I had to spend a night with friends in the Cotswolds in England, not far from the ancient town of Cirencester. The house where we stayed was an old one: some late additions had been made during the reign of Elizabeth I, but otherwise it was fourteenth century. It was not a castle, just an old farmhouse set in a tiny green pocket of a valley that looked as though it had been laid out by Peter Rabbit, or perhaps a Hobbit. Those little lanes and hedgerows and rounded green fields, and the soft, textured, yellowish-grey stone of the cottages and manor houses—these stirred up in our imagination lovely pictures of an epoch, long gone, of tranquility and repose, when life moved at a pace other than pell-mell, and people lived in some sort of courteous harmony with their world. We were greeted in the old cobbled courtyard by the lady and brought into the kitchen, where we had to stoop to avoid the herbs hanging from the great wooden rafters. She offered us heavy goblets of cowslip wine that she had made from flowers gathered on the place. For supper she gave us good thick soup from wooden bowls, brown bread, and butter. That night we slept under feather beds, and we woke in the morning to look out through leaded casement windows set in three-foot-thick stone walls at the meadows still white with the early mist.

The ambiguity I am aiming at here is perfectly clear: we have all had some experience or other that raised in our imagination this ambiguity, or at least this odd discrepancy in things—the discrepancy between what looks good and simple and human (the old days), and what we’ve arrived at by means of that movement we are pleased to call “progress.” The word implies, of course, a going ahead, and that implies “to better things” (you don’t go forward to worse things). In any case, we progress from century to century, or from decade to decade, and things get faster and straighter and cleaner; but every once in a while something (an overnight stay in a Cotswold farmhouse, a picture, a poem, a scene, a memory)—something will jog us a bit, and we feel like saying “Hey. Wait. Stop the music. Now what is it, exactly, that we’re doing?”

You may by this time have said to yourself that this article is turning out to be a back-to-Eden plea, the sort of thing you might expect from Wordsworth or D. H. Lawrence, or some romantic; and that that’s always an appealing invitation, but not one, really, that promises anything very helpful to us now.

Well, it’s not a call back to Eden, except in one way, which I’ll get to in a minute. But why can’t we go back to Eden—to simplicity and innocence and purity and spontaneity? Surely Western civilization, and especially American, we are told, has managed to sell its soul for a mess of computers and pollution, if not pottage. Can’t we take up arms—flowers or placards or Molotov cocktails—against this horror? Can’t we begin, via bells and beads and bare feet, to enact and celebrate that Edenic simplicity and innocence, and perhaps change the face of society?

We are told we can, and some millions of people under twenty-five believe in the possibility of this vision. I emphasize the word “possibility,” since I don’t suppose there is a human being, from Hitler on up, whose reveries don’t take him to some such Eden of tranquility. Everyone loves the vision. Nobody likes the imagery of 1984, or of Brave New World—those hells of metallic efficiency and automation and control. So the quarrel, I suppose, would not be between visions: everybody wants Eden. The quarrel is between those who think that Eden is forever lost to our history because of one implacable fact (some people call it the Fall, and all mythology has some such notion), and those who think that by deciding to do things differently we can somehow restore Eden. I suppose there is a third group (and this is where the prophets of the day would put the military-industrial-labor complex, and the big construction and real-estate speculators, and the money men and the politicians) who, though they may share the dream of Eden in their private dreams, find themselves so caught up in the avalanche of civilization that they hardly ever give a passing nod to the idea of stopping to find out what we’re up to.

I am not among those who think that a shift in style of life, or a new imagery of earthiness and innocence, or a new generation of creatures somehow untainted with the pox that infected the rest of the race for the rest of history—I say I am not among those who think that these things promise a real, historical shift, and that we may look for a greening of America if only we will listen to what “these kids” say.

I suspect that that is not the way things are. I suspect that an authentic response to the horrors of our epoch—the size of cities and the cost of living and the population explosion and the shrill crescendo of non-negotiable demands by one group and another and the ecological crisis and the war—includes neither the effort to fly to Eden nor armed revolution.

I believe this because I believe that there is more than mere horror in our epoch. There is a bitter irony at the root of it all. A bitter irony. And it is this, that not only our obviously gross inclinations but also our best efforts contribute to the chaos. Somehow, ironically, by the way we have set about fulfilling the mandate given to us at the beginning of civilization—the mandate to subdue the earth and have dominion over it—we have ended up creating a hell. It wasn’t by embarking upon something obviously grotesque that we ended up with a grotesquery. That horror came about, somehow, as a by-product of our way of doing what we were supposed to do.

For what is the human job on this planet? We, of all earthly creatures, do have a job. Lions and clams and elm trees seem to have been given the happy task of being gloriously themselves. I used to sit watching a tiny Yorkshire terrier that we had while we lived in New York City, and it struck me one day as I watched him drowsing on a cushion of the sofa in the morning sunlight that he was doing the will of God. He was being a Yorkie, and doing what Yorkies are supposed to do. His day involved playing, eating, sleeping, and generally carrying about and embodying that particular form of perfection and glory that we can see only in Yorkshire terriers. That was his job in life.

We men are supposed to do something, and a good share of that something is to have dominion over this planet. But it seems that, in the process of claiming that dominion of setting about doing what we were supposed to do, we somehow botched it. The irony appears when you look, not at the clearly bad things we’ve done, but at what accompanies the good things we’ve done. We seem to have succeeded in making the good items add up to a bad total.

For example, if you come across a tool or a method that allows you to do a job in half the time it has always taken you, you will, of course, start using it. Not to do so would be stupid. You have been dragging loads on sledges for years, and suddenly the man in the next cave comes up with a new device that eliminates two-thirds of the work. You waste no time in making one of these items yourself, and thereupon your town has advanced way beyond the town on the other side of the crag: you have wheels. Work gets done faster, and life is better. This is a good thing.

The only difficulty is that if you leap across a few thousand years and a few thousand such discoveries and inventions, you find your great-great-great-grand-children trying to find somewhere on the planet where they can leave behind their wheels, and everything that wheels have made possible. Whatever it was you made possible for them, it somehow didn’t bring about the repose and joy you thought you’d gained. By making every single individual task easier (planting, reaping, cooking, traveling, communicating), you somehow, ironically, made the whole picture more terrifying. You raised visions of a whole earth cemented over, its rivers vomiting sludge and trash into a choked sea, its air opaque with smoke and gas, its mountain ranges gutted and its wells leeched dry, its fish drowned in oil slicks and its trees poisoned and wilting, and its neurotic citizens sitting in thousand-mile traffic jams.

Five years ago we would have had the luxury of chuckling at this description of things. Now we don’t, since we see ourselves hurrying headlong toward that state of affairs. We will number, they tell us, eight billion souls in a few more decades. It frightens us, so we begin to take measures to counteract it; but we end up with more frightening pictures than ever.

What, for instance, do we do about the population explosion—which is itself the direct product, let’s face it, of our legitimate effort to fulfill our human task of claiming dominion over the planet? We have assailed disease after disease, thus drastically reducing the infant mortality rate and raising life expectancy. Each one of those achievements is wonderful: certainly Jonas Salk wasn’t doing wrong when he developed his vaccine. (My son is alive now because the hospital knew how to destroy the thing that a few years ago would have destroyed him.) The sum total of those good achievements amounts to a terror, however—an increase of our numbers that promises a pushing, heaving struggle for elbow room on this globe that will make the worst wars in history look like pat-a-cake.

So now we turn to that problem with our knowledge, skill, and good intentions, and we get a cover story in Time magazine, treating as sober realities what Aldous Huxley and George Orwell fancied not too long ago as futuristic nightmares!—the calculated, determinative, test-tube manipulation of human existence from conception to death (and beyond: they’re thinking of freezing us instead of burying or burning us now, so that we can be resuscitated when they find out what it is that makes us die, and get a vaccine for that; religious people have had a way of thinking that that particular vaccine won’t show up in laboratories—it comes from the veins of God).

Well, it was all very enchanting. Enchanting, we say: why enchanting? That has to do with magic, but the goodwoman there was neither a fairy nor a witch. The only brew she stirred was that good soup, and some thick oatmeal she gave us for breakfast—all covered with heavy cream, of course. What, then, was the spell that seemed to be at work there?

Surely it was something like the spells you get in old tales: we were somehow spirited away from our ordinary world into another world—one that appeared to be free from the plagues that curse our own world, and that took us back somewhere—to some remote past where things were “better.”

Now I know this is fanciful. I know perfectly well that I could have been seized with appendicitis that night and have had to be rushed to a hospital, at the risk of a smash-up on the road, and that the faster the car, the straighter the road, and the more gleaming the hospital, the happier I would have been.

But we can’t have it both ways. We can’t have wooden bowls and quiet, winding lanes and the creak of wagon wheels, and at the same time speed, sterility, and efficiency. Our world has to be one or the other, it seems. We’ve got to have things either old and simple and quaint (and hence inconvenient) or new and complicated and metallic (and hence horrifying). All the plastic and stainless steel and concrete has been added, surely, to make life better, and easier, and more human.

Wherever we look, we see the irony: that the good and necessary fruits of our labors—our God-commanded labors, if you like—are somehow botched, and tainted with doom, and that what we call progress may be hurrying us into a howling nightmare. Do we really, in the long view, want to split atoms? We get not only Hiroshima but atomic waste to cope with. Do we really, in the long view, want another six lanes of concrete along the Schuylkill or the Hudson? Do we really want to get to Paris in forty-five minutes, sonic boom and all? Do we really want every single hillside and meadow in Westchester County bulldozed into used-car lots, trailer parks, and McDonald’s stands (I happen to like McDonald’s hamburgers)?

Our efforts at power, speed, and convenience seem to go askew somewhere. Even our efforts to look inside ourselves seem touched with rottenness. Has the rise of behavioral sciences contributed to the equanimity of the race? Has the supposed knowledge of the deeps inside ourselves made us more or less frightened? Were the citizens of twelfth-century London more or less able to cope than their children of twentieth-century Philadelphia?

This is all very bleak. Shall we, then, opt out of it all in sheer terror or disgust? No. No reflective person, and certainly no one who takes the Judeo-Christian view seriously, can take quite that attitude about history and human existence. There is more to be said than “alas.” But I am not about to offer either the onward-and-upward view that sees the City of God just beyond the next round of legislation and reform, or the cop-out view that says, “Well, since there’s no hope, we can pretend human history and existence is unreal.”

There is an old notion, however, about the origin of this tragic irony in things, and a view that grasps the human situation in that light and proceeds from there, rejecting on the one hand the utopian nonsense that holds center stage at the moment, and on the other, the defeatist cop-out that well-intentioned religious minds sometimes fly to.

It goes something like this (and this is where we must go back to Eden and look at what happened in that old account): In that lovely paradise, we (let us read “we” for “Adam”) rashly shouldered a burden we ought never to have picked up. It was a burden too heavy for human backs to bear. It was the burden of the god. It was called the knowledge of good and evil.

Presumably the knowledge particularly appropriate for our species in the design of things is a knowledge of good. I do not, alas, understand the state of innocence, so I cannot try to explain just what our outlook and our relationship with our world was like in that state of affairs. But whatever it was, we imagine that there was a lovely harmony between man and the earth. We were certainly free—that’s one thing. It was, of course, a freedom that is terribly difficult for the twentieth-century mind to grasp, since it did not mean “self-determination,” or “lib,” or an absence of rules. It involved responsibility and submission to certain strictures. There was a hierarchy of being, and our particular place was here, with such and such a kind of knowledge appropriate to this level of things. (There were seraphim, with another kind of knowledge, and archangels, and so on, and they didn’t have and weren’t supposed to have exactly what we had. They weren’t men.)

In any case, we thought differently, and reached out for a foothold higher up. Surely, if there’s a fuller kind of knowledge, we deserve to experience it, we thought. We can handle it.

Alas. This inclination is what the old poets used to call hubris, and it is what sent all the tragic heroes crashing down. It was the effort to muscle one’s way up the scale to what looks like a freer, more privileged, more powerful place. Presumably it would be hubris for a clam to want to be a Great Dane, or a lizard to be an eagle, or Macbeth to be king. And for a man to want to be a god. You get what goes along with that higher station, and it turns out to be more than you can control. It doesn’t work. The clam finds that Great Dane-ness is too much—it runs away with him. The result is chaos.

This ancient account, it seems to me, suggests that, for whatever reasons, the kind of knowledge we reached out for in Eden was too much for us. It was like Great Dane-ness for a clam. It was appropriate for higher orders of being than we are, and it ran away with us.

We do not know what the history of civilization would have looked like if that primeval tragedy had not occurred. But we do know what it looks like now that the tragedy has occurred.

It is perhaps one way of understanding what that heady and interdicted “knowledge of good and evil” was, and one way of understanding our own resulting situation, if we say that at that point we shouldered the burden of a knowledge too keen for ourselves—a knowledge that could probe so far into things, and open up such vistas of discovery for us, that we, not being gods and hence lacking both the wisdom and the authority to control it all (remember the clam and the Great Dane), found ourselves whirled and dragged along by our knowledge rather than controlling it. And that is a great evil. It opened up possibilities of power and ecstasy, and it is the scramble for power and ecstasy that has engendered all cupidity and cruelty and hatred.

So once again we seem to have come to a point where we might well say, “Right. Fie on history. Fie on human existence,” and where we are left either with despair or with some gnostic cop-out.

But (to borrow from a well-known contemporary thinker) we must not immanentize the eschaton.

The prevailing political and philosophical manifestation of that error is to be seen in the ineffable liberal (and third-world) inclination to insist, in spite of all, that we can, given a teeny bit more patience and pulling together, immanentize that lovely classless, pluralistic, amiable eschaton. There is also an antiphonal variation of the same error to which the conservative (and certainly the religious) mind finds itself inclining, if only in its reveries. It is the wish to immanentize the eschaton by rejecting the validity of human history and existence, and by merely looking for Apocalypse. Repeat “merely,” since it is part and parcel of the view that takes the imagery of Eden and the Fall seriously to take the imagery of Apocalypse seriously. But we do not have the luxury of turning in our keys and sitting about clucking and tut-tutting about how awful everything is. There is more to do than that. We must live and participate in our own epoch.

But any orthodox Christian is, I should think, in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis his own epoch. On the one hand, he probably harbors deep skepticism about the ultimate efficacy of human efforts to solve human problems (and hence cannot but hear most of what goes on in public dialogue as nonsense); but on the other, because his faith is a historical faith, anchored in real events and processes in history, and above all because the God he affirms is a God who appeared in our history and in our flesh, he cannot, no matter how bleak and chaotic things seem to be, deny the validity of history. And, since history is made up of human events and enterprises, it is assumed that one will find his vocation in some relation to those events and enterprises.

His race—and hence he himself—has taken up the burden of the god. There is no redoing that. Nostalgia for a lost perfection, anger at the poor job we have made of history—these attitudes are hardly biblical. Redemption itself—that whole great glorious scheme whereby all things are made new—was unfolded in our history, and will culminate our history. Because of that unfolding, in the Law, the Prophets, the Incarnation, and the Apocalypse, a Christian sees history as invested with literally infinite significance.

He accepts, then, the burden of the god; but he does not pretend it is other than a burden.

Thomas Howard is assistant professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has the M.A. from the University of Illinois and the Ph.D. from New York University. He is author of “Christ the Tiger.”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.