OREM — A mother loses everything. A suffering god defies the taunts of Furies. Brother stands against brother — with a kiss.
I'm listening to Terryl Givens, a University of Richmond professor of literature and religion, as he recounts some stories in literature where God utterly fails. You can do this sort of thing in literature — it is fiction, after all.
Givens, who is speaking to a group at the seventh annual meeting of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology on March 25, recognizes the value of literature for exploring ideas. Deep ideas — like trying to imagine what is left if God fails.
Christ does appear in these stories, "but it is a Christ who is methodically and excruciatingly shorn of his salvific capacity," Givens says.
I have to admit, sitting in the front row at Givens' presentation, that I am only vaguely familiar with the stories he is using for his illustrations. I also fear that I am completely missing his point. (I am either experiencing self-doubt or self-awareness.) However, the room at Utah Valley University is filled with scholars, philosophers and theologians sitting on the edge of their seats. Givens is in his element.
He talks about how these famous stories are examples for how mankind can still be moral agents without God. Even as the characters stare into the abyss, even as their faith is stripped away, they make moral choices that seem startling.
In one story/poem, "The Ruined Cottage" by William Wordsworth, a mother loses her children and her husband. Her prayers go unanswered. Her hopes torture her. She dies alone in a decaying hut. "The story is a long, harrowing, almost unbearable tale of futility," Givens says. "Dead letters sent to an absent God." The narrator in the poem, confronted by this tale of woe, recognizes the "impotence of grief" — then pronounces a blessing upon the dead sufferer. Without any heavenly support, the blessing is a pure act of human will, Givens says.
The dramatic poem "Prometheus Unbound" by Percy Shelley retells the Greek myth of Prometheus who was tortured by the head god, Jove, for helping humans. Prometheus' liver is eaten each day by an eagle and re-grown each night. He suffers bravely for thousands of years. But then, Jove sends the Furies, who illustrate the futility of suffering by showing Prometheus the life of Jesus. The Furies tell him that, for all Jesus' sacrifice, it did no good and no one appreciates it (remember, this is fiction). Prometheus accepts this devastating assessment, but still, in the end, says to the Furies: "Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; and yet I pity those they torture not." He has admitted defeat, Givens says, yet he pities his tormenters. The Furies are stunned to silence.
In his novel "The Brothers Karamazov," Fyodor Dostoyevsky has the atheist Ivan systematically destroy the faith of his brother Alyosha, a priest. Ivan's logic — centering on whether Alyosha would have created a world with suffering if he had been God — crushes Alyosha's belief in a just God. Ivan tells his brother a parable about a modern-day Jesus who is sentenced to death by a Christian leader. Ivan's parable ends with Jesus kissing his modern captor. Alyosha then kisses his brother Ivan. It is more than an act of defiance. It is an act of faith when there is nothing worthy of faith.
And suddenly, there is Joseph Smith.
All these fictional stories were in the context of creedal Christianity, not restored Christianity. They were written to show that even without God, man is an independent moral force. We may not have the power to stop our plunge over Niagara Falls, Givens says, "but we can laugh all the way down if we choose." But Joseph Smith taught something extraordinary that turns these tales upside down again.
"God, angels and men are all of one species," Givens quotes Elder Parley P. Pratt, who was summarizing Joseph Smith's teachings. Truman Madsen, although not mentioned, wrote in his book, "Eternal Man," about how this is an utterly mind-shattering idea: People are eternal beings.
For most religions, however, there is an insurmountable gap between mankind and God. God is completely and totally other. The stories, however, fictionally knock that God down and leave man still standing in some way.
"Ironically," Givens says, "it is only in contemplating the absence of God from the universe that they discovered the divine in man."
"In the absence of God, when facing the failure of the transcendent, the human will is capable of reconstituting a meaningful universe," Givens says. "But what Joseph Smith taught is that God's divinity is similarly constituted. Love is not just his nature, it is his origin."
It seems that the stories do not eliminate the need for God; they merely demonstrate the collapse of the transcendent, the collapse of the insurmountable gap — something that Joseph Smith taught all along. The similarity and kinship with God and mankind's ability to become like him is starkly shown.
"God's pain is as infinite as his love," Givens says. God shows himself to be the most divine at the moment of his greatest suffering.
This doesn't seem a surprise to Mormons: these moral stabs of love and indomitable will against the abyss of suffering. Instead, it seems as natural as a baby learning from his parents how to walk. Whose children are we anyway?
"The divine nature of man and the divine nature of God are shown to be the same," Givens says. "It is the will to love and the will to suffer which are also the same."
"This is a rhetoric that is instantly recognizable across the spectrum of Christianity: There is something divine in us and it has to do with love. What I'm trying to say is 'No! Really, this is what makes God God,'" Givens says. It isn't that God's love is beyond us or transcendent. "It's God as an independent agent willing to love someone. And if we are the same species as God, we can do the same thing."
"Joseph Smith's cosmology gives us a way of sacrificing transcendence without the loss of absolute meaning," Givens says. "And I don't think we fully appreciate its power."
I leave Givens' presentation with the unsettling feeling that I just heard something profound — but something that may have been just out of my reach. I worry about how I can write about it. I'm filled with self-doubt. It is as if the Furies gather around me to tell me it can't be done.
But I write it anyway.