The Meaning of God

 In its bewildering way paradox can make more sense than something set down plainly.  God may give meaning to our lives without our being able to give meaning to God.   Let me entertain the vertiginous thought that the meaning of God is the method of His verification namely worship.

“Standing up, Damaris realized that interpretations nearly always are wrong; interpretations in the nature of things being peculiarly personal and limited. The act was personal but infinite, the reasoned meaning was personal and finite. Interpretation of infinity by the finite was pretty certain to be wrong. The thought threw a light on her occupation with philosophies. Philosophy to Plato, to Abelard, to St. Thomas, was an act—the love of wisdom; to her——

But all that was to come. Love or wisdom, her act awaited her. She ran lightly down the stairs.”

(from <i>The Place of the Lion</i> by Charles Williams)

Graham Greene's answers to Prayer in The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory

In a comment on my previous post John Doyle wrote of an answer to fervent prayer that brought a difficult situation with it. I have had experience like that myself so I have no difficulty in accepting the truth of what he says laying aside the sceptical post hoc propter hoc with a little smile. Graham Greene was a man who believed in prayer and who writes about it convincingly. I’m thinking here of two books in particular, The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair. Excellent recollective reading at this time when death seems to want to crash our party, approaching with the friendly clink of his carry out. In the latter book Bendrix is saved it would seem by the prayer of his lover who offered to leave him and give herself to God in exchange for his life. God in Greene’s book is a literalist who highlights the passage in the Gospel ‘knock and it shall be opened unto you’ by having the front door blasted off its hinges on top of Bendrix and saving him from the falling rubble. During the Blitz of course. Generally in Greene’s books God is a near remote figure who cannot comment on individual cases and simultaneously has a sharp elbow.

It’s a novel of stalking with Bendrix setting a private detective after Sarah to find if she has a new lover after she abandons him. The detective and his boy are splendidly comic pathetic in the English manner. Weather as the not often gentle rain is a feature of this book as it is in ‘The Power’ which runs with the immediate sweat of Mexican jungle. Humidity, humility and a priest on the run clinging to his duty to the end. He has prayed that he will sacrifice his own last confession and communion and go to hell but that his daughter should be saved from the evil which he sees nascent in her. Does he get his wish? This is Greeneland so you won’t be surprised. Mr. Tench the dentist marooned in Mexico by the falling peso is another comic turn from a member of the chorus. There’s a Marxist policeman, an acolyte of Satan, who trails the Padre.

These are some of his best books which haven’t dated at all. He was never much better than this which sound depreciative but is not given the high standard of his work.

Primordial Instruction

Looking around the Oriel Senior Common Room Dr. Whately notes:

They are not only, in general; very ugly and ill-made, but, in the structure of their limbs, and especially in the head and face, they approach considerably to animals of the ape tribe; and the countenance is usually expressive of a mixture of stupidity, ferocity, and something of suspiciousness and low cunning.

Actually he is in fact referring to uncivilised natives, savages and others who have degenerated from an original state in which the elements of gracious living were given by God in a sort of revelation. This must be the case because those races do not improve or invent anything so they could not have started out that way. Europeans improved after that antedeluvian donation, they have regressed and are now on the way out.

Each one of us Europeans, whether Christian, Deist, or Atheist, is actually a portion of a standing monument of a former communication to mankind from some superhuman Being. That Man could not have made himself, is often appealed to as a proof of the agency of a divine Creator and that mankind could not, in the first instance, have civilised themselves, is a proof of the same kind, and of precisely equal strength, of the agency of a divine Instructor.

One thinks of Von Daniken. These speculations are taken from a lecture On the Origin of Civilisation published in Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews (1860) while he was Archbishop of Dublin. He cites Humboldt in his lecture and it is clear that at that time good, intelligent and apparently well-informed people could hold views which to us are reprehensible. However it’s arguable that expressing revulsion is mere fatuous meliorism in these latter days when various horrors are welcomed as advances.