The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (14 page)

‘You’ve been misled’, the humble Christian said briskly, ‘by man’s pride. Man is an ingenious creature, it’s true. But that doesn’t give him the right to set himself up and judge questions
of morality for himself, instead of humbly accepting your word.’

‘D’you know,’ God said, a little quizzically, to the humble Christian, ‘you don’t strike me as terribly humble yourself.’

‘I? I’m the only humble person present!’ the humble
Christian
exclaimed. ‘Not’, he added quickly to God, ‘that that’s any reflexion on
you.
You
’ve no call to be humble.’

‘I’ve never much seen that anyone has, actually,’ God replied. ‘Next to faith and hope, humility seems to me the quaintest thing to count as a virtue. If virtue is a sensible concept at all, I’d have thought it much more virtuous to know the plain truth about one’s own value, irrespective of whether it did one credit or not.’

‘My very own creed,’ murmured Voltaire approvingly.

‘Anyway,’ God went on to the humble Christian, ‘I’m
objecting
not to your lack of humility, which doesn’t offend me, since I don’t count humility as a virtue, but to your lack of
consistency
. You say you’re the only humble person present. Yet you’re the only person present who claims he can tell what is and what isn’t the word of God.’

‘It’s not I who tell,’ the humble Christian cried in horror. ‘I’m far too humble to rely on my own judgment. God tells us what his word is.’

‘And what is it?’

‘Obviously, the Bible.’

‘And where does he tell us that the Bible is his word?’

‘In the Bible, obviously.’

‘Then you must’, Gibbon remarked, ‘have already relied on your own judgment to decide that the Bible
was
the word of God before you could decide to rely on the authority of the Bible,
as
the word of God, rather than on your own judgment, in considering the merits of the Bible’s claim to be the word of God.’

‘And in fact’, God added, ‘you don’t trust the authority of the Bible one bit. You rely on your own judgment to decide which passages of the Bible you’ll accept as the word of God. You accept it as verbatim reporting when
Leviticus
says I
commanded
you to love your neighbour. But when
Deuteronomy
names seven neighbouring tribes and reports “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them”, you maintain that humans
made a transcription error.’

‘Well, that
must
be what happened. It stands to reason.’

‘If it’s reason you’re going on,’ said Voltaire, ‘why drag in the Bible?’

‘God has generously given us both the Bible and our
commonsense
,’ the humble Christian said primly, ‘and he means us to use both, like all his gifts to us.’

‘If he means you to use your vermiform appendix’, Voltaire replied, ‘he has failed to make his intentions plain.’

‘His intentions are inscrutable. We do not know what
purpose
he has assigned to the appendix.’

‘It gives employment to surgeons,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘No doubt you will have no difficulty in believing that God made surgery an especially blessed profession from the moment he instituted
circumcision
?’

‘I really can’t’, the humble Christian said with some
irritation
to God, ‘explain this essentially simple matter unless you can keep your terrier from yapping at my heels. I was trying to make it clear that the Bible is to be read in the light of common sense. And anyone with a shred of that can see that God
can’t
have ordered the extermination of seven tribes.’

‘Can’t
?’ queried God. ‘Then you don’t in fact believe I’m omnipotent?’

‘You wouldn’t want to contradict your own nature.’

‘I may have a self-contradictory nature. Can you say I haven’t? Have you fathomed my nature?’

‘We know certain things about your nature’, the humble Christian said staunchly, ‘though we don’t of course know it all. For instance, we know that God is love.’

‘How do you know?’

‘From the Bible.’

‘Then you also know I ordered the extermination of seven tribes.’

‘Even
discounting
the
Bible,’
the humble Christian insisted, becoming a little red in the face as though to discount the Bible cost him some internal physical effort, ‘we know a great deal about your nature. It can be deduced from the fact that you created the world.’

‘If you discount the Bible,’ God said, ‘you don’t know that I created the world. It might just as easily have created itself, as
you apparently believe I did, though the Bible gives you no guidance on that point. Of course, you can always call the world-creating faculty “God”, just as you could call it
x
, but then you mustn’t pretend that
x
is the same thing as the nasty old person who overshadowed a virgin and gave orders for the extinction of seven tribes. I’m afraid’ (God rose) ‘you haven’t convinced me that that nasty old person doesn’t need
rehabilitating
, and I really must go and see to it.’

‘Are you so frightened’, the humble Christian demanded in a bullying tone, ‘of the power and convincingness of my
arguments
that you daren’t even stay to hear them?’

With a sigh, God sat down again.

‘Now’, the humble Christian said: ‘you are, you agree, the world-creating faculty. We therefore know that your nature consists of love, because creation is an act of love.’

‘I think you confuse it with human reproduction,’ God said, ‘whose creativeness humans often over-estimate. It’s usually when they want to excuse themselves for keeping women in domestic servitude and denying them access to the creative
professions
that people call having babies “creative”. It’s
interesting
but incidental that they usually imply at the same time that women “create” babies without any “creative” assistance from men. But in fact the man and the woman, however much they may love each other, don’t in any way
create
the sperm and the egg. And though it pleases the English language to say that the woman “conceives” the child, she has in fact not the smallest idea what it will be like till she sees it.’

‘Isn’t that just what I told you a moment since?’ the humble Christian cried in exasperation. ‘Our poor human love is but a puny echo of your great loving act of creation.’

‘Its lovingness, I should say,’ said God, ‘was relative to one’s standpoint. Does the lamb think it was loving of me to create the wolf?’

‘You are the Good Shepherd,’ the humble Christian answered piously.

‘It’s been remarked elsewhere’,
3
God said, ‘that that
metaphor
betrays just how cruel and hypocritical you believe me to be. The Good Shepherd is the one who saves the lamb from the wolf, in order that the lamb may presently be sent to the
slaughterhouse and served up as a human’s dinner, to the financial profit of the Good Shepherd.’

‘Pshaw!’ scoffed the humble Christian. ‘Are you trying to convert me to some out-of-date crankiness, like vegetarianism or socialism? Your interpretation is absurd. You shouldn’t take a parable literally.’

‘You’re’, God said mildly, ‘telling me.’

‘I suppose’, the humble Christian said, ‘you imagine you’re twitting me with the literal interpretation of
Genesis.
You’re so prejudiced against Christians that you haven’t noticed they dropped that ages ago.’

‘Not so
very
many ages ago,’ God murmured, ‘even making allowance for the foreshortening of a thousand ages in my sight. You’ve had about a century of reluctantly accepting evolution, compared with three or four millennia during which you took
Genesis
literally. Still, it would be churlish of me to hold it against you, when you believe that it was I who gave you the misinformation in the first place.’

‘I don’t! You didn’t!
Genesis
is spiritually true.’

‘All good fictions are spiritually true,’ God said, ‘
Genesis
no more than
Treasure
Island
.’

‘Now you’re being frivolous.’

‘By “frivolous” you mean “serious about literature”,’ God said. ‘People usually do. And of course I
am
serious about
literature
. A fictitious character can hardly afford not to be. The only bit of the Bible I’ve ever been able to believe is the bit that makes me out anti-philistine.’

‘But you can’t
seriously
compare an ancient, poetic allegory of the creation with a book for children.’

‘I suspect’, Gibbon remarked to the humble Christian, ‘that, like those who seek to suppress what they call obscene books, you confuse literary value with content. You think
Genesis
must be the more creative book because it’s about creation.’

‘On which theory’, Voltaire added, ‘you must suppose all editions of
Treasure
Island
to be pirated.’

‘
Genesis
’, Gibbon pronounced, ‘is certainly the more
inventive
and fantastical tale. But
Treasure
Island
has undoubtedly the better of it for logical and narrative coherency. An impartial judge of literature would no doubt reckon their merits even. Should you wish, as you seem to wish, to establish the superiority
of one of them, you must have recourse to another kind of scale.’

‘Naturally’, the humble Christian said, ‘I weigh things in a much more serious scale than a literary one: a moral scale. And
Genesis
wins.’

‘You have unconventional morals,’ said Voltaire. ‘To my mind,
Treasure
Island
is plainly an innocent book, since it doesn’t try to deceive anyone into taking it for fact, whereas
Genesis
is guilty of fraud.’

‘Can’t you
see
’, the humble Christian squeaked angrily, ‘that you’re just shewing how ungrateful you are. God, in his loving-kindness, took into account the intellectual level men had reached at the time, and in
Genesis
he gave them spiritual truth in terms they could understand.’

‘You made objections when
I
compared
Genesis
to a book for children,’ God complained. ‘Still, it’s good of you to acquit me of intent to deceive. I’m afraid, however, that you can’t let me off totally. By your theory I’m guilty of continuing to thrust the fairy tale of
Genesis
on you long after you
could
have
understood
the scientific truth. You were capable of understanding an evolutionary theory at least by the first century
B
.
C
., when Lucretius wrote a sketch of one. But I wantonly kept you in the dark till
A
.
D
. 1859.’

‘If’, the historian said to God in a helpful though drowsy voice, ‘you should require any further assistance with dates, apply to me. Don’t hesitate to ask, even if I should appear to have nodded off.’

The humble Christian gave a brief glance of pity at the historian, whose head had indeed lapsed sideways and whose shoulders were hunched, and then turned back to confront God, to whom he exclaimed scornfully:

‘Lucretius!’

‘A great poet,’ God murmured.

‘Perhaps, if you judge by merely poetic standards. But devoid of spiritual insight and profundity. Why, he was an atheist – and not even a consistent one. His tract on atheism begins with an invocation to the goddess Venus.’

‘The rigorous suppression of the feminine in me’, God said, giving a shake to his long, rather nightdressy robe, ‘is one of the aspects of the Judaeo-Christian tyranny that I find most irksome. You puritan, philistine Christians destroyed the culture
of antiquity, suppressed Lucretius’s great poem, lost command of the Latin Lucretius wrote, for which you substituted the jingles and jog-trots of church Latin, and eventually got
yourselves
into such a dark age of pious illiteracy that a Christian polemicist, in the course of delivering a sermon against the pagan divinities, could actually suppose that Venus was male. Lucretius must have shaken in his tomb with fury. To say
nothing
of what Sappho did in hers when her devotion to Venus was inadvertently rendered heterosexual. I suppose the ignorant Christian assumed (a) that
Venus,
since it ends in -
us
, must be a second-declension noun like
dominus
4
and (b) that any
important
deity, albeit pagan,
must
be male.’

‘No doubt’, the humble Christian said saccharinely, ‘the poor man knew no better. You shouldn’t get so angry with him. I’m sure he was a good, humble man, doing his best.’

‘He was arrogant enough to make assumptions both
ungrammatical
and sex-prejudiced. In fact he reminds me distinctly of you.’

‘Of
me
?’ the humble Christian demanded in fury.

‘How contemptuously you spoke of “the pagan goddess Venus”. The world is cluttered with bits of mythology
purporting
to represent the divine, and you claim you can pick out the one that’s correct and, on the strength of its authority, dismiss all the others.’

‘That’s just where you’re wrong’, the humble Christian answered warmly, ‘and out-of-date. Modern practice isn’t a bit like that. We hear very little these days of “the heathen in his blindness”, and we scarcely send out missionaries at all. I don’t in the least “dismiss” other religions. Everyone must find his own way to God. I respect the divine in all its forms.’

‘Look,’ God said, becoming a thin, unbending human figure with the curly-horned head of a ram.

‘So what?’ asked the humble Christian.

(‘The hieroglyph reads,’ Voltaire whispered to Gibbon, ‘“God is a supporter of Derby County Football Club” – a revelation I
find as hard to believe as any other.’)

The ram-headed figure changed into a mummified pygmy.

‘Ptah!’ said the humble Christian. ‘I don’t think that’s
particularly
funny.’

‘You weren’t meant to,’ God said, changing back into the form his interlocutors had become used to (that of a
respectable
, tallish, rather Roman-Senatorial man with a white beard).