To a friend, a letter on God

Dear Abel,

Whenever we meet we speak of God. I set the tone for our conversations a long time ago by pronouncing myself an atheist, but what an odd sort of atheist you must have found me. I certainly reject the label "spiritual", which I take to be as rotten as the cursed fig tree, but then you must find it odd (perhaps even awkward) how often God and theology slivers into the conversation. What is wrong with me? You describe yourself as an atheist as well, but I do think, my friend, that we are worlds apart. For while you look ceaselessly for answers in Plato and Cicero while at the same time fearing they might be denounced by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, that is a dilemma that never really occurred to me. I think you heard me mock the new atheists for the first time soon after we met, but it was only recently that you convinced me to watch them in your presence so I could give you my opinion. I did so, and you looked in awe as I accepted every single one of their arguments against religion, sometimes going even further in that virulence, while I nevertheless kept affirming that theirs were quite childish, not to say pedestrian reasons to become an atheist. As an atheist, I told you, I agreed with everything they said. But were I religious I would agree as well, and I very much hoped that my religious friends would agree with that as well — barbarism savagery and bigotry have no place anywhere. I repeated that those arguments seemed frivolous, utilitarian in the base sense of the word, so you very rightly demanded to know why. If my atheism had nothing to do with the number of deaths caused by religious fanaticism, by the thought-control and by indoctrination, whence did it come?

As I promised you then, I am writing this so I can try to answer that question. It is a very foolish lover who purports to give reason of the heart's meanders, so you will forgive me in advance for failing to do so. It has been a long travel, you see, to which books add just as much as chancing upon clears in the forest and gaining an epiphany of the dread god Pan. My atheism, contrary to what Dawkins suggests, does not consist of a scheme of subtraction, whereupon all gods would be subtracted, and then some, and then just the last one. Rather my atheism is of a very polytheistic nature, for I do feel the gods nearby. Only that gives me no relief. To the Greeks as well, security was not granted by the gods but by the grand order of the cosmos. The gods, if anything, were a part of that cosmos, but it is far more likely that they contributed much more to that disorder and uncertainty of human life, which we today owe and attribute to atheism, than they did to giving human souls tranquility.

But I did not come here to talk of polytheism. The gods give me strength and weakness, but they do not hold my hand. That province pertains solely to the Living God. But how could I ever explain to you that it has nothing to do with epistemology? How it bores me — quantum me tædet — when I start hearing arguments for and against the existence of God! Because for me one thing is self-evident. God exists. But by that fact no link is signified connecting me to Him. We remain as distant two people who've never met, which is the same as not existing, and hence I call myself an atheist. For that gap to be bridged both have to accept, unconditionally, the desire of the other. What Hitchens et al leave out of the picture is how much religion is a matter of love. I do not mean that Plotinian overflow, that benevolence — God is anything but benevolent —, but rather that erotic pulse which often would be better described as rape. This the Greeks mythologists knew, this the allegorists betrayed — it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, the God who wants to take you for Himself. This Jeremiah knew, this he resented. I resent it as well. I resent His weapons of overbearing power: literature and landscapes alike try to drive me to Him, but when they do I treat them in the same way as when I see supposed friends who try to con or cheat you, and I will not have it.

Love and Hate guide the lover, but the loved is not without his guiles. In faith, and this Kazantzakis taught me best, the hardest thing is to discern which one is which. Is God the lover or the loved? Does God want my faith, or do I want to believe? We dance, of course. I taunt Him and tease Him with my hesitant Yes, He flirts and He holds me against Himself with poems, with films, and with, oh Lord, with music, that most cunning of all His shieldmaidens. Simone Weil supposedly converted upon reading a poem called Love. (I've always avoided reading it, my eyes dodge the page where it will appear.) One of my greatest teachers argued with no small persuasive power that Beethoven's Arietta proved the existence of God. That is not a rational argument, it is a fallacy, and it is good that we refuse to be persuaded by it.

It is not that I wouldn't like God to hold me in His arms. It is just that the promises he makes are a lover's promises, sweet and tender, and perhaps even He Himself would like to believe in them, but that does not make them true. If I would fall on my knees and believe in your name, my Lord Hakodesh, would the world be once again held in its place? Would you draw the chains to hold again the Horizon of Heaven and Hell in its place? You can promise me that, and you do promise me that, but you do know, Adonai, that standing underneath the starry sky not even You can promise me that. A Lover's words, in rapida scribere oportet aqua, that Heraclitean rag.

To take God at His word, I would have to believe the impossible. This would put me off-balance. I present Him with my kind of impossibility: if You would persuade me to love you, I would believe the impossible. We are a strange couple. Epistemology has as much a role to play in it as when the fool Niccolò Niccolì criticizes Dante for not sticking to historical fact. We read Anselm when you stayed in my house in Thessaloniki, you were visibly excited when I told you that the ontological proof of the existence of God remained unshakeable until Kant, and even after the man there was a possibility that it might still be rescued. Your thirst for your God was endearing to me. You wanted to know how it worked, and once again you were surprised when I told you that even if if were some unassailable logic, still it wouldn't be put me down a single notch, that my atheism was not for debate. I think that was when I promised you that I would write this. I know it is not what you were expecting, but I hope it is at least satisfactory. One way or another you're bound to understand why is it we were talking on different spheres altogether. Maybe next time we meet we can continue from here.

Hope to see you soon,

M.