The author's introduction
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
A Call to Becoming Human
“Can a man be a saint without God? That is the only problem I know of today.” These are the words of Jean Tarrou in Camus’s novel La Peste, published in the aftermath of the Second World War (1947). Tarrou’s question seemed meaningful in a world that had not yet abandoned the “grand narratives” – those comprehensive narratives that purport to explain the world, history, and human life. His question strikes, in fact, at the heart of one such “grand narrative”: Marxism and its moral foundation.
“A man who wants to be a saint must struggle to the end, without hope of success,” believes the central character of La Peste, Dr. Bernard Rieux. For him, holiness is a hopeless resistance to suffering, illness, and death – a resistance that does not seek to explain itself through some comprehensive theory. For him, such resistance is in fact fidelity to humanity itself. But are not Rieux’s struggle and his resistance meaningless unless they are, in some sense, a cry addressed precisely to the God who is the “creator of heaven and earth”? Is Dr. Rieux capable of saying what this humanity actually is? He simply resisted and defied, apparently believing that resistance and defiance are what most profoundly define humanity itself. Why? He did not know himself.
Whatever the case, Camus seems to have anticipated, in some way, what Jean-François Lyotard would bring to light toward the end of the 1970s. In his famous book La Condition postmoderne (1979), Lyotard argued that postmodernity is characterized by an incredulity toward “grand narratives” (metanarratives). Indeed—if we look more closely, we will see that, from the 1970s onward, or perhaps somewhat earlier, we began to be inundated with stories about ordinary people, unknown women, small nations. Autobiographical writings, diary prose, memoirs, short stories, and novels began to proliferate, pointing to the relativity of truth, identity, and knowledge. Writers increasingly began to write about writing itself, about the impossibility of mastering language. Literature became its own subject. Irony and parody began to take hold of it. But characters like Dr. Rieux also disappeared. Defiant people who resisted suffering, illness, and death at all costs. Suddenly everything – history, knowledge, truth, literature itself, even humanity – became a specter. And that specter – like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – led us into madness. Before our eyes there began to appear worlds increasingly resembling those imagined by the screenwriters of science-fiction films at the end of the 1960s: worlds of apes, extraterrestrial forms of life, spaceships, interstellar journeys, hallucinatory journeys beyond infinity, robots, cyborgs, mutants, supercomputers. And, like mushrooms after the rain, all sorts of visions of “terrible places” began to spring up – dystopias.
The postmodernity I have sketched here is, of course, merely a kind of rough sketch itself. Blunt outlines that reveal and conceal at the same time. What seems to emerge within those outlines is the question: can there be a human being without God? I believe that this question—today, and not only today—is the only question that truly matters, rather than the question of whether one can be a saint without God.
And yet—again, as far as I can see, which may not be saying much—this question does not presuppose (although it does not exclude) primarily the God of religion or the God of philosophy (if, indeed, these are two different gods). Rather, at least to begin with, it presupposes the word itself: “God”—a word of which one of Buber’s older interlocutors once remarked that it had been so misused, sullied, and desecrated that at times it seemed to him almost like blasphemy. Buber replied that it was indeed the most burdened of all human words, that no other word had been so defiled, so torn apart, so sullied. But, Buber insisted, we must not simply discard the word, because it is also the word that carries within itself the human experience of freedom, mercy, love, and justice. I would add that it also carries the experience of God’s silence. It carries the experience of the ineffable. Of muteness.
Where, in language, does the need for the word “God” arise at all? Do we understand what we are doing when we say “God”? The word is not merely—as it is so often used—a kind of label attached to that which eludes our ordinary, descriptive use of language, attached to the enigma of life. Even in Aquinas’s “ways” (quinque viae), the issue is precisely this: “God” is not simply a hypothesis introduced in order to fill a gap in our knowledge. It is a word that arises at the boundary of our attempt to understand the very structure of contingency and intelligibility.
Rowan Williams argues that it follows from this that, when we reach the limits of ordinary descriptive language, we should not pretend that we have discovered yet another object that can be described according to the same categories. What is required then is a kind of leap, or transition—according to Williams, into a new linguistic register. Thus the word “God” is at once non-referential and referential. It does not refer to anything known, to a being. It refers to non-being, to what at first appears to be a kind of nothingness (nihil). It is a rupture within language, the very essence of language, its openness. And precisely this linguistic openness gives us grounds to search for the ultimate source and horizon of that openness, for that which appears to us as nothing—nihil. But we find it difficult, like Shakespeare’s Othello, to accept what we know when doing so requires of us a comprehensive transformation. Although Othello knew enough, he could not accept what he knew. And so it is with us: although the existence of the word “God”—or language itself—points us toward a kind of nihil, we lack the strength to accept it. We therefore resist this nothingness with all our might, attaching all sorts of meanings to the word “God” in order somehow to conceal our view of the abyss, of nothingness, of death. We drown ourselves in noise so as somehow to escape the thunderous silence of that which appears to us as nothing, the voiceless abyss. Or, at best—like Dr. Rieux—we defiantly resist what appears to us as nothingness.
Once the question can one be human without “God”? had appeared before my eyes, the words of perhaps the only character in Camus’s La Peste who undergoes a transformation—the priest Father Paneloux—began to resound within me:
“Brothers, the time has come. We must believe everything or deny everything! […] Religion in a time of plague cannot be an everyday religion.”
But what kind of religion is one that is not “everyday”? What is it that we must believe? And what, after all, is faith? When Tarrou asked Dr. Rieux, “Do you believe in God, Doctor?”, he replied:
“No, but what does that mean? I am in the dark and I am trying to see clearly. I stopped believing long ago that this was original.”
The assertion (“No!”), the question (“What does that mean?”), and the answer (“I am in the dark and I am trying to see clearly”) shook me deeply. I sensed something profoundly human in them. A defiance of “everyday religion,” of the “grand narratives” with which we so readily try to illuminate the darkness surrounding us; a defiance of using the word “God” to tame language, to deafen ourselves, in fact, to the possible utterance, call, challenge that comes from that nothingness. And yet, alongside my admiration, I also sensed the meaninglessness of Rieux’s defiance. I sensed almost a kind of arrogance in his fidelity to humanity, something demonic in his holiness. And when I myself was on the verge of despair, I read stories in which I found answers to questions such as: What kind of religion is one that is not “everyday”? What is it that we must believe? And what, after all, is faith? Answers that not only satisfied my mind but also kindled a fire in my heart.
Reading the biblical stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I encountered portrayals of people whose faith was original—people who penetrated into the heart of the unacceptable, into the nihil, in order to make a choice. I encountered portrayals of people who endured the night and lived to see the dawn; people who resisted fear and looked into what appeared to be nothing; people who dared to listen, to hear whether some voice might be coming from unfathomable and unknown depths or heights, however terrifying that voice might be. I encountered people who did not use the word “God” as a patch over what they could not understand, but who, unlike Othello, had the courage to accept what that very word was telling them. People who had the courage to open their ears to a new “linguistic register,” to a call to dare to step further, to step out of the webs of words into which they had been cast, to take a step into the unknown. I encountered portrayals of people who differed fundamentally from Prometheus, Sisyphus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Jean Tarrou, Bernard Rieux, and so many other heroes, ancient and modern.
In the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and, of course, in the portrayal of their most famous descendant, Jesus of Nazareth—I saw that the nothingness to which the word “God” refers is not mere nothingness, but kenosis—emptying, self-emptying—within God himself. I saw that this nothingness is death itself in God—which is, in fact, life. I saw a God who is not the source of metaphysical universals, not a patch applied to the enigma of life, but the God of historical experience—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A God who is for those who have trusted in him, and is not for those who have turned a deaf ear to his call. A God who is and is not. A God who speaks and is silent. A kenotic God—a God who empties himself and thereby creates a space for human beings and their history. A God who dies. A God who calls humanity, who calls faith.
The God of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob told their famous descendant—Moses—that his name was Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, which the descendants of the patriarchs, immersed in ancient Greek culture, came to understand as “I am who I am” (Greek: egō eimi ho ōn). In this way, they—or perhaps their successors—somehow identified the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the God of the philosophers: the unmoved mover, thought thinking itself, actus purus. The descendants of the patriarchs who, in one way or another, resisted Greek culture understood God’s name approximately as follows: “I will be what I will be.” By this they did not intend to assert some kind of divine arbitrariness or contingency, but rather his faithfulness to the covenant and to his promises, his presence, his nearness. This, in turn, required a faith that was not merely an acceptance of “grand narratives,” of metaphysical systems, of a “God” who was nothing more than a patch over a rupture in language. It required a faith that was neither, like Plato’s, merely a kind of opinion (doxa), nor Kant’s “rational faith” (Vernunftglaube), nor “blind faith”—a faith that rejects reason and is afraid to question. It required a kind of heroism, an act of stepping out, a response to words that are calls. Words that are calls. Words that call us out. Words that emerge from that nihil to which the word “God” points, but which—as the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob show us—is not mere nothingness.
In the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I did not merely see people whose faith was original; I myself also heard a word: a call to becoming human. What else, then, was left for me to do—what else but take up the work of the scriptor and hasten to begin recording the accounts of the “ancients,” the ancient biblical writers? I therefore sought to draw from the great treasury, from what the ancient writers of old had written, convinced that the words I was trying to transmit were not merely names, but words that call us out. Words that are not merely portrayals of this or that kind of person, of their more or less interesting fates, but a call to becoming human, to a holy defiance of evil and suffering, to faith.