By Ron Rosenbaum

January 21, 2007 | 7:00 p.m

I’m beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art. A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life’s work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself. He told The Times, for instance, “I may last or I may not last … part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment.” It’s Norman Mailer playing Woody Allen, who has also adopted this aw-shucks “my work doesn’t amount to much, etc.” strategy. But in Mr. Mailer’s case, I have a feeling that he felt someone would step forward and respond to this low-balling by saying, “Yes, but …. ” Yes, maybe nobody could live up to the kind of inflated notion he once had that he would “change the consciousness of [his] times” with his prose, that he’d run for President, win the Nobel Prize (remember the opening of The Prisoner of Sex, in which he’s waiting for the phone call from Stockholm?). But look what he has achieved: Even if you entirely set aside all the novels, he’s changed the face of American prose--certainly American nonfiction--with Armies of the Night (which, you might recall, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award). He wrote the closest thing to an American prose epic in The Executioner’s Song (another Pulitzer); he broke ground for every memoirist who’s put pen to paper since Advertisements for Myself. He transformed political reportage with his classic account of the J.F.K. nomination in L.A., “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” He made it possible to write about two very big things in a way they’d never been written about before in the first person: Sex and Ideas. So, since I’m not seeing any of my betters step forward and say the requisite “yes, but … ” O.K., I’ll volunteer. Big “yes,” to Mailer’s achievements especially for finding a way--both brilliant and comic--in Armies of the Night to write about the personal and the political, the personal and the metaphysical, the personal and the ideological, and even the personal and the theological. Especially the theological, because it’s my contention that the thing people miss most about Mr. Mailer is the theological aspect of his work, the vision of God and the Devil, the vision of theodicy, the problem of evil (my favorite subject) that runs through everything he writes, sometimes to its detriment (at times, I felt he was ventriloquizing theological speculation into his representation of Gary Gilmore’s stream of consciousness). Theological speculation with an exciting, heretical sense of sin--an acutely serious awareness of the consequences of his own sins--of the stakes in those moments of decision we all have to face, the ones that involve love, death and sacrifice. (And, by the way, his most underrated book, the one about the moon launch, Of a Fire on the Moon, said more profound and prophetic things about man and space, technology and Mystery than anything else in the past three decades.) I’d been thinking of Mr. Mailer even before the new book, because the good people at the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago have asked me, as part of my brief “Distinguished Visitor” stint this spring, to make some remarks about “The Journalism of Ideas,” and you can’t--well, I can’t--talk about J.O.I., let’s call it, without talking about what Norman Mailer made possible. I’ve always been fond of the title of the late Anatole Broyard’s memoir of coming to the Village in the 40’s and plunging into the literary life of his time: When Kafka Was the Rage. When I came to the Village at the tail end of the 60’s, Mailer was the rage. I’d already been turned on to his work in college, when I’d read the original 1967 Harper’s magazine version of Armies of the Night, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of nonfiction prose. (In that book, he manages to create a character--himself--who partakes of both Falstaff and Hamlet; no mean trick). And then, after I lucked out and found myself with a staff writer’s job at The Village Voice (a paper Mr. Mailer co-founded and named) and a contributing editor post at Harold Hayes’ Esquire (where Mailer had published “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”), he certainly was the rage to me. Not the only one: The contemporary nonfiction world seemed filled with people who were doing things nobody had done before, from Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Truman Capote, to unique eccentric geniuses like Terry Southern, Paul Krassner and Hunter Thompson. And, in the daily papers, a miracle three times a week: Murray Kempton! But what appealed to me about Norman Mailer is that he managed to validate, turn into a unique art, the fusion of memoir and metaphysics, J.O.I.--and to do it with joy, with the joy of a comic novelist, to have gleeful fun with the storytelling (the aspect of Mr. Mailer’s work even more overlooked than the theological is the fact that he can be very, very funny, often at his own expense, and yet manage to be deeply thought-provoking as well). When I was briefly attempting to teach seminars on “literary journalism” (a term I had problems with, preferring J.O.I.) at Columbia’s journalism school, I felt that I could at least accomplish something if I convinced my students to read Armies of the Night. It’s one of those books that holds up every time I reread it, often for different reasons. (The way In Cold Blood does, for instance, the latter becoming more a pure novel whose unuttered, always-present questions are about fate and theodicy--why believe in a God who permits hideous evils to happen to His most sinless true believers?) But you read Armies of the Night (which was subtitled, a little cumbersomely, “History as the Novel, the Novel as History”), and suddenly you see how all Mr. Mailer’s superb technical gifts as a novelist--especially the ability to bring a social world into being--are brought to bear on “what happened” in history. Shot through with the superb speculative intellect of the thinker doing the writing, it’s just thrilling, pure literary and intellectual pleasure to read. The way, for instance, that Mr. Mailer manages to situate the decision whether to answer the phone at the opening of the book in a psychic, social and ideological landscapes, and the web of connections between them that simultaneously becomes hilarious and suspenseful--it’s Balzac, Proust and Walter Benjamin on a conference call. (It’s History calling.) Or the way he turns literary figures like Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald into great characters. He was one of the first and best to write about the seductions and corruptions of celebrity in an age of mechanical reproduction. But I’m not here to do an exegesis of Mr. Mailer’s methods and prose (get it from the horse’s mouth in The Spooky Art). And I’m not suggesting his is the only way to write about ideas. Observer readers know I’m also a partisan of the less subjective methods of Lingua Franca, for instance. I just have this personal fascination with Mr. Mailer’s methods and his vision, perhaps because I’m someone who is more than slightly obsessed with theodicy (the attempt to rationalize the presence and often triumph of evil with belief in a just and loving God, the problem that Leibniz claimed he solved--a solution Voltaire famously ridiculed in Candide). Both the origin and the fate of Mr. Mailer’s theodicy are as interesting as the thing itself. Indeed, I’ve always wondered about Mr. Mailer’s account of the origin of his vision. As I recall it, he had this vision that he has often said is at the very heart of all his work--a vision he would later channel through the voice of the pimp Marion Faye in The Deer Park, through the voice of Gary Gilmore in Executioner’s Song--while he was doing a lot of flying on the wings of Benzedrine and cannabis. Whatever its origin in Mr. Mailer’s mind, his theodicy has a very contemporary parallel in a strain of post-Holocaust theology, post-Holocaust theodicy--a strain often attributed to the theologian Irving Greenberg. (It’s often forgotten that Mr. Mailer was one of the first non-theologians to speculate about the unconscious cultural impact of the Holocaust in the 50’s. The first sentence of his controversial essay “The White Negro” declared: “Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps … upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive … in these years.”) I wondered whether Mr. Mailer had read Greenberg or about him--and whether or not it recurred to him on pot, the vision was already seeded there, so speak. And that Mr. Mailer, in his way, would prefer a Bad-Boy version of how he came to the most fundamental idea of his career, rather than admit to getting it from a guy named Irving. What is this theodicy? You could call it God-in-struggle. It’s a response often now made to the very powerful philosophical argument against theism put forward in the 1950’s by J.L. Mackie, who argued that God could not be both all-powerful and just and loving. Because if He were all-powerful and just and still permitted the murder of, say, one million children who had no chance to sin before they were slaughtered in the Holocaust--well, such a God, such a belief, is unsustainable. How to still believe in God? One solution advanced recently (at least half-seriously) by the always-provocative thinker Jim Holt (in Slate) is to believe in a God who is “100 percent malevolent but only 80” percent effective. Another solution, for those who want to believe in a non-malevolent God, is to say “O.K., he’s loving but not all-powerful.” In some versions, he’s just a struggling weakling (i.e., in When Bad Things Happen to Good People). I’ll never forget what the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said to me when I asked him this question in his Jerusalem office while I was working on my book, Explaining Hitler. What Bauer said is that he had no use for this weakling God. He put it more colorfully, saying of this vision of a God who permitted the Holocaust: “If He’s all-powerful [and he allowed Hitler to kill a million children], he’s Satan. If he’s just but not all-powerful, he’s a nebbish.” A nebbish? I asked. “Well, you know, a poor chap who has to be supported, a God who needs to draw his strength from us, this is [Irving] Greenberg’s idea …. I don’t need a God like that.” But Norman Mailer does, sort of. This is how he puts it in a 1958 interview that is reprinted in Advertisements for Myself. He called it a notion “so central and so shattering that its religious resonances … are going to dominate this coming century … it’s that God is in danger of dying. In my very limited knowledge of theology, this never really has been expressed before …. Man’s fate being tied up with God’s fate. God is no longer all-powerful … the moral consequences of this are not only staggering, but they’re thrilling; because moral experience is intensified rather than diminished …. It’s the only thing that explains to me the problem of evil … that God Himself … can abuse our beings in order to achieve His means.” He doesn’t see his God as a “poor chap”. He sees him as an amateur boxer, determined, embattled in a cosmic “Thrilla in Manila” with the Devil--but on the ropes in the last rounds. He sees his God, it must be admitted, a bit like Norman Mailer, the incorrigible pugilist. Mr. Mailer once said that the last thing he wanted to be thought of in life was “a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” But in a way, he is--if not exactly nice at all times (though I’ve never found him otherwise the few times we’ve met), then in the way he’s made it a mission to rescue God from Yehuda Bauer’s contemptuous dismissal as a nebbish. The Ultimate Nice Jewish Boy thing to do. He doesn’t see this as endorsing a satanic God or a weak god, but a God who is always in struggle, in a titanic struggle with the Devil--and, most importantly, a belief that every act of human courage (however you want to define it) strengthens God and weakens the Devil. And every act of cowardice has the opposite effect. It is--and this is where people don’t get Mr. Mailer and his fascination with sin--an incredibly demanding, hyper-vigilant moralistic view of human conduct. Every failure--and he is relentless in detailing his own failures--contributes not just to lowering your own self-esteem, but to weakening God Himself! It’s self-important, some might say, but undeniably important. As is Mr. Mailer. Which is why, despite his own doubts, I think he’ll last. Postscript: I really didn’t want to trouble Mr. Mailer on his 80th birthday, but after I finished this column, I thought I ought to call him and see if he had a few moments for me to check on the importance of his theodicy--and its origin. When I reached him at his Provincetown place, I asked him, “Am I right in thinking this vision of God and man you spoke of in that interview in Advertisements for Myself imbued your work ever since?” “Absolutely--oh, ever since then,” he said. He told me about the circumstance of that interview: how he’d been thinking about this vision for a while but had never spoken of it in print until he went to Chicago to speak with novelist Richard Stern’s classes, and how his rapport with Stern and the presence of Mailer’s friend, Bob Lucid, had loosened his tongue. “Had you been reading theology before?” I asked him. Not much, he answered. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised if some third-century B.C. Greek philosopher had thought of something like” that vision of an embattled God, but that it didn’t come from reading Irving Greenberg. He did, however, now recall something else that had been on his mind. He remembered an obscure film “about, I think, Channel Island fishermen, called God Needs Man. I don’t even remember what it was about, but that title stayed with me--God Needs Man.” But he wants to clarify something: that he wasn’t thinking of a two-sided Manichean struggle for the soul of man. That it was, for him, more complex than that--a three-way thing: “I’ve said it in so many ways, but finally I just feel we live in a triangular relation with God and the Devil, that we’re a separate force. It’s not that we’re little puppets pushed around by an anode pole and a cathode pole. We push back on each of them. So it makes for a very complex universe, a complex moral universe, because you never know at a given moment whether you’re doing it [acting, “pushing back”] as a human or whether you’re being tricked by one or the other of two opposed deities.” Whether you’re an unknowing Agent of the Other Side. “It explains a lot to me when you look at it that way,” he said. It explains, for one thing, the kind of fascination Mr. Mailer displays for double agents and moles in books like Harlot’s Ghost. “We push back on each of them.” That’s what I like about Mr. Mailer’s work. He’s still at odds with God and the Devil, still trying to figure out who’s tricking whom. Keep on pushin’, Norman.

By Ron Rosenbaum

January 9, 2005 | 7:00 p.m

"Was God in the Tsunami?" I woke up to that question in my Yahoo inbox four days after the waves struck, a posting from Beliefnet, a popular discussion list I subscribe to. It was the morning when the death-toll estimates had gone into six figures for the first time. It would be interesting to calculate the number of deaths from a catastrophe that trigger the moment when people start asking "Where was God?" questions. But it seemed to me that morning marked the beginning. It was a week that would end with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself declaring that he had doubts about God.

As surely as the tsunami followed the earthquake, the questions-the perennial, never-satisfactorily-resolved questions-of theodicy followed the tsunami. Theodicy, of course, is the subdiscipline of theology devoted to the attempt to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, just and loving God who intervenes in history-the God most Western religions believe in-with the recurrence of catastrophic slaughter from "natural" causes such as tsunamis and man-made evils such as genocides. The same morning "Was God in the Tsunami?" arrived in my inbox, I checked on my favorite Web site, Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com), which links to the most notable essays and reviews of the day, and found a box that linked to no less than four articles with headlines such as "Faiths Ask of Quake: 'Why Did You Do This, God?'" and "To God, An Age Old Question." It was just the beginning. Let me concede that yes, there are many paths to faith, but it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It's all a mystery," "We just can't understand God's plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Yes, Voltaire misconstrued in Candide, probably deliberately, Leibniz's Theodicy: Leibniz was claiming that God created the best of all possible worlds consistent with free will-the freedom to choose evil without which choosing good means nothing special. The best of all possible worlds consistent with the nature of human nature, in other words-and its predilection for choosing evil. The question Voltaire should have posed is whether a better, less murderous human nature-consistent with free will-could have been created by Leibniz's God. Of course, the inadequacies of traditional theodicy are not a problem for those like my colleague Jim Holt, one of the best translators of arcane philosophical controversies (Kripke on naming!) for non-specialists. Mr. Holt once wrote that the evidence suggests that "the world is not presided over by a deity who is all-good and all-powerful, but rather by one who is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective." He arrives by a different route at the answer offered by some extreme Gnostic sects who believed this world was presided over by a malevolent demiurge posing as God. And the inadequacies of theodicy are not a problem for those who don't believe in an all-powerful God. Harold ( When Bad Things Happen to Good People) Kushner is one of those who thinks the problem of God's tolerance of catastrophic evils is solved essentially by making God a weakling-loving, but not really in charge, despite all the boasting in the Bible about God's powers, including the tsunami-related powers of raising and lowering the waters at will (remember that whole Flood thing?). Kushner is there on Beliefnet advising people to read the 23rd Psalm, which seems to me a wildly inappropriate choice, promising as it does that God will always be at our side to lead us beside still waters. So it's all good, except for the 150,000 who didn't exactly get the still waters that day. I recall the asperity with which this easy out (Kushner's "God is not all-powerful") was dismissed by Yehuda Bauer, the former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, when I asked him about it in Jerusalem. "There's no way there can be an all-powerful and just God," Mr. Bauer said. "Because if he's all-powerful, he's Satan [considering the recurrent prevalence of genocidal evil in the world]. If he's just [meaning just but, as per Kushner, too weak to make the world just], he's a nebbish …. I don't need a God like that." It'sremarkable, though, how Kushner's cop-out has become the contemporary evasive answer to questions of theodicy. Inside my faded paperback copy of When Bad Things Happen …, I found a bookmark that had evidently been there when I bought it. It's from the Full Circle bookstore, 50 Penn Place, Oklahoma City, Okla. I had evidently bought the book when I went down there right after the Federal Building bombing to do a story (for The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1995) on how the culture deals with questions of theodicy in the aftermath of catastrophe. "Full Circle," indeed. Rabbi Kushner's well-intended book didn't do the job for me back then, and it doesn't do it now, although it has become an almost unquestioned meme. Poor God-He means well, but He seems to have lost the superpowers he had in the Bible. Some sort of spiritual Green Kryptonite slipped him by Satan, I'll bet. So He's struggling and weak and nebbishy and we have to buck Him up. But for those who don't try the easy way out, the great conundrum of theodicy was recapitulated on the Arts and Letters Daily Web site by its editor, Dennis Dutton, in his lead-in to the links: "If God is God, he's not good. If God is good, he's not God. You can't have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe." It's a version of the challenging syllogism posed by J.L. Mackie in a 1955 issue of the journal Mind, an argument which contemporary theodicies have been trying, without notable success, to refute ever since. The lack of success seems to have lent a tone of desperation to some. I was struck by the police-interrogation tone of one of the links: "Faiths Ask of Quake: 'Why Did You Do This, God?'" "Yeah, Tough Guy, why'd ya do it? Your prints are all over the crime scene, Big Guy. You have the right to remain silent …. " You can almost hear the late, great Jerry Orbach, who's now presumably in a position to put the question, kicking a chair in the squad room to get the Divine Perp's attention. Then there was a link to "Tremors of Doubt" in The Wall Street Journal by David Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, which had the virtue of conceding that the conventional consolations of pop theodicy "about God's inscrutable counsels" or that "all this mysteriously serves God's good ends" are "odious banalities," and that even believers can't assume that theologians have answered the theodicy question adequately. It was only the beginning of the orgy of theodicy that followed, if one may use a profane term for a sacred quest. Foolish things were said by men of all faiths (almost always men, by the way; it's what feminists used to call Male Answer Syndrome): the rabbi in Israel who pronounced the tsunami "an expression of God's great ire with the world"; the Buddhist sage who said it represented God's resentment of the "huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth"; the mullah in Indonesia who said that it was "a reminder from God he created the world and can destroy the world." And the media kept headlining the search for answers: "Why Does God Allow Terrible Things to Happen to His People?", an essay in The Times of London asked. And there was an essay that addresses the question not to God, but to those who believe in Him: "How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?" (Martin Kettle in the U.K. Guardian, the rare essay that suggested there were no good answers.) And then, at the end of the week kicked off by "Was God in the Tsunami?", this shocker: On Sunday(!), Jan. 2, the London Telegraph dropped the bomb "Archbishop of Canterbury: This Has Made Me Question God's Existence." What's next? "The Pope Says: 'I Am a Wiccan!'"? (It's true that the archbishop waffled a bit and called for prayer, but he did say his faith was "upset" by the catastrophe.) One thing a reading of these essays reminded one of is that natural disasters are both more and less problematical for defenders of the faiths. On the one hand, earthquakes and the like don't involve man-made evils and thus the question of the depravity of human nature-and the difficult question behind that question: whether humans are at fault for their depraved nature, or whether the deity who created them could have done a better job creating humanity consistent with free will. As my friend Errol Morris puts it: The difficulty with man-made evils is not "man's inhumanity to man," the problem is precisely "man's humanity to man." The wickedness of humanity is not an aberration, but more like the norm. No, man or human nature can't be held responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis-except in those bloodthirsty theodicies which persist in seeing the punitive hand of God punishing man's collective sinfulness by the slaughter of innocent children not old enough to sin. A hard-to-defend but scripturally habitual response from a wrathful God for the sins of a sinful human nature He created but is somehow not responsible for. Nor are natural disasters as much of a problem for Deists, or for those who believe in a god who stopped intervening in human affairs after the creation of the universe or the creation of man. Catastrophic evils might call into question what is meant by the "intelligent" in "Intelligent Design," but not Design itself. But for those who believe in a God who has intervened in history, as he is portrayed in Western scriptures, a God who can raise and lower the waters, punish and save at will, has miracles at his disposal, and should be able to separate the sheep from the goats, the saints from the sinners: For that sort of God, the indiscriminate slaughter of 100,000 saints and sinners-children and parents alike-presents more of a problem. If God is responsible for the fall of a sparrow, it's hard to exempt him from other, more dramatic natural developments. Sure, you could say it's not His fault: He left us in a broken world, a fallen nature to reflect our own inner Fallen Nature. A vale of tears, whose horrors better prepare us to value the heaven that awaits us (well, some of us). But in general, in this view, we're better off dead-or, as some respondents on the Beliefnet comments section had it, the tsunami victims were lucky, they'd received a gift: They're in heaven ahead of time. Let me return to "Was God in the Tsunami?", the Beliefnet missive written by Rodger Kamenetz, a Jewish Buddhist or a Buddhist Jew (it wasn't quite clear-he had equal reverence for both traditions, it seemed). On the plus side, the author made the important point that any attempt to defend the deaths of tens of thousands of children not old enough to sin as part of "God's Plan," as His collective punishment for man's wickedness or some other variation on the blame-the-victim theodicy was an obscenity (my word, not his). And he gets points for citing King Lear-not Lear himself, but Gloucester's bitter complaint that "We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys. They kill us for our sport," It's not the only answer in Lear, but it's one that fits the bare facts. But then Mr. Kamenetz (whose essay has the alternate title "Was God in This Disaster?") lets himself get distracted by the Talmudic and Buddhist mystification. Proving once again that not all "wisdom of the sages" is equally wise, or must necessarily be approached with the same reverence. He gives us a story he says is from the Talmud that has Moses getting to heaven and learning that one Rabbi Akiba is the wisest interpreter of God's words and actions. Moses asks God what Rabbi Akiba's reward will be. "God shows him a vision: Akiba tortured by the Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body." Moses asks God why this incomprehensibly horrific fate for such a wise man. "God answers with a riddle," we're told: "It arose in thought." Say what? "It arose in thought." That's the best he can do? A Bill Clintonesque "because I can" boast? Is it just me, or does this story not exactly speak well for God? I guess you could say it "arose in thought" for the Roman soldiers, so you could put the blame on them, but the way it's told here, it seems clear it's God showing off both his power and his self-mystifying inscrutability. A God who encourages watching torture-as in the theology of Aquinas, who imagined that one of the pleasures that God would offer the souls He saved would be gazing down from Heaven upon the cruel and prolonged tortures of the damned in Hell. Recreational sadism from Heaven's luxury skyboxes ( Summa Theologica, Question 94). This was one of the logical outcomes of certain orthodox Christian doctrines that used to drive William Empson crazy. Read Empson's Milton's God, his last, most lacerating book, almost totally devoted to denouncing the God of Paradise Lost-Milton's massive effort at overcoming the contradictions of theodicy. And arguing from a study of Milton's posthumously published and ambiguously heterodox De Doctrina Christiana that Milton had doubts, too. (Actually, it's almost impossible to find a copy of Empson's Milton's God; someone should bring it back into print.) But to return to "It arose in thought": That's not a "riddle," that's a rebuff. In cruelty, it goes beyond the God of Job with his brusque "none of your business, buddy" brush-off. I wonder if the author of "Was God in the Tsunami?" is aware of how impoverished a God this sorry "riddle" gives us? Perhaps recognizing that this isn't going to resolve any doubts or offer much consolation, he makes his Buddhist move. He's met the Dalai Lama, he wants you to know, and "One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said-these aren't his exact words-that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination." The implication being that the child is really not lost at all-in fact, he or she is still right there in your life, in a low-maintenance way, I guess you'd say. In the imagination, of course, but "constantly" there. Maybe more present than when he or she was alive. I wonder how well this works when he tries it out on parents who have lost children. The comments on the listserv in response to the essay were mainly divided between atheists and believers, both factions, in their own way, absolving God from responsibility. For the atheists, if he doesn't exist, he couldn't have done it; for the believers, God has no responsibility for the catastrophe, just for the goodness displayed by the rescue workers in the aftermath, and the few "miraculous" stories of survival. This is something I find particularly annoying: a God who can intervene to save a handful out of a hundred thousand and gets credit for all the goodness displayed in the aftermath of the havoc He wrought. "Why this need to defend God?" someone (that would be me) finally posted on the Beliefnet comment board in response to the multiple alibis for God that others were posting. All so eager to rush forward and exonerate their version of God from any connection to the slaughter. It began to smack of "they doth protest too much": The disaster somehow gets transformed into a display of God's wonderfulness. In a way, doesn't this sort of thinking suggest a kind of Stockholm syndrome? He's the only God we've got, He's got us imprisoned in this hell of a world-so, after a while, we worship Him. One of the most glaring instances of this sort can be found in a quote in a story the Post carried on Jan. 2. It was the heartwarming story of a baby boy born prematurely while his mother fled upland from the waves as they hit the coast of India. Yes, it was the heartwarming "MIRACLE OF LIFE" that the Post headline had it. But then I have to admit that I cringed when I read the words of the baby's father (who had given him the name "Tsunami"-I'm sure the parents of those who lost babies will think this is really cute). But the thing that made me cringe was this quote from the father of Baby Tsunami: "It's all God's grace!" he said. I can't really blame the guy for saying whatever he says at a moment like that. He's got his baby. But think of the implications. Either he believes that his family has special grace, and that the tens of thousands of other families who lost children suffered the torment of a lost child because they deserved it, because they lacked "God's grace." Or he believes that God looked down and saw tens of thousands of imperiled children and decided that this one deserved the special intervention of his "grace" and the others didn't. If you believe that God intervened to save this one little life, you have to believe that He chose not to intervene to save the lives of all the other children. He wanted them dead. I would propose a truce between believers and unbelievers so they can stop fighting over the credit for the goodness of the rescue workers, whether it should be assigned to God or to man, so that we can remove God-and the critique of God-from the equation entirely for a while and save our energy to support the recovery unencumbered by this perennial debate, however important and profound. Here's the terms of the truce: Unbelievers will stop pointing out the inadequacies of the believers' theodicy, their justification for God. And believers will stop claiming credit for God for everything good that happens, unless they are willing to condemn Him to a perp walk for all the crimes committed on earth, many in his name.

By Ron Rosenbaum

February 9, 2003 | 7:00 p.m

I'm beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art . A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life's work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself.

He told The Times , for instance, "I may last or I may not last … part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment." It's Norman Mailer playing Woody Allen, who has also adopted this aw-shucks "my work doesn't amount to much, etc." strategy. But in Mr. Mailer's case, I have a feeling that he felt someone would step forward and respond to this low-balling by saying, "Yes, but …. " Yes, maybe nobody could live up to the kind of inflated notion he once had that he would "change the consciousness of [his] times" with his prose, that he'd run for President, win the Nobel Prize (remember the opening of The Prisoner of Sex , in which he's waiting for the phone call from Stockholm?). But look what he has achieved: Even if you entirely set aside all the novels, he's changed the face of American prose-certainly American nonfiction-with Armies of the Night (which, you might recall, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award). He wrote the closest thing to an American prose epic in The Executioner's Song (another Pulitzer); he broke ground for every memoirist who's put pen to paper since Advertisements for Myself . He transformed political reportage with his classic account of the J.F.K. nomination in L.A., "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." He made it possible to write about two very big things in a way they'd never been written about before in the first person: Sex and Ideas. So, since I'm not seeing any of my betters step forward and say the requisite "yes, but … " O.K., I'll volunteer. Big "yes," to Mailer's achievements especially for finding a way-both brilliant and comic-in Armies of the Night to write about the personal and the political, the personal and the metaphysical, the personal and the ideological, and even the personal and the theological . Especially the theological, because it's my contention that the thing people miss most about Mr. Mailer is the theological aspect of his work, the vision of God and the Devil, the vision of theodicy , the problem of evil (my favorite subject) that runs through everything he writes, sometimes to its detriment (at times, I felt he was ventriloquizing theological speculation into his representation of Gary Gilmore's stream of consciousness). Theological speculation with an exciting, heretical sense of sin-an acutely serious awareness of the consequences of his own sins-of the stakes in those moments of decision we all have to face, the ones that involve love, death and sacrifice. (And, by the way, his most underrated book, the one about the moon launch, Of a Fire on the Moon , said more profound and prophetic things about man and space, technology and Mystery than anything else in the past three decades.) I'd been thinking of Mr. Mailer even before the new book, because the good people at the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago have asked me, as part of my brief "Distinguished Visitor" stint this spring, to make some remarks about "The Journalism of Ideas," and you can't-well, I can't-talk about J.O.I., let's call it, without talking about what Norman Mailer made possible. I've always been fond of the title of the late Anatole Broyard's memoir of coming to the Village in the 40's and plunging into the literary life of his time: When Kafka Was the Rage . When I came to the Village at the tail end of the 60's, Mailer was the rage. I'd already been turned on to his work in college, when I'd read the original 1967 Harper's magazine version of Armies of the Night , which opened my eyes to the possibilities of nonfiction prose. (In that book, he manages to create a character-himself-who partakes of both Falstaff and Hamlet; no mean trick). And then, after I lucked out and found myself with a staff writer's job at The Village Voice (a paper Mr. Mailer co-founded and named) and a contributing editor post at Harold Hayes' Esquire (where Mailer had published "Superman Comes to the Supermarket"), he certainly was the rage to me. Not the only one: The contemporary nonfiction world seemed filled with people who were doing things nobody had done before, from Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Truman Capote, to unique eccentric geniuses like Terry Southern, Paul Krassner and Hunter Thompson. And, in the daily papers, a miracle three times a week: Murray Kempton! But what appealed to me about Norman Mailer is that he managed to validate, turn into a unique art, the fusion of memoir and metaphysics, J.O.I.-and to do it with joy, with the joy of a comic novelist, to have gleeful fun with the storytelling (the aspect of Mr. Mailer's work even more overlooked than the theological is the fact that he can be very, very funny, often at his own expense, and yet manage to be deeply thought-provoking as well). When I was briefly attempting to teach seminars on "literary journalism" (a term I had problems with, preferring J.O.I.) at Columbia's journalism school, I felt that I could at least accomplish something if I convinced my students to read Armies of the Night . It's one of those books that holds up every time I reread it, often for different reasons. (The way In Cold Blood does, for instance, the latter becoming more a pure novel whose unuttered, always-present questions are about fate and theodicy-why believe in a God who permits hideous evils to happen to His most sinless true believers?) But you read Armies of the Night (which was subtitled, a little cumbersomely, "History as the Novel, the Novel as History"), and suddenly you see how all Mr. Mailer's superb technical gifts as a novelist-especially the ability to bring a social world into being-are brought to bear on "what happened" in history. Shot through with the superb speculative intellect of the thinker doing the writing, it's just thrilling, pure literary and intellectual pleasure to read. The way, for instance, that Mr. Mailer manages to situate the decision whether to answer the phone at the opening of the book in a psychic, social and ideological landscapes, and the web of connections between them that simultaneously becomes hilarious and suspenseful-it's Balzac, Proust and Walter Benjamin on a conference call. (It's History calling.) Or the way he turns literary figures like Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald into great characters . He was one of the first and best to write about the seductions and corruptions of celebrity in an age of mechanical reproduction. But I'm not here to do an exegesis of Mr. Mailer's methods and prose (get it from the horse's mouth in The Spooky Art ). And I'm not suggesting his is the only way to write about ideas. Observer readers know I'm also a partisan of the less subjective methods of Lingua Franca , for instance. I just have this personal fascination with Mr. Mailer's methods and his vision, perhaps because I'm someone who is more than slightly obsessed with theodicy (the attempt to rationalize the presence and often triumph of evil with belief in a just and loving God, the problem that Leibniz claimed he solved-a solution Voltaire famously ridiculed in Candide ). Both the origin and the fate of Mr. Mailer's theodicy are as interesting as the thing itself. Indeed, I've always wondered about Mr. Mailer's account of the origin of his vision. As I recall it, he had this vision that he has often said is at the very heart of all his work-a vision he would later channel through the voice of the pimp Marion Faye in The Deer Park , through the voice of Gary Gilmore in Executioner's Song- while he was doing a lot of flying on the wings of Benzedrine and cannabis. Whatever its origin in Mr. Mailer's mind, his theodicy has a very contemporary parallel in a strain of post-Holocaust theology, post-Holocaust theodicy-a strain often attributed to the theologian Irving Greenberg. (It's often forgotten that Mr. Mailer was one of the first non-theologians to speculate about the unconcious cultural impact of the Holocaust in the 50's. The first sentence of his controversial essay "The White Negro" declared: "Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps … upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive … in these years.") I wondered whether Mr. Mailer had read Greenberg or about him-and whether or not it recurred to him on pot, the vision was already seeded there, so speak. And that Mr. Mailer, in his way, would prefer a Bad-Boy version of how he came to the most fundamental idea of his career, rather than admit to getting it from a guy named Irving. What is this theodicy? You could call it God-in-struggle. It's a response often now made to the very powerful philosophical argument against theism put forward in the 1950's by J.L. Mackie, who argued that God could not be both all-powerful and just and loving. Because if He were all-powerful and just and still permitted the murder of, say, one million children who had no chance to sin before they were slaughtered in the Holocaust-well, such a God, such a belief, is unsustainable. How to still believe in God? One solution advanced recently (at least half-seriously) by the always-provocative thinker Jim Holt (in Slate) is to believe in a God who is "100 percent malevolent but only 80" percent effective. Another solution, for those who want to believe in a non-malevolent God, is to say "O.K., he's loving but not all-powerful." In some versions, he's just a struggling weakling (i.e., in When Bad Things Happen to Good People ). I'll never forget what the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said to me when I asked him this question in his Jerusalem office while I was working on my book, Explaining Hitler . What Bauer said is that he had no use for this weakling God. He put it more colorfully, saying of this vision of a God who permitted the Holocaust: "If He's all-powerful [and he allowed Hitler to kill a million children], he's Satan. If he's just but not all-powerful, he's a nebbish." A nebbish? I asked. "Well, you know, a poor chap who has to be supported, a God who needs to draw his strength from us, this is [Irving] Greenberg's idea …. I don't need a God like that." But Norman Mailer does, sort of. This is how he puts it in a 1958 interview that is reprinted in Advertisements for Myself . He called it a notion "so central and so shattering that its religious resonances … are going to dominate this coming century … it's that God is in danger of dying. In my very limited knowledge of theology, this never really has been expressed before …. Man's fate being tied up with God's fate. God is no longer all-powerful … the moral consequences of this are not only staggering, but they're thrilling; because moral experience is intensified rather than diminished …. It's the only thing that explains to me the problem of evil … that God Himself … can abuse our beings in order to achieve His means." He doesn't see his God as a "poor chap". He sees him as an amateur boxer, determined, embattled in a cosmic "Thrilla in Manila" with the Devil-but on the ropes in the last rounds. He sees his God, it must be admitted, a bit like Norman Mailer, the incorrigible pugilist. Mr. Mailer once said that the last thing he wanted to be thought of in life was "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn." But in a way, he is-if not exactly nice at all times (though I've never found him otherwise the few times we've met), then in the way he's made it a mission to rescue God from Yehuda Bauer's contemptuous dismissal as a nebbish. The Ultimate Nice Jewish Boy thing to do. He doesn't see this as endorsing a satanic God or a weak god, but a God who is always in struggle, in a titanic struggle with the Devil-and, most importantly, a belief that every act of human courage (however you want to define it) strengthens God and weakens the Devil. And every act of cowardice has the opposite effect. It is-and this is where people don't get Mr. Mailer and his fascination with sin-an incredibly demanding, hyper-vigilant moralistic view of human conduct. Every failure-and he is relentless in detailing his own failures-contributes not just to lowering your own self-esteem, but to weakening God Himself! It's self-important, some might say, but undeniably important. As is Mr. Mailer. Which is why, despite his own doubts, I think he'll last. Postscript: I really didn't want to trouble Mr. Mailer on his 80th birthday, but after I finished this column, I thought I ought to call him and see if he had a few moments for me to check on the importance of his theodicy-and its origin. When I reached him at his Provincetown place, I asked him, "Am I right in thinking this vision of God and man you spoke of in that interview in Advertisements for Myself imbued your work ever since?" "Absolutely-oh, ever since then," he said. He told me about the circumstance of that interview: how he'd been thinking about this vision for a while but had never spoken of it in print until he went to Chicago to speak with novelist Richard Stern's classes, and how his rapport with Stern and the presence of Mailer's friend, Bob Lucid, had loosened his tongue. "Had you been reading theology before?" I asked him. Not much, he answered. He said he "wouldn't be surprised if some third-century B.C. Greek philosopher had thought of something like" that vision of an embattled God, but that it didn't come from reading Irving Greenberg. He did, however, now recall something else that had been on his mind. He remembered an obscure film "about, I think, Channel Island fishermen, called God Needs Man . I don't even remember what it was about, but that title stayed with me- God Needs Man ." But he wants to clarify something: that he wasn't thinking of a two-sided Manichean struggle for the soul of man. That it was, for him, more complex than that-a three-way thing: "I've said it in so many ways, but finally I just feel we live in a triangular relation with God and the Devil, that we're a separate force. It's not that we're little puppets pushed around by an anode pole and a cathode pole. We push back on each of them. So it makes for a very complex universe, a complex moral universe, because you never know at a given moment whether you're doing it [acting, "pushing back"] as a human or whether you're being tricked by one or the other of two opposed deities." Whether you're an unknowing Agent of the Other Side. "It explains a lot to me when you look at it that way," he said. It explains, for one thing, the kind of fascination Mr. Mailer displays for double agents and moles in books like Harlot's Ghost . "We push back on each of them." That's what I like about Mr. Mailer's work. He's still at odds with God and the Devil, still trying to figure out who's tricking whom. Keep on pushin', Norman.

By Ron Rosenbaum

October 8, 2000 | 8:00 p.m

I have a confession to make. A discovery I've recently made about myself, or at least the name for a condition, a syndrome: I am a Mysterian. This does not mean that I consider myself a visitor from the Mysterian star system, nor that I played bass in Question Mark and the Mysterians, a group once famous for the influential flat-affect one-hit wonder "96 Tears" (although I would have loved to).

No, it means I recognize in myself-in a long-held intellectual predisposition of mine-a philosophical stance given the name "Mysterian" by the British philosopher Colin McGinn in his brilliant and illuminating recent book on the long-vexed, still unresolved "mind-body problem." It's a book I urge all members of The Edgy Alliance* to rush out and read, a book with the somewhat misleadingly lurid title, The Mysterious Flame . It might better have been called The Mysterian Manifesto , although once you've read the book the title does make sense in the context of the lamp and flame metaphors with which thinkers have sought to illustrate the mind-body problem, the meat-and-mentality problem-the problem of explaining how something as apparently immaterial as consciousness arises from the piece of meat in our skulls, an organ that, physically, differs little from the liver or the kidney. Yes, there are electrical currents produced in the brain, but there is an electric current in a light bulb and no one calls it conscious or explains how electric currents invent the music of Mozart or the plays of Chekhov. Colin McGinn, who was trained at Oxford and writes on philosophic issues for The New York Review of Books , Lingua Franca and elsewhere, cites the Victorian thinker Thomas Huxley's metaphor for the mind-body problem: "That anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Mr. McGinn leaps from lamp to flame in his metaphor for the problem: "When wood burns it turns into fire, and this transformation seems almost miraculous until we understand the underlying chemistry and physics. But once we do understand, we see how wood can become fire given the process of oxygenation and the energetic properties of carbon. But this is exactly the kind of understanding that eludes us when the wood of the brain ignites into the flame of consciousness.… Consciousness is like a mysterious flame.… The brain has the raw materials with which to ignite consciousness … but we lack the kind of theoretical understanding that could render this occurrence predictable and natural." Mr. McGinn restores to this ancient disputation a fresh sense of wonder and mystery by clearly and briskly subverting the pretensions to certainty of the chief contending schools of thought: the materialist all-is-meat school and the dualist consciousness-is-the-ghost-in-the-meat-machine school. I'm someone who's always had an abiding, obsessive, perhaps some might say even unhealthy interest in the philosophical problem of consciousness, rivaled only by my obsession with theodicy (the problem of evil). But my problem is that I suffer from the philosophical equivalent of math anxiety when I try to read the technical literature on the question of consciousness. I trace this back to a traumatic attempt to force myself to read Kant's entire Critique of Pure Reason as a freshman at college, an attempt that left me scarred for life. But I do love to read skilled interpreters of primary philosophic literature, love the kind of thing W.V. Quine used to do in The New York Review of Books and Jim Holt does there and in other venues. I'm not alone in thinking Colin McGinn accomplishes this with thrilling clarity and without sacrificing philosophic rigor. More credentialed types, such as Steven Pinker ("McGinn is an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream"), have attested to it. I was particularly grateful for Mr. McGinn's lucid and telling dismissal of the claims of the recently fashionable materialist school that the mind is the brain, or as he puts it: "the mind is … meat neither more nor less ... [the feeling of] pain for example is nothing more than a firing of certain fibers in the brain. The feeling of pain simply reduces to such physical processes. The two are not merely correlated. They are identical!" To the materialist, Mr. McGinn continues, "the mind is the brain in disguise. The djinn is the lamp … the natural response to that is that if materialism is true, then I am not conscious after all-hence the old joke that a materialist has to feign anesthesia. We are all zombies, deluded into believing we are conscious." He goes on to point out that "if one could know everything about your brain of a neural kind … its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments … the position of every atom and its subatomic structure … everything that that materialist says your mind is, do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind, I know nothing about which conscious states you are in ... and what those states feel like to you ... knowledge of the brain does not give me knowledge of your mind. How then can the two be said to be identical?" I was somewhat less satisfied by his dismissal of dualism-the belief that brain and mind are different categories, the former completely explained by biophysics, the latter in some way not-because I think he tends to caricature dualism either as supernaturalism (the ghost in the machine) or epiphenomenalism (a ghost not causally connected to the machine). He seems to argue that dualism implies the mind cannot affect the brain or interact with it, that the mind is utterly determined by the brain, when in fact this neglects the notion of feedback loops and other forms of interactivity. And if one believes in even the most limited definition of free will, the mind can affect the brain, can worry, for instance, and thus generate the neurochemical cascade in the brain that causes alertness or paranoia. Still, that doesn't solve but only deepens the mystery of how the brain gives rise to such a mind, and Mr. McGinn makes the case that this failure is not an accident. Which is where his Mysterious Solution to the mind-body problem comes in-well, maybe not a solution, but rather a contention that the solution is beyond the reach of either the mind or the brain. Some might see this as a great big begging of the question, but Mr. McGinn argues that we-our brains, our minds, as well as the kind of intelligence, the kind of knowledge, we're equipped to discover and process-are terminally inadequate, at least as presently constituted, to discover the nature of the relationship between the brain and the mind. It will always be a mystery beyond our reach, in the way that a color-blind person will never be able to apprehend or describe the nature of the color red. Our brain is not equipped to discover its relationship to the mind, and our mind is not equipped to discover its relationship to the brain. Not for mystical reasons: The Mysterian position doesn't argue that the relationship will forever be beyond understanding (human beings may evolve to the point where we are better suited to understand it). Mr. McGinn believes there's a natural as opposed to supernatural explanation, a scientific explanation, but one that's beyond our nature to apprehend. Our consciousness is always likely to be a mystery to our consciousness. I'm not doing justice to the subtlety and complexity and clarity of his argument. Both materialists and dualists may carp. And I did find myself wondering whether the Mysterian position isn't a form of materialism under another name. Because Mr. McGinn seems to imply that the solution must necessarily come from natural science. It's like saying that if ghosts exist, they're not really supernatural, there's a scientific explanation-so then they're not really ghosts in any interesting sense. Setting aside these few cavils, The Mysterious Flame is a thrilling intellectual adventure, and I have to say I find the Mysterian position appealing, both for its intellectual daring and for its intellectual humility. I'm always glad to see skeptical subversions of the overweening confidence of those who think they've got everything All Figured Out. I think, in fact, I've been a Mysterian avant la lettre, as they say, before I even knew to call myself one. It would explain my recurrent citation in many disparate contexts of Keats' notion of "negative capability": the ability to tolerate uncertainty without an "irritable reaching" for some half-baked certainty to make oneself feel that one has things under control. (A tendency some women call "Male Answer Syndrome.") I found an analog of the Mysterian position in the work of Yehuda Bauer, the Hebrew University scholar widely regarded as the foremost historian of the Holocaust. In an influential attack on what he called "mystification" that first appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (one entitled "Is the Holocaust Explicable?"), Bauer responded to what might be called a False Mysterian position in the literature of the subject-that is, the "increasing number of commentators [who] argue that ultimately the Holocaust is a mystery, an inexplicable event." In fact, Yehuda Bauer told me in an interview in Jerusalem for my book ( Explaining Hitler ), the fact that it hasn't been explained doesn't mean that it can't or couldn't be explained. When it comes to Hitler, for instance, there are just too many gaps in the record, missing pieces of evidence, "lost years" and lost witnesses. Hitler is "explicable in principle," Bauer told me, but that doesn't mean he has been or ever will be adequately explained in practice. This is the true Mysterian principle, the analog to Colin McGinn's belief about the mind-body problem. The Mysterian position is frustrating and disturbing to some: Certainties are more comforting and consoling to the intellectually insecure. But to be able to say "I don't know" or "we can't know" is often a sign of wisdom rather than ignorance. And the Mysterian position has some distinguished adherents, perhaps including Shakespeare. I was struck by that thought recently when re-reading Richard II and Julius Caesar before seeing the Ralph Fiennes production at B.A.M. and the New York Shakespeare Festival production at the Delacorte. One could look at Richard II and Julius Caesar as expressing an underlying Mysterian position toward the past and the future, respectively. Consider the peculiar quality of the opening sequence of Richard II , the long build-up of charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim, challenge and counterchallenge that Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke engage in at great length before their sovereign, King Richard II. After all this wrangling about who's a traitor, who's a liar and who killed Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester- after things finally reach the point where it seems as if the dispute will be resolved, or at least settled, in a trial by combat between the two-Richard suddenly and inexplicably aborts the combat and, without resolving their claims, sends the two challengers into exile. For centuries, commentators have singled out Richard's apparently capricious disruption of the ancient trial-by-combat ritual as a sign of his unfitness for sovereignty, or as an act that undermines the authority of the kingship, or as an indication of his tragic flaw. It may be any or all of these, but it occurred to me that the source of Richard's act may stem from something deeper-from the fact that Richard is, at some level, a Mysterian. In a recent examination of the historical basis for the incident in Richard II , Cedric Watts finds that the chronicle histories Shakespeare drew on all contend that Mowbray killed Woodstock with Richard's complicity. But none of them seem to have any solid evidence other than partisanship. And in the play , Shakespeare gives us no basis for determining the truth of the competing claims-the rhetoric of each claimant is just as impassioned and persuasive as that of the other. It seems that this is no accident: that Shakespeare hasn't neglected to draw the same conclusion as the chronicles, but has deliberately crafted a scene in which the truth cannot be discerned from the available evidence-a Mysterian moment. This is not to say that Shakespeare believes there is no such thing as historical truth. He's getting at something else: the fact that history-life-is filled with many more moments in which we can't be sure of the truth but have to act in its absence. His other history plays are filled with similar scenes of charge and countercharge without necessary resolution, scenes which force us to confront our Mysterian human condition, the fact that we're frequently forced to make momentous decisions on the basis of a tragically flawed knowledge of the truth. "Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled" is the way Alexander Pope, another Mysterian poet, put it in his Essay on Man , "the glory, jest and riddle of the world." The prospective trial by combat between the counterclaimants that Richard disrupts can be seen as a ritualized method for establishing truth whose decisiveness has no foundation in reality. And so perhaps in halting the false truth-telling ritual (false in the sense that we can never know if the winner is more truthful or just stronger), Richard may not be acting capriciously but in a principled (if dangerous) fashion, disrupting the meretricious ritual without offering any adequate substitute. Because there is no adequate substitute; Richard is, at heart, a Mysterian-heroic but tragic in adhering to that position. If some of the history plays take a Mysterian position in regard to the past, others manifest one in relation to the future. One could look at Julius Caesar , for instance, as a play absolutely obsessed by the question of portents, prophecies and auguries-by the hidden Mysterian connection between the present and the future. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves," Cassius the cynical rationalist insists. But everything else in the play seems to subvert this materialist view of self-determination. Those who fail to listen to the soothsayers or neglect to pay attention to auguries in dreams are condemned to die for their failure. But even dreams and auguries can be misinterpreted. The future emerges from the past in a way as mysterious as the way the mind emerges from the brain in the mind-body problem, and we may never be able to interpret the connection. Even the soothsayer doesn't quite know for sure the truth of the sooth she says, so to speak. When Brutus' wife Portia asks her "know'st thou any harm's intended toward" Brutus, the soothsayer tells her, "None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance." Certainty, then, is beyond the reach of both seers and rationalists. Julius Caesar seems the work of a thoroughly Mysterian playwright, one who returned again and again to the ironies and impossibilities of deciphering the Mysterian pattern woven into the unfolding tapestry of time. After all, when Keats coined the phrase "negative capability," he was, in fact, minting it to describe a quality he found-where else?-in the Mysterian mind of William Shakespeare.

By Ron Rosenbaum

May 14, 2000 | 8:00 p.m

I'm beginning to think there may be something to the idea that Hollywood films contain satanic messages. But I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

The thought first occurred to me after getting into a long discussion with a friend about the conflicting satanic subtexts of Angel Heart , a criminally underrated chiller, and a film that might be the first of what I'd call the neo-Satanist wave in Hollywood films. A wave that seems to be building, infiltrating some very mainstream Hollywood product. Showing up, for instance, in-of all things-last Christmas' Arnold Schwarzenegger action blockbuster End of Days . But before we get to Mr. Schwarzenegger, let's talk a bit about Angel Heart . Do you know it? First of all, don't be put off by the fact that it stars Mickey Rourke, you'll only be hurting yourself, depriving yourself of the genuine pleasure and terror of this film. (It's before Mr. Rourke's Mannerist period with the jaw implants and all.) Seriously, it's one of the most sinister and chilling movie experiences I've had. My friend was describing seeing it opening night-and afterward going to a party "where you could tell who had seen Angel Heart from the profoundly stricken looks on their faces." You can't say that about many movies (except maybe Patch Adams , but that's for a different reason, a different kind of stricken). If you were shaken by the ending of The Sixth Sense , the ending of Angel Heart blows it off the map. Credit must go to William Hjortsberg's occult detective novel, Falling Angel -Raymond Chandler crossed with Edgar Allan Poe, with the tormented spirit of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus hovering over it. But Alan Parker, who wrote and directed the 1987 renamed film version, did an amazing job of transforming it into a sensationally atmospheric visual experience, a haunting evocation of New York and New Orleans in the mid-50's that is hypnotically compelling, endlessly rewatchable. It's hard to talk about it without giving away the ending, but I'll speak instead of Angel Heart 's status as a kind of hybrid of the Satanist genre that combines traditional Luciferian themes with a breakthrough into a new conceptual realm in contemporary Satanism. On the traditional front, you have a beautiful dark star-turn by Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre, the superbly dressed Lucifer with the exquisitely barbered goatee and satanic-looking widow's peak who turns the elaborate ritual of cracking and eating a hard-boiled egg into one of the most memorably scary bits of business you've ever seen. "The Greeks say the egg is the symbol of the soul," Mr. De Niro tells Mr. Rourke, almost unnecessarily by that time, as he chomps on the perfectly jelled white and yolk. Again, without spoiling Angel Heart for those who have yet to run out and rent it, what you realize after a while is that Mr. De Niro represents what might be called the conservative strain of contemporary Satanism: Satan as the agent of a conservative moral order. Satan as the enforcer who punishes overreaching human transgression. A Satan who functions, consciously or not, as the teacher of little moral lessons in a way that validates the warnings of religion against questioning divine law. You can see this as well in Al Pacino's recent Luciferian lawyer in The Devil's Advocate . Yes, he's out to steal men's souls for eternal torment and all that, but the real satisfaction he seems to take is in the beautiful way his seductions exemplify the jewel-like workings of the moral order to which he is little more than an obsequious servant or scenarist. Creating little fabliaux that reinforce the audience's scared but sanctimonious response. He is God's enforcer, little better than God's repo man, repossessing souls who fail to make their payment of piety to the Big Guy. On the surface, Angel Heart represents that same moral Satanist theme. At the end, the eternal punishment of burning in hell merges with the ultimate punishment of the criminal justice system, the electric chair: "You'll burn for this." But on another level, the one that makes it a forerunner of the neo-Satanist genre, Angel Heart radically jolts one into questioning the traditional moral order, into questioning the nature of the human heart, locating hell not in some geographic underworld but there , inside us. To say this abstractly and obliquely (so as not to spoil it) doesn't do justice to the deeply disturbing sense of dislocation Angel Heart leaves you with. It shares that with a very few traditional Satanist films, most notably the incomparable Rosemary's Baby , where the triumph of Satan, although achieved within the traditional hierarchy of good and evil, is felt as a sickening disruption if not refutation of the moral order. But the recent wave of neo-Satanism represented by Mr. Schwarzenegger's End of Days offers a far more radical challenge to that hierarchy, to the very categories of good and evil, God and the Devil, a challenge whose power Mr. Schwarzenegger may not be aware of (or, who knows, maybe he is , maybe he's one of Satan's secret minions). Of course there were incoherent intimations of the new Satanism in The Usual Suspects ; it's hard not to like Keyser Soze (and Kevin Spacey's moniker "Verbal Kint") or at least the idea of Keyser Soze, a nontraditional Satan. But for me, Suspects was too intent on being hip to be genuinely sinister, and beneath the suggestions of a more anarchic Lucifer I sense the same old neo-con Devil: a bad bad dude, but a bad dude implicitly affirming the moral order he negates. Far more subversive is the Lucifer in the South Park movie. Okay, maybe it's not that subversive, but what the hell, I have to mention it, I have to insist that you see it, because the obscene "romance" in hell between Satan and Saddam Hussein (which sees a love-struck Satan reading Saddam is From Mars, Satan is From Venus in order to understand Saddam's unwillingness to really talk after sodomizing him) may be the funniest thing on film in the past 10 years. But let's get to the Arnold movie, End of Days . Okay, on the surface it's overblown and even a bit silly: It's set in the last few days before the millennium (remember that whole deal?) when everybody from secret Satanists to a secret Vatican death squad of anti-Satanists has got their knickers in a twist over a prophesy that Satan is coming to earth from hell to mate with one specially selected young woman in New York. And if he closes the deal and knocks boots (or hooves) with her in the hour before midnight on the eve of the millennium, all hell is going to break loose. Satan's kingdom will come, God's will be abolished: It will be "The End of Days." It's interesting, come to think of it, that both South Park and End of Days feature a Satan fixated on that Special Someone, a lovelorn Lucifer. I guess that's part of the neo-Satanist plot; it humanizes the guy, makes his plight something we can all relate to, although jeez, if you can't score hot chicks in hell, what good is it being Lord of the Dark Realm in the first place? So anyway, after some complicated plot twists Arnold gets involved in trying to keep the Special Girl away from Satan at least for that final hour. His story is that he's an ex-cop and professional bodyguard whose life was destroyed when some corrupt cops he testified against kidnapped and murdered his wife and child. While there are a lot of stupid explosions, car and copter chases, the truly explosive confrontation comes later in the movie when Lucifer, played with great panache by Gabriel Byrne, tries to win Arnold over to his side (and get the girl) by using an extraordinarily subversive theological argument. See, Arnold lost his faith in God (he explained earlier in the movie) after he lost his family to the bad guys. He's on the verge of questioning God: "We had a disagreement," the big guy says laconically, a disagreement with God: "I wanted my wife and daughter to live." Lucifer homes in on this: He shows Arnold a kind of 3-D lifelike home video of his wife and daughter in the moments before the bad guys break in. And then the moment when they seize and kill them. Heoffers Arnold a deal: Show Satan where his "end of days" date is hiding, and Arnold can have his wife and child back alive again. Arnold hesitates and Lucifer then makes the following demonically ingenious argument: "He [God] could have stopped it, but He didn't. He fucked you, then He made you feel guilty. I don't do guilt. I didn't do what happened here [the murder of Arnold's family] . He did." Then he goes on to make the larger case against God: "You're on His side? He's the one who took away your family. I didn't. Let me tell you something about Him. He is the biggest underachiever of all time. He's just got a good publicist. Something good happens, 'It's His will.' Something bad happens, 'He moves in mysterious ways.' Take that overblown press kit they call the Bible. What do they say? 'Shit happens,' Please . He treated you like garbage, you walked away from the light just like I did. I'm not the bad guy." I have to give credit to whoever wrote Lucifer's lines. They're a brilliant vernacular distillation of the problem of theodicy that haunts not just Arnold and Lucifer but church theologians as well. Theodicy, you know, is the subdiscipline of theology that seeks to find a way to reconcile the frequent triumph of catastrophic evil in human history, the massacres of the innocent, the mass murders and the Holocaust, with the assertion that God is all-powerful and just. The argument Mr. Byrne is making in a way echoes the distillation of the problem of theodicy as it was expressed to me by Yehuda Bauer, one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust and the founder of the discipline of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University. He said something to me in his Jerusalem office when I interviewed him (for my book, Explaining Hitler) , something that has haunted me forever after: "God cannot be all-powerful and just. If He is all powerful," if for instance He permitted the Holocaust, the murder of a million children to happen, and He did nothing to stop it despite His power, despite the fact that He's supposed to have intervened in history on countless lesser occasions, if in fact, the Holocaust was, as some ultra-orthodox sages argue, part of His plan , then, Mr. Bauer told me simply and grimly, "God is Satan." On the other hand, if God is just and loving enough to wish to stop the mass murder of the innocents and he failed because he lacked the power (as pop consolationists like Rabbi Kushner of When Bad Things Happen to Good People argue in effect) then "God is just a nebbish, I have no use for such a God," Mr. Bauer said dismissively. It's an argument the philosopher J.L. Mackie first articulated in an influential 1955 article, "Evil and Omnipotence," in the journal Mind . It's an argument brilliant philosophical believers like Alvin Plantinga have labored intensively to refute ever since. And, as I said, it echoes what Mr. Byrne says to Arnold: If something good happens, it's God's will, if something terrible happens, "He moves in mysterious ways," and we're not supposed to question why. Mr. Byrne doesn't go as far as Mr. Bauer in saying God is the real Satan (if he's all-powerful). But he implies it when he says, " I'm not the bad guy here." Guess who that leaves? In doing so he's almost reasserting the Romantic-vitalist Satanic tradition exemplified by William Blake in his famous argument that Milton was really on the Devil's side in Paradise Lost (Lucifer being tragically, poetically heroic, God a great big bore). I want to make it clear that I'm not endorsing Satanism here, what I am saying is that it's incredibly refreshing to see a film that questions the simple-minded, simpering piety that passes for theodicy in popular culture and popular films. The simple-minded theodicy that allows the parents of a kid who escaped being murdered at Columbine to give all the credit to God-it was His doing, He saved my child. Which leaves the parents of a kid who was murdered to choose between thinking God wanted their kid dead and mouthing pious blather about God moving "in mysterious ways." You see it over and over again, the sickening cruelty of the survivors of a natural tragedy, a tornado for instance, weepily telling the television cameras their survival was all God's will, thus implicitly telling their neighbors who lost a mother or a child God must have wanted them dead. But it just ain't as easy as that. This isn't hard-won religious faith, this is cruel kindergarten-like cowering. Religious faith needs the challenge of the subversive theodicy in End of Days or it doesn't mean anything. It's sad that the only source of skeptical challenge to brain-dead pieties in Touched By An Angel –popular culture should come in a neo-Satanist Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but we should be grateful to My Dark Lord Arnold for having the muscle to bring it to us. Did I say that, "My Dark Lord Arnold"? I don't know what came over me. I mean that fine actor Arnold, of course.