On God: An Uncommon Conversation (19 page)

         

So I guess from what you've said you now understand why here and there in commentary on your work people will say, “Oh, Mailer, he's sort of a Gnostic.”

Well, yes, perhaps I do understand—I will say that I want to accomplish something with these dialogues. Normally, you are not supposed to talk about religion until you know a good deal about it, and then you are still wise to say little. But I have proceeded to ponder these questions without being qualified. Yet my basic argument is that of course I am qualified all the same. We all are. That is why I can say yes, if you want to get down to it, I probably am a Gnostic in the sense that the inner feeling I have about these matters is so clear and so acute to me. I certainly do feel ready to talk about it. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that oxymorons pollute the mind, and the Great Oxymoron—All-Good and All-Powerful—is the most virulent of all, which is equal to saying that modern-day Fundamentalism is poison to the human spirit.

         

Whereas Gnosticism now indicates the road to take?

Perhaps we can now afford to be Gnostics. In early Christian time, the fundamental wisdom of human beings may have been: “We need order. We do not need stimulation. We do not need thought that is lively and novel and new. We need order. We need command from above.” That was a stage in human existence. It was much like the stages of existence that children pass through, where they must live under order at a certain point or nothing holds their behavior together.

         

You're talking like a Hegelian now.

Well, I don't care about the labels. I think we are at a stage of development where Gnosticism may serve us better.

         

I can imagine how you as a new Gnostic must think about corporations, too.

Well, we don't have to go there. Right now, I much prefer to wander through the forests of theology than the quick-sands of economics. Let me conclude, however, by thanking you for the order and stimulation you brought to this theologically ignorant mind.

X

Prayer

MICHAEL LENNON:
Here's a question on ritual. It will introduce us to the question of prayer. All your ideas, I would say, have an underlying assumption that God has a continuing, even a profound interest in some individuals and certainly in the ultimate fate of the human species, flora and fauna, and the rest of His Creation. This is completely at odds with some of the earliest recorded religious expression, namely, from the Sumerians, whose prayers were always begging the gods, “Remember!” Prayer and ritual were a constant attempt to engage the attention of forgetful and indifferent gods who had created but had abandoned humanity. This, by the way, wasn't a notion emerging from disasters and dislocations but could be found even as their civilization flourished. Can you comment?

         

NORMAN MAILER:
It's the other half of the equation. The obverse side of prayer is that it rarely gets answered—so rarely, indeed, that people at religious meetings cite such events as formidable. Answered prayers are often seen as a species of miracle. Prayers are not usually answered. But then I think of the Lord wading through a mud wash of prayers: “Oh, God, let my team win the game!” “Oh, God, let me sell this old heap that no one wants so I can buy a new heap with spoke wheels.”

I don't think God listens to prayer. The Sumerians, as you describe them, were relatively sophisticated people who recognized that they might pray, but answers did not come often.

Now let's suppose some people have a child who's ill, and they pray to God with great sincerity, begging for their child to live. I'm willing to accept the effort as not something to sneer at. I won't say it works, but we can certainly feel for the parent.

         

When you were talking about Gandhi and oxymorons, you said: “There are a few that are vital and valuable. One of them is ‘heroic passivity.' There, one's experience must serve as the arbiter. There can be heroic passivity, or quasi-passivity. The latter can be a disaster.” Along that line, what would you say about the contemplative life? By that I mean the cloistered orders who don't run hospitals or schools, just pray for the world. This is a strong Christian tradition, ditto for the Buddhists and some Hindus, and probably Hasidim engage in some variant of that. Do you see a value in this kind of passivity?

I would answer yes. I'm not opposed. If we're going to come nearer to God, to find a sense of God behind the words, it's perfectly conceivable to me that the deity of whom I speak does pay attention to transcendental sincerity. I have a crude analogy to offer. Occasionally, after having worked on a novel, you come across a review that's so intelligently written and gets so close to what you were attempting to do or, even better, offers insights you did not arrive at by yourself that your work is more illuminated for you. Such a critic makes me feel better about the act of writing. So do I also think that there are people who contemplate existence, then pray in depth to God and are qualified to do so. They are not petty. What I hate about prayer is that so often it is superficial and greedy. Most of the time it is looking for an undeserved advantage: I'm kind of stupid, God, but maybe You'll help me because I'm praying to You. They do it as if modesty is the only passport needed.

         

This is about Buddhism: What's your take on the Buddhist notion of the boddhisatva vow? Reaching nirvana is a catch-22: If you have achieved a level of deep compassion, enough to reach nirvana, you can't go happily off into it while other sentient beings are still here struggling and suffering. So even though you personally have a free pass out of this far-from-perfect world, you
voluntarily
reincarnate as a boddhisatva—a helper, a teacher, a guide to the way—and keep reincarnating until everyone has achieved nirvana. Devout Buddhist lay people of many persuasions, and all the monks and nuns, take the “bodhisattva vow” at an advanced stage of their training.

It's a beautiful notion. The difficulty I've always had with Buddhism, however, is not bodhisattva but nirvana. As I see it, the point of existence is not to rise above our petty feelings and leave them behind but, on the contrary, to be able to struggle with those petty feelings in such a way that we lift them into more vigorous feelings. Nirvana always struck me as a place I had no interest in reaching. Whether it existed or not—I had no idea—it did not appeal. I remember talking to a friend of mine who's a good Buddhist, and I soon fell into a polite rage. Over just a few drinks! “You Buddhists always talk about nothingness, at how to arrive at nothingness,” I told him, and added, “As a writer, I can tell you, I live with nothingness every minute I'm working. I sit at my desk and for the first half hour there's nothing—I have to pass through such nothingness in order to come to a few ideas. You're not really talking about nothingness. Nothingness is an awful state! It's so empty a state. Why don't you talk about what it really is you are looking for, which is
the ineffable
?”

I hope he was struck with the thought, even if only by a little. Being a good Buddhist, he did no more than smile!

Back to the bodhisattva: I would say again it's a noble conception. Whether true or not is another matter.

         

At the end of one of our interviews, you said that in many ways the Creator might be comparable to a Greek god—strong yet not All-Powerful, flawed but noble; well, you know, Greek myths are full of incidents where the gods took human form or animal form. Apart from the well-known stories of Zeus turning up as this or that personage to impregnate some female, there are also stories of Zeus turning up as a beggar. In one story, peasants take in a wretched beggar overnight, share their far-from-abundant meal with him, treat him very well, and next morning find his bed empty and a sack of gold in his place—Zeus came calling and rewarded them for their kindness to the poor! God showing up on earth is an idea embraced long before Christian theology.

I don't see any need to answer the question. I just take it for granted. If God wants to appear as a human, indeed He would. But I think what's more interesting is the belief that if you're good when you don't have to be good, something favorable can happen, which I think is also part of human nature. Humans live for revenge—but they also live for the belief that we are capable of goodness. For me, the brunt of these stories is the human desire involved. I want to be capable of goodness, and indeed I would also wish to believe that there is something in the universe that will reward you for goodness. Prayer, I would argue, is all too often the stepchild of that emotion.

         

I want to go back to a crucial point. Earlier you said you doubted the efficacy of prayers because all too often they were requests for personal gains or status: money, a job, a new car. But do you give enough credence to the huge number of people who pray for guidance or forgiveness or for strength to avoid sin? These types of prayers may exceed the greedy type. Who could say?

I would agree. Let us even assume they do exceed it. My point is that God may not pay great attention to most prayer. Think of it as an immensely abused communication system, which is overwhelmingly present in human affairs. I would suppose that God can pick up human messages without the need for prayer. I will admit that a prayer can have, on occasion, such vibrancy that God is cheered by it. But I would also say that most prayer is wasteful and self-indulgent, an exercise in narcissism. Over the years, I've heard so many people say, “I'm praying for you.” My reaction is, “I don't need it. It's not helping. You're just invading my presence.” Often, it is no more than another petty human weapon. It could be well intended. They do care about you, they want to do the best they can for you. But do they really need to pray to make their feelings legitimate? If they love you, then you are probably going to reap a benefit whether they try to talk to God or not.

         

How so?

Through the warmth you receive from them—the honest warmth of their feeling rather than the oratorical “I'll pray for you.”

         

You feel then that prayer tends to be meretricious?

That may be too strong a word. How about oversubscribed? Ninety percent of prayer may not necessarily lead to anything. I think a lot of people pray in order to intensify their sense of focus. They are doing it for themselves. What I don't like about prayer is the enormous baggage that goes with it, the stultification of society that is shored up by prayer, the number of mediocrities who pray for something that they know nothing about. You can see humongous examples of that on television every night, crowd-rousers invoking the holy efficacy of prayer while seizing every false advantage they can find—including, how not?—quick appeals for money.

         

Static.

Worse. I think the interception of prayer may be one of the Devil's most powerful instruments. Whenever a prayer is offered that is lacking whole integrity, the Devil may know how to profit from such shoddy work.

         

Many religious people find solace in praying together. They believe that group prayer, at a religious service or in a group of people, is a more efficacious way of reaching the Lord. Now, the Lord may be too engaged to pick up a single cry for intercession, but he can hardly neglect a full house of prayers from, say, St. Peter's, led by the Pope on the son's birthday. Quantity changes quality, as you are forever saying.

There is no question in my mind that St. Peter's would attract God's attention. Still, we must enter into the nature of the communal prayer. For example, right now, a war is being waged between Islam and ourselves. If there is a particular phenomenon that characterizes Islam, it is how they pray together five times a day. They put their foreheads to the ground, they raise their buttocks toward Heaven, and they pray. And we in the West look down on it. We tend to consider that kind of excessive. Moreover, we don't necessarily believe that Allah is well-intentioned. To us, he is an alien God. So the fact that a number of people get together for such prayer and have a community of opinion doesn't make them appear virtuous to us. For that matter—change of venue!—when a theater audience laughs as one, does that have any relation to prayer? To feel that one is part of a great group of people is reassuring regardless of the occasion. But whether prayer is beneficial is quite another matter. All over America there are now prayers to Christ for our soldiers in Iraq, whole communities praying that our soldiers don't run their Humvees over terrorists' explosives. Of course, you've also got Islamics praying just as powerfully and just as intently that their enemies will be wiped out by the same explosives.

         

Why not also say that the people at St. Peter's may be praying for us to get out of that war?

All right. Exactly. Some are. And I can believe there is a collective telepathic power that humans do have. With a thousand people together, or ten thousand, yes, the effect may be magnified beyond the numbers. But to assume it is magnified to good purpose is a very large assumption. It could as easily be toward an evil one. Humans are skewed away from the point all the time. America spent close to fifty years believing that Russia was the evil empire while all the time that ugly, cruel place was getting weaker and weaker and growing worse and worse as it became less capable of destroying us. For the last two decades of the Soviets, we never saw them for what they were: a constipated commerce-locked economy, an overordered society, slow in development, and, in relation to us, as boastful as it was empty. Their real desire may have been to rise to some beginning of economic equality with us. They lacked the inner wherewithal to believe they could destroy us, and all the while our anti-Sovietism served the needs of the American power seekers. We kept the American public afraid of the Soviets long after it may have been justifiable. By the end, they were not the evil empire but a wretched kingdom.

         

We were praying against it, too, praying for its collapse.

We weren't praying for its collapse. We were hoping that when a war came we would destroy the Russians before they would destroy us.

         

But when we read in the newspapers about what was going on in Russia in the seventies and eighties and how grim it was, I'm sure a lot of people were saying, “The Lord is bringing the Russians to their knees.”

Well, now you have a great many people saying, “Maybe the Lord will bring Islam to its knees.” Islam is saying, “Allah will bring the great Satan to its knees.” The notion that a country is holy or evil, I find insupportable.