Martin Warren, Assistant Professor
Department of English, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
Abstract
Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow leads the reader
to wrestle with how evil, pain, and suffering are explained in
theodicy and thus grapples with “the risks and beauties
of religious faith.” The sparrow of the novel’s title
refers to the insignificant sparrow of Matthew 10:29-31 that
is observed and known by God in its fall to earth. In this
speculative fiction novel, the Jesuits hear beautiful music transmitted
from another planet and send a mission to meet God’s other
children. The meeting ends disastrously. Russell
encourages us, through the device of the mission, to reflect
on our understanding of how God’s will works in the universe.
[1] “In 1942 the medical service of the Revier [Ravensbruck] death
camp were required to perform abortions on all pregnant women. If
a child happened to [be] born alive, it would be smothered
or drowned in a bucket in front of the mother. Given a
newborn child’s natural resistance to drowning, a baby’s
agony might last for twenty or thirty minutes.” Germaine
Tillion, Ravensbruck, 77.
[2] “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped;
You
were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an
object of laughter;
Everyone
mocks me.” Jeremiah 20:7
[3] “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not
one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
... So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Matthew
10:29-31.
Introduction
[4] In providing reassurance to his audience in the face of persecution,
the writer of Matthew’s gospel offers an image of God’s
encompassing love in the figure of the sparrow that falls to the
ground. The sparrow, common, dowdy, seemingly unimportant
even in the world of birds, and certainly insignificant in the world
of humans, is noticed, however, by God. Its fall to the ground
is a moment worthy of God’s consideration. If God can
notice the fall of a sparrow, the gospel writer suggests, then surely
we humans, made in God’s own image (Gen.1:26-27), must be
profoundly significant. Certainly we are the ones tenderly
watched over by God. The comforting image of the Matthean
sparrow reinforces our belief in a God of love. Yet
apparently unjustified woes, filled with inexplicable pain and suffering,
are imposed on God’s children. The opening epigraph
concerning babies drowned right before their mother’s eyes
in Ravensbruck death camp horrifies and disquiets us at many levels,
leading us to ask why a beneficent deity would permit such senseless
and wanton destruction. Our belief is shaken. David
Birnbaum states our dilemma succinctly when he writes: “How
can we affirm the validity of a sincere religious commitment in
a world where we ourselves have witnessed such prevalence of gratuitous,
gross evil?” (1989, xx).
[5] The reality of evil makes us question the belief that God is
just. We are forced to ask whether a truly adoring God would
make a world where someone we love dies of a terrible disease or
where terrorists kill thousands of people as occurred on September
11, 2001 in New York City. If God is all-powerful,
are we then just puppets jerked around by a divine puppeteer in
a far larger plan whose purpose we do not understand? As we
face evil in God’s good creation we must wonder, as Jeremiah
says in the second epigraph, whether God has duped us. So
how do we work with this perception of being duped?
[6] In Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, we are
invited to explore the intersection of human faith and God’s
will and the existence of evil and suffering in a creation that
God in the Book of Genesis declares is good. The novel is
not about the existence or non-existence of God. Rather it
is about the nature of God as far as we can understand God’s
plan and purpose not just for the cosmos but also for the individual. Russell,
in an interview, says that
The central theme [of the book] is an exploration of the risks
and beauties of religious faith. If there isn’t a God, then
Emilio Sandoz is all alone. And yet he’s terrified of
the God he thinks he has discovered. ... The risks [of religion]
have to do with believing that God micromanages the world, and with
seeing what may be simply coincidence as significant and indicative
of divine providence (“Author Interview”).
Emilio Sandoz, the Jesuit linguist at the heart of the novel, wrestles
with the concept of God micromanaging the cosmos. Hearing
exquisite extraterrestrial operatic music via an observatory in
2019, Sandoz persuades the Society of Jesus to undertake a mission
to the makers of this “divine” music, these other children
of God. The mission ends in catastrophe despite the good will
of the members of the mission. Through the “guiltless
cultural blindness” of the mission, great harm arises and “the
biblical sparrow, despite what Jesus promises ... falls, apparently
unprotected and unloved” (Krivak 1997,19). Sandoz ends
up fighting an internal battle with the book’s silent character,
God, whom Sandoz once loved but now no longer understands or trusts. Like
Jeremiah, Sandoz feels duped by God as he struggles to understand
how doing God’s will as he saw it brought pain and destruction.
[7]
Trying to discern what it means for God to watch over every sparrow,
believers have developed the branch of learning called theodicy
which means “God’s justice” from “God” (theos)
and “justice” (dik?). According to
Russell (2004), this novel clearly deals with theodicy:
We seem to believe that if we act in accordance with our understanding
of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But in doing
so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to. Emilio
has kept his end of a bargain that he made with God, and he feels
betrayed. He believes that he has been seduced and raped by
God, that he has been used against his will for God’s own
purpose. And I guess that’s partly what I’m doing
with this book. I wanted to look at that aspect of theology. In
our world, if people believe at all, they believe that God is love,
God is hearts and flowers, and that God will send you theological
candy all the time. But if you read the Torah, you realize
that God has a lot to answer for. God is a complex personality. I
wanted to explore that complexity and that moral ambiguity.
[8]
Following in the footsteps of Richard Rorty, I will privilege imaginative
literature over “rationalist” philosophy (cf. Rorty’s Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity [1989]). Thus, in this article I
will employ literature (specifically Russell’s The Sparrow) as
a discourse that interrogates the rationalizing theodicies of philosophy
and theology and the problems such theodicies create “in their
attempt to justify God’s ways to those who think the problem
of evil is solved by producing an explanation” (Tilley 1991,
1). The discussion will begin with an examination of theodicy
and then move into the challenge presented to theodicy posed by
the extreme skepticism of deconstruction theory. From there,
as the discussion journeys on to Russell’s The Sparrow, “let
us,” as David Jasper (1989) writes, “allow writing in
the Derridean sense, its head unrepressed by philosophy or by the
demands of theological system. Let us deliberately engage
in an act of literary kenosis (emptying out) in obedience
to an honesty” that undermines rationalistic attempts to “prove” the
goodness of God and leads us “to an honest faith in we know
not what” (135).
Theodicy
[9] “The Lord, the Lord is a merciful and gracious God, slow
to anger and abounding in kindness and truth. He keeps kindness
to the thousandth generation” (Exodus 34: 6-7).
[10]
The modern understanding of theodicy as a science which treats of
God through the exercise of reason alone finds its origins in the
eighteenth century. William King, the Anglican archbishop
of Dublin, published De origine mali in 1702. Gottfried
Leibniz, in responding to King, composed his own work in 1710 and
coined the word “theodicy.” Leibniz’s work was
an attempt to explain “how the present world is the best of
all possible worlds” (Tilley 1991, 2). Theodicy is essentially
the reply to a demand for rational coherence and is also utopian. According
to Tilley, theodicy “stabilizes an inherently unstable world
by declaring it stable, ... it displays a world which we wished
existed, a world in which evil was manageable, if not by us, at
least by God” (248-9). Like a juggler trying to keep
all the balls in the air at the same time, theodicy deals with three
propositions: (1) God is all-powerful; (2) God is absolutely good;
(3) Evil exists. In dealing with these three propositions,
theodicy becomes essentially a “defense of (the justice and
righteousness of) God in the face of evil” (Birnbaum 1989,
3). This defense of God has a long history expressed
in the work of Marcion, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Augustine, Boethius
and Aquinas. In the view of theodicy, evil is understood as: (a)
moral evil, i.e., the willful acts of human beings, such as murder
and rape, and (b) natural evil, i.e., natural disasters. Unfortunately,
in defending God, theodicy “effaces the difference between
the world that theodicists wish to be (a world wherein God reigns)
and the world that is” (Tilley 1991, 249). The beauty
of a novel such as The Sparrow is that it draws the reader
to address the issue of evil in the world that is and not in a world
that we wish would be. In effect, a text such as The Sparrow resists
theodicy’s declaration that this is the way the world is by
presenting the reader with the faith journey of Emilio Sandoz. Through
Sandoz’s questioning of the traditional theodical explanation
of the tragedy that befalls his mission, we find an avenue for us
to bring to the fore our own questions.
[11]
Theodicy is not at work in all religions. Rather it finds
itself employed mostly in the monotheistic religions since they
proclaim that there is only one God, “a God who is all-powerful
and all-good” (Birnbaum 1989, 4). Since there are no
other gods in the monotheistic religions, and if God is truly omnipotent
and beneficent, then evil must be explained in a way that allows
God to remain good and powerful.
[12]
In the Judeo-Christian perspective, God is not only all-powerful
and all-good, but also all-knowing. For example, in the Book
of Genesis, “God is serenely and supremely in charge. There
is no struggle here, no anxiety, no risk” (Brueggeman 197,
153). God is most definitely the one who controls everything. As
John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer writes, God’s
government is “that by which, as keeper of the keys, he governs
all events” (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.16.4). Yet
the world is stamped with misery and suffering, by evil in all its
forms. So if God is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful,
why do suffering and evil occur? In answer to this question,
three possibilities exist: (1) God is ignorant of our suffering;
(2) God is powerless to do anything about it; (3) God does not care
if we suffer. For the most part, these three possibilities
are not acceptable to the monotheistic religions. Hence they attempt
to reconcile a benevolent God with suffering and evil through the
construct of theodicy. Theodicy, in answering the question
about why suffering and evil are permitted by a benevolent, all-knowing
and all-powerful God, gives four possible reasons: “(1) some
goods are possible only if certain evils exist; (2) human freedom
is a particularly great good, but free humans may do evil; (3) we
become fully human only by being tested against evil; (4) perhaps
there are limits on God’s power” (Placher 2003, 98). Whichever
way theologians try to explain evil, as is seen in the four foregoing
reasons, what must be preserved is the idea that God cannot be responsible
for evil. After all, it is a given that God is all-good. What
is more, when humans turn to evil, our freedom of will is offered
as an explanation for why God is not responsible, for “[T]
he purpose of most theodicies is to show why the sufferings which
people endure and the sins they commit do not count against belief
in God” (Tilley 1991, 231). Theodicy accepts, according
to Ricoeur, “both the rule of non-contradiction and that of
systematic totalization” and seeks to be a self-sufficient
discourse practice (1986, 635). This notion of theodicy as
a self-sufficient discourse practice is found in the five main models
of theodicy: (1) deistic; (2) dialogic; (3) monarchical; (4) agential;
and (5) self-limiting.
[13]
The deistic model of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sees
God as making the world and then setting it off to operate on its
own. Leibniz, the seventeenth-century German philosopher and mathematician,
believed that God’s design of the world was perfect so that
no “interference” from God was required. In this
model, “God has only to start it [creation] up, so to speak,
and be present now and then in times of personal and public crisis” (McFague
1003, 105). This is the model to which many Christians and
non-believers adhere.
[14]
The dialogic model may be described quite simply as “God speaks
and we respond.” In her analysis, McFague says this
model has two tracks: “religion and culture (the latter including
scientific knowledge and all social institutions such as government,
the economy, the family), with each left to its own affairs” (2003,
106). Since the culture track is separate, God only touches
the world in the human subject and then only within the inner being
of the person.
[15]
In the monarchical model, God is an omnipotent king who controls
his human subjects, who in return offer him total obedience. God’s
power and glory are paramount here.
[16]
The agential model depicts God as an agent “whose intentions
and purposes are realized in history ... God is actor and doer,
creator and redeemer of the world, as well as its providential caretaker” (McFague
2003, 108). This model is reflected in the Belgic Confession
of 1561 which propounds that God is like us in making and doing
things with a purpose, with intention, for a specific conclusion.
[17]
The self-limiting model is the province of process theologians who
propose there are limits to God’s power. Such a theologian
is David Ray Griffin, who lays out the basic process theology position
that God has freely chosen to limit God’s self to make possible
free and independent agents acting in the world. This God
does not prevent all evil because God cannot.
[18]
The problem with all these models is that they subscribe to theological
determinism. God is the sole given, and God’s love and
justice are simply self-evident. We are, however, whether
we like it or not, children of modernity whose sense of history
has led to an awareness of historical contingency. Historicism
leads us to doubt the absolute validity of any worldview or philosophy. As
Wilhelm Dilthey points out in his Weltanschauungslehre, there
appears to be an irreconcilable contradiction between those looking
for metaphysical realities, the true structure of the world and
reality, and those who acknowledge the uncompromising relativism
of historical consciousness (1931, 3, 6). Thus the objective
world of theodicy with its harmonious structure founded on the givens
about God cannot hold. Historicism transmutes theodicy into
a banal enterprise and brings us to a sense of the absence of God,
or the non-existence of God, or the unknowableness of God. Building
on the insight provided by Dilthey’s analysis of the historical
sense, I will follow the trajectory of the unknowableness of God
and enter into what is called negative theology and the realm of
deconstruction, seeing Russell’s The Sparrow as a novel
which enters into the empty space between humans and God and attempts
to create a new fabric of connections between human and divine.
Negative Theology, Deconstruction, and Theodicy
[19] “Here is an anecdote: I have more than once set philosophy
of religion students to study The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The
Dark Night of the Soul. ‘After all,’ I say, ‘you
want to know about God, and St. John of the Cross is the best. Admittedly,
he is not a philosopher but a mystic. Nevertheless, if man
can know God, John did. Let’s look at him.’ Back
come the students, irritable and disappointed: ‘There’s
nothing there,’ they complain. ‘That’s it!,’ I
say, ‘That’s it!’” (Don Cupitt, Taking
Leave of God, 1981).
[20]
I begin this section of the discussion with the epigraph from Cupitt
since it illustrates the subversive nature of mysticism and negative
theology. A brief excursus into mysticism and negative theology
will help expose a weakness in the foundations of Modern theodicy
which originated in the writings of the eighteenth-century Anglican
archbishop, William King, and in the philosophizing of Leibniz. Modern
theodicy asserts that we can produce an adequate, rational understanding
of God and of God’s actions in creation; that we can uncover
God’s intentions. Countering modern theodicy’s
claim, Stephen D. Moore writes that “negative theology can
be said to be a self-subverting discourse that systematically showcases
its own inadequacy to the theological task of endorsing God in concepts–a
stuttering disruption of the confident assertions of conventional
theological discourse. In short negative theology is the deconstruction
of positive theology” (1994, 24). Negative theology
and traditional mysticism remind us that we cannot penetrate beyond
language and somehow reach behind words to describe some direct
experience of “God” or “Other.” Cupitt
believes that mysticism is not a universal, prelinguistic experience
that can serve to validate all religious and ethical knowledge (1998,
33-35). The idea that “mystical experience” exists
somehow beyond language is specifically modern, a notion of the
Enlightenment (see Cupitt 1998, 35-45 for a thorough description
of this understanding of mysticism.). In the modern construction
of mysticism, a mystic was a person who experienced “mystical
states, which in turn were thought of as being, needing to be, pure
non-linguistic states of consciousness. It was very often
said that such interpreted states were ‘ineffable,’ because
in them one was absorbed, passive, and plunged into an undifferentiated
unity” (1998, 33). These ineffable events then confirmed
the truth of religious orthodoxy since it was claimed that mystical
experiences are noetic, giving knowledge of a Transcendent Object,
God. This understanding of the “ineffable event” is
problematic, however. It assumes that ineffable experiences
are based on an assumption that “experience” can exist
prior to language, and that it is possible to have an experience
which language cannot describe. However, this privileging
of experience over language has been rendered obsolete in the postmodern
world. In the traditional understanding of knowledge, knowledge
is a faithful representation of reality where the mind is like a
mirror reflecting the real. From a postmodern view we create
both language and truth about the world. Language is the constitutive
core of all experience. Thus, as Cupitt says, “there
is no meaningfulness and no cognition prior to language” (1998,
11). This statement is of profound significance in the deconstruction
of theodicy.
[21]
Cupitt’s investigation of mysticism leads him to see premodern
mystics, not as defenders of the faith, but as proto-deconstructionists,
i.e., they used the language of mystical literature to deconstruct
the ability of the ecclesiastical authorities to regulate the spiritual
lives of the members of the flock. In Cupitt’s conception
of classical or traditional mysticism, mystics are
people highly conscious of language, people who convey their message,
not by pointing to something outside language, but by the way they
play games with language, tormenting it because it torments
them, keeping to the rules in such a wicked way as
to get round the rules. What they write best is best
interpreted as a slightly mocking and subversive commentary
upon the officially approved forms of words for speaking about
God (1998, 61).
Take, for example, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327 CE) a medieval
Dominican mystic. He sees reality as a dance of language,
writing that “God calls himself a word ... beside this Word,
man is a byword” and “[E]very creature is full of God
and is a book” (Eckhart [trans. Blakney 1957], 222). Eckhart
insists we must let go of any God who is describable in human language,
that we must for God’s sake take leave of God (204) for in
rejecting one account of language, one may affirm God in another
way. In other words, Eckhart is deconstructing the standard doctrine
of God, which avers that God, and God’s intention, are knowable.
Eckhart’s version of negative theology, this particular way
of mystical writing, may be seen as a forerunner of deconstruction.
[22]
The path followed by the west has been strictly “logocentric,” i.e.,
a belief in some ultimate meaning that underlies all experience
and language. In the Christian tradition, this ultimate meaning
is expressed in the ultimate Word, God, who lies outside of language. God
as Word directs “reality” unaffected by linguistic constraints
and differences. This is the omnipotent, omniscient God of
theodicy, that theological practice that we have understood to be
a self-sufficient discourse practice that confers upon itself extra-linguistic
privileges in the ontological claims it makes for God as Word. But
as we have seen in the discussion of Eckhart’s mysticism and
negative theology, we must let go of any God describable in human
language in order to affirm God. Eckhart’s play with
language opens the way to challenging theodicy, permitting us to
read The Sparrow in a way that undermines rationalistic attempts
to “prove” the goodness of God.
[23]
If Eckhart’s negative theology may be described as a proto-deconstructionism,
it is appropriate to examine deconstruction itself. The value
of deconstruction in this discussion is that “it presents
a challenge to text or any linguistic construct, and perhaps, therefore,
may be of profit in unbinding those theodicies which find themselves
to be texts hampered by the claims of theology or the need to provide
answers to a problem” (Jasper 1989, 119). Deconstruction
is not a destructive methodology nor mere academic wordplay. Rather
it understands language as creative and vibrant, something which
opens up possibilities for making meaning. Writing in 1998,
Carl Leggo describes deconstruction as
a practice of reading that begins with the assumption that
meaning is a textual construction. Perhaps even more useful
than the noun “construction” is the verb “constructing” because
deconstruction is a continuous process of interacting with
texts. According to deconstruction, a text is not a window a
reader can look through in order to see either the author’s
intention or an essential truth, nor is the text a mirror that
turns back a vivid image of the reader's experiences, emotions,
and insights. Instead, deconstruction is a practice of reading
that aims to make meaning from a text by focusing on how the
text works rhetorically, and how a text is connected to other
texts as well as the historical, cultural, social, and political
contexts in which texts are written, read, published, reviewed,
rewarded, and distributed (1998, 187).
Theodicies have operated as if, to use Leggo’s words,
they are windows into the verities of the divine and thus able to
assure us of God’s all-knowing, all-powerful nature that cradles
us benevolently in the face of pain and suffering that we do not
understand.
[24]
In using deconstruction, the reader does not dismantle the text
but uses interpretive strategies that reveal how a text unravels
in self-contradiction. Where do these self-contradictions
find their origin? In answer to this question, Appignanesi
and Garratt write “[D]econstruction is a strategy for revealing
the underlayers of meaning in a text that were suppressed or assumed
in order for it to take its actual form. ... Texts are never simply
unitary but include resources that run counter to their assertions
and/or their authors’ intentions” (1999, 80). In
other words, deconstruction helps the reader examine the givens
in a text. One of the givens in Western metaphysics has been
that language can be put aside by reason to “arrive at a pure,
self-authenticating truth or method” (Norris 1982, 19). However,
deconstruction as an interpretive strategy “assumes that language
is unstable and ambiguous and is therefore inherently contradictory. Because
authors cannot control their language, texts reveal more than their
authors are aware of” (Barnet 1996, 368). Meaning can
never be quite grasped. Rather meaning is always deferred. There
are no answers, only an extreme skepticism. Deconstruction
acts as a purifying strategy upon the text.
[25]
At this point, it is appropriate to apply deconstruction’s
purifying strategy to theodicy itself. Theodicy acts as a
self-enclosed text through which humans long to find meaning, the
answer to our problem, i.e., how can we believe in a good God in
a world filled with so much evil? As text, theodicy reflects
on the larger text that is the story of God and God’s creation. However,
the author of that larger text is God.
[26]
The tradition of God as author is a long one. To cite simply
one example of this analogy, we can turn to the early Church Father,
Irenaeus, who wrote: “There exists but one God ... he is the
Father, God, the creator, the author, the giver of order. He
made all things by himself, that is, by his Word and by his
Wisdom, by the Son and the Spirit” who, so to speak are “his
hands” (Adversus haereses). Like any author,
God has something to communicate. Bonaventure sees one aspect
of this communication as follows, that God created all things “not
to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it” (In
secundum sententiarum I,2,2,1). The Catechism of the Catholic
Church in reflecting on God’s glory states that “The
glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and
communication of his goodness, for which the world was created” (Catechism #294). Like
any author, God has a life prior to creation. That fact is
essential to the whole construction of theodicy according to David
Jasper:
For theodicy ... this life exterior to creation is a vital security
to the belief that the creation was God’s intention and that
in spite of all, his intentions were that it be good (‘And
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good!). His
intentions, in other words, are entirely successfully effected in
his work and ultimately, if the theodicy is to be sustained, nothing
lies outside God’s beneficence and omnipotence (1989,
123).
However, Jasper goes on to point out a grave weakness in this analogy
of God as author. That weakness is intentional fallacy which
is
the mistaken belief that what the author intended is the ‘real’, ‘final’ meaning
of the work and that we can or should know what this is. In
this respect, readers attempt to find the origin of the text, its
beginning, in the author’s consciousness. But
if we cannot know the beginning of a text in terms of what
is available to us on the page, how much more difficult it
would be to discover the origins of the thought that impels
the text. (Bennett and Royle 1999, 7)
Given this disjunction in the creativity of the human author, “between
intention and effect, on what literary basis are we to grant the
divine author a privilege not available to the human–that
he effects in creation exactly what he intends?” (Jasper 1989,
123). Once we recognize that in theodicy, as with any other
text, there is no necessary connection between intention and effect,
we find ourselves freed from the presuppositions of theological
absolutism. We can at this point “deconstruct our sense
of the divine workings into a new sense of freedom and a new discernment
of the mystery” (Jasper 1989, 124).
[27]
We have, in Derrida’s terms, come to the point of aporia,
the moment in a text where the meaning becomes ambiguous or self-contradictory,
presenting an opportunity to consider God and pain and suffering
in different ways. If we apply intentional fallacy to theodicy
any meaning in a theodical sense is ultimately deferred. Theodicy
as text can now engage in the practice of text calling to text. Thus
in a play of intertextuality in this paper, Leibniz calls to Meister
Eckhart to Russell’s The Sparrow.
The Sparrow as a Response to Theodicy
[28] “In a phrase with which Bonhoeffer has made us familiar,
the world is etsi deus non daretur, as if there were
no God. That
is to say, the cosmic order is systematically ambiguous, capable
of being interpreted theistically or naturalistically. In
such a world the awareness of God takes the form of the cognitive
choice which we call faith” (John Hick, Evil and the God
of Love 1996, 373).
[29]
All the things that chip away at our sense of self and security,
teach us in the words of Simone Weil that “the thing we believe
to be ourself is as ephemeral and automatic, a product of external
circumstances as the form of a sea-wave” (Weil 1968, 188).
This image of the self as a product of external circumstances is
seen in the process of reading. If we accept that the process
of meaning as we read The Sparrow takes place within us,
the reader, then the text unsettles us, acts upon us. We live
in a drama between reader and novel. Like Emilio Sandoz, the novel’s
main character, we become responsible to (a) construct the text
in the face of the calamities that befall the characters; (b) answer
how we understand the risks and beauties of religious faith; and
(c) struggle with the question of how God’s will operates
in creation and whether we can begin to respond to it. That
is to say, we live in the ambiguity of the cosmic order of the novel
knowing that, as Bonhoeffer says above, there can only be ambiguity. The
choice is in how we respond to the ambiguity.
[30]
Turning now to The Sparrow, we have the advantage of using
the fruits of the earlier part of our conversation to help us understand
how the novel is a response to theodicy. Having articulated
the traditional elements of theodicy and then journeyed through
a deconstruction of theodicy in which we acknowledged intentional
fallacy as theodicy’s fatal flaw, we come to the novel with
a number of important points that must be kept in mind. These
points according to David Jasper are: (1) God as the true artist
never means quite what he says which leads to an infinite deferment
of meaning. (2) Thus, theodically speaking, we must have a
faithful commitment to deferment of meaning. (3) What is important
therefore is that enactment is all. We as humans continue
to act. (4) The novel continually shows its insufficiency to answer
the question set up. It challenges the reader to let go of
the obsessive need for meaning. (5) The novel is a mirror
reflecting back to us with ruthless honesty. In fact, The
Sparrow is the best place to tackle the issue of an omnipotent,
omniscient, beneficent God and pain and suffering, since the novel
allows us to play with meaning (Jasper 1989, 130-31).
[31]
In The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell, whose academic career
focused on paleoanthropology, revives the anthropological science
fiction that was popular in the 1970s. Russell follows in
the footsteps of someone like Ursula Le Guin whose The Left Hand
of Darkness (1969) epitomizes anthropological science fiction. In The
Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin creates a world complete with
its own language, myths, and religion to help the reader investigate
one specific question in Le Guin’s “thought experiment,” the
question being “Is gender necessary?” As a paleoanthropologist
Russell creates a “thought experiment” in which her
object of study is the issue of a divine plan at work in the encounter
between the human race and two species of aliens. Like Le
Guin, Russell creates a complete world in which misunderstood cultural
differences bring about disaster.
[32]
The novel’s chapters alternate between two themes: (a) the
Jesuit mission to a newly discovered world, the planet Rakhat, and
(b) the investigation, years later on earth, into the disastrous
outcome of the mission. The central character is Emilio Sandoz,
a Jesuit who is a highly talented linguist. Sandoz hopes the
mission will resolve his spiritual doubts. In the “outward” chapters
we learn of the origins of the mission and the complex and rich
learning that takes place once the humans meet the more rustic species
of aliens on Rakhat. However, due to cultural misunderstandings
the mission collapses into a debacle. The “inward” chapters
occur years later in the novel’s timeline and center on Sandoz
who is the apparent sole survivor of the mission. Rescued
and returned to Earth, Sandoz must face his superiors, himself,
and God. The VaRakhati, the inhabitants of Rakhat act as distorting
mirror into which we and Sandoz gaze. In the “inward” chapters,
we along with Sandoz, are given the chance to ponder the issue of
God’s will, whether there is a divine power, and how the existence
of evil can be explained or justified. Throughout his priesthood,
Sandoz has maintained a highly intellectual belief in God. One
could say that his faith is built on constant acts of will. However,
once he hears the first exquisite song from Rakhat received through
the Arecibo Observatory, Sandoz sees the will of God at work in
guiding his personal destiny. The events that follow in the
planning of the mission and landfall on Rakhat strengthen Sandoz’s
conviction that all that is happening is God’s will. When
disaster strikes, Sandoz’s belief is shattered and he must
consider the risks and benefits of a belief in God.
[33]
So who is Emilio Sandoz to begin with? As Russell describes
him, he is typical of those who have inherited the findings of the
Enlightenment. Sandoz inhabits a world built on Reason. In
Chapter 12 as Sandoz’s novitiate and time of preparation in
the Jesuits is laid out, we are presented with a man who is rationalistic,
scientific, concerned with the objective nature of reality:
And yet, in all those years of preparation,
the prayer that had resonated most strongly in his soul was the
cry, "Lord, I believe. Help me in my disbelief."
He found the life of Jesus profoundly
moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to
faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms.
It was as
though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe
the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers,
he thought in the darkness.
He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather
than deny the existence of something he couldn't perceive
himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty
and carried on, praying in the face of his doubt. ...
Lying in bed, that warm August night,
he felt no Presence. He was aware of no Voice. He felt as alone
in the cosmos as ever. But he was beginning to find it hard to
avoid thinking that if ever a man had wanted a sign from God,
Emilio Sandoz had been hit square in the face with one this morning,
at Arecibo (107-108).
[34] Sandoz begins to see his life gathering
to this point. It is all part of God’s plan. God
has brought together the perfect crew: Sandoz with his linguistic
skills; Anne, a doctor and anthropologist; Anne’s husband
George who is a physicist and engineer; Jimmy, a scientist; and
Sofia Mendes, a specialist in Artificial Intelligence, who will
build the AI system that will guide the ship while the crew is in
suspended animation. This is solid theodical thinking like the agential
model defined by McFague, mentioned earlier in this paper. Yet
as Sandoz sees God’s hand in every detail, Sofia Mendes contemplates
the path that brought her to the mission and her conclusion is different
from Sandoz’s.
[35] Mendes, orphaned at fourteen in Istanbul
in the Second Kurdish War, has resorted to prostitution to survive. Picked
up by Jean-Claude Jaubert, a futures broker who represents “a
group of investors who sponsor promising young people in difficult
circumstances” (64), Mendes literally finds herself a commodity. The
investors, represented by Jaubert, help Mendes develop her polyglot
ability and her “natural bent toward AI analysis” (65). Enmeshed
in a contract like an indentured servant, Mendes’ programs
belong to her investors. Her fate is like that of many orphans
who come from “privatized orphanages” (64). Fortunately,
her contract is bought out, leaving Mendes free to choose to join
the mission. Contemplating her painful path to this point
in her life, Mendes realizes
[S] he had no idea what to make of his
[Sandoz's belief that God was calling them to contact the
Singers [the VaRakhati] . There were Jews who believed that
God is in the world, active, purposeful. After the Holocaust
it was difficult to sustain such an idea. Certainly her own
life had taught her that prayers for deliverance go unheard, unless
she wanted to believe Jean-Claude Jaubert was God’s
agent (125).
[36] In the character of Mendes, we are
presented with the attitude that questions theodicy and its insistence
that each element in life somehow is part of a larger unknowable
plan devised by God for our own good. Yet as the voyage to
Rakhat continues, many of the novel’s characters become convinced
that there is a divine plan behind the whole mission. As the
ship lands, we learn that “[F]or Anne and George Edwards,
for D.W. Yarbrough and Emilio Sandoz, this voyage had given meaning
to random acts, and to all the points where they had done this and
not that, chosen one thing and not another, to all their decisions,
whether carefully thought out or ill considered” (189).
[37] All goes well until the second month
after landing on Rakhat when Alan Pace, a member of the mission,
dies mysteriously. Then Yarbrough becomes seriously sick and
Sofia and Marc Robichaux go missing on a short mission. Anne
Edwards, a natural skeptic, questions where God’s will is
in the tragedy of Pace’s death. Sandoz tries to explain
that it is not what happens that is important but why it
happens. The why is important because that is where meaning
is found and for Sandoz, God is the poetry in the why. Anne,
however, does not buy the “poetry” of Pace’s death: “See,
that’s where it falls apart for me!” Anne cried “What
sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I
just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either
God’s in charge or He’s not” (288). Sandoz’s
reply is rather pallid: “Some poetry is tragic. It is perhaps
harder to appreciate” (289).
[38] In the conversation between Anne and
Sandoz, we see the obsessive need for meaning that underlies theodicy. All
the givens, God as omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent are in place. Typical
of theodicy, as Anne points out, is the fact that God can never
be blamed. If there is tragedy, poetry threads through it
in the form of the why of God’s intricate and subtle plan,
a plan too fine for the human mind to understand. But as David
Jasper pointed out in his discussion of theodicy and intentional
fallacy, there is a disjunction in the creativity of the author
between intention and effect, which leads us to ask “on what
literary basis are we to grant the divine author a privilege not
available to the human–that he effects in creation exactly
what he intends?” (1989, 123). When we recognize the import
of that question, we are freed from theological absolutism. In
the final part of the novel Russell reveals through Sandoz the collapse
of traditional theodicy as Sandoz grapples with his personal tragedy,
putting aside the theodical construct that God as author brings
about in creation exactly what he plans.
[39] Chapter 31 reveals the significance
of a fatal error in understanding made by the humans as they encounter
the intricacies of Rakhati culture. The Jesuit mission, while
working with the first of the two species on Rakhat, the Runa, shows
them how to make gardens so that they do not have to travel for
food. The lack of travel increases the fat level in the Runa
and with that sexual desire leading to an increase in Runa babies. What
the humans do not realize is that the Runa and the Jana’ata
(the ruling Rakhati species) live in a fragile ecological balance. To
keep the balance regarding resources, the Jana’ata choose
whom the Runa will partner and which Runa couples will have children. Once
the Runa begin choosing their own partners and breeding “indiscriminately,” the
ecological balance is lost and the social contract between Runa
and Jana’ata is broken. The Jana’ata come to the
Runa village in order to kill the excess babies, thereby restoring
the balance to Rakhati culture and ecology. From the point
of view of the humans, a thing of goodness, the gardens, has set
in motion a massacre of the innocents.
[40] Sandoz and Robichaux as the only two
human survivors from the massacre are taken by Supaari, a Jana’ata,
and given the hasta’akala, the trail of ivy. In
this surgery, the muscles are removed from the hands so that they
are “made to look like the trailing branches of ivy, which
grows on stronger plants, to symbolize and enforce dependence” (382). Receiving
the hasta’akala, Sandoz and Robichaux are entirely
dependent on Supaari, thus ironically echoing their total dependence
on God and God’s will. Even as Robichaux dies, he affirms
with his last words, “Deus vult”, that everything
is God’s will (384).
[41] Transferred to the Galatna palace,
stripped of his clothes, Sandoz believes he is now a zoological
specimen and as such is ironically “compelled to master submission” (389),
believing that whatever happens is utterly God’s will. At
this point Sandoz’s fortunes seem to change for the better
as he finally meets the one person he has dreamed of meeting, the
Reshtar, “A man of learning and artistry ... a great poet. The
author of the sublime songs that brought Emilio Sandoz and his companions
to Rakhat” (390).
[42] Standing naked before the Reshtar,
Sandoz becomes convinced that the whole mission has been for this
moment when he could talk to the Reshtar whose poetry is so magnificent
that he surely must know God. For Sandoz,
It was a moment of redemption so profound
he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded
by the inchoate fear and the isolation. He tried to pull himself
together, wishing he'd been stronger, more durable, a better
instrument for his God's design. And yet he felt purified somehow,
stripped of all other purpose. ... He would tell the Reshtar:
When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel
at those moments [of death, joy] , we call it God, and when we
capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.
And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found
a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we
heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring
us here, to know you (390-1).
[43] At this point when Sandoz is almost
in religious ecstasy, we can see traditional theodicy at work in
his thinking. All the joyful moments, doubts, suffering, the
deaths of his companions and the innocent children, have brought
him to this moment where he believes he can see how God’s
plan has knitted together the joy and tragedy of the mission so
that two species of God’s children can meet and know God. But
while Sandoz is overcome with the magnificence of God’s plan,
the Reshtar also sees the occasion as momentous as he ponders how
he will turn this “meeting” into poetry. “We
shall sing of this for generations, he thought” (392) as he
positioned himself behind the bewildered Sandoz and proceeded to
rape him.
[44] So, the novel asks us, where is God’s
will in all this? Sandoz comments later of the event that “I
laid down all my defenses. I had nothing between me and what
happened but the love of God. And I was raped, I was naked
before God and I was raped” (394). And therein lies
not only Sandoz’s dilemma but ours also “[B]ecause,” as
Sandoz says, “if I was led by God to love God, step by step
as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real
and true, then the rest of it was God’s will too, and that,
gentlemen, is cause for bitterness” (394). The rape
of Emilio Sandoz undermines the logic of God’s omnipotence,
the logic of theodicy. What Russell does in her novel is to
provide us with the opportunity to deconstruct theodicy as we acknowledge
that intentional fallacy lies at its heart. We are placed
in a drama between reader and novel. We now find ourselves
responsible to construct the text in the face of the calamities
that befall the characters and answer how God’s will operates
in creation and whether we can begin to respond to it. The
novel jolts us out of the textuality of theodicy and offers a direction
to follow when Giuliani, the Jesuit General, brings up Michelangelo’s
series of sculptures called The Captives: “Out of a
great formlessness of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads,
shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast
in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There
are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness” (400). Giuliani’s
opinion that Sandoz (and we) can answer the dilemma about God’s
will by emulating The Captives offers us a postmodern way
of responding to the question of an omnipotent and benevolent God
and pain and suffering.
Postmodern Response to Theodicy: A Conclusion
[45]
The postmodern self is rather like Michelangelo’s captives
struggling for meaning out of their formlessness. Humberto
Maturana (1980) and his disciples describe the postmodern self as
a “self-producing” system, i.e., one that is engaged
in a constant re-creation of itself through the selective reorganization
of the disorder present in the surrounding worlds and within itself. In
a similar vein, Kenneth Boulding describes the postmodern self as
involved in “the processes which develop an unplanned order
out of randomness ... simply because of the principle that
whenever an uncertain or probabilistic event actually comes off,
this changes the probabilities of all potential events around it” (1981,
xii). This self-producing self is a narrative self, for the
construction of identity takes the form of a narrative. The
narrative self occupies a position in a vast web, a nexus, a point
of intersection. As Lyotard writes: “A self does not
amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric
of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young
or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is located at ‘nodal
points’ of specific communication circuits however tiny these
may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through
which various kinds of messages pass” (1984, 15). Charles
Taylor (1989) continues the development of Lyotard’s notion
of the self as nexus. For Taylor the self exists only within “webs
of interlocution.”
[46]
Since in postmodern terms we are a nexus, part of a web of interlocution,
simply a post through which all kinds of messages pass, we discover
that we are not the centre of the universe, that we do not endow
the world with its significance or provide meaning for the world.
Recognizing this fact shows that theodicy itself is an illusion. Theodicy,
which finds its origins in the Enlightenment, is paradoxically not
about God but really about us. For theodicy has been the way
in which we have attempted to endow ourselves with meaning in the
face of life’s absurdity and pain. In creating theodicy
we have made ourselves the source of meaning. But the postmodern
description of the self shows that we are not sources but receivers. This
postmodern de-centering of the ego brings us back to negative theology
and mysticism.
[47]
As we saw earlier, Meister Eckhart’s negative theology frees
us from the burden of interpreting all things in terms of ourselves;
frees us to see the reality that we have nothing that we have not
received. Eckhart reminds us that it is a mistake to think
that we can produce an adequate conception of God for we shall utterly
fail in the effort. The best we can produce is an idol that
is dependent on our efforts. Eckhart teaches us in so many
words that we must detach ourselves from the God that we construct. This
is the meaning of Eckhart’s puzzling statement: “I pray
to God that he may make me free of ‘God’.” We
can play with this statement in the context of this paper and say: “I
pray to God that he may make me free of theodicy.” As
we saw in the novel, when Sandoz begins to see the deaths of his
companions and the Runa children as part of the divine design to
bring about the meeting between himself and the Reshtar, Sandoz
is at the centre of all meaning. That is a dangerous illusion. As
postmodernism and negative theology tell us, we are formless, formed,
and re-formed in the web of interlocution we call life or God. There
are no fixed points, no certainties. Everything is ceaseless
flux, a transient construct. This means life is an endless
striving of activity or endeavor. There is no expected outcome
to life. We are not expected to become something but simply to live
our life. There is no “final success” or Ideal
or divine plan that needs to be fulfilled. This means, as
Dietrich Bonhoeffer says in his July 16, 1944 letter to Eberhard
Bethge, that we live in the world etsi deus non daretur,
as if there were no God (1972, 360-61). Contrary to appearances,
this is not a counsel of despair. Rather Bonhoeffer’s
thought brings us back yet again to the mystics who are the ideal
for the postmodern world as they live in the situation of the silence
of God. Living in the world as if there were no God brings
to mind Meister Eckhart’s belief that “Man’s highest
calling is when, for God’s sake, he dares to take leave of
God.” At the end of The Sparrow, Emilio
Sandoz is left with the opportunity to take leave of God and to
live in the world “as if there were no God [acknowledging
that] the cosmic order is systematically ambiguous, capable of being
interpreted theistically or naturalistically. In such a world
the awareness of God takes the form of the cognitive choice which
we call faith” (Hick 1966, 373). He can leave behind
the realist language of theodicy and instead live in faith in the
web of interlocution we call life or God, stepping into “a
journey experienced as a movement into unknowing” (Jasper
2004, 60). Does Russell give us an answer to this opportunity
provided for Sandoz, to the question of the validity of theodicy? Does
Sandoz take the step of faith, living with the ambiguity of the
cosmic order and leaving behind theodicy?
Sandoz appears once again in Children of God, the sequel
to The Sparrow. As Russell says, “I left my main
character impaled on the horns of a dilemma, and I wasn’t
able to let it go at that” (Russell 2005). Sandoz enters Children
of God filled with the bitterness that burdened him at the conclusion
of The Sparrow. Interestingly, the answer to Sandoz’s
agony of bitterness is provided by his daughter, Ariana. At
the end of Children of God when Sandoz meets the daughter
he never knew he had, Ariana tells him of the death of Gina, her
mother, in an epidemic. Earlier in the novel, Sandoz had married
Gina and had been forced to leave her behind on Earth when he was
drugged and forcibly taken once again to Rakhat. Wondering about
God’s hand in this epidemic, the Nonna Disease, that killed
so many older women, Ariana says, “God never explains. When
life breaks your heart, you’re just supposed to pick up the
pieces and start over, I guess” (Children of God 436). At
that point, Ariana offers Sandoz the opportunity of holding his
grandson, Tommaso. Giving way, he chooses to do so and shatters
the “crowded necropolis of his heart” (436). In
the act of choosing to hold his grandson, Sandoz, like Ariana, accepts
the ambiguity of the cosmic order and the fact that God never explains. His
choice to hold Tommaso is the cognitive choice we call faith. The
Grand Narrative of theodicy is ended.
References
Appignanesi, Richard and Chris Garratt. Introducing Postmodernism.
Cambridge, MA: Icon Books, 1999.
Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing about Literature. Seventh
Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, eds. An Introduction to Literature,
Criticism and Theory. Second edition. London: Prentice Hall,
1999.
Birnbaum, David. God and Evil. A Unified Theodicy/Theology/Philosophy.
Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1989.
Bonaventure. In secundum sententiarum. Venetiis: apud Franciscum
Sansouinum, 1562.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. New
York: Macmillan, 1972.
Boulding, Kenneth E. “Foreword” in Autopoiesis: A
Theory of Living Organization. Edited by Milan Zeleng. New
York: North Holland, 1981.
Brueggeman, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1997.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans.
Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Città del Vaticano:
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994.
Catholic Study Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Cupitt, Don. Mysticism After Modernity. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998.
______ Taking Leave of God. New York: Crossroad, 1981.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Weltanschauungslehre, Gesammelte Schriften,
VIII. Leipzig & Berlin, 1931.
Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation. Trans.
Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957.
Irenaeus. Adversus haereses. 2, 30, 9; 4, 20, 1: Patrologia
Graeca 7/1.
Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. San Francisco: Harper
and Row, 1966.
Jasper, David. The Sacred Desert. Religion, Literature, Art,
and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
______ The Study of Literature and Religion. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1989.
King, William. De origine mali. Dublin: A. Crook, 1702.
Krivak, Andrew J. Review of The Sparrow. America 176
(1997): 19-20.
Leggo, Carl. “Open(ing) Texts: Deconstruction and Responding
to Poetry.” Theory into Practice 37,3 (1998): 186-92.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi. Theory and History of Literature 10. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1980.
McFague, Sallie. “Models of God and the World.” In Essentials
of Christian Theology. Edited byWilliam
C. Placher. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Moore Stephen D. Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida
and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1994.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
London: Methuen, 1982.
Placher, William C., ed. Essentials of Christian Theology.
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology.” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 53,4 (1986): 635-48.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Russell, Mary Doria. Children of God. New York: Ballantine,
1998.
______ The Sparrow. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
______ A Conversation with Mary Doria Russell. May 1, 2005 <http://www.randomhouse.com/BB/readerscircle/russell2/guide.html>
______ Interview. 1 July 2004 <http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/sparrow-author.asp#interview>.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Tilley, Terrence W. The Evils of Theodicy. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991.
Tillion, Germaine. Ravensbruck. New York: Anchor, 1975.
Weil, Simone. On Science, Necessity, and God’s Love. Collected,
translated, and edited by Richard Rees. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1968.
