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.

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