Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

One doesn't, in any case, make use of a beloved woman's image to shore up one's trust in the universe: the universe that produced her is the same universe that produces every threat to her well-being and survival. She will die, and God -- in spite of our fondest wishes -- won't. How can gratitude for her existence outweigh the anguish of her incipient nonexistence?

I suppose I need nurturance and consolation too badly to get it from God; I have made sure to choose lovers who could supply it. Do I want to remake my image of God in the image of my lover? No, I don't; she is not to be duplicated. A human body and personality must not be reduced to a mere object of worship. If male God-language were objected to for its reduction, not its inflation of men, one could not object to the objection.

Recent writing about God-language reads, on the whole, like the search for a better metaphor -- an enterprising Henry-Fordian quest, a retooling of the theological factory for the more efficient production of spirit. But spirit develops only inefficiently, through suffering and indirection.

Emily Dickinson, who had tested that process thoroughly, wrote:

Each one of us has tasted

With ecstasies of stealth

The very food debated

To our specific strength -- [8]

Perhaps the stealth is essential: perhaps we all have to be stealing our image of God from the heap of stones the builders rejected in order to be sure we have the right one. Perhaps the very force of the rejection called our attention to our particular rock: its trajectory, the thump as it landed, the mottling or veining visible on its surface, its heft in the arms. Perhaps women who need the Goddess need her because she was forbidden. Perhaps when God is no longer compulsory -- when the builders consider him a bad risk--he immediately becomes irresistible.

What if, from the very beginning, the one male God was not primarily an attempt by a male priesthood to consolidate its authority against Goddess religion, but an attempt by a powerful imagination to delineate a problematic God? What if the alternation in God's character between tender care and ferocious brutality, between limitless creation and wholesale wreckage, occurs not because the writers of the Hebrew Bible admired brutality or wreckage, but because they could not escape them? Metaphor is a talking cure: it starts at the point of injury. What if J and Jeremiah and the author of the Book of Job suspected that the violence of the universe was at every point congruent with its nurturance? Hebrew monotheism sets up one source for good and evil, one responsible will from which they both derive. Is any image more apt, more visceral, for such a God than male violence?

III

Kodosh: set apart: lonely. [9]

Jack Miles, in God: A Biography: "God, by being removed from time and generation, is also somehow barred from love. And though it is hard to say quite how, this fact is surely connected with the mutual irritability that exists between him and Israel, an irritability unique in the annals of literature." [10]