Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

Of course: he has no one to touch him.

The poet Sam Hamill has called domestic violence--which so often takes the form of harsh punishment for supposed minor infractions -- "an inarticulate expression of self-hatred." [11] The batterer's rage is not, at heart, caused by anything in the victim's behavior. She is only the scapegoat on whom he inflicts unendingly his own deep shame at his life. His power over her is limitless--it may be murderous--but he feels himself to be powerless, both against her intractable separate self and against his own circumstances.

Feminist analysis is naturally reluctant to look at his feelings with sympathy: the power differential between the fist and the face is so undeniable, and the difficulty of protecting a woman against a violent man so great. But Hamill does not say the batterer needs sympathy; he says he needs language. The batterer wants the power to order his own life, to know and supply his own needs, but he is enslaved by the conditions of his outer life and has no coherent inner life. He wants -- as one wants blindly, bodily, before language or consciousness -- to give some gift to the world, but he cannot imagine or name it. Hamill quotes May Sarton: "The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison." [12] The batterer's inability to give his gift is so magnified by the humiliations of his daily life that it becomes insupportable: he strikes at the nearest person. He beats his lover because he is enraged at his whole universe -- that is to say, at the whole range of his mind.

God has language. He created the world through words. But words fail him. Matter responded to his words at the creation, but humans do not. Since Adam and Eve ate the fruit and Cain murdered Abel, he has been trying to order the world to a pattern of his own comprehension, but no one else will comprehend it along with him. Almost from the outset he doubts himself: the flood is an act of regret and disgust at his own world's imperfections as manifested through humans. He repents of the flood too, once he sees the suffering he has caused; like any batterer he regrets his loss of control, and promises never to do it again. And does not -- not by that method.

Perhaps a covenant with one people will be a more manageable start than a relationship with all people. He settles on Abraham. His harrowing test of Abraham -- and of Isaac -- seems a sort of screaming through the dense fog of incomprehension that hangs between the bodiless and the embodied, which he can stop as soon as he sees that Abraham does in fact hear him. But he repeats that test with variations on Jacob at the ford of Jabbok, Moses on the way down to Egypt, and the whole people at Sinai after the incident of the calf (and again and again in the wilderness): flashes of rage, passed on as terror to the people whose love he demands. He wants to give something, which he clothes over and over again in the form of injunctions and prohibitions, but he is so unable to say clearly what it is that we do not know yet: more life, that much is clear, and a life that entails a just and compassionate social order, but the details become so involved with an elaborate ritual practice -- and an elaborate contempt for other people's ritual practice -- that it is impossible to untangle the compassion from the contempt. By the time of the prophets he is disgusted even with the ritual practice he once commanded (Isa. 1:11-14), and claims to have given bad laws for the people's undoing (Ezek. 20:25). [13]