Rage On
Last week’s New Yorker ran a powerful short story called The Gorge, by Umberto Eco, a heavy piece about Italian life during the Second World War. The two main characters are a young Catholic boy, and an endearing older man named Gragnola – an anarchist, with all sorts of faith and love and valor hid well beneath a crusty, cowardly exterior. The two are friends.
One day the old man talks theology with the boy. While I don’t see everything the same way he does, his words, and the boy’s reflections on them, dig deeply into the realness and messiness of life. Here’s the end of a conversation about the Ten Commandments. The old man speaks first:
“And now we come to the last commandment: ‘Don’t covet other people’s stuff.’ But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got ‘Don’t steal’? If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin? No, not if you don’t steal it from him. Don Cognasso [the local priest] will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing. But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round. And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger. And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed. But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing. The tenth commandment prohibits revolution. Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you. That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head [Mussolini], who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Kripp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons. But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?”
“No, I understand, even if not everything.”
“I sure hope so.”
Justice envy. What a clever distinction. And what a beautiful reflection more generally on the complicated nature of envy, and the need to parse the implications of “don’t do it at all.”
Later on the boy notices that Gragnola always wears a long, thin sack hanging from his neck and tucked beneath his shirt.
“What’s that, Gragnola?” he asks.
“A lancet.”
“Were you studying to be a doctor?”
“I was studying philosophy. I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died…And I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a coward. With the things I do and the things I know, if the S.S. or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me. If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me. And I’ll be sending my comrades to their death. This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet. It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second – sffft. I’ll be screwing them all: the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
(Did I mention the man is crusty?)
The boy reflects on things like this that Gragnola says:
“Gragnola’s speeches left me sad. Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good. He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus. Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.
“And yet he was not mean; he loved the people around him. He had it in only for God, and that must have been a real chore, because it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros – the rhinoceros never notices a thing and continues going about its rhino business, and meanwhile you are red with rage and ripe for a heart attack.”
Could this describe the experience of raging at God any more poignantly?? Or the paradox so many God-haters are: people so compassionate, so in touch with the beauty and pathos and suffering of humanity, that they just can’t stomach the idea of God being the jerk they’ve understood God to be. They love so deeply they have to hate God.
I respect these kinds of people. I guess I was one for a good bulk of time. I still feel rage toward a certain image of God, but am coming to trust more and more deeply that that is not the God we’ve got. My trust makes me say to “God”-haters whole-heartedly: “Rage on!” I respect their (our) reasons for doing so. And I hope and pray that all of us have occasion to experience God as other than jerk. I pray that if that takes being raging atheists for a while (which probably means not atheists at all), we find the courage to live and be that storm for as long as it takes to find the Calm that comes after. Or sometimes, if we’re lucky, the Calm that’s right there in the middle.