First, the Rev. Peter Bunting points out, "[I]f you take God away
from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful
or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God, without the
hope of salvation or succour." In other words, the rebellion against
God, fueled (it seems) by compassion, ends by undermining the grounds
for empathy and hope. Depose God, and you begin to make of man a beast.
<snip>

http://www.amconmag.com/10_20_03/review.html

The Book Against God,

First, the Rev. Peter Bunting points out, "[I]f you take God away
from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful
or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God, without the
hope of salvation or succour." In other words, the rebellion against
God, fueled (it seems) by compassion, ends by undermining the grounds
for empathy and hope. Depose God, and you begin to make of
man a beast.

[T]he creation of something out of nothing is an act of love. Even the
creation of pain, the creation of evil. For this reason: we do not know
why evil exists. We do not know the largest scheme of things, we cannot
know God's plan. We know that evil is evil. But do we know that the
existence of evil is evil? Do you see my point? In other words, do we
know what evil exists for? We do not. And this is for the same reason
that we do not know what the opposite of evil exists for. Why does
goodness exist? Why happiness? ... And life is love. That we would
rather be alive than dead, even if life is painful, is proof that there
is more love in the world than pain.

http://www.amconmag.com/10_20_03/review.html


Prodigal Son


The Book Against God, James Wood, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 272
pages.



By J.P. Zmirak

This novel is an unexpected delight. The Book Against God reads almost
as if Evelyn Waugh were alive again, and had decided to write in his
graceful, fluid prose about one of Walker Percy's heroes: the
distracted, contemporary sons of comfort whose search for religious
meaning is indirect, halting, and thoroughly believable. Wood speaks in
the voice of Thomas Bunting, a youngish, intellectual skeptic
religiously obsessed with disproving the existence of God. Bunting is
not a conventional unbeliever. As the son of a jovial, learned, and
blissfully confident Anglican vicar, Bunting wrestles continually with
God-leaving his dissertation to molder, ignoring his beautiful wife,
forgetting to bathe, smoking incessantly, and spending his days
ensconced with stacks of theological works, scribbling refutations in a
notebook. The latter he calls his "Book Against God," or "BAG,"
which he intends to craft into a comprehensive critique of Christian
faith-a counterpart to the grand apologetic Pascal once hoped to
write.

Pascal couldn't finish his work; he left behind instead the luminous
notes we call Pensées. Nor does Bunting complete his magnum opus-at
least not in the form he'd intended. The novel, which he narrates, is
what he produced instead, and it's far more compelling than the short
fragments of counter-theology from the original project that appear
occasionally in the story.

Full of wry observations about contemporary life and mores, and
unwitting self-revelations, the tale Bunting tells of himself rings
with psychological truth and carries the reader along in sympathy with
a protagonist one might expect to dislike: a spoiled, self-destructive
intellectual idler in a dirty silk dressing gown. Our fondness for
Bunting at first is only what we'd feel for a loveable rogue, someone
who for a while "gets away" with breaking the rules that bind most
of us, whose jabbing wit keeps us entertained.

But Woods is stalking bigger quarry, and he wields his considerable
talents to make Bunting particular and plausible-while still serving
an allegorical purpose. Step back, and one can see in Bunting a figure
of modern Western man-an unwounded, pouting Prometheus whose only
fire is a cigarette, too caught up in the ruins of his childhood to
father any offspring of his own. In the book's most telling scene,
Bunting risks dooming his marriage by deceiving his wife in order to
avoid conceiving a child.

The story itself is fairly straightforward, although its chronology
twists and turns according to the narrator's reticence: Bunting, the
gifted son of benevolent (if sometimes inattentive) parents, drifts
through an undistinguished academic career and into a marriage-which
he proceeds to starve with neglect and poison with compulsive lies. He
fails to complete his Ph.D., flubs freelance assignments, spends
himself into penury, and ends up leading a solitary, almost ascetic
existence-with only his old expensive tastes, the memory of fine
meals, and a few pairs of fancy shoes to attest his devout worldliness.
Throughout most of the story, Bunting hides his religious doubts from
his priest father-a man he loves with childish devotion tainted by
adolescent rebellion. In fact, from a blankly psychological
perspective, here is the nub of Bunting's problem: he never completed
that rebellion, never summoned the nerve to state his doubts and
differences openly and forge for himself an independent, adult
identity. Instead, he sneaks around like a smart but dirty-minded
13-year-old, a perpetually impure altar boy. When his marriage
collapses, Bunting even returns to his childhood home, where for months
he sleeps in, lets his mother cook for him, and hides from his father
his liquor bottles and irreligious books. The suspense that drives the
book-and it's a surprising page-turner-is whether (and how)
Bunting will ever amount to anything more.

In his explicit reflections on whether God exists-and if so, whether
He is good or simply powerful-Bunting follows the well-worn path trod
by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and other precursors of existentialism. His
favorite objection to God's existence is the widespread evil and
suffering in the world. When arguing with his mildly theistic friends,
Bunting invokes these phenomena-from the casual cruelty of a tavern
keeper towards his bartender, to grand-scale evils such as
genocide-arguing passionately that a God who loved us as sons would
never permit all this. When he finally, towards the end of the book,
raises this argument to his father-in a wrenching, touching
scene-he receives an intriguing answer. It comes in two parts.

First, the Rev. Peter Bunting points out, "[I]f you take God away
from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful
or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God, without the
hope of salvation or succour." In other words, the rebellion against
God, fueled (it seems) by compassion, ends by undermining the grounds
for empathy and hope. Depose God, and you begin to make of man a beast.
(As another character observes, the behavior of anti-religious
governments from 1789 through 1989 seems to bear this out.) This
argument doesn't move Thomas much; he has little experience of
personal suffering and not much genuine sympathy for those who do.
Throughout the book, his protests about the evils of human suffering
are belied by his lack of interest in suffering humans. He doesn't
give to beggars, offer needed help even to friends, or concern himself
with the needs of his own wife. (He never washes a dish.) It's clear
that Thomas invokes the problem of evil mostly as a debater's tactic.

Father Bunting's second answer strikes closer to the heart of the
matter. As the priest explains,

[T]he creation of something out of nothing is an act of love. Even the
creation of pain, the creation of evil. For this reason: we do not know
why evil exists. We do not know the largest scheme of things, we cannot
know God's plan. We know that evil is evil. But do we know that the
existence of evil is evil? Do you see my point? In other words, do we
know what evil exists for? We do not. And this is for the same reason
that we do not know what the opposite of evil exists for. Why does
goodness exist? Why happiness? ... And life is love. That we would
rather be alive than dead, even if life is painful, is proof that there
is more love in the world than pain.

Here the old man has discerned what really troubles his son-and, by
extension, Western man: the problem of goodness. (It's telling that
religious faith is stronger in the Third World than in the West;
suffering seems less an obstacle to belief than comfort and leisure.)

From his youth, Thomas has felt bitterly inadequate beside the towering

figure of his father-a sophisticated believer, a kind-hearted wit, a
faithful, beloved priest. Unable to resolve his ambivalence, Thomas
allows it to form his stance towards the world. He becomes, as it were,
the accuser, always looking for the worm in the apple, the poisoned
apple in the garden. Faced repeatedly throughout his life with the
fruits of abundant goodness-a generous family, loyal friends,
abundant leisure, and a beautiful, amazingly forgiving wife-Bunting
is overwhelmed and appalled. The very plenitude of creation and the
magnanimity of other souls fill him with anxiety and resentment-a
reaction that recalls Sartre's hero Roquentin in Nausea, who sees the
beautiful objects of nature as

soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a frightful,
obscene nakedness ... All these objects ... how can I explain? They
inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more
dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.

By the end of the book, Bunting is forced to admit to himself that it
is goodness that he dreads and plenitude, not emptiness, that threatens
him. That all through his life he has taken refuge from the particular
goodness that surrounded him everywhere-from his parents' patience
to his wife's almost inexplicably enduring love-in abstract
negations, pursued to preserve his desolate, solitary "freedom."
(Recall Sartre's infamous assertion that man's freedom consists in
his "nothingness" in the face of suffocating, inert "being.")
Bunting even botches an attempt by his wife to reconcile, abstracting
himself from the romance of the moment in pursuit of a dry, theoretical
point.

As he contemplates what's left of his life, Bunting turns once again
to the pastoral idyll of his childhood, wondering aloud what ruined
this Eden, what introduced the "worm" into the garden. In bringing
his hero back to this primal scene, Woods has made of Bunting a figure
of Adam, the archetypal man who-once in the past, and ever
again-chooses his own will over God's, an empty "liberty" over
happiness.


________________________________________________


J.P. Zmirak is author of Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist, Global
Economist. He writes frequently on economics, politics, popular
culture, and theology

http://www.amconmag.com/10_20_03/review.html


Prodigal Son


The Book Against God, James Wood, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 272
pages.



By J.P. Zmirak

This novel is an unexpected delight. The Book Against God reads almost
as if Evelyn Waugh were alive again, and had decided to write in his
graceful, fluid prose about one of Walker Percy's heroes: the
distracted, contemporary sons of comfort whose search for religious
meaning is indirect, halting, and thoroughly believable. Wood speaks in
the voice of Thomas Bunting, a youngish, intellectual skeptic
religiously obsessed with disproving the existence of God. Bunting is
not a conventional unbeliever. As the son of a jovial, learned, and
blissfully confident Anglican vicar, Bunting wrestles continually with
God-leaving his dissertation to molder, ignoring his beautiful wife,
forgetting to bathe, smoking incessantly, and spending his days
ensconced with stacks of theological works, scribbling refutations in a
notebook. The latter he calls his "Book Against God," or "BAG,"
which he intends to craft into a comprehensive critique of Christian
faith-a counterpart to the grand apologetic Pascal once hoped to
write.

Pascal couldn't finish his work; he left behind instead the luminous
notes we call Pensées. Nor does Bunting complete his magnum opus-at
least not in the form he'd intended. The novel, which he narrates, is
what he produced instead, and it's far more compelling than the short
fragments of counter-theology from the original project that appear
occasionally in the story.

Full of wry observations about contemporary life and mores, and
unwitting self-revelations, the tale Bunting tells of himself rings
with psychological truth and carries the reader along in sympathy with
a protagonist one might expect to dislike: a spoiled, self-destructive
intellectual idler in a dirty silk dressing gown. Our fondness for
Bunting at first is only what we'd feel for a loveable rogue, someone
who for a while "gets away" with breaking the rules that bind most
of us, whose jabbing wit keeps us entertained.

But Woods is stalking bigger quarry, and he wields his considerable
talents to make Bunting particular and plausible-while still serving
an allegorical purpose. Step back, and one can see in Bunting a figure
of modern Western man-an unwounded, pouting Prometheus whose only
fire is a cigarette, too caught up in the ruins of his childhood to
father any offspring of his own. In the book's most telling scene,
Bunting risks dooming his marriage by deceiving his wife in order to
avoid conceiving a child.

The story itself is fairly straightforward, although its chronology
twists and turns according to the narrator's reticence: Bunting, the
gifted son of benevolent (if sometimes inattentive) parents, drifts
through an undistinguished academic career and into a marriage-which
he proceeds to starve with neglect and poison with compulsive lies. He
fails to complete his Ph.D., flubs freelance assignments, spends
himself into penury, and ends up leading a solitary, almost ascetic
existence-with only his old expensive tastes, the memory of fine
meals, and a few pairs of fancy shoes to attest his devout worldliness.
Throughout most of the story, Bunting hides his religious doubts from
his priest father-a man he loves with childish devotion tainted by
adolescent rebellion. In fact, from a blankly psychological
perspective, here is the nub of Bunting's problem: he never completed
that rebellion, never summoned the nerve to state his doubts and
differences openly and forge for himself an independent, adult
identity. Instead, he sneaks around like a smart but dirty-minded
13-year-old, a perpetually impure altar boy. When his marriage
collapses, Bunting even returns to his childhood home, where for months
he sleeps in, lets his mother cook for him, and hides from his father
his liquor bottles and irreligious books. The suspense that drives the
book-and it's a surprising page-turner-is whether (and how)
Bunting will ever amount to anything more.

In his explicit reflections on whether God exists-and if so, whether
He is good or simply powerful-Bunting follows the well-worn path trod
by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and other precursors of existentialism. His
favorite objection to God's existence is the widespread evil and
suffering in the world. When arguing with his mildly theistic friends,
Bunting invokes these phenomena-from the casual cruelty of a tavern
keeper towards his bartender, to grand-scale evils such as
genocide-arguing passionately that a God who loved us as sons would
never permit all this. When he finally, towards the end of the book,
raises this argument to his father-in a wrenching, touching
scene-he receives an intriguing answer. It comes in two parts.

First, the Rev. Peter Bunting points out, "[I]f you take God away
from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful
or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God, without the
hope of salvation or succour." In other words, the rebellion against
God, fueled (it seems) by compassion, ends by undermining the grounds
for empathy and hope. Depose God, and you begin to make of man a beast.