sky, new universesJewel the black breast of night; and far off the
outer nebulae like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with fire-works
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness
perhaps for the howling fire-blast that we were born from.
But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contained the giant atom survives. It
will gather again and pile up, the power and the glory –
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole:
the whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God’s promises;
but back and forth, die and live, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries
His terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God’s apes – or tragic children – share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that’s what life’s for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante’s Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does
not care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness – look at the
tide-stream stars – and the fall of nations – and dawn.
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel
Valley to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor – I
know not – of faceless violence, the root of all things.13
Anger at the cruelty of it all
The spectacle is certainly magnificent and draws forth awe from us, as we contemplate the implacable momentum of the life-power that surges indifferently through the universe. This was certainly why Nietzsche admired the raw honesty of the warrior aristocrat before the Church weakened his tough ethic with Christian pity. ‘The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy is . . . that it accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.’14 There is a terrible honesty in that. It is the raw unconscious honesty of the lion who trails the herd of antelope and picks off the wounded straggler with beautiful ferocity. It is possible to admire the fierce symmetry of the balance between species in nature and to understand why, for example, the orphaned baby elephant has to be ignored by the rest of the herd and left to die. The species cannot afford to care for the individual, only for its own survival. But one’s heart winces at the sight, and feels that it should not be this way among humans. There is something in us that seems to be emotionally reluctant to abandon the stragglers who limp behind the human herd. That is why we respect and occasionally support those who work to help the wretched humans of the earth and to succour the wounded who cannot keep up with the pace of the strong.
The interesting thing to notice here is that the great champions of those who are reduced to slaves or instruments of the strong are probably more motivated by anger than by pity. This is a mysterious phenomenon: a universe born in violence and driven by remorseless power gives birth to beings who are made angry by the very law of life, by the structure of the universe that gave them life. That’s why my next mood, my noonday mood, is best described as ‘anger at the cruelty of it all’. For me, the best model of this anger is Jesus; not the divinised Christ who was coopted by the powerful to sit in distant splendour above the chancel arch in vast cathedrals, but the human Jesus, the angry prophet of Nazareth. Over the years I have been as guilty as any preacher of making him in my own image or of doctoring him to suit my own needs. But once we abandon the salvation scheme that sees him as a divine figure sent to rescue us from God’s wrath at our God-inflicted sinfulness, we get him back in a way we may not really want. He becomes the fiercest exemplar of the Hebrew tradition of the prophets, that group of men who were angered by the way the powerful drove their chariot wheels over the wretched of the earth. This is high anger at the very order of things, but it is particularly aimed at those upon whom the arbitrary indifference of the universe may be said to have smiled, yet who take their good fortune as evidence of their own virtue or rightful place in the scheme of things:
Woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. Woe unto ye that are full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto ye that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.15
These words were uttered by Jesus at a time when the distance between the rich man and the destitute peasant was no vaster than the gulf which now exists between a Californian billionaire and the child of a crack addict in one of the LA ghettoes. Jesus knew that the poor were always going to be with us, but he despised the religious theorists who offered divine justification for the insensate cruelty of it all. He seems to have had some respect for the Romans who governed his country, probably because they did not try to offer any kind of theological justification for their imperial ascendancy. Their confidence lay in their own power, which they delighted in exercising. The powerful of our era lack the blunt honesty of the Nietzschean warrior who roared like a lion and rejoiced in his strength for its own sake. The powerful today try to make a virtue of their arbitrary good fortune, justify it by theory, explain it. And religion has consistently offered its services as the Great Explainer in Chief. This accounts for Jesus’ anger at religion, seen at its most torrential when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple, because they were symbols of the way religion was used to deepen the misery of the poor by exploiting their piety for gain:
And Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught them saying, Is it not written, My house shall be called the house of prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves.16
Jesus belonged to that tiny group of men and women in history who instinctively ally themselves with the victims of power. Their spiritual psychology is explained very simply in a novel about one of the worst political crimes of the twentieth century, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Gil Courtemanche, in A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, puts these words into the mouth of Gentille about her lover Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian journalist:
I know exactly why I love you. You live like an animal guided by instinct. As if your eyes are closed and your ears are blocked, but there’s a secret compass inside you that always directs you to the small and forgotten, or impossible loves, like ours. You know you can’t do anything, that your being here won’t change a thing, but you keep going anyway.17
People like Bernard are not able to do much about the way the small and forgotten are constantly crushed by the powerful, apart from occasionally snatching a victim from the advance of the juggernaut. But they are able to bear witness against the ugly cruelty of power and the people it corrupts. They become recording angels whose words stand defiantly against the evils
