Notes on God's Violence

for Mara Benjamin

The half-formed cup cries out in agony,

The lump of clay suffers a silent pain.

I heard the cup, though, full of feeling, say,

"O clay be true, O clay keep constant to

Your need to take, again and once again,

This pounding from your mad creator who

Only stops hurting when he's hurting you."

John Hollonder, "The Mod Potter"

It is only when man wishes the impossible that he remembers God, To obtain that which is possible he turns to those like himself.

Lev Shestov

The violence of God, against which the defenders of gentleness have brought out such heavy artillery, seems permanently bound up with his maleness. Kali, with her girdle of skulls, is an Eastern phenomenon (God being -- however universal in another sense -- a Western one); feminist theology in the West is as uneasy about violent images of female power as Adam would have been letting Lilith back into Eden. As energetically as "women's rage" has been celebrated everywhere else in feminism, the celebration ceases at the doors of the seminary. [1] There it is safer to try to quarantine violence: to hope that if enough male pronouns are altered, enough violent images deleted from the Psalms, violent realities will simply ebb. To hope that when there is no longer a violent God there will be no more violent men.

The reasoning seems to be the same as in cases of television and movie violence: "If they see Him doing it, they'll want to do it themselves." It is as if representation came first, and then action: as if stories do not spring from realities but from malevolent purposes trying to work themselves out as realities. As if there can be no reason apart from malevolence to tell a troubling story.

Not the least of the crimes of television and movie violence is that it has driven out of the culture any general understanding of what makes violence necessary, not gratuitous, in a story. We are so accustomed to seeing death and damage presented suddenly, more or less cleanly, and without emotional sequelae -- not for the sake of understanding, pity and change but for the sake of shallow excitement -- that we begin to think the violence in works of art has no wider purpose than that. One recent feminist study of Yeats considers "Leda and the Swan" (for a page or two of a more complicated chapter) as pornography, "stripped of its artistic privilege and examined in terms of its content alone." [2] In terms of its content alone -- supposing the poet's sensibility to be no part of its content -- the poem is an image of a woman being violently raped by an animal; the fact that the image is not Yeats's own daydream but an episode from a myth -- that the bird is a god in disguise, and a god without altruism -- cea ses to have any importance. It ceases to matter that the poet speaks of the terror and helplessness of the "staggering girl...mastered by the brute blood of the air," and of the fracture of her life and of history that unfolds from the rape: the ten-years' war for Troy and the murders of the house of Atreus. It makes no difference that the poet wonders what a woman, seized by another body against her will, takes from that unwilling intimacy: what knowledge of the other body simply as body (man, bird, god) breaks through the knowledge of attack as attack, an incongruous moral neutrality in the midst of the evil. Bird, woman and violence are still there. The critic who relied altogether on this method might perceive the mythical and emotional subtleties of the poem as mere erudite posturing, a smokescreen of culture disguising raw titillation. In effect she would be declaring that because rape ought not to happen, poets must always write as if it did not; that the representation is as illegitimate as the act, a nd done for the same reason; that no violent image can ever be presented without colluding in violence.

But is it only artistic "privilege" that distinguishes "Leda and the Swan" from a porn video of a woman and a dog? Does the poem's "content" stop at its visual content, at what could be transferred to a movie screen? Is its mood, its subtlety, its intellectual demand, invisible -- weightless in the political scheme of things?

The Bible is not a work of art in the same sense as a poem. It is not meant primarily to make an intellectual demand in memorable language -- or like Greek myth to tell an absorbing story, or like Greek tragedy to purge us by pity and terror. It aims to move us to justice and mercy. It is active art, to which people trust their conduct; moral art, which (rightly or wrongly) designates some forms of violence as necessary for the conduct of ethical social life. If the gratuitous violence of popular culture incites its viewers to mindless emulation, one could say that the violence of the Bible incites its readers to mindful emulation. The Bible acts directly on the conscience, without the filtering process by which art sifts down into our decisions. Even if we arrive at an adequate standard for judging "Leda and the Swan" -- or, say, King Lear, which presents another vain and violent old man--the Bible will not submit itself to that standard.