Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“I should have guessed!” She laughed. “Are you telling me Felix Fidley believes?”

“Belligerently.”

“How odd. He’s such a rationalist-University of Chicago and all. Are you sure?”

It was touching how sincerely Lucinda believed in reason. It was difficult for her to get her mind around the fact that believers weren’t all high-school dropouts who used their fingers and toes to add and subtract.

“For lots of people it’s become a matter of political coalitions more than anything having to do with theology. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If liberals are going in one direction in the religion-versus-reason debates, defending the theory of evolution and secular humanism, neocons feel they have to head off in the opposite direction. Or they think that it’s okay for people like them, who are thoroughly civilized, to question God’s existence, but that it would be moral anarchy if the teeming masses started to doubt God. I suspect that that’s what Fidley believes.”

Provocation is a good example of what Cass was describing. It was founded by left-wing intellectuals in the 1940s, but its editors had been profoundly insulted by the new leftism of the sixties and reacted by lurching to the right. By now Provocation’s policy of opposing anything advocated by the liberals-a word it had helped besmirch-has carried it into open warfare against the entire project of the Enlightenment. Darwin has come in for multiple attacks, and religious scientists have shown off their creativity. There was an article by an Orthodox Jewish linguist who used Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar to vindicate the Bible’s story of the Tower of Babel. There was an article authored by a fundamentalist geologist on the movement of the tectonic plates of the earth as consistent with a worldwide flood on the order of Noah’s. There was an article by a Catholic anthropologist arguing against the liberal denial of distinct races and backing it up with Genesis 10, where the begettings of Noah’s three sons are explained. Provocation’s review of The Varieties of Religious Illusion had been so negative as to border on the actionable.

“Are you going to debate him?” Lucinda had asked him, turning over on her side so that she was facing Cass, her head propped up on her palm.

“Do you think I should?”

“What day did you say this thing is?” he’s asking Roz now on the phone.

“February 29. I think that’s tomorrow.”

“It is tomorrow! I’m fucked. And that’s when Lucinda is getting back from Santa Barbara. What was I thinking ? ”

“Well, if anyone is worth debating on this issue, then Felix Fidley is,” Lucinda had said. “It would certainly be a major win for you, and I don’t see how you could fail to win.” She’d smiled, and her delicate nostrils flared ever so slightly. “I’d like to see that.”

She’d reached out her hand and laid it on Cass’s stomach and then had slid it slowly up his chest. She reached up for Cass’s glasses and gently removed them, leaning over him to place them on his night table, her brandy-glass-shaped breasts just grazing his uplifted face.

That minute adjustment had come over her face, unstiffening her upper lip and unloosing the full extravagance of her beauty, flooding all of Cass’s modules, seizing him up with the one and wordless premise that composes the Argument from Lucinda.

“I’m fucked for real,” he says now to Roz.

Jonas Elijah Klapper had intimate knowledge of all the prominent thinkers across the ages. There was not a novelist, poet, essayist, critic, historian, metaphysician, ethicist, theologian, or belletrist worth the reading (an emphatically necessary qualification) of whom he had not taken the reckoning. He had expended himself in exhaustively computing the ranking of anyone meriting mention in the great chain of genius. His project had been demanding. It had demanded neither more nor less than omniscience. The (all but) universal ovation was not disproportionate to the accomplishment. He had organized the vast reaches of human thought in a way that could be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the commendable efforts of Miss Ching in helping him to settle into his Frankfurter suite of offices, her admirable zeal in conceiving categories for the color-coded files, craftily alphabetized.

So, when Jonas Elijah Klapper stated that the Grand Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim was a religious genius on the order of Meister Eck-hart, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Nathan Benjamin ben Elisha ha-Levi Ghazzati (also known as “Nathan of Gaza” or “Nathan the Prophet”), it was quite a statement. Professor Klapper confided in Cass that the Valdener Grand Rabbi was among the most extraordinary men of his lifetime-and he had met all the extraordinary men of his lifetime, including the pre-eminent secular scholar of Qabalah, one of the few non-Americans granted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Jonas had been initiated as a mere pup of thirty-eight), the Jerusalemite Yehuda Ickel.

Cass had liked the Valdener Rebbe quite a lot, almost in spite of himself, and certainly in spite of his mother. In fact, one of the Rebbe’s most endearing traits, at least to Cass, was the warmth he still harbored toward the former Devorah Sheiner. The Rebbe seemed to regard her with none of the severity with which she regarded him, though perhaps this was just part of his Socratic slyness. Still, listening to Professor Klapper’s assessment, he had to conclude that it was probably his own ignorance of Yiddish that had blocked him from seeing the full extent of the Rebbe’s extraordinariness, though he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the blame lay in his intrinsic soul-shortage.

According to Professor Klapper, the Valdener Grand Rabbi was like the Palomar Observatory, which he had been compelled to visit with his fulsome hosts at the University of California at San Diego when he had been out there to deliver, soon after the publication of “my little book The Perversity of Persuasion,” the prestigious John Shade Lecture in Literature and Truth. They had organized quite the tour for him, in consequence of which he had immediately resolved never to accept another invitation from anywhere in the entire state of California, a ban he had, over the years, gradually widened until it included everything west of the Hudson. Jonas Elijah Klapper was ready to confess his vagueness on such details, since Sigmund Freud was as far as he would venture in the direction of the hard sciences, but he had carried away the impression that the contraption took the compass of the infinite cosmos. If that was so, then it was still as nothing compared with the observatory that was the Valdener Grand Rabbi.

“For it is the measure of the infinite soul that is taken by your inestimable relation, Reb Chaim.”

Everything the Valdener Rebbe said and did was both liminal and luminant. That is what Jonas Elijah Klapper might choose to call the graduate seminar next year:

“The Liminal, the Luminant, and the-”

The professor was brought up short by a rare aposiopesis. He looked over to his erstwhile student to see whether he might offer some help. The word that seditiously leaped into Cass’s mind was so inappropriate that Cass suspected Roz’s insidious sense of humor was infecting him again-long-distance, since she still hadn’t returned from the Amazon.

“Well, never mind that for now. We shall think of the apposite trinomial in time,” the professor was continuing.

The Valdener Sage had the capacity to speak the liminal words that transported the Self through the narrow threshold within the Self to enter into the hushed precinct where the Sublime sat on its throne of glory, an ecstatic knowledge that transformed the Self even as it revealed the Self, for it awoke within the Self the knowledge of what is immortal in the Self, not in the sense of duration, definable by time, but, rather, the Self that dwells, like the Place-or Ha-Makom, one of the monikers for YHVH- outside of time, the Self that cannot die because it was never born, begotten by no seed of man.