“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” the Lord says to Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century — a truly “calamitous” century, as Barbara Tuchman calls it in the subtitle to A Distant Mirror (New York, NY: Knopf, 1978), her history of the period. Julian recounts that experience in Showings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977).
Most of Julian’s coevals would probably not have seen things that way at all.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, everything is all right,” parents everywhere for many centuries, in those or other words, have assured their frightened children — sometimes even when to all other eyes everything is far from all right, and it appears that things will never be all right again. In their viewing of their children, such parents see with the eyes of love, and in what they say they speak that love, as Julian’s messenger did to her.
There may finally be some irreducible element of choice and decision in such seeing and saying, especially in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, so much obvious evidence that everything is anything but all right. It is surely not unreasonable to consider the whole body of evidence pertinent to determining the truth of the assertoric proposition that all is or at least will someday be well — if such propositional truth is all that interests one. Nevertheless, deciding such issues with full regard to truth is far more a matter of having, or coming to have, “new awareness,” new eyes to see and ears to hear what is given one to see and to hear.
No amount of further looking will reveal colors to an eye devoid of the capacity to see them, for example — as scientists tell us is true for many animals, including domestic pets. Nor will any further accumulation of data ever convince one without love honestly to assure a frightened or sorrowing child that everything is all right.
Julian of Norwich, statue by David Holgate, Norwich Cathedral (from Wikipedia)
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In a well-known line William Faulkner says: “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” He speaks the truth.
To capture at least some of what is at issue in that same truth, one might say that fiction of the best sort serves as a sort of prosthetic device for awareness, giving readers new organs, in effect, to perceive what no amount of further investigation could possibly show them otherwise.
What such fiction lets be seen is nothing fictitious. Such fiction does not consist what might be called “as if” assertions — sentences masquerading as assertions but really asserting nothing.
Fine fiction does indeed make “assertions,” but what it “asserts” is more real than what to all merely journalistic eyes passes for “reality” itself. Such journalistic “reality” is itself asserted by fine fiction to be no more, at the very best, than a paltry portion of what is — a minor part uppity enough to lay pompous claim to being the whole.
Seen through the eyes such fiction gives us, the distinction between the mythical and the logical—between myth and reason, mythos and logos — redraws itself. Above all, it no longer makes sense to try to make any sharp distinction between the gods of myth (the gods of so-called “pagan” experience) and the gods of religion. Nor would it be any derogation of any god, or even of God, to call that god/God “mythical.” It would not mean that there was no such god or God. It would mean, rather, that the god/God was more than real, and never to be found among what is no more than that — found, that is, as just one more thing within what passes by journalistic standards for “reality.”
To put the same thought differently, no investigation of journalistic “reality,” no matter how intensive and extensive, could ever give us enough to decide, one way or another, whether either Mars (the god, not the planet) or Yahweh exists. That’s because, if either Mars or Yahweh was journalistically “real,” then neither could be Mars or Yahweh anymore.
We might say that the being of the god Mars would have to be a Martial being, and the being of Yahweh a Yahwist being. And to say that is not really to tell anyone anything we don’t already know: that the being of divinity, if there is any divinity, has to be, of course, a divine being.
So be it!
NOTE TO READERS: This post is a revised version of section 7 of “Hushed Talk of God,” the 7th chapter of my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, which is available at this blogsite in the “Shop” (see above the post).