This is such a well-written, well-wrestled piece. As usual, I will be restacking this with more of my thoughts shortly. But I am curious to know your thoughts on two points:
1) While loss is clearly inaccessible by the gods and exclusively available to Man, what would you imagine to be the substance of Man's affirmation to what is ultimately unavoidable for him? While Man can lose, truly and completely, in what fashion could he demonstrate any meaningful affirmation of that vulnerability? Would it simply be the refusal to succumb to hopelessness and take ones own life? That seems almost too meager an affirmation to my mind (but then, from personal experience, I believe this is actually quite a lot more meaningful and agentic than it might seem on the surface). It reminds me of Camus' insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus' happiness, that we must forge our own value and meaning. And while I admire the strength it takes to perform this imaginative/creative task, it also seems as though it could only be half-heartedly applauded because we have no choice but to make the best of our absurd condition. Is that achievement enough? Or does it place us simply on the opposite pole from our immutable, detached deities? They cannot lose, but we cannot win. Neither of us wholly admirable because neither of us are free from the confines of our nature. (I am beginning to think that the answer to all of this is "love", but I'm interested to hear your perspective.) Does that make sense? I promise I'm not high.
2) Assuming that a god worth loving is a god that stands to lose it all, I find myself coming up against the age-old theodicy, in a form anyway. In this context, I wonder if a god that can truly lose it all might actually be a sadistic gambler? While we, as humanity, could love this god for its vulnerability (and therefore its capacity for real relationship), there would be a dark cloud trailing this conclusion because it would simultaneously mean that this god brought innumerable creations into existence to inevitably suffer, and potentially without any means of relief or redemption. So, in that sense, would that totally vulnerable god be worth our love or would that god instead be worthy of our spite, stained as he would be with our sweat and our blood and our tears which he precariously balances in the cup of his fallible hands?
These aren't necessarily questions I have answers I feel very committed to holding at the moment, which is why I'm hoping your perspectives might provide more food for thought. As usual, a really incredible piece, Barnes. You never fail to capture my imagination.
Your first question. The worry is that the affirmation collapses into either Camus’s defiance or the bare refusal to quit, and that either way it is forced, so only half to be admired. I would resist all three steps.
It is not the refusal to take your own life. A person can decline that and still spend every remaining day in the subjunctive, wishing the loss away, in a standing no to the life he is in fact living. Continuing is not affirming. The yes I mean is a stance toward the content of a life, not a verdict on whether to keep it. It is the refusal to retroactively unlove what you have lost in order to stop the loss from hurting. That is the cheap exit from grief, and nearly everyone takes some version of it. We shrink the dead down. We tell ourselves it mattered less than it did. We convert love into indifference because indifference cannot be wounded. The second yes is the refusal of that conversion. It goes on loving the thing it can no longer hold, and it affirms that the having was worth the losing. So your hunch that the answer is love is exactly right, and it is more than a consolation prize: the substance of the affirmation simply is love that does not curdle when its object is taken. That is not meager. It is the hardest thing a person ever does.
It is also not Camus, though the two are easy to confuse. Sisyphus forges meaning against a void; the value is manufactured, the posture is defiance, and “we must imagine him happy” is an order issued to the self against a cosmos that offers nothing. My claim is the reverse at the root. The value was not manufactured. The thing you loved was really worth loving, the meaning was found and not imposed, and the task is not to invent significance where there is none but to stay faithful to a significance that was genuine, on the terms it actually came, loss included. Camus’s revolt is still a no to the cosmos dressed as a yes to the self. The yes I mean is the cessation of that revolt: not gritted teeth, not heroic defiance, but the place where the question why was it taken stops being asked, because the having is no longer felt as a thing owed back. It is nearer to weary but at peace than to the clenched fist.
Which dissolves the symmetry you drew. You said the gods cannot lose, we cannot win, both confined, neither admirable. But “we cannot win” smuggles in the gods’ own measure of winning, which is invulnerability, and the whole piece is the claim that invulnerability is not a victory but the disqualifying condition. We do not fail to reach their kind of winning. We do the only thing that counts as winning for a being who can lose, which is the very thing they cannot do. The axes are not opposite poles. Theirs is the inability to enter the game at all. Ours is a difficulty inside a game that is real.
And it is not forced, which is the last step I would resist, and where your own parenthesis is right. The proof that the affirmation is free is that most people never manage it. If it were the automatic output of having no alternative, it would be universal, and it is rare. The collapse is always available and usually taken, in the slow forms more often than the sudden one. The freedom is not freedom from the loss. It is freedom in how you stand toward it, and two people handed the identical loss prove daily that the standing is not determined. That is the narrow room where choice actually lives. It is the only room we have, and it turns out to be the one the gods were locked out of.
Your second question is harder, and I will not hide behind the one boundary I am owed before i answer it. The piece argued about the structure of lovability, not the existence or goodness of a creator, so strictly it does not saddle me with the vulnerable creator-god you are cross-examining. But the cross-examination is fair, and I would rather meet it.
The sadistic gambler charge is aimed at the wrong god. A gambler risks other people’s chips. The vulnerable god, on the only model that earns the name, risks his own. The descent is self-emptying, the staking of his own safety, the climbing down into the exposure rather than the wagering of others from a safe seat. The god who should worry you is the other one. It is the invulnerable spectator, the watchmaker, the voice from the whirlwind, who has nothing at stake while his creatures have everything and who can watch the whole thing burn without a hair singed. That is the god who plays with creation from outside. Vulnerability is not what makes a god suspect. It is the correction to the suspicion. The detached god is the sadist your question is hunting for. The vulnerable one is the reply to him.
But there is a real charge underneath the misaimed one, and I will not pretend it dissolves. Sharing the suffering does not by itself justify having authored the conditions for it. A father who climbs into the fire after the child he put there is less monstrous than one who watches from the lawn, but he is still answerable for the putting. Vulnerability mitigates. It does not acquit.
Here is where the piece’s own logic does more than i expected. The capacity for love and the capacity for loss are not two things. They are one capacity seen from two sides. To make a creature that can love is to make a creature that can lose, of necessity, because love is attachment to something that can be taken. A god who spared his creatures all loss would have spared them all love, all stakes, all weight, and would have made them precisely what the essay spent its length pitying: gods, lossless and weightless and shut out of the one thing that makes existence worth anything. So the suffering is not a defect the maker failed to engineer away. It is the shadow thrown by the only gift worth giving. That does not make any particular suffering good, and it does not touch the worst of your worry, the gratuitous case, the tortured child, the loss with no redemption in it, which I think is genuinely unanswerable and which I am not going to insult you by answering. But it changes what the gamble was. He did not stake his creatures on a whim. He gave them the one thing that could make them more than gods, and that thing has loss built into it the way a coin has a second face.
And notice the turn that brings your two questions together. A vulnerable god cannot promise the ending. A god who could guarantee redemption would be back to running the board from outside, which is to say back to invulnerability, the safe spectator who cannot be loved. The price of a god who can really lose is a god who is in it with you with no guaranteed save. That is the terrifying thing, and it is the cost of the only god worth the name. So is he owed love or spite? Both are intelligible, and the tradition holds both, Job’s near-spite and the rage of the lament psalms right beside the love. But notice what spite needs. You cannot hold a grievance against a spectator who risked nothing. You can only submit to him or ignore him. Grievance is a relationship, and every real relationship, love and grief and the wronged creature’s reproach alike, runs on the stakes. The detached god is past your love and past your reproach both. The vulnerable god opens the two at once, because he came down far enough to be answerable. Your spite, if you level it, is itself the proof that he got close enough to be blamed, which is the same proof, turned over, that he got close enough to be loved.
The interesting thing about our conversation here, on a personal level, is that it both inspires me and leaves me with a sinking feeling.
It inspires me because it affirms something I've held central to my faith--vulnerability, loss, grief, and love are central to the unique person of Christ. And yet, a sinking feeling because I'm beginning to wonder if my faith is established on naivety and baseless romanticism.
First, I want to state that I read this very thoughtful reply and found myself in agreeance. I really admire the way that you've articulated your points.
Your description of humanity being gifted with the ability to transcend the gods, a thing that necessarily includes loss as the flipside, is profound. Your point about a god getting close enough to be both answerable and loved is genuinely beautiful.
And my favorite: your contrast between a freedom from and a freedom toward.
Second, you make a fair point--my second question is technically outside the conversation of this piece, though I appreciate your engagement nonetheless as it is a question that seems to naturally arise from the work you're performing here. (But, please, in the future, don't tantalize me with images of you saddled.)
I ultimately agree that the vulnerable god is the reply to the sadistic one, and I am eternally wrestling to make logical peace with my otherwise blind faith in that by wrestling with the image you've articulated of the father tossing his child into the fire and then climbing in to sit with him in it. Wrestling with the fact that vulnerability does not acquit.
This brings me back to the beginning of my comment here--my anxiety that my faith may be a naive and romanticized hope without any philosophical merit. In my mind, the way that this ethical dilemma could be untangled would seem to require a regression from the excellent points you've made in this piece, which then concerns me that love might not remain centered, or even possible. It would require the adoption of a sort of universalism--which I think might be more in line with the safety-net gods you've described. In this scenario the vulnerable creator god denies the privilege of distance, embodies suffering and loss, but ultimately secures all creation and created beings through a tireless transformative love (demonstrated through the self-sacrifice of joint suffering). Without this assurance, that the flames of suffering will not fail to temper the heart toward love, then it would seem that our vulnerable god cannot be entirely acquitted. Then again, as I said, I think that brings us back to square one--a god who stands to lose nothing.
However...thinking out loud here...perhaps the loss of the creator god isn't the loss of the object of his love, but the loss of the nature of love itself.
If, supposing that the traditional view of Christian theology is correct, and the Godhead (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) represented a wholly closed system of perfect communion--wanting nothing, needing nothing--an infinite giving and receiving between a mysteriously triune being defined (somehow) by love, then perhaps the loss occurs when that system is opened for the inclusion of yet more beings, and in that opening, in the risk of that breach, it is infected with the suffering of creation.
The perfect nature of love as a communal harmony is punctured and now love is no longer pristine as it was before, but must now be expressed as self-sacrifice. Love is not diminished, but it is wounded. The rupture will always have existed, the scars of self-sacrifice will always remain (as the gospels depict in Christ's resurrected body), and so unsullied perfection is lost and love now bears the scars of redemption.
If that holds any water at all, then perhaps all can be redeemed, all suffering can be justified through that redemption, and the vulnerable god loses and is given the opportunity to choose the second yes--a narrative with scars rather than a narrative untouched, not shifting to indifference for a creation gone wrong, but persisting in love of a creation that limps.
Incoherent romanticism? Probably.
Regardless, I just want to reiterate that I don’t mean to insinuate that I disagree with you on any of the points you’ve made. On the contrary—you’ve given me quite a lot to consider and have significantly added to a conversation that’s been held within myself for years.
(But, please, in the future, don't tantalize me with images of you being saddled.)
What stays with me is how the whole thing holds together, body and endnotes as one mind thinking. You build the argument up top and then run a conscience underneath it, citing your sources, marking exactly where you can be defeated, planting the ichor turn you choose not to use. So rare to see such rigor that can cause wonder in the reader. Masterful scholarship Barnes.
This is such a well-written, well-wrestled piece. As usual, I will be restacking this with more of my thoughts shortly. But I am curious to know your thoughts on two points:
1) While loss is clearly inaccessible by the gods and exclusively available to Man, what would you imagine to be the substance of Man's affirmation to what is ultimately unavoidable for him? While Man can lose, truly and completely, in what fashion could he demonstrate any meaningful affirmation of that vulnerability? Would it simply be the refusal to succumb to hopelessness and take ones own life? That seems almost too meager an affirmation to my mind (but then, from personal experience, I believe this is actually quite a lot more meaningful and agentic than it might seem on the surface). It reminds me of Camus' insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus' happiness, that we must forge our own value and meaning. And while I admire the strength it takes to perform this imaginative/creative task, it also seems as though it could only be half-heartedly applauded because we have no choice but to make the best of our absurd condition. Is that achievement enough? Or does it place us simply on the opposite pole from our immutable, detached deities? They cannot lose, but we cannot win. Neither of us wholly admirable because neither of us are free from the confines of our nature. (I am beginning to think that the answer to all of this is "love", but I'm interested to hear your perspective.) Does that make sense? I promise I'm not high.
2) Assuming that a god worth loving is a god that stands to lose it all, I find myself coming up against the age-old theodicy, in a form anyway. In this context, I wonder if a god that can truly lose it all might actually be a sadistic gambler? While we, as humanity, could love this god for its vulnerability (and therefore its capacity for real relationship), there would be a dark cloud trailing this conclusion because it would simultaneously mean that this god brought innumerable creations into existence to inevitably suffer, and potentially without any means of relief or redemption. So, in that sense, would that totally vulnerable god be worth our love or would that god instead be worthy of our spite, stained as he would be with our sweat and our blood and our tears which he precariously balances in the cup of his fallible hands?
These aren't necessarily questions I have answers I feel very committed to holding at the moment, which is why I'm hoping your perspectives might provide more food for thought. As usual, a really incredible piece, Barnes. You never fail to capture my imagination.
Brandon,
Outstanding.
Your first question. The worry is that the affirmation collapses into either Camus’s defiance or the bare refusal to quit, and that either way it is forced, so only half to be admired. I would resist all three steps.
It is not the refusal to take your own life. A person can decline that and still spend every remaining day in the subjunctive, wishing the loss away, in a standing no to the life he is in fact living. Continuing is not affirming. The yes I mean is a stance toward the content of a life, not a verdict on whether to keep it. It is the refusal to retroactively unlove what you have lost in order to stop the loss from hurting. That is the cheap exit from grief, and nearly everyone takes some version of it. We shrink the dead down. We tell ourselves it mattered less than it did. We convert love into indifference because indifference cannot be wounded. The second yes is the refusal of that conversion. It goes on loving the thing it can no longer hold, and it affirms that the having was worth the losing. So your hunch that the answer is love is exactly right, and it is more than a consolation prize: the substance of the affirmation simply is love that does not curdle when its object is taken. That is not meager. It is the hardest thing a person ever does.
It is also not Camus, though the two are easy to confuse. Sisyphus forges meaning against a void; the value is manufactured, the posture is defiance, and “we must imagine him happy” is an order issued to the self against a cosmos that offers nothing. My claim is the reverse at the root. The value was not manufactured. The thing you loved was really worth loving, the meaning was found and not imposed, and the task is not to invent significance where there is none but to stay faithful to a significance that was genuine, on the terms it actually came, loss included. Camus’s revolt is still a no to the cosmos dressed as a yes to the self. The yes I mean is the cessation of that revolt: not gritted teeth, not heroic defiance, but the place where the question why was it taken stops being asked, because the having is no longer felt as a thing owed back. It is nearer to weary but at peace than to the clenched fist.
Which dissolves the symmetry you drew. You said the gods cannot lose, we cannot win, both confined, neither admirable. But “we cannot win” smuggles in the gods’ own measure of winning, which is invulnerability, and the whole piece is the claim that invulnerability is not a victory but the disqualifying condition. We do not fail to reach their kind of winning. We do the only thing that counts as winning for a being who can lose, which is the very thing they cannot do. The axes are not opposite poles. Theirs is the inability to enter the game at all. Ours is a difficulty inside a game that is real.
And it is not forced, which is the last step I would resist, and where your own parenthesis is right. The proof that the affirmation is free is that most people never manage it. If it were the automatic output of having no alternative, it would be universal, and it is rare. The collapse is always available and usually taken, in the slow forms more often than the sudden one. The freedom is not freedom from the loss. It is freedom in how you stand toward it, and two people handed the identical loss prove daily that the standing is not determined. That is the narrow room where choice actually lives. It is the only room we have, and it turns out to be the one the gods were locked out of.
Your second question is harder, and I will not hide behind the one boundary I am owed before i answer it. The piece argued about the structure of lovability, not the existence or goodness of a creator, so strictly it does not saddle me with the vulnerable creator-god you are cross-examining. But the cross-examination is fair, and I would rather meet it.
The sadistic gambler charge is aimed at the wrong god. A gambler risks other people’s chips. The vulnerable god, on the only model that earns the name, risks his own. The descent is self-emptying, the staking of his own safety, the climbing down into the exposure rather than the wagering of others from a safe seat. The god who should worry you is the other one. It is the invulnerable spectator, the watchmaker, the voice from the whirlwind, who has nothing at stake while his creatures have everything and who can watch the whole thing burn without a hair singed. That is the god who plays with creation from outside. Vulnerability is not what makes a god suspect. It is the correction to the suspicion. The detached god is the sadist your question is hunting for. The vulnerable one is the reply to him.
But there is a real charge underneath the misaimed one, and I will not pretend it dissolves. Sharing the suffering does not by itself justify having authored the conditions for it. A father who climbs into the fire after the child he put there is less monstrous than one who watches from the lawn, but he is still answerable for the putting. Vulnerability mitigates. It does not acquit.
Here is where the piece’s own logic does more than i expected. The capacity for love and the capacity for loss are not two things. They are one capacity seen from two sides. To make a creature that can love is to make a creature that can lose, of necessity, because love is attachment to something that can be taken. A god who spared his creatures all loss would have spared them all love, all stakes, all weight, and would have made them precisely what the essay spent its length pitying: gods, lossless and weightless and shut out of the one thing that makes existence worth anything. So the suffering is not a defect the maker failed to engineer away. It is the shadow thrown by the only gift worth giving. That does not make any particular suffering good, and it does not touch the worst of your worry, the gratuitous case, the tortured child, the loss with no redemption in it, which I think is genuinely unanswerable and which I am not going to insult you by answering. But it changes what the gamble was. He did not stake his creatures on a whim. He gave them the one thing that could make them more than gods, and that thing has loss built into it the way a coin has a second face.
And notice the turn that brings your two questions together. A vulnerable god cannot promise the ending. A god who could guarantee redemption would be back to running the board from outside, which is to say back to invulnerability, the safe spectator who cannot be loved. The price of a god who can really lose is a god who is in it with you with no guaranteed save. That is the terrifying thing, and it is the cost of the only god worth the name. So is he owed love or spite? Both are intelligible, and the tradition holds both, Job’s near-spite and the rage of the lament psalms right beside the love. But notice what spite needs. You cannot hold a grievance against a spectator who risked nothing. You can only submit to him or ignore him. Grievance is a relationship, and every real relationship, love and grief and the wronged creature’s reproach alike, runs on the stakes. The detached god is past your love and past your reproach both. The vulnerable god opens the two at once, because he came down far enough to be answerable. Your spite, if you level it, is itself the proof that he got close enough to be blamed, which is the same proof, turned over, that he got close enough to be loved.
The interesting thing about our conversation here, on a personal level, is that it both inspires me and leaves me with a sinking feeling.
It inspires me because it affirms something I've held central to my faith--vulnerability, loss, grief, and love are central to the unique person of Christ. And yet, a sinking feeling because I'm beginning to wonder if my faith is established on naivety and baseless romanticism.
First, I want to state that I read this very thoughtful reply and found myself in agreeance. I really admire the way that you've articulated your points.
Your description of humanity being gifted with the ability to transcend the gods, a thing that necessarily includes loss as the flipside, is profound. Your point about a god getting close enough to be both answerable and loved is genuinely beautiful.
And my favorite: your contrast between a freedom from and a freedom toward.
Second, you make a fair point--my second question is technically outside the conversation of this piece, though I appreciate your engagement nonetheless as it is a question that seems to naturally arise from the work you're performing here. (But, please, in the future, don't tantalize me with images of you saddled.)
I ultimately agree that the vulnerable god is the reply to the sadistic one, and I am eternally wrestling to make logical peace with my otherwise blind faith in that by wrestling with the image you've articulated of the father tossing his child into the fire and then climbing in to sit with him in it. Wrestling with the fact that vulnerability does not acquit.
This brings me back to the beginning of my comment here--my anxiety that my faith may be a naive and romanticized hope without any philosophical merit. In my mind, the way that this ethical dilemma could be untangled would seem to require a regression from the excellent points you've made in this piece, which then concerns me that love might not remain centered, or even possible. It would require the adoption of a sort of universalism--which I think might be more in line with the safety-net gods you've described. In this scenario the vulnerable creator god denies the privilege of distance, embodies suffering and loss, but ultimately secures all creation and created beings through a tireless transformative love (demonstrated through the self-sacrifice of joint suffering). Without this assurance, that the flames of suffering will not fail to temper the heart toward love, then it would seem that our vulnerable god cannot be entirely acquitted. Then again, as I said, I think that brings us back to square one--a god who stands to lose nothing.
However...thinking out loud here...perhaps the loss of the creator god isn't the loss of the object of his love, but the loss of the nature of love itself.
If, supposing that the traditional view of Christian theology is correct, and the Godhead (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) represented a wholly closed system of perfect communion--wanting nothing, needing nothing--an infinite giving and receiving between a mysteriously triune being defined (somehow) by love, then perhaps the loss occurs when that system is opened for the inclusion of yet more beings, and in that opening, in the risk of that breach, it is infected with the suffering of creation.
The perfect nature of love as a communal harmony is punctured and now love is no longer pristine as it was before, but must now be expressed as self-sacrifice. Love is not diminished, but it is wounded. The rupture will always have existed, the scars of self-sacrifice will always remain (as the gospels depict in Christ's resurrected body), and so unsullied perfection is lost and love now bears the scars of redemption.
If that holds any water at all, then perhaps all can be redeemed, all suffering can be justified through that redemption, and the vulnerable god loses and is given the opportunity to choose the second yes--a narrative with scars rather than a narrative untouched, not shifting to indifference for a creation gone wrong, but persisting in love of a creation that limps.
Incoherent romanticism? Probably.
Regardless, I just want to reiterate that I don’t mean to insinuate that I disagree with you on any of the points you’ve made. On the contrary—you’ve given me quite a lot to consider and have significantly added to a conversation that’s been held within myself for years.
(But, please, in the future, don't tantalize me with images of you being saddled.)
What stays with me is how the whole thing holds together, body and endnotes as one mind thinking. You build the argument up top and then run a conscience underneath it, citing your sources, marking exactly where you can be defeated, planting the ichor turn you choose not to use. So rare to see such rigor that can cause wonder in the reader. Masterful scholarship Barnes.