First Meditation: Who Is God? 85
the central articles of the Christian faith to cheap trifles. Com -
pared to that unspeakable offering, after all, that interminable
and abominable oblation of infinite misery, what would the
cross of Christ be? How would it be diminished for us? And
to what? A bad afternoon? A vanishingly temporary indispo-
sition of the infinite? And what would the mystery of God be-
coming a man in order to effect a merely partial rescue of cre-
ated order truly be, as compared to the far deeper mystery of
a worthless man becoming the suffering god upon whose per-
petual holocaust the entire order of creation finally depends?
A smaller gesture within the greater? A minor, local economy
within the totality of the universal?
Predestination, in fact, need not be invoked here at all.
Brush the issue entirely aside. Let us suppose instead that ratio-
nal creatures possess real autonomy of almost godlike scope,
and that no one goes to hell save by his or her own Prome-
thean industry and ingenuity: When we then look at God's
decision to create from that angle, we find, curiously enough,
that absolutely nothing changes. Not to wax too anthropomor-
phizing here, like a poor simpleminded analytic philosopher
of religion who thinks of God as some immense finite agent
similar to us (if much more imposing), but we really should
pause to interrogate the logic of God's motives in the story
as commonly told. Let us, that is, say God created simply on
the chance that humanity might sin, and on the chance that
a certain number of incorrigibly wicked souls might plunge
themselves into the fiery abyss forever. This still means that,
morally, he has purchased the revelation of his power in cre-
ation by the same horrendous price-even if, in the end, no
one at all should happen to be damned. The logic is irresist-
ible. God creates. The die is cast. Alea iacta est. But then again,
as Mallarme says, "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard"