NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

The most current serving of Wood’s nourishing New Yorker fare:

Choice phraseology:

…a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.*

…this rather repellent idea that suffering is dimly watermarked by redemption

…the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is "theodicy," which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics.*

Insightful judgment:

…this entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised is what gives the book a rough power

Apt, colourful quotation

Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel "The Way of All Flesh"-the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.

Pointed argument

…when we actually need his intervention-say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps-he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested "free will."

…in Heaven, our will miraculously coincides with God’s will. And here the free-will defense unravels, and is unravelled by the very idea of Heaven. If Heaven obviates the great human freedom to sin, why was it ever such a momentous ideal on earth, "worth" all that pain and suffering?

* Why we worship him.  

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