As Always, Mark Twain

 

In the previous essay, I tried my hand at humorous creativity to shoot down the idea that a benevolent God is in control of the world. But who was I to think I could do a better job than Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain?

I looked through a collection of Twain’s unpublished writings. He left as many unpublished scribbled sheets as he did published books, if not more. This demonstrates that the success rate of a genius (assuming that is what he was) is probably below fifty percent. In many cases, I can see that these works were unpublishable. They just did not have the compelling wit of his more famous works. Especially in his declining years, he simply did not work as hard as he could have. Genius is not enough; discipline is necessary.

A recurring theme in his unpublished writings is that, if there is a God, He must be cruel. In his essay Thoughts of God, Twain tried to analyze the twisted thought processes of a God who could create the fly. God’s commission to the fly: “Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting…Settle upon the soldier’s festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he also prays…” And the plague victim: “sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gums them thick with plague germs…” At least with humans there is the hope, or delusion, of life after death, but animals suffer from flies, “…all the kindly animals that labor without fair reward here and perish without hope of it hereafter…”

Twain then attacks the idea that, when humans help one another, they are doing God’s work. Twain could not have known John F. Kennedy would say, “Here on Earth, God’s work must tryly be our own.” Twain just considers human good deeds to be God taking credit for someone else’s good work. The only italicized passage says, “There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve.” If it is a sin to withhold help when we can give it, God must be a cosmic sinner.

In another essay, In My Bitterness (written when Twain was still bitter about the death in 1896 of his daughter Olivia (Susy) of meningitis), he wrote, “He gives you a healthy body and you are tricked into thanking Him for it; some day, when He has rotted it with disease and made it a hell of pains, you will know why He did it…He may tear the palpitating heart out of your breast and slap you in the face with it.”

In a story at the end of The Refuge of the Derelicts, Twain writes about the cruelty of the spider sucking the life out of her victims, and even her husband, and then along comes a wasp and lays an egg on the spider. The wasp grub “gnawed a hole in the spider’s abdomen, and began to suck her juices while she moaned and wept…” The wasp grub eats the spider from the inside, leaving it alive until the last miserable moment. The wasp was “radiant with that spiritual joy which is the result of duty done.”

Theodicy is the intellectual discipline of making excuses for God. You would think that it would by now have gone extinct. But humans want to believe, despite all evidence, that God is good. That is certainly what I want to believe, but, as Twain would have said, wanting don’t make it so.