Jack miles god a biography

a six-months-belated, incomplete review, in four parts.

1). so, my favorite video game of all time is pillars of eternity. I think it’s pretty neat. there are lots of things I love about it, but one of its most interesting themes, in my opinion, is the way the narrative handles its theology.

(I am about to spoil pillars of eternity here btw, assuming that most people don’t care, but it really is a wonderful game and you should play it if it appeals to you.)

you go through this whole story, right, the setup to which involves a lot of “gods messing around in mortal affairs,” and towards the latter half of the game–and in the dlc–you even get to converse with some of the gods personally. most of them are at best petty, at worst wholly immature. there’s this sense of frustration, yeah, when you finally have the opportunity to talk to them, after all this time dealing with the consequences of their actions, and the only thing you can get out of them (despite the richly varied dialogue tree) is a sense of self-righteous obfuscation. and then–

and then!

right at the end of the game, just before the climax, you discover something: there are no gods. not really. millenia ago, a technologically advanced civilization, tired of existential uncertainty and religious warfare, went searching for the true gods, to finally bring peace and coherence to their world. instead, what they found, devastatingly, is that no gods exist; the universe is existentially a vacuum, with no purpose or meaning or ultimate authority in sight. faced with this, these ancient people decided that, if such a truth became known, mankind would no longer be able or willing to live. so they took it upon themselves to use their technology and become “the gods”—read, very powerful and godlike beings—and then they brutally erased every trace of what they had done, so that future generations would believe their divinity to be authentic and immutable, the way they themselves would have wanted the gods to be.

when you finally realize this in the game, it’s not only a powerful moment emotionally, but it just makes so much sense. because by this point, you’ve come to understand that the gods are fundamentally—well, if not human, then very imperfect beings with very human flaws, which are magnified by the unimaginable power and temporal perspective they bear. because here’s the thing, right: when a human society is trying to imagine or create a god, when they're trying to design divinity, the only materials they have to work with are fundamentally human stuff. anything beyond humanity, beyond mortality, is intrinsically beyond the power of mortal human beings to conceive.

okay. that was introduction #1. scratch that for now. let’s move on to introduction #2.

2). you know that idea that a lot of poetry is about defamiliarization?

I know the bible. I went to catholic school for ten years. I live in america, in a red state (I know, f’s in the chat. I also accept formal condolences and hallmark sympathy cards). I’ve been stuck in a quasi-religious existential crisis since I was about fourteen, in the latter half of the catholic school years, when I realized that I wasn’t actually religious but I also realized that I kind of wanted to be. I have only “not being able to afford college in america” to thank for not having gone to school for biblical exegesis. so, like, to reiterate this–I know the bible, if not professionally, then pretty well, yeah?

and yet, somehow, god: a biography, by jack miles, still managed to defamiliarize the text for me, to such a degree that I felt almost as though I had never really, truly, read it before. in the iconic, immortal (and rightfully memed) words of anne rice: it’s interrogating the text from (what might initially seem) the wrong perspective.

it’s like this: a few years ago, I visited the ruins of pompeii, and from the crumbling town square, in the flatly suffocating heat, you could see the menacing, lopsided slope of mount vesuvius, like an animal crouching in the distance, rationally dangerous, but presently asleep. later that same afternoon–exhausted, heat-sick, probably dehydrated, and definitely not wearing the right kind of shoes–I hiked to the top of mount vesuvius itself, and what strikes me now is that, from the caldera peak, my gaze wasn’t drawn to the ruins of pompeii at all. instead, what captured my eye was the bay of naples, the tranquil blue of the glimmering waters, the winking glass and metal of the modern buildings below, and the yellow flowers which grew up and down the mountainside in between.

pause. record scratch. let's start again.

3). Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (neutrons or protons). The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or the absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.

is it appropriate, to parallel this with the kind of societal, cultural, and spiritual big bang that occurs (or once did) when disparate, conflicting elements of “god” are combined to form one shifting, inconsistent, unprecedented being? one erratic, unpredictable, incongruent mass, chemically unstable, and yet compelling, dynamic, moving, and in some strange way, comprehensible? not rational, but intelligible? an idea too complex to imagine, but not too convoluted to see?

4). I think that this book might be unreviewable, for the simple reason that–demonstrably–I could write a thousand different reviews of it, from a thousand different angles, and each one would only suffice to cover a portion of the whole, at least for me. I’ve started to write about this book so many times, and every time I write something different, but it still never feels right, you know? like, nothing I can come up with would encompass the scope of miles’s study here, and the richness it had and still carries for me. I think it’s great, and strange, and almost endlessly fascinating, sure, but what does that really even mean? if you have an interest in biblical exegesis, you should definitely read this, but it’s also wonderful as a purely literary critique. it’s food for thought about both our corporeal and our spiritual history. it’s probably, in a way, equally validating for both an atheist and a believer, and for anyone in between. it’s touching, and sobering. maybe most of all–it’s fascinating. and, like all great works which re-center the perspective from which we interpret the world, like the first aerial shot of a vast, sprawling city–it’s invaluable, and certainly unique.