The Reconceptualization of God: God's Death in Parable of the Sower and The Year of the Flood
In Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the concept of God acquires a new meaning as the characters in the novels face increasingly volatile conditions that threaten their lives. For this reason, characters create religions that help them cope with their realities. In both novels, God dies the Nietzschean way but is reconceptualized as one of Thacker's demons in Parable and Year.
The concept of God in the novels is comparable with the Eugene Thacker’s thought of nothingness, referred to as Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum. Thacker makes three distinctions of the world, namely “the world-for-us, the world-in-itself and the world-without-us” (3-6). Nihil negativum is the world-in-itself because of its “inaccessibility” and “enigmatic” hidden qualities (Schopenhauer in Thacker 47). In The Year of The Flood and Parable of the Sower, the concept of God morphs from humanoid/Christian divine entity into an incomprehensible concept that can only be reached through experience. Thacker notes that nihil negativum is about “the limits of language” to communicate experience. However, it is also about “the horizon of the human as it struggles to comprehend the unhuman” (47). Furthermore, the state of nihil negativum does not have the form of subject and object nor can it be communicated to others, because it is only reachable through one’s experience (47). Thacker thus uses nihil negativum to help create a demontology; an ontology of demonic representations that help reveal the hiddenness of the-world-in-itself. With the concept of nihil negativum in mind, I argue that the concept of God is in Parable changes from a negated being to a thought of nothingness that one reaches only through experience; the experience of Change.
In Parable, the protagonist Lauren Olamina contemplates different ideas of what God is before she concludes that God is an experience of Change, essentially of nothingness, for change is neither positive or negative, yet both. As daughter of a Baptist minister, Lauren is entangled in a walled community of which her father is the leader. She baptizes the same way everyone does in order to become an official member of the Baptist church. Nevertheless, Lauren questions her father’s “big-cop-God” or other people’s belief that God is nature (15). Lauren notes that nature “turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of” (15). She sympathizes with Deist thoughts asking, “Is there a God? If there is, Does he (she) it? Care about us?” whilst ponders on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs that God “was something that made us, then left us on our own” (15). Moreover, she wonders if God is just a “big kid playing with his toys” which leads her philosophy one comparable to flat ontology wherein it does not matter if a big number of people die due to a hurricane or if some kids get baptized in “expensive water” (16). Yet she negates these ideas that would have been compatible with Thacker’s thought of nothingness in demontology in order to create another one that still is.
The concept of God in Parable of the Sower is essentially of nothingness (which is Thacker’s demon of demontology), in the sense that it negates both the positive and the negative (Kant’s nihil privativum). Lauren Olamina is a black teenager who grows up in a gated community that serves as a protective barrier to the increasingly hostile outside world. In the wake of an economic crisis that further dwindles, absurd high crime rates, privatized military and modern slavery by corporations, Lauren stops believing in her father’s God and reconceptualize God. Lauren describes God as an experience and concept as supposed of a being:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God is Change.” (3)
For Lauren, God as a Christian being is “a lie” (3); “my father’s God stopped being my God” (7). To her, God is what you create and what creates you. The only constant factor in life is “Change” (3). God/Change is not positive nor negative and it is irrelevant to God/Change whether the human subject experiences Change as positive or negative. In this way, God/Change is a representation of the demon in Thacker’s demontology as the hidden world-in-itself; the hidden power behind the scenes of the cosmos that affects humans and which humans affect interchangeably.
On the one hand, Lauren’s Earthseed embraces God/Change as the impersonal factor in the equation of the cosmos. On the other hand, Lauren’s concept of God allows difference, what is considered subhuman (difference in race and gender), to flourish in an apocalyptic condition. Yet the root of Lauren’s Earthseed and God lies in Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism. In his essay, “Your God is a Racist, Homophobic and a Misogynist . . . Our God is Change”: Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler and Afrofuturist Critiques of (black) American Religion, Michael Brandon McCormack affirms that Lauren is an “Afrofuturist (fifth-wave) womanist theologian who only embraces notions of God that can be corroborated with her own experience and ultimately can be beneficial to her community” (19). Earthseed can be thus interpreted as a feminist religion, but Earthseed encompasses intersectional feminism, eco-centrism as well as nihilism. Lauren explains:
“The Self must create
Its own reasons for being.
To shape God,
Shape self” (Butler 258)
God in Earthseed is thus the ontological demon that humans try to accept as the unknown that shapes them and that they can shape in return without a Christianized handbook on what to do and how to find meaning. Humans must find meanings for themselves and that can be interpreted as nihilistic. One of the survivors in her group, Travis, criticizes Lauren’s God expressing sneeringly, “You’re God doesn’t care about you at all!” (221) after Lauren explains her concept of God: “God is not good or evil, doesn’t favor you or hate you, and yet God is better partnered than fought” (221). Furthermore, Lauren’s heaven is referred to as “the Destiny of Earthseed”, which belongs in the stars (222). Humans are to leave the depleted earth, because there is no hope for Earth, only for Mars. In these ways, Lauren’s God fits with the demon as the-world-in-itself, impersonal and immune to human desires. Lauren’s view is nihilistic sees the future of humanity elsewhere that the Earth for it is depleted; it is in the Anthropocene. Earthseed’s dependence on Change and acceptance of difference extends beyond race and gender; it extends to other unknown worlds.
In the case of The Year of the Flood, God is initially presented as the nothingness or no-thingness that holds the universe together, which is immeasurable, hidden as Thacker’s demon of demontology. Adam One explains to the Gardeners:
“God is pure spirit [. . .] the No thing; the No-thingness, that through which and by which all material things exist; for if there were not such a No-thingness, existence would be so crammed full of materiality that no one thing could be distinguished from another. The mere existence of separate material things is a proof of the No-thingness of God.” (62)
God as No-Thing/No-thingness implies that God is not a thing to be measured or weighed by scientists (there is an indirect critique to Kant here). Its existence cannot be seen but only experienced through the Gardener’s religious and green practices. Thus, it is as though God as No-thing is the world-in-itself manifested through religious experience.
Even though Adam One, the religious leader of The Gardeners, describes God as the No-thingness to balance the available materiality, he personifies God as a being of good and bad in later chapters. According to Thacker’s demontology, the demon is not good nor bad, but the unreachable hiddenness of the world-in-itself. Therefore, God is not Thacker’s third demon but the mythological one, in which humans try to understand non-humans. The horror of nature’s capabilities in God’s Gardener’s religion is describes as though God’s presence in all living things and non-living things. The second demon is unlike the third one, does not present a perspective of the non-human, but present a perspective of the human grappling with the understanding of non-humans. God is not a metaphor for humans but an allegory “in which the very story of our ability or inability to comprehend the world is encapsulated in the ritual acts of invasion, possession, metamorphosis, and exorcism” (Thacker 27). God, the mythological demon in Year is the attempt of the Gardeners to understand the-world-in-itself.
The Gardeners create a new understanding of God and how God operates is comparable to Thacker’s second demon, the mythological demon, however, their attempt to understand non-humans is still based on a Christian concept. Therefore, the concept of God for the Gardener’s is not just an attempt to understand the world-in-itself but is a way to create a new normativity for the way humans should live accordingly by reconceptualizing God as a Hegelian spirit. According to Hegel, God’s death (as proposed by Nietzche) evokes “spiritualization” or a “reconceptualization of God” (Hegel in Bubbio 694 - 698), in which the knowledge of God’s death transforms into a union between that of human and God’s “finitude” (Bubbio 694). In short, Hegel interprets the death of God in modern times as the negation of God’s absoluteness and God’s resurrection as spirit. In his essay, Scholar Paolo Diego Bubbio argues that “humans now have to learn how to bridge that disunion between being and thought, finite and infinite, through reconciliation” (that is spirit) (Bubbio 698). Furthermore, Bubbio suggests that God’s resurrection happens in the community of believers whereby the many selves (the I(s)) are “free to contribute to the production of a normativity” that help form “the essence of the idealist project” and not function as “the legal conception of the divine” (696). In Year, Adam One describes God as “pure spirit” and “No-thing/No-thingness” (62) as though God is an unattainable form of life. However, God is personified and referred to as “He”, “Creator” and as though God communicated with biblical figures such as Adam, Jezus and Jacob (62). In the first hymn written for Creation Day, Adam is described as a human that could see God;
“When Adam first had breath of life
All in that golden place,
He dwelt in peace with Bird and Beast,
And knew God face to face” (16)
God’s Gardeners conceptualize God and His words as words written by human through the spirit of God similarly to how modern Christians believe. However, they reconceptualize God as spirit (the Hegelian way) to realize the immanence of God (No-thingness) within and between all living things including themselves (see previous paragraph’s passage of Adam One’s explanation of God), which allows them to reinterpret the Bible to fit their practices to their idealist agenda of eco-friendly pacifist vegetarians devoted to preserve and restore extinct animals and plants. God in Year is thus a subjective spirit found in the interconnectedness and relations of all things, not the independent separate and transcendental Christian God (the traditional substance).
To summarize, God/Change in Parable is a representation of the demon in Eugene Thacker’s proposed demontology to reveal the hiddenness of the world-in-itself through experience, while God/No-Thing/No-thingness in Year is subjective spirit found in the relations between things (living people, earth, plants, animals) that enable the Gardeners to experience and create a new normativity to live by. Both new conceptions of God are the consequences of humans finding ways to deal with their posthuman condition. Lauren Olamina’s safe walled community eventually become a place of tragedy and people that defect from a walled compound community of the elite scientists in Year are hunted by CorpSeCorps (private military soldiers hired by the compounds). In the following chapter, I will elaborate on how Olamina and God’s Gardener’s religious practice is a posthuman practice that embrace ideas present in posthumanism as a philosophy.