‘That’s well and good, but there are some – not many to be sure – but some who believe that the mind of God is not necessary for us to exist. That we are what we are, in all our sad imperfection, because the cold laws of nature have spewed us forth – the laws of nature, which care nothing for man and have no conception of God or anything else and which, like automatons out of control, keep creating and grinding on in a void. And while we may believe that we are created in the image of God, in fact, we are nothing but grains poured into this mad machinery, of no more importance than animals or water or stones or stars. For there are some who are able to live without God, who neither dread nor fear the idea of a world that grinds on without meaning from beginning to end. And one fine day, these people say, which, in fact, won’t be fine but bitter, the end will come and the machinery stop, because this is what the laws of nature want. Or, even worse, whether they want it or not, they will keep on mindlessly crushing the grains until they themselves
collapse and disappear, with the world in tow, just as they once arose out of nothing …’
‘Utterly impossible! Something cannot arise out of nothing and vanish into nothing. It can’t! It can’t! It can’t! There is no nature without God! God created nature, and nothing in nature happens that he himself has not ordained!’
‘What about miracles?’
‘Miracles are God’s way of revealing his greatness to us, by inflating nature and giving it a little twist.’
‘But what if there are no miracles and these are merely natural phenomena that seem strange to us because we don’t fully comprehend them?’
‘What if … but … yet … still … All these speculations – none of it gets you anywhere!’
‘But some people live with the absence of meaning … are able to live …’
‘But not for long! Because we will find them; we will ferret them out. And then we’ll see how they sing and dance that tune of theirs in Spanish boots!’
‘But what if the only reason we have God is because we’re afraid? And it’s only out of fear that we prattle on about how he created us, how he watches over us? And we do everything in his name because we dread the thing that might well be the truth, namely, that it doesn’t matter if we are good or evil, that it makes no difference at all whether we exist or don’t exist?’
‘Silence! If you’re going to blather on about this, keep your voice down. The walls have enormous ears with falcon-sharp eyes attached to them. It’s best to ponder these things in silence …”
In silence … now let us think without speaking:
All thoughts we ponder deep in our minds and say nothing because we are afraid. We are afraid of the Creator, and even more afraid that there is no Creator and that all the stories about God are inventions by which our masters oppress us and, mainly, by which we oppress ourselves. We are afraid of everything – of nature, God, the count, the prince, the emperor, all those bishops and vicars, visitations, faith commissions, preachers, Leapers, Founders and mercenaries, as well as the Turks, natural and supernatural catastrophes and ominous astrological forecasts; we are afraid of foreigners, we are afraid of each other, we are afraid of our very selves …
And now let us think and again speak out loud:
Worst of all is when you do everything, and do it exactly as God commands, and he still pays no attention to you. You ask, you beg, you grovel before him, but he just seems to close his eyes and shut his ears, and meanwhile some new misfortune befalls you and you haven’t even recovered from the last one. And when there’s a new catastrophe on the horizon, meant not just for you but for those closest to you, too, good fortune steers well clear, while those other people, who commit outrages against God’s law, live in peace and stuff their faces, since, for reasons we can’t comprehend, life delivers the biggest and juiciest cuts to their table. And we keep waiting and waiting, wondering what’s going on and understanding nothing. Why do bad things happen to us, who are neither responsible nor guilty? Why does sickness spare them, who are the embodiment of human evil (if it really is human) and instead attacks a good husband and father, who toils from morning till night to feed his family? Why does it ambush the mother whose dried-out breasts are suckling her tenth child – a child that like six children before him will probably breathe his last not long after breathing his first? Why? Why do these things happen to us, who are just and honest, but to certain others never at all?
Living among the populace are certain individuals, and it’s because of them that you have to be constantly on your guard. Things that apply to ordinary suffering mortals do not apply to them – and for several reasons. First, they suffer less than the majority. Second, the majority suffer precisely because of these individuals, who (and this is the third reason) make the majority suffer simply for their own amusement, doing evil to kill the boredom of their lives as merrily as possible. And meanwhile, honest people suffer because, sadly, by some inexplicable rule, righteousness and suffering go hand in hand, as the ancient Greeks tell us. But the populace knew nothing about the ancient Greeks, since what they needed to know was not much more than working the fields, raising livestock, making handicrafts and fabricating lots of ideas and theories that would curl their God’s hair. If he had hair, that is, long grey hair, just like his beard, which is the way the populace imagined their God. But he doesn’t have a beard or hair because God is a concept, which is something very few people thought in those days – or rather, God does not have hair or a beard for the simple reason that (and in those days only the very boldest people thought this, in secret) God … simply … does not … exist.
There is no God – nada, as travellers in the past expressed it, who, fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, passed through these parts on their way to the Holy Land, but then they got bogged down in the Ottoman Empire, many of them in Bosnia. Nada was what the mercenary
soldiers said in the Spanish tongue, coming back from the wars in Spain. The local populace, with sidelong glances at all these Spanish speakers, thought they were saying the Slovene word for hope. Nada, nada – always this nada. But it wasn’t hope they meant, but nothing, which is what the Spanish word means. The few people who understood Spanish wondered if some words might not contain the hidden truth of similar-sounding words from other languages. If so, then nada – hope – is pure ordinary nothing, as it fairly often turns out to be in life. And to hope for nothing, therefore, is more realistic than to hope for something, because you won’t be disappointed when your nada proves to be nothing more than a worthless piece of nothing. And nada, nothing, was all that remained to those whom the populace saw as guilty, who found themselves in the grip of the people’s justice.
We have, to be sure, gone somewhat off track, but not astray. What we have said does, in fact, relate to those insidious manipulators
mentioned earlier. The ones who look most innocent are actually the very worst. It is not easy to recognize them, for they disguise themselves in the skin of youth, or maybe the skin of old age, an utterly desiccated, wrinkled skin – since he doesn’t choose the form of his appearance … Oops, we wrote ‘he’ – we are intentionally not writing his name, let alone pronouncing it, lest that pervert think too highly of himself. But if we had to write it – and there are some among us who can, although not many – we would never capitalize it; we’d write it all in lower case, in sloppy handwriting, and do our best to make it a disgusting scrawl … ughhh … aarrgh – he knows somebody is talking about him, he’s kicking and stomping, so from now on we’ll have to be more careful, think more slowly … We should zealously try to humiliate him with our scrawl. So, unless it’s truly necessary, rather than saying his name, let’s just clear our throats, cough, maybe whistle as we meaningfully roll our eyes, then spit out a juicy one on the ground.
All these catastrophes, all these vermin crawling out of the earth or tumbling from the sky, there must be a reason for them. We don’t believe God would torture us right and left just because he felt like it – that he’d torture us, who every Lord’s Day, even in thick snow or pounding heat, fly off to church – well, not literally fly, since we’re honest folk and don’t keep to hidden