Cookie Cutter Theology

It occurred to me one morning recently that I was spending too much time playing games on the computer. It was so easy, in an idle moment, to call up my trusty FreeCell program or my irascible backgammon program and work through a game or two. So I made a vow, of sorts, not to be enticed into playing a single game for an entire day.

Having nothing much else to do, I decided it was time to clean up the “office,” and I began to scan the shelves in search of books I might easily get rid of. During this process I came upon quite a few books I’d forgotten I owned, of course. Some of them, I suspect, very few people even remember. For example, how about Philosophy as Dramatic Theory, by Julien Marias? That name doesn’t come up in conversation much these days, at least in my social circles.

I pulled it off the shelf, not because it brought back fond memories, but because the writing on the spine was so faint I couldn’t read it, and I was curious to see what it was.

I opened it at random and hit upon Marias’s critique of Sartre’s theory of God as celestial cookie man. Sartre argues that because “human nature” doesn’t exist, God would have no basis for devising a form for a cookie cutter to make humans beings. This proves, in Sartre’s view, that God does not exist. What it really proves is that Sartre has no clue as to how life-forms develop. And it also represents a steep decline in reasoning since Spinoza’s day or the eighteenth century, when philosophers at least likened God to a watch-maker; not to mention the utterly poetic account of how things got their shapes that we find in Plato’s Timaeus.

The challenges of approaching such a weighty issue by means of metaphor—the cookie man, the watchmaker, the Demiurge—are formidable. It has occurred to me that it might be helpful to rearrange the issue syntactically. What if we took up the issue by reference to the various ways we might relate to a deity, rather than how he or she relates to us? There might be a god of supplication, to whom we turn when we can think of no other way out of a dire situation. And there is certainly a god of exaltation, to whom we address our ecstatic emotions at the sight of glistening frost on the morning grass or a snow-covered mountain peak. And let’s not forget the god of contrition, through whom we assuage the feeling that we’ve transgressed against the holiness of creation, or simply hurt someone’s feelings.

All of those feelings, which are orientations toward the divine, are real enough. And I’m tempted to add a fourth: the god of participation. The first three I mentioned seem to have a kind of motion, from and toward, inner and outer, fueled by a desire for connection and wholeness. The god of participation inhabits that connection, developing with confidence in harmony with some larger whole.

These are half-baked notions, to be sure, and terribly abstract, but isn’t that what blogs are for? I’m confident that with a bit more time in the oven, we’ll soon have a sheet of delectable confections, no cookie cutter required.