Reflections

Abstract

When Mark Twain looked into the mirror of heaven and the book of nature, he saw what for him was the “real God,” the “One who created this majestic universe and rules it.” He would not have human characteristics like jealousy, “a trait so small that even men despise it in each other”; “He would regard self-praise as unbecoming the dignity of His position”; “He would not have the spirit of vengeance in His heart” (“Mark Twain’s God,” The Three R’s 153–54). Twain recognized that our sacred texts throughout history, especially the Bible (his immediate concern), have created as objects of worship preposterous personae—a grandmother slaughtering and dismembering Marduk, a tyrannical, womanizing, child-abusing Zeus, or an angry, jealous, biased, sex-preoccupied, self-promoting, vengeful Yahweh. Twain found the biblical God repellent and responded with sardonic laughter directed toward those who created and perpetuate his story. Even so, Twain was unwilling to relinquish the metaphor of a masculine, divine author, king, and originator. He is the “one who created this majestic universe and rules it.”

[God] is not jealous, trivial, ignorant, revengeful …; He has personal dignity—dignity answerable to his grandeur, his greatness, his might, his sublimity; He cares nothing for men’s flatteries, compliments, praises, prayers; it is impossible that he should value them, impossible that He should listen to them, these mouthings of microbes…. His sun does not stand still on Gibeon to accommodate a worm out on a raid against other worms….

Mark Twain, “Mark Twain’s God,” The Three R’s 155

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

That has expelled us and our images….

Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction I