One of my fears as a pastor is that I will say too much about God. The anxiety has only heightened for me in a political climate in which very many powerful people seem to have no trouble talking explicitly and in detail about what they believe God thinks. I’m with W.H. Auden when he says that “truth, in any serious sense, like orthodoxy, is a reticence.” Reticence about the things of God is a virtue. And like any virtue, as Aristotle reminds us, it can be taken too far. It’s possible to say too little about God.
If saying too much about God is a problem, not saying anything at all about God, forgetting him altogether, is not much better. Reticence is about finding the right mean between saying too little and too much.
Jon Fosse’s novel Septology is reticent about God in just this way. The novel is, as Thomas Petriano notes in America, “one long reflection on the nature of God.” In fact, it is a long reflection on the questions of theodicy.
Fosse is one of Norway’s most celebrated and prolific authors and playwrights. He is perhaps less-known to English readers than is his younger contemporary and fellow Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Like Knausgaard’s oeuvre, Septology is autofiction. This novel is Fosse’s masterpiece, and it is completely absorbing. Septology is a seven-movement, three-volume novel that chronicles the life of Asle, an aging Norwegian painter, in the last week of Advent, leading up to Christmas Eve. The crisp prose of the English translation comes to us from Damion Searls. I am reading a copy that collects all three volumes under one cover, an economical but serviceable edition by Transit Books.
The novel is thinly populated, with only a handful of characters: Asle’s neighbor and friend Asleik, his gallerist Beyer, a woman, Guro, and a few other minor roles. What complicates the novel’s plot is that Asle is friends with another Asle, a doppelganger who is also an aging painter, but whose life has followed a very different trajectory than the narrator’s, down the dark and lonely road of alcoholism. This leads the second Asle to hospitalization and death in the course of the novel. Our narrator Asle cares for him as he declines.
Also complicating the novel is the stream-of-consciousness narration by Asle, which smoothly slips into reminiscences about different periods of his life, from his childhood through to his marriage to Ales and her subsequent death. But the first-person perspective of the narrator Asle elides into the third-person memories of the other Asle (the alcoholic, sometimes referred to as his “namesake”) and even into the experiences of this second Asle as he suffers from delirium tremens in hospital.
The ambiguity between the Asles, and the ways that the narrator shares consciousness with the namesake, creates a trippy, hallucinogenic vibe to the novel’s atmosphere. Everything is porous and changing, and all boundaries are blurred. Indeed, there are no full stops in the book. The entire novel is one run-on sentence without periods. Fosse’s writing is simple, repetitive, almost childlike. The plot of the book comes to us in halting staccato; very little happens, and we hear more about what Asle is thinking than anything he does. This is why Fosse could tell the Financial Times, “You don’t read my books for the plots.” The novel is its own universe, deeply absorbing and moving. This has little to do with the events it describes but comes more from the experience of living in the conscious mind of Asle.
One of the devices Fosse uses to anchor the story is a picture that the narrator Asle paints of a St. Andrew’s cross:
And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and the purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think …
These “two lines that cross” become something of a key for thinking about the two Asles as their lives “blend beautifully and drip,” sometimes to the point that the reader is unsure of which Asle is which.
In his novel The Ball and the Cross, Chesterton records a conversation between Michael the archangel and Lucifer. Michael says, “That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision.” Fosse has Asle paint the colliding lines of the St. Andrew’s Cross, all the while bringing Asle’s life into collision with his namesake. Also, like Chesterton, Fosse is a convert to Catholicism. As Christopher Beha points out, Septology was written after Fosse married (a third time), quit drinking, and converted. The “eternal collision” of the cross, which is also a collision within each human being, is drawn out and magnified in Septology, a novel that is thus semiautobiographical for Fosse.
The theological influences on the novel are drawn from the liturgy of the Latin Mass, the Salve Regina, and the Lord’s Prayer, but also from Meister Eckhart, the only theologian Fosse quotes directly in the text. And the searching of the novel is a searching out of theodicy, as the reader grapples with the presence of God in his absence and reckons with what it means to believe in God.
For instance, Asle muses,
either God is all-powerful and then there’s no free will, or God isn’t all-powerful, and there is free will, within limits, but in that case God is not all-powerful, so ever since God gave humanity free will he gave up his omnipotence, something like that must be true, because without a will that’s free there can’t be love, and God is love, that’s the only thing that is said of God in the New Testament, and that’s why God lacks divine omnipotence, he has God’s weakness, impotence even, but there’s a lot of strength in weakness, yes, maybe the weakness is a strength? And it’s possible that God is all-powerful in his weakness and that there is free will, even if its impossible to think that …
Asle is trying here to square the nature of God (especially his omnipotence) with human free will. And the way he does this is by situating God’s omnipotence in his weakness, in the paradox of the cross.
This is not too far off from the way that another contemporary author, Annie Dillard, grappled with theodicy. In Holy the Firm, she describes a similar strength in weakness tethered to the Incarnation:
Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation—a contraction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love. That God’s works are as good as we make them. That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen. Faith would be that God moved and moves once and for all and “down,” so to speak, like a diver, like a man who eternally gathers himself for a dive and eternally is diving, and eternally splitting the spread of the water, and eternally drowned.
To understand the nature of God, to make sense of his presence in the world, we must resort to paradox, so that weakness becomes the place we encounter God’s omnipotence, his absence the place we encounter his being.
And yet for Fosse there is a sense in which questions of theodicy remain open. He gives no defense for God but only tries to describe the mystery of his being. Asle muses that “it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness, and that darkness, God’s darkness, yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light, I think[.]” It’s not that this makes sense for Asle, that it’s intellectually satisfying, that it’s even possible to comprehend. He adds:
I don’t understand why it’s at night, in the darkness, that God shows himself, yes, well maybe it’s not so strange, not when you think about it, but there are people who see God better in the daylight, in flowers and trees, in clouds, in wind and rain, yes, in animals, in birds, in insects, in ants, in mice, in rats, in everything that exists
But, as Asle notes, not everything that exists is necessarily pleasing. For there are also “corpses, decay, stenches” and all other forms of ugliness. And we cannot say that God is not present in these things, for they exist. This leads Asle to conclude that
God does not exist, He is, and God is in everything that exists, not like something that exists but as something that exists, that has being, they say, I think, even if good and evil, beauty and ugliness are in conflict, the good is always there and the evil is just trying to be there, sort of, I think and I can’t think clearly and I understand so little and these thoughts don’t go anywhere
The tensions between the darkness and the light, God’s being even without “existence,” the good prevailing in the midst of evil—Fosse (in the words of Asle) holds all these together. In this tension, Fosse creates a kind of space, an opening by which we can see the truth of God, not just in the goodness he has created, and not complicit in the evil around us, but somehow shining behind and through all things. This shining is also invisible, yet still perceptible somehow.
Nearing the end of the first volume, Fosse tests this opining in the young Asle’s encounter with the pedophilic “Bald Man.” The predatory encounter could have been far worse, though its ugliness remains churning and grotesque. But this narrative is bracketed by the reflections on God’s “invisible light” on the one side and the Salve Regina and the Jesus Prayer on the other. This setting of the narrative leads the reader to see that somehow God’s goodness, his being, is not negated by such evil.
In a way, this is not too different from Dostoyevsky’s grappling with theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov. In the exchange between Ivan and Alyosha in the chapter titled “Rebellion,” Ivan makes the case not that God does not exist, in the face of the suffering of children, but that he is unjust, that their suffering can never be remedied. Ivan rages, “And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. … I don’t want harmony.” He adds that “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
What Fosse is doing in Septology grapples with the same theological problem, with the goodness and power of God in the face of children’s suffering. It’s not just Asle’s encounter with the Bald Man, but in the inexplicable death of his young sister, in the drowning of the neighbor boy, that we see the suffering of children. These events remain surds in the world Fosse creates, but they are surds couched in Asle’s praying of the Rosary:
Holy Mary Mother of God Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death and I breath[e] evenly and I think yes like this nothing else nothing more because I didn’t care about the others and I breath[e] slowly in and out and I move my thumb and finger up to the third bead and say to myself Ave Maria Gratia plena Dominus tecum
Asle continues the prayer, holding the loss and the suffering he witnessed, before telling us that “a ball of blue light shoots into my forehead and burst and I say reeling inside myself Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora.” This is how the novel ends.
Fosse could have said more about God’s presence in the face of suffering and evil. He could have offered a defense for God. But he didn’t. In Septology he says just enough about God to show his presence, even when he feels most absent.
The Rev. Dr. Cole Hartin is an associate rector of Christ Church in Tyler, Texas, where he lives with his wife and four sons.
