Questioning existence

CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

City of God
By E.L. Doctorow
New York, Random House Inc., 2000
272 Pages, $38 (hardcover)

Brush up on your Augustine. Dust off your copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Get your binoculars out and do some bird-watching. Add to these things a general understanding of astronomy and jazz (or the Midrash), and you may get swept away in E.L. Doctorow's novel City of God. Otherwise, it'll be a struggle to get through - but the effort may prove worthwhile.

There are at least five story lines in City of God. On the book flap, it states that "a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain - sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs, ideas for movies, obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age." Thank heaven for that description because it isn't until almost halfway into City of God that we are given the fictional novelist's biography and an understanding of who he is. After that, his story and his stream-of-consciousness-style writings seem more comprehensible. Before then, be prepared to be confused.

City of God would be a great book club book. It begs to be discussed and explored - with other people's knowledge base supplementing your own. There is much to contemplate: the origins of the universe and its ultimate end, the evolution of Christianity and Judaism as religions, reconciling a belief in God with the Holocaust, society's changing codes of conduct, music, science, etc.

As an example, the novelist's best friend, who happens to be the main character in one of his main storylines, is a priest. This friend is not on good terms with the church and, indeed, ends up resigning his position. In explaining to the novelist how he ended up alienating himself from the church authorities, he says:

"Oh - it was simple enough. I merely asked the congregation what they thought the engineered slaugher of the Jews in Europe had done to Christianity. To our story of Christ Jesus. I mean, given the meagre response of our guys, is the Holocaust a problem only for Jewish theologians? But beyond that I asked ... [the congregation] ... what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster."

Doctorow certainly does not shy away from controversial theological conundrums. Much later in the City of God, there is a passage that will make many a Jew raise his or her eyebrow. During a synagogue study session in which the female rabbi is questioning the meaning of tradition, a congregant stands up and says "am I wrong that there are some things we must not question? For instance, that the Torah was given by the Creator.... Without this, never mind no tradition - it's no religion. Nothing."

Another congregant preempts the rabbi in responding.

"You are saying ... that the ancients were in closer communication with the Creator than we ourselves. That they knew more, that they worked out everything that had to be worked out. And now it's all fixed and immutable. Doesn't that mean that we are reverencing something or someone between us and God?"

These are just two of the many ideas Doctorow asks us to consider in City of God. It's unfortunate that the book is written in such a way that readers will spend as much time figuring out what is going on as they will pondering such existential issues.

To help cut down on the confusion, here are a couple of pointers:

St. Augustine (354-430 CE) was one of the foremost philosopher-theologians of early Christianity and the leading figure in the church of North Africa. His best-known works include one called City of God, in which he provides a Christian vision of Roman history.

Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an engineer, mathematician and philosopher who was considered by many to be a genius. His concepts were hard to grasp for most people and, therefore, Wittgenstein often felt alone and unhappy. His ideas on logic and language form the basis of his greatest work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

City of God is less a novel than it is the "contents of [Doctorow's] teeming brain." It will whet your appetite for knowledge about the creation of the universe, the planets and life. It will open your mind to the possibility of analyzing songs as the Midrash interprets the Torah. As for birds and their relation to humanity or divinity, that's a topic that you may or may not wish to pursue further.

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