God Knows

We may very well be living in post-Christian times. The publication of E.L. Doctorow’s “City of God” 1,600 years after the appearance of a volume of the same title by St. Augustine of Hippo may be Christianity’s final parenthesis. Can a spiritual church possibly survive in a secular world, ask both writers. Can the City of God survive in the city that never sleeps?

Augustine was an optimist in an era when word of Jesus was hitting Rome like an Internet IPO. But Doctorow is a modern fellow who has lived through the better part of the worst century known to mankind to the end of the second millennium. Both he and the faith-leaking hero of his monumental novel can read the signs as clearly as if they were lit up in Toshiba iridium above Times Square. The End Is Near. Flash. The End Is Near.

The Rev. Thomas Pemberton came to the ministry in the ‘60s, in the era of the Peace Corps and Hope. The late ‘90s, however, find him the minister of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in one of the more forlorn reaches of New York’s East Village. As the novel opens, Pem is on the verge of losing everything he has ever called holy, preaching to a handful of churchgoers, a wardful of the terminally ill and the occasional stoopful of the permanently stoned (from whom he is not averse to taking a nickel bag).

Yet the lack of a congregation and the theft of surplices and prayer books from the vestry is nothing compared to Pem’s weakening faith. Among other doubts, Pem is troubled by the Holocaust, and specifically by the lack of a sufficiently strong reaction by his brethren. “What mortification,” he asks his congregation one Sunday morning, “what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn’t some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. . . . A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp?” No wonder the last of his parishioners flee St. Timothy’s.

But there is another who answers Pem’s question. One morning, he awakens to find the huge cross above the altar of St. Tim’s gone, presumably stolen. The mystery graces the police blotter and the newspapers for a day and then is forgotten. Until a mysterious phone call brings Pem to the Upper West Side. There, on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism Pem finds the cross.

The finder of the cross and the founder of the sect is Rabbi Joshua Gruen, a yarmulke-less man in his early 30s, who lives above the synagogue with his two children and his wife, Sarah, a rabbi herself and a beauty of “impeccable ethics.” Drawn by the simple righteousness of this couple, Pem returns time and again to visit Josh and Sarah. Meanwhile, his faith and his parish continue to unwind. Until one day, Pem finds that the very act of worship has become intellectually untenable. Going before the bishop’s examiners, he defrocks himself. “Migod,” Pem tells them, spitting out his skepticism of the grand story of the Bible, “there is no one more dangerous than the storyteller. No, I’ll amend that, than the storyteller’s editor. Augustine, who edits Genesis 2-4 into original sin. What a nifty little act of deconstruction--passing it on to the children, like HIV.”

And, as it turns out, “City of God,” the Book of Pem, has a storyteller. The fragmented sections of the novel that from the beginning have woven Pem’s tale with bits of commentary and song have all been written by a narrator by the name of Everett. Everett, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and a sometime writer of movies, was drawn to Pem by the newspaper story of the theft of the cross from St. Timothy’s. Slowly Everett infiltrates Pem’s life and his weakening faith. It is Everett who hears of Pem’s original call, and it is Everett who watches Pem fall from grace and then from the church. It is also Everett who befriends Rabbi Sarah and hears the remarkable story of her father’s life as a messenger boy in the Lithuanian ghetto of Kovno spiriting the diaries of the ghetto elder out of the ghetto and into a Catholic church. And it is Everett who tells of Pem’s travels in search of these diaries and Everett who tells of the blossoming romance between the Christian Pem and the Jewish Sarah.

And of course “City of God” has an editor as sure as Genesis 2-4 had an editor. This Augustine is Doctorow, a writer who speaks in so many voices that he makes the ventriloquist of the narrative strands of the Torah seem like a kiddie party entertainer. In the assured hands of Doctorow, “City of God” blooms with a humor and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days.

But at the end, Editor Doctorow proves to be an Augustinian optimist after all. The City of Everett, the world of the novel, the world of Pem and his beloved Sarah, is safe. Another sacred mechanism has replaced true belief. “In the 20th century about to end,” Sarah says, “the great civilizer on Earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt . . . the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering.” For Pem, doubt may not be enough. “We need a place to stand,” he cries to God. “We are weak, and puny, and totter here in our civilization.” But for Doctorow, where there is doubt, there can still be love. Against all odds, Pem and his companion totter on, like a pair of Beckett clowns, waiting in the City of Godot.