05/07/2022
In "Signs and Wonders," from which I approvingly quote a few passages in my "The Hidden Gospel," Marina Warner begins one of her essays as follows –
"The surprise is, there is no talk of love."
She is referring to the Ten Commandments, which, with a few variations, are listed in three different places, a fact that is not discussed in Sunday School (I wonder what the original version was like that Moses angrily shattered).
Marina Warner is only partly correct, since to find favour we are commanded to love, although we are not necessarily loved in return, despite St Paul's repeated claims to the contrary. Job might silently not have agreed, and Freud certainly disagreed, as he made clear in his "Civilization and its Discontents," where he wrote –
"If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God's 'inscrutable decrees,' … he could probably have spared himself the dètour he has made."
Warner proceeds by raising another point which first struck me ages ago, and to which even now I have not been able to find a logical answer. I'll pose the question as she herself puts it –
"What does this jealous God mean when he says, 'you shall have no other gods before me?'
Yes, quite! Does that mean that there are other gods? Were the Arians correct after all? If my beloved Lorraine were to tell me, for example, that she loves an inanimate statue, I cannot see myself becoming mightily upset about it. A statue cannot reciprocate.
The picture depicts a miracle. It shows Pygmalion and Galatea, the statue that was loved and came to life.
