Cosmic Ventures: A Meditation of God at War
Mailer's Esquire essay (December 1989) refining the embattled, limited God he first sketched in 'Hip, Hell and the Navigator' (1959) — proposing that divinity might as well be 'She,' or better 'They,' a marriage of godlike Male and Female.
“Cosmic Ventures: A Meditation of God at War,” Mailer’s essay for Esquire (December 1989, 156–57), refines the theology he had first set out in “Hip, Hell and the Navigator” (59.2): a God who is neither all-powerful nor all-good but embattled, at war, dependent on human courage. Here he adds a revision of its gender — “despite my reputation as a male chauvinist … God may be referred to as ‘She’ as legitimately (for all we know) as ‘He,’ or, even better, as ‘They,’” a marriage of “a godlike Male and Female” that “may not work a great deal better than the majority of ours.” It anticipates the theological dialogues of his last years (On God, 2007). Reprinted in Living Philosophies, ed. Clifton Fadiman (Doubleday, 1990).
Related pages
- 1989
- The Rolling Stone Interview, Part II: Sympathy for the Devil (75.2) | Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer (75.11) | Letters to Mike Lennon (30 January 1972, 7 October 1974) (82.15) | God and Man and Norman Mailer (83.45)
- Hip, Hell, and the Navigator (59.2)