A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgård
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A God Who Learns

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, he says, because their existence could become a distraction. The intense brightness of their pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. Knausgaard is aware of this danger and hints at the risk he's taking at the beginning of A Time for Everything when he says, "...darkness isn't the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found."

Nevertheless, Aquinas says, angels are messengers from the divine and deserve due attention. In particular, their assumption of material form is instructive in itself because it is a demonstration of the possibility of the infusion of the material by the spiritual. For Aquinas this demonstration becomes definitive in the Incarnation of the God-man Christ.

This may all sound biblical. But it's not. It's largely Greek philosophy which begins by positing the immutability, the un-changeability of the divine as one of its primary characteristics. Knausgaard, in the guise of his fictional theologian Bellori, dumps this Greek presumption of divine stability by taking the bible somewhat more literally than even many evangelicals might like. "It is not the divine," Bellori claims in his On The Nature of Angels, "which is immutable and the human which is changeable, he wrote, the opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration of the divine from the creation to the death of Christ."

What Knausgaard is exploring is therefore not the influence of God on man through the heavenly envoys but the opposite. Man's experience is so alien to God that it has to be communicated gradually to him, beginning with the conversion of the angels. These are the pitfalls he means. Angels "regard us with total apathy," he says. They don't have a clue about who and what we really are. They have to learn. And so does God:

"The fact that the Lord's feelings towards mankind alternated between sorrow and despair and a fury so great that it could cause him to destroy whole cities means that the expectations he had of them, which they could never live up to, were inhuman - that is, divine. He never saw man in his own right, never for what he was, only what he ought to be. ...he never understood them. And how could He? God was far too large for man, their lives too small..."

This becomes even clearer in the exegetical discussion about the prophet Ezekiel: "Before Ezekiel, the Lord's applications to mankind had always taken place outside them; the boundary between the Lord and the chosen one was absolute. With Ezekiel this boundary was crossed for the first time." God was learning, and consequently changing, turning more man-like: "Does not Ezekiel describe God as a 'form in human likeness'?"

But man too was developing. He was becoming 'divinised' (an explicit doctrine of the Eastern Church), that is, he too was becoming capable of change. He was fighting his way back past the mighty Cherubim guarding the gates of paradise, and back into the divine presence.

Ultimately this provides a very different view of salvation than Greek philosophy. Becoming divine is indeed a liberation but not into a nirvana of eternal stasis. Rather it is salvation into a world of continuous development: "Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear."

I admit that the first time I read A Time for Everything I just didn't get it. I therefore apologise, probably to myself, for not allowing myself to be drawn into his alternative theology of change, to be, that is, just a little bit divinised.

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