DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP

by Matt Cardin

In the Babylonian creation epic known as Enuma Elish, Tiamat is described as a monstrous deity of darkness and watery chaos that was slain by her children, the Babylonian gods, who then used the halves of her body to create the world (half for the sky, half for the earth).

At one point Yahweh even allows tehom to reclaim the cosmos: in the story of Noah and the flood, the waters come not only from above but from below: ‘In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of heaven were opened’ (Genesis 7:11). Thus the flood was not just a flood, but an unmaking, a temporary returning of the earth to its original formless state.

For a certain type of person, this all raises the question of whether God is truly the final power in the universe. Since the deep existed with God from the beginning, is it not possible to conjecture that it is at least as powerful as he?

Seconds became minutes. Soon the clock chimed the Westminster first quarter, and still we sat in silence. The clock chimed the half hour. And then the third quarter. If I had been sitting there sober, I would have long since been fidgeting and trying to make conversation. But with the aid of my wine, I was uncommonly relaxed, and so was uncommonly able to slip into a semi-trance state of temporal flow. My eyes drooped, the orange glow of the fire filled my head, and time began to glide by like steel blades skimming over a crust of ice.

The God who created the world, who created life and flesh in Genesis, also implanted within that life the possibility of corruption. He made the possibility of decay, dissolution, putrefaction. As a matter of fact, that is the truth found in flesh. This phenomenon we call ‘life’ is merely negative entropy, a rottenness held temporarily in abeyance by the power or principle known to the ancient Jews as Yahweh, and known to us simply as God. Death, the grave, the riddling of these soft bodies by gnawing worms, is simply the inevitable transition between things as they are now and things as they are in reality. Life and health are themselves unnatural.’

When I closed my eyes, I gained the impression of a second heart having been born within me. It was a heart made entirely of light, but of a strange sort that appeared as a luminescent darkness rather than a warming glow.

Demonic affliction was hardly unknown among the spiritual orders, and customarily came only to those souls who had reached such an advanced state of grace that the enemy of God took note and inflicted all sorts of horrible inner and outer torments in order to drag the spiritually-minded brother down from his lofty height. If that were indeed the case with me, then I knew I should count it an honor to be singled out by Satan himself as worthy of special attention.

The pages before me spoke of something not of God’s creation, and thus not subject to the redemptive work of Christ; something existing not in the world of God but outside it, somewhere in a void of utter confusion. Reading these words, I began to envision dimly, as through a pane of smoked glass, a vast and ancient realm of uncreated darkness, a great gulf of eternal night where chaos churned through infinite circles of futility. It was fantastic, breathtaking, overwhelming in its immensity and grotesquery. Through a strange kind of epistemological alchemy, the mere sight of this realm began to impress upon me a sense of ancient secrets being laid bare. I saw plainly the absolute immanence, the impossible nearness, of this other realm. I saw the way it pressed in upon the world of life and light at the edges, and not only there, but also in our very midst, at the interstices where the components of the created order cohere. I saw the true nature of the ordered cosmos upon which I had based my hopes: its mutability and insubstantiality, as if it were merely a castle in the sand, waiting helplessly, absurdly, upon a deserted shore, for the ravenous tide to come in and devour it.

God spoke the creative words to bring forth an ordered cosmos, peopled with conscious spiritual and physical beings. In fact — most shocking of all, a realization that I could scarcely accept — I saw that the God whom I had devoted my life to serving was the offspring of the abyss, and that both He and His cosmos were negated by its universality.

After Vespers, I retired to my cell and knew immediately that it would be a sleepless night, for I was energized by a wondrous sense of well-being, which surged outward from my dark heart to the farthest reaches of my extremities, deadening any residual inclination that I might have had to place stock in that body and its desires, tantalizing me with visions of the world as it would appear when the truth began to shine through the cracks of creation like rays from a black sun.