Hope and Faith Theme Analysis

I know your species tends to look down on our world, considering it brutal, cannibalistic and deceitful […]. But among us there had always been, from the beginning, a sense of equality. […] Perhaps this is a concept difficult for you to grasp, but there was a mutual respect amongst us. Eating another animal was not grounds for despising it; and being eaten did not instill in the victim – or the victim’s family – any exaggerated admiration for the dining species.

Noah – or Noah’s God – changed all that. If you had a Fall, so did we. But we were pushed. […] Noah – or Noah’s God – had decreed that there were two classes of beast: the clean and the unclean.

We had survived. We had stowed away, survived and escaped – all without entering into any fishy covenants with either God or Noah. We had done it by ourselves. We felt ennobled as a species. That might strike you as comic, but we did: we felt ennobled. That Voyage taught us a lot of things, you see, and the main thing was this: that man is a very unevolved species compared to the animals. We don’t deny, of course, your cleverness, your considerable potential. But you are, as yet, at an early stage of your development. We, for instance, are always ourselves: that is what it means to be evolved. We are what we are, and we know what that is. […] One moment you bark, one moment you mew; one moment you wish to be wild, one moment you wish to be tame.

How do you turn catastrophe into art? […] We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for.

But some subjects just seem to get painted more than others. Take officer-class Noah, for instance. There seem to be surprisingly few pictures of his Ark around. […] A key moment in human history, a storm at sea, picturesque animals, divine intervention in human affairs: surely the necessary elements are there. What could account for this iconographical deficiency? Perhaps the lack of a single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself: maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn’t show God in the best possible light?

The painting has slipped history’s anchor. […] We don’t just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine; we don’t just become the sufferers. They become us. And the picture’s secret lies in the pattern of its energy. […] All that straining – to what end? There is no formal response to the painting’s main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) – how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining.

How could her father have failed to recognize God, His eternal design, and its essential goodness? The proof of this plan and of this benevolence lay manifest in Nature, which was provided by God for Man’s enjoyment. This did not mean, as some had assumed, that Man might recklessly pillage Nature for what he sought; indeed, Nature was deserving of the more respect because it was a divine creation. But God had created both Man and Nature, placing Man into that Nature as a hand is placed into a glove. Amanda frequently reflected upon the fruits of the field, how various they were, and yet how perfectly each was adapted for Man’s enjoyment.

Where Amanda discovered in the world divine intent, benevolent order and rigorous justice, her father had seen only chaos, hazard, and malice. […] Mainly, […] it was a question of faith. She believed in the reality of something ordained by God and described in a book of Holy Scripture read and remembered for thousands of years; whereas he believed in the reality of something described in the pages of Saunder’s News-Letter & Daily Advertiser, which people were unlikely to remember the very next morning. Which of them, she insisted upon knowing, with a continuing and unnecessary mockery in her eye, was the more credulous?

“There is a monastery upon the mountain.”

[…] “And shall we drink the wine there?” She was remembering her travels in Italy.

“It is forbidden,” replied Miss Fergusson. “Tradition forbids it.”

“Tradition?”

“Heaven, then. Heaven has forbidden it, in memory of the fault into which the grapes betrayed the Patriarch. […] Noah’s drunkenness.”

“The God of this mountain is the God who saved only Noah and his family out of the whole world. Remember that.”

Miss Logan grew seriously perturbed at these observations. Was Miss Fergusson comparing the earthquake which had thrown down the village of Arghuri to the great Flood itself? Was she likening the salvation of two white women and a Kurd to that of Noah’s family? When preparing for their expedition they had been told that the magnetic compass was useless on such mountains as these, for the rocks were loaded with iron. It seemed evident that you could lose your bearing here in other ways as well.

History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, […] a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. […] all the time it’s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. […] We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.

Love and truth, yes, that’s the prime connection. We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened. This God-eyed version is […] a charming, impossible fake […]. But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost […], we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. And so it is with love.

You might acknowledge God on paper forms just as you deferred to senior officers around the base; yet the moment you were most you, when you were really Spike Tiggler, the kid who’d grown up from a borrowed car on a quiet road to a roaring fighter in an empty sky, was when you’d climbed hard and were levelling out your silver wings, high up in the clear air south of the Yalu River. Then you were wholly in charge, and you were also most alone. This was life, and the only person who could let you down was yourself.

I wanted to be judged, do you see? It’s what we all want, isn’t it? I wanted, oh, some kind of summing-up, I wanted my life looked at. We don’t get that, not unless we appear in court or are given the once-over by a psychiatrist, neither of which had come my way and I wasn’t exactly disappointed, seeing as I wasn’t a criminal or a nutter. No, I’m a normal person, and I just wanted what a lot of normal people want. I wanted my life looked at. Do you see?

“It seems to me,” I went on, “that Heaven’s a very good idea, it’s a perfect idea you could say, but not for us. Not given the way we are. […] So what’s it all for? Why do we have Heaven? Why do we have these dreams of Heaven?”

[…] “Perhaps because you need them,” she suggested. “Because you can’t get by without the dream. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It seems quite normal to me. Though I suppose if you knew about Heaven beforehand, you might not ask for it.”