Dissertation Fellow 1999-2000
Anita Houck (Religion and Literature)
University of Chicago Divinity School
If God is God: Laughter and the
Divine in Ancient Greek and Modern Christian Literature
In scenes that became notorious with later commentators, Homer
portrays the gods as characters liable to laughter and comic behavior.
Writers from Plato to Reinhold Niebuhr have argued against laughter’s
place in considerations of the sacred; yet, despite the criticisms,
the past century has given us several works that use laughter to
depict the God of Christianity. This study examines laughter’s
role in the theological imagination, first by considering attitudes
toward laughter in ancient Greece and the modern West and then by
reading several texts that depict the divine as laughing or laughable,
including works of Homer, Aristophanes, Mark Twain, Anne Sexton,
Charles Péguy, Rainer Maria Rilke, and G. K. Chesterton.
In both the ancient and modern traditions, laughter is inherently
ambiguous, capable of expressing a range of attitudes; and it is
inherently ethical, capable of enforcing social norms, admitting
disorder into social structures, and creating and sustaining relationships
of inclusion and exclusion. Because laughter has a necessary ethical
dimension, laughter at and by the gods poses significant questions
about good and evil. In particular, it raises the problem of theodicy,
the question of how evil can coexist with divine justice. Laughter
in these texts can be a response to the divine—the mocking
dismissal of a deity who can’t be counted on to be all-good
and all-powerful, for instance, or the congenial sharing of a cosmic
joke—and can conceptualize the relationship between humanity
and divinity in ways that challenge and complement the perspectives
of other theological methods.
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