Thomas Hardy’s New Year’s Eve stages a confrontation between humanity and God that manages to be bleaker than atheism. The speaker quotes Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, turning scripture into accusation:

‘Yea, Sire: why shaped you us, who “in
This tabernacle groan” —
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!’

The Pauline original carries a degree of hope, but Hardy’s narrator weaponises the passage: joy itself becomes a curse when experienced within a mortal frame where loss is certain. Better never to have known it. An echo of Sophocles is unmistakable: “Not to be born is, past all prizing, best”; a sentiment Beckett would take up: “No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born.”
But it’s God’s reply that chills:

‘Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!’

A Creator who confesses to being sense-sealed, who evolved Consciousness without intending to, who is baffled by moral categories he never designed. Simple godlessness would be less wounding: a God who exists but is less conscious than we are.

This is the theological vision Hardy developed in The Dynasts, his vast verse-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, where the blind, unconscious will presides over human history. George Orwell thought it was where Hardy “set free his genius,” praising its vision of armies marching through mists, men dying by hundreds of thousands in the Russian snows all for absolutely nothing. I’ve never read it and find the thought somewhat daunting. Has anyone reading here attempted Hardy’s epic?