Faith & Spirit Quote by Joyce Cary

Cary pins theology to the wall with a novelist's most ruthless tool: internal consistency. God, in this framing, isn't a mood or a poetic placeholder. He's a fully realized character, bound by traits the way any convincing figure in fiction is bound by motive and logic. The provocation is that a miracle would be bad writing. It would be a deus ex machina that breaks the rules of the world and, by extension, makes the whole narrative collapse. Cary isn't gently doubting religion; he's attacking the easy comfort of a God who can be both dependable lawgiver and occasional rule-breaker when the plot demands a rescue.

The subtext is aimed at modern religious compromise: the attempt to keep scientific order (a universe that runs) while also reserving a supernatural escape hatch (a universe that can be interrupted). Cary insists you must choose. Either reality is coherent because its author is coherent, or the author is arbitrary and the cosmos becomes as flimsy as a story that can't keep its own promises.

Context matters: writing in a century shadowed by world war and philosophical upheaval, Cary is pushing back against sentimental faith and crisis-driven appeals to providence. His line about the universe "blow[ing] up" is hyperbole with a moral edge: if you let ultimate power be whimsical, you don't just lose physics; you lose meaning. The real target isn't God but the human appetite for exceptions.