Our Cosmology (A Preface)

Guirgis’s conception of the Christian God and His justice is one of the more distinct and unique interpretations that I have ever read. In order to fully understand Guirgis’s cosmology, and how it affects the plot of the play, we must start at the very beginning.

God has a grand plan for the universe. We call this “God’s Ineffable Plan.” Everything is going to happen exactly as God has planned it. He is the only one who fully knows and understands this plan. Because this plan is “ineffable,” by definition we humans can’t ever know or understand it. Part of the tension within the notion of an Ineffable Plan is that it works with the idea of a terrible world, not against it. A common justification for not thinking that God exists is how could He possibly let so many awful things happen? Things will go wrong in the world, and because they are terrible it will seem like they aren’t a part of God’s plan, but they are. In the Ineffable Plan, each of these events, no matter how terrible, must happen. 

We as mere mortals can’t comprehend the breadth, depth, or scope of God’s Ineffable Plan because we are not God. We also can’t know what goes against His plan, since nothing ever does. We must take it on faith that “everything happens for a reason,” even if we don’t know what that reason is or what it will produce.