ABSTRACT
Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book sets up an almost perfect storm against the possibility of theodicy: a corrupt church, most corrupt at its most obnoxiously ostentatious; intense physical suffering caused by the amoral natural disaster of the Black Plague; and a narrator (Kivrin Engle) who by the laws of time travel from the twenty-first century cannot intervene significantly in the events she witnesses. The story then subtly, gradually, reveals an immanent divine presence that does not necessarily save its characters from suffering, but comes to join them in the suffering and bear it with them, so that the suffering, still there, is touched by grace. This Divine presence takes the form of a relational trinity: Dunworthy, Kivrin, and Father Roche. Each is painfully fallible but takes on functions of God in relation to the others. The novel ends suffused in authentic unironic Christian transcendence incarnated without remainder into immanent human relationships. This Christian God deals with evil not necessarily by delivering those who suffer but by entering into and participating in the suffering by means of Christ’s bodies that make up the ideal imperfect earthly communal consolation of Christ’s body.
