Bronze Age

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Bronze Age is more than a historical period; it is a charged rhetorical figure in the novel's sustained argument about the fate of religious faith in the twentieth century. The term surfaces at a moment of congregational debate within the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, where a member challenges the continued relevance of ancient sacrificial practices, dismissing them as relics of a bygone era. This invocation of the Bronze Age crystallizes the novel's central tension: how can a modern, thinking person honor a tradition whose core obligations seem to belong to a primitive past? The Bronze Age thus becomes a shorthand for the archaic, ritual-bound layer of Judaism that the novel's characters must confront, reinterpret, or discard as they seek a faith adequate to their own time.

The Bronze Age in the Congregational Debate

The most explicit deployment of the Bronze Age comes during a question-and-answer session at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, where a newcomer challenges the rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, on the continued validity of ancient commandments. The questioner declares that "this is no longer the Bronze Age" and that he cannot take seriously "the sacred obligation regarding the ritual sacrifice of animals to appease or honor God." He extends the critique to the wearing of a prayer shawl with fringes knotted at the corners, as specified in the Book of Numbers, arguing that he can be trusted to remember the Ten Commandments and to live by them without such physical reminders. The challenge is pointed: if the tradition's specific ritual obligations are time-bound artifacts of a primitive age, then what remains of the tradition itself? Another man in the congregation picks up the thread, asking where one draws the line "when there is nothing left"—a question that exposes the risk of a faith so thoroughly modernized that it loses its distinctive character.

The Debate as Sacramental Ritual

The narrator, reflecting on this exchange, notes that the questions had been asked before and the answers given before; the debate itself was "as sacramental as reading from the Torah." This observation reframes the Bronze Age challenge not as a disruptive novelty but as a recurring, almost liturgical feature of Jewish communal life. The narrator wryly adds a "six hundred fourteenth mitzvah" to the traditional 613—the ritual obligation to "work the rabbi over" before deigning to join her congregation. The joke underscores a deeper point: the questioning of ancient obligations is itself a kind of sacred practice, a way of engaging the tradition that is as meaningful as any prescribed ritual. The Bronze Age, in this light, is not simply a discarded past but a necessary foil against which modern faith defines itself.

The Bronze Age and the Question of God's Atavism

The Bronze Age also appears in a more somber register in the narrator's private correspondence with Joshua Gruen, the Episcopal priest whose crisis of faith frames much of the novel. The narrator asks whether time is a loop, whether everything seems to be running backwards, whether civilization itself is in reverse. He then poses the troubling possibility that God "truly does belong to the atavists"—that faith, in its purest and most powerful form, may be inseparable from the primitive, the archaic, the Bronze Age. Joshua's reply is bleak: if that is the case, then "that's what faith is and what faith does," and the two of them are "stranded." Here the Bronze Age becomes a figure for the terrifying possibility that the modern, skeptical mind has cut itself off from the very source of religious vitality, leaving only a hollowed-out, intellectualized faith.

The Bronze Age and the Ethics of Doubt

The novel's treatment of the Bronze Age is ultimately inseparable from its larger argument about doubt and belief. In her address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion in Washington, D.C., Sarah Blumenthal argues that doubt, not certainty, has been "the great civilizer" of the twentieth century. She contends that true believers, of whatever stamp, have done the murdering, while those who hold their convictions "in abeyance and irresolution" have been more likely to walk in God's spirit. The Bronze Age, as the emblem of unreflective, ritual-bound certainty, stands as the negative image of this ethical doubt. Sarah's trust is placed not in those who "reaffirm historic guarantees" but in those uneasy promulgators of traditional religion who chafe under doctrinal pronouncements and read Scripture with Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." The Bronze Age, in this framework, is the age of guarantees—of animal sacrifice, of fringed garments, of a God whose authority reduces all to "beggarly submission." The novel's postsecular vision, by contrast, embraces a compromised faith, one that acknowledges its own inadequacy and yet persists.

The Bronze Age and the Possibility of Renewal

The Bronze Age also haunts the novel's most hopeful relationship. Thomas Pemberton, the Episcopal priest who resigns his orders and undertakes conversion to Judaism, tells the narrator that he has never felt "as completely, wholly Christian" as he does now, studying to be a Jew. The narrator warns him not to say such a thing to anyone else, but Pem insists it is true. This paradox—that a man becomes most fully Christian by becoming a Jew—suggests that the archaic inheritance of the Bronze Age is not simply to be discarded but to be re-entered and transformed. Pem's conversion is not a rejection of his Christian past but a deepening of it, a return to the roots that the Bronze Age represents. The novel thus holds out the possibility that the atavistic core of faith, far from being a trap, may be the very ground of renewal—provided it is approached with the doubt and self-awareness that the modern age demands.