Reading beckett via Kit Fine (10)

Theology 

I heard Beckett's publisher, the legendary John Calder, say that Beckett had invented a new theology in his later works. I recorded him saying this here. 

John Calder notes that in Book 3 God in Paradise Lost is half regretting the gift of free will, watching the creature proliferate paths, and then wonders whether to call the whole thing back in, to fold the branching back into a single line. Milton’s God does not merely issue commandments, he oversees a space of possibilities, a modal space, a sense of what could happen, what must happen, what is permitted, what is barred. Free will is an ontological widening, a literal opening out of the world’s future into alternatives. The creature’s dignity is a metaphysical generosity, a permission for otherness to arise. The anxiety, the God shaped worry, is that once you allow this widening, you also allow the possibility of the worst. 

So the fantasy of taking the gift back is a fantasy of modal narrowing, not just moral tightening. It is a fantasy of closing the world, shrinking its branches, collapsing its counterfactuals, reducing the number of live routes by which the world can go on. Milton’s drama can be read as a struggle over how wide reality is allowed to be. Essence, in Fine’s sense, is what something is, not merely what it happens to be necessary. Grounding is the relation of dependence that makes some facts hold in virtue of others. Counterfactuals are disciplined “what if” transitions that track how a world would have to reshape if some condition were different. Impossible worlds are a way of modelling what we nevertheless reason with when we contemplate contradictory requirements, mutually obstructing demands, or worlds whose rules cannot all be satisfied together. 

If Beckett invents a theology it is a mechanics. It is a theology of how reality is allowed to be structured, how much room it has, how it is permitted to move, and what sorts of movement count as progress rather than looping. An argument from p to p is the most blatant form of circularity, like p and not p is the most blatant form of contradiction. The whole problem is that ordinary validity threatens to make everything look presuppositional, because if the premises entail the conclusion, in one sense the conclusion was “already there”. 

Fine’s move is to distinguish “weak” derivability from “strong” derivability. Weak proofs can loop, strong proofs must embody a direction, a progression, a gain that is not merely a reshuffling. The system is engineered so that identities of the form A → A are never strongly provable. The logic is trying to model the difference between merely ending up where you started, and genuinely moving. In other words, it tries to formalise the feeling that there is a kind of reasoning that is technically correct yet existentially empty, the kind that returns you to yourself with no new ground under your feet, and a different kind of reasoning that forces a real step, a change in what is supported, what is justified, what is available. That is already Beckett. 

Ill Seen Ill Said begins with an almost obscene clarity and then immediately makes that clarity untrustworthy. “From where she lies she sees Venus rise.” It is a sentence that pretends to be pure witness, a clean camera. It is also a sentence soaked in the erotic sublime without saying anything “explicit”. Venus is not just a planet and not just a goddess, it is a sexed name for a light that returns, a recurring bright point that can be watched, waited for, depended on. The phrase “from where she lies” gives you posture, vulnerability, convalescence, exposure, the bare fact of a body positioned for seeing, or for being seen. It is a line that could be tender, it could be clinical, it could be pornographic in a sublimated way, because “she lies” is both location and the hint of deceit, and because Beckett’s English always lets the physical verb throb under the abstract grammar. If this were a conventional realist opening, it would ground the scene. 

Beckett’s opening offers grounding as a lure, then makes grounding itself wobble. Who is “she”. Who sees? Who is reporting? What counts as “from where”? Is this a stable point in a stable world? Or is this a sentence that is trying to conjure a world into being? The uncanny here is modal. The sentence behaves as if the world is already there, already determinate, but the prose quickly reveals that determinacy is something being attempted, something being enforced. The text keeps circling, revising, re placing, not simply because of obsession, but because the world it is trying to speak is underdetermined. The narration is not describing a settled reality, it is negotiating a space of compossibles, trying to find a set of facts that can all hold together. 

If free will is modal expansion, then Beckett stages a punishing modal narrowing. There is a woman, there is a rise of Venus, there is a hut, a stonescape, a skull like interiority, and yet the prose behaves as if reality cannot afford to be too wide, because width would produce contradictions the text cannot carry. The narrator keeps tightening, not to achieve truth in a scientific sense, but to achieve a world that can exist without tearing. And yet it keeps tearing. 

That is why looping becomes the central spiritual technology of the book. It is a ritual of trying again, and trying again is where Beckett’s “theology” lives. Every time the prose restates, corrects, withdraws, or re frames, it is performing a counterfactual: if it were like this instead, the scene would hold. But then the revised scene generates a new impossibility. The world will not stabilise, because any stabilisation produces a remainder, something ungrounded, something that will not be explained by what has already been said. The narrator is searching for a set of facts that are mutually compossible, a package of truths that can live together in one world. But the narrator is also driven by an essence claim, an implicit thought that whatever “she” is, whatever this watching is, it has to have a certain kind of purity, a certain kind of minimality, a certain kind of “ill seen ill said” quality. If that is taken as an essential constraint, it can force the space of allowed worlds to become so narrow that no world satisfies it. 

That is one route to impossibility: not a contradiction you state, but a set of demands you cannot jointly meet. Here the “new theology” begins to look like a metaphysics of failed creation. Milton’s God speaks and the world appears, and the drama is about what that world permits. Beckett’s voice speaks and the world half appears, then collapses, then appears again, thinner, poorer, more ascetic, more violent in its restraint. Creation becomes an endless attempt to ground, and the ground never finally arrives. That is why the text feels holy and obscene at once. Holy because it is obsessed with the conditions of saying at all, obscene because it keeps exposing the raw mechanics of conjuring, the straining apparatus behind the veil. 

Imagine the narrator says, in effect, “she is there”, and then, pages later in the rhythm of the prose, arrives back at “she is there” again. From the outside, that looks like pure circularity, p to p. Nothing gained. But Beckett’s loop does not feel like trivial repetition. It feels like a return with damage, a return with residue, a return with a different weight. The text is full of weak loops, returns that do not progress, that merely restate. But it is also full of attempts at strong movement, transformations that would count as progress if they could be sustained. The tragedy is that the book’s strongest movements are precisely what cannot be stabilised, because stabilising them would produce an identity, and identity, in this spiritual economy, is the forbidden strong theorem. A stable “A → A” would be the world finally holding, and Beckett does not let that be “strong”. Venus rises every night, in one sense it is the purest loop imaginable, a recurrence. Yet it is also a kind of progress, because the light changes, the seeing changes, the watcher changes, the world’s time is passing. The loop contains difference. 

Beckett turns that cosmic erotic recurrence into the book’s formal pulse, the book keeps returning, but the return is always slightly wrong, ill seen, ill said. The world is asked to repeat itself, but it cannot repeat cleanly, because repetition itself is a metamorphosis. Counterfactual pressure warps the actual. If Calder is right to connect this to Paradise Lost, the connection is not that Beckett is smuggling in Christian doctrine. It is that Beckett is staging the metaphysical cost of permitting alternatives. Milton’s God permits a branching of history through creaturely freedom, and then governs that branchiness through providence, law, and narrative closure. Beckett’s voice seems to envy the narrowing that would make closure possible, and yet it also cannot bear closure, because closure would be a kind of theological violence, the cancellation of the remainder. So the book oscillates between wanting a single track, one final description, and being compelled to reopen the space again, to let the sentence try another world. 

Read this way, “free will” becomes a metaphor for the text’s own modal generosity, the way it keeps allowing another version, another placement, another “as if”. The fantasy of taking free will back becomes the fantasy of making the narration finally definitive, making the description bind, making the world stop shimmering. But the shimmer is not an accident, it is the mark of essence failing to settle into ground. The narrator keeps trying to ground the scene, and the scene keeps refusing to be grounded without loss. That refusal is the book’s dread, its austerity, its sublimated erotic charge. The eroticism is the repeated contact with what will not be pinned down, the continual approach to a figure whose being is always just out of reach, and whose distance is not merely emotional but ontological. 

When the text asserts, it is trying to fix actuality. When it retracts, it is declaring that the attempted world was impossible, not merely false but unfit, internally unstable, noncompossible with some other constraint the prose cannot abandon. When it repeats, it is not simply obsessive, it is searching the neighbourhood of worlds, it is sampling nearby alternatives, like a counterfactual engine that cannot stop running because the actual world has not yet been successfully compiled. 

A theology, here, is a theory of creation, fall, and redemption. Beckett’s creation is perpetual and minimal. The fall is the inevitable failure of any description to ground itself without remainder. Redemption, if there is any is the discipline of progressive movement without pretending you can reach a final identity. It is a world where “on” is the only commandment, and the only grace is that the commandment continues even when the world it commands is half impossible. 

If Calder is right that Beckett is responding to Milton at the level of creation and free will, then the response only becomes visible once we see how exact Milton’s own modal engineering is. Milton announces his project early, and with astonishing clarity. He wants to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” This is not merely a moral ambition, it is a structural one. To justify is to ground. Milton is telling us that the poem will show how the actual world, with its evil, suffering, and fall, holds in virtue of deeper principles. Providence is the ultimate grounding relation. Nothing that happens is brute. Everything is meant to be explainable, even if the explanation exceeds human grasp. Milton is committed to a world in which actuality sits inside a vast, articulated modal space. 

Alternatives are live. Counterfactuals matter. God knows not only what will happen, but what would have happened had creatures chosen otherwise. This is explicit in Book III, when God declares: “They therefore as to right belong’d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will, dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I.” 

Milton is separating foreknowledge from necessity. God knows all futures, but does not collapse them. The modal space remains wide. Human beings are free because alternative futures are genuinely available to them, even though God sees them all at once. In Fine’s terms, God’s knowledge does not ground the creature’s action. The grounding runs the other way. The creature’s essence as free is what makes those alternatives real. This is why Milton’s God repeatedly insists on the gift of freedom. In Book V, Raphael explains to Adam that obedience only has value if it is not forced: “Freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.” 

Love here is modal openness. To love is to be able not to love. The dignity of the creature lies in inhabiting a branching future. Milton’s cosmos is therefore maximally expansive. It allows Satan’s rebellion, Adam and Eve’s fall, history’s long travail, precisely because to forbid those paths in advance would be to collapse the creature back into necessity. The price of goodness is risk. 

Now notice the anxiety that shadows this gift. Milton never allows us to forget how dangerous this openness is. Satan’s speeches are thrilling because they exploit modal expansion. When Satan declares, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” he is asserting an autonomy of modal structure. The mind, he claims, can reorganise its own space of possibilities independently of God’s grounding order. This is the heresy at the heart of the epic. Satan wants a world where grounding is internal, where explanation stops with the self. Milton stages this as a catastrophic mistake. Satan’s world is wide but incoherent. It proliferates alternatives that cannot be sustained together. Hell is full of motion, debate, invention, and yet nothing progresses. The fallen angels build Pandemonium in a burst of creative energy, but the structure has no future. It is a brilliant local construction that grounds nothing beyond itself. 

Already, we can see the seeds of Beckett here. Satan’s hell is not stasis, it is looping activity without redemption, a world rich in R, the transition relation, but thin in ⟂, the grounding relation. Milton, however, refuses to let this be the final word. The point of Paradise Lost is that God’s modal architecture is larger and more patient than Satan’s. God permits even this false autonomy to unfold, because it will ultimately be reabsorbed into a providential structure. The fall itself becomes the condition for a greater good, the “felix culpa”, the fortunate fall. Here Milton doubles down on grounding. Even the worst deviation will be shown to have held in virtue of a deeper plan. 

Beckett is writing after a long cultural experience in which that promise of ultimate grounding has worn thin. Ill Seen Ill Said can be read as what happens when the Miltonic guarantee is withdrawn, when the modal space remains open but the providential backstop disappears. Look again at Milton’s God in Book III, contemplating the fall before it happens. God speaks in the future perfect. He sees the branching, but he also sees the end. There is no suspense for God. Every “if” is already integrated into a final “so that”. This is what gives Milton’s universe its terrifying calm. No matter how much freedom is granted, it will not undo the ultimate explanation. 

Beckett’s narrator in Ill Seen Ill Said speaks from a radically different position. The voice does not know the end. It does not even know whether the scene it is describing can be made to hold. When it revises, retracts, or restates, it is not performing providence, it is performing uncertainty. The modal space is still there, but it is no longer guaranteed to be redeemable. Alternatives proliferate, but no final structure promises to absorb them. Calder’s intuition about a “new theology” becomes very precise. Milton’s theology is expansive but stabilised. Beckett’s is expansive but unstable. Or, more sharply, Beckett inherits the Miltonic gift of modal richness, the sense that reality is not a single line but a branching field, and then asks what becomes of that richness when you can no longer rely on a God who will eventually make sense of it. 

In Milton, free will is the engine of history. In Beckett, the same engine keeps running, but history no longer resolves. The creature keeps being offered alternatives, but the alternatives no longer ground a meaningful future. The result is not simple despair. It is a strange, austere looping, the repeated attempt to say, to see, to fix, followed by the recognition that the fixing itself introduces new impossibilities. 

Ill Seen Ill Said is a kind of inverted Paradise Lost. Instead of a God who surveys all possible worlds and integrates them into a single providential order, we have a voice trapped inside the act of world-making, unable to see whether the world it is making is compossible with itself. Instead of a fall that will be redeemed, we have a continual falling away of grounding, each sentence risking collapse. Instead of free will as a glorious opening, we have free will as a burden, an obligation to keep choosing, revising, trying again, even when no choice promises salvation. Milton’s God wonders, fleetingly, about the consequences of freedom, but never doubts the structure that contains it. Beckett’s voice seems to live inside that doubt. It keeps asking, implicitly, whether the world might be better off narrower, thinner, less generous, whether something could be gained by saying less, seeing less, allowing fewer alternatives. But every narrowing produces its own remainder. Something always escapes. The gift cannot be taken back without destroying the very act of saying. 

That is the deepest continuity between Milton and Beckett. Both are obsessed with the conditions under which a world can exist. Milton answers by building the largest possible structure, one in which even rebellion is grounded. Beckett answers by stripping the structure down until its failure becomes visible, until the reader feels, not intellectually but bodily, what it is like to inhabit a world where modal expansion persists but grounding does not arrive. That, more than doctrine, is Beckett’s theology. Milton and Beckett are both writing as engineers of livability, they are both asking what sort of arrangement of possibility, necessity, choice, and explanation can hold a creature up. The difference is that Milton’s creature is held up by a providential architecture that can take the weight, whereas Beckett’s creature keeps discovering that the weight has to be borne locally, by the voice, by the body, by the sentence, with no guarantee that the bearing will add up to anything stable. Milton’s God makes a promise that is easy to miss because it is presented as a theological given. The promise is not that the creature will avoid misery, it is that misery will be located within a story whose final terms are intelligible. Even when Raphael warns Adam that he may fall, the warning presupposes that the warning itself is meaningful, that admonition fits into a rational order, that choice can be guided. The poem is full of these stabilising devices. Knowledge is offered. Reasons are given. Angels explain. Even Satan’s rhetoric is allowed to unfold as rhetoric, as something that can be diagnosed and answered. The creature’s unhappiness is real, but it is not metaphysically homeless. It belongs somewhere. 

Beckett’s refinement is to write as if that belonging has become doubtful in the quiet way the world becomes unliveable when explanation no longer lands. That is why the Beckettian theological register is not primarily a set of claims about God, it is a set of constraints on saying, seeing, and continuing. When Beckett remarks that he has “no talent for happiness”, the line reads at first like a private confession, a temperament report, an admission of some internal lack. “No talent” is a modal diagnosis. Not an incapacity in one particular world, but a difficulty with the space of worlds as such, with the way alternatives open and close, and with the way the actual is meant to be grounded. Happiness, in the ordinary way we talk, is a kind of settlement. Not merely pleasure, but a feeling that the world you are in is the one you can inhabit, that the counterfactual pressure has eased. You stop thinking, if only for a while, “it could have been otherwise”, or “it should have been otherwise”, or “what if I had”, or “what if they had”. You are not constantly forced to re-run the branching. You are not trapped in revision. You are in a region of modal space that is stable enough that you can treat it as home. 

Milton’s poem is designed to make that sort of settlement metaphysically available, even after catastrophe. The fall is dreadful, but it is not the end of meaning. There is promise, there is a future that integrates the damage. Even the phrase “justify the ways of God to men” implies that explanation can terminate, that there is a final stop, a ground that is not itself in question. The creature may weep, but can also be taught to hope, because the world is intelligible in principle. Now look at the distinctive movement of Beckett’s late prose, the way it tries to settle and cannot. Ill Seen Ill Said is written as if settlement is precisely what the act of saying fails to achieve. The voice proposes, adjusts, retracts, proposes again. That motion is the metaphysical situation. The world is not given, it is continually attempted. It is continually approached by counterfactual variations that do not feel like playful imagination, they feel like the only way the scene can be held together at all, and yet each variation threatens compossibility, threatens to make the world inconsistent with itself. A proof can look busy and still go nowhere, because it keeps presupposing what it claims to establish. That is exactly the Beckettian dread at the level of lived world making. The voice tries to move from seeing to saying, from saying to seeing, from a description to a world. But it keeps finding itself at p again, at the bare fact that there is only this attempt, this sentence, this failing revision. The effort feels like progress, then reveals itself as return. 

Beckett’s theology is a theology of non-termination. It is what a world feels like when explanation does not bottom out, when you cannot locate your suffering inside a structure that will eventually redeem its intelligibility. You still have the Miltonic modal richness, the sense that things could have been otherwise, that choice matters, that alternatives haunt the actual. But you no longer have the Miltonic guarantee that the haunting is in service of a final order. The counterfactuals become raw pressure rather than meaningful branches in a providential tree. Milton’s God can allow counterfactual space to remain open because God can also close the story without coercing the creature. Beckett’s narrator cannot close the story. The narrator can only narrow locally, by cutting down language, by turning the prose minimal, by refusing ornament, by refusing narrative abundance. 

That narrowing is the late style’s most theological act. It is as if the only mercy left is modal austerity, fewer branching options, fewer claims, fewer commitments that might later collapse. Yet the mercy fails to become happiness, because even the narrowing is not a true closure. It becomes another loop. The sentence that tries to end becomes the sentence that re-opens. The silence that tries to settle becomes another demand to speak. Beckett’s “no talent for happiness” is an ontological condition. Happiness would require a kind of groundedness, a sense that the actual world is not merely one precarious selection among intolerably many, but is anchored by reasons that hold. Beckett’s writing keeps staging the opposite. The actual appears as if it is always in danger of being unmade by the very alternatives that define it. 

The self is not simply sad, it is structurally exposed. It cannot stop surveying the modal field because the modal field is what the self is made of. The self is not a substance with a stable essence that then contemplates possibilities, it is a system of tries, revisions, near misses, counterfactual rehearsals. That is why even a small calm does not thicken into happiness. Calm does not ground. Calm is merely a pause in the looping. 

This also makes Milton’s God feel newly relevant, and newly disturbing. If God were to “take back” free will, the modal space would narrow, and certain kinds of torment would end. The branches would be cut. The “what if” would be disabled. But Milton insists that such narrowing would destroy creaturely dignity. Beckett’s refinement is to show what it is like when the dignity remains, the branching remains, the permission to vary remains, but the surrounding structure that makes the permission bearable has thinned out. The creature is free, and that freedom is not a liberation but an exposure, a perpetual susceptibility to alternatives that cannot be reconciled. Milton’s theology is a theology of grounded openness. Beckett’s is a theology of ungrounded openness, or, more sharply, of openness that has turned back on itself and become compulsive. It is not that there are no meanings, it is that meanings do not close. They do not finish their own job. They do not provide the rest that happiness needs. A talent for happiness would be, in structural terms, a talent for accepting a world as compossible, for letting the actual be actual without constantly re-litigating the alternatives, for letting explanation stop somewhere. Beckett’s narrators lack that talent because their worlds refuse to offer the stopping point. They live in the space Fine would call dangerous for progress, the space where p keeps returning as its own conclusion, where the system can look like it is moving while it is really only tightening the knot. Beckett’s genius is to make the knot audible, to make the reader feel the metaphysical strain as dread, as uncanny erotic sublimation, as the strange ache of a scene that both insists and fails to hold. 

Milton builds a universe in which the pain of freedom is justified by an ultimate ground. Beckett writes as if freedom remains but justification has become a stalled procedure, a proof that cannot complete without presupposing what it seeks. That stalled procedure is not merely logical, it is felt. It feels like loneliness that grows the more you examine it, it feels like desire that returns as its own object, it feels like a life that cannot settle into happiness because the world itself keeps failing to close. 

Doubles and Tulpas

In Paradise Lost, doubling appears everywhere, but it is carefully managed. Milton’s universe is full of mirrors, counterparts, shadow figures, and second versions, yet these doubles are almost always subordinated to a stable hierarchy. Adam and Eve are doubles of one another, “one soul in two bodies”, but the doubling is ordered. Eve emerges from Adam’s side, not as an autonomous rival ontology but as a differentiated reflection. The angelic host is doubled by the fallen host, Heaven by Hell, obedience by rebellion, light by its privation. Even Satan is a kind of double of God, an image of sovereignty distorted by self-grounding ambition. 

But in Milton, doubling never runs away with itself. Each double has a place. Each shadow points back to a source. The structure remains grounded. Milton allows alternative centres of agency, but he does not allow alternative grounds. Satan can will, speak, organise, persuade, but he cannot ground. His attempt to make his own will the explanatory stopping point is precisely his theological error. He tries to become his own essence. He tries to live in a world where he explains himself. Satan attempts to install an illicit p → p as a strong theorem. He wants his identity to ground his action, without remainder, without appeal to anything prior or external. Milton stages this as metaphysical suicide disguised as freedom. 

The result is a kind of proto-tulpa. Satan becomes increasingly hollow the more he insists on his autonomy. His speeches grow grander, but his being thins. By the time he enters the serpent, the doubling has become grotesque. He inhabits another form, but that form is no longer an expansion, it is a narrowing. The serpent is not a new possibility, it is a degraded vessel for a will that has lost its grounding. 

Yet Milton keeps this within bounds. Satan’s doubling is punished, contained, and ultimately absorbed into the providential architecture. The double never becomes a rival world. Beckett inherits the same modal openness, the same sense that alternatives proliferate, that selves can split, echo, reflect, and misalign. But he removes the hierarchy that would keep the doubles in check. There is no longer a God who guarantees that every doubling will point back to a single source. There is no longer a metaphysical referee who decides which copy is primary and which is derivative. 

As a result, Beckett’s worlds fill with figures that feel like tulpas, not because they are imaginary in a trivial sense, but because they are generated by the system’s own inability to ground itself. A tulpa, in its original sense, is a thought-form that acquires quasi-independence, a figure sustained by attention and repetition rather than by external grounding. That is exactly how Beckett’s doubles behave. They are products of a world that cannot close, a world where saying something almost brings it into being, but not quite, and where the difference between creation and description has become unstable. 

In Ill Seen Ill Said, the woman who lies watching Venus is already doubled by the voice that describes her. But the voice is not secure. It keeps slipping, correcting, revising. Is she there, or is she being summoned by the sentence? Is the voice reporting, or inventing? The double is not stable enough to be hierarchical. There is no Adam and Eve relation, no clear source and reflection. Instead, you get a mutual haunting. The voice needs the figure to continue, and the figure only exists insofar as the voice continues to speak her. That is tulpa logic in a stripped, brutalised form. Milton’s theology tolerates doubling because it ultimately subordinates it to essence and ground. Beckett’s theology is what happens when essence itself becomes fragile. 

In Milton, essences are firm. Angels are angels. Humans are humans. God is God. Possibilities unfold within those essences. In Beckett, essence is no longer secure. The figures are barely what they are. They are “ill seen” because their being is unstable, and “ill said” because language cannot fix that being without immediately distorting it. Doubling, then, is no longer a fall from unity. It is the default condition. Every attempt to speak produces a second version, and the second version is not clearly subordinate to the first. This is why Beckett’s texts are full of voices that seem to argue with themselves, figures that appear to watch themselves being watched, narrators who are unsure whether they are describing or commanding. The world has become reflexive without becoming self-grounding. It reflects itself endlessly without arriving at identity. 

Compare this again with Milton’s God contemplating free will. God can afford to allow doubling, even rebellion, because the ground remains intact. The world may split, but it will be reabsorbed. Beckett’s voice cannot afford that generosity. Each doubling threatens collapse, because there is no guarantee that the copies will recombine. Instead of a providential tree of branches, you get a thicket of self-generated forms choking one another. This sheds new light on Beckett’s confession of having “no talent for happiness”. Happiness, structurally speaking, would require a self that is not perpetually doubled against itself. It would require a world where the self’s reflection does not immediately become a rival, a demand, a threat. In Milton, the self can look at itself through God’s gaze and still remain whole. In Beckett, the self looks at itself and fractures. The reflection does not reassure. It proliferates. 

Murphy’s encounter with Endon already showed this. Endon functions like a living double, a figure who embodies a mode of being Murphy desires but cannot inhabit. Endon is not a projection in the psychological sense. He is a modal rival, someone who lives comfortably in a weakly grounded world without demanding strong explanation. Murphy treats Endon as a tulpa, invests him with significance, reads him as a key. But Endon does not return the investment. He remains opaque, self-sufficient, indifferent. The double does not resolve. It exposes Murphy’s dependence on grounding. 

In the late Beckett, that exposure becomes universal. There is no Endon figure to externalise it. The doubling happens inside the voice itself. The narrator becomes its own rival, its own observer, its own insufficient ground. The result is a theology without salvation, but also without simple despair. It is a theology of persistence under splitting. The command is not “believe”, and not even “hope”, but “go on”. Going on is what remains when doubling cannot be healed and cannot be escaped. 

Milton’s God wonders, fleetingly, about the cost of free will, but never doubts his ability to absorb the consequences. Beckett’s theology begins after that confidence has evaporated. Free will remains, modal openness remains, doubling remains, but the power to reassemble the fragments has been withdrawn. What replaces it is not chaos but austerity. Less language, less world, less claim. A narrowing that tries to prevent the proliferation of tulpas by starving them of excess, even though it can never quite succeed. Milton’s doubles are disciplined by ground. Beckett’s doubles are disciplined only by exhaustion. Milton’s universe allows reflection because it has a centre. Beckett’s universe reflects because it has lost one. 

The tulpa, in Beckett, is not a mistake. It is the form the self takes when essence can no longer guarantee unity and when modality remains open despite that loss. That is why Beckett’s theology refines rather than negates Milton’s. It does not deny freedom. It shows what freedom feels like when the metaphysical infrastructure that once made it livable has thinned beyond repair. The creature is still free, still branching, still doubling, but now it must carry the cost of that branching without the promise that the branches will ever reconverge. The result is a world of shadows that do not point back to a source, voices that do not settle into a speaker, and selves that cannot become happy because happiness would require a wholeness the structure no longer supports.

Next: Psychiatry

Previously: Chess, Murphy (8), Murphy (6), Murphy (5), Murphy (4) Murphy (3), Murphy (2), Murphy(1), Introduction, Criticism