The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

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by Watson, Peter


  STIRRED BY SELF-LOSS

  Devotedly religious in his teens, Gide’s faith failed in his twentieth year. He had come to the conclusion that Christianity was “deadly” to culture.2 At more or less the same time, he inherited enough money for him not to need to work, so he moved back to Paris and began to mix there with the avant-garde, particularly the writers gathered around Stéphane Mallarmé, whose aestheticism and love of the music of words Gide shared. Like many an only child, he craved company and found a home among the circle that formed around the literary magazine he helped to found, the Nouvelle Revue Française.

  But he was not only alive to French writers but also much influenced by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, Yeats and Blake, and liked to quote the latter’s lines:

  Thou art a man, God is no more

  Thy own humanity learn to adore.3

  Perhaps because of his upbringing, Gide was temperamentally suited to the phenomenologists’ central idea, which was a reaction against the view that the particular is somehow of less consequence than the general. Husserl had said (see chapter 3) that, in giving our attention to the particular, “we fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule,” but that was never Gide’s worry.4 He shared with Shaw the idea that life is not a possession but an experiment and, as a consequence, he quickly formed the view that a man’s greatest task must be “an exemplary existence.” More specifically, he said that salvation cannot depend on human organization, that man is whatever he will eventually make of himself, limited only by his “unfortunate eagerness” to accept ready-made definitions which “permit him to substitute contemplation for action.”

  God, Gide thought, is one of these ready-made definitions. Moreover, we should not “spoil” our life for any one objective; there is no one to pray to, and “a man must play the cards he has.”5 Sooner or later we must make a choice, in order to act, but one choice does not necessarily pre-determine another. We must realize there is nothing beyond man, except what he can make for himself.6

  Gide used the word “spiritual” as Valéry did, as Mallarmé did, as Santayana did, not as something that concerned another realm, a mystical world elsewhere, but as an important part of this life that stemmed from the phenomenologists’ understanding, the poetic approach to the particular. He came to believe that it is the “duty” of man to “surpass” himself, strive not toward any specific goal but simply toward the enrichment of existence itself. Life is its own meaning, he concluded, and that meaning has been realized if you can look back on your life and say something like, “All things considered, I have won the game I played.”

  Gide claimed that the particular is itself meaningful, from which it follows that “truth” is not to be attained by any procedure—artistic, scientific, philosophical—but only by those experiences which are immediately accessible to perception and sensation. Nothing, he insisted, can trump the argument of the individual who says, “I saw it” or “I felt it.” All attempts to systematize experience succeed only in “denaturing, distorting and impoverishing.”7

  One consequence of this was that Gide consciously tried to develop his senses, and showed this in his work. Travel, he thought, was an important element here (he was an early visitor to North Africa)—the stranger in the land, taking nothing for granted, is alive in a way that the native inhabitants are not.8 This is, in essence, what his 1897 book Les Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth) was about, emptying the mind of its contents, so that “there is no longer anything between us and things.” “There were merchants of aromatics. We bought different kinds of resins from them. Some were for sniffing. Some were for chewing. Yet others were burned. . . . Sheer being grew for me into something hugely voluptuous.” For Gide, touch was the most immediate of the senses, underlining that “[o]nly individual things exist . . . things in themselves hold forth, accessible to everyone, all that life has to offer. Objects are neither ‘symbols’ nor manifestations of ‘laws’ more important than themselves, but independent entities that have successfully resisted all of man’s attempts to organize them into other things that can be neither seen, heard nor touched.”9

  The independence of things, he warned, can be terrible, but it can also be exhilarating, an opportunity; and we should beware explanations, which, he said, were “necessarily inadequate.” “Existence is not something that may be thought of at a distance; it has to invade you abruptly, fix itself upon you.”10 For him, logic was a kind of mental barrier, stopping us from realizing the chaos “on the other side”—a chaos, he thought, that Baudelaire, Cézanne and his friend Valéry had tried hard to show. For Gide, “wonder at the world” should replace philosophy, which attempts to “explain” the world. Philosophies, ideologies—and that includes religion—get in the way of wonder.

  More than that, Gide believed that all systems of organization—science, religion, philosophy, theories of art—are egoistical impositions on the chaotic reality that is life; and that the self-loss, or self-forgetting, involved in wonder, in the immediacy of experience, in the taking of decisions and acting, is, in effect, what salvation is, removing the difference between us and things.

  By the same token, he maintained that the idea of the self as a unity is false. The words he used were in fact that the self is a “superstition.” “If we look inside ourselves we discover no fixed unchanging thing we can call the self, but only the aimless passage of memories, perceptions and emotions.” That, he thought, was Montaigne’s great innovation, to recognize the “non-stability” of the human personality, “which never is, but is conscious of itself only in a becoming that cannot be pinned down.” As he liked to say, “I am never; I become.” He shared with Yeats, and many others at the turn of the century, a view of human nature that was in many ways quite at variance with Freud’s, a view which insisted that there is no single self but as many selves as we want there to be, a new one every day. “We are no more ‘determined’ from within than from without.”11

  We are “condemned” to freedom, Gide said, and the verb was appropriate in that, unless we understand freedom, the complete lack of guidance, the total absence of ready-made solutions, can be fearsome. Rather, he said, “events should find us ready to exchange one self for another and better one”; we have to stand ready to recognize a better self (how we do that is considered later). Everett Knight put it this way: “The greatness of Gide is to have resisted throughout his life the temptation to be—to enter into the ‘repose’ of thinghood.” In other words, he never thought of himself as one thing rather than another, he never resisted change. He thought it was the dread of being nothing very much that made men do dreadful things.12

  All this was the context for his famous concept of the “gratuitous act.” Gide’s “philosophy”—though he eschewed that word—his approach to life and experience, was that if man possesses no internal principles, then he exists only through his actions, and when he is acting, behaving, it is the suddenest actions that are the most authentic, because then a man is behaving without allowing himself time to think and his performance will not be tarnished by self-interest. “A gratuitous act is not dictated by self-interest.” (This was to be strongly substantiated years later by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) Since there are no eternal goals or truths, “the only incentive to action is one which leaves man with dignity and autonomy.” This is what establishes value; it is in effect an ethic, which may be summarized as follows: “You must follow your bent, provided it leads upward. Self-imposed discipline; self-abnegation is the noblest form of self-realization.”13

  Gide’s emphasis on the particular led him to the view that we should strive to bring to “the fullest fruition” that which is unique in us, and through our actions we must surpass ourselves—that is, seek to achieve more than we thought we could at the outset. And the way to achieve this, he thought, was not the old religious idea of “a contemplative life,” but holding ourselves in constant readiness to discover experience through a
ction. And action involving self-loss is the most fulfilling and complete of experiences.

  LIES AND SHARED FICTIONS

  More than one critic has drawn attention to the lines of influence between William James and his “younger and shallower and vainer” brother, Henry. The older brother stayed with the younger one in the spring of 1901 while the former was writing The Varieties of Religious Experience, making use of Henry’s typist, Mary Weld.14 Henry read his brother’s finished book in 1902, while finishing his own novel The Wings of the Dove. At times their creative lives were so intertwined (both were fascinated by mental illness, for example) that wags described William as the better writer and Henry as the better psychologist.

  What concerns us most is Henry’s concern with, and approach to, religious experience and how it is to be understood—and possibly replaced—in the modern world. At one level his novels notably reflect the distinction William makes in Varieties when describing Lutheranism and Calvinism as theologies that appeal to “sick souls,” and Catholicism, by contrast, as “healthy-minded.” This centers most on the problem of evil. “The healthy-minded individual tends toward pluralism and a view of evil as not central to human experience, but rather ‘a waste element . . . so much dirt,’ as it were. The sick soul, by contrast, regards the problem of evil as the essential fact of this world, something to be surmounted only by appeal to supernatural forces.”15 This is not exactly how it is played in Henry’s books: “Bereft of the possibility of a direct encounter with the supernatural, James’s protagonists must accept the world in its fallen state.”16

  The Golden Bowl is the most explicit of Henry’s books with regard to religion and what comes after. At one level, the book is about Evil—evil, as the protagonist Maggie Verver puts it, with “a very big E.” At another level, and even more fundamentally, it is about the problem that, for James, lay before us in a secular world: namely, the problem of desire. It is desire that is at the root of all evil, and the ways in which desire can be expressed and controlled in a world without the traditional rituals of organized religion are for him both the core predicament and the main opportunity. It is the institutions of religion that concern James, and how we are to live without them.

  The story of The Golden Bowl follows the theological conceit of the Fall, which accompanies Maggie’s acquisition of self-knowledge. What begins in The Golden Bowl is continued in James’s later fiction, but religious themes are there transformed into broader concerns. This is because, as Pericles Lewis has observed, “The characters in James’s novels seem to pay little heed to articulated religious belief. Indeed, they often seem to inhabit a moral world in which absolute measures of value such as those associated with God are no longer available.”17 Instead, they try to tailor their former ethical views to a new way of living together, still taxed and vexed by the problem of (and solution to) Evil, always manifested through desire.

  Henry recognized that he was living in a “radically new spiritual situation,” one in which the organized churches had little role left to play and where, increasingly, religion became a matter of personal experience.18 As Louis Menand has observed, in Varieties William argued that “God is real because he produces real effects” (see chapter 2 for a wider discussion). More fully: “The unseen order is, in a sense, the product of our beliefs, and its truth consists neither in the possibility of proving it scientifically nor in the possibility of having an unmediated access to it, but in the fact that it influences our actions in this world.” In effect, Lewis says, William James interpreted transcendental ideas as “shared fictions,” and it was this that Henry picked up on in his later works, from The Golden Bowl onward.

  In those works he explored the mechanisms by which individuals try to obtain from others particular beliefs, and the phenomenon that, in order to belong to a certain group, one must “accept certain beliefs, and accept them so wholeheartedly as to experience them as one’s own. . . . For James, shared fictions take the place of more traditional religious beliefs; he often describes them as ‘sacred.’” These beliefs may involve believing in someone’s goodwill, that one character really loves another, that someone is virtuous; or negative shared beliefs such as suspecting the nature of someone’s illness, thinking the worst concerning the origin of another’s fortune. This leads, perhaps inevitably, to the point where James suggests that even lying might be a moral duty, “when the lie is in good faith.” The dénouements of his three last completed novels (The Wings of the Dove [1902], The Ambassadors [1903], The Golden Bowl [1904]) turn—like the final scene in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—“on the question of whether the protagonist will tell a ‘necessary lie’ in order to maintain an illusion in which a community would prefer to live.”19 As Lewis goes on to say, the phrase “as if” recurs throughout the last three books, echoing William James’s recasting of Kant in Varieties: “We can act as if there were a God.”20

  In other words, faced with a world without God and at the same time an ostensible moral base deriving from God, if we are to live together we must maintain fictions—even if, on occasion, they are lies—if they oil the wheels of the community to which we wish to belong. Maintaining community is the all-important priority (this is Habermas’s “solidarity”). More than that, we must treat these shared fictions as sacred. “In the fallen world of James’s novels, the shared fiction seems to be the only remnant of faith that can allow James’s characters to live together. The problem for James, his characters, and his readers is that these shared fictions can hardly be distinguished from lies.”

  James’s characters, especially in The Golden Bowl, are both conscious of evil and aware of the absence of supernatural intervention in the modern world. The Golden Bowl probes this dilemma and explores what fictions might allow us to overcome it. In the book, Maggie Verver, the only child of Adam, a very rich American moneyman and art collector, is set to marry, in London, an impoverished but stylish Italian nobleman, Prince Amerigo. In the run-up to the marriage the prince encounters Maggie’s lifelong friend, Charlotte Stant. It is in fact a re-encounter from years before: without Maggie being aware of it, Charlotte and the prince had enjoyed an affair in his native Rome. Before the marriage, Charlotte and the prince go shopping for a wedding present for Maggie and in an antique shop they inspect a golden bowl which, in the end, they don’t buy because the prince suspects it has a hidden flaw. Following the marriage (at which point the prince’s debts are paid off by Adam), Maggie begins to worry that her father is lonely and she persuades Charlotte to marry him. This brings all four characters closer and, while Maggie seems more interested in her father than in her new husband, Amerigo and Charlotte are again thrown together and re-consummate their affair.

  Maggie, all innocence at the beginning of the book, is now acquiring some European sophistication and polish, and she begins to suspect the affair between Charlotte and Amerigo. Her suspicions are soon to be confirmed. She visits the same antique shop where Charlotte and the prince discovered the golden bowl, is shown the very object they didn’t buy, and acquires it for her father. However, the shopkeeper has overcharged her and is feeling remorse, so he goes to her house to confess. There he sees photographs of the prince and Charlotte and tells Maggie about their earlier visit to his shop. They had spoken Italian in front of him, not knowing that he understood every word they were saying.

  In the last part of the book, crucial from our point of view, Maggie sets about separating Charlotte and Amerigo, but without letting her father know what’s been going on. She persuades him to return to America, taking Charlotte with him. Impressed by Maggie’s newfound sophistication and guile, Amerigo warms to his wife and goes along with her plans.

  The symbolism of the bowl has been criticized as heavy-handed, but it successfully fulfills several functions. Its potential flaw draws attention to the shortcomings of the characters, each of whom is either a gift or the recipient of a gift, though those shortcomings are never discussed—as so much is not
discussed, in particular the affair and Maggie’s plotting to induce her father to return to America, thereby taking Charlotte away from the prince. The point is that everyone colludes in not discussing these issues. The weather pattern of general well-being is on the surface of things, while underneath the weather is anything but pleasant—and is in fact a collectively shared fiction. “Although the characters constantly deceive one another, they do so in order to make their lives together bearable.”

  James’s point is that we need to feel some things are sacred and, in a secular world, there is still this need, but notions of what exactly is to be kept sacred have changed: since transcendence is no longer possible—transcendence with a supernatural meaning—then to live in this secular world, as a community, means living with, accepting, the fictions of the others “among whom one is thrown.” Any form of the sacred appropriate to this modern age will be, as for William James, one that is effective because people accept it.21

  Henry James’s novels are, at root, about the intransigence—the insistence—of desire to manifest itself, and its ability to disrupt a social cohesion that traditionally was kept in place by the evolved rituals of organized religion (marriage, above all). In the modern world where ideas of transcendence, of an afterlife, of the sense of community offered by the rituals of organized religions, are no longer open to us, the only way to live, to have a community, James is saying, is to act “as if” the disruptions of desire are not taking place, “as if” social cohesion is not being disturbed. This gives us the best means of attaining such social cohesion—a sense of community—and of maintaining it. James has identified what for him (and for many others) is the most substantial threat arising from the death of God—the threat to our social sense of who we are. He also recognized that traditional religious organizations had been devoted, in large part, to coping with desire.

 

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