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

by Watson, Peter

  In Germany, the theologian and historian Theodor Kappstein admitted that Nietzsche was the philosopher of the world war because he had educated a whole generation toward “a life-endangering honesty, towards a contempt for death . . . to a sacrifice on the altar of the whole, towards heroism and quiet, joyful greatness.”3 Even Max Scheler, a better-known philosopher (and later a favorite of Pope John Paul II), in The Genius of War and the German War (1915) praised the “ennobling” aspects of conflict. He welcomed the war as a return to “the organic roots of human existence. . . . We were no longer what we had been—alone! The sundered living contact between the series individual-people-nation-world-God was restored in an instant.”4 The communal “we,” Scheler said, “is in our consciousness before the individualized self,” the latter being “an artificial product of cultural tradition and a historic process.”5

  Though the claims—both for and against Nietzsche’s influence—may have been overblown, they were not without foundation. In Germany, together with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament, Thus Spake Zarathustra was the most popular work that literate soldiers took into battle, “for inspiration and consolation.” More than that, according to Steven Aschheim, 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime edition were distributed to the troops. Even one or two literate non-German soldiers took the book with them, notably Robert Graves and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Nor should we forget that the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, whose action precipitated the crisis of 1914, was fond of reciting Nietzsche’s poem Ecce Homo: “Insatiable as a flame, I burn and consume myself.”6

  Whatever we make of all that, the second point still takes some getting used to. This is the fact that in 1914 so many people welcomed the war. This, too, had certain Nietzschean overtones, in that war was seen as the ultimate test of one’s heroic qualities, a test of will and an unrivaled opportunity for ecstatic experience. But it was more than that—far more. For many, the war was seen as redemptive.

  But redemptive from what? one might ask. In fact, there was no shortage of candidates. Before 1914, the very appeal of Nietzsche lay in his widespread critique of the decadence people saw everywhere about them. Stefan George, as we have already seen, argued in Der Stern des Bundes that a war would “purify” a spiritually moribund society, while the German dramaturge Erwin Piscator agreed, claiming that the generation that went to war was “spiritually bankrupt.” Stefan Zweig saw the conflict as some kind of spiritual safety valve, referring to Freud’s argument that the release of “the instinctual” could not be contained by reason alone. Typically, the Expressionists looked forward to the death of bourgeois society, “from whose ashes a nobler world would arise.”7

  In John Buchan’s 1910 novel, Prester John, there is talk of wiping out the civilization of the West, which has lasted for more than a thousand years. One of the characters says: “It is because I have sucked civilization dry that I know the bitterness of the fruit. I want a simpler and a better world.” In 1913, Gabriele d’Annunzio had told Maurice Barrès, the French novelist and anti-Dreyfusard, that “a great national war is France’s last chance of salvation” from a “democratic degeneration, a plebeian inundation of her high culture.”8 Barrès’s countryman Henri Bergson thought that the war “would bring about the moral regeneration of Europe,” and accused the Germans of being “mechanical men without soul.”9 The French poet Charles Péguy, too, believed in 1913 that a war would be of value “because it brings regeneration.” The Futurists in their manifesto released as early as 1909 had argued that war would be “the only hygiene of the world”; and elsewhere: “There is no beauty except in strife.”10 And a yearning for some great redemptive cause that would satisfy desire is to be found in the pre-war poetry of Rupert Brooke:

  To turn, as swimmers into clearness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

  Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,

  And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

  And all the little emptiness of love.11

  Alban Berg, Alexander Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky all subscribed to the view that war would “shake the souls of people” and “prepare them for spiritual things.” In Germany in particular it was felt that a commercial world “had been swept aside for heroes.”12 G. K. Chesterton was more prosaic but no less damning of the status quo, declaring that both religious and political ideals were in decay: “Man’s two great inspirations [have] failed him altogether.”

  This is another of those issues that was much bigger, more divisive, then than now. Roland Stromberg, in his Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914, notes that “self-discovery through violence” was part of the intellectual furniture of those times, and that when war exploded in August 1914 it seemed to many “a kind of triumph of spirit over matter.” Even such figures as Arnold Bennett, Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Marcel Proust were on record as saying they found life interesting again after the boredom before. “War as restoration of community and as escape from a trashy and trivial way of life is probably more understandable today than war as salvation,” says Stromberg. “Yet the commonest images aroused by the shock of August were the cleansing fire or flood, or ‘the blacksmith that will pound the world into a new shape,’” as Ernst Jünger put it. “Destruction and the right to realize oneself went together.” Or as Isaac Rosenberg, a British poet who would be killed in the war, wrote: the “ancient crimson curse” would “Give back the universe / Its pristine bloom.”13 Hans Rogger, an American historian of Russia, reported that many writers and intellectuals in Moscow and St. Petersburg welcomed the war “for having freed Russia of narrowness and pettiness and for opening new perspectives on greatness. Some viewed war as a spiritual awakening.”14 Hugo von Hofmannsthal reported that in Austria “the whole people is transformed, poured into a new mold.”

  Sentiments like this reflected the general view, among intellectuals certainly, that the spirit was in an unhealthy state before the war; there was an obsession with materialism and a neglect of “things of the mind.” Even during the war, when the scale of the carnage was already becoming apparent, these sentiments continued, up to a point. The great Danish composer, conductor and violinist Carl Nielsen, in his Inextinguishable Symphony, premiered in 1916 and featuring a “battle” between two sets of tympani, paid tribute to the life force, constantly renewing itself even in death, “and charg[ing] on again to a prodigal abundance.”15

  COMMUNITY: THE PERVASIVE THEME OF 1914

  In tandem with all this went a rise in nationalism and patriotism, twin feelings that surprised many (especially socialists) who, before the war, had prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Nationalism, says Roland Stromberg, was in some ways a substitute religion, quoting the potter and art historian Quentin Bell: “Cambridge, like the great majority of the nation, had been converted to the religion of nationalism; it was a powerful, a terrible, at times a very beautiful magic.”16 Nationalism, says Stromberg, “coincided with the search for membership in a community, the pervasive theme of 1914.” “One beautiful result of the war,” wrote Edmund Gosse, “is the union of hearts.”17 “I don’t want to die for my king and country,” Herbert Read, poet and art critic, wrote while he was in the trenches. “If I do die, it’s for the salvation of my own soul.” Elsewhere he wrote: “During the war I used to feel that this comradeship which had developed among us would lead to some new social order when peace came. It was a human relationship and a reality that had not existed in time of peace. It overcame (or ignored) all distinctions of class, rank and education. We did not call it love; we did not acknowledge its existence; it was sacramental and therefore sacred.” As Stromberg confirms, sacrament hovers in the background of virtually every war novel, in this most literate of wars.18

  Many intellectuals now felt that many non-intellectuals at last had a welcome chance to break out of their “clipped and limited lives,” which would
help restore a sense of community. But the George circle in Germany had a different perspective: “Tens of thousands must perish in the holy war,” George commented. Only in this way, said Gundolf, could the soul’s sickness be cured, and the spiritual evolution of the German nation be enabled. The German historian Karl Lamprecht enthused about “this marvellous upsurge of our national soul . . . happy are those who have lived at a time like this.” Émile Durkheim thought the war would achieve his long-sought-after goal of “reviving the sense of community.” The German theologian Ernst Troeltsch was convinced the war increased the feeling of Deutschtum—Germanness—among his fellow countrymen, which was “equivalent to belief in God’s divine power.” “It is the tremendous significance of August,” he added, “that under the impact of danger [the war] pressed the whole people together in an inner unity, such as never before had existed.”

  Another effect of the war was that everywhere “the religion of social services” propelled the conscience-stricken rich into the ghettoes to grapple—or at least familiarize themselves—with poverty. “The urge to break away from a life-killing egoism often led to affirming one’s organic connection with the great collectivity.”19

  An underlying ingredient in all this talk of redemptive communities was the fact that many of the European states were ethnically and linguistically diverse.20 They might live under a common law and a common government, but they did not necessarily speak the same language or inherit the same customs. This was especially true of Russia and Austria-Hungary, but it also applied to a lesser extent in Great Britain, Belgium, Germany and France. The newly sacred union spawned by danger overcame, for a time at least, all differences, though Hannah Arendt later dismissed these new communities as illusory (as indeed they proved to be).21

  There was also the so-called elitist school of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who were skeptical of what the achievements of the war would be. Though Weber shared with many others what he called “an almost unbearable nostalgia for the lost wholeness” in modern society, he also held to the view that “the people can never rule, the state will never wither away, power will not be exorcised from the world by any poetic incantation. The realization of Christian ethics,” he concluded, “is not possible in human society.”22

  Weariness set in eventually, of course, and disenchantment soon enough. The painter Lowes Dickinson decried the lack of diversity in discussion during the war. “To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to the truth.” Quentin Bell said of the Bloomsbury Group that “none of them, so to speak, ‘believed in’ the war, and they refused, resolutely, to be religious about it.” D. H. Lawrence was ambivalent. He thought that “humanity needs pruning,” that “the great adventure of death” was a suitable subject for a novel, and he had a thirst for a “genuine community.” But there was no community in war for him: “The War was not strife; it was murder.”

  Gustave Le Bon had argued, as more than one sociologist after him had done, that “war is an antidote to anomie or decadence, a restorer of solidarity.” Perhaps this explains why intellectuals were so much in favor of it to begin with: for people usually separated from the rest of the community by virtue of their education and interests, war perhaps had the advantage of “reuniting” them with others.

  The situation in 1914, Stromberg continues, had a unique quality about it that had never quite existed before and would not do so again: “It was a moment in the growth of consciousness”; the most significant motif was the “raw reality” of the reappearance of the sense of community. For many, he insisted, the war’s psychological origins were not malevolent: they involved, rather, “a powerful thirst for identity, community, purpose—positive and, in themselves, worthy goals, perverted and misdirected but not poisoned at the springs.”23

  The spirit of the year 1914 was “an antidote to anomie, which had resulted from the sweep of powerful forces of the recent past—urban, capitalistic, and technological forces tearing up primeval bonds and forcing people into a crisis of social relationship.”24 But the antidote brought with it too high a price and so we are still searching for a viable alternative.

  Given the importance of the themes of redemption and of restoration of community, and given the horrific nightmare that trench warfare quickly turned into, it is perhaps no surprise that two elements came to the fore in the Great War that particularly concern us here. One was poetry and the other was socialism. Socialism as a surrogate religion is considered in the next chapter. The extent to which poetry and war went together was extraordinary and revealing.

  IRONY AND INNOCENCE

  “At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form” that it did during the First World War (at least in the English language), and there are those such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry “never got over the Great War.” To quote Francis Hope, the British poet-critic, “In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry since 1918 is war poetry.” Again, in retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, intense and uncertain as it was, lent itself to a shorter, sharper, more compact verse structure, and provided arresting and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the author’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But among these a few stood out who are now household names.

  Moreover, as Nicholas Murray has pointed out in The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets, those poets have never been more popular than they are today, a hundred years later. “War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read—and perhaps revere—war poetry says something about what we are and want to be, as a nation.”25 Websites are now dedicated to the war poets, and as the former poet laureate Andrew Motion has said, their work now comprises “a sacred national text.”

  Not that many of them confronted our subject directly. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were, by their own admission, anti-clerical. Sassoon described himself as “a very incomplete and unpractising Christian . . . the Churches seemed to me to offer no solution to the demented doings on the western front. . . . As far as I can remember, no one at the Front ever talked to me about religion at all. And the padres never came near us—except to bury someone.”26 His poem “Christ and the Soldier” was about a roadside Calvary in France “which, for most soldiers, was merely a reminder of the inability of religion to cope with the carnage and catastrophe.” In “February Afternoon” (1916), Edward Thomas found scant consolation in religion: in the poem, God looks down “stone-deaf and stone-blind.” Wilfred Owen said he had escaped from evangelical religion by mid-1912: “All Theological lore is growing distasteful to me.”27 Edmund Blunden’s poem “Report on Experience,” one of his best, contains the lines:

  . . . I have seen the righteous forsaken,

  His health, his honor and his quality taken.

  and culminates with an ironic “God bless us all.”28

  Irony. In his classic book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argues: “there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”29 He gives examples of what he means. One reason the Great War can be seen as more ironic than any other is that its beginning was more innocent. Britain had not known a maj
or war for a century. No man in the prime of his life knew what war was like. As Ernest Hemingway was to note, abstract words like “glory,” “honor,” “courage” were hollow and obscene alongside “the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” Fussell lists propagandistic euphemisms that tried to lessen the impact of what was happening: a friend is a comrade; a horse is a steed; danger is peril; warfare is strife; not to complain is to be manly; the blood of young men is “The red / Sweet wine of youth” (Rupert Brooke). Apparently, war was at first regarded by some as a game, almost—at the Battle of Loos in 1915, the 1st Battalion of the 18th London Regiment allegedly kicked a football toward the enemy lines while making their attack.

  In many of the stories told about the war, the ending—and the nearest these stories come to a meaning—is ironic. Fussell quotes an episode from Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War in which the author came across a young lance corporal making tea in the trenches. Blunden wished him a good tea and moved on. Moments later a shell burst on the trench and the lance corporal was reduced to “gobbets of blackening flesh.” While Blunden was taking this in, “the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.”

  The range of psychic phenomena reported at the front itself was vast, Jay Winter reports, though the emergence of pagan or pre-rational modes of thought under the appalling stress of combat should surprise no one. Many soldiers carried cards bearing lucky emblems on their person, a different card carried in different pockets. Others carried soil from their home village or dust from their local church or chapel. One chaplain from Aberdeen remarked: “The British soldier has certainly got religion; I am not so sure, however, that he has got Christianity.”30 The problem was that “the experience of the trenches could not easily be explained in conventional theological (or indeed any other rational) terms.”