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

by Watson, Peter

In truth, O’Neill saw little hope that this search could be mounted, let alone succeed; but a starting point lay in the recognition that the human condition is “innately contradictory,” that suffering is a big part of it, and that there is no help for it, but we have a capacity for suffering and tragedy which is, by its nature, “both devastating and uplifting.”38

  Again, this measure of self-understanding must be seen against the background of the family. Families, for O’Neill, are full of private spaces, secrets and concealments in which, despite all, understanding and forgiveness must be found. The importance of the family—unlike for Freud—lay not in the way it affected one’s life in the early years, shaping character, but in its continued importance throughout life, as the site where our illusions cannot be maintained because fellow family members know too much, where excuses can never be offered or accepted as explanations. The family is where mutuality is to be achieved, despite everything and in the acknowledgment that intimacy can be as painful as it can be rewarding.

  And happiness is no final state, any more than is fulfillment. The only “final” state is self-understanding, and, depending on what has gone before in a life, there is no saying what that may be. It may as easily be negative as positive. We should not expect anything else.

  13

  Living Down to Fact

  O

  ne of Virginia Woolf’s most famous statements, made in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), is “on or about December 1910, human nature changed.”1 The first version of this essay had been written in reply to an article by Arnold Bennett in which he argued that the foundation of good fiction “is character-creating and nothing else,” and asserted that Woolf’s characters “do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.” What Virginia Woolf meant by her remark was that there were so many cultural changes happening simultaneously that they were experienced as a change in nature. She added: “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”

  Her remarks arose partly out of her interest in painting, in how it differed from writing, and her interest in psychology, in particular psychoanalysis. The Hogarth Press, which she and her husband, Leonard, had founded in 1917, had begun publishing translations of Freud’s work in the early 1920s. Virginia was impressed by painting’s ability to present details simultaneously, whereas writing was linear, and she was impressed, too, by painting’s other ability—explored in Cubism and Expressionism—to look at an object from different standpoints, often distorting images in the process. Recent science, too, she knew, had insisted on the distortions inherent in human perception.

  Her interest in psychoanalysis (fueled by her descents into madness throughout her life) also told her that people rarely thought in linear ways, as Arnold Bennett’s stories implied. Rather, we think in “splashes,” as she put it, verbal splashes reflecting “eddies of feeling” that are anything but linear. It was this, among other things, that she sought to express in her work.

  Her awareness of the changes taking place around her was Woolf’s chief strength in the long run—in fact, she never gave up her interest in change. Throughout the 1920s, arguably her most productive decade, one of her self-imposed tasks as a novelist was to describe God “in the process of change.” She was very conscious of the nineteenth-century materialists, as she called them, and their concern with facts rather than with the souls of their characters. She praised James Joyce’s Ulysses as an attempt “to find an appropriate modern form of spiritual feeling” (see p. 264 for Joyce’s attitude to fact).

  CHARISMA AND EVERYDAY LIFE

  Woolf was conscious, as Max Weber was conscious, of the “disenchantment” of the modern world—what he called the “routinization of charisma”—and she sought to bring about what he thought of as the greatest contemporary challenge, “the return of charisma to everyday life.” One answer for Weber was the investment of charismatic authority, an emotional force, in gifted individuals (Hitler being one unfortunate example), but Woolf was much more concerned with the charisma that might be found in the ordinary. She developed a theory that, alongside the everyday—time spent enveloped by, as she put it, “cotton wool”—there were “moments of being,” secular sacred moments “in which experience enters the sublime, moments that transform and energise all the moments of non-being that surrounded them.” It was the business of art to identify these moments, describe them in as memorable a way as possible, and in that way preserve them.

  By so doing, Woolf maintained, modern fiction could challenge modern civilization’s preoccupation with material matters “at the expense of other values.” In her books, different sets of values compete with each other and in this way she conceived the modern world as analogous to the pagan world, with many gods—not one—each representing some aspect of life but not the totality, and reconcilable only temporarily. “The essential challenge for the modern novelist is to produce such moments of reconciliation without imposing a false harmony on the world of brute fact.”2

  The change that Woolf identified meant that the world was no longer perceived by everyone in the same way, there were no longer fixed points of reference, no common grounds of agreement, no shared beliefs or communal experiences—the world was “fragmented, unstable, asymmetrical.” Moreover, this put readers in an era of change, too: “We, as readers, had to synthesise the broken pieces for ourselves. We had to make our own harmony, our own wholeness.”3 This fitted with her remark about the change she perceived as having taken place in December 1910, in that for her (and, she believed, for others too) “reality was no longer public”—it was private, personal, idiosyncratic, subjectively construed.

  It followed from this that, as both Weber and Woolf recognized, spiritual experience in the modern world—without churches, still less cathedrals—could be found only in the intimate sphere; that since communion with God was no longer possible, communion with other people in an intimate embrace was its only replacement. “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today [1917] only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma [spirit], which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.”4

  “Pianissimo” is perhaps the crucial word here, for Woolf shared the view of many of her contemporaries that the Great War was the result of materialism and the aggressiveness of a male-dominated civilization. Her idea of a more intimate civilization, a more spiritual world, therefore included a change from what we might call male values to female ones: nurturing, caring, family life.

  Weber had famously outlined an overlap between Calvinism and capitalism in his notion of “the calling,” the idea of “vocation,” which had moved out of the monasteries and into the classic Victorian idea of work as duty, a secularized form of asceticism. What he thought in particular had been lost in this process was the presence, authority and aura of sacred relics and the “mediating fiction” of the priest. Woolf overlapped with Weber in that she thought the task of modern fiction was to reintroduce “vision” into a genre that during the nineteenth century had come to be dominated by fact (itself, of course, an aspect of secularization). This was all the more important for Woolf because she also intuitively agreed with Weber that the advances in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century science, though remarkable, had actually done little to advance “ultimate meaning.”

  Woolf believed that literature had taken over some of the functions of religion, in that both were out
side mainstream society and that in both it was the job of the cleric or writer to speak out truths, inconvenient or otherwise; to speak up for a set of “spiritual” values that went against the prevailing “materialism.”5 She saw women as having a special place in this, and it is worth reminding ourselves once more that, alongside the more “metaphysical” ideas of fulfillment and redemption considered in this book, many in the twentieth century—women, homosexuals, racial minorities—underwent a far more practical transformation in their sense of fulfillment as their material and psychological conditions improved. Woolf was alive to—and part of—these changes.

  As noted above, both Weber and Woolf saw the modern world as not dissimilar to the pagan, pre-Christian world, in which there were many gods, representing many values, often competing and by no means always reconcilable. Furthermore, both saw that, in such a system, there was always the opportunity (and therefore the danger) for people to follow their own interests to the exclusion of almost everything else: this might well be fulfilling in personal terms but did little for the wider community. It was an individual, solitary—and possibly lonely—form of fulfillment.

  A further parallel between Weber and Woolf lies in the former’s argument that whatever advances science had made by then, none of its results had provided humanity “with a sense of ultimate meaning.” Many of Woolf’s characters (in The Waves, for instance, or To the Lighthouse) are continually searching for an answer to the meaning of existence but, for the most part, come up empty-handed. At the same time, Woolf fills her books with what Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, calls “daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”; the characters, like Virginia Woolf herself, hoped to “make of the moment something permanent”—an attitude which she says amounted to a manifesto that was “of the nature of a revelation.” “The quest for meaning will find resolution not in a grand gesture that encompasses everything, but in minor daily miracles.”6

  With these concerns as her starting point and with Weber in the background, Woolf gradually came to focus on two aspects of experience that, for her, were of paramount importance and that became, again for her, what we might call a surrogate religion. These two elements were intimacy and “moments of being.” She thought that the great philosophical/emotional/intellectual problem of her day, or any other, was how one mind could know another, how it is possible to understand another person’s thoughts and values. “For Woolf,” as Pericles Lewis says, “no communion is possible with God or Christ, but she does seek some form of communion among selves.” For example, she asks herself how we can ever know what other minds think about God.

  This, he says, leads us to the episode in “An Unwritten Novel” (1920) where she is on a train sitting opposite a “poor, unfortunate woman.” She gives the woman a fictitious—and somewhat mean—name, Minnie Marsh, and imagines her as an unhappy, childless spinster. She then tries to imagine what sort of God this other woman prays to: “Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o’clock in the afternoon?” She can imagine only an old patriarch in a black frock coat, a bullying parody of Jehovah, someone who resembles “the leader of the Boers”—an old spinster like “Minnie” would surely want “a God with whiskers.” Her point is, of course, that she had absolutely no idea, and when “Minnie” is met at Eastbourne station by her son, all Woolf’s fantasies are exploded.

  What is not exploded is her point that, if one person cannot begin to imagine what another person’s idea of God is, or what his or her mental life is, how can we ever share anything? Is not the notion that all Christians, say, believe in the same God bound to be a fiction, an illusion?

  As to the second aspect of experience that she regards as central, not all intimacies are the same, of course. Some people are proud, some spend their time brooding, others despise one another, making intimacy difficult, if not impossible. But in modern times, Woolf suggests, the only authentic spiritual experience is to be found in intense moments of vision, or ecstasy, that it is the specific business of art to identify, preserve and transmit. She contrasts these “moments of being” with “moments of non-being.” “During moments of non-being,” one is, as mentioned earlier, “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton-wool.” In her own case these moments all come from childhood: such as the sudden desire not to fight with her brother, or the vision of an apple tree as somehow connected with the suicide of a family acquaintance.

  These moments usually contain a shock or even a blow, and usually promise “a revelation of some order.”7 They are similar to what James Joyce would call “epiphanies.” And she went on to say something similar to what Rilke said about naming: “From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this . . . a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.”

  And somewhat like Rilke, too, Woolf saw herself as a receiver of observations rather than a God substitute imposing patterns on her stories and characters. She was especially attuned, she felt, to observe moments of being, moments of ecstasy, involving “the erasure of the boundaries that typically separate one self from another.”

  These moments can be seen as a new form of the sublime, for which nineteenth-century realism had had little use. But in Woolf’s hands the new sublime relates not so much to grand or extraordinary things as to modest, inconspicuous, everyday objects that turn out to open up unexpected worlds. She uses these moments—when someone sees a hat pin worn long ago, or remembers a kiss—to establish an intimate link (sometimes retrospective) between individuals, by means of an overwhelming “oceanic” feeling traditionally associated with something altogether grander—mountains or cathedrals. For her, these episodes constitute the only really sacred moments available to us in a secular world, and it is the writer’s job to draw attention to them, to highlight their value, and to preserve them for us in a permanent—immortal—form.

  Lewis again: “The question that each of these ecstatic episodes poses is whether the meeting of minds that the sublime moment offers can lead to sustained communion. For Woolf, the ‘moment of being’ . . . is a type of sacrament appropriate for a world in which no single measure of the sacred obtains, and in which community must result from the always temporary, ironic and visionary merging of competing value systems.”

  As Freud’s English-language publisher, Woolf embraced the psychoanalytic approach. She thought that the “oceanic” feeling so sought after by religions and appropriated by them, and the “intimate sublime moments of being” which so attracted her, had their origins in infancy, born of the time when the infant is separated from the mother, the warm embrace of first the womb and then the breast.

  The nearest we can get to a spiritual feeling, Woolf is saying, is intense intimacy. By definition, therefore, we live most intensely in our families and with our friends. Indeed, this is the purpose of friendship, to search for, to create, intimate moments of being. The moments of bliss from our childhood create the benchmark; adult intimacy both recalls and overtakes that earlier experience. It is the purpose of art to identify these elements and preserve them, but the moments themselves are available to everyone.

  IDEALISM AS RUIN

  Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have often been compared—and as often contrasted—as experimental novelists, as explorers of the “stream of consciousness” mode of writing. In her diary, Woolf remarked that Ulysses was “a misfire,” “pretentious” and “underbred,” though she thought it also had genius.

  One big difference between them was that, unlike Woolf, Joyce thought of himself as a Nietzschean. In 1904, describing himself as “James Overman,” he was all for neopaganism, licentiousness and pitilessness. Nietzsche and others helped sustain his opposition to the totalizing religious and philosophical frameworks characteristic of the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Joyce wrote in a letter to his wife, Nora: “My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity.” Stephen Dedalus is fond of saying “the Absolute is dead.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man recounts Stephen’s gradual rejection of his Catholicism. We feel the pull of religion as he accepts that his faith is “logical and coherent”; but what he fears is “the chemical reaction that would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are amassed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.”8 As Gordon Graham explains, “the hope, in other words, is not theological truth but spiritual freedom”; Dedalus’s aim is to discover “the mode of life or of art whereby [the] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” This is a vision of life as itself an aesthetic expression.9

  But above all, Joyce had an extraordinary attachment to fact, a “scrupulous meanness,” in Christopher Butler’s words, to seeing things as they actually are. As he expressed himself to Arthur Power, an Irish friend who had lived in Paris before becoming art critic of the Irish Times: “In realism you get down to facts on which the world is based; that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable misconceived ideal. In fact, you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived downI to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotism. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.” So here Joyce is identifying a new form of false consciousness.

  He also rejected any metaphysical order. Very possibly, he shared the views of his countryman Oscar Wilde, who said: “It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the skepticism of which they were afraid.” In Stephen Hero, Joyce the Catholic engineers Stephen Dedalus to confront loss of faith head-on, at the same time retaining and secularizing whole swathes of the vocabulary of religion. This is shown most clearly in his interpretation of the notion of “epiphany” as a secular spiritual moment when a collection of (usually ordinary) experiences, memories and ambitions coalesces in an intense, multilayered explosion.10