The Rage Against God

by Peter Hitchens

  The next day we caught the train—for me a long journey in that strange, exciting light that floods the skies of England when the sun is low in the sky, ending with the unmixed delight of homecoming after dark, the extraordinary pleasures of a soft bed, privacy, and adults who were not teachers. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a few days later, were always an anti-climax after this. To this day I prefer the anticipation of Advent to Christmas itself, and the season is strangely incomplete without a long train journey through a cold landscape. As for Easter, I had to teach myself to observe it when I returned to the faith years later. It never fell during the school term, and although the Easter Story, told at any time, is powerful and haunting, the festival itself had no significance for me except as a time for stuffing myself with chocolate eggs.

  Imagery of the Last Judgment was still powerful currency to us. As I will explain later, its power would return one day to surprise me. One of my teachers—actually by far the best of them—would seek to frighten us into learning by warning us that we would suffer the fate of the Foolish Virgins when the time came for the decisive examinations we had to take at the age of thirteen. For us, the Last Judgment was superseded by the fearsome, unyielding tests that would decide the outcomes (or so we believed) of our entire future lives. Pass, and success and security would be ours. Fail, and we would be lost outsiders. I certainly believed it. There would, so the teacher predicted, be wailing and gnashing of teeth and casting into the outer darkness, thanks to our idleness and sloth. He urged us to keep private notebooks of French vocabulary bearing the title “Fuel for the Lamp,” to remind us of what might happen if those notebooks were empty. Recently, as I studied the elaborate carvings of the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the west front of the Cathedral at Berne, I found myself thinking unbidden of French irregular verbs and Latin vocabulary.

  Faith in “Science”

  The Christian conservatism of my schools did not protect me from the rather Victorian faith in something called “science” that was then very common. Perhaps this is because Christianity was not implied in every action and statement of my teachers, whereas materialist, naturalistic faith was. This faith did not require any great understanding. Mainly, it was just an assumption, a received opinion we all accepted. At the age of fifteen, despite an almost complete inability to learn the most basic parts of the school science curriculum, I was wholly satisfied that evolution by natural selection—which I did not understand because it was not thought necessary to explain this holy mystery—fully explained the current shape of the realm of nature.

  (These days I know, with complete certainty, that there are a number of things about which I have no idea at all, nor does anyone else. This knowledge would have greatly surprised my fifteen-year-old self.)

  I likewise thought—when I was solemnly first introduced to it at the age of thirteen—that “science” had fully explained the motions of the planets, the law of gravity, and the mysteries of time. Anything that had not yet been explained would no doubt soon be discovered. There were no mysteries.

  Because we could observe gravity in action, we somehow knew what it was. Nobody then mentioned that its operation, especially in empty space, simply cannot be explained. All was settled. Just learn the Table of Elements, your species, your elementary biology, and your formulae, and that was that. The fact that the “laws” dealt with in this subject are all accounts of what did happen, rather than rules about how things should happen, was passed over in silence. Why and how were silently but inextricably confused. The use of the majestic word “laws” curiously turned the mind away from speculation about whose laws they might conceivably be or why they might have been made. Science, summed up as the belief that what could not be naturalistically or materialistically explained was not worth talking about, simply appropriated them.

  Why then should any reasoning, informed person need the idea of God? What would he have explained that was not known among the Bunsen burners, the jars of acid, and the pickled embryos in brownish fluid, in the Science Block? Perhaps if I had been taught science with a little less confidence and told that these claims were open to argument, I might have been more interested in it. (Though I doubt it. My type of school-boy thought it a little demeaning to be “good at” the useful and workaday subjects.). But I should stress that I was not actually taught these articles of the materialist faith, let alone the arguments that continue to rage around them. I was simply given the impression by adults that these things were the case, and that this was all settled forever.

  It was the faith of a faithless age. I had no idea, then, quite why so many of the older generation had set their faces so hard against religious belief. I was quite shocked when I later discovered the true state of affairs. They did not know half the things they claimed to know. Their faith in science was an attempt to replace the Christian faith, ruined by wars and disillusion, with a new all-embracing certainty.

  Seeking to Banish Darkness and Death

  I also recall a very curious thing, which would later change without my realizing how important it was. During my atheist period, I became an enthusiast for total rationality. I happily embraced the cold, sharp metric and decimal systems, discarding the polished-in-use, apparently irrational but human and friendly customary measures—which my generation was the last in England to learn. In a similar desire for mental tidiness, I sought out and preferred buildings without dark corners or any hint of faith in their shape. I was comforted by the presence of modern cuboid structures, preferably of glass and concrete, in any town. I longed for a world of clean, squared-off structures, places where there was no darkness.

  I did not know exactly what I was seeking or avoiding, but it was well described in John Buchan’s story Fullcircle. A character who lives in a seventeenth-century manor house (as did Buchan himself) muses by his library fire:

  In this kind of house you have the mystery of the elder England. What was Raleigh’s phrase? “High thoughts and divine contemplations.” The people who built this sort of thing lived closer to another world, and thought bravely of death. It doesn’t matter who they were—Crusaders or Elizabethans or Puritans—they all had poetry in them and the heroic and a great unworldliness. They had marvellous spirits, and plenty of joys and triumphs; but they also had their hours of black gloom. Their lives were like our weather—storm and sun. One thing they never feared—death. He walked too near them all their days to be a bogey.

  As a small child I had been rather interested in death, in graveyards and tombstones. They were not concealed from me as they would be now. The English parish churches of those days had generally not cleared away their graves, altar tombs, and gravestones and turned their churchyards into tactful gardens. Many smelt sweetly of slow human decay. I had little doubt about what was going on beneath those mounds and stones. I had once found a dead mouse, buried it with a short funeral, and soon afterward morbidly dug it up to see what had happened to the corpse. I have never forgotten the sheer purposeful energy of the fat, gray worms I found and the ravenous speed with which they were working. It was almost violent.

  I knew far more about death—as a process—than I knew about sex or swearwords, of which I was almost completely ignorant up to the age of twelve. We recited a gruesome rhyme in the playground—seemingly passed on by a magic process from one generation to another—that began, “Never laugh when a hearse goes by, or you will be the next to die,” and went on to describe the process of bodily corruption in appalling detail, most of which I can still remember word for word. Does this still continue? I doubt it. But we thought it all jolly and normal.

  Having spent long hours in churches peering at memorial tablets, and having walked through many churchyards past worn and leaning stones and worryingly cracked altar tombs, I immediately understood Pip Pirrip’s odd ideas about gravestones at the opening of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, a book that continues to have a near-biblical force for me, especially when I consider my treatment of my parents. The grav
estones did indeed seem to possess characters. And I was specially, personally terrified when I first read the scene when the young hero finds himself trapped behind an occupied—and rotten—coffin in the burial vault in J. Meade Falkner’s tremendous novel Moonfleet. I felt as if the author had personally intended to frighten me.

  Strangely, as I entered my teens, I no longer felt that close familiarity with death. On the contrary, I sought to ignore it. I shamefully refused to go to my grandfather’s funeral and was wrongly allowed to get away with this dereliction—which I have regretted more with every year that has gone past, as I feel that fierce old man’s scorn for the modern world coursing through my own veins and hear with perfect clarity his beautiful Hampshire accent in my imagination. I perhaps made up for this later when I attended the burial of his oldest son, my uncle, also a rigorous Calvinist. This took place amid a deluge of icy rain, under a typically black English summer sky, in a cemetery drearily overlooked by the walls of Portsmouth prison and so waterlogged that the mouth of the grave had to be held open with metal props and planks lest it closed with a giant squelch before the service was over.

  The hymns and prayers were pure gloom, calculated to spread despond among the living. A relentless pastor intoned as the coffin was lowered: “Our dear brother here departed now goeth either to Heaven or to Hell. There is no scriptural warrant for the existence of any other place.” I have to confess—and I am sure my kind and gently humorous uncle would not mind my saying so—that the occasion was so impossibly miserable that it was very nearly funny. I do not think I could have stood it at all during my godless teens, but the fault would have been in me, not in the ceremony.

  In the heat of adolescence, when immortality is most attractive, I actively loathed anything that suggested the existence or presence of death. I now positively preferred a world in which death was distant enough to be a bogey, where tombstones were cleared away against the wall, where any sign of dusk or gloom was always banished by enormous windows of plate glass, sparkling light reflected off pale wood, and night defeated by strong electric lamps. I longed to see churches converted into useful libraries or other secular buildings, having first been scoured clean of every last trace of superstition and ritual. I rejoiced at the destruction or desecration or purging of structures with a religious character. They made me feel uncomfortable and resentful. I had a similar loathing for paintings, sculptures, music, or poetry that used religious idioms. This attitude toward painting, in particular, was to end later in an unexpected way.

  My moral positions, in the same way, became fierce opposites of what had always been taught. I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable. I renounced patriotism, too—so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusion of this decision. I began by embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority over the conventional warmongers. In my last disastrous, obnoxious months at my Cambridge boarding school, I learned how to shock my teachers—from sitting up during chapel prayers, to putting my feet on the seat in front of me in the school theatre, to getting caught breaking into a government nuclear shelter. At the end they were all—perhaps especially the best of them whom I had so completely disappointed—more than glad to see the last of me. At the time I had absolutely no idea that I might have been making any kind of mistake. I was in fact rather pleased with myself. I have come to think that this readiness to live entirely in the present—in which we spare ourselves any self-reproach and fail completely to see ourselves as others see us—is a metaphor for the Godless state, in which we simultaneously ignore the experience and warnings of our past and the unknown, limitless dangers of our future.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Last Battleships

  “He breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder.”

  (THE 46TH PSALM)

  I can easily slip into the self-indulgent luxury of living in the past. I know it is purposeless, wrong, and self-deceiving, since the past is irrecoverably gone. I suspect that I do it now, as many others whose parents have died before they were old must do, in the hope of finding a door into a world where my mother and father are restored to life and youth, and I can explain to them how I have at last grown up, and I can introduce their grandchildren to them. But no such door exists, and I assure myself that I do it for a serious purpose—to remind myself, over and over again, how utterly the world can change in a little time and how readily we forget the good that has been thrown aside along with the bad.

  Noble Austerity: The Britain of My Childhood

  What I remember about the Britain of my childhood is an intensely serious and warlike place: trotting by my father’s side down a Devon lane, roofed with the branches of ancient trees, and coming across the remnants of an old tank-trap built against the danger of invasion; seeing the painted signs, still not much faded, pointing to air-raid shelters or emergency fire hydrants; rambling along the pitted runway of an emergency airfield yet to be reclaimed by nature, a few hundred yards from my home; gazing at the gaps in the buildings and the still-unrepaired ruins in the great naval cities I inhabited, and the invariable adult reply to the question, “What’s that?” being, “A bombed site.”

  These days, when I hear military experts using the similar-sounding expression “bomb sight,” I am immediately transported to the back seat of a bulbous black car, as I peer through the rain-speckled glass at yet another of these weed-grown spaces, never for a second thinking (as my parents must have) that I was looking at the scene of a death, or of many deaths. None of us had died. We had won the war. It was the Germans who had died, and even then, surely not defenseless women and children in their homes. This is what we thought.

  It was somber and rather uplifting to live in this noble austerity. The predominant colors of urban Britain at that time were black and gray, under gray skies. For me, it has never been so beautiful since. I have a recollection of a visit to London, with the bright red buses against the monumental black of the great government offices, thrillingly majestic and symbolizing strength and endurance. Now it has all been cleaned and is very pretty, but the severe grandeur has disappeared with the soot.

  It all gave the impression of restraint mixed with power. The people were serious, soberly and formally dressed. They spoke tersely in a serious fashion, a disciplined and contained language that was only allowed to show off in poetry or song. The cityscapes were serious. The voices, of all classes, were serious. Words emerged individually from people’s mouths rather than in the slurred stream we are familiar with today. Understatement was so universal that it took me twenty years or more to understand fully some of the rebukes directed at me as a child. We were frequently harshly spoken to by adults and were expected to obey instructions. Yet I also remember a great deal of abiding kindness and gentleness toward small children, especially in people’s faces and speech.

  The Royal Navy: Power Made Visible

  The impression of serious purpose was intensified by the naval background to everything—cranes on the near horizon, the clangor of dockyards, my father coming home in uniform, the casual use of naval slang at home, the old kitbags, the dented and much-traveled black tin trunks, Royal Navy pattern, which I used for taking my clothes to and from boarding school—and something else that will never leave me. In those years we still had the last remnants of an imperial, ocean-going navy, and I do not believe there is anything, apart from a great cathedral, that begins to match the visual power of a warship—its symmetry, elegance, and majesty—especially one alive and hung with flags. I would look up at the steel towers and battlements and skyscraping masts, at the gargantuan armored turrets with their fifteen-inch guns, and long to be part of this vibrating, heroic, pungent monster.

  Winston Churchill sought to describe the Dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet leaving their shore stations for war in 1914 as “lik
e giants bowed in anxious thought,” but this is less than the half of it. These were castles that could move, works of popular art and architecture, the very idea of power made visible. George Orwell remarks in Homage to Catalonia how the sight of big guns mysteriously lifts the spirit.

  The loss of these ships makes the heart sink. I still clearly recall the sultry afternoon in August 1960 when HMS Vanguard, our last battleship, was towed to the breakers, where she was to be turned into washing machines and razor blades. I knew as I watched the slow, dreary occasion (she ran aground as if in protest) that it was a day of melancholy, loss, and decline, however much the TV commercials of that unusually dishonest and tawdry era tried to tell me that I was in a cheerful age of progress. I had felt the same when allowed, around the same time, to handle a Golden Sovereign, by then a collector’s piece but before 1914 the normal day-to-day currency of my country. We had exchanged this real and valuable thing, with its beautiful engraving of St. George slaying a dragon, for a paper promise. How could that be called progress? The word has made me suspicious ever since.

  Like most children in victorious great nations, I had a lively mental picture of how things would look and sound as the shells left the muzzles of our great guns. I had no picture about how it might be if another navy opened fire on ours, or little detailed interest in what a fifteen-inch shell might do to those it struck. For we always won, did we not? Even now, the stench of fuel oil can summon back mental pictures of great dockyards full of such ships to my inward eye. But I also make occasional pilgrimages to sad Portsmouth—generally to tend family graves—and pause on the top of Portsdown Hill to see the hulks of decommissioned destroyers, anchored far up the creek and awaiting the blowtorch, and the emptiness of the dockyard that was once the principal arsenal of empire and is now a memorial to national feebleness and decline.