The century that had begun with a conviction of boundless possibility was giving way to a nameless dread. But, Nietzsche believed, human beings could counter the danger of nihilism by making themselves divine. They must become the new absolute and take the place of God. The God they had projected outside themselves could be born within the human spirit as the Übermensch (“Superman”) who would provide the universe with ultimate meaning. To achieve this, we had to rebel against the Christian God who had marked the limit of human aspiration, estranged us from our bodies and passions, and enfeebled us with the ideal of compassion. As an incarnation of its will to power, the Übermensch would push the evolution of the species into a new phase so that humanity would finally become supreme. But what would happen when human beings did indeed imagine that they were the highest reality and a law unto themselves? What if the ideal of kenosis was replaced by the naked lust for empowerment, backed by the immense capacity of scientific technology?
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founder of the science of psychoanalysis, illustrates the shift in mood that Nietzsche had diagnosed.83 Although he grew up in a Jewish household that took religion very seriously—or, perhaps, because of his religious upbringing—God was indeed dead for Freud. He did not become an atheist as a result of his study of psychology; he was a psychoanalyst because he was an atheist. For Freud, the idea of God was simply untenable. In 1875, he had discovered the writings of Feuerbach, who had fallen into eclipse since the 1840s, and believed implicitly in the “warfare” myth: in this seemingly interminable conflict, religion must be eliminated.84 Science alone could ensure the physical and mental health of humanity, and, in fact, its victory was inevitable. Human rationality was coming into its own, gradually breaking the fetters that had impeded its development. “The voice of the intellect is a soft one,” he wrote, and it would eventually succeed in quashing religion, but only in “a distant, distant future.”85 It was dangerous to force people into atheism prematurely, as this could lead to unhealthy denial.
Freud had studied medicine at the University of Vienna but always had a deep interest in religion and philosophy. His religious studies, however, were conducted in light of the death of God in his heart. There was no need to justify his atheism, because its truth was self-evident. The idea of God was “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity, it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals would never be able to rise above this view of life.”86 Observing the similarity between religious rites and the obsessive rituals of some of his patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity. The desire for God sprang from the infant’s experience of helplessness and his yearning for a protector; it reflected the child’s passion for justice and fairness and his longing for life to continue forever.
Freud had already worked out his theory of the origins of faith before he began to study religion. He simply selected texts, which he interpreted somewhat eccentrically, that supported his conviction that religion sprang from psychological pressures reflecting our evolutionary development. He had been influenced by the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who thought all living creatures had an innate urge to adapt to their environment. To reach the leaves on a high branch, a giraffe learned how to stretch its neck and passed this acquired characteristic to the next generation. In a Lamarckian theory, since dismissed as simplistic, Freud suggested that religion was an acquired trait of this kind, which had developed in response to a specific event. At a very early stage of human history, he suggested in Totem and Taboo (1913), the patriarch had exclusive rights to the females of the tribe. This aroused the hostility and resentment of his sons, who overthrew and killed him but later, tormented by remorse, invented rituals to assuage their guilt. In Moses and Monotheism (1938), Freud argued that Moses had been killed by the Israelites in the wilderness during a ritual reenactment of this primal murder.
His definition of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) is also reductive: religion is wish fulfillment of instinctual, unconscious desires, a fantasy that was once consoling but is now doomed to failure, because its myths and rituals belong to such a primitive stage of human evolution. It was time to allow science to allay our fears and provide a new basis for morality. These explanations won respect because they were rooted in science, but Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being.87 His view of religion as rooted in the infant’s veneration of the father also prompts the question of whether Freud’s rejection of God did not spring from an unconscious hostility to his own father.
Freud has been called the last of the philosophes. In one sense, psychoanalysis can be seen as the culmination of the Enlightenment project to bring the whole of reality under the control of reason. Thanks to Freud’s pioneering work, dreams could be interpreted, subconscious impulses brought to light, and the hidden meaning of ancient myths laid bare. But Freud also diminished the Enlightenment ideal by demonstrating that reason comprised only the outermost rind of the human mind and was a superficial crusting on a seething melting pot of primitive instincts over which we had little control. Where Darwin had revealed that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” Freud showed that the mind was a battlefield on which we struggled endlessly with the unconscious forces of our own psyche, with little hope of final resolution.
Freud brought to light a darker strand of the fin de siècle when he suggested that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by the lust for procreation. But at the end of the nineteenth century, many Christians believed that human beings were evolving to a new and more perfect state. For their part, agnostics were convinced that the world would be a better place without God. Ingersoll looked forward to a future in which “man, gathering courage from a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain to a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition.”88 Doubt was “the womb and cradle of progress.”89 The idea that a “personal God does all” had bred “idleness, ignorance and misery,”90 but now people could channel the energies that had been sapped by religion into the creation of a more just and equal world. “A battle is going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil,” wrote John Stuart Mill. The task of this generation was to promote “the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually being ground from evil.”
To do something during life, on even the humblest scale if nothing more is within reach, towards bringing this consummation ever so little nearer, is the most animating and invigorating thought which can inspire a human nature.91
This rather than any belief in the supernatural was the religion of the future; working for their fellow human beings would fill the void described by Nietzsche.
But this vision of hope required an act of faith. The American Civil War (1861–65) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had both revealed the horror of warfare in the industrial age, when the exact sciences were applied to weaponry to devastating effect. Yet the nation-states of Europe seemed in thrall to Freud’s death wish. After the Franco-Prussian War, they began an arms race that led to the carnage of the First World War (1914–18), apparently regarding warfare as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive. At whatever cost to itself or others, the modern state must build the biggest army and create the most destructive weapons. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or story looking forward to a terrifying future war did not appear in some European country.92 The “next great war” loomed as a fearful but unavoidable ordeal, from which the nation would emerge with renewed strength and vigor.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) poignantly expresse
d the modern predicament. In “The Darkling Thrush,” dated December 31, 1900, he expressed the bleak desolation of the human spirit excluded from traditional ways of arriving at a sense of life’s meaning. He described the “sharp features” of the wintry landscape as “the century’s corpse;” it seemed to Hardy that “every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly, an aged thrush—”frail, gaunt and small”—began to sing, flinging his soul upon the growing gloom. As he listened to this “full hearted evensong,” Hardy could only reflect, with a calm, sad acceptance:
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembl’d through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.93
Unknowing
At the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) confidently predicted a century of unparalleled scientific progress. There were just twenty-three outstanding problems in the Newtonian system, and once these had been solved, our knowledge of the universe would be complete. There appeared to be no limit to the modern Western achievement. In nearly all fields, artists, scientists, and philosophers seemed to anticipate a brave new world. “In or about December 1910, human nature changed,” wrote the British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) after visiting the startling exhibition of French postimpressionist painters. Artists deliberately flouted their viewers’ expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating. Some wanted to contemplate irreducible fundamentals, cut out the peripheral, and focus on the essential in order to construct a different reality: scientists searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies and primitive artifacts. People wanted to break the past asunder, split the atom to make something new. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) either dismembered his subjects or viewed them simultaneously from different perspectives. The novels of Woolf and James Joyce (1882–1941) abandoned the traditional narratives of cause and effect, throwing their readers into the chaotic stream of their characters’ consciousness, so that they were uncertain about what actually was happening or how they should judge the action.
But the First World War revealed the self-destructive nihilism that, despite its colossal attainments, lurked at the heart of modern Western civilization. It has been described as the collective suicide of Europe: by slaughtering a generation of young men, the war so damaged European society at its core that arguably it has never fully recovered. The utter futility of trench warfare, fought as it was for no adequate social, ideological, or humanitarian cause, defied the rationalism of the scientific age. The most advanced and civilized countries in Europe had crippled themselves and their opponents with their new military technology simply to serve the national ego. The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop. After the armistice, the economy of the West seemed in terminal decline, and the 1930s saw the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism. By the end of the decade, the unthinkable had happened and the world was embroiled in a second global war. It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry. They revealed the inherent destructiveness of all idolatry: once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants.
Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty. Hume and Kant had cast doubt on this ideal by suggesting that our understanding of the external world was merely a reflection of human psychology. But even Kant believed that the fundamental categories of Newtonian science—space, time, substance, and causality—were beyond question. Yet within a generation of Hilbert’s confident prediction that all physicists had to do was add the final touches to Newton’s great “Systeme,” it had been superseded. Already in the late nineteenth century, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) had developed the theory of electromagnetic radiation, showing that physicists were beginning to understand time quite differently from the way we experience it, since a radio wave could be received before it had been sent. The puzzling experiments on ether drift and the speed of light conducted by the American scientists Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923) suggested that the relative velocities of light from the sun were the same in the direction of the earth’s rotation as when opposed to it, which was entirely inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics. There followed the discovery of radioactivity by Alexander-Edmond Becquerel (1820–91) and the isolation of quantum phenomena by Max Planck (1858–1947). Finally, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) applied Planck’s quantum theory to light, and formulated his theories of special (1905) and general (1916) relativity. Relativity was able to accommodate the Michelson-Morley findings by merging the concepts of space and time, regarded as absolutes by Newton, into a space-time continuum. Building on Einstein’s breakthrough, Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics.
So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally, as each generation improved on the discoveries of its forebears. In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics, three-dimensional space and unidimensional time had become relative aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Atoms were not the solid, indestructible building blocks of nature but were found to be largely empty. Time passed at different rates for observers traveling at different speeds: it could go backward or even stop entirely. Euclid’s geometrical laws no longer provided the universal and necessary structure of nature. The planets did not move in their orbits because they were drawn to the sun by gravitational force operating at a distance but because the space in which they moved was actually curved. Subatomic phenomena were particularly baffling because they could be observed as both waves and particles of energy. “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed me,” Einstein recalled. “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.”1
If these discoveries were bewildering to scientists, they seemed utterly impenetrable to the layman. A curved space, finite and yet unbounded; objects that were not things but merely processes; an expanding universe; phenomena that took no definite shape until they were observed—all defied any received presupposition. Newton’s grand certainties had been replaced by a system that was ambiguous, shifting, and indeterminate. Despite Hilbert, we seemed no closer to understanding the universe. Human beings, randomly produced minutiae whose existence was probably ephemeral, still appeared to be cast adrift in a vast, impersonal universe. There was no clear answer as to what had preceded the “big bang” that had given birth to the universe. Even physicists did not believe that the equations of quantum theory described what was actually there; these mathematical abstractions could not be put into words, and our knowledge was confined to symbols that were mere shadows of an indescribable reality. Unknowing seemed built into the human condition. The revolution of the 1920s had overturned traditional scientific orthodoxy, and if that had happened once, it could happen again.
Some Christians believed that the new physics was friendly to faith, even though Einstein always insisted that relativity was a scientific theory and had no bearing on religion. They seized eagerly on his famous remark in a debate with Bohr in Brussels (1927) that although quantum mechanics was “certainly imposing,” an “inner voice tells me t
hat it … does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”2 But Einstein was not referring to the personal God; he had simply used the “Old One” (a medieval Kabbalistic image) to symbolize the impersonal, intelligible, and immanent order of what exists. The British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, however, saw relativity as evidence for the existence of mind in nature; Canon Arthur F. Smethurst regarded it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit;3 others saw the new conception of time as validating the after-life;4 big bang theory was thought to substantiate the Genesis account;5 and some even managed to see the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics as support for God’s providential control of the world.6 This type of speculation was ill-conceived. Inured to their need for scientific proof, these apologists were still interpreting the ancient biblical symbols in too literal a manner. Max Planck had a more sage view of the relations between science and religion. The two were quite compatible: science dealt with the objective, material world and religion with values and ethics. Conflict between them was based “on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statement.”7
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