Strange Gods
Page 44
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It is arguably more difficult for Americans today to comprehend, in an imaginative sense, the political passions that produced both Nazism and Bolshevism than it would have been for an American patriot in revolutionary Boston to imagine that civil and religious authorities in his society had, less than a century earlier, executed people for witchcraft.
I must emphasize that I do not consider Nazism, or any other form of fascism, an alternative “religion” in the full sense that Stalinism was. In Spain, the Franco regime supported and was supported by the most conservative forces within the Catholic Church. In Germany, Nazi leaders realized that they would have had to pay too high a price in an attempt to wipe out traditional Christianity; Hitler’s strategy was, instead, the attempted co-option of Christian institutions through such measures as his 1933 concordat with the Vatican and his appeal to the nationalism of both Lutheran and Catholic German clerics. It was entirely possible to consider oneself simultaneously a Nazi and a Christian, and millions of Germans did. German troops went into battle accompanied by both Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and soldiers wore the traditional imperial belt buckle with the legend “Gott mit uns.” There were of course many instances of resistance to the Nazis—and their persecution of Jews—by individual Catholic and Protestant clergy, and by groups of lay Christians, throughout Europe, but the churches as institutions were concerned mainly with preserving their traditional sphere of authority.*1
Stalin’s Soviet Union, by contrast, did attempt to root out traditional religion, and it was impossible, anywhere in the world, to be a committed Communist Party member and a religiously observant Jew or Christian. Koestler, who spent the last half of his adult life in England, viewed ideological conversions from the vantage point of an outsider and an insider. Born into a nonobservant Hungarian Jewish family, he joined the Party in Germany in 1931 and left, disillusioned with Stalinism, in 1938. In between, he spent a year in Stalin’s Soviet Union and also fought against Franco in Spain, where he was captured and tortured by fascists. (His novel Darkness at Noon, first published in 1940 and never out of print since then, is set in the Soviet Union but also draws on his experiences as a political prisoner of Franco’s forces.) Unlike many foreigners, Koestler understood Stalin’s purges for what they were—the only way a ruthless and antirational secular religion could maintain its power to terrorize an entire people. In 1940, Koestler escaped from France to join the British Army, and he remained in England after the war. His voice has a particular resonance because, unlike many former Communists, he never joined the ranks of those who found a new home in a traditional religion that replaced one rigid set of irrational beliefs and rules with another.*2
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Koestler and Chambers, with their common history as apostate Party members, knew each other after the Second World War. Since the immense international publicity surrounding the 1940 publication of Darkness at Noon, Koestler may well have been the foreign ex-Communist best known to Americans. When Chambers died, Koestler wrote, “I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time….The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.”1 Despite their immensely different cultural backgrounds, both men had spent their young adulthood searching for a secular creed that would provide the meaning and purpose of a traditional religion.
Chambers began his search for the One Big Truth as a Long Island teenager, influenced by a female mentor who was a Christian Scientist. He listed Christian Science as his “religion” on his 1920 application to Columbia University, but this seems to have been no more than a dalliance. When he joined the fledgling American communist movement in 1925, as his biographer Sam Tanenhaus observes, Chambers “had at last found his church.”2 His conversion took place while Koestler (who would not join the German Communist Party until 1931) was living on a kibbutz in Palestine and beginning to find that Zionism fell short (for him) as a guiding ideology.
Chambers’s embrace of the Party also occurred in the same time frame as Chesterton’s formal conversion to Roman Catholicism, which did not take place until 1922—even though the latter had long been an apologist for the most orthodox and traditional forms of Christianity. In 1926, Chesterton—who was raised a Unitarian—delivered himself of the astonishing pronouncement that the Roman Catholic Church was clearly “the only champion of reason in the twentieth century.”3 During the same period, Chesterton’s argument played a role in the conversion of Lewis, who traveled intellectually and spiritually from atheism to Christian theism and finally to Anglicanism in 1931. Lewis did not make any assertions about the Church of England as a fount of reason, but instead offered a more general description of the pull of religion for the convert as “not even ‘All or nothing’…Now [for the convert], the demand was simply, ‘All.’ ”4
What all of these conversions in the 1920s and 1930s offered was authority and stability in a highly unstable time. Lewis, who is considered a much more modern and liberal religious thinker than converts to either Roman Catholicism or Communism of his era, nevertheless provides the most explicit description of the compulsive pull of faith and conversion in the autobiography of his early life, Surprised by Joy. The book was published in 1955, so it is informed by Lewis’s knowledge of what both Nazism and Stalinism had wrought.
But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.5
Ah, that seductive compelle intrare! Lewis, a classics scholar, was being highly disingenuous in his suggestion that such an injunction was not to be feared unless it came from demonic secular leaders like Hitler and Stalin. As Lewis well knew, the phrase was first used in Christian apologetics by Augustine, who asserted that dissident Donatists must be compelled to attend Roman Catholic services. Upper-class Donatist leaders who refused were to be exiled, and servants and slaves beaten. (Augustine rationalized his compelle intrare from the parable of the great supper in chapter 14 of Luke, in which a lord of the manor is furious because invited guests use marriage or work as excuses not to come to dinner. “Go out into the highways and hedges,” the master says to his servant, “and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.”) How can any human being know what is on the other side of the door when he is told, “Compelle intrare”? And if the convert changes his mind, does the door swing both ways and allow an exit? These questions have no meaning in Dante’s “Paradiso,” that supernatural realm where the only answer can be “La sua volontade è nostra pace” (“His will is our peace”)—a phrase echoed in Lewis’s “His compulsion is our liberation.” The door to paradise only swings one way, and what inhabitant of that divine kingdom would want it otherwise? In the natural realm, though, the assertion that “His compulsion is our liberation” is just that—an assertion based on faith rather than a conclusion rooted in evidence.
Compulsion as liberation is the theme that binds all of the converts who oscillated between secular and religious absolute truths during the years between the twentieth-century world wars. For the dazzled convert, Koestler observes, “There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity—except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.”6
In contemplating the absolutist secular movements of the twentieth century, some secular humanists as well as many religious believers have propagated the mistaken notion that conversions to Stalinism
in the 1920s and 1930s were a logical extension of nineteenth-century materialism and of modernism itself. If one digs deeper, to the notion of surrender that permeates all writings of ex-Communists who underwent two conversions in their lifetime, it is evident that the choice of twentieth-century Stalinism was a perversion of both modernism and nineteenth-century Marxism. The material misery of everyday life as it was experienced by Stalin’s subjects (as well as by Soviet citizens in the less frightening post-Stalin era) demonstrates the fallacy of regarding statist Communism as “modern” in any sense other than its timing. Stalinism rejected not only the tender sentiments of “bourgeois humanism” that shaped the better angels of modernity but also the material science upon which the Soviet system claimed to be based. For me, the oxymoronic nature of the ubiquitous Soviet phrase “scientific communism” has always been demonstrated most clearly by the idiotic and tragic story of Stalin’s rejection of Mendelian genetics and his embrace of the crackpot biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. Lysenko deemed it possible to build a biologically new Soviet man through socialist environmental manipulation, and he applied his beliefs to Soviet agriculture with disastrous results. Real scientists, who tried to fight Lysenkoism and predicted correctly that “socialist” biology would set back Soviet farming and biological research for at least a generation, were either fired or sent to perish in the Gulag.*3
Thus, the fundamental mistake made by both Western converts to Communism and “reverse converts” who equated liberalism with Communism (as Chambers eventually did) was that they saw Stalin’s Soviet Union as the culmination, not the negation, of all ideas of human progress since the beginning of the Enlightenment. A more accurate way of looking at such conversions is that they were permeated by antirationalism and intellectual submissiveness in modernist and rationalist packaging. The ideological packaging was so opaque that it fooled both Western leftists and many traditionalist religious converts who, during the same period, considered their embrace of orthodox religion a blow against “scientific communism” and the exaltation of materialist technology. Little did most of them know, to paraphrase Clemenceau, that scientific communism was to science as Socialist Realist art was to both realism and art.
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The tension between faith and real science (as distinct from bogus scientific communism) was, however, a serious issue in the conversions and reverse conversions of the first half of the twentieth century. The struggle against materialistic philosophy, which would produce many conversions to conservative Christianity, antedates Darwin and Marx as well as twentieth-century Soviet Communism. As demonstrated by Robert Boyle’s and William Paley’s arguments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious concerns about intelligent design emerged as soon as more sophisticated microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific instruments began turning up all sorts of information conflicting with the Bible. Since that time, there has been no letup in the debates on this subject. In the twentieth century, the conclusion that design must imply an intelligent designer turns up over and over in Christian apologetics by ex-Communists like Chambers, as well as by converts to Christianity like Chesterton and Lewis. When it came to intelligent design, these very dissimilar men were all on the same page—a page that could not be turned and that signified the opposite of John Donne’s glorious image of a transcendent “library where every book shall lie open to one another.”
Chambers’s account of the moment when he began to question atheism and, by extension, communism is almost comically reminiscent of Paley’s analogy between the creation of the universe and the design of a watch—only, in Chambers’s case, the source of illumination was his daughter’s ear. In the foreword, written in the form of a letter to his children, to his 1952 autobiography, Witness, Chambers described “every sincere break with Communism” as “a religious experience.” When anyone leaves the Communist Party, Chambers declared, the break occurs “because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.”7 Chambers was then famous and notorious as the essential prosecution witness in the perjury trial of the equally notorious Hiss, who was convicted of having lied to a congressional committee about having been a member of the Party. The “witness,” who left the Party in 1938, testified that he and Hiss had been close friends as Communists in the 1930s, and had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. Chambers was led to repudiate Communism by a growing realization, beginning with his baby’s ear, that the God of the Bible, not Stalin, was the arbiter of the universe.
My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her forehead or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.8
That parenthetical “the Communist view” is priceless. Chambers could just as easily have used the adjectives “evolutionist,” “Spinozist,” “atheist,” “agnostic,” or “humanist”—any word, really, that belongs to the vocabulary of Enlightenment reason, evolution by means of natural selection, or modernism in general. Chambers’s overwrought absolutism comes through clearly in everything he has to say about the religious nature of both his embrace and his ultimate rejection of communism. I suspect that his tone had as much to do with the refusal of liberal intellectuals to believe his testimony against Hiss as with their own political views, which included an abhorrence of all informers of the McCarthy era.*4
Chesterton, who grew up and came of age during the late Victorian era, was still as flummoxed in the 1920s by Darwin’s challenge to the concept of man as a special creation of God as Pope Pius IX had been in the 1860s. In 1864, Pius issued his Syllabus of Errors, which rejected just about everything that had taken place since the Reformation and said, in essence, “We do not seek or need an accommodation with science, with political systems that separate church and state, with societies where people believe that public schools should be free of church control. Like God, we will always remain the same.” A major error of the modern world, the Syllabus declared, was the suggestion that the teachings of the church fathers “are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and the progress of the sciences.”9 This monolithic and confidently doctrinaire faith, as it remained throughout the first half of the twentieth century, would be a magnet and lodestar not only for disillusioned communists but for absolutist converts like Chesterton, with a psychological need to be, if not more Catholic than, at least as Catholic as the pope.
In 1916, Chesterton uncompromisingly described The Descent of Man as a vision that “really was a descent of man—[who]…had been kicked off his pedestal onto the floor.”10 Remove specific American place-names and dates: it becomes almost impossible, when evolution is the subject, to tell the difference between the English literary critic writing during the First World War and Chambers, the American Communist-turned-Christian writing in the 1950s. (In fairness to Chesterton, the unprecedented carnage of what was then called the “Great War”—even though the comment about Darwinian evolution appears in a book on Victorian literature—produced a new and heightened susceptibility to anti-evolutionism among many religiously inclined people, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, on both sides of the Atlantic. Social Darwinism had perverted Darwin’s theory of evolution by extending the notion of the “survival of the fittest” from man in a state of nature to man in a state of civilization—an idea that was explicitly rejected by Darwin himself.*5 As religious traditional
ists saw it, the world’s most recent war owed a good deal to secular rejection of the biblical concept of man as “a little less than the angels.” In America, the three-time presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, would become the leading exponent of postwar anti-evolutionism.)
Lewis’s thinking was much deeper than Chesterton’s and as far removed in tone from the spottily educated Chambers’s as could be imagined. Yet Lewis, notwithstanding his less hectoring and absolutist tone, shared Chambers’s and Chesterton’s preoccupation with evidence for a plan in creation, and he offered one of the more novel variations on the argument for a divine and intelligent designer. What is unusual about Lewis’s argument for design is that he combines it, in Mere Christianity, with his answer to the unanswerable theodicy question. And this book is based on a series of lectures delivered by Lewis and broadcast by the BBC during the Second World War—a time when, as was the case during the First World War, the question of how a loving God could allow such evil in the world loomed particularly large for religious believers. By the time the lectures were first published as a book in 1952, the theodicy question had become even more unavoidable in light of postwar revelations about the full horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Lewis struggles, like all Christian philosophers, to reconcile evil with divine design.