by Susan Jacoby
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?…A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies….Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.11
Justice cannot possibly be a concept invented by human reason, any more than an ear as an instrument for perceiving sound can be the product of eons of evolution by means of natural selection. This argument is, in its emphasis on an intellectual rather than a physical design, more subtle than that of Chambers (or Boyle or Paley). But it is really the same naked argument dressed in donnish clothes, with the addition of the essential charge made by all of the religiously orthodox against atheism: There can be no morality without religion. Justice, compassion, forgiveness cannot possibly be ethical concepts that arise from the concern of human beings for one another but must be the overarching, implanted work of a divine creator. The human brain, by itself, cannot conceive of either absolute or relative justice. And if evil and injustice exist, then the imperfect understanding and nature of man must be the reason. In this discussion linking divine design and human concepts of justice and injustice, belief in free will (including the freedom to think) lurks, as it always does, as the escape clause. But Lewis does not say any of this in an authoritarian tone; there are a good many ifs along the way to obscure, for a modern reader, the Augustinian and Thomist origins and destination.
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The relationship between politics and conversion to a traditional religion is neither as clear nor as linear as the relationship between politics and a conversion to a rigid secular ideology. Chesterton and his friend and contemporary Hillaire Belloc (1870–1953), also a devout Catholic (though he was raised in the faith), formulated a distinctly odd, now largely forgotten political philosophy know as “Distributism.” Belloc and Chesterton (often joined in the portmanteau “Chesterbelloc,” coined by George Bernard Shaw) promoted their philosophy, until Chesterton’s death in 1936, in the contrarian magazine G.K.’s Weekly. The publication was founded in 1925, and Chesterton explained that his magazine would fight for Catholic “ethics and economics,” just as a magazine like the New Statesman did for “Socialist ethics and economics.” The connection between Chesterton’s religious views and his politics, once he converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism in 1922, was clear. He had dabbled in spiritualism in his youth—a commonplace among lapsed Protestants in the late nineteenth century—and returned to Anglicanism when, in 1901, he married a woman who took the Church of England seriously. His conversion was prompted by the conviction, held by all English intellectuals who followed the path from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, that the English church was a wobbly imitation of the “real thing”—the One True Church that Henry VIII had forsaken for Anne Boleyn. There is no doubt that Chesterton thoroughly approved of the stand against modernism and materialism embodied in the Syllabus of Pius IX. In a 1926 book dealing specifically with conversion to Catholicism, Chesterton declared that there was no other institution “to say a single word for the family, or the true case for property, or the proper understanding of the religious peasantries, while the whole press is full of every sort of sophistry to smooth the way of divorce, of birth control, of mere State expediency and all the rest.”12 The Distributists called for a dismantling of industrial capitalism, a return to a romanticized Catholic tradition dating from the Middle Ages, and the re-establishment of medieval guilds to provide a more humane life for ordinary workers. That life wasn’t actually so great for those “religious peasantries” or for medieval stonecutters seems not to have occurred to Chesterton. His late-twentieth-century reputation as a clever but essentially minor literary figure has been re-evaluated and upgraded in recent years, partly as the result of a major biography, by the Roman Catholic priest and Oxford theological scholar Ian Ker, published in 2011. Ker is considered the world’s pre-eminent living authority on the works of the nineteenth-century Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90), who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism literally midway in his life’s journey, in 1845.
Newman’s works remained an important influence, well into the twentieth century, on Catholicism—and particularly on Catholic converts—in both the United States and Europe. Edith Stein—who, coincidentally, converted to Catholicism in the same year as Chesterton—began translating Newman’s diaries and letters into German shortly after her baptism. But there is little evidence in Chesterton’s dogmatic pronouncements to support Ker’s view of him as a worthy descendant of Newman. Chesterton’s apologetics, with their romanticized view of the medieval world, seem much less modern than Newman’s nineteenth-century works, which cannot easily be classified as theologically conservative or liberal (though both factions within Catholicism have tried to lay claim to him). In general, Newman is regarded as a man ahead of his time in Catholic history. His writings exerted much more influence on participants in the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, than on the First Vatican Council, in the late 1860s.
For Chesterton, even men of deep faith—if it is a liberal faith—are killjoys guilty of undermining belief in the miraculous. As early as 1908, he dismissed any “liberal” clergyman as a bogeyman “who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave.”13 There is a legion of famous Anglo-American cultural figures (not all of them conservatives), from Shaw to William F. Buckley, Jr., who considered Chesterton an impressive intellectual because he could always produce a well-turned English phrase. But a sentence may give off verbal sparks and still amount to utter nonsense. Actually, in societies infected by reason, libertarianism, and liberalism, any man is perfectly free to believe that his aunt rose from her grave. However, there is a word, used by rational conservatives as well as liberals, for such a person, and the word is “delusional.” It is only when the resurrection is said to have taken place thousands of years ago, and faith in the miracle has been codified in a powerful religion, that we shrink from applying the pejorative “delusion” to the belief that anyone has ever walked out of a tomb on his or her own two feet.
But, then, Chesterton was the author of a good many witty putdowns of reason and rationality. “When learned men begin to use their reason,” he said, “I generally discover they haven’t got any.”14 He also placed his wit at the service of the most predictable prejudices of the British upper classes of his time, including anti-Semitism. He opposed closer relations between the British government and the United States on general principle (who knew that Father Brown would become such a big hit on American educational television long after his death?) and remarked, “We have dipped the Union Jack in surrender to the Stars and Stripes, out of respect for the sort of Jew who cannot get into any club in New York.”15 Come to think of it, there isn’t anything witty in this passage. It is simply unvarnished anti-Semitism, and Chesterton’s embrace of one of the most vulgar prejudices of his British contemporaries further undermines attempts to portray him as a distinguished figure in Anglo-American intellectual history.
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Lewis, by contrast, did not try to substitute wit for reason, and was one of the least overtly political converts, in either the re
ligious or the secular direction, of his time. Although he is best known today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis became, in his long life, one of the leading apologists for Christianity in the twentieth century. The absence of in-your-face politics may explain why a number of his books on religion are still read. The U.S. National Institutes of Health director, Dr. Francis Collins, cited Mere Christianity and Lewis as important influences on his own conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s.
The disproportionate influence exerted in America by the conversion stories of both Chesterton and Lewis (especially Lewis, who possessed a gift for presenting abstruse theological argument in popular form) has been compounded in recent decades by the cultural distance that makes it even more difficult now than it was in the mid-twentieth century for Americans to view lionized English writers as men of their own troubled era rather than as superior beings with some sort of special insight into rarified matters of the soul. A particular element in Lewis’s influence is the popularity of the Narnia fantasies and their preservation in the mass entertainment media. Lewis’s conversion to Anglicanism rather than Roman Catholicism was a disappointment to his close Catholic friend Tolkien (1892–1973).*6 But the melding of religious symbolism with pagan fantasy that characterizes both the Narnia series and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings indicates their commonality of devotion. Oh, all right, so Lewis in particular could never have predicted what modern marketing would do with his Jesus symbol, the virtuous and adorable lion Aslan. And neither Tolkien nor Lewis could have imagined that their works would beget the phenomenon of Harry Potter and that, yea, verily, alleged grown-ups would line up by the thousands every few years for premieres of the latest movie featuring the supernatural. But the fantasy worlds of both writers do intersect with their intellectual and theological worlds, in that they are permeated by contempt for modernism and materialism.
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For all of the converts between the wars—whatever direction or directions they took—the changes of faith were central to their lives. “The mark of the Faith is not tradition; it is conversion,” Chesterton asserts. “It is the miracle by which men find truth in spite of tradition and often with the rending of all the roots of humanity.”16 Chambers describes his conversion to communism, which occurred in 1925, in much the same terms. Embracing communism in what Chambers called the “dying world” of bourgeois humanism after the First World War was as much a religious experience as leaving the Party would be for him in late 1938. For Chambers, the Party alone offered “faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die. It demanded of me those things which have always stirred what is best in men—courage, poverty, self-sacrifice, discipline, intelligence, my life, and, at need, my death.”17
In view of the parallels between the centralized authority of the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, it is not surprising that scholars and journalists have focused so much attention on ex-Communists who converted to Catholicism. I was surprised, for example, to learn that Chambers, after leaving the Party, had chosen first Episcopalianism and then Quakerism, with its central tenet of an Inner Light that can never be dictated from any outside force, rather than Catholicism. Chambers had his problems with Quakerism, too—probably because Quakers tend to be political liberals, for whom Chambers had nothing but contempt. Much of this contempt was rooted in his belief that liberals had swallowed many of the arguments of Marxism (and Chambers made no real distinction between Marxism and the twentieth-century Bolshevism he had embraced). But if Chambers’s view of liberalism and democratic socialism was distorted, that is understandable in light of the widespread belief of American liberals, well into the 1990s, that Hiss was the victim and Chambers the villain. If a man is telling the truth, as I believe Chambers did, and is not believed by a large group of people, the witness would have to be a secular saint to judge that group with any objectivity. I have often wondered whether Chambers would have turned to Catholicism had he lived longer.
There is no question that Roman Catholicism, with its centralized authority, was in a better position than other religions to provide a haven for homeless Communists longing for direction. In America, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen specialized in celebrities and in former Communists.*7 Among his decidedly non-Communist celebrity converts were Clare Boothe Luce, the renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler, and Henry Ford II. Two of his most prized converts, forgotten now but well known at the time, were Louis Budenz, former editor of the American Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker, and his wife, Margaret. My favorite story demonstrating the wholeheartedness of conversions to and from Communism appeared in a 1980 profile of Margaret Budenz, then seventy-one, in People magazine. The author interviewed Budenz, who had converted to Catholicism, along with her husband (who had been raised a Catholic before he became a Communist and an atheist), by Sheen in 1945. The couple already had three children born out of wedlock; Bishop Sheen married Margaret and Louis in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral shortly after Margaret was baptized and Louis confessed his sins and returned to the church. The People story reports that Margaret, to underline her “wholehearted commitment to Catholic doctrine, tossed her diaphragm into a trashcan at Grand Central Terminal.”18 A fourth daughter was born to the born-again Budenzes thirteen months later.*8 This seems to me a quintessentially American story, if only because it is hard to imagine a European Catholic convert—from communism or from one traditional religion to another—talking to a celebrity magazine about having thrown away her contraceptive device as a demonstration of her new Catholic loyalties.
Still, Americans tend to be too fond of claiming that something is specifically an American phenomenon. (We can’t seem to get over John Winthrop’s idea of ourselves as inhabitants of “a city on a hill” that cannot be hid.) Tanenhaus, in his definitive 1997 biography of Chambers, describes Witness as “a uniquely American book, for only in America do religious and political ideals become interchangeable, even indistinguishable.”19 This evaluation misses the mark. Even though religion does play a larger role in American politics today than it does in any Western European country, there is nothing uniquely American about the attraction of early-twentieth-century leftist intellectuals to communism, as attested to by the memoirs and letters of Koestler and numerous other European political activists. Tanenhaus is right to point out that Chambers’s religio-political absolutism does indeed have American antecedents in the Puritan jeremiads of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather, with their vision of human beings as inherently fallen creatures, and of worldly affairs as a titanic battle between those who would elevate man beyond his station and those who know we are only saved or damned by the grace of God. But this theology—like the anger at social and economic injustice that drew so many intellectuals to communism—flourished on both sides of the Atlantic.
The voice whispering compelle intrare is most seductive when it is articulated and heard not by the wicked but by the good, and when it seems to come from deep inside rather than from the outside. The religious imperative is at its most powerful when explained with words of beauty and emotion by converts who, like Lewis and Stein, could never be imagined as tyrants imposing their beliefs on others. Such words make it easy to forget that compulsion, in the emotional, psychological, political, and religious realms, often presents itself in the first instance in the attractive guise of voluntary surrender to an overwhelming good. Yet, as the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky once observed, the worst ideas in human history rarely announce themselves by walking through the door and declaring, “Hi, I’m Evil” to the ready supplicant.20 On the corporal plane, we speak of “falling in love”—not of choosing to love (not, at least, until the first overwhelming enchantment has diminished enough to allow a return of the material world to the consciousness of the lovers). Christian mystics speak of the love of God in precisely the same fashion—in lyrical, besotted terms whose only mortal equivalent is the early throes of passionate sexual love. Communism, too, was
a love affair, for those who saw the compulsion of the Party not only as a personal liberation but as the liberation of the human race. “Arise ye prisoners of starvation / Arise ye wretched of the earth / For justice thunders condemnation / A better world’s in birth.” No one converted to Bolshevism in its early years because he or she thought a worse world was in birth. However, opportunistic conversions would become much more common in the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, as Stalin solidified his control of the state bureaucracy and punishment for resisting Stalinist ideology grew more stringent. As in the early Christian era, the spread of a new empire gave rise to a new faith.
It seems to me entirely understandable that, at a time when many intellectuals were attracted to Communism, many others were attracted to the more structured, authoritarian forms of Christianity. It is equally understandable that, although there were many instances of prominent ex-Communists embracing Catholicism, very few Party members (including those raised as Jews) showed any interest in observant Judaism after leaving their secular religion. Judaism differs from Christianity in that the former has not compelled anyone to come in since the nasty conquests of pagans described in the early books of the Bible. Judaism, for more than two millennia, has said “you may” rather than “you must” to potential converts.