Another summer day: After the attack on the morning of September 11, someone posted on the Internet a photograph of one of the disintegrating towers. The image of a face seemed to form from whorls of black smoke—people were quick to say the devil’s face. The face had a bulbous schnoz and more closely resembled the face of W. C. Fields.
Anyway, it was not Satan that people I know talked about in the days and months after September 11. It was religion—the religion of the terrorists—and the dangerous presumption of men who say “My God.”
After September 11, it became easier, apparently it became necessary, for many of my friends to volunteer, without any equivocation of agnosticism, that they are atheists. It was not clear to me whether they had been atheists all along or if the violence of September 11 tipped Pascal’s scales for them. People with whom, as my friend Will used to say, I would share my lifeboat, declared their loathing for religion, particularly the desert religions of the Middle East—the eagerness to cast the first stone, the appetite to govern civil society, the pointy hats, the crooks and crosses, the shawls, the hennaed beards. One of my closest friends, who lives in Memphis, observed that God looks to be deader than Elvis. (In his e-mail, my friend nevertheless resorted to a childhood piety: “God” is hallowed as “G-d.”) But most of my friends left it at nothing. Whiteout. January First of the rest of their lives. (Buddhism retained its triple-gong rating.)
I was driving an elderly friend to a funeral. In response to nothing I had said (I suppose because we were on our way to a funeral), my friend announced her conviction that the world would be better off without religion. “I mean all of them,” she said. An angry gesture of her open hand toward the windshield wiped them all away. As we drove on in silence, it occurred to me that I had interpreted what my friend said as something about men, though she had not said men. I had interpreted what she said as about God. But she said religion.
“I feel the same way about the Olympics,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said after a while. “I believe in the Good Lord. It’s religion I don’t like.”
From his desert perch, a drab, plump ayatollah rejoices in the deaths of young martyrs who send infidel dogs to hell. The teachings of Jesus Christ go begging when a priest falls to his knees on the hard rectory floor to fondle and blight an altar boy’s innocence.
My friend the doctor, whom I see every Sunday at Mass, whom I follow in the Communion line, asked, as we were leaving church, if I think the world is better or worse off for religion.
If you think the world is perfectible, then worse.
• • •
In American myth, the Village Atheist is a loner, a gaunt fellow in a flannel shirt, standing on a hill on Sunday morning. He faces away from the steeple in the dell. Perhaps he is putting flowers on his wife’s grave. The hater of Sunday lives in a trim white house, eats porridge for breakfast; no wreath on his door at Christmas; gives generously to the Community Chest. His roses are the envy of the garden club, of which he is not a member.
Here are the three atheists of my youthful apprehension, apostles of the rounded sleep: Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Bertrand Russell, James Joyce.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a professional atheist who appeared on television talk shows in the 1950s and ’60s. She was blowsy, unkempt; I could imagine her living room—the card table piled with legal briefs and Swanson TV Dinner trays full of pens and paperclips. She had two sons. Her fierce humor—I suppose I would now call it a lack of humor—was directed at Americans willing to violate individuality by insisting on public religious observance. O’Hair sued the Baltimore school system to outlaw the reading of Scripture in public schools; she sued NASA to stop astronauts from quoting Scripture in outer space. One of her sons repudiated her and she him; that son became a Baptist minister. Madalyn O’Hair was abducted by a former employee whose motive was, ostensibly, ransom. Her second son and her granddaughter were also abducted. All three were murdered.
In 1901, at the age of twenty-nine, Bertrand Russell discovered paradox. He wrote:
Let R = {x | x ∉ x}, then R ∈ R ⇔ R ∉ R
Nor do I.
When I entered college, Bertrand Russell’s book Why I Am Not a Christian stood face-out on the shelf of the campus bookstore—the face of a philosopher, I thought at the time. The face of an Anglican bishop, perhaps. The fluffy white hair, the starched collar. The face of an ancient satyr. In 1958 Bertrand Russell wrote: “I do not think the existence of the Christian God is any more probable than the existence of the gods of Olympus or Valhalla.”
An affront to his ghost, I suppose, but Catholics, in our infuriating way, held out hope for James Joyce. Haunted, wasn’t he? “Haunted” was the word we used. Old Jimbo exhausted his breath with sacrilege, yet the Church was forever cropping up in his book, wasn’t it? He took it all too seriously, too young. Don’t you worry, he’ll have come round at the last, like Molly Bloom:
. . . as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves . . . ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are . . .
• • •
I have never been to the mountaintop, if that’s what you mean. The only thing I know for a fact is that God never uses His own money. He hasn’t got any money.
Some well-meaning person once referred to Dorothy Day, in her presence, as a saint.
“Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
Dorothy Day, as one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, ran a hospitality house for the poor on the Lower East Side of New York. This was in 1956. The building that housed the hospitality house did not meet the fire code of the borough of Manhattan.
Dorothy Day was fined $250, which she did not have. The city ordered her to make repairs. The fine and the circumstance were reported in the New York Times. The same morning the Times article appeared, Dorothy Day was leaving the hospitality center for the courthouse in order to plead her case before a magistrate of the Upper Manhattan Court. A disheveled man in bedroom slippers stepped forward from a line of people waiting on the sidewalk for clothes to be distributed. The man handed Dorothy Day a check for $250.
The man in bedroom slippers was W. H. Auden, the greatest poet of his generation. Auden read the article in the New York Times while eating his breakfast, got up from the table, exited his apartment with a check in his hand, marmalade on his chin.
In a preface to a book of critical essays, W. H. Auden defined his vision of Eden (by way of divulging how his critical faculties were colored) as: “Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints . . . Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera . . .”
When I asked a priest-friend for his vision of paradise, he said: “Well, it will certainly be a surprise, won’t it?’
• • •
Wayne lived in one of the welfare hotels on Turk Street. He may have sold drugs; if he did, it was penny-ante stuff. He may not have taken drugs; he said not. Wayne was about seventy-five percent trustworthy, a rarified percentile. He couldn’t read. I fear he may be dead. Wayne sat in front of the store across the way from Tillman Place Bookshop with a cup and a sign—he depended on fellow vagrants to make his signs for him: VETERAN. GOD BLESS.
Wayne was sweet-natured, simple-minded. Wayne told me he sometimes heard voices urging him to nefarious behaviors, but he refused those voices. He had no teeth, or few; he was often beaten up by bad men, particularly one bad man, who wanted Wayne’s space in front of the store across the way. Wayne’s space on the sidewalk was prime Sunnyside. The bad man, having chased Wayne away with hummingbird-like aggression, would then fold himself into abjection, would call o
ut, God bless you, sir, God bless you, ma’am, to passersby, and he was, perhaps, an authentic agent of God’s blessing, but not for Wayne.
On the day I recollect, the bad man was not about. Wayne was sitting on the sidewalk in his accustomed place. A droplet of rain was suspended from an awning; the tiny bag of water held the sun. A day in early January.
Switch-tense: As I watch, several things happen simultaneously: Up at the corner, in front of Shreve’s, the old man who sings “When You’re Smiling”—top hat, cane—is cajoling some frowning passersby to no avail. A young man—he is nobody I know—enters the scene from the north, approaches Wayne with a large pink box of doughnuts—left over from somebody’s breakfast board meeting, I assume, then left out on a trash bin. Anyway, a box of doughnuts. The man seats himself on the sidewalk alongside Wayne, offers the doughnuts to Wayne and also a cup of coffee—so maybe I’m wrong about the provenance of the doughnuts. Wayne smiles with pleasure, catches my eye as he reaches for a doughnut, and is momentarily connected to the old man singing “When You’re Smiling,” for he and the other—the doughnut bringer—in mock-mockery, begin to sway to the cadence of the song like two bluebirds on a bough in a silly old cartoon. The sun, too, now seems a simple enough phenomenon—cadmium yellow pouring onto the pavement. A passerby drops a dollar bill into Wayne’s cup and Wayne nods and smiles (and looks over to me). I smile. The design—tongue and groove—of a single moment.
I do believe the moment could be plotted algebraically according to some golden mean (though not by me), a line from A to B, B to C, C to D, D to E.
Therefore:
A = B + C + D
B + C + D = E
Therefore,
A = E.
But here’s the thing: Wayne’s smile.
I have thought about this for twenty years or more. Wayne’s smile said: Do you get it? Wayne’s smile said: Remember this moment, it contains everything.
• • •
After September 11, atheism has become the most casual interjection into the television conversation. The grand old rock star OBE, for example, imparts to us, though he hasn’t been asked, what he thinks of all that—of God, and all. Well, that’s all gone, thank God, he says, slapping his shrunken thigh. The music critic in our local paper regrets, on his readers’ behalf, the religious context weighing upon the transcendent beauty of a Bach cantata. And on the bestseller lists the ascending titles are apologies for the “New Atheism.” From England, cradle of the New Atheism (as London turns Muslim and Hindu), Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist, proposes that parents who raise their children religiously are guilty of child abuse. On the same shelf, the journalist Christopher Hitchens titles his essay on atheism as a deliberate affront to Muslim piety. Roughly 145 years separate the bereft atheism that drummed upon Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” from God Is Not Great.
In the early 1970s, I was a graduate student at an institute in London founded by a German intellectual who went mad. He believed he was the god Saturn and that he had devoured his sons. The institute is devoted to the study of Renaissance intellectual history at the moment in Europe when magic became science.
The government inspector in Jean Giraudoux’s play The Enchanted (1948) attempts to forbid the supernatural by decree:
Science . . . liberates the spirit of man from the infinite by means of material rewards. Thus, each time that man succeeds in casting off one of the spiritual husks of his being, Science provides him with an exact equivalent in the world of matter. When in the eighteenth century, man ceased to believe in the fire and smoke of hell, Science provided him with immediate compensation in the form of steam and gas . . . The moment man cast off his age-long belief in magic, Science bestowed upon him the blessings of the Electric Current . . . When he ceased any longer to heed the words of the seers and the prophets, Science lovingly brought forth the Radio Commentator . . . In place of revelation he now has . . . Journalism.
On Bill Maher’s cable television athenaeum, the journalist Christopher Hitchens proposes to Mr. Maher—and Mr. Maher wholeheartedly agrees—that science is the last best hope for humankind. Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Maher are unmindful, for the moment, of Hiroshima, drone missiles, chemical weapons, genetic modification, Original Sin.
After September 11, political division in America feels and sounds like religious division. Beginning with the sexual liberation movements of a generation earlier—with feminism and gay liberation—the growing preoccupation of the Left has been with the politics of sexual self-determination. There are some in the “old” political Left who decry the influence of sexual politics over traditional political concerns, like foreign policy and domestic poverty. It is more problematic that the new sexual identity movements allow themselves to be cast by the political Right as antireligious. The Left cedes religion to the Right, in exchange for a woman’s right to legal abortion. The political Right intones Leviticus to homosexuals who wish to marry. The Right assumes a correlation between politics and religion; the Left assumes an antagonism toward traditional religion as the price of sexual freedom.
I am old enough to remember the Negro civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. People who today relegate religion to the political Right forget how influential religion once was in the American Left. In those days, for that cause, civic protest was framed as religious idealism. Not only American history but salvation history seemed to weigh upon the present.
On television I saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascend the pulpit of the Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis. It was the evening of April 3, 1968. The civic life of America became part of a larger story, as Martin Luther King Jr. led his listeners to consider “the great and eternal issues of reality.” He spoke of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; he spoke of Athenian democracy, the Emancipation Proclamation, FDR, and the Great Depression.
People said among themselves afterward that Dr. King’s speech seemed, in its historical sweep, its elevated view, its summation, like the sermon of a man who knew he was going to die. Dr. King said he was grateful to God for allowing him to see this moment in America—the struggle for freedom by black Americans nearly completed. He said he might not reach the Promised Land with his people, as Moses did not. “But it really doesn’t matter to me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said. “Mine eyes have seen.”
2. The Desert Floor
The Israelites picked up a system of metaphor and a pervading sense of the irony of being God’s Chosen from their sojourn on the desert floor—the desert floor as an unending test of endurance. For all the humiliations the desert inflicted upon them, however, it was from the desert that the Israelites projected, also, an imagination of the metaphysical world. Hell is hot, for example. Eden green. If the progress of our lives is a vale of tears, the Promised Land will be a psalm. All who are alive above the ground plead with the sky. But the Israelites alone among creation received an extraordinary assurance through the prophet Moses: Where does God reside? God resides with us.
A blessing upon the New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker continues to commission and to publish and to pay for original illustrations and comic drawings. I noticed, while thinking about this book, that in almost any issue of the New Yorker, I could find cartoons that rely upon one of three allegorical ecologies that derive from the religious imagination: Mountain. Desert. Cave. Three ecologies of the holy desert still hold a place in the secular imagination of the Upper West Side.
The Mountain (these are drawings in the New Yorker, I remind you): Moses raises his tablets. (Guy in the foreground remarks to another guy, “Sans seraph!”) The Hermit Sage is seated at the mouth of a cave on a precipice—a foil to the Seeker who has climbed the precipice to ask the meaning of life. The mountain penetrates into the clouds to become Olympus, the mound from which sausage-curled Zeus heaves thunderbolts. Cloud cover extends upward to the Pearly Gates and to Saint Peter’s Desk, occasion fo
r gags related to the bureaucracy of entry or exclusion, as at a country club. Also, heavenly ennui—gags on the order of: Not what I expected. Or: If only I had known . . .
The Desert: across which a Sun-Crazed Man crawls, or two Sun-Crazed Men, one pulling ahead. Cactus, bones, empty canteens. If only I had known . . . Or: If you had listened to me. Also, the Desert Island—a single palm, two strandees. If you had listened to me. Also, the freeway exit to nowhere. (If you had listened to me.) Also, the Crazed Miner, combining allegories of Desert and Cave.
The Cave: the Sage (see The Mountain). Or the Caveman—usually a cave painter or an inventor of modernity. Also, the Tunnel of Love; also, the entrance to Dante’s Inferno: Not what I expected. Also, the Dungeon. Also, Hell—a vast cavern, lakes of flame; themes of bureaucracy, ennui (see Saint Peter’s Desk): Not what I expected. If only I had known . . .
And I am forgetting one: Eden. If only I had known . . .
• • •
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote of a “region of dissimilarity,” an absence, a nonexistence, of synapse between his, Augustine’s, ability to conceive and his attempt to conceive of the inconceivable—between the creature and the creator. “It transcended my mind,” wrote Augustine of his intuition of God. “It was superior to me because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it.” Augustine does not write about distance, but difference. We cannot think about God except insofar as God reveals God to us. And where did the God of the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, reveal His intention to accompany us?
The desert is a region of dissimilarity to us, to what we need for life—water, shelter, a body temperature of 98.6. So, it is logical, in a way, to seek the unknowable in the uninhabitable.
The desert of my imagining is at once extraordinary—the locus of revelation—and ordinary; it is a plain, a disheartening expanse of time and the image of all our days. Such was the desert the Israelites wandered for forty years unchanging.
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