JOHN GRAY CONFRONTS A GODLESS WORLD
Theisms come in many shapes and sizes, and so, according to John Gray, do atheisms. The title promises a typological classification of the various kinds of atheism. What the book delivers is an attack on ‘meliorist’ atheisms – atheisms, that is, which are committed to the belief in history as a steady upward course from the darkness of barbarity into light of civilization (from Latin melius= better). Foremost, in Gray’s sights, I suspect, is that old bugbear of Christian apologists, the ‘new atheism’ of Richard Dawkins et al.. But the criticism comes, this time, not from the standpoint of Christianity, but from an atheist, desperately concerned for us all to be assured that it is perfectly possible to be a real atheist without all the naïve new atheist nonsense of making the world a better place.
What Gray says in this book
Five chapters dealing, quite critically, with meliorist atheisms are followed by two which describe, in more positive terms, certain supposedly less familiar atheisms that Gray regards as non- or anti-meliorist. In reality, these atheisms turn out, not so much to be distinct atheist ‘creeds’, as diverse aspects of a single family of unbelief – namely, meliorist atheism. Those aspects, dealt with in four successive chapters, are progress (JS Russell, Bertrand Russell); evolution (Voltaire, Mesmer, Trotsky, Yuval Harari); revolution (Jan Bockelson, Jacobinism, Bolshevism); misotheism, or God-hating (Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky, William Empson). They may occur severally or in various combinations, but, together, represent the family traits of meliorist atheism.
According to Gray, these traits reveal such atheism to be a legatee of Christian monotheism. Christianity, he argues, has always been characterized, in its developed form, by millenarianism, and a modified form of gnosticism – both elements that guarantee its meliorist character. When divested of supernatural belief, this meliorist faith morphed into the secular religion described in these chapters.
In contrast, Gray’s final two chapters set out some examples of non-meliorist atheism untainted by the Christian meliorist legacy (Santayana, Joseph Conrad, Schopenhauer, Spinoza). Unlike the atheism of the earlier chapters, this atheism, says Gray, owes nothing to monotheism, but has more in common with pre-Christian, non-monotheistic forms of religion with their cyclic, as opposed to a linear, view of history. In other words, Gray’s classification aligns meliorist atheism with Christian monotheism, and non-meliorist atheism with pagan, non-monotheistic religion. The latter form of atheism has, in Gray’s opinion, successfully broken with Christian monotheism.
This way of mapping out the religious terrain is at odds with the conventional one, which treats atheism as synonymous with non-religion and an abandonment of all religious worldviews. Such a view is incorrect, according to Gray, and a product of Enlightenment misrepresentations. ‘Religion’, properly understood, he argues, denotes the ideational activity by which humans construct their collective worlds. As such, it is part of the human condition. No one can escape it, not even meliorist atheists. We all inhabit collective worlds, after all. But the religion by which they are reproduced and transmitted down the generations has, in most ages, not been about, belief in a monotheistic deity. It follows that the Enlightenment view of religion as just that – ‘belief in a monotheistic deity’ – leaves out of the picture many important aspects. These include precisely those which meliorist atheism shares with its Christian past – including its linear understanding of history and its meliorist aspiration. As a result, meliorist atheism, by adopting this Enlightenment view, misunderstands, not only religion, but its own ideational basis and its own relation to religion.
My reactions
I agree with certain elements of Gray’s analysis – in particular, his broad definition of ‘religion’ as any kind of ideational activity. I also agree with him on two further points: that many contemporary atheists have not emerged from the shadow of Enlightenment ideology, and that any emergence from that ideology will need to be accompanied by a radical re-mapping of the religious phenomenon.
But I also believe that, in attempting this re-mapping himself, Gray gets the crucial conceptual boundaries in all the wrong places and that he misunderstands the genealogy of atheism. Above all, he is wrong to make meliorism the crucial issue. Misconceptions are often aided and abetted by that familiar journalistic habit of focussing on individual personalities and stories. If one sets out with individual stories, on the one hand, and a pre-conceived schema of atheism, on the other, it is all too easy to establish connections between the individuals and their stories with a view to justifying the schema. Such a method is no substitute for serious cultural history.
My own interest in these issues arises out of a concern with Christian apologetic. It is of crucial importance, in my view, for Christian evangelists properly to understand the ideational forces ranged against us. There can be no productive engagement between Christians and their interlocutors so long as the nature of those forces are not properly understood. In the interests of assisting such understanding, I mean to set out my disagreement with Gray’s mapping of the religious phenomenon, and then propose what seems to me a better alternative. With this established, I shall attempt to situate on that map the atheistic positions favoured by Gray, and examine their claim to be non-meliorist.
My disagreements with Gray
What are the grounds for Gray’s characterization of secular humanism as a transform of Christianity? What antecedents in Christianity do we find for humanist notions such as progress?
Essentially, they are two: Christian millenarianism and a Christianized form of Gnosticism.
Before considering these, let me make clear I do not dispute that humanism emerges, at least in some degree, out of Christianity. The transition is gradual, and, over the course of it, a whole spectrum of positions emerge that are intermediate between the two – Deism, for example. Nevertheless, what we arrive at in the end is not what we began with. Black is separated from white by a whole spectrum of greys. Yet, black is not white, and white is not black.
The early Christians believed that the full realization of God’s Kingdom was imminent. In the meantime, their own communities were to be a kind of anticipation of that future reality, manifesting in the here-and-now something of the glory to come. As time went by, and the initial sense of imminence wore off, Christian communities of many kinds – from monasteries to the millenarian projects of radicals like Jan Bockelson – have always continued to share the aspiration of bringing the eventual conditions of the Kingdom of Heaven into the reality of the present. I am less sure how far these communities ever felt they were hastening the arrival of the end-times, as opposed to simply anticipating an arrival that they already believed to be imminent. There have evidently been periods of intense eschatological ferment. At such times, the sense of participation in an anticipated event may, in reality, have been hard to distinguish from the sense one is contributing bring it about, however convinced one may be, on a theoretical level, that the day and the hour lie ultimately with God.
Certainly, both mainstream Christianity and exclusive humanism maintain a teleological conception of history. But the Christian understanding is not necessarily one of an incremental progress to its goal; indeed, it has far more commonly resembled the NT picture of a swift descent into chaos, from which the second-coming has brought a providential rescue. Nor, for all the above-mentioned difficulty in distinguishing participation in the anticipated event from hastening its occurrence, has the mainstream Christian conception shifted from the notion of a final end that God alone would bring about. In both respects, the meliorist atheism described by Gray presents a sharp discontinuity with practically all orthodox Christian teaching. I would not deny that, in some degree, secular humanism represents a transform of Christian belief – but Gray’s meliorism is not where the continuity lies.
As for Christianized ‘Gnosticism’, Gray’s concept remains so ill-defined that I am hard put even to understand what it means. The clearest instance he gives is John Scotus Erigena’s view that ‘the Absolute needs to manifest itself in time in order to become self-aware.’ In other words, ‘God created human souls so that God could know himself in them’. The continuity of such a view with German Romantic philosophy is clear enough: the continuity with mainstream Christian teaching, much less so. Erigena would seem, in this respect, to have been, to say the least, a theological outlier. So clearly is this the case, indeed, that when Abrams in his classic account of Romanticism wants to pinpoint the essential difference between the underlying myth of Romanticism and that of mainstream Christianity, it is precisely on its ‘Gnosticism’ that he places the chief emphasis.
God created human souls so he could know himself in them. Instead of being a stain on the face of eternity, humankind was a mirror in which God could see itself. Shattering himself into infinitesimal fragments, God created the human world. History is the process in which these fragments are reassembled.’
In other words, divine self-actualization manifests as the history of humankind, and the history of humankind is nothing other than that process of that divine self-actualization. This Romantic ‘God’ is entirely imminent in creation, and, as such, far removed from the transcendent being of Christianity, known to us from the Bible and mainstream Christian tradition.
So, the continuities of exclusive humanism with Christianity do not amount to very much. The corresponding continuity of non-meliorist atheism with pre-Christian religion rest, if possible, on even shakier ground – as I hope will become clear from my presentation below of an alternative – more credible – mapping of the religious phenomenon.
The types of religion
As already stated, I fully accept Gray’s definition of religion as ‘any form of ideational activity’. ‘Religion’ in this broad sense covers the full range of phenomena that qualify to be discussed here as ‘types of religion’.
However, for want of any more adequate term, it is also a term I propose to employ in an altogether narrower sense to denote a specific kind of ideation – one more familiar to our remote ancestors. This type of ‘religion’ is one according to which an individual’s status and their personal life-projects are determined: 1. by obligations that bind them to their parents, ancestors and ancestral spirits; 2. by relationships that they have with their fellow-beings by dint of those obligations to the past. The anthropologist Natalie Biardeau observes of the ancient Indian householder: ‘His social and family bonds are so strong that his troubles and joys are to a large extent those of the group to which he belongs. He cannot think of his own prosperity without thinking of that of his whole lineage.’ Religion in this sense is synonymous with ‘piety’ – towards one’s forebearers and fellows. Think of the Roman hero Aeneas with his father Anchises on his back, holding the hand of the infant son Julus trotting at his side, and with his other hand clasping the effigies of the ancestor gods he has just rescued out of his burning city. Piety of this kind, has, mutatis mutandis has been the lot of the greater part of human race throughout history.
There are two major exceptions – types of what might be termed ‘non-religious religion’. These are ‘religions’ in the sense of being ideational systems, but not in the sense of being types of traditional piety.
- The first of these types comprises forms of ‘ethicized’ or ‘salvation’ religion that stress the importance of ‘right intention’ in the performance of religious action, and so give an enhanced role to the worshipper as an individual rather than a representative of a social group. Examples of these include those great ‘faiths’ that emerged in the axial age, and constitute the greater part of what we nowadays think of as ‘religions’, e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.. The new of focus on individual intention inevitably implies a measure of withdrawal from the obligations of the inherited socio-religious order of piety, described above. To this extent, these religions may actually be at odds with ‘religion’ in the narrower sense, though such individualism is often tempered by a commitment to a social order of more universalizing cast than that of traditional inherited pieties: namely, Church (Christianity), umma (Islam) or sangha (Buddhism). Still, from perspective of traditional ‘religious religion’ one can understand the disapproval and alarm registered by the Chinese official writing at a time when Chinese Buddhism reached its zenith: ‘I fear that every building will turn into a monastery and the people in every family will be ordained into the priesthood, and not one foot of soil will remain to the state.’ Similar misgivings are expressed by Cicero when confronted with another kind of ‘non-religious religion’ – the ‘shameful’ phenomenon of ancient Epicureanism.
- The second exception consists in the range of religious options arising out of the religious revolution of 18th-19thC Europe. At first, an elite phenomenon, this revolution began with the Enlightenment project of divesting the world of transcendence, and re-conceiving human good in essentially humanist terms. It then continued with the Romantic project of re-infusing the world with a new kind a spiritual dimension that accorded the human subject the place of author – or at least co-author – of its own experience. This development resulted in a focus on individual agency still more extreme than we find in our first type of non-religious religion. Concurrently, the social formations of early Modern Christendom with their dependence on Catholic and Protestant churches begin to transform into the modern nation state with its purely abstract concepts of sovereignty and individuality ‘based on formal reason and an absolute concentration of de facto power’ (John Milbank). Taken as a whole, this religious revolution, initiated by the social elites, has left the modern world with a broad spectrum of new religious options, all of them classifiable as ‘non-religious religions’. One option (2a) is to remain within the framework of an exclusive humanism by embracing the first phase of the religious revolution and ignoring the second. Another (2b) is to stick with the transcendent god of Christianity but to integrate the second phase of the religious revolution by developing theological understandings of Christian faith within the new space accorded to spirituality by the Romantic emphasis on subjectivity and experience. The third and final option (2c) rejects both exclusive humanism and transcendent theism, and carries through the Romantic revolution by seeking out non-transcendent versions of the sacred. Following the terminology of the sociologist Charles Taylor, I shall term the last option counter-Enlightenment immanentism. Immanentism here means an understanding of the sacred that doesn’t posit a creator god standing outside and beyond (as well as within) creation. The religion of traditional piety is immanentist in this sense. But the immanentism of the counter-Enlightenment does not revert to the old pre-Christian collective pieties, nor is it theistic in the traditional sense. Rather, it seeks out a this-worldly sacredness within the spiritual space opened up by Romantic subjectivism.
Where, then, do Gray’s atheisms sit on the religious spectrum?
Broadly, those atheisms for which Gray shows distaste on grounds of their meliorism (including the New Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens et al.) sit in category 2b: they are non-religious religions which are exclusively humanist. The atheisms of which he approves belong in category 2c; they are all (except perhaps Spinoza) non-religious religions which can be classified as forms of counter-Enlightenment immanentism.
In my view, Gray much exaggerates the importance on today’s cultural scene of exclusive humanism. The high visibility of the latter could be a relatively temporary blip occasioned by the recent notoriety of the New Atheism. Far more widespread these days, and more significant, is the religious tendency Taylor calls expressivist individualism. This is but the latest transform of a worldview largely derivative of counter-Enlightenment immanentism, and descending ultimately from Romanticism. Actually, Gray’s preference for this kind of atheism is very widely shared.
The identification of meliorist atheism with exclusive humanism is obvious enough. However, some further justification may be needed for my view that Gray’s preferred religious options are all types of counter-Enlightenment immanentism. In support of that view, therefore, I need to say more about the religious phenomenon so described by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. It happens to be particularly well illustrated by the religious perspective of George Santayana – an atheist position that gets first place in Gray’s exposition of anti-meliorist atheisms.
Here is what Gray has to say about it:
Santayana is materialist (‘Nature is self-sufficient’) but his world view doesn’t exclude the possibility of ‘spirit’ (‘Nature produces everything in the world, including the human species and all its works’ – even ‘religion’). ‘Spirit’ doesn’t involve ‘otherworldly rapture’ but arises from Nature itself, and consists in a process of ‘disillusion’ with the world that is somehow liberating. With the liberation of the spirit, ‘the whole natural world will be removed to a distance. It will have become foreign. It will touch us, and exist morally for us, only as the scene of our strange exile, and as being the darkness, the cravings, the confusion within which the spirit finds itself plunged, from which, with infinite difficulty and uncertainty, it hopes to be delivered.’
In order further to explain Santayana’s idea of Nature – or, as we learn elsewhere, natural ‘sensations’ or ‘essences’ – serving as a scene of ‘deliverance’ Gray refers to the passage in Proust where the narrator describes the experience (‘sensation’) of memories evoked by a morsel of Madeleine soaked in lime tea. Actually, this turns out to be the first of a series of such enigmatic experiences. The narrator eventually discovers the key to them in the power of Art to recapture and transvalue ‘lost time’, thus saving it from meaninglessness and oblivion. Proust’s novel is full of ‘darkness, cravings, confusion’. But through the trans-valuative power which the narrator finally learns to exercise over his own experiences, these are recaptured in a form that yields pleasure and aesthetic value.
There are two important points to made here. First, we have a ‘materialism’ that seems compatible with a notion of ‘spirit’. Neither ‘nature’ nor ‘spirit’ presuppose a boundary between matter and mind: on the one hand, ‘nature produces everything in the world’; on the other, spirit ‘doesn’t involve ‘otherworldly rapture’ but arises from nature itself’. There is no transcendence, no ‘other realm’; yet, this does not imply a worldview that denies, or reduces, the role of mind/spirit. Indeed, the latter arises out of nature, even while, at the same time, liberating us from her. There is, therefore, a kind of spirituality of nature herself.
This combination of materialism and ‘this-worldly’ mysticism is exactly what Taylor describes as counter-Enlightenment immanentism:
The modern cosmic imaginary can foster the spread of materialism … The link with materialism is clear enough. This imaginary has rendered close to incomprehensible the old cosmos ideas. It certainly has discredited the limited-scale Biblical cosmos idea. A vast and unfathomable universe, from which we have made a dark genesis, is obviously compatible with materialism. Indeed, the development of this imaginary owes something to ancient Epicurean ideas which were proto-materialist ….
What tells the other way are precisely the moral meanings of the universe: the sense of our deep nature, of a current running through all things, which also resonates in us … the sense of intra-cosmic mystery, which was quite missing from Providential Deism, and from the apologetics of the age of Newton … even as it is today from the scientistic outlook and that of much Christian fundamentalism.
Secondly, the worldview of Santayana, as Gray describes it, implies a distancing of nature that falls short of total abandonment. It will be ‘removed to a distance from us’; yet, for all that (and only when so distanced), ‘touch us and exist morally for us’ as ‘the scene’ of our strange exile. Thus, ‘spirit’ leaves behind ‘nature’ only to the extent of a satellite that continues to be held by it as it were in an orbit from which it cannot break out. To go back to Proust, the salvation to which the novel points us consists in a kind of recapitulation of experiences which, when lived through, were intensely painful, but, recaptured by the artist’s creative memory, achieve a strange value of their own.
A worldview such as I have just described is absolutely not that of Epicurus or of any traditional form of non-religious religion. Yes, it seeks a liberation from the world. But that liberation is not an escape, but a kind of recapturing of the world in another, aesthetic, mode. There is, in Santayana and Proust, an aesthetization of human experience that is completely foreign to Epicurus – or even to that famous poetic exponent of that philosophy, Lucretius,, In short, what is being preached here, as the example of Proust makes clear, is a Romantic immanentism based essentially on the practice of Art.
Meliorism?
Hopefully, we are now beginning to get a sense of true relation between Gray’s kind of atheism and other forms of religion that have existed in the world. So, it is now time to go back and examine Gray’s claim that his kind is non- or anti-meliorist.
Enough has been said to demonstrate fairly conclusively that Gray’s comparison with antique religion – religious religion – is irrelevant here. Counter-Enlightenment immanentism is a form of non-religious religion, like most of what came before it in the West over the last two thousand years.
Broadly, all forms of non-religious religion are salvational. It is the aspirations of the individual that motivate their break-away from the old religious religion. At the same time, these non-religious religions invariably came to fill a socio-religious and socio-political role in creating new more universalizing religious communities (e.g. Umma or Sangha). One sees this with Theravada Buddhism. Stripped of its traditional socio-political correlates, and presented for Western consumption as a form of ‘philosophy’, it can be reduced to a meditational practice such as will serve the largely therapeutic requirements of the Western individual. Hence, the frequent claims one hears that Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy. A glance at the ethnographic accounts of social anthropologists in Thailand or Sri Lanka will reveal the fuller picture of a faith which, like Christianity, has shaped the fundamental institutions of the lands in which it developed.
The case is the same for the modern Western forms of non-religious religion – but with one very relevant complication with which I shall deal below.
Expressivist individualism can be reduced to the practice of an aesthetic experience, and as such, need have no influence on anyone but the person who undergoes that experience – any more than Buddhist meditation necessarily does. But, in one case as in the other case, a culture or society sufficiently imbued with the personally salvific effects of that experience, will shape its institutions so as to create the conditions for its most widespread enjoyment. The human and cultural value of an aesthetic experience such as that of a poem of Schiller, say, will impose upon its votaries the duty to create the political and institutional conditions requisite to the institution of what Schiller himself terms in his well-known tract ‘The Aesthetic Education of Man’. In a similar way, the human value, for French Surrealist poets of the 20s and 30s of a practice of ‘poesie’ indissociable from the liberation of human desire motivates the revolutionary aspiration to freedom embodied in the communist revolution.
Is Gray’s preferred kind of atheism meliorist? It is certainly salvational – like all forms of non-religious religion: it has no other conceivable human goal. The question is whether those salvific effects stop short at merely personal change, or whether, to the extent that the self and its world are mutually interdependent, they lead to an aspiration also to change the world. The evidence of religious history would suggest that the second, larger, goal is always in some degree implicit in the first. Man being an essentially social being, one cannot even aspire to change the self without simultaneously envisaging a transformation of its world.
We come finally to the ‘complication’ mentioned above. This consists in the fact that some of the material cited by Gray (in the case of Marcel Proust, Dostoyeski, or Joseph Conrad, for example) comes, not from philosophical, religious, or biographical texts, but from novels, and represent the utterances of fictional characters. The important place of fictional writing amongst this material is hardly surprising, given the paradigmatic role of the aesthetic experience (e.g. novels) in expressivist individualism. But what can we conclude about the philosophical stance of the author of a novel from the philosophical reflections of its characters? It is obvious that such statements have to be interpreted according to a double register – even when the character is a fictionalized narrator, or a ‘persona’ of the author. Crucially – in the present context – one of the effects of this ‘complication’ can be to make the author’s stance appear more pessimistic and less ‘meliorist’ than it really is.
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks offers the perfect example of what I’m talking about. But it also offers such a perfect illustration of the different modes of religious and non-religious religion and their relation to each other that I propose to conclude with some extended reflections on this novel as a way of exemplifying the religious typology developed above, and especially the distinction between traditional forms of non-religious religion and the currently prevailing form of non-religious religion that is expressivist individualism.
The religions of Buddenbrooks
The novel retells the history of the rise and subsequent decline and collapse of the fortunes of a wealthy merchant family. Religion, in the broadest sense, features throughout. We begin with the very worldly though devout Lutheranism of the grandfather, Johann, symbolized by the ‘leather-bound journal’, passed down the ancestral line with the family Bible, in which the head of the household expatiates in gratitude to the divine hand that protects and guides the family fortunes. The son, Thomas, dedicates himself, body and soul, to family ‘firm’, yet, in his case, the father’s traditional piety gives way to a form of self-belief that he puts to the service of a collective, not a selfish, ambition – ‘the dream of preserving an ancient name, an old family, an old business, of carrying it on, and adding to it more and more honour and lustre … making the grain business flourish, and oneself beloved and powerful in a little corner of the earth … a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic’. Such thoughts, not committed to the ‘leather-bound journal’, evince the faith, so Thomas puts it, ‘that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me.’ ‘Fortune and success’, he goes on, ‘lie with ourselves. We must hold them firmly deep within us’. The tragic corollary that we see playing out in the latter part of the book is that any failure of such self-belief initiates a corresponding downward spiral. Furthermore, the Buddenbrook history evidences an increasing, and probably related, incapacity to make successful marital alliances – a matter of over-reaching princely ambitions scorning rival local houses in favour of cosmopolitan but ill-advised and ultimately fruitless connections abroad. The end-point of this trajectory is represented by the sickly and moribund issue of Thomas and his trophy musician wife. This son, Hanno, is possessed of uncanny musical abilities, but totally devoid of the qualities required for carrying on the firm.
The influence of Schopenhauer is, I suspect, first of all, very evident in the pathology of the will to which I have just alluded. But Schopenhauer also enters the novel very directly in the shape of an unnamed philosophical text that falls into Thomas’ hands at that phase of his career where his powers are on the decline, he begins to think of death, and ‘the burden of his son’s future, the future of the house’ weighs him down. ‘He said to himself he had lived in his forebears and would live on in his descendants. And this line which he had taken coincided not only with his sense of family, his patrician self-consciousness, his ancestor-worship, as it were; it had also strengthened his ambitions … But now, before the ear and penetrating eye of death, it fell away’.
He sat there one day, in the pavilion, and read for four hours, with growing absorption in a book … It was a large volume … the second part only of a philosophical system… And behold, it was as though the darkness were rent from before his eyes … “I shall live!” said Thomas Buddenbrook, almost aloud, and felt his breast shaken with inward sobs. “This is the revelation: that I shall live! For it will live – and that this it is not I is only an illusion, an error which death will make plain”…. End, dissolution! … (But) What would dissolve? Why, this his body, this heavy, faulty, hateful incumbrance, which prevented him from being something other and better.
The form of potential ego death intimated by this text seems to speak specifically to the disappointment of those family hopes vested in his son.
Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind childish folly! What can my son do for me – what need have I of a son? Ah it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple? I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say “I” – especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!
Finally, music is the third area in which the influence of Schopenhauer is felt. Within the novel, especially as represented in the distinctive gifts of young Hanno, it seems to represent and, in some way, to enact a kind of self-consciousness of the will that is formally incompatible with its active exertion in the world. Thus, Hanno’s distinctive gifts seem to combine musicianship with a certain capacity for empathy that emerges, surprisingly at that agonizing moment of his father’s life where he suspects his wife’s marital fidelity:
God knows how much he understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy, and strength. But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son. On that common ground they met as one.
Indeed, one might say, that “that common ground” constitutes a perspective that unites not only Thomas and Hanno, but the author and reader along with them.
So, return now to examining the question, on the basis of the texts cited above, whether the religious perspective of the author is ‘pessimistic’, and you will see the difficulty.
The perspective of the novel (which is all the text allows us to speak of) is rooted in the historical context of its characters and their moral world – a world about which the author evidently has very mixed feelings, to the extent that one could certainly say the book contained elements of satire. There is a broader, religious perspective brought to bear. But it is one destined by the modesty of the Romantic novelist’s vocation to be a novelist (as opposed to a philosopher or a preacher) to remain implicit. And it is a perspective to which the characters of the novel appear, on the whole, to have limited access. (By which, I mean that, unlike in the case of Proust’s great novel, there is no character in the novel that accedes wholly to the perspective of the narrator). Certainly, the condition of the house of Buddenbrook – or, to the extent that house is interpreted as paradigmatic, of the state of Germany, or the world – is not a happy one. Thomas’ ambitions are doomed to frustration, and the accumulated habits they have instilled deny him anything but a relatively transitory glimpse of a liberating reality beyond those ambitions. But Mann’s text offers us, even within the social context depicted, intimations of other ways of being that might balance human aspiration with a degree of self-knowledge. One of those moments that seems to open such broader perspectives, is the occasion when the vision of Hanno, accompanying his father on an arduous round of social calls, allows us to view his father with sympathetic but alien eyes:
He saw not only the unerring charm which his father exercised upon everybody: he saw as well, with strange and anguished penetration, how cruelly hard it was upon him … Thus the social intercourse with one’s kind, instead of giving little Johann, quite simply, the idea that one has practical interests in common with one’s fellow men, which one looks after oneself, expecting others to do the same, appeared to him like an end in themselves; instead of straightforward and single-minded participation in the common business, he saw his father perform an artificial and complicated part, by dint of a fearful effort and an exaggerated, consuming virtuosity.
In short, we see Thomas through his son’s eyes, struggling under the burden of a false religion, which one wonders even whether his father, had he known, would have recognized as his own.
This is evidently not a ‘tragic’ picture of the world – if by that we mean the sense of something necessary in human suffering. In fact, the broader perspective to which the reader accedes through such passages actually places the experiences of Thomas and his world within a wider, othering, vision which is both genuinely appreciative and compassionate at the same time. Like Swann in Proust’s famous novel, Thomas is somehow caught in the situation of Moses on Mt Pisgah, fated to glimpse, in the shape of Schopenhauerian philosophy, a ‘promised land’ which will never be his. Yet, in deference to that ultimate vision, his entire experience and that of his world remains hallowed by an aura of ultimate significance – like those enigmatic figures in the foreground of Caspar David Friederich’s pictures that carry the ‘elan’ of the viewers’ imagination towards a horizon that intercepts their own line of vision. To return to our earlier characterization of Santayana – what we find here ultimately is very much that aestheticizing (non-religious) religion that distances us from a painful world without altogether severing the connection. We do not ultimately break out of the orbit that maintains us in a constant separation from the world of our experience.
Going on now to the question of how this aestheticizing religion relates to other religious forms – it is interesting how closely the Weberian Lutheranism of the Buddenbrooks approximates, especially in the case of Thomas, to a worldliness so extreme as to put us in mind of the old family religion of pagan householder with its total supersession of the individual in the interests of clan and dynasty – to traditional ‘religious’ religion, in other words. So, in the light of this, it is hardly surprising if the religious reaction, when it comes in the shape of Schopenhauer, rather resembles in tone the traditional renunciatory call of ethicizing religions like Buddhism or Christianity to a kind of enlightenment through ego death. In both cases what is being renounced isn’t exactly individualism in the modern sense; there is indeed a sense in which it is itself ‘individualistic’. Rather it is precisely the collective patrician faith of clan and dynasty, that has become, for Thomas, a rigid carapace of which he can no longer divest himself.
The ‘religion’ of the book, then, if we may so describe it, couldn’t be said to correspond either to traditional religion or traditional renunciatory faith – it is a renunciatory faith of very specifically Romantic cast, totally imbued with its distinctive aestheticism with all that implies for the relationship of the self to its world – in short, a classic instance of counter-Enlightenment immanentism. Yet, we can see how that counter-Enlightenment immanentism comes, in relation to a distinctively ‘religious’ form of Christianity, to occupy the place traditionally taken, in antiquity, by non-religious religion in relation to the religions of family and clan.
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DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
STEVEN PINKER: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW!
TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE
REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY
JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND