The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Five of the later plays, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, hang together in that their overall theme is a search for a dimension of human existence that is “forever exempt from the laws of change.”12 This is highlighted and countered in the plays not just by the lurking presence of death (often in the form of terminal illness—syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer) but also in the fact that those who die are the last of their line: this is not just death, but extinction.13 In a famous article, “Symbols of Eternity: The Victorian Escape from Time,” Jerome Buckley grouped Ibsen with Coleridge, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Pater and William Morris in their attempts to “fashion worlds of artifice beyond the reach of change.” We see these “symbols of eternity” in Ibsen in, for example, the paradise/kingdom of Orangia/Appelsinia in The Master Builder, in Hedda’s ancient Greek paganism, in Borkman’s mine, in Allmer’s search for the unchanging dimension of human responsibility in his great book.

  What Ibsen’s plays explore are the pain and the tragedy almost inevitably involved in trying to create something of lasting value amid the flux and ceaseless flow of change, the experimental nature of life and reality. That said, his work is guardedly optimistic in its attempt to provide constructive responses to our new predicament, outlined by Nietzsche. “[His work] celebrates joy in the jaws of death, sees in the law of change not decay but continuous transformation of the self, that re-establishes value in an empty world by accepting responsibility for one’s actions and decisions, and that creates meaning in the void where none existed.”14

  Hedda Gabler poses the problem. Hedda has a complex inner life and longs to be “more” than she is—her bourgeois surroundings do not fulfill her and she aches for a classical world, a culture of higher purposes, of beauty and timeless myth, where she can feel “upward momentum.” She becomes a “virtuoso of the eccentric,” which helps maintain her feeling of being among the spiritually elect. It is her aim in the play to redeem Løvborg from his wife, who has changed him from being a bohemian into a respectable and abstemious academic. But when he dies in an unseemly scuffle with a prostitute, an ugly accident in a brothel, she realizes that the only way out for her, the only way to impose order—and yes, beauty—on her predicament, is to assert herself by means of her own death in a manner denied Løvborg.

  The other later plays are not so uncompromisingly bleak. Salvation, for Ibsen, is not to be achieved in any teleological sense, or by directing ourselves to any God-given “final cause,” but by ethical actions whereby our ideals are reconciled with “workable human realities”; life is small, and has its ordinary elements—oh, yes—but we must search for dignity where we can find it among those small, mundane lineaments, knowing that the most we can hope for is “flashes of spiritual value” and that they compose life’s larger purposes.

  If this view of flashes of spiritual value overlaps with Santayana’s philosophy, Ibsen’s idea about “cosmologies of two” overlaps with D. H. Lawrence (considered later) when he says, “We lack peace because we are not whole. And we are not whole because we have known only a tithe of the vital relationships we might have had. We live in an age which believes in stripping away the relationships. Strip them away, like an onion, till you come to pure, or blank, nothingness. Emptiness. That is where most men have come now: to a knowledge of their complete emptiness. They wanted so badly to be ‘themselves’ that they became nothing at all: or next to nothing.”

  In Little Eyolf, Ibsen gives us an early view of, and an answer to, Lawrence’s predicament of isolated individualism. After Eyolf, the crippled and thus half-unwanted son, is drowned, lured into the sea by the Rat-Wife, Alfred and his wife, Rita, resolve to do more for the poor children in their area. To help these children in a way they never helped their own infirm and less-than-perfect child brings them together in a way they have not been together before. The value they now see in their lives—to help the children—is an absolute value, in this world, the small world that is theirs, that surrounds them. What they are resolved to do may seem unremarkable, may not have the worldwide “significance” that Alfred’s book Human Responsibility might have had, was intended to have had, but it is capable of realization, it is a workable ideal. It may not feel like salvation in a cosmic sense, an otherworldly sense, nor will it confer immortality on Alfred and Rita. But it allows them to take part in something of value—helping others—that in itself can be regarded as immortal.

  And finally, it rescues their marriage, no small thing in Ibsen’s eyes, and that is because Ibsen has them change. “Why, oh, why,” says Alfred, “do we want one another to be always the same, fixed, like a menu card that is never changed . . . life—it keeps renewing itself. Let us hold fast to it, my dear.—We come to the end of it only too soon.” Life is change, says Ibsen, echoing the American pragmatists and Henri Bergson, in their different ways.

  When We Dead Awaken overlaps with Yeats to an extent. The sculptor Rubek is bored with his wife and at an impasse in his creative life. The fortuitous appearance of a model he once used for his work promises both a revitalized erotic life—desire—and to unlock his creative energies. But this recalls the “impossible alternatives” in Yeats’s poem “The Choice”:

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  Perfection of the life, or of the work,

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion . . .

  Rubek cannot reconcile these competing forces any better than anyone else can. The central conceit in When We Dead Awaken is a quartet—two men and two women—which forms and re-forms in a series of alliances, continually seeking, via these re-alignments, some solution to the individuals’ inability to maintain relationships, while leaving them lonely, incomplete, empty and in despair.15 With Yeats, Ibsen is forcing us to choose and reminding us that the “absolute” reassurance of art is not life, or not all of life, that it is not in and of itself completion or wholeness.

  In Rosmersholm can be found similarities with Santayana’s work in that the play—bleak and despairing as it is—is about joy, about the norm of life being joy, not in the sense that it is the standard, everyday state of man, but what he is born for.16 Rosmer is an apostate, trying to embrace change and effect political reform in Norway, even though it means supporting developments that go against the traditional interests of the aristocracy, of which he is a member. He sees himself as someone innocent and pure who is trying to do good in a disinterested way. Rebekka, the friend of his wife, Beata, who committed suicide a year ago, still lives in the Rosmer household because she is in love with Rosmer, sharing his political sympathies and actions. As the play unfolds it becomes clear that Rosmer may not be quite so pure as he imagines, or pretends to himself to be; that he is and has been in love with Rebekka. When Professor Kroll, Rosmer’s brother-in-law, learns of his political plans, he is outraged at the class betrayal and begins to sabotage Rosmer’s aims by publishing innuendoes in the local newspaper about what really happened concerning Beata’s death—hinting that it wasn’t suicide due to mental illness, as originally supposed, but to Rosmer and Rebekka having an affair. Rebekka admits that there is some truth to this, a confession that places a terrible burden on both of them.

  Ibsen’s message here is that to experience “goodness,” and to value it above personal happiness, “is to experience the meaning of joy.” He highlights this, typically perhaps, with the encroaching tragedy—the fact that neither Rosmer nor Rebekka can live with the guilt that is now exposed, that their relationship was to blame for Beata’s suicide. Together they kill themselves, in the same way that Beata died, by jumping into the millrace. “They die for the right reasons,” says Durbach, “to reassert the moral will, to free their love of guilt, and to establish once again the primacy of human values in the world of ordinary experience. They die in joy, in that complete fulfillment and realization of self in the love of the other which, in the language of an ea
rlier dispensation, would be synonymous with blessedness and grace. . . . They will die as a fusion of autonomous spiritual powers, a single consciousness, a genuine cosmology of two.” “Is it you who goes with me, or I with you?” Rebekka asks.17 “We go together, Rebekka, I with you, you with me. . . . For now we two are one.”

  Joy, which is the aim and purpose of life in Ibsen, comes from the power of moral perception. This is the only eternal value in a desolate world, “even at the cost of life and happiness.”18 Ibsen’s wide range gave his moral vision great authority.

  DESIRE AND CRUELTY

  Of Johan August Strindberg it has been said that “there is a shorter distance between blood and ink” than with Ibsen. Indeed, Strindberg’s dramatizations of what he saw as “the awful human impasse” were more urgent than either Ibsen’s or Chekhov’s. As mentioned earlier, Strindberg went through life “afraid and hurrying” and ridden with guilt. He took personally the moral decay that he saw all around him, and this to an extent fueled his “quarrel with God,” which was, as Otto Reinert put it, a much more ambiguous enterprise than Ibsen’s. Fascinated by the new metapsychologies of Freud and Jung (Strindberg and Freud gained the allegiance of the German literary world at much the same time), his object in his plays was to continually expose the self of the alienated modern man, “crawling between heaven and earth, desperately trying to pluck some absolutes from a forsaken universe.” He was determined to make war on God—with Nietzsche he shared a contempt for Christianity—while searching for something new, and he identified with the rebels against God—Cain, Prometheus, Ishmael. Yet he admitted at one point, “I have looked for God and found the devil”; “Our highest achievement [is] . . . the concealment of our vileness”; and “My life adds up as a warning for the improvement of others.”19

  His most characteristic tone is found in his plays Easter, A Dream Play, Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata. Each concerns existential revolt directed against the meaninglessness and contradictions of human existence. For Strindberg, in a world of elusive truth, “only the self has any real validity.”20 An ardent disciple of Darwin and Nietzsche (he exchanged several letters with the philosopher), Strindberg admitted, “I myself found the joy of life in its strong and cruel struggles,” and in his explorations of the cult of the self he presents us with the argument that it is only Dionysian vitality that carries us along.21 He himself had a Dionysian vitality, at one stage conducting psychological and drug-induced experiments on his own person, and exploring botany, chemistry and optics in addition to writing sixty plays, thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history and politics, as well as producing the more than sixty paintings exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London in 2005.

  He shared certain ideas with the pragmatists and phenomenologists. He was convinced the “world process” is a whirling chaos of flux and yet more flux, and his work is marked, above all, by his impatience with fixity of character. A fatal error of classical theatre, he felt, was “its commitment to constant characterization.” The truth is, as revealed in Miss Julie, for example, that man never stops developing and contradicting himself, and the only true picture of him is one that reveals “the multitude of inconsistencies and contradictions” of his soul.22 Strindberg confirmed that he had lived “multifariously” the lives of all the people he described in his work, and that his plays were an “unending dialectic” between his “many selves.”

  At the same time (and contrariwise) he had a “metaphysical hunger,” and though lacking a mystic’s temperament he had a mystic’s impulse toward some single comprehensive experience of reality, an Anschluss mit Jenseits, a union with the beyond. His demands on the ultimate were preposterous but he never learned to reduce them. And this helped bring about a profound change in him. Very possibly the real roots of Strindberg’s “preposterous demands” were sexual and pathological. This is certainly one way of understanding what he called his “Inferno crisis” in 1894, a number of terrifying paranoiac psychotic episodes lasting two years, after which he rejected his earlier atheistic position and came to accept the semi-mystical views of Emanuel Swedenborg and others, who maintained that life is controlled by “powers” or supernatural agents, and that there are “correspondences” between the transcendental world and the real world; that there is, in some mysterious way, an “Absolute” unifying all experience.

  Until that point, however, Strindberg had accepted—more than had Ibsen—the almost classic Nietzschean position: that we are many selves, that we are what we make of these selves, and that is why Dionysian vitality is so important. And only by means of that vitality can we maintain our appetite for experimentally exploring each of these selves until we settle on one that we find fulfilling, always acknowledging that life cannot remain static, either, and that once we find one self that makes us seem whole, life may change again soon enough.

  But he also occupied a Freudian position in that he thought that the expression of what could be “dredged up,” uncensored, from the unconscious was the only way to achieve wholeness, the only way to “de-restrict” desire and “complete” what the self is. But even when these epiphanies occurred, Strindberg didn’t expect them to last forever; the flux of life continued, the Darwinian struggle—as often as not containing cruel elements—never stopped.

  “MOZARTIAN JOY” IS THE AIM

  George Bernard Shaw, the Irish author of some sixty plays, co-founder of the London School of Economics, an early, prominent member of the Fabian Society and the only person to win both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar (for his work on Pygmalion), both was and wasn’t religious—depending on how you define that term. He thought that Darwin had “dealt a mortal blow to Christianity,” but he was much influenced by Bergson’s “creative evolution.” He wrote a book entitled The Quintessence of Ibsenism in which he set out a lot of his own interpretations of Ibsen: that he had sought to rescue his generation from materialism; that the aim of life is self-improvement, self-fulfillment; that morality is not fixed but evolves; that standards can never be eternal; that modern European literature is more important in teaching us how to live than the Bible; and that “Mozartian joy” is the aim.23

  Shaw thought that life and “reality” were essentially experimental, that individuals were themselves experiments. Traditional religions, he thought, were intellectually dishonest and inflexible in their inability to take account of evolution and its many implications, the most important of which was and is the indefiniteness and the mutability of reality itself. Given the uncertainty built into reality by evolution, there could be no permanent, unchanging moral imperative built into life, nor could there be any transcendent validity to anything. At the same time, “We must have a religion if we are to do anything worth doing. If anything is to be done to get our civilization out of the horrible mess in which it is now, it must be done by men who have got a religion.”24 How he reconciled these two views is part of his achievement.

  Shaw was obsessed by change in life, by the possibility—and hope—of improvement, which is why he was as interested and as involved in politics as he was in the theatre. There was no “golden rule” for him—the way we lead our lives must be judged by its effect on life itself, on ourselves and others, rather than by conformity to any rules or ideal. “Life consists in the fulfillment of the will, which is constantly growing, and cannot be fulfilled today under the conditions which secured its fulfillment yesterday.”25

  It followed for Shaw that there is more to life than happiness. “There is nothing so insufferable as happiness, except perhaps unhappiness.” Having the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not, he thought, was a guarantee of miserableness—“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.” But he didn’t idealize work any more than anything else—because he didn’t trust idealization. Whereas happiness for him was “self-centered, transient, sterile and uncreative,” he worshipped creativity. With Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House he feared “the accur
sed happiness . . . of yielding and dreaming, instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”26

  If he had any motto or maxim, it was “Use is life.” He reiterated time and again that “he could find no mighty purpose” in the pursuit of either personal happiness or personal virtue. But he often spoke about finding his sense of life in “use”; he even said he believed himself “used” by an unspecified force for mighty purposes—he was a follower of Bergson and this is how, for him, élan vital worked, perhaps. Traditionally, such feelings might originally have involved reverence for some form of deity, but Shaw argued that the conventional understanding of the Christian God was just another form of idealism.

  He expressed this better in words he put into Don Juan’s mouth in Man and Superman: “Religion [had been reduced] for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.” From this it naturally followed that the life to come, for Shaw, was not “an eternity spent . . . in a sort of bliss which would bore any active person to a second death,” but “a better life to come for the whole world.”27 The overlap with the pragmatists here is clear.

  In 1895, he wrote to his friend Frederick Evans, a London bookseller and amateur photographer, “I want to write a big book of devotion for modern people, bringing all the truths latent in the old religious dogmas into contact with real life—a gospel of Shawianity, in fact . . . I have been described as a man laughing in the wilderness. That is correct enough, if you accept me as preparing the way for better things.” This, then, was Shaw’s aim, to create “an awareness of something better and the will to bring it into existence.”28 And this, too, is where Bergson came in. In writing the preface to Back to Methuselah (1920), Shaw says: “I had always known that civilization needs a religion as a matter of life or death; and as the concept of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with the first condition of all religions that have ever taken hold of humanity; namely, that it must be first and foremost a religion of metabiology. I believe myself to be a servant and instrument of Creative Evolution. God is will. . . . But will is useless without hands and brain. . . . That evolutionary process to me is God.”29