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

by Watson, Peter

  Evolutionary fitness was for him a sort of red herring. He thought that our highest destiny is to be other than—outside—our biological urges; that “the soul’s reward is outside evolution, evolution and art [being] totally different,” the former achieving its results by imperceptible increments over long time spans, art achieving its effects, usually, by one magnificent urge, or surge. Valéry believed that the imperceptible pace of evolution led us to mistake continuity for finality, one consequence of this being that “there is no wholeness in the universe,” so that partiality is as real as totality—which is where the poet or artist comes in, creating “small worlds of order.” A successful work of art inspires “the force of faith without exacting belief.” A successful poem, for him, produces moments (moments, note) “of infinite consequence,” a separate reality from the biological world, spiritual but not theological. There is an overlap here with the views of Santayana.

  Valéry was particularly concerned to show that there is a “mutual irrelevance” of biological and spiritual values—for him that was the point of being human, that we had broken free of our biology. Biological life, as he characterized it, was “ordinary,” but though the soul was a partner to the body, our most precious psychological experiences are those—such as delight in knowledge, or disinterested love—“which envisage an end radically distinct from our involvement in life.” He thought that the Romantics’ yearning after the unattainable stopped them—and many of us—from coming to terms with the fact that all stages in our quest for discovery “are ineluctably provisional.”30 Rather, he thought that man, “a stranger on Earth,” could not bend the world as it is to any purpose: we cannot modify the constitution of things, but we can modify their relation to one another.

  Valéry felt that disappointment “inevitably” arose in all earthly experiences because “they are never quite adequate to what the self might hope to derive from them.” He applied this to works of art also: however significant the landmarks, they are never really definitive (this was summed up in his famous remark that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned at a certain stage). A poet should be easy to impress and impossible to convince; the spontaneous movements of the mind, especially our “strange preoccupation” with immortality, must be verified and examined by a stricter second self.

  “A work of art is always to some extent a disappointment to its author, but because it announces something less than the intended discovery, not because it is unequal to, or betrays, something already fully experienced and inadequately expressed. The perfection, to which the work is inadequate, lies beyond the work, not behind it; we are concerned with the falling short of a perfection whose complete conception—quite apart from concrete realizations—would itself be emergent, not with the imperfect expression of an ineffable but already known ‘profundity’ [italics added].” And this argument applies equally to the self: the essential self, “like the poetic reality which is one of its aspects,” is something to be discovered by emergence which, even as it emerges, is never the end point. And “[t]he product of any . . . single act is to be regarded as contributing to the discovery, not as the imperfect announcement of a thing discovered in a more favored state of consciousness. . . . The discovery itself is a purpose.”

  This is why, for Valéry, order, or form (the sonnet in poetry, for example), is not a limitation: the form is objective, not limited to an immediate occasion, and determines relationships recognized by author and beholder alike, both of whom can assess the success or otherwise of the realization, each having a more or less agreed idea of the form and how it affects expression. A work of art shows us what we are capable of and points to a perfection that will never exist except in the mind of either the artist or the beholder, or both. The perfection, however big or small, always remains ideal; we must accept our disappointment as we savor the ideal notion that the work of art has set before us.31

  For Valéry as for Stefan George, poetry, the poetic use of language, even its artificiality—especially its artificiality—were spiritual, at least in intent: “L’esprit est un souffle, la pensée un poids.”32 Our most intimate, our most profound thoughts, he said, come from the naïveté and confusion of our ancestors, and no poetry worth the name can allow such thoughts to remain inexact—in that sense poetry has embodied progress, as a form of clarification (Thomas Nagel’s definition of philosophy). The intellect is the real angel in our heads, it is the intellect that determines that the soul is an arbitrary construct, that art is the real spiritual construct, that spiritual life, seen in this way, is a proper part of nature. We are on the verge of the psychological age, he wrote.

  Poetry was “an absolute place,” a voyage through “the Netherlands of in-between existence,” a way of thinking unlike any other, a way for thought and words to emerge, one result of Schopenhauer’s “will,” which Valéry thought of as “an urge without a goal,” perhaps the most meaningless thing in the cosmos. A poem is not just a way of reli[e]ving an internal pressure in the poet, or of producing “passive delight” in the reader or beholder, but also an indispensable means of arriving at a unique state of aesthetic consciousness. It is not so much something divine, as Mallarmé had said, as “the temporary depository of our intimations of divinity . . . the poem is, for the poet, at once an invitation to the reader, a stage in the realization of his own destiny, and no more than provisional in either of these functions.” In creating a poem, the poet becomes more than himself, a fuller form of himself; “the real destiny of the universe is to be expressed by poets.” The self is inexhaustible.33

  The very point of poetry, Valéry is saying, is for the human mind to approach asymptotically the experience, which is as far from the materially real as it can be, and yet still means something: that is what spirituality is. Many have said that religions draw much of their lasting force in the world from the continued existence of suffering. Valéry saw that people are capable of far more than they will actually achieve in their lifetimes, and that this knowledge—derived from reading and sharing poetry—should strengthen them and help them prepare for, and respond to, suffering. In other words, we are bigger than traditional religions allow us to be.

  It is this ambition that unites the figures in this chapter.

  EVANESCENT ORDER

  W. B. Yeats described himself as “enthralled” by Nietzsche. In 1902, he wrote to his friend the American collector John Quinn, “I have not read anything with so much excitement,” and elsewhere he said that he found Nietzsche a “joy.”34 Otto Bohlmann finds many correspondences between the work of Nietzsche and that of Yeats, the latter distinguishing between a “harsh” and a “gentle” Nietzsche, and being drawn to the philosopher’s “darker” instincts and his ideas about man’s “frightful” inner nature. Yeats liked the fact that Nietzsche looked out on the world “with unmoistened eyes,” that he thought the “total character” of the world was “chaos,” and that the fact that the world was “rich in contradictions” was “fruitful.” He was sympathetic to Nietzsche’s opinion that love was “a brief forgiveness between opponents.”35

  For Yeats as for Nietzsche, personality “is a constantly renewed choice,” invariably giving life the qualities of a (Darwinian?) battle, which is nonetheless to be “embraced as a joy.” Once we acknowledge life as a tragedy, and understand our limitations, he said, we open ourselves to the fact that “even the shortest moments might contain something sacred, which outweigh [for that brief time] struggle and suffering.”

  For Yeats, that’s what the aim of poetry was: the creation of brief moments of “ecstatic affirmation.” The world, as the phenomenologists say, is illogical, and reason, logic, poetic analogies and license allow us to “treat as equal what are merely similar,” thereby creating order; and even evanescent order is better than none.

  Like his fellow Irishman George Bernard Shaw, Yeats both was and was not religious. He thought that “ultimate unity” can be achieved only beyond the phy
sical world, but he also thought that subjectivity and objectivity need each other “if wholeness is to be achieved”; and that is what poetry is, subjectivity and objectivity wrapped up into order. For him, “all art is passion, the praise of life,” and he shared with Shaw, too, the view that there is “no final happy state except insofar as men may gradually grow better.” Great art—and great art always has tragic overtones—takes us “beyond self-consciousness” into “self-forgetfulness”: this is what salvation is.

  He, too, was influenced by Mallarmé and the Symbolists. When he read Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s occult drama Axel, he said, “I could without much effort imagine that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for.” He was drawn to the Symbolist technique of terse and open-ended communication “that defies analytic attempts at exterior deciphering or decoding of ambiguities of meaning.” He liked the subtleties of poetry “that have a new meaning every day.” For him this was “the meaning of meaning in poetry.”

  Nor was Yeats averse to regarding art as having a sacred function—the poet as secular priest. “The arts in brooding on their own intensity have become religious and are seeking . . . to create a sacred book.” In “The Autumn of the Body” he writes: “The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests.” And, elsewhere: “How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their words upon men’s heartstrings again without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.”

  His achievement in amalgamating metaphor and (Celtic) myth in noble, grandiose sweeps endowed poetry and poetry reading with a ritual, almost a ceremonial quality, and that, too, suggests it was a secular replacement form of liturgy.

  In many of his works the protagonists combat chance elements of an indifferent cosmos. However, unlike Mallarmé, Yeats never abandoned the possibility of spiritual transcendence, which is why his broader significance lies elsewhere. He was as much a child of his time as he was of his father. John Butler Yeats was a confirmed religious skeptic. A lawyer who abandoned the bar in Dublin to study painting in London, he was later described as a man “who had an opinion about everything and information and eloquence to support it, and was always witty and intelligent even when inaccurate. Edward Dowden, G. K. Chesterton, Van Wyck Brooks, and others have testified to his personal charm.” Trained in law, J. B. liked dichotomies, the social versus the individual, the intellect versus the emotions—in particular “poetry is the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the sociable-minded.”36 For him, Shakespeare’s age was the ideal age, for then, “everybody was happy.” Unhappiness came in with the French Revolution, “which brought realism along with it.” And there were two kinds of belief, he maintained, the poetical and the religious, poetry expressing an absolute freedom, and religion embodying the denial of liberty.

  W. B. Yeats was fortunate in having an educated and reflective father. In his early years he reacted against many of the elder Yeats’s views, in particular his skepticism. But those views help partly to explain the poet, as does the general intellectual climate of the time. Because, as W. B. came onstream as a poet and as an individual, developments in Europe and America were influencing young men like him (see the following chapter for details). These events caused Yeats to react against his father’s skepticism, but not to embrace what we might call the status quo ante—Christianity. Instead, like many others, in an attempt to combat the “materialists,” as he called them, he turned to semi-mystical thought, which refused to accept the universe identified by the scientists and the rationalists. He subscribed to a variety of occult theories, joined occult societies, and formulated a mystical nationalism which, while it resulted in some magnificent poetry, at this distance might seem embarrassing.

  The point of Yeats is that the system he tried to adopt was far more all-embracing, far more ambitious, attempting to explain far more than anything that, say, Shaw or Valéry tried to do. But Yeats ultimately failed. In retrospect this was—and perhaps still is—his greatest significance, and it is the subject of the next chapter.

  * * *

  I. Taylorism, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1914), referred to the introduction of scientifically calculated synthetic workflows into factory management. Intended to improve efficiency, it was sometimes called Fordism.3

  8

  “The Wrong Supernatural World”

  Y

  eats would probably not have turned to the occult sciences with such alacrity had not a movement in that direction already been well under way. As Richard Ellmann describes it: “All over Europe and America young men dropped like him, and usually without his caution, into the treacherous currents of semi-mystical thought. . . . Since Christianity seemed to have been exploded, and since science offered to Western man little but proof of his own ignominiousness, a new doctrine purporting to be an ancient and non-European one was evolved by a strange Russian lady. The new movement called itself Theosophy and offered a ‘synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy’ which opposed the contemporary developments of all three.”1

  The “strange Russian lady” was Madame Helen Blavatsky, born in 1831 in Yekaterinoslav, who advanced “with certainty” her theories that “man had never been an ape” and that Herbert Spencer was in fundamental error, and accused in particular the Christian priesthood of modern materialism. Modern religion, she insisted, was but ancient thought distorted; and to uncover what such thought really was, she turned to comparative mythology, which, since about 1860, had been highly developed in books by such scholars as Max Müller, a German who taught at Oxford, and culminated in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).

  In an early work of her own, Madame Blavatsky drew attention to what she saw as the similarity in the fundamental beliefs across all religions, and attributed this “to the existence of a secret doctrine which was their common parent.” She claimed access to an oral tradition, for the true doctrine according to her had never been allowed to be set down. “Now,” she said, “an ancient brotherhood was keeping the secret wisdom high in the mountain fastnesses of Tibet.” The members of this brotherhood had no interest in spreading their wisdom, but should they choose to do so, she confided, they would “astonish” the world. And they had at least shown certain things to Madame Blavatsky, for the onward transmission of their secret doctrine via the “Theosophical Society.” “As these mysteries were gradually revealed, the world would slowly progress towards the greater spirituality that had been prophesied for it.”2

  One of the reasons the movement was popular—it was a “magnet” for disaffected members of the educated public, says the Yeats scholar Margaret Mills Harper—was that it was both anti-atheist and anti-clerical. It attacked science but used scientific concepts where it suited the moment; it espoused fatalism, yet also offered hope of progress. “Spiritual evolution restored the hope which natural evolution had removed.”

  And it was Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, her chief work, that drew Yeats to Theosophy, the first of several forms of occult reasoning that attracted him. Her doctrine proposed three main ideas. First, she said, there was an “Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless and Immutable Principle on which all speculation is impossible”—the Theosophists paid little attention to deity. Second, the world is essentially a conflict of polar opposites, contraries without which life cannot exist. Third, she proclaimed the fundamental identity of all souls with the “Universal Oversoul,” which carried the implication that any soul might, under proper conditions, partake of the Oversoul’s power, a heady possibility. The soul had seven elements, or principles, and it evolved through these elements over time. Heaven and hell were to be considered as “states,” not actual places.

  During this spiritual evolution humankind progressed from a more intuitive way of thinking to a more intellectual style, growing more conscious. This is where the world is at present, s
he said, in the fourth stage. In future stages—five, six and seven—intuition, intelligence and consciousness will fuse into an intense spirituality that, at present, we cannot imagine. When it suited them, the Theosophists reinforced their arguments with examples from Eastern religions—for instance, they espoused the idea of Nirvana.

  Several of Yeats’s school friends became interested in Theosophy, which is how he learned of it. He met Blavatsky herself in London, in 1887, and she persuaded him to join her “lodge.” He was impressed by the fact that she was “so fully herself.” Yeats was not altogether convinced of her occult powers (he was enough of his father’s son) but he was impressed by the fact that, as he saw it, she “held in her head all the folklore of the world and much of its wisdom.”3

  Blavatsky warned her followers to beware of black magic, but not all of them went along with her, including Yeats, who took his friend Katharine Tynan to a spiritualist séance, “where he was so upset by the supernatural phenomenon that he lost control of himself and beat his head on the table.” However, by that time the demand for “magical instruction” was growing, and Blavatsky consented to form an “esoteric section” of the society to accommodate it; Yeats joined enthusiastically. He hoped that it would prove to the satisfaction even of skeptics like his father that occult phenomena were possible.4 Several experiments were carried out, which sound ridiculous now but were taken seriously then. The esotericists tried (unsuccessfully) to raise the ghost of a flower, and to evoke certain kinds of dreams by sleeping with special symbols under their pillows. Madame Blavatsky took objection to these efforts, and Yeats was asked to resign from the Theosophists, which he did.