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

by Watson, Peter

  The fashions and fads for homeopathy, phrenology, mesmerism, hydrotherapy, shamanism and Orientalism all came and went in the nineteenth century, some making bigger waves than others, but all leaving their mark. Figures like Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller were all regarded as inspirational leaders with spiritual qualities, together with John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland who arrived in the United States in 1849 and who, among his other achievements, deserves credit for preserving the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona as national parks.

  Despite the rise and fall of many of these fads, Taylor argues, the last three decades of the nineteenth century “produced full-fledged organizations devoted to spiritual therapeutics that were national, even international, in scope.”24 One of the reasons for this, he says, was that the visionary tradition had been gradually suppressed within American high culture “because of the rising tide of positivistic science.”

  Utopian socialism was another part of the visionary tradition, Taylor says, and here he includes the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, charismatic religions aiming to change the experience of intimacy, and alternative forms of consciousness. Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought and Christian Science drew their strengths from an interest in life after death, producing a parallel interest in “automatic speech,” table tipping, slate writing and “rapping and knocking,” as he puts it. Books with titles such as The Divine Law of Cure, Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography and Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics proliferated. In 1881, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College was formed by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, which taught pathology, “therapeutics,” moral science and metaphysics. The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1885. Despite many experiments, Taylor reports drily, “the psychical researchers were unable to discover any evidence for the reality of life after death.” But they did “establish the reality of the unconscious.”

  The impressive-sounding Boston School of Psychopathology comprised an informal knot of investigators including William James, the neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Richard Clarke Cabot and the neuropsychologist Morton Prince. Many of its members “had direct ties either by birth or upbringing with the intuitive psychology of character formation bequeathed to them by Emerson and the Concord transcendentalists.” The Boston School was much more scientific than any of its predecessors, being much influenced by Darwin. Even so, James maintained, it was psychic phenomena that “were destined to change the very shape of science in the future.”

  There was, Taylor goes on, a dramatic expansion of psychotherapy in America after 1900, as people began to acknowledge that “spirituality played a key role in a person’s mental health.” Mystic states were key here, he said, but they were so different from “the normal everyday waking state” that “we don’t know how to deal with them.” The Emmanuel movement was launched in 1906 at Emmanuel Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, “to fuse modern scientific psychotherapy with the Christian teachings of moral character development.”25 These meetings, which drew upward of five hundred people twice a week, came to be called “moral clinics.”

  In addition, from 1893 when the World’s Parliament of Religions met in America as part of the Columbian Exposition, marking the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World, a number of Indian swamis and Japanese Zen spiritual elders, plus the White Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, toured the United States to great acclaim, speaking at universities. These events resulted in the establishment, among other things, of Vedanta societies.

  Taylor, alumnus of the fiercely positivist Harvard, nonetheless gave a sympathetic account of the visionary tradition, arguing that it was more open-minded than the more mainstream traditions, that it discovered the unconscious independently of, and maybe before, Freud; and that, at root, it conceded that mysticism is a genuine aspect of experience, not a pathology, and one that we need to take seriously and try to understand if we are ever to have a full life. The main thrust of his study, from our point of view, confirms that though Yeats embraced “the wrong supernatural world,” he was by no means alone in this. For twenty or thirty years either side of 1900, vast numbers on both sides of the Atlantic thought as Yeats did.

  AN EPIDEMIC OF THE OCCULT

  In Europe, many spiritualists were freethinkers who rejected mainstream religious practice and belief but were left cold by the certainties of positivism, the search for the laws of behavior. “One impulse was to turn to spiritualism as a means of reconciling science, deism and socialism. This utopian project took many forms, from an exploration of autokinesis [moving objects by thought] to automatic writing to séances.”

  Quite a number of eminent writers, public figures, scholars and even scientists treated these matters as serious endeavors—Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Faraday. The Roman Catholic Church repeatedly anathematized the movement; spiritualist writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and specifically denounced by the Holy See (in 1898 and 1917, for example). Jay Winter explains the rest of the intellectual background: “In the early twentieth century those who entertained at least a suspension of disbelief about spiritualism did so for many different reasons. Some tried to translate traditional theology or the poetry of ancient metaphors about human survival into the language of experimental science. They point to magnetism, electricity, and radio waves as constituting unseen yet real phenomena of distant communication. Thought waves or other forms of human feeling or expression conceivably did the same.”26

  This spiritualist approach, Winter says, was as remote as could be “from the mental environment of fundamentalist Christianity. Observation, not Scripture, was the source of wisdom.” The pages of many journals—in France, Britain and America—were open to the possibility that spiritualist phenomena were worthy of investigation. Among those who shared these views were Sir Oliver Lodge, professor of physics at Liverpool University, later principal of Birmingham University and later still president of the Society for Psychical Research; the physicist Sir William Barrett; William McDougall, the Oxford and Harvard psychologist; Gilbert Murray, the Oxford classicist; William James; and Lord Rayleigh, Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge and Nobel Prize laureate in 1914. In Italy, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso took part in séances, in Germany the Kaiser dabbled in spiritualism, while Thomas Mann provided an (admittedly ironic) account of séances in The Magic Mountain (1924). In Russia, the professors of zoology and chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg joined the Theosophical movement, and some published papers on spiritualism.27

  CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

  Artists were not immune to these developments. Many, for instance, were drawn to Theosophy: Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society in 1909; the composers Scriabin, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were all familiar with the work of Madame Blavatsky; and though Paul Klee adamantly denied he was a Theosophist, he wrote, “My hand is wholly the instrument of some remote power. It is not my intellect that runs the show, but something different, something higher, more distant—somewhere else. I must have great friends there, bright ones but somber ones too.”

  Klee’s interest in Theosophy may have stemmed from his association with Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky adhered all his life to the Russian Orthodox beliefs he was born into, but he repeatedly meditated on Theosophical themes, in particular the “universal catastrophe” he believed was on the way, a belief he shared with his fellow Russian the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.28

  Kandinsky’s concern with Theosophy is shown most in two written works, the Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912 and Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written in 1909 and published two years later. The aim of the former, produced with his fellow artist the Bavarian Franz Marc, was to show what was happening in art all over Europe at any one time. Theosophy’s shadow runs through many of the contributions. August Macke, the Expressionist painter from Westphalia, close to Marc and Klee, produced an essay,
“Masks,” that Yeats would have found congenial. “Form is a mystery to us,” Macke wrote, “for it is the expression of mysterious powers. Only through it do we sense the secret powers, the ‘invisible God.’” Franz Marc took up a similar theme in an essay on Cézanne and El Greco, which described them as masters of a “mystical inner construction.” There was, he said, a “secret connection of all new artistic production,” awareness of which lay behind the ideas of the group known as Der Blaue Reiter. “Its aim was to speak to the yet unknowing world of these spiritual developments.” The Russian artist David Burliuk wrote that his fellow countryman the poet Andrei Bely was “a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy.”

  Kandinsky was a fervent advocate for the spiritual in art. His essay in the Almanac explored the “new value that lives within” man. This search, he said, leads to elevation, to a revelation that can be “heard”: “The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually effective beings. Even dead matter is living spirit.” Materialism, he insisted, has no capacity to hear, and must be replaced: “The final goal (knowledge) is reached through delicate vibrations of the human soul.” These views, as Jay Winter emphasizes, are “entirely consistent” with aspects of the Theosophical systems of Steiner and Blavatsky.

  In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky said that the artist is at the pinnacle of a triangle, often alone, often scorned as a charlatan or a madman. Yet painting and art, he added, “[are] not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle.” This, too, is consistent with Theosophical elements, which see the clairvoyant, like the artist, as one who could discern the “higher matter in which thoughts and feelings form patterns without any resemblance to the objects of the physical plane.”29

  There is a good deal here that, to an outsider, is woolly, incoherent, even absurd. But none of these artists followed Yeats all the way to a belief in fairies, and Kandinsky was the man who invented—or discovered—abstraction in Western art. In this he was mixing the spiritual with the unconscious, or thought he was. Arguably, this was a more fruitful direction than the one Yeats took.

  • • •

  In a sense, Kandinsky discovered abstraction by accident, if we believe his story that he came home one day and saw a painting of “real loveliness” in his studio, yet which had no identifiable shapes—until he realized that it was one of his own pictures lying on its side on an easel. However it happened, Kandinsky’s abstractions conformed to the Theosophical belief that the physical world—the world of objects, things—was losing its importance; indeed, it was preventing us from seeing the great spiritual world behind the world of objects and thus holding us back. It was central to Theosophy that when the spirit was revealed there would be an end to history—the contingent pattern to human events—and a new order would be established or revealed.

  Kandinsky’s abstractions would help bring about this new state of affairs, by showing that beauty had no need of earthly forms, the recognizable shapes of things; that there was a reality underneath and elsewhere. Recent scholarship has shown that his painting Little Pleasures (1913), prefiguring Sartre’s Les petites heureuses, is a Theosophical reinterpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John, in which the things of this world, the material reality whose small value is alluded to in the painting’s title, are seen as passing away—disintegrating into abstractions before the new order arrives. Kandinsky cherished some elaborate ideas about the symbolism of colors and their synesthetic qualities (“seeing” sounds and “hearing” colors), all part of his conviction that there was a hidden reality behind the appearance of things that it was his responsibility to convey. For him, abstraction was a new way of understanding the world, a way of approaching the spirit: spiritual existence—ecstasy—was abstract, without shape as commonly understood.

  The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, too, was a Theosophist but he was also more of a phenomenologist than Kandinsky, exploring the structure and growth of real forms. To a degree he went in the opposite direction of the Russian. In works like The Beginning of the World (1924), which is a marble sculpture in the shape of an egg, Brancusi is attempting to give us a completely self-contained work, where the skin is part of the structure’s expressive qualities but also inseparable from the rest. The Theosophists thought that “spirit” inhabited all matter, and so such a sculpture could be seen as liberating the spirit in marble. But we need not go that far. The simplicity and cleverness of Brancusi’s perfect forms tell us in this case, for instance, that marble can be as full of meaning as anything it might be made to represent, that self-containment is the aim of life; that, in order to present a “perfect skin” to the world, we need to live—to be—entirely within our nature, accepting its qualities and limitations; and that there is as much meaning in detail as there is in great abstractions. Brancusi emphasized this by making identical forms in different materials—Bird in Space (1925), for instance, exists in black marble, in white marble and in shiny metal. That the experience of each simple form is radically different shows how detail can be essence, can govern meaning. Meaning can be small as well as large.

  The third of the important Theosophical artists was Piet Mondrian, who was convinced that the purpose of art was “spiritual clarification.” He was likewise convinced that matter was the enemy of spiritual enlightenment and that all forms of material existence were coming to an end—one of Helen Blavatsky’s core ideas. “Nothing but abstraction could do justice to the imminent dawn of the spirit.”30

  Mondrian converted to Theosophy in 1909, during the Cubist vogue and at the time when Kandinsky was edging toward abstraction. Classical, original Cubism had been grounded in the city, in the metropolitan experience, but in his early grid paintings Mondrian explored nature—trees and oceans and skies—in which the main subject is energy, then a major concern of science (particles were forms of energy, and energy was locked up in matter as Einstein’s E=mc2 had shown); to Theosophists, energy was a form of spirit, the ultimate basis of reality.

  This is what Mondrian’s grid paintings show: the energy of trees and the energy surrounding them, with the haphazard pattern of the branches incorporated into the sky that forms the background. The same is true of Pier and Ocean (1915): a decrepit pier in Scheveningen, on Holland’s North Sea coast, is incorporated into the surrounding sea with only minimal transition. Thus, piers and oceans are different configurations of identical forces. Comparable with these two is Mondrian’s best-known work, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, produced in 1942–43 after the Second World War had prompted his move to New York. His grid style suited the pattern of Manhattan’s streets, but it is the movement—the energy—that is the most important element of this iconic painting.

  Mondrian’s images are as jerky, nervy and restless as Brancusi’s are calm. In the 1920s, asTheosophy faded, the “process philosophy” of Alfred North Whitehead took its place. By this account, the universe was and is a huge field of energy which takes different forms in a series of events. Events are the building blocks of nature—this is how the world is to be understood, as a series of manifestations, nodes of energy taking different forms. This had many ramifications, one of which was that actions could produce change in the world—events—just as much as thoughts could. This would give rise, in time, to the philosophy of existentialism. Mondrian was not an existentialist, not a classic one anyway, but his exploration of energy, restlessness beneath the surface, kept alive the essentially Platonic idea that there is a different realm, a superior realm, a more real realm, in existence somewhere.

  PART TWO

  One Abyss after Another

  9

  Redemption by War

  I

  n our own day the Great War stands alongside the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Killing Fields of East Asia as one of the defining horrors of the twentieth century. Let
us remind ourselves of just one example of that conflict. The Battle of the Somme got under way at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916; out of the 110,000 British troops who attacked that Saturday morning along the thirteen-mile front, no fewer than 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day—still a record. “Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.”1

  THE PHENOMENON OF 1914

  But that was 1916. The summer and autumn of 1914 were very different. Knowing what we know now, it is hard to credit the way people greeted war. There are two elements that concern us. One is illustrated by the fact that a London bookseller denounced the war as “the Euro-Nietzschean war.” He was referring to the (for him) surprising fact that the outbreak of war saw a marked rise in the sale of works by Nietzsche. This was partly because many of Germany’s enemies thought that the German philosopher was the chief villain, the man most to blame for the war in the first place, and the individual responsible, as time wore on, for its brutalities.

  In his book Nietzsche and the Ideals of Germany, H. L. Stewart, a Canadian professor of philosophy, describes the Great War as a battle between “an unscrupulous Nietzschean immoralism” and the “cherished principles of Christian restraint.” Thomas Hardy was similarly incensed, complaining to several British newspapers: “I should think there is no instance since history began of a country being so demoralized by a single writer.” Germany was seen as a nation of would-be supermen who, in Romain Rolland’s words, had become a “scourge of God.”2 To many it seemed as if the abyss had been plumbed, that the death of God, so loudly advertised by Nietzsche, had finally brought about the apocalypse many had predicted.