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

by Watson, Peter

  Spiritualism proliferated most among those without strong ties to established churches. The Frenchman Charles Richet conducted a remarkable piece of research at the front, publishing his results in the Bulletin des armées de la République in January 1917. There had been many respondents—ordinary soldiers, doctors, officers—and they reported most commonly accurate premonitions of death, not just among the combatants themselves but among members of their families back home.

  In Britain, Hereward Carrington produced a study entitled Psychical Phenomena and the War, which explored cases of dead soldiers apparently sending messages of hope and consolation to their grieving loved ones; and in both France and Britain there were many accounts of dead soldiers attending ceremonies of remembrance. Others saw angels on the battlefield, phantom cavalrymen, “luminous mists.” Winter makes the point that proper burial was by no means guaranteed, or indeed the norm, which must help to account for many of these reports. It was this universality of bereavement that fed what Winter calls the “spiritualist temptation.” This was all surely understandable, but no more than were the revulsion, disillusion and cynicism that came out of the four years of carnage, from which some sort of “meaning” had to be extracted.

  Fussell quotes Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV,” written in the early 1960s, under the title “Never Such Innocence Again”; and this is Fussell’s main point, that irony then entered the world as meaning, even as redemption. But irony offers only small meanings, paradoxical meanings—you could say it is even anti-meaning and certainly anti-transcendental.

  One can see what Fussell means. After the “Great” War, the very concept of “greatness”—great projects, great motives, great ideas—was under deep suspicion, if not dead in the water. This is perhaps why poetry was the dominant artistic wartime form: life—the good life, bad life, trench life, home life (when you are separated from your family)—is made up of the small things poets observe, the all-important details which, as often as not ironically, are made to seem meaningful. As the poets said, and as the phenomenologists and pragmatists had said before them, all the use in life is in the small things. That is one meaning of the Great War. When irony enters the imagination, truth is not the first casualty of war: innocence is. This was an earthquake in the landscape of belief. After the Great War, people no longer trusted belief.

  • • •

  Theosophy and spiritualism may be thought of as having attempted to rescue religion by giving it a “scientific” credibility that Christianity was seen to lack.31 According to H. R. Rookmaaker in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, “Mondrian and others were building a beautiful fortress for spiritual humanity, very formal, very rational . . . they did so on the edge of a deep, deep abyss, one into which they did not dare to look.”32 But, he said, another school emerged that did look into the abyss—Surrealism.

  The immediate precursor to the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico, whose self-portrait of 1913 was entitled And What Shall I Worship Save the Enigma? Several of his other paintings continue the theme: The Enigma of a Day (1914), The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) and The Disquieting Muse (1916). All of these show his concern with the disturbingly strange in the midst of the ordinary, with strange lighting, long shadows where the source of the shadow is not shown.33 His own comment on his work is that it seeks to identify a “presentiment” that has existed since prehistory. “We might consider it,” he says, “as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe.” This uncanny feeling, by implication, is where the religious sentiment comes from.

  André Breton picked up on this in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), in which he stated that it was the Surrealists’ aim to break free of the rational by such means as “free” (or automatic) writing—of the kind Yeats had indulged in with his wife—in order to uncover the irrational forces of the unconscious. In this sense, Surrealism sought to self-consciously re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science and, to that extent, it was essentially therapeutic.

  Surrealism was different among modern art forms in being technically extremely accomplished (which helped make it popular), and different in that it was concerned with dreams, the possibility of their symbolism representing a “deeper” reality below conscious life; and that order is merely on the surface and a different kind of meaning lies below. Breton stressed “the omnipotence of the dream” in his manifesto, and also that there were “certain superior forms” that remained to be discovered, the mark of them all being their irrationality. Surrealism sought to reveal these hidden forms, “dictated by thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”34

  This rejection of reason owed a lot, of course, to the ravages of the war and the sense that a new mode of living was now required. This was epitomized by Max Ernst, who wrote in his autobiography: “Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. He was resuscitated on November 11, 1918, as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myths of his time.”35 The new myths were intended to replace the old one, and this was shown most clearly in Ernst’s painting The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses (1926), the witnesses being Ernst himself, Breton and Paul Éluard. The painting parodies High Renaissance figures and pagan motifs. In several other paintings Ernst introduced non-Christian sources, as did Paul Delvaux and Joan Miró in their Surrealist work.36

  But what strike us, above all, are the Surrealists’ technical mastery and their compelling attempts to depict the disturbing world of the unconscious (though Freud observed that, however dreamlike Dalí’s works were, for example, they were still the product of the conscious mind). The technical mastery was more than incidental. Méret Oppenheim has been described as a Surrealist—her Fur Breakfast is composed of a standard cup, saucer and spoon made of fur. This is also pure phenomenology, drawing attention to the everyday qualities of cups and saucers and spoons by the simple expedient of interfering with that everydayness. The Surrealists aimed to show that there is more to reality than we think, that chaos and absurdity are as much a part of the human condition as reason, that irrationalism is a disturbing force, producing mystery, fear and wonder in equal measure, and that there is a difference between the surreal and the supernatural.

  Perhaps the seminal Surrealist work is René Magritte’s The Human Condition. This technically very accomplished picture shows a painting of sea and sand on an easel that is itself on a beach, so that the image on the canvas runs into the “real” view beyond. It is disturbing, but conveys successfully the idea that being disturbed doesn’t “mean” anything. Religion is a response to a disturbing or fearful feeling that is just part of the human condition, a mystery that doesn’t mean anything.

  Surrealism was a much more serious—and more accomplished—art form than it is often given credit for.

  10

  The Bolshevik Crusade for Scientific Atheism

  W

  e saw in the previous chapter that the “pervasive theme” of 1914, when so many people greeted the war so enthusiastically, was “community,” the wish to recover the community life that had existed before the forces of modernism destroyed it. In such an intellectual/emotional climate, and with the social upheavals brought about by the conflict, one might have expected that socialism, one of the most vibrant surrogate religions of the time and perhaps of all times, would have been waiting in the wings, so to speak, ready to take advantage of the mayhem. In practice, it didn’t work out like that.

  Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written in The Communist Manifesto, “the proletariat has no fatherland,” although they were completely opposed to nationalism, viewed war as invariably inimical to the interests of the laboring masses (“injecting a shot of illicit profits to prolong capitalism’s miserable life”), and although Marx had said that he saw war as the “midwife to revolution,” the Great War stimulated an outgrowth of nationalism which, in the main, the relative
ly new socialist parties embraced with as much gusto as anyone else. Nationalistic feelings, it would seem, outfaced international-socialist feelings everywhere. “Socialist leaders felt a tide of spontaneous patriotism welling up from below, and responded to this.”1

  Everywhere, that is, except in Russia, as all the world knows. There, as the Great War endured and losses mounted, revolution had been anticipated for months. In the new type of mass war, the home front was not excluded, and the suffering intensified, not helped by one government scandal after another. All the same, the end of the tsarist regime came surprisingly quickly, with the February Revolution of 1917 (February 26–29, Old System/March 8–11, New System) resulting in a “dual power.” Officially, a provisional government was now in place that would rule until elections could be held and a constituent assembly convened. But there was also an unofficial power center, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This is where, for a time, the real power lay. Later in the year, soldiers began to desert from the front en masse, peasants started seizing gentry land and workers took control of the factories. The Bolshevik Revolution (October 26–27, OS/November 7–8, NS) established a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose immediate aims were the consolidation of Bolshevik power and getting the country out of the war.

  This was not achieved without cost. In March 1918, the Russian government accepted German terms: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk lost her the Baltic states, large areas of Ukraine (until then Russia’s breadbasket), Belorussia, Poland and swathes of Transcaucasia, not to mention an indemnity in gold. German troops did not withdraw until the following November (and only then as a result of the armistice on the western front), and this left a power vacuum in which “Red” and “White” armies engaged in a bloody civil war.2 By the time these hostilities were over, the economy was to all intents and purposes at a standstill and no fewer than thirteen million people were dead, most of them not as a result of war but from starvation and epidemics. Five million more were to die in the famine of 1921–22, as a result of which millions of orphaned or abandoned children roamed the countryside, forced to steal so as to survive.

  The rest of the machinations and maneuverings via which the Great War led to the Russian Revolution need not concern us. What does concern us is the nature of Marxism, and for at least two reasons. One is that, in many ways, Marxism was conceived as an alternative religious structure; and the second, that it led to the most determined attempt yet made to eradicate God.

  A NEW STAGE IN MANKIND’S DEVELOPMENT

  Marx, says Bruce Mazlish, was one of the Essenes of early socialism. This is meant to imply a certain religious and ascetic quality, but in fact Marx defies easy characterizations. At times he saw himself as a scientist, invoking the name of Darwin as analogous to his own role in discovering laws not of “natural technology” but of “human technology.” In the late 1830s, at the end of the Romantic period, Marx wrote poetry and forged friendships with Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh. As Mazlish also points out, the spread of Marxism is analogous to the expansion of Christianity and Islam. So it should not be surprising to find that Marxism first succeeded in Russia, a backward and very religious country where capitalist industrialization did not yet exist.

  Nor, says Mazlish, was Marx immune to the language of Luther in the latter’s translation of the Bible. “Some argue that Marx is heir of the tradition of the great Jewish prophets, thundering forth at mankind. . . . But Marx received that tradition in its Lutheran form, as a result of being raised a believing Christian. Marx, needless to say, did not remain a believing Christian, any more than Luther was a forerunner of communism. . . . What they do share . . . is a rhetorical structure, namely the characteristic articulation of the apocalyptic tradition that moves step by step . . . from the original condition of domination and oppression to the culmination of perfect community.” Although he became a militant atheist, “a scoffer at the ‘union with Christ,’” the function of religion, its place in our psychology, remained of central importance to Marx.3

  Marx was always a philosopher as much as an economist. His basic contention, culminating in Das Kapital, was that the worker becomes “all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” He insists that the worker is poorer “even if better paid,” because of an increase in alienation—the worker has become impoverished as a human being. And so Marx developed the concept of alienation, arguing that it originated in labor and had four defining aspects: (1) labor is no longer the worker’s own under capitalism—it is an alien entity, dominating him; (2) the very act of production alienates the worker from his own nature—he becomes less than a man; (3) the needs of the market—and of the factory—estrange men from other men; and (4) from his surrounding culture. Marx believed these forces of alienation were producing a new psychology.

  His first achievement was to write as if he had discovered a new science, one that revealed a new stage in mankind’s development. He gives credit to the French and the English for first grasping that history is the history of industry and exchange, making economic history central. He dismisses political history; there is no social contract as such, à la Rousseau; only economic relations “tie man to man.” Such a view marked a profound revolution in political science.4

  Marx also argued that this financial division of labor underlies “the emergence” of the state. The state offers what is in effect an illusory communal life. Families and classes exist, offering some identity, but “it follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.” Political life is but a veil for the “real struggles” based on the division of labor and private property, and this is a further cause of estrangement. This leads Marx to a famous passage addressing the “ruling ideas” in a society: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Because of this, the alteration of men (for the better), “on a mass scale,” can be achieved only by an act, a revolution. “Only in the activity of revolution itself [does] man make himself into a new man, cleansed and purified.”5

  But is Kapital intended to be read as a dry textbook? Not really. “Workers who never read Kapital nevertheless could now trust that there was a scientific underpinning to their feeling of being exploited.”6 The purpose of Kapital was, as Engels saw, to become the workers’ bible, part of a campaign to kindle revolution. In that, it eventually succeeded.

  STEEL, HAMMER AND STONE

  Upon gaining power in 1918, the Bolshevik leaders moved swiftly to remove organized religion from Russian life. An early initiative was to alter the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian system, aiming to confuse people about the holiday seasons of the Orthodox Church. They also created work schedules that invariably conflicted with religious holidays and, eventually, replaced the seven-day week with a six-day week—five days of work and the sixth off. In effect, they abolished Sunday so as to prevent believers from attending Sunday liturgy.7

  In the 1920s, the Communist Party created the League of Militant Atheists, designed to broadcast the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, what came to be called “scientific atheism.” “In general, scientific atheism combined a belief in socialist utopianism with an ethical mandate to proselytize the message of atheism. The role of the League of Militant Atheists was to teach the ethics of scientific atheism as a replacement for the moral teachings of popular theologies. They argued that religious doctrines created, to use Nietzsche’s term, a ‘slave morality’ that fooled religious believers into mistaking passivity for moral goodness.”8 To further their aims, the League set up atheist “cells,” or houses, a system by which the inhabitants of rural communities could learn about atheism and discuss the falsity of re
ligion. An atheist newsletter, Bezbozhnik, was made available.

  The Five-Year Plan of anti-religious propaganda adopted in 1932 envisioned eventually one million such cells, outnumbering the old parishes by sixty to one. The number of Russian Orthodox churches was reduced from 54,000 in 1914 to 39,000 in 1928 (and to 4,200 in 1941). And it wasn’t only Christianity that was hit; the number of Islamic courts was reduced from 220 in 1922 to just seven in 1927. The early Communists particularly hated the supernatural element in religion. In its place, Marxism-Leninism was held to have exclusive access to the truth, through the “sacred” writings of Marx and Engels, which for them had the status of divine revelation, placing economic relations, and exchange, at the center of the belief system.

  We shall come back to scientific atheism shortly, but first we need to return to Nietzsche because, as recent scholarship has shown, the early Soviet intellectual, social and political scene was almost as much influenced by the German philosopher as it was transformed by Marx, Engels and Lenin. The pre-eminent scholar in this field is Bernice Glazer Rosenthal, professor of history at Fordham University, who says that although for most of the Soviet period “either [Nietzsche’s] name was unmentionable, or it could be used only as a pejorative,” and although from 1920 on his books were removed from the People’s Libraries, they were not removed from all of them and individually owned copies were passed from hand to hand, a practice that would become a tradition in Eastern Europe as the century wore on.9

  Despite this, she says, the “philosopher with a hammer,” as Nietzsche was known in Russia, touched deep cultural chords. Dostoevsky had to an extent prepared Russia for Nietzsche, and in many respects the German’s ideas were compatible with Marxism, or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche’s views on the malleability of language, his contempt for what he called “old words” and his embrace of the “new word,” with its biblical undertones, impressed those whom Rosenthal calls the Nietzschean Marxists, people such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. Another area where Nietzsche and Marxism found themselves in tandem was the philosopher’s decrying of individualism: the world was, as he put it, “torn asunder and shattered into individuation,” which was for him the source of all evil. Nietzsche championed a different form of individuality—“self-realization within a community.”10 The Bolsheviks also liked his view of the universe as an irrational place “in which blind will is the only constant,” and his notion that science diminishes man, especially Darwinism, because it stresses “mere survival,” not creativity.