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

by Watson, Peter

  America’s great turn inward during the 1940s and ’50s, to be followed, to an extent, by other Western nations, marked, in one observer’s words, “the apotheosis of the optimistic portrayal of the self.” It embodied, above all, the decline of the doctrine of original sin: the individual was no longer seen as “inherently depraved”—instead, the self became what one made of it. This freed people, in the words of Norman Mailer, in The White Negro, “to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”

  Thus, as post-war prosperity established itself, for the growing numbers who had left the church the goal of salvation was replaced by that of self-realization. It was conceivably the biggest acceleration in secularization there has ever been, and it laid the intellectual and emotional groundwork for the therapy boom that took place from the 1960s on.

  HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY

  The work of the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl provides an apt link between this chapter and the next, on the Holocaust and its effect on religious understanding and secularization.

  Frankl decided to be a doctor very early on, and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. He wrote to Freud while still at school, as a result of which the master submitted one of Frankl’s essays to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Under Freud’s influence Frankl turned to psychiatry, and by 1939 he was head of the neurology department at the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in Vienna. This gave him and his family some protection against deportation, but in 1942, when the American consulate in Vienna told him he was eligible for a visa that would guarantee his survival, he decided to stay, probably because his parents were aged. In September that year Viktor and his family were arrested and deported, Frankl spending the next three years in four concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and Türkheim, part of the Dachau complex. He and his father had been separated from the rest of the family, and he watched his father die in the camp where they were then incarcerated. When Viktor returned home, he found that his mother, brother and wife had also perished.

  Before he went to the camps he had begun a book on a new form of psychotherapy (which we shall come to), but it was confiscated and he never saw it again. His experiences during those years, however, reinforced his beliefs, and when he returned to Vienna he wrote a new book, in nine days. It was published in 1946 in German as A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, the title later changed to Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything; and in 1959 it appeared in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. It has since sold more than twelve million copies in twenty-four languages, and has been voted among the ten most influential books in America.19

  Frankl evolved “logotherapy,” by which he meant a system of psychiatric treatment for what he called the “meta-clinical problem of our day”—namely, the “mass neurosis” concerning the meaning of life. His most vivid insight, he said, had come to him in the camps with his identification of what someone else had called “give-up-itis.” One day an individual in the camps would simply refuse to get out of bed in the morning, dig deep into a secret pocket to find one remaining cigarette, and start to smoke. Inevitably, within forty-eight hours that person was dead.

  Frankl’s main argument is that we have a choice of how we will respond to suffering. We all suffer—not to the same extent, of course—and for most of us nowhere near as much as people suffered in the camps. But we are free to respond to that suffering, to make it an achievement, even to make it ennobling. “We give suffering a meaning by our response.” He disagreed with Freud that the aim of life is pleasure, and with Adler that the aim is power. For Frankl, the main aim of life is the discovery of meaning, and he quoted various polls, in Europe and America, which showed that, at the time, more people were concerned about meaning in their lives than, say, money. He referred to Irvin Yalom’s book Existential Psychotherapy (1980), which said that 30 percent of the people who came to him for help were searching for meaning in their lives, and that 90 percent of alcoholics said they found their lives meaningless.

  For Frankl, modern life is lived in an existential vacuum, where we have been estranged from our instincts and have lost our traditions; we live within a “tragic triad” of pain, guilt and death. The way out of this triad, he insisted, was “out there” in the world, not within us, and meaning was to be found in one of three ways—by deed, actions in the world; by someone, love; or by turning our inevitable suffering into something ennobling. We must not fear death, but use its inevitability to underscore the transitoriness of the world so that we act now rather than later. He agreed with Carl Rogers that self-actualization was the aim, but that it could be achieved only as a side effect of self-transcendence—surpassing ourselves—in which the conquest of suffering offers the most widely available possibility. We must lead our lives constantly imagining we are on our deathbed looking back, and asking ourselves whether we have lived a life we can be at peace with.

  Frankl lived a long life (dying at ninety-two in 1997), and he practiced into old age his twin passions of flying and mountaineering. He liked to say that whereas Freud, Adler and Jung have given us “depth psychology,” he had given us “height psychology,” “helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence.” He was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. His reply was: “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”20 Is that a too-easy answer?

  20

  Auschwitz, Apocalypse, Absence

  T

  he murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War, its systematic and arbitrary nature, was destined to eclipse all other calamities of the twentieth century, including the carnage of the first war, the millions of Russians killed in both wars and Stalin’s purges in between. The Holocaust brought cruelty to a new level. “The great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.” This is Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950. Better known, perhaps, is Theodor Adorno’s remark, that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But Adorno changed his mind after encountering Paul Célan’s poem “Death Fugue,” and although many people shared Trilling’s bafflement, there were those who sought to confront the horror head-on.

  From our point of view, the question that emerges as the most insistent is this: how could people who had perhaps not agreed with Nietzsche before, and continued to believe in God, still carry on believing when evil, cruelty and suffering had reached such epic proportions? How could an omnipotent, benevolent God allow such calamities? Where was God in Auschwitz?

  Some statistics first. Before the genocide, most people who would survive the camps had believed in the existence of God; afterward, only 38 percent did. The belief that Jews were a chosen people also suffered: 41 percent held this view before the war, one third afterward. Only 6 percent of the survivors thought that the creation of Israel, in the wake of the war, had been worth the sacrifice of six million lives.1

  In her book Suffering as Identity, Esther Benbassa argues that suffering is a part of Jewish identity, that the trials and tribulations undergone by the Jews throughout their history have become part of who they are and that, for many people, for many Jews, the Holocaust fitted into this paradigm. She referred back to the work of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who argued that “misery and pain are needed in order to awaken the conscience of men and thereby to advance the cause of ethical progress.”

  In Nazi Germany that attitude continued, for the ultra-Orthodox produced ready theological responses to anti-Semitism. Ahiezer de Vilna and Elchonon Wasserman, who lived through Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) but died before the death camps, argued that “the whole of history unfolds under God’s aegis,” meaning that even the Naz
is were his instruments. De Vilna thought that the Reformed Jews were responsible for what was happening; Wasserman blamed the abandonment of the Torah, assimilation and Zionism, which he regarded as a lack of trust in religion and in God. Both maintained that what was required of the Jews was a turning to God, by way of the Torah. “The more the apparent increase in the power of evil and the sterner the chastisement, the closer one was to redemption. Thus Nazis, Zionists, heretics, the assimilated and Reformed Jews were all instruments of the divine plan of salvation.”2

  Aharon Rokeach, leader of the Hasidic community in Belz in western Ukraine, whose eldest son was burned alive in a synagogue that the Germans had torched, said: “It is indeed a kindness of the Almighty that I also offered a personal sacrifice.” Suffering, for him, was a form of God’s “hidden grace” that prayer and study of the Torah could “transform into revealed goodness.” Several Hasidic teachers, such as Shem Klingberg when he was in the Plaszow death camp (in a suburb of Kraków), urged the faithful to accept suffering and death “with love, even during the Final Solution.” Even Hasidic rabbis in the Warsaw Ghetto argued that suffering came from God: “It had not been caused by their sins, but was part of his plan for humanity.” Yitshak Weiss, the spiritual head of the Spinka dynasty, in the Maramures region of Romania near the Hungarian border, danced and sang on the train that took him to Auschwitz. “Purify our hearts,” he prayed, “and we shall serve you in truth.”

  Many other examples of this kind of reasoning, having its origin in the Jewish notion of “sanctification of the Name of God,” could be given. Traditionally, in the Talmud, such sanctification can occur only when, by not denying their faith, Jews attain a choice in the manner of their death. This doctrine was amended during the Holocaust. Although Jews scarcely had a choice in their death, Orthodox leaders deemed that they had a choice in the way that they died—a choice between death amid degradation and death “with inner peace, nobility of soul, and self-respect.”

  To avoid being intimidated into prostitution, which the German military were intent on, ninety-three young women of the Orthodox Bais Yaakov school in Kraków committed suicide by taking poison after reciting one last prayer. Their sacrifice was immortalized by the Hebrew poet Hillel Bavli in a poem that has been incorporated into the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, “in a spirit reminiscent of the medieval custom of liturgizing catastrophes and acts of martyrdom for the instruction of future generations.”3

  HITLER, THE NEW NEBUCHADNEZZAR

  Ultra-Orthodox arguments went so far as to say that “Hitler was the new Nebuchadnezzar sent by God to chastise his people.” Yoel Teitelbaum cursed the Zionists for behaving in such a way as to precipitate and legitimize the Final Solution—“just punishment for an act of blasphemy, that of initiating a return to Zion on their own and, thereby, acting as substitutes for the awaited Messiah.” Some Hasidic thinkers even saw the mass murder “as ‘the labor pains’ that are to precede the coming of the Messiah.” The movement known as Chabad considered the entire modern age as the dawn of the messianic era, “which could only be preceded by cataclysmic events.”

  On this reasoning the genocide was “thought to have saved the people of Israel by amputating one of its gangrenous members . . . the suffering endured by pure, holy beings in this period had been merely temporal. What did it matter when measured against eternal life? . . . To suffer for the love of God—therein lay the significance of being chosen.” Chabad’s charismatic leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, went furthest, arguing that the genocide had been the work of a “just God” and had been caused by the sins of the Jews, and that God carried out his work “with the help of Hitler, his messenger.”

  By no means did everyone accept such reasoning, and in practice there were three alternatives. One had it that God had been hidden during the genocide. The second said that God had to be redefined—he was no longer omnipotent or benevolent, or even a “he”; while the third alternative proclaimed that God had been absent from Auschwitz and elsewhere “because God was dead.”4

  The first argument was put forcibly by the Orthodox rabbi Eliezer Berkovits. His view was that Auschwitz was not unique, because there had been similar disasters in the past that put the Jews’ faith to the test. However, he did not attribute the death camps to Israel’s sins, as did Schneerson and some others. Berkovits accepted that the Final Solution was “an absolute injustice,” but turned to the concept, contained in the Bible, that God had “veiled his face.” On this reasoning, from time to time in history God withdraws, “thereby allowing certain events that he could have prevented to take place.” This withdrawal by God does not mean—or even imply—that he wanted these (often terrible) events to occur, but rather it reflects his desire to grant humans greater spiritual freedom.

  “Such ‘veiling’ is the price to be paid for the emergence of a moral humanity. . . . It would be impossible to be humane if God were rigorously just.” For Berkovits, the “absence of God” is nothing new—every generation has had its Masada or Auschwitz—suffering is a consequence of free will. As a creator, God is “obliged” to create an imperfect world, while at a personal level “suffering is positive,” it “purifies and deepens the personality.” For Berkovits, the Final Solution was “an attempt to dethrone God,” but the fact that Israel was (re)born on its territory so soon afterward “proves that God is not absent from history.” Many others share Berkovits’s view that Israel, despite its avowedly secular character, is in fact a religious institution: one role of the Jews, and of Jewish suffering, was to lead the Gentiles to God.5

  For Irving Greenberg, “all the old truths and certainties, all the old commitments and obligations, have been destroyed by the Holocaust” and any “simple faith” is now impossible. The Holocaust ended the old era of Jewish covenantal existence and brought in a new one. He terms this “the third great cycle of Jewish history,” after the biblical age and the rabbinic age. In the new dispensation, the Jewish covenant with God is voluntary. On this analysis the building of Israel is not the work of God but of the Jewish people. For Greenberg this meant that God still existed but the understanding of him could no longer owe anything to rabbinic teaching: the people must set the agenda, creating a modern, post-Holocaust religion in which all the old prejudices and oppressions must be dispensed with.

  Three theologians—Arthur A. Cohen, Hans Jonas and Melissa Raphael—chose instead to redefine God in the wake of the Holocaust. In The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, Cohen argued that traditional notions of a beneficent and providential God could no longer be entertained. For him, God could no longer be understood as a direct causal agent in human affairs. He is a mystery, and it is that mystery which provokes our searching, and that searching which, ultimately, brings about our moral development, because we can no longer ask anything of God.

  Hans Jonas, in a work that he admitted was purely speculative, also argued that God can no longer be understood as omnipotent, but rather, that he suffers alongside humankind and “becomes,” just as people do, implying that he needs the actions of people “to perfect the world.” Melissa Raphael suggests that, after the Holocaust, the patriarchal notion of God as almighty and omniscient is simply incompatible with what happened in the death camps, and should be understood rather as “God the mother,” caring, suffering, loving, but not omnipotent. She “secretly sustains the world by her care.”6

  A NEW MEANING FOR PRAYER

  For many people, it should be said, and as the statistics mentioned at the beginning of this chapter showed, these arguments took some swallowing. That was certainly so for Richard Rubenstein, who in After Auschwitz (1966) roundly broke with the classical idea of an omnipotent, benevolent God, and, echoing Nietzsche, declared that God was dead, that Auschwitz had made any theology espousing Judaism’s traditional providential God “intellectually untenable.” Rubenstein called for traditional theology to be replaced; instead, there should be a
positive affirmation of the value of human life “for its own sake, with no theological references. Joy and personal fulfillment have from now on to be sought in this world, rather than in a mystical eschatological future. There is no hope of human salvation for the human race, whose ultimate fate is to return to nothingness.”7 We are finite beings, he insisted, with finite selves. Self-discovery in this world should be our aim. Prayer should no longer be understood as attempts at a dialogue with God but as expressions of our aspirations. If God is to be understood in any way at all it is as a focus, an aide in concentrating “on what is of genuine significance in the business of life.” Rubenstein’s theories upset many in the Jewish community, and he was “exiled.”8

  Amos Funkenstein, professor of Jewish studies at the University of California at Berkeley, also criticized the view that the Holocaust was incomprehensible. He thought that historians, psychologists, sociologists and philosophers “ought to make every effort to comprehend the catastrophe and ought to be guided by reasonable expectation that they can comprehend it.” To understand the Holocaust, he insisted, we have to turn “from God to man.”9

  Emil Fackenheim, a German refugee who escaped the Nazis and eventually took Canadian nationality, coincided with Rubenstein in his reasoning. In two books, The Human Condition after Auschwitz (1971) and God’s Presence in History (1970), Fackenheim found the idea of a redemptive God after Auschwitz to be untenable. The imperative now, he said, had to be Jewish survival, to remain “alive, resistant and united as a distinct, identifiable people”: “After the death camps, there remains only one supreme value: existence.” In fact, Fackenheim made survival a commandment—the 614th. (Rabbinical Judaism maintains that there are 613 commandments in the Torah.) For him, too, the state of Israel is “a riposte” to Auschwitz, and in that sense redemptive.10