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

by Watson, Peter

  BEING JEWISH WITHOUT GOD: THE RELIGION OF THE HOLOCAUST

  The uniqueness—or otherwise—of the Holocaust has become an important distinguishing factor between religious Jews, especially Orthodox, and secular Jews. For the Orthodox and for practicing Jews, the Final Solution has been incorporated into a long line of Jewish misfortunes and previous ordeals that are part of Jewish history and identity. For many secular Jews, however, who may sympathize with—and approve of—the existence of Israel but have no wish to live there, the Holocaust, Esther Benbassa suggests, has itself become the core idea of a new religion, a secular surrogate equivalent but without a God, “a self-sufficient religion with its rites, ceremonies, priests, places of pilgrimage, modern martyrs, rhetoric, and one supreme commandment: the obligation to remember. At the center of this religion stands Auschwitz.”

  The adoption of Auschwitz is curious, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of the seventy thousand prisoners there were Russian or Polish prisoners of war, whereas at nearby Birkenau between 1.1 and 1.6 million people were gassed, 90 percent of them Jews. The new religion, Benbassa says, took shape following the Eichmann trial in 1961 and gained strength during the 1967 Six-Day War, when it seemed possible that yet another genocide might occur. “Auschwitz was eventually transformed into a new Sinai: the place where a new Judaism, a Judaism made to order—less constraining, without the onus of Jewish religious practices or Jewish culture—was revealed to man. Jewishness was thus no longer a religious category, properly speaking, but, rather, an ethics adapted to the demands of a modern society in which mixed identities co-exist without discomfiture.” This new Judaism is called the Judaism “of the Holocaust and Redemption,” raising the destruction of the Jews “to the level of an event possessing intense transcendental meaning, while conferring qualities of the same order, redemptive in this case, on the creation of the state of Israel.”

  On this basis, the Holocaust was unique, incapable of being explained or historicized. Isaac Deutscher and Elie Wiesel (and Adorno, to begin with) advocated silence, on the grounds that the genocide “would forever remain beyond the grasp of the human mind.” But the Holocaust as a religion of suffering has been adopted by the Jewish masses, “who remain deaf to historicization, which has essentially been restricted to scholarly circles.” All the talk about the “impossibility of representation” after Auschwitz contributes to the mythologization of the event. “In traditional Jewish theology, the ways of god are inscrutable. The ways of Auschwitz now become inscrutable as well.”

  But Benbassa has her doubts: “One may wonder, indeed, how long this secular religion can provide the grounds for a viable Jewish identity, when one considers that it has been erected mainly on a foundation of suffering and victimhood and makes of its followers eternally vigilant Jews plunged into a permanent state of insecurity.”11

  The genocide has become an essentially religious mystery. “It was also an election, a self-election, of the human, by the human, and for the human: without God.” It was a new religion of the “absolute exception,” with the result that some individuals, like Alvin Rosenfeld, insist that the memoirs, the prose and poetry of the genocide be regarded as “holy” texts. Arnoˇst Lustin maintains that some of the works written about the catastrophe “can stand comparison with the best written parts of the Bible.”

  Another aspect of this new religion is that for several Jewish generations the memory of the catastrophe has been bequeathed to them by the media’s treatment of it, and this has served to construct a “transnational community” made up of Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike—in effect, Israel and the Diaspora found themselves united in a new shared religion “that outsiders could immediately recognize and was easy to practice. It was a religion of those chosen by suffering, an ersatz for Judaism that protected them from anti-Semitism, at least for a time, and acted as a brake on assimilation.”12

  These developments have not been without their critics: “The uses to which memory has been put [in the various museums of the Holocaust in the United States, for example] border on expropriation. In fact, the religion of the Holocaust that was put in place after the Six Day War rang in the era of being Jewish without Judaism and, of course, without God. . . . In the process of being converted into a universal religion with a message that is easy to understand, the memory of the genocide contributed, paradoxically, to de-universalizing the Jews, distancing them from others who suffered and gradually shutting them inside their own pain.”13

  APOCALYPTIC FULFILLMENT

  The events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, which killed upward of 250,000 people, injured far more and brought the Second World War to an end in Asia, also required some theological adjustment on the part of the many who, notwithstanding Nietzsche and all that had happened in the previous years and decades, had remained religious. In particular, it became necessary to redefine God.

  One of the most considered responses came from Jim Garrison, theologian and president of Wisdom University (in Oakland, California, dedicated to the study of the world’s wisdom traditions), who used the “process” philosophy of Alfred Whitehead and the psychoanalysis of Carl Jung to adapt traditional images of God to the modern world, some of his ideas overlapping with Jewish theologians of the Holocaust. It was Jung’s argument, Garrison said, that “God” was an “archetype,” synonymous with the unconscious; that the religious impulse stemmed from the unconscious (see chapter 14). Archetypes, according to Jung, are ancient ways in which our psychology is organized, aspects of the collective unconscious that lie at the root of human nature. These usually take the form of pairs of opposites (introvert/extrovert, anima/animus, for example), and shape our psychology accordingly. Reconciling these opposites, he said, comprises the “burden of completeness” which is our essential existential predicament. Garrison argued that the religious archetype within us also had a dual nature, that there is—to resort to traditional terminology—a God of lightness within us and a God of darkness.

  He gave the God of darkness the archetypal name of Wotan, thinking that darkness was an especially German trait; all the horrors of the 1939–45 war, including the Holocaust, were merely “a curtain raiser” to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The fanaticism of the Germans against the Jews has been replaced by the anti-communism of the West in general.”14 Jung had said that we have within us a “hungering for the infinite,” an “eschatological expectation of the Great Fulfillment,” and that one way to achieve this is to generate our own apocalypse. This is where Garrison brought in Whitehead’s process philosophy as well as something the former called “panentheism,” the notion that creation, evolution, progress, process and change are identical with divinity, so that if these bombs were invented they in some way served a divine purpose.

  To a non-believer this, too, sounds like a “just-so” story, but what Garrison meant was that in bringing us to the point where we can actually destroy the earth and everyone alive on it, the divine process was bringing itself not just to an end but also to an apocalyptic fulfillment. And in doing so it was forcing man—who had removed his gaze from the heavens ever since the Renaissance and had looked ever more “horizontally,” toward other men—to look again upward, to the heavens. The threat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, therefore, raised the possibility of us killing mankind and God—the creative principle—at one and the same time.

  Garrison thought the Christian church had been particularly lame in its responses to the “God is dead” debate, and that it had also been blind to the fact that “the hand of God” could be discerned at Hiroshima. But for him the idea that supreme creativity (conceiving and building the atomic bomb) should also be the instrument by which all creativity—all life—could be annihilated, that the forces of the unconscious could eliminate all consciousness, was not so much a bitter irony as one way for mankind to experience apocalyptic fulfillment. Its attainment, if it occurred (and during the Cold War it never seemed far away), would be,
so to speak, a negative goal of wholeness, a dark form of completeness; but, he said, this was the situation we were faced with in a post-Hiroshima world.

  As with some of the post-Holocaust theories, this amounted to saying that God—viewed as creativity, process—is neither wholly beneficent nor omnipotent.

  THEOTHANATOLOGY

  While the Holocaust may have had a more powerful effect on Jewish thought than on most, it did not concern Jews exclusively. Moreover, the atomic bombings in Japan clearly showed what else was at stake, for everyone, and the growing awareness of Stalin’s Great Terror was another factor in the equation. These events gave rise among some Christians to what John Warwick Montgomery called “the new theological science of Theothanatology, wherein God’s mortal illness or demise serves as the starting point for a radically secular approach to the modern world.”15

  The movement received widespread publicity—for example in Time, the New Yorker and the New York Times—and was a wholly Protestant initiative. Its half-dozen or so proponents could be divided into “hard” radicals and “soft” radicals, according to how fervently they argued that God was now dead all over again.

  The first name among these theothanatologists was Gabriel Vahanian. Born in Marseille, he studied under Karl Barth, then taught for twenty-five years in the United States before retiring to Strasbourg. Vahanian’s argument was that God had become irrelevant in cultural terms, that the leveling down of “transcendent values” to “immanental ones” was bound to result in the demise of God because he became just another “cultural accessory,” no different, really, from other cultural ideas. Vahanian thought that we must wait for this view to pass, for people to realize that “the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,” that until we acknowledge the total “otherness” of God (Barth’s seminal idea), God will remain for all intents and purposes dead.

  Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School, second among the Death of God theologians, wrote The Secular City in 1965 after he had lived in Berlin for a year, where he taught in a church-sponsored education program that had branches on both sides of the barbed wire. Since the Berlin Wall had just been erected, he was forced to commute back and forth through Checkpoint Charlie. In Berlin he came under the intellectual influence of Karl Barth, as well as of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who espoused an idea concerning what he called the “defining edge of evil,” positing that to do good we must always act immediately, before our self-regarding conscience intervenes. Cox adapted some of these thinkers’ ideas, arguing in his book that secularization occurred most often and most easily in the city environment, and that it was a positive phenomenon “whereby ‘society and culture are delivered from tutelage to religious control and closed metaphysical world views.’”16

  Echoing the views of Jonathan Raban in Soft City: The Art of Cosmopolitan Living, where it was argued that there is no single point of view from which we can grasp the city, Cox said the same is true of religion. Secularization raises the stakes, increasing the range both of freedom and of responsibility. Cox argued that art, social change and the fleeting I-you relationships of city life could breed a new spiritual atmosphere, very different from the traditional ideas of God. “This may mean that we shall have to stop talking about ‘God’ for a while, take a moratorium on speech until the new name emerges.” In other words, here, too, as with Vahanian, “waiting” is recommended; but this should not necessarily strike us as strange, Cox said, because “hiddenness stands at the very center of the doctrine of God.”

  What he meant by there being no single viewpoint from which to grasp religion was that, as Garrison had intimated, not all of religion is good—that it is in part inflexible and intolerant; but secularism, too, has its faults. John Paul II, he said, was good on a united Europe, but not on contraception. The church embraced both the achievements of Mother Teresa and the corruptions of Jim and Tammy Bakker. These ideas, which gave rise to, among other things, liberation theology, started from the postmodern viewpoint that we “cramp” the divine presence by confining it to some specially delineated spiritual or ecclesial sector, whereas in the city there are all sorts of perspectives—not just “the classical God of metaphysical theism.” In the city, where there are so many “others,” we may find God in Someone Else.

  Cox reflected his debt to Bonhoeffer in saying that theology comes after the commitment to action. Religion shouldn’t stifle thought, it is not necessarily, or first and foremost, a worldview—it is action. By the same token, his time in Berlin had taught him that communism needed secularizing—it also was too confined to ersatz customs. Cox took action himself and joined the civil rights activities at Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and was jailed briefly. He insisted the believer must engage in justice in the world, not pause for theological reflection.

  Much influenced by Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Tillich, Thomas Altizer (born 1927) is one of the most radical of the radicals in the Death of God movement. In his view God is wholly dead, and the church—especially the Christian church—is moribund; all traditional teaching has to be discarded (it was always provisional), even Jesus as traditionally understood. The deadest idea is that of metaphysical transcendence, so that all we are left with, says Altizer, is the idea of resurrection. We don’t know what form this will take, when or even if it will occur; nothing that happens in the future can be identified with anything that happened in the past; but we must hold ourselves ready for a new epiphany that may be so unlike the old ones that we will never be sure that it is one. This is the apotheosis of the idea of kenosis, emptying oneself of will, to make oneself available for God to take over. Here, too, we find the idea of waiting.

  Another of the radicals is William Hamilton. In his seminal essay “Thursday’s Child,” he depicts the theologians of today and tomorrow as “men without faith, without hope, with only the present and therefore only love to guide them”—“a waiting man and a praying man.” At the same time he affirms the literal death of God. All that was left was to discover Jesus in the world—he argued that Jesus may be concealed in the world, engaged in the struggle for justice. In the secular world man becomes the focus, “while we wait prayerfully for the epiphany of a God of delight”—we must try to enjoy (the idea of) God, says Hamilton, even if we cannot use him.

  For Hamilton, God is in some sense still there, “waiting as we wait, the recipient of our prayers.” For Paul van Buren, however, even this no longer applied: “I don’t pray. I just reflect on these things.”17 Like the others, he was influenced by Barth, under whom he received a doctorate in Basel. But Van Buren also came under the influence of Wittgenstein, and this led to his Secular Meaning of the Gospel. His version of “Christian atheism” argued that God had died, in part, from “a thousand qualifications”; that attempts like Whitehead’s to define God as process philosophy had been one such qualification; and that such modifications had killed God partly because their multifarious nature had removed the possibility of epiphany.

  Van Buren was one of those who thought that the modern world was much too pluralistic ever to be defined by one theological idea, and that in any case a theology that is only about God has no place in the modern world, where human life and human history are what count. If theology can’t address this, he said, it has no use. This means that Jesus is to be understood as a man, not as God, and Easter is to be understood metaphorically, as an aspect of one man’s freedom. “So let us frankly embrace the secular world of which we are a part. Religious thought is ‘responsible to human society, not to the church.’ Its orientation is humanistic, not divine. Its norms must lie in the role it performs in human life. . . . Any insights into the ‘human situation’ which our religious past may provide us, therefore, can be helpful only insofar as we bring them into a dynamic conversation with and allow them to be influenced by our rapidly changing technological culture.”18

  Vahanian was French, and all the other theothanatologists but one were or are American
. The last to add to the mix is John Robinson, bishop of Woolwich in south London, whose Honest to God (1963) was a publishing sensation.19 It argued that secularized man, having rejected the idea of “God up there,” also needs to recognize that the idea of “God out there” is an outdated simplification of the nature of divinity. Instead, he said, we should take our cue from the existentialist theology of Paul Tillich and regard God as “the ground of our being.” He also embraced Bonhoeffer’s idea of a religionless Christianity: that God’s continuing revelation to humanity is brought about in the culture at large, not just in the confines of “religion” or “Church.” Robinson argued that God as somehow “above the universe” is still part of our mental furniture, although we no longer think of reality in that way. He embraced some aspects of postmodernism (see chapter 26), in which God is increasingly thought of as our creation.

  Perhaps his most original idea, for most people, was the notion that God is “the ground of our being,” meaning that we give special attention to what we think is the ultimate in our lives—when we pray we are identifying the most important, intimate thing, and whatever that is, it is God. This, too, of course, can be seen as a human creation, and it partly coincides with Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence”—that we should live for those moments we would like to live over and over again. By this account, God is a way of attaching importance to the world, or part of the world; of being serious about life, of recognizing what is important to us. Robinson did not believe in supernatural entities, but opted for “naturalism,” which “identifies God, not indeed with the totality of things, the universe, per se, but with what gives meaning and direction to nature.” The supernatural, he said, was “the greatest obstacle to an intelligent faith.”