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

by Watson, Peter

  George Steiner’s well-stocked mind is everywhere evident in his work. He is a passionate worshipper of high art, in an old-fashioned way, as if from a time when high art really mattered. High-art names teem across his pages—Van Gogh and King Lear, Mondrian and Chartres Cathedral, Paul Valéry and Henry Moore—corralled passionately into the “speculative ordering” Steiner gives them. Though his books are ostensibly arguments or theories, as one critic said they are essentially statements of faith—Steiner wants high art to reclaim “its primary importance and its primal power.”9 His essential argument is that the special place high art should have in the hierarchy of human activities is religious in nature: “great literature or painting or music are spiritual in their impulses, transcendent in their meanings, mysterious in their force.”

  In Steiner’s view, we are living, metaphorically, in the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, in effect a period of waiting between the death of God and his resurrection. Waiting and patience are part of the human condition, he says, for we have been waiting for centuries—for eons—for signs of God’s existence, and it is this waiting, this theological understanding of ourselves, without any certainty, that has given rise to our culture and is responsible for what we have achieved.

  Since Nietzsche announced the death of God, we have been living in a secondary world where art, with a few exceptions, has been taken over by journalism, by critics and the academy rather than by the artists themselves—worlds that are trivial, consumer-driven, in too much of a hurry (“Fashion is the motor of death”) or scholastic in the medieval sense of arguing over minute issues that scarcely matter. During that time, he says, art has moved from mimesis to abstraction, and in doing so has lost its language. With the added impact of science and technology, literacy has been replaced by numeracy; a passion for words has been undone by an obsession with numbers.

  For Steiner this is a major break, a fall, and a catastrophe. Our world is impoverished because we have lost the ability to “respond responsibly” to art, the task having been taken over by secondary critics, so that the narrative of one art responding to another has been lost—“The best readings of art are art.”10 The process of artistic insight is not cumulative and self-corrective as the sciences are; art does not supersede art the way later science supersedes earlier science, and as such it is unsuited to the academy. Art is “immediate” and “free” in a way that science is not, one artwork does not necessarily “verify” another; as William Blake put it, “it is of the minute particular,” its purpose is often intuitively self-evident but difficult—even impossible—to articulate. Art cannot be paraphrased, and there is no boundary to language.11

  For this reason Steiner proposes that poiesis, the act and experienced act of creation, is the fundamental aspect of being and of meaning. Moreover, the concept of transcendence brings us up against the even more fundamental concept of the “other,” and this is what God is, above everything else. It is this radical difference of God, and the uncertainty surrounding “him,” that inclines us to make intuitive leaps, to search for forms of words that can nevertheless only approximate the “other,” that make indeterminacy “pivotal”: part of the point of poiesis is mystery.

  Steiner’s point is that, rather than criticism, whether academic or journalistic, the spiritual in art can best—and perhaps only—be had from studying the chain of artworks; that watching the response of one great figure in the modern world to another in the ancient (that is, the religious world) is the closest we can come to the spiritual and the sacred: Nietzsche on and “against” Wagner, Proust face-to-face with Vermeer, Mandelstam reading Dante, Karl Barth laboring after Mozart. These transformations as between successive figures—secular artists responding to religious ones—are the greatest opportunity we have to see how a secular world can flourish. The bond between the former and the latter is what we should seek to identify, describe and understand. It is the best way to assimilate what has been lost and to see how it might be recovered.

  For Steiner, the problem with science is that it is not disinterested; as Heidegger said, it aims at mastery, whereas art does not. There may be eternal truths in science; but though we ourselves will not live forever, an aesthetic truth that quickens “into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity” has a metaphysical resonance even if it isn’t purely religious. An aesthetic observation that will be good for all time gives us a warm feeling of completion that science, for all its strength, does not.

  Despite this, and perhaps a little regretfully, Steiner notes that, although religion may have informed art in the past with what was felt to be a “real presence,” this can no longer suffice. Not just because God is dead, but also because, throughout history, art has been a form of dialogue, a much more practical and immediate and even productive form of dialogue than, say, prayer is. He shows, by his many references to the ways in which different artists pay homage to one another in their work, by his assertion that no work of art is autonomous and that that realization is one of the secrets—perhaps the secret—of art appreciation, that the conversation of mankind through its major works of art is the path to truth and beauty. And the way later works of art build on earlier works—with courtesy, hospitality and even love—is a model of interaction for the rest of us in a secular world. By studying this progression, by immersing ourselves in high art, we can achieve a “transformative intensity” in our lives that is available nowhere else.

  A PREMONITION OF HARMONIES DESIRED

  As Steiner would readily concede, both religion and science are great universal enterprises. Science seeks understanding via laws that apply at all times and everywhere. Religion seeks and offers a metaphysical unity on the grounds that this is what people want, that the certainty of an underlying unifying idea—the Absolute—is the most satisfying and rewarding experience of “Reality” that is available for many. We find that Czesław Miłosz’s perspective is a valuable corrective to both these statements: that the value of science, for most people, lies in its specific technological achievements rather than its universal laws; and that what we might call metaphysical fulfillment is for many a luxury, and comes a distant second in the scheme of things compared with the everyday requirements of living.

  Miłosz, in fact, is saying something not dissimilar to what James Joyce said: “[I]f we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism.” Heaney concurs, except that he is also saying, as are Miłosz and Joyce, that living down to fact is not, in any way, as Charles Taylor might be tempted to observe, a “subtraction story.” Quite the contrary: the authority of poetry, the conviction with which it speaks, the unflinching accuracy with which it addresses the world, are part—even a large part—of the joy of living. It is part of the point of poetry to explore the limits of our world, and part of its achievement to transcend those limits. This is the best—and maybe the only—form of transcendence available.

  As a preparation and explanation of what poetry is, and seeks to be, and how it brings meaning to our lives, and what type of meaning, Heaney can hardly be bettered: “[A poem] begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion . . . in its repose the poem gives us a premonition of harmonies desired and not inexpensively achieved. In this way, the order of art becomes an achievement intimating a possible order beyond itself, although its relation to that further order remains promissory rather than obligatory. Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it.”12 There are two points here that relate directly to ou
r theme. One, that poetry offers clarification that is “not necessarily great,” and two, that art intimates a possible order beyond itself.

  First, Heaney is considering the size of poetry and its relation to the size of life, both the size of an individual life and the size of “life” in general. This is important because even a short poem can have a “big” subject and because, as James Wood has said, the idea of “one overbearing truth” is exhausted in our time, meaning that poetry, the poetic approach, is, at least in theory, more relevant and important than ever before. And although Heaney is admirably ambitious for poetry, he is also quite content for its concerns and abilities to be on the small side, the human scale, not the superhuman. He speaks of poets providing us with “the shimmer of reality,” “cadences that drink at spots of time.” Osip Mandelstam’s poems are represented as nuggets of harmony, the details “clear as rivets brightened by the punch.” Heaney quotes the Polish poet Anna Swir: “For one moment [the poet] possesses wealth usually inaccessible to him, and he loses it when that moment is over.” Elsewhere, he likens poetry to the clapper in a bell. Poetry is the experience of being “at the same time summoned and released.” He praises Auden for his “defamiliarizing abruptness,” and early Auden he likens to the shock of bare wire.13

  He quotes Robert Lowell in his epoch-making Life Studies: “A poem is an event, not the record of an event”; the language of a poem should be “a bolt of clarification,” “a ‘momentary stay against confusion’ in the discovery of a firmly verified outline.” Speaking of Lowell’s mature works: “A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. The reader was permitted the sensation of a whole meaning simultaneously clicking shut and breaking open, a momentary illusion that the fulfillments which were being experienced in the ear spelled out meanings and fulfillments available in the world.” In Sylvia Plath’s verses, he says, there is a sense of “surprised arrival”; in her later poems, a “sudden in-placeness about the words and all that they stand for,” which recalls Wallace Stevens’s definition of poetry as “sounds passing through sudden rightnesses.” Elsewhere, Heaney says, Plath’s work had “unprecedented pitch and scald.”14

  Heaney says of Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”: “[T]he concluding lines constitute an epiphany, an escape from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of the disillusioned intelligence.” Yet while Larkin is exemplary in the way he sifts the conditions of contemporary life, refuses alibis and pushes consciousness toward an exposure that is neither cynicism nor despair, “there survives in him a repining love for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance. When that repining finds expression, something opens and moments occur which deserve to be called visionary.”15

  It is in the nature of poetry to be short. If we agree with James Wood that a poem is “the most realized form of intention,” then brevity becomes an important part of the point. Heaney’s claims for poetry, for the government of the tongue (and other poets have made equivalent claims), become in this way also a claim for the poetic aesthetic, for the fact and promise of brevity. In this way, poetry does not become the only way to regard life, but it does become the pithiest and richest way to marry experience, language and meaning. It highlights the point that new experience, the experience of new knowledge, is, by definition, invariably brief. The knowledge stays with us, but the first encounter with—and the apprehension of—such knowledge happens immediately. Immediacy is the point of phenomenology. Immediacy equals intensity. Intensity is one of the purposes of life.

  AUDEN’S QUARREL WITH MEANING

  All this has important consequences for the very nature of meaning: namely, that there is no single “big” answer to the meaning of all life, but only a series of “small” answers to parts of it, and that over time we may accumulate them, to form our own well-stocked minds.

  The fulfillments of poetry are its meanings (plural). In The Government of the Tongue, Heaney devotes many pages to W. H. Auden, whom, he reminds us, the Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky described as “the greatest intelligence of the twentieth century.” For Auden, Heaney says, “poetry could be regarded as magical incantation, fundamentally a matter of sound and the power of sound to bind our minds’ and bodies’ apprehensions within an acoustic complex; on the other hand, poetry is a matter of making wise and true meanings, of commanding our emotional assent by the intelligent disposition and inquisition of human experience. In fact, most poems—including Auden’s—constitute temporary stays against the confusion [a phrase Heaney uses several times]. . . . We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence . . . and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.”16

  All this, says Heaney, applies to other poets also, but where Auden stood out was in his quarrel with meaning. “To avoid the consensus and settlement of a meaning which the audience fastens on like a security blanket, to be antic, mettlesome, contrary, to retain the right to impudence, to raise hackles, to harry the audience into wakefulness—to do all this may not only be permissible but necessary if poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life.”17

  What this all implies, first, is that a fuller life is to be had not from one portmanteau idea, as religions typically offer, as the idea of one God offers, and the idea of therapy often implies, but from a collection of altogether smaller ideas achieved piecemeal, by poems or other works of art, or conversations with others. It recalls George Steiner’s arguments.

  A HOLIDAY FROM RATIONALITY

  To take up the second point: what order (if any) does poetry intimate beyond itself? Not one single overriding order, of course, and any selection risks distortion. But a beginning can be made.

  Perhaps the first thing to say is to underline what Michael Hamburger says in his prose book about poetry, repeating Baudelaire’s comment that poetry “marches fraternally” between science and philosophy, and that the best way to embrace life and enjoy it, and to find fulfillment within it, is via the process of what Jean-Paul Sartre called “lyrical phenomenology.”18 Science and philosophy are essentially about what rational generalizations we can agree upon after observing the world about us; and agreement, clearly, is something we enjoy and which we find convincing; both agreement and being convinced are rewarding pleasures and contribute to meaning.

  Poetry explores the world piecemeal, detail by detail, as the poet finds a form of words—what Heaney calls the “jurisdiction of achieved form” (itself a pleasure)—that marries observation and emotion in an intuitive order that can be had in no other way, in which there is as much feeling as understanding. In doing so, poetry provides, as perhaps all art provides, what James Wood has called “a holiday from rationality.” It follows from this that much of what poetry has to offer is what Hamburger refers to as “minute realities,” which echoes with Sartre’s petites heureuses and with the idea of it being but a momentary stay against confusion.19

  The Italian poet Eugenio Montale conveyed something of this in these lines:

  Non sono

  che favilla d’un tirso. Bene lo so: bruciare,

  questio, non altro, è il mio significato.

  I am no more

  than a spark from a beacon. Well do I know it: to burn,

  this, nothing else, is my meaning.

  Is this as much as we can hope for? Poetry seeks to convince, by the accuracy of its form, but at its best it does much more. Here, perhaps the most fundamental experience that poetry has to offer, the order that it intimates, is in fact the lack of order, not only in the world but even in the individual, which may be the beginning of the real road to fulfillment.

  Hamburger reminds us that W. B. Yeats strove to render “the multiplicity of the self without loss of intensity.” Pablo N
eruda begins his poem “Muchos somos” (We Are Many):

  Of the many men who I am, who we are,

  I cannot settle on a single one.

  Ezra Pound put it this way: “In the search for oneself, in the search for ‘sincere self-expression,’ one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says ‘I am this, that, or the other,’ and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.”20

  In The Elder Statesman, T. S. Eliot has a character say:

  I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone

  And in becoming no one, I begin to live.

  All this recalls Keats’s discovery of the “negative capability” of poets, “their chameleon mutability,” one’s need “to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought not a select party,” to have “no identity,” no fixed character, no fixed opinions.21 And Faust: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart.”

  In The Estate of Poetry, Miłosz says:

  The purpose of poetry is to remind us

  how difficult it is to remain just one person.