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

by Watson, Peter

  24.Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin’s Writers, trans. Sam Garrett, London: Harvill Secker, 2010, pp. 140–43.

  25.Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 178.

  26.Ibid., pp. 201–2.

  27.Froese, op. cit., p. 7.

  28.Ibid., p. 40.

  29.Ibid., p. 49.

  30.Bulakh et al., op. cit., p. 52.

  31.Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 56.

  32.Ibid., p. 58.

  33.Joshua Rubinstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 115–16.

  34.Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 122.

  CHAPTER 11: THE IMPLICITNESS OF LIFE AND THE RULES OF EXISTENCE

  1.Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osters, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 89. Max Weber, “Der Beruf zur Politik,” in Weber, Soziologie, Weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1964, p. 322.

  2.Safranski, op. cit., p. 91.

  3.Ibid.

  4.Ibid., p. 92.

  5.Ibid., pp. 337–38.

  6.Ibid., p. 93.

  7.Charles B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 268–69.

  8.Safranski, op. cit., p. 366.

  9.Ibid., p. 377.

  10.Wolfgang Leppmann, Rilke: A Life, trans. Russell M. Stockman, New York: Fromm, 1984, p. 361.

  11.Ibid.

  12.Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982, p. 27.

  13.Don Paterson, Orpheus: A Version of Rilke’s “Die Sonette an Orpheus,” London: Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 66–67.

  14.An Unofficial Rilke: Poems: 1912–1926, selected and trans. Michael Hamburger, London: Anvil Poetry Press, 1981, p. 69.

  15.Leppmann, op. cit., p. 184.

  16.Ibid.

  17.Ibid.

  18.Ibid., p. 386.

  19.David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942, Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980, passim; and David S. Luft, Eros and Inwardness: Weininger, Musil, Doderer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 121.

  20.Jane Smiley, Guardian, June 17, 2006.

  21.Luft, Crisis of European Culture, p. 252.

  22.Luft, Eros and Inwardness, p. 124.

  23.Luft, Crisis of European Culture, p. 219.

  24.Luft, Eros and Inwardness, pp. 120–21.

  25.Ibid.

  26.Luft, Crisis of European Culture, p. 255.

  27.Ibid., p. 201.

  28.Ibid., p. 255.

  29.Ibid., p. 260.

  CHAPTER 12: THE IMPERFECT PARADISE

  1.Henry Idema III, Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Secularization in Three Novelists: Anderson, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990, p. 1.

  2.Idema, op. cit., p. 6.

  3.Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, London: Constable, 1929, p. 245.

  4.Idema, op. cit., p. 44.

  5.Ibid., p. 47.

  6.Ibid., p. 73.

  7.Ibid., p. 171.

  8.Lynd and Lynd, op. cit., p. 275.

  9.Idema, op. cit., p. 174.

  10.Ibid., p. 204.

  11.Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997, p. 20.

  12.Stevens, op. cit., pp. 53–54.

  13.Ibid., p. 748.

  14.Leon Surette, The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and Humanism, Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, pp. 199ff.

  15.Stevens, op. cit., p. 845.

  16.Ibid., p. 914.

  17.Ibid., p. 55.

  18.Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 73–74.

  19.Idema, op. cit., p. 92.

  20.Ibid., p. 13.

  21.Bart Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002, pp. 226–27.

  22.Ibid., pp. 9–11.

  23.Ibid.

  24.Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 345.

  25.John Patrick Diggins, Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire under Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 183–84.

  26.Diggins, op. cit., p. 65.

  27.Ibid., pp. 186, 259–60.

  28.Ibid., p. 37.

  29.Ibid., p. 47.

  30.Michael Manheim (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 19.

  31.Manheim, op. cit., p. 20.

  32.See Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 180–84, for a discussion on psychodynamic themes in O’Neill.

  33.Manheim, op. cit., p. 30.

  34.Ibid., p. 84.

  35.Ibid., p. 86.

  36.Normand Berlin, Eugene O’Neill, London: Macmillan, 1982, pp. 128ff, for a chapter on “Endings.”

  37.Manheim, op. cit., p. 139.

  38.Berlin, op. cit., p. 216.

  CHAPTER 13: LIVING DOWN TO FACT

  1.Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 144.

  2.Ibid., p. 146.

  3.Mitchell Leaska, Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf, London: Picador, 1998, p. 235.

  4.Leaska, op. cit., p. 146.

  5.Ibid., p. 147.

  6.Ibid., p. 152.

  7.Lewis, op. cit., p. 155.

  8.Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 95 (Portrait of the Artist, 1992 edition, p. 265).

  9.Ibid., p. 96.

  10.Derek Attridge (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 91.

  11.Ibid.

  12.Brett Bourbon, Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 145.

  13.Declan Hibberd, Introduction to the Penguin edition of Ulysses, 1922, 1992, p. x.

  14.Hibberd, op. cit., p. xv.

  15.Ibid., p. lvii.

  16.Ibid., p. lxxviii.

  17.Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, London: Chatto & Windus, 1966, p. 194.

  18.Rieff, op. cit., p. 196.

  19.Ibid., p. 208.

  20.Ibid., pp. 211–13.

  21.Jad Smith, “Völkisch Organicism and the Use of Primitivism in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 30 (2002): 3 (The Plumed Serpent, 1998 edition, pp. 129–31).

  22.Smith, op. cit., p. 11.

  23.Rieff, op. cit., pp. 228–31.

  CHAPTER 14: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF METAPHYSICS, A REVERENCE FOR METAPSYCHOLOGY

  1.Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life, London: Verso, 2000, p. 82.

  2.Rogers, op. cit., p. 89.

  3.Ibid., p. 95.

  4.A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz, 1936, p. 33.

  5.Ayer, op. cit., p. 36.

  6.Ibid., p. 108.

  7.Ibid., p. 113.

  8.Ibid., p. 116. See also A. J. Ayer, The Mea
ning of Life and Other Essays, Introduction by Ted Honderich, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.

  9.Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 120.

  10.Ibid., pp. 200–201.

  11.Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927; vol. 21 of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1968.

  12.Freud, Illusion, p. 50.

  13.Ibid., p. 55.

  14.Ibid., p. 67.

  15.Ibid., p. 73.

  16.Ibid., p. 78.

  17.Ibid., p. 83.

  18.Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, revised and ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1979, p. x.

  19.Freud, Civilization, pp. 13–14.

  20.Ibid., p. 22.

  21.Ibid., p. 54.

  22.Michael Palmer, Freud and Jung on Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, passim.

  23.Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1933, p. 239.

  24.Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1960, p. 43.

  25.Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 134.

  26.Ibid., p. 114.

  27.Ibid., p. 134.

  28.Ibid., p. 135.

  29.June O. Leavitt, The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka: Theosophy, Cabala, and the Modern Spiritual Revival, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 122–23, 137–39, for a discussion of Kafka and the Bible.

  CHAPTER 15: THE FAITHS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

  1.Molly Cochran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010, especially ch. 10: Sami Pihlström, “Dewey and Pragmatic Religious Naturalism,” p. 213.

  2.Pihlström, op. cit., p. 215.

  3.Ibid., p. 218

  4.Ibid., p. 226.

  5.Ibid., p. 220.

  6.Ibid., p. 232.

  7.W. Donald Hudson, Wittgenstein and Religious Belief, London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 114.

  8.Hudson, op. cit., pp. 70–71.

  9.Ibid., p. 79.

  10.Ibid., p. 92.

  11.Ibid., p. 106.

  12.Ibid.

  13.Ibid.

  14.Quoted in Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, p. 99.

  15.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry on Whitehead, p. 5 of 9.

  16.Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954, p. v (“Why I Am Not a Christian” was given as a lecture in 1927).

  17.Russell, op. cit., p. 15.

  18.Ibid., p. 179.

  19.Ibid., pp. 43–44.

  20.Ibid., p. 177.

  21.See Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, 1921–1970: The Ghost of Madness (vol. 2), London: Jonathan Cape, 2000, p. 36, for his relationship with Dora. See also Nicholas Griffin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, especially ch. 15.

  22.Ibid., p. 60.

  23.Ibid., p. 59.

  24.Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929, p. 68.

  25.Russell, Sceptical Essays, p. 70.

  26.Ibid., pp. 116–17.

  CHAPTER 16: NAZI RELIGIONS OF THE BLOOD

  1.I have used Brian Moynahan, The Faith, London: Aurum, 2002, p. 675.

  2.Moynahan, op. cit., p. 675.

  3.F. X. J. Homer, “The Führer’s Faith: Hitler’s Sacred Cosmos,” in F. X. J. Homer and Larry D. Wilcox (eds.), Germany and Europe in the Era of Two World Wars: Essays in Honor of Oron James Hale, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986, pp. 61–78.

  4.Alister McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology: From the Enlightenment to Pannenberg, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, p. 5.

  5.Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 38ff, for “The theological situation at the turn of the century.”

  6.Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden, London: SCM Press, 1976, pp. 38ff.

  7.Busch, op. cit., pp. 92f, 117f.

  8.Zdravko Kujundzija, Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology, entry on Barth, p. 16.

  9.Busch, op. cit., pp. 120f. McCormack, op. cit., pp. 209ff.

  10.Busch, op. cit., p. 245.

  11.Kujundzija, op. cit., p. 17.

  12.McCormack, op. cit., p. 449.

  13.Moynahan, op. cit., p. 678. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue, Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1979, p. 123. J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, p. 2.

  14.Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 1.

  15.Ibid., p. 42.

  16.James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (eds.), The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 21.

  17.Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, London: B. T. Batsford, 1972, p. 82.

  18.Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 117.

  19.Cecil, op. cit., p. 85.

  20.Ibid., p. 92.

  21.Ibid., p. 93.

  22.Ibid., p. 96.

  23.Ibid., p. 99.

  24.Ibid., p. 103.

  25.Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 1.

  26.Poewe, op. cit., p. 73.

  27.Ibid., p. 76.

  28.Ibid., p. 111.

  29.Ibid., p. 165.

  30.James Bentley, Martin Niemöller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 81ff., 143ff.

  CHAPTER 17: THE AFTERMATH OF THE AFTERMATH

  1.Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 21.

  2.Isaac, op. cit., p. 22.

  CHAPTER 18: THE WARMTH OF ACTS

  1.Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, publ. 1942, 2003 edition: London: Taylor & Francis; Karl Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays, London: Routledge, 1943; Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944; Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; William Temple, Christianity and the Social Order, London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1976; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, London: Harper Brothers, 1944.

  2.Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation: 1944–1949, London: Penguin Books, 1994, 1995, p. 214.

  3.Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 227.

  4.Geroulanos, op. cit., p. 242.

  5.Ibid., p. 271.

  6.Ibid., p. 307.

  7.Ibid., p. 230.

  8.Ibid., p. 387.

  9.Everett Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy: The French Example, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 132.

  10.Olivier Todd, Malraux: A Life, New York: Knopf, 2005, pp. 108–13.

  11.Geroulanos, op. cit., p. 151.

  12.Ibid., p. 159.

  13.See Stacey Schiff, Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, London: Chatto & Windus, 1994, pp. 105
and 197, for Saint-Exupéry and Malraux.

  14.Geroulanos, op. cit., p. 170.

  15.Ibid., p. 171.

  16.Ibid., p. 174.

  17.Ibid., p. 179.

  18.Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York and London: Penguin Books, 1956, 1975, p. 43.

  19.Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 44.

  20.Ibid., p. 348.

  21.Ibid., p. 356.

  22.Knight, op. cit., pp. 42–43.

  CHAPTER 19: WAR, THE AMERICAN WAY AND THE DECLINE OF ORIGINAL SIN

  1.Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. E. Brooks Holifield, A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983, pp. 201–2.

  2.Holifield, op. cit., p. 213.

  3.Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind, London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1946, p. 12.

  4.Liebman, op. cit., p. 20.

  5.Ibid., p. 31.

  6.Ibid., p. 154.

  7.Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life, New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace, 1998, p. 114. Petigny, op. cit., pp. 37–41.

  8.Maier, op. cit., p. 283.

  9.Petigny, op. cit., p. 285.

  10.Ibid., p. 50.

  11.Ibid., p. 79.

  12.Ibid., p. 81.

  13.Ibid., p. 239.

  14.Richard I. Evans, Carl Rogers: The Man and His Ideas, New York: Dutton, 1975, p. xxiii.

  15.Evans, op. cit., p. 151.

  16.Ibid., p. 165.

  17.Petigny, op. cit., p. 276. Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics: The New Morality, London: SCM, 1966.

  18.Petigny, op. cit., p. 246.

  19.Viktor Frankl, Man’s Quest for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Books, 1962, 1984, 2006, Afterword by William J. Winslade, p. 155.

  20.Frankl, op. cit., p. 164.

  CHAPTER 20: AUSCHWITZ, APOCALYPSE, ABSENCE

  1.Esther Benbassa, Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm, London and New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 92–93.

  2.Benbassa, op. cit., p. 94.

  3.Ibid., p. 97.

  4.Ibid., p. 99.

  5.Ibid., p. 101.

  6.See Imre Kertész, The Holocaust as Culture, trans. Thomas Cooper, London: Seagull Books, 2011, p. 62, for people who explicitly rejected religion and culture as plans to fall back on.