Against Interpretation (35 page)

Of course, the cinema does not obey the same schedule of contemporaneity as the novel; thus, it would appear anachronistic to us if someone wrote a novel like Jane Austen, but it would be very “advanced” if someone makes a film which is the cinematic equivalent of Jane Austen. This is no doubt because the history of films is so much shorter than the history of narrative fiction; and has emerged under the peculiarly accelerated tempo at which the arts move in our century. Thus its various possibilities overlap and double back on each other. Another reason is the fact that cinema, as a late-comer to the serious arts, is in a position to raid the other arts and can deploy even relatively stale elements in innumerable fresh combinations. Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotion. All the trappings of melodrama and high emotion may be found in the most recent and sophisticated cinema (for example, Visconti’s
Senso
and
Rocco and His Brothers
), while these have been banished from most recent sophisticated novels.

One link between novels and films that is frequently made, however, does not seem very useful. That is the old saw about dividing directors into those who are primarily “literary” and those who are primarily “visual.” Actually, there are few directors whose work can be so simply characterized. A distinction at least as useful is that between films which are “analytic” and those which are “descriptive” and “expository.” Examples of the first would be the films of Carné, Bergman (especially
Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light,
and
The Silence
), Fellini, and Visconti; examples of the second would be the films of Antonioni, Godard, and Bresson. The first kind could be described as psychological films, those concerned with the revelation of the characters’ motives. The second kind is anti-psychological, and deals with the transaction between feeling and things; the persons are opaque, “in situation.” The same contrast could be carried through in the novel. Dickens and Dostoevsky are examples of the first; Stendhal of the second.

[
1961
]

V

Piety without content

A
S WE
may learn from such disparate sources as the
Oresteia
and
Psycho,
matricide is of all possible individual crimes the most insupportable psychologically. And, of all possible crimes which an entire culture can commit, the one most difficult to bear, psychologically, is deicide. We live in a society whose entire way of life testifies to the thoroughness with which the deity has been dispatched, but philosophers, writers, men of conscience everywhere squirm under the burden. For it is a far simpler matter to plot and commit a crime than it is to live with it afterwards.

While the act of killing the Judeo-Christian God was still under way, antagonists on both sides took up their positions with a great deal of sureness and self-righteousness. But once it was clear that the deed had been done, the battle lines began to blur. In the 19th century, melancholy attempts at promoting a revived pagan religion to replace the vanquished Biblical tradition (Goethe, Hölderlin) and tremulous hopes that something humane could be saved (George Eliot, Matthew Arnold) are heard amidst the loud and somewhat shrill voices of the victors proclaiming the triumph of reason and maturity over faith and childishness, and the inevitable advance of humanity under the banner of science. In the 20th century, the sturdy Voltairean optimism of the rationalist attack on religion is even less convincing and less attractive, though we still find it in conscientiously emancipated Jews like Freud and, among American philosophers, in Morris Cohen and Sidney Hook. It seems that such optimism is possible only to those whom the “bad tidings,” the
dysangel
of which Nietzsche speaks, that God is dead, have not reached.

More common in our own generation, particularly in America in the backwash of broken radical political enthusiasms, is a stance that can only be called religious fellow-travelling. This is a piety without content, a religiosity without either faith or observance. It includes in differing measures both nostalgia and relief: nostalgia over the loss of the sense of sacredness and relief that an intolerable burden has been lifted. (The conviction that what befell the old faiths could not be avoided was held with a nagging sense of impoverishment.) Unlike political fellow-travelling, religious fellow-travelling does not proceed from the attraction which a massive and increasingly successful idealism exercises, an attraction which is powerfully felt at the same time that one cannot completely identify with the movement. Rather, religious fellow-travelling proceeds from a sense of the weakness of religion: knowing the good old cause is down, it seems superfluous to kick it. Modern religious fellow-travelling is nourished on the awareness that the contemporary religious communities are on the defensive; thus to be anti-religious (like being a feminist) is old hat. Now one can afford to look on sympathetically and derive nourishment from whatever one can find to admire. Religions are converted into “religion,” as painting and sculpture of different periods and motives are converted into “art.” For the modern post-religious man the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.

Religious fellow-travelling leads to several highly undesirable consequences. One is that the sense of what religions are and have been historically becomes coarse and intellectually dishonest. It is understandable, if not sound, when Catholic intellectuals attempt to reclaim Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and James Joyce—passionate atheists all—as true, if highly tormented, sons of the Church. But the same strategy is entirely indefensible on the part of the religious fellow-travellers operating within the Nietzschean “God is dead,” who apparently see no harm in making everybody religious. They stand for no tradition to which they seek to reclaim errant members. They merely collect exemplars of seriousness, or moral earnestness, or intellectual passion, which is what they identify the religious possibility with today.

The present book under review
18
is just such an example of religious fellow-travelling, worth examining because it clearly reflects the lack of intellectual definition in this attitude which is so widespread. It consists of an assemblage of writings by twenty-three authors “from Tolstoy to Camus,” selected and edited by Walter Kaufmann, an associate professor of philosophy at Princeton.

Of the order of the book one need not speak since it has no order, except a vague chronological one. There are a few selections with which one could hardly quarrel, such as the two chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” from
The Brothers Karamazov
(certainly Kaufmann is correct in saying that one cannot understand the Grand Inquisitor story without the preceding disquisition by Ivan on the sufferings of children), the excerpts from Nietzsche’s
The Antichrist
and Freud’s
The Future of an Illusion,
and William James’ essay “The Will to Believe.” There are also a few imaginative choices of writings which deserve to be better known: e.g. the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX, the exchange of letters between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner on the Church’s stand against Communism, and the essay of W. K. Clifford which prompted the famous reply of William James. But the majority of the selections seem ill-chosen. Oscar Wilde cannot be regarded seriously as a religious writer. Neither is there any justification for Morton Scott Enslin’s chapter on the New Testament, a conventionally sound account of the gospels and their historical setting, which is entirely out of place in an anthology of religious
thought.
The choices of Wilde and Enslin illustrate the two poles of irrelevance into which Kaufmann’s book falls: frivolity and academicism.
19

Kaufmann says in his introduction: “Almost all the men included were ‘for’ religion, though not the popular religion which scarcely any great religious figure has ever admired.” But what does it mean to be “for” religion? Does the notion “religion” have any serious
religious
meaning at all? Put another way: can one teach or invite people to be sympathetic to religion-in-general? What does it mean to be “religious”? Obviously it is not the same thing as being “devout” or “orthodox.” My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not “language.” Similarly one is not “a religionist,” but a believing Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Shintoist, or Tallensi. Religious beliefs may be options, as William James described them, but they are not generalized options. It is easy, of course, to misunderstand this point. I don’t mean to say that one must be orthodox as a Jew, a Thomist as a Catholic, or a fundamentalist as a Protestant. The history of every important religious community is a complex one, and (as Kaufmann suggests) those figures who are afterwards acknowledged as great religious teachers have generally been in critical opposition to popular religious practices and to much within the past traditions of their own faiths. Nevertheless, for a believer the concept of “religion” (and of deciding to become religious) makes no sense as a category. (For the rationalist critic, from Lucretius to Voltaire to Freud, the term does have a certain polemical sense when, typically, he opposes “religion” on the one hand to “science” or “reason” on the other.) Neither does it make sense as a concept of objective sociological and historical inquiry. To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historic community, whatever the interpretation of these symbols and this historic community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition.

The significance of Kaufmann’s book is that it is one more example of a prevailing modern attitude which seems to me, at best, soft-headed and, more often, intellectually presumptuous. The attempts of modern secular intellectuals to help the faltering authority of “religion” ought to be rejected by every sensitive believer, and by every honest atheist. God-in-his-heaven, moral certitude, and cultural unity cannot be restored by nostalgia; the suspenseful piety of religious fellow-travelling demands a resolution, by acts of either commitment or disavowal. The presence of a religious faith may indeed be of unquestionable psychological benefit to the individual and of unquestionable social benefit to a society. But we shall never have the fruit of the tree without nourishing its roots as well; we shall never restore the prestige of the old faiths by demonstrating their psychological and sociological benefits.

Neither is it worth dallying with the lost religious consciousness because we unreflectively equate religion with
seriousness,
seriousness about the important human and moral issues. Most secular Western intellectuals have not really thought through or lived out the atheist option; they are only on the verge of it. Seeking to palliate a harsh choice, they often argue that all highmindedness and profundity has religious roots or can be viewed as a “religious” (or crypto-religious) position. The concern with the problems of despair and self-deception which Kaufmann singles out in
Anna Karenina
and
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
do not make Tolstoy in these writings a spokesman “for” religion, any more than they do Kafka, as Günther Anders has shown. If, finally, what we admire in religion is its “prophetic” or “critical” stance, as Kaufmann suggests, and we wish to salvage that (cf. also Erich Fromm’s Terry lectures,
Psychoanalysis and Religion,
with its distinction between “humanistic” or good and “authoritarian” or bad religion), then we are deluding ourselves. The critical stance of the Old Testament prophets demands the priesthood, the cult, the specific history of Israel; it is rooted in that matrix. One cannot detach criticism from its roots and, ultimately, from that party to which it sets itself in antagonism. Thus Kierkegaard observed in his
Journals
that Protestantism makes no sense alone, without the dialectical opposition to Catholicism. (When there are no priests it makes no sense to protest that every layman is a priest; when there is no institutionalized other-worldliness, it makes no religious sense to denounce monasticism and asceticism and recall people to this world and to their mundane vocations.) The voice of the genuine critic always deserves the most
specific
hearing. It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in
To the Finland Station
and many others have done, that he was really a latter-day prophet; no more than it is true of Freud, though here people are following the cue of Freud’s own rather ambivalent self-identification with Moses. The decisive element in Marx and Freud is the critical and entirely secular attitude which they took to all human problems. For their energies as persons and for their immense moral seriousness as thinkers, surely a better epithet of commendation can be found than these tired evocations of the prestige of the religious teacher. If Camus is a serious writer and worthy of respect, it is because he seeks to reason according to the post-religious premises. He does not belong in the “story” of modern religion.

If this is granted, we will become much clearer about the attempts which have been made to work out the serious consequences of atheism for reflective thought and personal morality. The heritage of Nietzsche constitutes one such tradition: the essays of E. M. Cioran, for example. The French
moraliste
and
anti-moraliste
tradition—Laclos, Sade, Breton, Sartre, Camus, Georges Bataille, Lévi-Strauss—constitutes another. The Hegelian-Marxist tradition is a third. And the Freudian tradition, which includes not only the work of Freud, but also that of dissidents such as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse (
Eros and Civilization
) and Norman Brown (
Life Against Death
), is another. The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. Modern seriousness, in numerous traditions, exists. Only a bad intellectual end is served when we blur all boundaries and call it religious, too.