The Rage Against God Read online

  And then there were the things I thought and wrote and said, the high, jeering tone of my conversation, the cruel revolutionary rubbish I promoted, sometimes all too successfully, with such conviction that I persuaded some others to swallow the same poison. I have more or less recovered. I am not sure they all did. Once you have convinced a fellow-creature of the rightness of a cause, he takes his own direction and lives his own life. It is quite likely that even if you change your mind, he will not change his. Yet you remain at least partly responsible for what he does. Those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. Someone is bound to take them seriously, and it really is no good pretending that you didn’t know this.

  I should be careful here. Confession can easily turn into showing off one’s wickedness. There is a clever H. G. Wells short story about the end of the world called “A Vision of Judgement,” in which a grisly tyrant is ordered to own up to his sins at the throne of God. He does so, “white and terrible and proud and strangely noble,” much like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. He turns his confession into a great sonorous boast: “No evil was there but I practiced it, no cruelty wherewith I did not stain my soul…and so I stand before you meet for your nethermost Hell! Out of your greatness daring no lies, daring no pleas, but telling the truth of my iniquities before all mankind.” The braggart sinner’s unexpected punishment is to have the true story told, of all his embarrassing private follies, until everyone present is laughing at him and he runs to hide his shame in the Almighty’s sleeve. There he finds, crouching next to him, the incendiary prophet who used to denounce him in life, likewise shown up by the recording angel as a laughable fraud, enjoying his outcast status rather too much.

  I would add, for those who mistakenly think that religious persons imagine they are better than the rest, that my misbehavior did not stop when I crept stealthily into the pew behind the pillar at the back of the church, where I have skulked for the last twenty-five years. It merely lost its organized, deliberate character. I do not claim to be “saved” by my own declarations or by my attendance at the Lord’s Supper. That is up to other authorities, which know my inward heart, to decide.

  I talk about my own life at more length than I would normally think right, because I need to explain that I have passed through the same atheist revelation that most self-confident members of my British generation have experienced. We were sure that we, and our civilization, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels, and heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the welfare state, the United Nations, and “science,” which explained everything that needed to be explained. People still died, it was true, but generally off-stage and drugged into a painless passivity. We could not imagine ourselves ever doing so. The “pains of death” had been abolished, along with most of the pains of life.

  I was convinced that a grown-up person had no need of Santa Claus fantasies or pies in the sky. I knew all the standard arguments (who does not?) about how Christianity had stolen its myths and feast days from pagan faiths, and was another in a long line of fairy stories about gods who die and rise again. Since all the great faiths disagreed, they couldn’t all be right. Jesus was curiously similar to Mithras, or was it Horus? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, easy as pie, not in the sky, and made still more facile by the way such youthful epiphanies are applauded by many teachers and other influential adults, and endorsed by the general culture of my country, which views God as a nuisance and religion as an embarrassment or worse.

  The Dismissal of Faith by the Intelligent and Educated

  The fury and almost physical disgust of the Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity is an open expression of the private feelings of the educated British middle class, normally left unspoken but conveyed by body language or facial expression when the subject of religion cannot be avoided. Mrs. Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928, in terms that perfectly epitomize the enlightened English person’s scorn for faith and those who hold it:

  I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

  Look at these bilious, ill-tempered words: “Shameful, distressing, obscene, dead to us all.” There has always seemed to me to be something frantic and enraged about this passage, concealing its real emotion—which I suspect is fear that Eliot, as well as being a greater talent than her, may also be right.

  This widely accepted dismissal of faith by the intelligent and educated seemed then to be definitive proof that the thing was a fake, mainly because I wanted such proof. This blatant truth, that we hold opinions because we wish to, and reject them because we wish to, is so obvious that it is too seldom mentioned. I had reasons for wanting that proof. There were, after all, plenty of Christian intellects available if I had desired reassurance that faith and intelligence were compatible. But I dismissed them as obvious dupes, who spoke as they did because it was their professional paid duty to do so.

  I had spotted the dry, disillusioned, and apparently disinterested atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age. I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness, and their air of finding human credulity amusing. I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgment. It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.

  Vanity Seeks Company

  When reciting the Apostles’ Creed, I had inwardly misinterpreted the expression “the Quick and the Dead”—in my childish ignorance, I had hoped that I might be one of those quick enough to escape the Judgment. I should add here that, while I grew to understand the real meaning fairly swiftly, the phrase never blossomed fully into life until I heard a doctor matter-of-factly describe the moment when our first child stirred in the womb as “the quickening.” But that was in another time entirely, and a long way distant.

  I had, like so many other young men and women of my age, been encouraged by parents and teachers (made soft by their own hard childhoods) to believe that I was clever, and so better than my fellows. Such vanity seeks company. If I could become one of them—the clever, dry ones—I could escape from the sports-mad, simple-minded, conventionally dull, commonplace people among whom I seemed to have been abandoned for much of the year.

  This again is a confession of a serious failing. I was the child (there is one in every class, every Scout troop, every museum trip) who didn’t particularly want to join in with the games or the songs. I really did think of myself in this way, and sometimes still do. As one of the free-thinking and enlightened unbelievers, I would not be condemned to normal life in a suburb or a suit. My life would be an adventure. (So it proved, as it turned out, though different from the adventures I had imagined.) I envied them. I wanted to be one of them. It seemed to me to be the height of being truly grown-up, to be liberated from these tedious, apparently trivial rules and all the duties that went with them.

  The Deadly Chill of Ancient Chants and Texts

  There were other things too. During a short spell at a cathedral choir school (not as a choirboy, since I sing like a donkey) I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong. This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity. The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoi
ng, haunted, impossibly old building are extraordinarily potent. If you welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort. If you suspect or mistrust them, they will alarm and repel you like a strong and unwanted magic, something to flee from before it takes hold.

  Like hundreds of thousands of English middle-class children, I had attempted to survive sermons by leafing through the technical and administrative bits at the very front and very back of the little red prayer book in the pew. I had wrestled with “The Table to Find Easter,” with its cabalistic Golden Numbers, and thought it too much like mathematics to be interesting. I had peered at “The Table of Kindred and Affinity” and wondered innocently what fear lay behind these unyielding prohibitions, most of which were also largely unnecessary. What kind of world had required a long list of the people you weren’t allowed to marry? Despite the Freudians, I already realized that I couldn’t marry my mother even if I wished to, which I must confess I did not. However far I looked ahead, I could not picture myself marrying my deceased wife’s father’s mother.

  I had enjoyed the “Forms of Prayer to Be Used at Sea,” especially the one to be said “Before a Fight at Sea against Any Enemy.”

  Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come and help us… Take the cause into thine own hand, and judge between us and our enemies.

  You could almost hear them being said in strong West Country voices, as the rigging creaked and the slow-matches smoldered and the ship turned toward the foe.

  But above all I had discovered—and strongly feared and disliked—the ancient catechism that I had (wrongly) imagined I would one day have to learn by heart and repeat to a bishop—a figure I had seen from a distance, medieval in his miter, his outline clouded by incense. I was actively angry and resentful at the catechism’s insistence on rules I had no intention of obeying. By the time I was around twelve, I had a sense, when I encountered this text, of a very old and withered hand reaching out from a dusty tomb-like cavity and seeking to pull me down into its hole forever.

  The dark purity of the seventeenth-century language was also disturbing. It was the voice of the dead, speaking as if they were still alive and as if the world had not changed since they died—when I thought I knew that the world was wholly alterable and that the rules changed with the times. Now I am comforted greatly by this voice, welcoming the intervention of my forebears in our lives and their insistent reminder that we do not in fact change at all, that as I am now, so once were they, and as they are now, so shall I be. These, as the sentimental but moving old poem has it, are the prayers your father’s father knew, and his father before him. Then I came to fear and dislike this voice so much that I rejoiced to see it being silenced by pestilential modernizers. The words I found myself particularly loathing formed part of the answer to the question: “What is thy duty towards God?” They run: “To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters…to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.”

  This passage well expresses the thing that the confident, ambitious young person dislikes about religion: its call for submission—submission!—to established authority, and its disturbing implication that others can and will decide what I must be and do.

  Our Greatest Fear

  Behind the fear of submission lies a whole other set of things that my generation did not wish to acknowledge, the thing we feared perhaps most of all, of following our parents into conformity and suburban living, becoming parents ourselves, mowing lawns, polishing shoes, washing the car. This fear is succinctly described in A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden, a 1978 novel looking back on the early 1950s. A character sneers, “Poor dear Jenny scares him not with severity but with suburbia, the dread of our generation, the teacup, the diaper, the pelmet, the flowery stair-carpet, the click of the latch of the diminutive garden-gate.”

  It was unimaginable that we, the superior and liberated generation, should be trapped in this banality. The very word “suburb” evoked a mixture of apprehension and scorn. Why did we fear this fate so much? Perhaps it was because they brought us up too kindly, convinced in the post-war age that we should not endure the privation, danger, and strict discipline that they had had to put up with, so we turned arrogant. I certainly did.

  Perhaps it was because in the “long 1960s”—which began with TV and rock and roll in the late 1950s, reached their zenith in the great year of self-righteousness in 1968, and continue to this very moment—we sensed that the world had left them behind. They were bewildered and alien in their own land, feeling themselves still to be in their prime, but regarded as impossibly old by us, and increasingly feeling old themselves. They had won the war, but—as we shall see—that war and those who had won it had been discredited. To become like them, to dress like them, speak like them, eat what they ate, and enjoy the music and art they liked was to join the defeated, and to be defeated.

  To this day I can remember my feelings of mingled dismay and loss of control over my own life as I purchased the piles of equipment necessary for the care of our first child. It was mostly in hideously colored plastic, for in those servantless days in England, parenthood was deeply unfashionable and mainly indulged in by the poor, which meant modish, well-designed baby equipment did not exist. I felt (correctly as it turned out) that I was being called by irresistible force into a state of life I had not chosen and would never have voluntarily accepted.

  I have often thought that the strange popularity of abortion among people who ought to know better has much to do with this sensation of lost control, of being pulled downward into a world of servitude, into becoming our own parents. It is not the doomed baby that the unwilling parents hate (and generally it is the father who is liberated from his responsibilities through abortion and who exerts pressure for it). It is the life they might have to live if the baby is born. Others may have expected and even enjoyed this transformation of themselves into mature and responsible beings. My generation, perhaps because we pitied our mothers and fathers, believed that we could escape it. In fact, we believed that we would be more mature, and more responsible, if we refused to enter into that state of life, unto which it should have pleased God to call us. The oddest thing about this process is that we encountered so little resistance. We had, I think, expected and even hoped to be met with hard, uncompromising argument and rebuke. But authority melted away at a touch and mysteriously indulged us as recompense for our insults and rebellion. It was as if a rebel army had reached the limits of the enemy capital and found the forts and batteries abandoned and the defending soldiers fleeing away. Now I know why it was so easy. Then I thought, wrongly, that our victory was our own doing.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Loss of Confidence

  “The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord.”

  (THE 2ND PSALM)

  The revolt against God was plainly in the very air of early 1960s England, before most of us were even aware of it. I think I now know why. God was associated in our minds with the tottering, enfeebled secular authorities of our country, to whom we had bound ourselves at misty, freezing memorial ceremonies each November.

  The Failure and Dishonesty of Public Officials

  The authorities were not what they claimed to be. The cool competence and the stoicism were a fraud. The catastrophe of the Suez episode in 1956, when our governing class had tried to behave like imperial rulers in Egypt and had fallen flat upon their faces, had shrunk them and weakened their power to command. The government had sought to abuse (as later governments would also abuse) the semi-sacred incantations of 1940: Egypt’s leader, Gamel Abdel Nasser, was a “dictator.” Acceding to his demands for control over the Suez Canal was “appeasement.” As we have found so often since, these modern villains are not Hitlers, and their ill-armed backward nations are not the Third Reich. Nor are our modern leaders noble or heroic. Secretly colluding with France and Israe
l to fake a pretext for war, as the British government did in 1956, was hardly Churchillian. Although the full details of this chicanery took years to emerge, the smell was bad, and we were vaguely aware that they had lied rather crudely to us. We were also conscious that they had done so while trying to employ the cult of Churchill with which we were imbued. (More about that in a later chapter.)

  This failure and dishonesty sapped and rotted everything and everyone, from the local vicar and the village policeman to the grander figures in the nation. None of them ever had quite the confidence they had possessed before. Some, through strength of character, could still exert authority of their own. Others, who had relied on the institutional force of obedience to the good state, had lost it. Older teachers, who could not be trifled with, were still terrifying persons whose anger could make all the blood in your body drain into your feet with a word of rebuke. But that was because they still carried in themselves the style and manners of a more confident time. Younger ones were just ordinary humans. They had to charm us—or fail.