The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (25 page)

AN EPIDEMIC OF THE OCCULT

In Europe, many spiritualists were freethinkers who rejected mainstream religious practice and belief but were left cold by the certainties of positivism, the search for the laws of behavior. “One impulse was to turn to spiritualism as a means of reconciling science, deism and socialism. This utopian project took many forms, from an exploration of autokinesis [moving objects by thought] to automatic writing to séances.”

Quite a number of eminent writers, public figures, scholars and even scientists treated these matters as serious endeavors—Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Faraday. The Roman Catholic Church repeat
edly anathematized the movement; spiritualist writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and specifically denounced by the Holy See (in 1898 and 1917, for example). Jay Winter explains the rest of the intellectual background: “In the early twentieth century those who entertained at least a suspension of disbelief about spiritualism did so for many different reasons. Some tried to translate traditional theology or the poetry of ancient metaphors about human survival into the language of experimental science. They point to magnetism, electricity, and radio waves as constituting unseen yet real phenomena of distant communication. Thought waves or other forms of human feeling or expression conceivably did the same.”
26

This spiritualist approach, Winter says, was as remote as could be “from the mental environment of fundamentalist Christianity. Observation, not Scripture, was the source of wisdom.” The pages of many journals—in France, Britain and America—were open to the possibility that spiritualist phenomena were worthy of investigation. Among those who shared these views were Sir Oliver Lodge, professor of physics at Liverpool University, later principal of Birmingham University and later still president of the Society for Psychical Research; the physicist Sir William Barrett; William McDougall, the Oxford and Harvard psychologist; Gilbert Murray, the Oxford classicist; William James; and Lord Rayleigh, Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge and Nobel Prize laureate in 1914. In Italy, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso took part in séances, in Germany the Kaiser dabbled in spiritualism, while Thomas Mann provided an (admittedly ironic) account of séances in
The Magic Mountain
(1924). In Russia, the professors of zoology and chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg joined the Theosophical movement, and some published papers on spiritualism.
27

CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

Artists were not immune to these developments. Many, for instance, were drawn to Theosophy: Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society in 1909; the composers Scriabin, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were all familiar with the work of Madame Blavatsky; and though Paul Klee adamantly denied
he was a Theosophist, he wrote, “My hand is wholly the instrument of some remote power. It is not my intellect that runs the show, but something different, something higher, more distant—somewhere else. I must have great friends there, bright ones but somber ones too.”

Klee’s interest in Theosophy may have stemmed from his association with Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky adhered all his life to the Russian Orthodox beliefs he was born into, but he repeatedly meditated on Theosophical themes, in particular the “universal catastrophe” he believed was on the way, a belief he shared with his fellow Russian the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
28

Kandinsky’s concern with Theosophy is shown most in two written works, the
Blaue Reiter Almanac
of 1912 and
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
, written in 1909 and published two years later. The aim of the former, produced with his fellow artist the Bavarian Franz Marc, was to show what was happening in art all over Europe at any one time. Theosophy’s shadow runs through many of the contributions. August Macke, the Expressionist painter from Westphalia, close to Marc and Klee, produced an essay, “Masks,” that Yeats would have found congenial. “Form is a mystery to us,” Macke wrote, “for it is the expression of mysterious powers. Only through it do we sense the secret powers, the ‘invisible God.’” Franz Marc took up a similar theme in an essay on Cézanne and El Greco, which described them as masters of a “mystical inner construction.” There was, he said, a “secret connection of all new artistic production,” awareness of which lay behind the ideas of the group known as Der Blaue Reiter. “Its aim was to speak to the yet unknowing world of these spiritual developments.” The Russian artist David Burliuk wrote that his fellow countryman the poet Andrei Bely was “a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy.”

Kandinsky was a fervent advocate for the spiritual in art. His essay in the
Almanac
explored the “new value that lives within” man. This search, he said, leads to elevation, to a revelation that can be “heard”: “The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually effective beings. Even dead matter is living spirit.” Materialism, he insisted, has no capacity to hear, and must be replaced: “The
final
goal (knowledge) is reached through delicate vibrations of the human soul.” These views, as Jay Winter emphasizes, are “entirely consistent” with aspects of the Theosophical systems of Steiner
and Blavatsky.

In
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
, Kandinsky said that the artist is at the pinnacle of a triangle, often alone, often scorned as a charlatan or a madman. Yet painting and art, he added, “[are] not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle.” This, too, is consistent with Theosophical elements, which see the clairvoyant, like the artist, as one who could discern the “higher matter in which thoughts and feelings form patterns without any resemblance to the objects of the physical plane.”
29

There is a good deal here that, to an outsider, is woolly, incoherent, even absurd. But none of these artists followed Yeats all the way to a belief in fairies, and Kandinsky was the man who invented—or discovered—abstraction in Western art. In this he was mixing the spiritual with the unconscious, or thought he was. Arguably, this was a more fruitful direction than the one Yeats took.

•   •   •

In a sense, Kandinsky discovered abstraction by accident, if we believe his story that he came home one day and saw a painting of “real loveliness” in his studio, yet which had no identifiable shapes—until he realized that it was one of his own pictures lying on its side on an easel. However it happened, Kandinsky’s abstractions conformed to the Theosophical belief that the physical world—the world of objects, things—was losing its importance; indeed, it was preventing us from seeing the great spiritual world behind the world of objects and thus holding us back. It was central to Theosophy that when the spirit was revealed there would be an end to history—the contingent pattern to human events—and a new order would be established or revealed.

Kandinsky’s abstractions would help bring about this new state of affairs, by showing that beauty had no need of earthly forms, the recognizable shapes of things; that there was a reality underneath and elsewhere. Recent scholarship has shown that his painting
Little Pleasures
(1913), prefiguring Sartre’s
Les petites heureuses
, is a Theosophical reinterpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John, in which the things of this world, the material reality whose small value is alluded to in the painting’s title, are seen
as passing away—disintegrating into abstractions before the new order arrives. Kandinsky cherished some elaborate ideas about the symbolism of colors and their synesthetic qualities (“seeing” sounds and “hearing” colors), all part of his conviction that there was a hidden reality behind the appearance of things that it was his responsibility to convey. For him, abstraction was a new way of understanding the world, a way of approaching the spirit: spiritual existence—ecstasy—was abstract, without shape as commonly understood.

The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, too, was a Theosophist but he was also more of a phenomenologist than Kandinsky, exploring the structure and growth of real forms. To a degree he went in the opposite direction of the Russian. In works like
The Beginning of the World
(1924), which is a marble sculpture in the shape of an egg, Brancusi is attempting to give us a completely self-contained work, where the skin is part of the structure’s expressive qualities but also inseparable from the rest. The Theosophists thought that “spirit” inhabited all matter, and so such a sculpture could be seen as liberating the spirit in marble. But we need not go that far. The simplicity and cleverness of Brancusi’s perfect forms tell us in this case, for instance, that marble can be as full of meaning as anything it might be made to represent, that self-containment is the aim of life; that, in order to present a “perfect skin” to the world, we need to live—to
be
—entirely within our nature, accepting its qualities
and
limitations; and that there is as much meaning in detail as there is in great abstractions. Brancusi emphasized this by making identical forms in different materials—
Bird in Space
(1925), for instance, exists in black marble, in white marble and in shiny metal. That the experience of each simple form is radically different shows how
detail
can be essence, can govern meaning. Meaning can be small as well as large.

The third of the important Theosophical artists was Piet Mondrian, who was convinced that the purpose of art was “spiritual clarification.” He was likewise convinced that matter was the enemy of spiritual enlightenment and that all forms of material existence were coming to an end—one of Helen Blavatsky’s core ideas. “Nothing but abstraction could do justice to the imminent dawn of the spirit.”
30

Mondrian converted to Theosophy in 1909, during the Cubist vogue
and at the time when Kandinsky was edging toward abstraction. Classical, original Cubism had been grounded in the city, in the metropolitan experience, but in his early grid paintings Mondrian explored nature—trees and oceans and skies—in which the main subject is
energy
, then a major concern of science (particles were forms of energy, and energy was locked up in matter as Einstein’s
E=mc
2
had shown); to Theosophists, energy was a form of spirit, the ultimate basis of reality.

This is what Mondrian’s grid paintings show: the energy of trees and the energy surrounding them, with the haphazard pattern of the branches incorporated into the sky that forms the background. The same is true of
Pier and Ocean
(1915): a decrepit pier in Scheveningen, on Holland’s North Sea coast, is incorporated into the surrounding sea with only minimal transition. Thus, piers and oceans are different configurations of identical forces. Comparable with these two is Mondrian’s best-known work,
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
, produced in 1942–43 after the Second World War had prompted his move to New York. His grid style suited the pattern of Manhattan’s streets, but it is the movement—the energy—that is the most important element of this iconic painting.

Mondrian’s images are as jerky, nervy and restless as Brancusi’s are calm. In the 1920s, asTheosophy faded, the “process philosophy” of Alfred North Whitehead took its place. By this account, the universe was and is a huge field of energy which takes different forms in a series of events.
Events
are the building blocks of nature—this is how the world is to be understood, as a series of manifestations, nodes of energy taking different forms. This had many ramifications, one of which was that actions could produce change in the world—events—just as much as thoughts could. This would give rise, in time, to the philosophy of existentialism. Mondrian was not an existentialist, not a classic one anyway, but his exploration of energy, restlessness beneath the surface, kept alive the essentially Platonic idea that there is a different realm, a superior realm, a more real realm, in existence somewhere.

PART TWO

One Abyss after Another

9

Redemption by War

I
n our own day the Great War stands alongside the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Killing Fields of East Asia as one of the defining horrors of the twentieth century. Let us remind ourselves of just one example of that conflict. The Battle of the Somme got under way at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916; out of the 110,000 British troops who attacked that Saturday morning along the thirteen-mile front, no fewer than 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day—
still
a record. “Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.”
1

THE PHENOMENON OF 1914

But that was 1916. The summer and autumn of 1914 were very different. Knowing what we know now, it is hard to credit the way people greeted war. There are two elements that concern us. One is illustrated by the fact that a London bookseller denounced the war as “the Euro-Nietzschean war.” He was referring to the (for him) surprising fact that the outbreak of war saw a marked rise in the sale of works by Nietzsche. This was partly because many of Germany’s enemies thought that the German philosopher was the chief villain, the man most to blame for the war in the first place, and the individual responsible, as time wore on, for its brutalities.

In his book
Nietzsche and the Ideals of Germany
, H. L. Stewart, a Canadian professor of philosophy, describes the Great War as a battle between
“an unscrupulous Nietzschean immoralism” and the “cherished principles of Christian restraint.” Thomas Hardy was similarly incensed, complaining to several British newspapers: “I should think there is no instance since history began of a country being so demoralized by a single writer.” Germany was seen as a nation of would-be supermen who, in Romain Rolland’s words, had become a “scourge of God.”
2
To many it seemed as if the abyss had been plumbed, that the death of God, so loudly advertised by Nietzsche, had finally brought about the apocalypse many had predicted.

In Germany, the theologian and historian Theodor Kappstein admitted that Nietzsche
was
the philosopher of the world war because he had educated a whole generation toward “a life-endangering honesty, towards a contempt for death . . . to a sacrifice on the altar of the whole, towards heroism and quiet, joyful greatness.”
3
Even Max Scheler, a better-known philosopher (and later a favorite of Pope John Paul II), in
The Genius of War and the German War
(1915) praised the “ennobling” aspects of conflict. He welcomed the war as a return to “the organic roots of human existence. . . . We were no longer what we had been—alone! The sundered living contact between the series individual-people-nation-world-God was restored in an instant.”
4
The communal “we,” Scheler said, “is in our consciousness before the individualized self,” the latter being “an artificial product of cultural tradition and a historic process.”
5

Though the claims—both for and against Nietzsche’s influence—may have been overblown, they were not without foundation. In Germany, together with Goethe’s
Faust
and the New Testament,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
was the most popular work that literate soldiers took into battle, “for inspiration and consolation.” More than that, according to Steven Aschheim, 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime edition were distributed to the troops. Even one or two literate non-German soldiers took the book with them, notably Robert Graves and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Nor should we forget that the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, whose action precipitated the crisis of 1914, was fond of reciting Nietzsche’s poem
Ecce Homo
: “Insatiable as a flame, I burn and consume myself.”
6

Whatever we make of all that, the second point still takes some getting
used to. This is the fact that in 1914 so many people
welcomed
the war. This, too, had certain Nietzschean overtones, in that war was seen as the ultimate test of one’s heroic qualities, a test of will and an unrivaled opportunity for ecstatic experience. But it was more than that—far more. For many, the war was seen as
redemptive
.

But redemptive from what? one might ask. In fact, there was no shortage of candidates. Before 1914, the very appeal of Nietzsche lay in his widespread critique of the decadence people saw everywhere about them. Stefan George, as we have already seen, argued in
Der Stern des Bundes
that a war would “purify” a spiritually moribund society, while the German dramaturge Erwin Piscator agreed, claiming that the generation that went to war was “spiritually bankrupt.” Stefan Zweig saw the conflict as some kind of spiritual safety valve, referring to Freud’s argument that the release of “the instinctual” could not be contained by reason alone. Typically, the Expressionists looked forward to the death of bourgeois society, “from whose ashes a nobler world would arise.”
7

In John Buchan’s 1910 novel,
Prester John
, there is talk of wiping out the civilization of the West, which has lasted for more than a thousand years. One of the characters says: “It is because I have sucked civilization dry that I know the bitterness of the fruit. I want a simpler and a better world.” In 1913, Gabriele d’Annunzio had told Maurice Barrès, the French novelist and anti-Dreyfusard, that “a great national war is France’s last chance of salvation” from a “democratic degeneration, a plebeian inundation of her high culture.”
8
Barrès’s countryman Henri Bergson thought that the war “would bring about the moral regeneration of Europe,” and accused the Germans of being “mechanical men without soul.”
9
The French poet Charles Péguy, too, believed in 1913 that a war would be of value “because it brings regeneration.” The Futurists in their manifesto released as early as 1909 had argued that war would be “the only hygiene of the world”; and elsewhere: “There is no beauty except in strife.”
10
And a yearning for some great redemptive cause that would satisfy desire is to be found in the pre-war poetry of Rupert Brooke:

To turn, as swimmers into clearness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love.
11

Alban Berg, Alexander Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky all subscribed to the view that war would “shake the souls of people” and “prepare them for spiritual things.” In Germany in particular it was felt that a commercial world “had been swept aside for heroes.”
12
G. K. Chesterton was more prosaic but no less damning of the status quo, declaring that
both
religious and political ideals were in decay: “Man’s two great inspirations [have] failed him altogether.”

This is another of those issues that was much bigger, more divisive, then than now. Roland Stromberg, in his
Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914
, notes that “self-discovery through violence” was part of the intellectual furniture of those times, and that when war exploded in August 1914 it seemed to many “a kind of triumph of spirit over matter.” Even such figures as Arnold Bennett, Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Marcel Proust were on record as saying they found life interesting again after the boredom before. “War as restoration of community and as escape from a trashy and trivial way of life is probably more understandable today than war as salvation,” says Stromberg. “Yet the commonest images aroused by the shock of August were the cleansing fire or flood, or ‘the blacksmith that will pound the world into a new shape,’” as Ernst Jünger put it. “Destruction and the right to realize oneself went together.” Or as Isaac Rosenberg, a British poet who would be killed in the war, wrote: the “ancient crimson curse” would “Give back the universe / Its pristine bloom.”
13
Hans Rogger, an American historian of Russia, reported that many writers and intellectuals in Moscow and St. Petersburg welcomed the war “for having freed Russia of narrowness and pettiness and for opening new perspectives on greatness. Some viewed war as a spiritual awakening.”
14
Hugo von Hofmannsthal reported that in Austria “the whole people is transformed, poured into a new mold.”

Sentiments like this reflected the general view, among intellectuals certainly, that the spirit was in an unhealthy state before the war; there was an obsession with materialism and a neglect of “things of the mind.”
Even during the war, when the scale of the carnage was already becoming apparent, these sentiments continued, up to a point. The great Danish composer, conductor and violinist Carl Nielsen, in his
Inextinguishable Symphony
, premiered in 1916 and featuring a “battle” between two sets of tympani, paid tribute to the life force, constantly renewing itself even in death, “and charg[ing] on again to a prodigal abundance.”
15

COMMUNITY: THE PERVASIVE THEME OF 1914

In tandem with all this went a rise in nationalism and patriotism, twin feelings that surprised many (especially socialists) who, before the war, had prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Nationalism, says Roland Stromberg, was in some ways a substitute religion, quoting the potter and art historian Quentin Bell: “Cambridge, like the great majority of the nation, had been converted to the religion of nationalism; it was a powerful, a terrible, at times a very beautiful magic.”
16
Nationalism, says Stromberg, “coincided with the search for membership in a community, the pervasive theme of 1914.” “One beautiful result of the war,” wrote Edmund Gosse, “is the union of hearts.”
17
“I don’t want to die for my king and country,” Herbert Read, poet and art critic, wrote while he was in the trenches. “If I do die, it’s for the salvation of my own soul.” Elsewhere he wrote: “During the war I used to feel that this comradeship which had developed among us would lead to some new social order when peace came. It was a human relationship and a reality that had not existed in time of peace. It overcame (or ignored) all distinctions of class, rank and education. We did not call it love; we did not acknowledge its existence; it was sacramental and therefore sacred.” As Stromberg confirms, sacrament hovers in the background of virtually every war novel, in this most literate of wars.
18

Many intellectuals now felt that many non-intellectuals at last had a welcome chance to break out of their “clipped and limited lives,” which would help restore a sense of community. But the George circle in Germany had a different perspective: “Tens of thousands must perish in the holy war,” George commented. Only in this way, said Gundolf, could the
soul’s sickness be cured, and the spiritual evolution of the German nation be enabled. The German historian Karl Lamprecht enthused about “this marvellous upsurge of our national soul . . . happy are those who have lived at a time like this.” Émile Durkheim thought the war would achieve his long-sought-after goal of “reviving the sense of community.” The German theologian Ernst Troeltsch was convinced the war increased the feeling of
Deutschtum
—Germanness—among his fellow countrymen, which was “equivalent to belief in God’s divine power.” “It is the tremendous significance of August,” he added, “that under the impact of danger [the war] pressed the whole people together in an inner unity, such as never before had existed.”

Another effect of the war was that everywhere “the religion of social services” propelled the conscience-stricken rich into the ghettoes to grapple—or at least familiarize themselves—with poverty. “The urge to break away from a life-killing egoism often led to affirming one’s organic connection with the great collectivity.”
19

An underlying ingredient in all this talk of redemptive communities was the fact that many of the European states were ethnically and linguistically diverse.
20
They might live under a common law and a common government, but they did not necessarily speak the same language or inherit the same customs. This was especially true of Russia and Austria-Hungary, but it also applied to a lesser extent in Great Britain, Belgium, Germany and France. The newly sacred union spawned by danger overcame, for a time at least, all differences, though Hannah Arendt later dismissed these new communities as illusory (as indeed they proved to be).
21

There was also the so-called elitist school of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who were skeptical of what the achievements of the war would be. Though Weber shared with many others what he called “an almost unbearable nostalgia for the lost wholeness” in modern society, he also held to the view that “the people can never rule, the state will never wither away, power will not be exorcised from the world by any poetic incantation. The realization of Christian ethics,” he concluded, “is not possible in human society.”
22

Weariness set in eventually, of course, and disenchantment soon enough. The painter Lowes Dickinson decried the lack of diversity in discussion
during the war. “To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to the truth.” Quentin Bell said of the Bloomsbury Group that “none of them, so to speak, ‘believed in’ the war, and they refused, resolutely, to be religious about it.” D. H. Lawrence was ambivalent. He thought that “humanity needs pruning,” that “the great adventure of death” was a suitable subject for a novel, and he had a thirst for a “genuine community.” But there was no community in war for him: “The War was not strife; it was murder.”

Gustave Le Bon had argued, as more than one sociologist after him had done, that “war is an antidote to anomie or decadence, a restorer of solidarity.” Perhaps this explains why intellectuals were so much in favor of it to begin with: for people usually separated from the rest of the community by virtue of their education and interests, war perhaps had the advantage of “reuniting” them with others.