This is a very depressing book.
Bruce Lockerbie explores the "modern writers' struggle against religion." He covers authors such as: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Herman Melville, Emilie Dickinson, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, and Frederick Nietzsche.
These people were all deep thinkers and gifted writers. But they all either drifted away from or strongly rejected the God of the Bible. At first, I found the book somewhat interesting as I discovered what stood behind my doubts about all these authors. It's sad that when we study great authors, our teachers often omit their spiritual struggles. But as the book moves from one author to the next, their stories become repetitive. Here are the usual causes behind their dismissal of God:
1. The Enlightenment - Rationalism and higher criticism undermined their confidence in the Bible.
2. The Theory of Evolution - This provided a pseudo scientific basis to dismiss God.
3. Social Upheavals - the Industrial Revolution and World Wars had negative effects on these authors.
4. Personal Wealth - After achieving some success, most of these authors did not need to work.
5. "Guiltless" Pursuit of Pleasure - In many cases their wealth and freedom gave them many opportunities to pursue personal pleasure. Society no longer condemned them. But they still had to explain themselves to God. What better way to get rid of guilt than to get rid of God.
As depressing as this book may be, I would point out to everyone that there were great writers who lived during this period who were not swayed by the causes above. A good parallel to this book might be to study writers such as: William Paley, John Henry Newman, TS Eliot, CS Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Malcom Muggeridge, etc.
Notes and Quotes
Page 14. “More to the point, what is it about belief that so in rages those who choose not to believe? What stirs the animus of certain nonbelievers to become disbelievers, eager to contend against those who profess what the disbeliever denies?”
Page 21. Nobel prize winning biologist, Jacques Monod, “the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, there is no intention to the universe.“ “like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music just is indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.” Jacques Monod, chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), 172-173.
Page 29. “Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it, as it is.” Matthew Arnold, God in the Bible, 378.
Page 30. “In sophisticated Athens, the search for a rational explanation of the universe apart from the guns had learned, as always, from religious apostasy to political anarchy; for as Theodore Dostoyevsky and Jean Paul Sartre were to agree 2500 years later, if God does not exist, everything is permitted. In the Athens of Sophocles‘ day, The only deity for whom any credence remained was Tyche, or Chance.
Page 41. “I know that I ought now to give myself to God and spend the spring time of life in his service for it seems to me a mockery to spend wife’s summer and autumn in the service of Mammon and when the world no longer charms us… Do you or hearts because we are afraid to do otherwise and give to God the miserable recompense of a sickbed for all his kindness to us“ (The letters of Emily Dickinson 28 March 1846).
Page 49. Emily Dickinson said this regarding not becoming a Christian: “it is hard for me to give up the world.”
(The letters of Emily Dickinson 28 March 1846).
Page 44. “You cannot imagine the terrible torment the desire to be live has caused and still causes me, for it is a desire that grows all the stronger in my heart the more arguments I have against it.“ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, letter to Natalya Fonvizina, 1854.
Page 51. “Walt Whitman was the high priest of poetic religiosity.”
Page 58. Ralph Waldo Emerson, essay, “self-reliance.“ 1841 Regarding this, Lockerbie, “The gauntlet of intellectual and spiritual rebellion against convention had been thrown down; the banner individual and selective truth had been raised.”
Page 60. “In particular, Whitman more and more adopted for himself the impression at first suggested by others that he was a Christ – figure – if not, in fact, the Christ himself.”
Page 61. Emerson wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Page 62. “At its core Whitman’s religion was a blend of pantheism – the deification of nature – and solipsism – the deification of self.”
Page 69. Whitman would have no part of repentance: “(let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation,) O soul, thou pleasest me, I thee.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pages 73-77
His great great grandfather John Hawthorne, was one of the judges at the 1692 Salem witch trials. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories about the hypocrisy and cynicism of early New England. The Scarlet Letter featured Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, who hid his affair with Hester Prynne and fatherhood of her daughter Pearl as well as the vengeful husband of Hester, Roger Chillingworth.
Page 79
We know nothing about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s personal faith or lack thereof. However, he seemed to be reacting against what he perceived to be the cold, hypocritical faith of his forefathers.
Herman Melville
Page 81
I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs 5 miles or more…
Page 87
Ahab bathed his harpoon in blood saying,
Ego non baptizo te in nomine patria, sed in nomine diaboli. Meaning: I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.
He had made a Faustian pact with the devil.
Page 89
If is the signal for the diametric opposite of faith, the maximal miss trust. It is the word beginning all attempts at discrediting God: if God is good, then why…? If God is omnipotent, then why…? If God is loving, then why…? If it is rooted in hubris, the over weaning pride that dilutes a human being into contesting with God strength for strength.
Milleville, became a skeptic like his character Ishmael. However his book, Billy Budd, may show that he found some escape from his sinking doubts.
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain
His father died when he was 11.
He made fun of the Christian faith in Tom Sawyer‘s Sunday school quiz and then many episodes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Huck Finn’s Prayer
So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try to hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knower very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed that was a lie — and he knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, page 166.
These quotes were not in the book:
“The best of us would rather be popular than right."
The Mysterious Stranger
"I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse." Concerning the Jews
I think this is a quote from the mysterious stranger. Satan states to the damned human race:
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, New Haven, no help. It is all a dream — a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but I thought — a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternity‘s.
Double check this in Spiller.
It appears that this is where Clemens ended up. He wrote a letter to William Dean Howells in which he said that if he wrote any more, he would need a pen warmed up in hell.
Page 130
William Blake was a neo-pagan who believed that he was in constant communication with the spirit world of demons and angels.
William Ernest Hensley
Page 138-137
He rejected God mainly because of the death of his young daughter and because of disease and suffering in the world. His approach to the possibility of hell is a boastful self-confidence. This is shown in his poem, Invictus:
It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
Thomas Hardy
Page 146
From the Crimean war to the Boer war to World War I, England‘s confidence in a caring and protective God has been shaken. The established church’s hold on the souls of Englishmen had been weakened, in part by the church’s timidity in the face of Darwin’s inquiry and Huxleys scientism, and in part by the church’s rapturous adoption of German theologians accommodations to the science of so-called “higher criticism.”
Page 147
Hardy’s opinion of the clergy from, “A Tragedy of Two Ambitions.”
To succeed in the church, people must believe in you, first of all, as a gentleman, secondly as a man of means, thirdly as a scholar, fourthly as a preacher, faithfully, perhaps, as a Christian — but always first as a gentleman.
Hardy made many notes in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holidays Throughout the Year, by John Kienle
In his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy makes his case against God as Tess slowly realizes her faith in God will not save her. Here is a quote:
Page150
But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? Where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other God whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was on a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awakened.
William Butler Yeats
Yeats was not happy with either the Anglican Church or the Roman Catholic Church. He felt both were complacent.
Page: 156
Unable to believe in either Christian doctrine or the new science that attacked the Christian faith, Yeats became, by his own admission, and unwilling disbeliever. At age 70, he wrote, “I am very religious, and deprived by [Thomas] Huxley… Whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion.”
This new religion was Yeat’s own neopaganism, the strangest amalgam conceivable, consisting of selected Christian teachings, Celtic legends and fables, demonology, astrology, Hindu religion, magic, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalism and other odd bits of the occult he invented by himself.
Ernest Hemingway
His mother was a devout Christian, and she made sure that her children were raised in the Christian faith. His father was a doctor, and he introduced him to the love of the outdoors. His father would later commit suicide.
Page 202
If others choose to rail against an unjust or even non-existent Deity, Hemingway is more composed. After all, the God of his childhood upbringing has simply become irrelevant to the man.
Page: 202
Hemingway responded to TS Eliot‘s conversion to the Christian faith with this little title:
* Neo-Thomist Poem
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want him for long.
*The title “Neo-Thomist Poem” refers to temporary embracing of church by literary gents—E.H.
The Nihilists
Page 205
Well before the end of the 19th century, the philosophy fueling popular and belief— even disbelief — was nihilism, the conviction that, having denied the existence of any transcendent spiritual realm and having looked at the material world and found it empty, all that remains is nothing. If nothing, then nihil, the Latin word for nothing. Nihilism is a worldview asserting the conundrum that nothing is real. Nihilism permits the enigma that claims the absence of everything, including the one who identifies that very absence. Nihilism thrives on such contradiction as this: that the only rational option is recognition of the universal irrationality. Thus, nihilism creates a cannon of art whose theme is negativity, the literature of despair, the work of those who claim – with Ernest Hemingway — is the only valid form of prayer is a parity of the paternoster:
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place
Friederich Nietzsche
Page 206
He was born in 1844 in Saxony, son of a Lutheran pastor. He rebelled against Prussian patriotism and discipline of his boyhood. He was a professor of ancient languages In 1878 he resigned because of ill health, because of syphilis. Yet he produced most of his work At this time, especially Also Sprach Zarathustra.
The author points out that some of his writings were corrupted by his unscrupulous sister after his death.
He blamed Christianity for having sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures. He said that Christian pity leads to nothingness. I do not see how this happens. It seems to me that he rejected the reality of God, and then struck at the heart of the Christian faith in order to blame the Christian faith for his unbelief.
In his famous tract of 1895, the antichrist, he wrote about a mad man who walked about with a lantern crying out that he was looking for God. Many who did not believe in God joked with and mocked the man, but the man finally says that we have killed him we are all his murderers. God is dead.
When Time Magazine ran a story about the God is dead philosophy, some people responded with a bumper sticker that read: “My God is not dead. Sorry about yours. “
Other philosophers built on his idea: Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
In my opinion, all of these men fail to fill the void that they created when they cast got out of their minds.
Pages 225-226
TS Eliot divided modern literature into three periods. The first period took the faith for granted and omitted it from its picture of life. This era lasted until the middle of the 19th century, Or until Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. This second. Followed when men doubted, worried about, and contested the faith. This era included writers such as Dickinson, Milleville, Twain and Yeats. The third era was a phase in which the writers never heard the Christian faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism. The whole realm of modern literature is corrupted by what I call secularism.
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